War presents citizens with questions of how to understand their nationality and what constitutes national loyalty. For African Americans in World War I, debates about national identity held another layer of meaning. President Woodrow Wilson defined American involvement in the conflict as an effort to make the world safe for democracy, yet during this time African Americans were excluded from the rights and privileges of American democracy. This paper examines how African American pastors seized the war as an opportunity to demonstrate patriotic duty in hopes of securing those rights. African American pastors combined the rhetoric of democracy and patriotism that pervaded pulpits across the nation with appeals to God’s sovereign rule and the doctrine of human unity. In the process, African American pastors challenged the nation to make American democracy safe for African Americans and advanced how Christianity can function in public life.
World War I has provided great fodder for scholarly work on African American life, but few consider Black churches and the war. Chad Williams (Torchbearers of Democracy, University of North Carolina Press, 2010) highlighted the symbolic nature of African American servicemen for the extension of Black citizenship, but Black Christians appear only in passing. Among studies of the American churches during the war, John F. Piper Jr (The American Churches in World War I, Ohio University Press, 1985) only considered Black Christians in the context of the Federal Council of Church’s outreach to African Americans. Richard Gamble (War for Righteousness, ISI Books, 2003) examined progressive churches in the war but left out Black churches. The lack of attention is remarkable considering the central place of Black churches in African American life during this time. This paper aims to fill that gap by considering how Black pastors used theology to advance an understanding of African American nationality during and after the war.