These authors expose theistic commitment and performance for the damage it does to the integrity of Black personhood. They highlight the manner in which adherence to church values, for example, comes at the expense of human health and well-being as suffering gets cast as the marker of human advancement and divine engagement.
Church devotion destroys productive human relationships, as Larsen’s novel Quicksand (1928) makes explicit. Helga Crane, the main character, moves from social disregard on the part of whites, and some Blacks, to an embrace of Black theism in the form of a country preacher and his church, only to encounter a death-dealing arrangement in which her value is reduced to the children her body produces. Prayer and service to the church do nothing but enhance her misery, and she eventually realizes why: God, and, therefore, God’s assistance, are an illusion. Crane is left to her own devices, responsible for her own well-being, and accountable for her own happiness.
As she is contemplating her condition—namely, a church community that hates her, a husband who only values her reproductive capacity, and children that consume her strength, within her emaciated body raged disillusion. Chaotic turmoil. With the obscuring curtain of religion rent, she was able to look about her and see with shocked eyes this thing that she had done to herself. She couldn’t, she thought ironically, even blame God for it, now that she knew that He didn’t exist.
While not named as such explicitly, there is to be found in her resolve elements of the humanist principles presented in the first chapter of the book.
These authors expose theistic commitment and performance for the damage it does to the integrity of Black personhood. In his nonfiction, including his memoirs Black Boy (1945) and American Hunger (1977), Richard Wright calls for humanism as a way to advance beyond the stagnation of human opportunity and creativity represented by racism and reenforced through the antihuman theologizing of theism—that is, Black churches. Better known than his nonfiction are works of fiction like Native Son (1940) and The Man Who Lived Underground (1941/42). Wright pushes against a theistically arranged set of values that urge obedience over critical thinking, and that diminish self-worth for the sake of heaven.