By George Anthony Pratt

Introduction

Philosophy of religion is the examination of the nature and meaning of religion. This scope of study reflects on matters of religious significance, including an investigation of different themes in various faith traditions as well as concepts of God or the Ultimate. Students of philosophy of religion at the undergraduate level are introduced to significant thinkers within the subfield and exposed to topics in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and epistemology. Applying methods of philosophical reasoning to religious thought and practice can pose a challenge to an undergraduate student who is a religious adherent or practitioner, particularly one located in the African Diaspora whose cultural heritage and personal experience is largely impacted by the African American or Black Church. Understanding critical topics in philosophy of religion can emerge as enigmatic for this type of student, when the literature often tends to lack an examination of spiritual traditions and religious experiences across the African Diaspora.

The challenge rests in the creative act of going outside standard texts to identify, understand, and critique central topics. For students of African descent, locale and experience can easily inform this attempt. In pursuing this challenge, I considered my religious rearing in the Black Mainline Protestant faith tradition in the American South while examining culturally relevant examples present in the 1982 documentary Say Amen Somebody. The film captures an overview of the history and significance of Black gospel music (or “gospel”) in the United States by following seminal figure “Mother” Willie Mae Ford Smith (1904–1994), vocal clinician and Christian evangelist. In this essay, I use an account of Mother Ford in the documentary as an entry point to discuss topics within philosophy of religion, namely religious and mystical experience. In the beginning of the film, Mother Ford describes how she feels when singing gospel as “a feeling within, you can’t help yourself.” She recounts, “I don’t know it goes between the morrow and the bone, it just makes me feel like…I wanna fly somewhere, I forget I’m in the world sometime…” Upon observation, Mother Ford is expressing the experience of a feeling that sometimes causes her to become temporarily unaware of her physical existence in the world when singing gospel. In order to interpret Mother Ford’s account through the lens of philosophy of religion, the question emerges, “Can Mother Ford’s experience of singing the genre be classified as religious or mystical?” Before this question is answered, it is important to note gospel music's spiritual and cultural significance, as well as its sacred nature, by examining its origins. Both gospel music and Mother Ford’s definition of gospel must be contextualized to read her experience and to explain how the philosophy of religion student can consider her account as a religious or mystical experience. While the philosophy of religion project requires an outsider perspective, the African American student—as a cultural insider whose religious background lies in the Black Church—examining gospel music cannot always separate personal memories and experiences from their inclination to interpret Mother Ford’s experience as religious or mystical. Having witnessed the frenzied behaviors of individuals singing gospel makes an outsider perspective difficult to attain for those individuals. In this article, I blur the lines of the Durkheimian perspective on the sacred/profane dichotomy to underscore the nuances of reading gospel as religious material.

A Brief History of Gospel Music as Sacred Expression

Gospel is a genre of African American Christian music that expresses a personal or communal belief in the Christian faith and contains common themes of praise, worship, and God’s goodness. While gospel music is composed and performed for different purposes, it is most often sung during religious ceremonies and services at Black churches. Such a cursory understanding of gospel could lead one to consider Mother Ford’s statement concerning feeling absent from the world when singing gospel through the lens of philosophy of religion, but greater consideration of the genre’s origins must be provided to situate further analysis.

Gospel choir, Morgan State University, CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Gospel traces its roots to the ring shout, a transcendent and ecstatic ritual practiced by enslaved Africans in the Americas and Caribbean, in which worshipers move in a circle while clapping their hands, shuffling, and stomping their feet. Historian Sterling Stuckey argues that the ring shout was a unifying element of African bondspeople in the American colonies, reflecting their communal cosmological understandings despite their various ethnic and cultural traditions. Stuckey concludes that field hollers, work songs, and spirituals evolved from ring shout, shaping what was later identified as gospel. Gospel in turn would go on to influence the birth of blues and jazz. Samuel A. Floyd Jr. confirms Stuckey’s contention by noting the many stylistic elements of the ring shout that influenced various Black music styles during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including gospel. Gospel music’s function as a form of religious expression and its origins are important to consider—namely, its role relative to the unique position of Black people in America in their collective struggle for human and civil rights.

Album cover art, *Precious Lord: Recordings of The Great Gospel Songs of Thomas A Dorsey,* Legacy Recordings, 2008

Mother Ford’s style of gospel is sometimes referred to as ‘gospel blues’ because of its use of phrasing and harmonic patterns similar to that of twelve-bar blues. Gospel was revolutionized when Thomas Dorsey, the “Father of Gospel Music,” fused jazz and blues with gospel. Dorsey's “If You See My Savior, Tell Him That You Saw Me,” which Mother Ford popularized at the 1930 National Baptist Convention in Chicago, was the first song he wrote that combined a blues structure to gospel lyrics. In 1932, Dorsey co-founded the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, of which Mother Ford chartered the St. Louis Chapter of the following year. She became the director of the national organization's Soloist's Bureau, training emerging singers in the gospel blues style. Dorsey likened Mother Ford’s voice to Bessie Smith and suggested that she was even more talented than the famed blues singer, though Ford never elected to sing blues professionally. Initially, Mother Ford was rejected from many mainline Black Baptist churches which viewed gospel as secular and unrefined. While she was criticized for her “bluesy” style, she never viewed it as secular.

A Durkheimian Analysis of Gospel Blues

To understand Mother Ford’s treatment of gospel, it is useful to use Emile Durkheim’s (1858–1917) sacred/profane dichotomy, highlighting the nuances of reading the genre asreligious material. Durkheim was a French scholar and founder of the modern academic discipline of sociology whose work, specifically The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, is seminal to the canon of religious studies. In this 1912 text, Durkheim identifies the division of sacred and profane as a distinctive trait in religious thought, defining religious beliefs as representations that express the nature of sacred things and the relations they have with other sacred or profane things. He noted that the category “sacred” was intrinsically fluid, and that anything could be classified as such. What he identified as critical, however, was the social act of separation from the profane, or how the religious person conducted themselves with sacred things. In Mother Ford’s case, she marked gospel as sacred, and blues as profane. After undergoing a “Pentecostal experience of Holy Spirit baptism, with speaking in tongues,” she expressed, “I had no more desire to sing the blues, but I had the spirituals in my mind.” This experience caused her to change her lifestyle, including rejecting the secular music she had previously enjoyed. Blues and jazz artists such as Bessie Smith, Count Basie, and Cab Calloway no longer held any appeal for her. Mother Ford proclaimed she was to sing gospel music to minister as an “evangelist” and “revival worker.” For these reasons, she rejected commercializing gospel music throughout her life, choosing instead to perform live at religious revivals, programs, and on the radio. Her marking of gospel relative to blues allows for Durkheim’s concept of the impurely sacred or sacred contagion to be applied to the complexities presented in Mother Ford’s experience and outlook.

Durkheim suggested that, in some cases, an object could easily pass from one state to another, and that the domain of the sacred could retain impure powers. In this context, blues can be viewed as a profane thing or object that becomes sacred when its structure is applied to gospel lyrics. Gospel music as a sacred thing is an object of the sacred, existing in its domain. When blues is fused with gospel, it becomes an impure power within the sacred domain for one who views the blues as secular. The fluidity of Durkheim's categories also allows for blues to be considered sacred, as it finds its origins in the same place where gospel does: the sacred ritual of the ring shout.

The prior notion could also challenge the use of the sacred/profane distinction to read Mother Ford’s marking of gospel. First, if blues is sacred and emerged out of the same sacred origin that gospel does, it would exist in the sacred domain, rather than an impure power. Secondly, reading blues as sacred demonstrates that sacredness is both relative and situational. Just as Mother Ford reads blues as secular or profane, Bessie Smith may have seen the blues as sacred. Just as the ring shout was sacred to enslaved Africans and their European captors viewed it as heathenish or profane, mainline Baptists regarded Mother Ford’s “bluesy” gospel style as secular, while she believed it to be sacred. While the dichotomy is a flawed product of European religious thought, as seen in this example, it allows for the African American philosophy of religion student to explain why they are inclined to interpret the religious material in Mother Ford’s account from both an outsider’s and insider’s perspective: an outsider student of religion viewing a subject, a religious adherent engaged in religious behavior, and an insider member of the Black Church and singer and connoisseur of gospel music.

Willie Mae Ford Smith, 1988, National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellow award ceremony, https://www.arts.gov/honors/heritage/willie-mae-ford-smith

Singing Gospel as Religious and Mystical Experiences

When describing singing gospel, Mother Ford expresses a belief in a “feeling within” that she has no control of, accompanied by a desire to “fly somewhere,” that causes her to “forget she is ‘in the world sometimes.’” Her suggestion of an absence of reality when singing gospel spurred by a “feeling within,” which she understands as the Holy Spirit prompting her to feel like flying, is also understood by others. William Dargan states, “singing has been for Willie Mae Ford Smith a world in which she lives.” Singer and radio host Zella Jackson Price remembers:

“Mother Smith was dramatic and ... she was Holy-Ghost filled.... When she said she felt like flying away, in your mind's eye, you could visualize this.... She had power in her voice [and] in her expression. She was a singer. I've seen her walk out singing ... on the way to her next appearance … and folks is just shoutin' everywhere, hats flyin' and carryin’ on, just somethin' terrible.”

According to writer and gospel music producer Anthony Heilbut, “those who attended her programs consider them some of the deepest experiences of their lives,” and gospel singer Alex Bradford likened her effect to that of weaving a spell with a single note. Noted in these observations are Mother Ford’s ability to engender the same type of feeling or experience she undergoes caused by the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost, a manifestation of God, within other people through gospel. The question then emerges whether her experience and those of others can be considered religious or mystical.

First, the student must examine if ‘religious experience’ can accurately categorize Mother Ford’s account and those of her listeners. “Religious experience” refers to any experience appropriate to a religious context, or one that has a “religious flavor.” It must also include any of various religious feelings, including for instance awe and sublimity. Perhaps most religious experiences are visual or auditory presentations in which subjects report “seeing” or “hearing,” but not with their physical eyes and ears. This type of experience is present in Zella Price’s account of using “your mind’s eye” to “visualize flying away” when listening to Mother Ford, a feeling she felt herself when singing gospel. Another type of religious experience is one that comes through sensory experiences of ordinary or physical objects, but which seems to carry additional information about a supramundane reality. Examples include experiencing God in nature, such as Moses with the burning bush. Though he experienced God through this bush, a person standing nearby would observe only the ordinary burning bush. This type of religious experience is not applicable in the case of Mother Ford and her listeners. There is an additional type of religious experience that is more difficult to describe, and is usually regarded as “ineffable.” It cannot be characterized accurately in sensory language or analogically; however, the subject of the experience posits that it is a real, direct awareness of some religiously significant reality external to the subject.

The uncontrollable feeling within Mother Ford reflects a concept of the Holy Spirit in the African American religious experience. In this tradition, the Holy Spirit is a manifestation of God that can subject individuals to its presence by “falling upon them,” resulting in subjects “catching the Holy Ghost” or “getting happy.” This understanding is reflected in the frenzied and trance-like behaviors of Mother Ford’s listeners “shoutin' everywhere” after feeling the “anointing” or the presence of the Holy Spirit in her voice. The movements of these ecstatic dances resulting from the Holy Spirit falling upon her listeners through her voice do not communicate in language what the Holy Spirit is, yet subjects report knowing it by feeling it. A case could be made here to qualify Mother Ford’s listeners’ experience as this “ineffable” type, but it does not totally encapsulate the experience. As a “revival worker,” the application of her voice serves as a technology to intentionally acquaint her listeners with the Holy Spirit, “weaving a spell.” In having the knowledge or the “anointing” to engender an experience or “feeling within” and for others, Mother Ford may or may not conceive of her experience with the Holy Spirit or the Sacred as ineffable, as it relates to singing gospel. The question remains, can Mother Ford or her listener’s experience be considered mystical? Mystical experiences are defined as purportedly super-sense-perceptual or sub-sense perceptual. They are unitive experiences granting acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are not accessible by way of sense-perception, somatosensory modalities, or standard introspection. This definition does not allow the student to read Mother Ford’s or her listeners’ experience as mystical, because in a normative context of the Black Protestant faith tradition or Black Church as seen in this case, the subjects do not understand “being Holy Ghost filled” or having an encounter with the Holy Spirit as a unitive experience by which they become one with it. Instead, they view “getting happy” as the Holy Spirit temporarily coming over them, an involuntary visitation from the third personality of the Triune God. The non-unitive understanding of the encounter with the Holy Spirit allows for the student to investigate if the subcategory of numinous religious experience can be applied to the subjects.

The numinous experience is a non-unitive one, purportedly granting acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are not accessible by sense-perception and contrasting with religious experiences that involve only feelings. The numinous experience is one which is particular to religious human beings, an experience of the Sacred consisting of a “wholly other” reality, unfathomable and overpowering, and engendering a sense of dreaded fascination in which the religious person becomes, “submerged and overwhelmed” by their own nothingness. In the example of Mother Ford, her lack of awareness of her physical existence in the world when singing gospel while being “Holy Ghost filled” or feeling the Holy Other “within” fits this description of a numinous experience. Mother Ford’s listeners’ experiences can be interpreted as numinous too. Their frenzied behavior or “shouting” as a result of her numinous experience and spurred by her singing gospel can be read as a hierophany, in which the Sacred manifests itself in their bodies. In response to the wholly other, or the “Holy Ghost,” that cannot be conceived through the senses, listeners lose the ability to control their movements or voices. Thus, the philosophy of religion student can classify the experiences of Mother Ford and her listeners as numinous.

Conclusion

In this case study, it was critical to examine the language of the religious subjects in order to analyze their experiences through the lens of philosophy of religion. Logical Positivists claim that individuals cannot account for religious language by linking it to experiences of the physical world because it lacks empirical consequences, rendering such language meaningless R. B. Braithwaite, however, argues that claims made in religious language are meaningful, but not true or false seeing as they should not be understood as assertions. He notes that claims in religious language may describe a set of mental events with which the experience itself can be identified. This critical approach allows the student to consider the claims of Mother Ford and her listeners about their religious experiences as meaningful, and permits the student to validate claims made from their own lived religious experiences and heritage as meaningful.

This exercise has profound implications for the undergraduate student of philosophy of religion. By venturing out of the literature, I demonstrated the Afrocentric theoretical construct of agency in using a culturally-centered text relative to my experience as a religious adherent in the historically Black Protestant tradition to solidify my understanding of theoretical concepts. To conformably situate my analysis through the lens of philosophy of religion, I applied concepts in other approaches to religion to explain why I, as both a burgeoning scholar of religion and as a member of the Black Church, was prompted to read Mother Ford, a Black woman elder, as a cultural text to explore religious experience. Additionally, my engagement with various fields such as religious studies, ethnic/cultural studies, and film studies reflects the transdisciplinary perspective that is required in the 21st century. Most importantly, this attempt proves that the young Black scholar of religion can center themselves comfortably within the philosophy of religion’s scholarly discourse, moving from what bell hooks calls “the margins to the center.”

Endnotes

1 Say Amen Somebody, directed by George Nierenberg (GTN Production, 1982).

2 Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1987) 10–11.

3 Samuel Floyd, “Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry,” Black Music Research Journal no. 22 (2002): 49–70, https://doi.org/10.2307/1519943.

4 William Dargan and Kathy Bullock, “Willie Mae Ford Smith of St. Louis: A Shaping Influence upon Black Gospel Singing Style,” Black Music Research Journal 9, no. 2 (1989): 249–70, https://doi.org/10.2307/779426.

5 Michael Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 151–208.

6 Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (New York: Limelight Editions, 1997), 198.

7 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by Carol Cosman (London: Oxford University Press, 2008), 34. First published 1912.

8 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 38.

9 Willie Mae Ford Smith, interview with William Dargan, July 8–14, 1988, in Dargan and Bullock, “Mother Ford,” 251.

10 Say Amen Somebody.

11 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 412.

12 Dargan and Bullock, “Mother Ford,” 258.

13 Zella Jackson Price, interview with William Dargan, July 11, 1988.

14 Heilbut, The Gospel Sound, 199–200.

15 Jerome Gellman, “Mysticism and Religious Experience,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy, ed. William Wainwright (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 142.

16 Religious Experience,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified Dec 13, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-experience/#LanExp.

17 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Religious Experience.”

18 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Religious Experience.”

19 Gellman, “Mysticism and Religious Experience,” 140.

20 Gellman, “Mysticism and Religious Experience,” 141.

21 Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 2nd ed (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 12, 25–40.

22 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (London: Harcourt, 1961). Translated by Willard R. Trask, 20-29.

23 Richard Braithwaite, “An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief,” in The Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Basil Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 72–91.

24 Braithwaite, “An Empiricist’s View,” 72–91.

Author Bio

George Anthony Pratt is a third-year history and religion double major at Morehouse College. His research interests include Africana studies, American religions, and Gender and Sexuality. Currently, he is the Editor-In-Chief of Litteratus, Morehouse College’s Howard Thurman Honors Program Literary Journal , and is a contributing writer with The Christian Recorder, the oldest continuously published African American newspaper in the United States. He manages various research projects as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow (MMUF), Quarterman Keller Social Justice Scholar, Andrew Young Center for Global Leadership Social Justice and Leadership Innovation Fellow, and Abraham Joshua Heschel Covenant Fellow. George has completed studies in sociology and religion at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom as the 2021-22 English Speaking Union’s Luard Morse Scholar.

Examining Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith as a Case Study: Notes of Religious and Mystical Experience