The following paragraph are taken from my forthcoming biography of Jean Price-Mars (“For the Sake of Black People and the Common Good: A Biography of Jean Price-Mars”: Vanderbilt University Press, 2026). It engages Price-Mars’s personal faith and religious sensibilities.

“My biography of Jean Price-Mars also analyzes his personal faith and religious responsibilities—if any can be clearly identified. Rather than affirming a firm personal commitment or piety to a specific religious tradition or creed, it is more suggestive to speak of Price-Mars’s religious curiosity. Yet Price-Mars’s deep interest in religion perhaps reflects his psychological conflict to reconcile the Christian faith of his father and grandmother with what he himself described as the “ancestral faith” or the “popular religion” of the Haitian people. He may have experienced a crisis of faith in his formative years as a university student in Paris, where he was exposed to a wide array of intellectual traditions, competing epistemologies, and France’s increasingly assertive non-theistic humanism and radical secularism, along with the country’s “progressive turn-away” from its Christian heritage.

Price-Mars’s turn to “Black Africa” through Vodou was a strategic intellectual and cultural pathway, through which he sought connection, psychological relief, and resolution to a profound crisis of faith and identity. As an emerging Haitian intellectual in his early twenties, struggling to understand his ancestral roots or heritage, he experienced a multifaceted crisis that was at once religious, cultural, intellectual, historical, and psychological. In this sense, for Price-Mars, Haitian Vodou as a living religious system and symbol of ancestral memory functioned as a mediating force that helped bridge religious dissonance, cultural alienation, historical rupture, and psychological disruption. By adopting an anthropological approach to Vodou, Price-Mars mobilized the ancestral faith of the Haitian people as a central instrument in his nation-building and cultural nationalism project, seeking to unify Haiti’s diverse social groups whose lives, aspirations, and collective imagination had been fractured by the American military occupation and U.S. imperialism in Haiti. In this sense, Price-Mars may be understood as strategically employing Vodou as a religious system and anthropology as a scientific discipline in advancing a coherent political, cultural, and nation-building agenda.”

–Joseph, Celucien L., “For the Sake of Black People and the Common Good: A Biography of Jean Price-Mars” (Vanderbilt University Press, 2026), pp. 43-4.