This chapter defines pragmatism and pragmatic religious naturalism through a reading of pragmatists William James, John Dewey, and George Santayana. It shows how Du Bois constructs crucial notions of black identity, double consciousness, and black peoplehood with anti-essentialist pragmatist tools such as James's radical empiricism. It goes on to show how Du Bois's religious voice is fully inhabited by four key characteristics of pragmatic religious naturalisms: 1) skepticism of supernatural revelation; 2) conceiving of religion's powers as coming from finite human trusts; 3) finding religion's genius in its pairing of the real with the ideal; and finally 4) a meliorism in which hopefulness only emerges from a frank confrontation with real struggle and loss.