| -(Courtesy
of the Meadville / Lombard Library) |
In the decades after the middle of the 20th century,
two "Sidneys" or "Sydneys" shaped
much of the writing of American religious history. Sydney
E. Ahlstrom, a Lutheran-bred Minnesotan taught at Yale
and adopted New England as his province. In his A Religious
History of the American People, he saw the nation's
religion as being, in many ways, New England Puritanism
writ large. Sidney E. Mead, also born (in 1904) in Minnesota,
on the other hand—who never taught east of Chicago,
Iowa, California, Nevada, and Arizona—chose Unitarianism,
a faith stereotypically associated with New England, for
identification and affiliation.
If Ahlstrom slighted the American Enlightenment, the Deist
founders and proto-Unitarians of the late 18th century,
Mead focused on them and their legacy, pursuing these
"rationalists" over against the "pietists,"
revivalists, awakeners, and evangelicals who came to prominence
in the 19th century. For him, American religion posed
what we might call a party of Reason over against a party
of Revelation (and emotion) and he saw them as struggling
for the mind and soul of unsettled citizens ever after.
Mead's youthful background found him a convert in what
may well be described as the Fundamentalism that was taking
shape in the 1920s, where Minnesota was an arena for its
encounters with Modernism and Liberalism. He had "walked
down the sawdust trail" of a revival, become part
of a form of Methodism that he saw as subliterate, and
become familiar with the world of "bible schools."
As he came to maturity, Mead—who married rather young
to Mildred LaDue, an artist and soul-mate through all
his years—made his way to California and was accepted
at the University of Redlands, which had American Baptist
affiliations. The University of Chicago, to which he came
for doctoral work and to begin his teaching career in
1941, had been founded by such Baptists who—especially
in its Divinity School—were associated with the modernist
wing. Mead found this approach congenial and could have
been best described as a liberal Baptist in the 1940s.
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The
Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago
(Courtesy of the Meadville / Lombard Library)
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From
1943 to 1960 he taught in the cooperative experiment called
the Federated Theological Faculty. It was based in the
University's Divinity School but had close bonds with
the Chicago Theological Seminary, Disciples Divinity House,
and the Meadville Theological School, a Unitarian seminary
of which Mead became president in 1956. The federation
broke up in 1960. Mead helped in the new formation of
Meadville, which became Meadville/Lombard Theological
School. It received the assets of Lombard College, a Universalist
venture in Galesburg, Illinois. Mead, who disdained most
aspects of presidential life, did enjoy occasional trips
to the Galesburg area, where he and associates monitored
the growth of grain in fields that were a part of Lombard's
assets.
During his late Chicago years Mead—always restless
in denominational circumstances—did devote himself
to Unitarian causes. After becoming a member of the Unitarian
Church of the Larger Fellowship, he joined the First Unitarian
Church of Chicago. He preached on occasion at Midwestern
Unitarian gatherings and attended meetings of the Unitarians
in the years when they were moving toward mergers that
formed the Unitarian Universalist Association. He could
never not be a critic, however, and even at an anniversary
celebration of Meadville/Lombard, he spoke rather derisively
of theological education as practiced there and throughout
America. At the same time, his was a witty, ironic, tempered
kind of criticism designed to prod denominations to appreciate
and strive for a "learned ministry," something
he found them too often failing to do.
The entry "Unitarianism" is not to be found
in the indices to Mead’s books. One has to track
down Unitarian motifs through his discussions of national
founders like Thomas Jefferson, who had prophesied that
in due course all the churches would turn Unitarian, and
especially of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Mead found so
congenial. A careful reading of Mead would find him instinctively
aligning himself with what some have called "the
Romantic Enlightenment" more than the purely rationalist
version. Emerson and the Transcendentalists spoke to Mead’s
soul as Jefferson and Franklin spoke to his mind.
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| The
Phoenix crest of the University of Chicago. |
Mead’s
masterpiece, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of
Christianity in America published in 1963, is a collection
of carefully crafted essays that he first published in
journal form and then edited to form a coherent work.
Incidentally, "Christianity" in Mead's book
did not include Roman Catholicism, which received slight
mention. He wrote just before the breakthroughs on the
ecumenical front and before the new accents on "women's
history" or "ethnic" (as in Afro-American,
Hispanic, etc.) history came to question the focus on
Ahlstrom and Mead’s "mainstream." (Those
who studied with him at the University of Iowa and Claremont
Theological School testify that he was extremely open
to the worlds of women and "multi-cultural"
students even if he did not take these into the center
of his own inquiries.)
Mead’s
concentration in The Lively Experiment had to do
with the grand Jeffersonian and Madisonian moves toward
religious freedom and individualism—“from coercion
to persuasion." But he devoted attention as well
to Abraham Lincoln, whom he regarded as the most profound
theologian of the American experience. The fact that Lincoln
was the only American president never to have joined a
church was a feature that Mead, uneasy with denominationalism,
enjoyed pointing out.
The Nation with the Soul of a Church (1975), was
a more polemical collection of essays. In it he began
to define what became a trademark Meadian theme, "Religion
of the Republic." Robert N. Bellah, in a famed essay
in 1967, spoke of this as "Civil Religion."
For Mead, this religion’s rootage was in what historian
Crane Brinton had spoken of as religion that was "simply
Enlightenment, with a capital E." Conrad Wright and
other historians of Unitarianism have shown the congruence
between this “founding fathers” faith and the
Arminian theological stirrings in New England that took
shape in the Unitarian denomination in the 19th century.
The Religion of the Republic vied with institutional
religion. Mead noted, "I came from outside “the
church” as institutionalized, and although I have
found very congenial companionship with some professional
churchmen, I now realize that I never felt comfortable
and seldom felt completely welcome inside their temples."
Perhaps, he thought, he should be seen as a member of
the "Alumni Association" of church institutions.
That stance would hardly qualify Mead or anyone for candidacy
for excommunication from the Unitarian Universalist Association!
Mead continued his discerning development of the religion
of the republic in The Old Religion in the Brave New
World published by the University of California Press
in 1977. Here William Ellery Channing makes a cameo appearance
for having "bridged the gap between eighteenth-century
'Enlightenment' and nineteenth-century romanticism in
its American transcendentalist dress." In a way,
Mead was doing such bridging a century and a half after
Channing.
When
writing a preface to History and Identity published
by the American Academy of Religion in 1979 while in retirement
at Tucson, he commented on four essays brought together
by students. Now the central theme had become “the
relation of historical studies to the achievement of stable
identity." While all around him historians and others
were arguing that one found identity in one's race, ethnic
group, or religion, he cast the search against a cosmic
backdrop, "in the context of unimaginable time,"
as one "senses a mystical unity with all of life
on its 'immense journey'." This was a motif one can
find in any number of writings associated with Unitarianism
in that period, though Mead made no point of using church
or denomination as the reference point for seeking identity.
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Martin
Marty
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Finally,
in more papers collected by students, Love and Learning,
he is most autobiographical and "ecclesiastical,"
worrying as he does in some of the essays about the low
quality of learning among seminarians and ministers.
As so often,
one finds here a kind of "lover's quarrel" with
the manifestations of religion by an historian with a
kind of Transcendenalist's soul and, therefore, one expressive
of uneasiness about the very institutions— university,
theological school, religious body, and nation—that
he served.
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Sidney Mead was
active in the life of Unitarian Universalist congregations
where he taught: the University of Chicago, the
University of Iowa, and Claremont California’s
Associated Colleges and School of Theology.
His work on religion in America was strengthened
by his having received unusually strong appreciation
by both secular historians and teachers in the field
of American Studies. A symbol of this fact is the
rare distinction of his having been honored at a
joint session of the American Church History Association
and the American Historical Association.
The following two selections point to reasons for
this fact.
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THE LIVELY EXPERIMENT CONTINUED
By
Jerald Brauer, former Dean of the Divinity School of the
University of Chicago
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The
first thing that strikes one about Sidney E. Mead the
scholar is that he succeeded in doing what few in his
profession ever achieve: he broke fresh ground. Sturdy
son of the Midwest, he exemplified that pioneer quality
that marked his forbears—he went ahead and others
followed. This was evident early in Mead's career.
In the process of rethinking what he called American church
history, or the history of Christianity in America, or
even at times religion in America, Sidney E. Mead produced
the first new conception of the history of Christianity
in America since Robert Baird. The simplest way to document
this judgment is to point to the fact that Mead relocated
the hinge on which the history of Christianity in America
turns. All previous and most present histories of that
subject locate that point either in the founding of New
England or in the early nineteenth century.
Those who opted for New England selected the Puritans
as the foundation for American politics, culture, and
society. In this view American history was but the successive
transformations of Puritanism in various reincarnations.
Others affirmed the first quarter of the nineteenth century,
within the "National Period," as the crux of
American history. Voluntarism and the testing of the frontier
shaped the character of America and everything in American
society, including Christianity. Both interpretations
made the coming of religious freedom of fundamental importance
but only in a derivative way. Puritanism was understood
as the root from which constitutionalism grew, with religious
liberty as the outcome of its inner logic. The frontier
became the testing ground for the possibility of religious
liberty.
Mead broke with such interpretations and located the hinge
of American religious history, and hence of the total
history, in the revolutionary generation. All of American
history moved toward that center and out of that center.
Just as the incarnation that revealed the nature and will
of God becomes central for a Christian interpretation
of universal history, so for Sidney Mead that incarnation
of religious liberty in the Constitution becomes the center
for the whole of religious history in America. He returned
again and again to how that came about, the forces that
produced it, and its consequences for national and even
international life. This is the source for the lively
experiment with which we struggle to this day. Here was
born the religion of the Republic. There emerged in that
generation a schizophrenia that has cursed American denominations
and American citizens from that day forward.
One need only point to the continuing discussion of the
religion of the Republic or civil religion to mark Mead's
fundamental contribution to American religious historiography.
As early as 1956 he had adumbrated "the religion
of the democratic society and nation," noted its
roots in the Enlightenment, and sketched out some of its
beliefs. Additional references were made to this religion
of the Republic in other of his essays prior to his major
article in 1967. Mead has worked with this basic issue
throughout his career; it is the center of the hinge on
which Christianity in America turns. It was born in the
revolutionary generation, nurtured under the Constitution,
and has carried the American people through countless
trials. It was distorted by the people yet provided a
prophetic resource to correct them. The relation between
this faith and that professed within the denominations
constitutes, in Mead's judgment, the most critical problem
for religious life in America.
At the heart of that religion is the belief in the absolute
necessity of religious freedom, forced by American circumstances,
but given theoretical underpinning by the religion of
the Enlightenment. The denominations have never been able
to provide a theological defense of that reality. That
failure has created a major problem for them and for American
society. To this day the way religion is related to the
political order in America remains a complicated and vexing
question. One of Mead's solid contributions is his sophisticated
and carefully nuanced analysis of the problem. He rejects
the "wall of separation" terminology as misleading
and inadequate. A purist with regard to questions of religious
liberty and nonestablishment, he has placed the so-called
church-state question in a different context. None of
the related issues—denominationalism, religion of
the Republic, religious liberty, "church-state"—is
to be seen in isolation or in simple doctrinaire fashion;
all are interrelated in the complex fabric of our past
that provides the material out of which our culture is
woven. The lively experiment will determine whether that
fabric will endure or be shredded in the course of history.
-Abridged from his introduction to The Lively Experiment
Continued
THE THEOLOGY OF THE REPUBLIC
by
J. Ronald Engel, Research Professor in Environmental and
Social Ethics
Meadville Lombard Theological School
Sidney
E. Mead is both historian and seer of the American democratic
faith. For several decades his essays have given to students
of American history what Ralph Barton Perry's Puritanism
and Democracy and Ralph Gabriel's The Course of
American Democratic Thought gave to earlier generations.
They have provided grounds for belief in the enduring
greatness of the Enlightenment ideal of the Republic in
spite of the events of the twentieth century. Even when
liberal hopes for a new dispensation of liberty and equality
gave way late in the 1960s to bitterness and defeat, Mead's
finely crafted retrieval of the "Republic of our
agrarian dream," the "time when wise men hoped,"
performed a redemptive function. He is one of a very few
who has had the literary capacity to link his contemporaries
with the immortals of the revolutionary age and the deathless
vision they beheld.
Of equal significance has been his spirited insistence
that a democratic society requires democratic religion.
In debate with sociologists and historians such as Will
Herberg, Martin Marty, and Winthrop Hudson, who sought
a transcendent source of judgment of American cultural
religion in a renewal of the prophetic biblical heritage,
Mead argued that there is an authentic prophetic heritage
resident in the American founding and that this heritage
holds any and all denominational traditions accountable.
It is the responsibility of the churches to articulate,
each in its own way, grounds for affirming the Enlightenment
heritage of religious and political freedom.
Perhaps the greatest tribute that can be paid to Sidney
Mead is to say that he has assumed the theological responsibility
appropriate to a historian in the American Republic. In
the words of David Noble, "Just as the historian
is the citizen who is most responsible for describing
our covenant, he is also the one most responsible for
defending it—he is our most important secular theologian."
Most notably, Mead has performed this function from within
the discipline of religious history.
What Mead's profound grasp of the contemporary human condition
calls for—what his penetrating retrieval of American
religious history leads us to seek, yet what his theology
fails to provide—is an ecological perspective on
human history and destiny in which the variety that is
our common humanity takes its place within the variety
of all natural creation. Here every individual and every
species would be potentially both an end in itself and
a synergistic means to the flourishing of a common world.
I submit that it is to some such vision of a "Republic
of the World" that Mead's theology of the democratic
faith must move if it is to do justice to the full American
experience of the tragedy and hope of our shared existence.
Abridged from chapter 3 of The Living Experiment Continued
