Читать книгу American Gandhi - Leilah Danielson - Страница 11

CHAPTER 2

Spirituality and Modernity

And now in this new power of the Spirit they began to consider the grievous state of the world and the multitude of evils therein.

Many things were natural and possible to them now which had seemed impossible so long as fear and hate and mistrust ruled their hearts.

They planned for a world in which righteousness should reign supreme.

They saw that the way of love was the sure and only way to bring good to pass on earth, and that ever the Son of Man if lifted up would draw all to himself.

—A. J. Muste, 1918

WHEN MUSTE GRADUATED from Hope College, he had a choice of attending either Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, or New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Jersey. The choice, as Muste understood it at the time, was between the ‘‘restricted life’’ of the Dutch ethnic community and the metropolitan possibilities of the broader United States. He had ‘‘come to feel’’ that his ‘‘future was in the English speaking community, part of the United States, and not in the Dutch community of the [Midwest]. In that sense very definitely I wanted to get away.’’¹ The decision also reflected his craving for intellectual stimulation and rigor. He was to be sorely disappointed by the education offered at New Brunswick, but the institution’s mediocrity pushed him to explore the dynamic intellectual and cultural world of New York City. There, he was introduced to modern trends in philosophy and religion that would serve as the fulcrum for his break from Calvinism, the crux of Dutch American identity and ethnicity, and his embrace of the Social Gospel.

The liberal religion that Muste would eventually adopt has received bad press ever since the 1930s, when Reinhold Niebuhr began his sustained attack on it as having a simplistic and naive understanding of human nature and society. Critics have further charged that the liberal emphasis on self-cultivation and self-affirmation led to the therapeutic, privatized, and individualist culture of the twentieth century.² Yet the development of American spirituality also led to social commitment; it was, Leigh Eric Schmidt argues, ‘‘inextricably tied to the rise and flourishing of liberal progressivism and a religious left.’’ Moreover, far from being naively optimistic, liberals confronted the most perplexing questions raised by modernity, in the process experiencing its ‘‘hazards of alienation, lost identity, and nihilism.’’ Their turn inward was ‘‘a cosmopolitan quest’’ to transform the alienation and anomie of modernity for the good of individual and social life.³

Muste’s career exemplifies the connections between spiritual seeking, cosmopolitanism, and political engagement. After graduating from Hope College in 1906, he gradually became alienated from the institutional church and pietistic notions of salvation, an estrangement that led to despair and ultimately renewal through a mystical experience. From then on, he viewed the life of Jesus and its central themes of love and self-sacrifice as the true essence of Christianity. This view propelled him beyond the institutional church where he found fellowship within mainline Anglo-American Protestantism, with its ethos of spirituality, antimilitarism, and social reform. Muste had scarcely found himself in the American tradition of nonconformity when the United States declared war upon Germany. With war mobilization and conscription in full force, the meaning of American citizenship changed, demanding that the obligation to the nation supersede the religious, civic, and voluntary associations that had organized American public life in the nineteenth century.⁴ Muste would ultimately choose God over country, in the process forging an alternative identity and solidarity as a radical Christian pacifist.

BEFORE moving to New Jersey to attend seminary, Muste spent a year teaching English literature and Greek at the Northwestern Classical Academy of the Dutch Reformed Church in Orange City, Iowa. The ‘‘city boy’’ felt out of place in Orange City. But the town’s proximity to Anne Huizenga, who lived with her family twenty miles away near Rock Valley, in northwestern Iowa, made it worthwhile. Muste and Anne had become engaged during his final year at Hope College. For him, it had been love at first sight. ‘‘It took a little longer in her case,’’ but by late winter it was clear that they were going to get married. Living and teaching in Iowa gave the couple a chance to spend time together before Muste went to seminary. ‘‘In those days,’’ Muste recalled, ‘‘you didn’t get married when you were in college nor even while you were in theological seminary. In fact, it was regarded as positively an immoral thing to do.’’ For one, it indicated that ‘‘you couldn’t control yourself,’’ and, second, it was considered irresponsible to marry a woman before attaining the means to support her.⁵

Anne was quite a catch for the working-class Muste. Her family was comfortably middle class; her father was a Dutch Reformed minister and two of her older brothers were physicians. In contrast to Muste’s home, where his parents could barely read and write, Anne’s had an ‘‘intellectual atmosphere’’ that he eagerly absorbed. Together, he and Anne’s family read and discussed Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, and other texts. It was, he recalled, a year of being ‘‘intoxicated’’ by ‘‘intellectual life and experiences.’’⁶

Ironically, when Muste moved to the New York metropolitan area to attend New Brunswick Theological Seminary, he entered an intellectual community that was less stimulating than his fiancée’s home in rural Iowa. It was, he recalled, ‘‘a devastating experience’’ to go there; he would not ‘‘have survived it without New York,’’ where he was able to take classes at New York University and Columbia University.⁷ One of the oldest seminaries in the United States, New Brunswick had long faced declining enrollment and student complaints about the quality of its education, so much so, in fact, that Reformed congregations in the metropolitan area rarely hired its graduates. New Brunswick’s official historian has suggested that one reason for its poor reputation was its conservatism. Yet this explanation overlooks the fact that nearby Princeton Theological Seminary, which was even more orthodox, had a better reputation. One gets the sense that it was the seminary’s insipidness, rather than its conservatism, that was the problem; certainly that was what rankled Muste.⁸ While other American seminaries were becoming more scholarly, New Brunswick persisted in viewing itself as a school for training ministers and was reluctant to adopt contemporary academic standards. Until 1907, faculty members were hired by the Reformed Church’s General Synod, which believed that the best qualification for teaching was holding a successful pastorate.⁹

As much as Muste disdained New Brunswick, it provided him with a supportive environment for mediating between Calvinism and liberalism, and between his ethnic ties and national loyalties. In the first place, despite Muste’s low opinion of the faculty, they considered him ‘‘the most brilliant student our seminary has had for twenty years,’’ endowed with unique ‘‘spiritual power,’’ and awarded him a fellowship that gave him an annual income of $3,500.¹⁰ Second, his classmates, most of whom were Dutch Americans like himself, formed a tight-knit group that provided him with friendship and community. Third, he gained valuable ministerial experience. As the only student who was fluent in spoken and written Dutch, during his first year, the seminary dispatched him for the summer and every other weekend to a Dutch-speaking church in Albany, New York, where he was responsible for preaching a morning service in Dutch and an evening service in English.¹¹

This experience made Muste aware of the differences between a Dutch and an American pulpit. In Dutch, he was expected to ‘‘expound some passages of scripture rather than preach topical sermons,’’ while in English, the ‘‘personal and spiritual needs of people’’ were paramount, and he found himself moving away from ‘‘the typical Calvinist and Reform Church position’’ in order to appeal to his American parishioners. Through this process he discovered that he preferred the latter; he was ‘‘interested in the personal problems of people’’ and liked relating to them in more intimate terms.¹² In embracing a distinctly American and liberal Protestant homiletics, Muste departed from the tradition in which he had been raised and from what he was learning at New Brunswick.

Muste’s evolving views on homiletics relates to the most important advantage of attending New Brunswick Theological Seminary: its location in the New York metropolitan area, which gave him access to the theological and philosophical currents and controversies of the early twentieth century. In fact, it was exposure to American ministers in Manhattan that provided him with a model for the personal style of preaching he practiced in Albany.¹³ Most crucially, he was able to take advantage of an agreement between the seminary and New York University and Columbia University that allowed students in high standing to pursue postgraduate degrees for free. Interested in philosophy, Muste traveled two hours by train once or twice weekly to take graduate courses at New York University and, later, Columbia in an effort to fill his ‘‘hunger’’ for knowledge.¹⁴

Muste began taking classes in the philosophy department at Columbia University at an exciting time. Since being hired in 1902, Nicholas Murray Butler, the ambitious president of the university, focused on shifting its curriculum away from undergraduate education and the classics to graduate and professional education. As part of this modernizing effort, Butler had recently hired John Dewey.¹⁵ The pragmatist joined a faculty of ‘‘friendly critics,’’ philosophers of diverse schools who together offered a well-rounded curriculum. The head of the department was F. J. E. Woodbridge; the other members of the faculty were Felix Adler, William P. Montague, and Wendell T. Bush. In later years, Dewey’s pragmatism would exercise a tremendous influence on Muste’s thought and politics. At this point, however, it was Woodbridge who made ‘‘the deepest impression.’’ Like Dewey, Woodbridge espoused naturalism, a distinctly modern approach to philosophical problems that draws upon the methods of the empirical sciences. However, rather than embrace the democratic creed of pragmatism in which he saw traces of idealism, Woodbridge turned back to Aristotle and classical philosophy. Woodbridge thus provided the young Calvinist Muste an entrée into modern thought without completely challenging his worldview. As Muste commented of Woodbridge’s appeal, ‘‘I was definitely a Platonist. This tied in with my Calvinism.’’¹⁶

Even so, Muste’s exposure to naturalism and pragmatism subtly shifted his Calvinist worldview. William James’s ideas about religion particularly affected him.¹⁷ In Varieties of Religious Experience and his other writings, as well as at several public lectures Muste attended, James defended religious belief against the ‘‘intimidation’’ of positivistic science and, indeed, suggested that religion and science could be reconciled.¹⁸ He pointed out that science, like religion, was a human creation; personal inclination and social context shaped scientific knowledge, making it no more ‘‘true’’ than other truth claims. And he called upon science to evaluate religious belief using the scientific method of inquiry in which experience and results determine the truth of a hypothesis. Based on this criteria, James insisted, religious belief was as real as empirical science because it could ‘‘make a genuine difference in our moral life.’’ He made the same demand upon religion, dismissing tradition and doctrine as paths to truth, and emphasizing the ‘‘fruits’’ and consequences of beliefs. James was uninterested in ‘‘secondhand religious life’’ because it was based on tradition, not experience, and he drew his readers’ attention to the mystical tradition of spiritual inwardness and direct experience with the divine.¹⁹

James pointed Muste toward a more modern religiosity and sensibility. Unlike his contemporaries, and certainly unlike his professors and peers at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, James defined religion broadly and inclusively. Religion was ‘‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.’’²⁰ Indeed, James must be identified ‘‘with the Christian ‘modernism’ of his milieu, according to which religion was a fine thing but specific theological doctrines were felt to be something of a distraction.’’²¹ The impact on Muste was subtle yet dramatic. As he recalled, Varieties of Religious Experience ‘‘opened up to me a great variety of approaches to life and in that way . . . laid the groundwork for wrestling with . . . the theology [with which] I was brought up.’’²² In particular, James’s stress on experience over form, and his celebration of spiritual inwardness and mysticism, suggested the possibilities of a religious life stripped of theology and the church.

James further bequeathed to Muste the notion that it was possible to be both an idealist and a realist. Throughout Muste’s long career, the ideal of ‘‘human brotherhood’’ and the imperative to bring it about on earth, drove his activism, whether that ideal was rooted in Christianity or socialism (or both). Still, drawing upon pragmatic theory, he insisted that ideals, to be meaningful, had to be grounded in practical analysis and activity. ‘‘Ultimate values, ideals which are essential,’’ he reflected in an interview about his early career as a minister and an activist, ‘‘have to operate in some political and economic situation and not in a vacuum, not [in the] abstract.’’ Bringing the ideal and the real together and ‘‘effecting some kind of an integration . . . is a perpetual and very difficult problem, but it seems to me that this is the problem of human existence and therefore in some way or other I’m trying to work at it all the time.’’²³

Muste’s move toward a more modern, pragmatic worldview and theology was gradual. For a while he seemed to live in two different worlds. One was in New Brunswick where he continued to see himself as preparing for a life serving the Reformed Church and the Dutch American community. The other was the intellectual and cultural life of the great modern metropolis. There, as we have seen, he took seminars with leading philosophers who stressed the diverse ways of knowing and being. Moreover, as a supply preacher at a Reformed church in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the summer of 1908, he delighted in the ‘‘seething’’ culture of ‘‘Italian, Polish, Jewish, recently arrived immigrant[s], children, babies all over the streets and the steps [of tenements].’’ Reflecting his roots in industrial Grand Rapids, he felt comfortable among the city’s immigrant, working-class residents. He ‘‘never had the feeling that some people do[,] that New York is a terrible place to live in. I can put up with almost anything in New York.’’²⁴ In this respect Muste differed from the Progressive Era reformers with whom he is often linked. Although he shared their Protestant heritage and commitment to a life of service, his ease in the culture of urban America marks him as part of the modernist generation, which was more ethnically diverse and which celebrated the possibilities of the city.²⁵

In 1908–9, of course, Muste had not yet embraced a modern credo, but his inclination was forward rather than backward. His choice of pulpit is illustrative. As valedictorian, he was offered three choice pulpits: one was the newly founded Fort Washington Collegiate Church in the Washington Heights neighborhood of northern Manhattan, and the other two were older, established churches in rural settings outside of the city. The president of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary had also offered him funding for doctoral study in Europe and the promise of an academic position at the seminary when he returned. He made the decision ‘‘that New York was the place for me’’ without ‘‘too much difficulty.’’ In the first place, Fort Washington Collegiate Church was only a few blocks away from where the Yankee ballpark was then located. For another, academic life held little appeal: ‘‘I was too much interested in action.’’²⁶ He would also be able to continue his education, since Washington Heights was located just north of Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary. Finally, the New York church was especially wealthy and well established, with roots in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, but it had shed its exclusively Dutch cast, while its Presbyterian structure and Calvinism attracted non-Dutch Protestants. With a single classis (the local governing body, known as a presbytery in the Presbyterian Church) for all four of New York’s Reformed churches and substantial investment income, it offered a salary of $2,000 a year, more than twice the average salary for Reformed ministers at the time.²⁷

More to the point, Muste chose the Collegiate Church for the ‘‘challenge’’ it represented. It was a world he knew little about: mostly native-born, middle-class professionals who were active in social work and politics, and whose intellectual pursuits extended far beyond his parlance of theology and the classics. The lawyer Raymond Fosdick, then commissioner of accounts for the City of New York, was one of his congregants. Fosdick’s older brother was Harry Emerson Fosdick, then a minister in Montclair, New Jersey, who would later become famous as the pastor of Riverside Church in Morningside Heights and as a staunch defender of modernism against the rising tide of fundamentalism in the 1920s. Another congregant, John A. Fitch, former student of the labor economist John Commons, had just published The Steel Workers, an acclaimed sociological study of the steel industry. Fitch also served as industrial editor of Paul Kellogg’s Survey, the leading journal of social work, and was a professor at the New York School of Social Work. Shelby Harrison, head of the research department at the recently formed Russell Sage Foundation was yet another prominent member of the congregation, as was the Republican congressman William Stiles Bennet. Here, as Muste noted wryly in his oral history, he could not get away with popularizing a Calvin passage as he could have in a ‘‘typically Dutch-speaking congregation,’’ and he found the opportunity ‘‘decidedly stimulating.’’²⁸

Before Muste could accept his call to the Fort Washington Collegiate Church, however, he had to pass the licensure examinations and be ordained by a classis. He also wanted to marry Anne who remained with her parents in Iowa. The preparation for ordination was lengthy and arduous. Under the care of the Grand Rapids classis, Muste had to return home to take an all-day licensing exam in Greek, Hebrew, church history, theology, and church government, as well as deliver a sermon. His father was present when he received his license, and they celebrated at the Muste home afterward. The occasion was indeed a ‘‘very important’’ and ‘‘happy one’’ for his parents, for whom it had been eleven years since their eldest son had left for Hope Preparatory Academy. On his way back to New York to be ordained by the city’s classis, Muste traveled to Iowa to marry and collect Anne. Back in New York, on June 25, 1909, Muste was examined again and then ordained in ‘‘a very solemn and impressive service’’ in which the novitiate knelt while the ministers placed their hands upon his head. The service concluded with a benediction by Muste. It was a ‘‘tremendous experience for me,’’ Muste recalled. ‘‘I felt a very strong call to the ministry and a very strong urge to preach and a feeling that I had something to give and, of course, [I had] this sense of fulfillment that my parents had.’’²⁹

AT Fort Washington, Muste exhibited the personal traits that would make him a successful minister and, later, a beloved and effective leader. He had an unpretentious and down-to-earth temperament, keen sense of humor, and took pleasure in leisure and commercial amusements, particularly baseball. When providing pastoral care, he was an attentive and nonjudgmental listener, and when he spoke, he had a direct, personal style that sought to reconcile different points of view. Moreover, unlike stereotypically charismatic personalities, he had first-rate organizational skills that would make Fort Washington a dynamic and expanding institution. These two aspects of his character—warmhearted and catholic, on the one hand, and calculated and ambitious, on the other—help to explain why, later in his career, he was often underestimated by political and intellectual foes. At Fort Washington, it led to personal growth and professional success, endearing him to his congregation and his superiors in the collegiate system and making his break with the church, when it came, free of mutual recriminations.³⁰

As minister, Muste continued to evolve a more modern theology. God assumed the role of loving father, not judging patriarch; his focus was on life on this earth, not on the hereafter.³¹ Union Theological Seminary, where he took courses from 1909 until 1913 and obtained another bachelor of divinity degree, encouraged this move away from Calvinism.³² The center of liberal Protestantism, Union had declared its independence from denominational control in 1892 following the ‘‘Briggs controversy.’’ The controversy began when the Presbyterian Church suspended a faculty member for advocating the revision of the Westminster Confession, which, among other things, asserts the doctrines of infallibility and biblical literalism. From then on, Union ‘‘moved in an increasingly liberal and nondenominational direction.’’³³ It also served as a leader in the move toward a more academic, historical-critical approach to seminary education. Reflecting this orientation, its faculty did not necessarily have pastoral experience, and often held advanced degrees from German universities, making it a striking contrast to the education Muste had received at New Brunswick. At Union, Muste became acquainted with the national and international leaders in mainline Protestantism and made contacts with people who would later play a significant role in his life, such as Norman Thomas, later the leader of the American Socialist Party, and Ted Savage, who would become executive director of the Presbytery of New York.³⁴

What Muste learned at Union challenged Calvinist doctrine to its core. Arthur McGiffert, from whom he took four classes on church history and with whom he developed a close, personal relationship, used critical historical methods to study the New Testament and early Christian history, an approach that had earned him some notoriety in the 1890s. McGiffert criticized the Reformed tradition for having a juridical conception of God, and his research emphasized that Jesus conceived of God as merciful and fatherly. He explored modern trends in religion, tracing the shift in religious authority from external, legal, and absolute terms to human, vital, changing, and as the product of personal experience. He stressed the key role of William James in rehabilitating faith for the modern world, as well as the German theologian Albrecht Ritschl for his view that religious life is love activated in service to others and in community.³⁵ Other Union faculty members were similarly modern, stressing the need—and the inevitability—of adapting Christianity to the historical context and turning to the life of Jesus as a model for Christian living in a modern age. Christianity is ‘‘the religion of sympathizing love and of self-sacrificing service,’’ asserted George William Knox, Union’s professor of the philosophy and history of religion.³⁶

Through his courses at Union, Muste’s sense of religion’s purview expanded, and he soon became deeply interested in politics, though not an activist. McGiffert, Knox, William Adams Brown, and other faculty were part of a larger cultural project of constructing a ‘‘radical Jesus’’ whose ideals of egalitarianism and love stood against the church and state of his time.³⁷ Like other adherents of the Social Gospel, they understood the Kingdom of God to be a redeemed social order. Most important for Muste’s politicization was their view of Christianity as a prophetic religion that built upon the historical and ethical foundations of Judaism. As Muste recalled, studying the Hebrew prophetic tradition taught him that religion was not remote, but found ‘‘in the here and now’’ and ‘‘in the historical process,’’ thus giving action in this world meaning and ultimate significance. The prophets were ‘‘preachers of social justice, fearless agitators, political rebels . . . constantly stirred as was Moses by anger against injustice and dreams of a just nation or society.’’³⁸

Muste’s congregants, most of them Roosevelt Republicans, encouraged his exploration of the social and political implications of Christianity in study groups and forums sponsored by the YMCA. He also attended some of the discussion clubs that sprinkled the city where ‘‘Socialist and liberal activists and intellectuals’’ came together to examine such topics as child labor, juvenile justice, peace, and international arbitration. In this context, he read Woodrow Wilson’s ‘‘New Freedom’’ and found it persuasive, as well as socialist material that popularized the ideas of Marx.³⁹

His politicization moved ‘‘very fast’’; ‘‘by the time the [1912] election came along I voted for [Socialist candidate Eugene V.] Debs.’’⁴⁰ Still, to vote for Debs in the context of progressive New York circles was not a particularly radical thing to do. As Muste stressed in his oral history, Debs was ‘‘in a way . . . a part of this progressive tradition.’’ He was ‘‘a figure associated with Abraham Lincoln,’’ not with un-Americanism or even Marxism; the marginalization of socialism would come later, during and after World War I.⁴¹ Moreover, he remained largely disconnected from the socialist agitation, labor strikes, and political scandal that shook up the city during this period.

Yet politics would not be the fulcrum for Muste’s estrangement from the Fort Washington Church. His nascent socialist consciousness was well within the bounds of acceptable political discourse in the context of Progressive Era Manhattan. He still considered himself a minister by vocation and not a reformer; politics rarely made an appearance in his sermons, which remained focused on his congregants’ personal problems. And yet even as his church prospered, by 1913 he was in the midst of a profound spiritual crisis that would ultimately compel him to break from the Reformed Church. The theological modernism to which he had been exposed at Union had gradually eroded his faith. He now doubted the doctrines of the Westminster Confession, particularly the virgin birth, original sin, and the literal interpretation of scripture. As he questioned the tenets of the faith in which he had been raised, he fell into a deep depression, fearing that he had ‘‘lost religion’’ and ‘‘questioning how you could believe that life was worthwhile at all.’’ He even considered leaving the ministry altogether.⁴²

Whether because of his ‘‘nervous prostration’’ or because his wife was sick from a miscarriage (or both; the sources are unclear), in early 1914 he and Anne left the city for the Catskills to reflect and recuperate. There, he had a tremendous mystical experience that reassured him of God’s existence and of God’s love; ‘‘I have now arrived at a perfect religious certainty, a peace of mind after a long period of doubt,’’ Muste proclaimed upon returning to the city.⁴³ The New York Times reported that ‘‘he returned to the city restored from the nervous prostration he had experienced, but when he compared his reformed, new-found, faith with the doctrine of his church, he found divergences.’’⁴⁴ Close friends, including Henry Sloan Coffin, a leader in the Presbyterian Church and faculty member at Union Theological Seminary, urged him to find a way to reconcile his new beliefs with the Westminster Confession and then work to reform the church from within. But Muste, setting a pattern that would be repeated throughout his life, would brook no compromise with his conscience, and he honored his contract with the Reformed Church requiring that he report any ‘‘doubts or difficulties’’ to his classis.⁴⁵

On October 20, 1914, the New York Classis met to consider a communication from Muste to the effect that the doctrines of the church were largely ‘‘untrue, outworn, or unimportant,’’ and that the real meaning of Christianity was to follow Jesus, ‘‘to live by his spirit, to give him free course in one’s life.’’ ‘‘This past winter has brought me into such communion with God, such peace, such perfect confidence, as I can honestly crave for all men everywhere,’’ Muste explained. While he hoped to continue doing ‘‘God’s work’’ within the Reformed Church, he accepted the probable consequences of his apostasy. Though they ‘‘loved the pastor,’’ the classis was unwilling to make an exception, and it was clear that Muste had to resign.⁴⁶

Viewed as a preacher of ‘‘rare intellectual ability’’ and ‘‘unusual [spiritual] power,’’ his departure from Fort Washington deeply troubled and saddened New York City’s Reformed community.⁴⁷ ‘‘I blame Union Theological Seminary for the whole trouble,’’ the Reverend Dr. David J. Burrell, senior pastor of the Collegiate Reformed Church, told the New York Herald.⁴⁸ Another minister was more sympathetic, commenting presciently that ‘‘we cannot but feel that in an environment in which he feels a little less restraint theologically, he will develop into a very unusual man.’’⁴⁹

To leave the Reformed Church was also, symbolically at least, to break with the Dutch ethnic community. His parents, who had sacrificed to make his ministerial career possible, found his decision puzzling, even embarrassing, though they would continue to respect and love him. Perhaps they received some consolation from their younger son, Cornelius, who followed Muste into the Dutch Reformed ministry, yet remained within the church. Indeed, ‘‘Neal’’ occupied a sort of parallel universe; he followed Muste to Hope College, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, and a ministerial career in New York City. Yet, as Muste drew deeper into nonconformity and political radicalism, Neal continued his steady rise in the Reformed Church, fulfilling the expectations his parents had for his older brother. In so doing, however, he assumed a class status and identity that separated him from his family of origin. He visited Grand Rapids less frequently than Muste, who made the trip at least twice a year; there, relatives found ‘‘Uncle Neal’’ distant and condescending, preferring the company of ‘‘Uncle Bram,’’ who was ‘‘quiet,’’ ‘‘humble,’’ and ‘‘down-to-earth.’’⁵⁰

IN his journey from Calvinism to liberalism, from the Republican Party to voting for Debs, Muste was typical of other Social Gospel progressives. The first generation of progressives, such as Jane Addams, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, shed their Calvinist heritage and turned to secular professions and reform as an outlet for their ‘‘quest for religious perfectionism.’’⁵¹ The Social Gospel similarly shaped the evolving political identities of the next generation of Protestant reformers, such as Norman Thomas and his brother Evan, Kirby Page, Paul Kellogg, Mary Van Kleeck, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others. As Muste and other Calvinists groped toward a new, more authentic Christian faith, they drew upon powerful cultural narratives popularized by figures like William James and the Quaker mystic Rufus Jones, who celebrated spiritual inwardness and ecstatic experience as offering a path out of the dislocating and alienating effects of modernity. The mystical tradition that they helped invent was a cosmopolitan one in which the solitude of mystical experience gave way to a sense of oneness with all peoples, to ideals of ‘‘universal brotherhood, and sympathetic appreciation of all religions.’’⁵² It was also a reformist one; James and Jones believed that mysticism unleashed energy for the hard work of social transformation. For James, for example, the measure of religious experience was ‘‘its fruits, its production of saintliness and active habits.’’ It was a ‘‘way to unleash energy, to find the hot place of human initiative and endeavor, and to encourage the heroic, the strenuous, the vital, and the socially transformative.’’⁵³

Still, there were important differences between these two generations of Protestant reformers. The latter, coming of age during the era of modernist revolt, would prove itself more laborite and more libertarian than the former, which had a deep affinity for top-down, Fabian-style reform. Muste’s generation was also more cosmopolitan, decidedly rejecting notions of Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority and embracing cross-ethnic exchange and experiences (Muste was, of course, an immigrant himself). They were, in other words, Protestant modernists; the emphasis is on the adjective, for they largely remained conventional in matters related to morality, sexuality, and gender in contrast to their more secular comrades like Floyd Dell, Margaret Sanger, Edmund Wilson, Max Eastman, and Louise Bryant. In this vein, most Christian modernists supported Prohibition; Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes bragged that he would ‘‘never under any circumstances allow a drop of alcohol to pass my lips.’’⁵⁴ Muste was somewhat unusual in his opposition to Prohibition and his refusal to moralize on the evils of alcohol, as well as in his enjoyment of popular culture. But he shared the moral uprightness of his fellow Protestants, noting later in life that ‘‘he had never been drunk.’’⁵⁵

How Muste related to his wife during this period of spiritual crisis offers another example of the cultural conservatism of Protestant modernists. Though Anne was aware of Muste’s estrangement from Reformed doctrine, he did not engage in philosophical or intellectual discussions with her. More to the point, he apparently decided to break with the church without consulting her, setting a pattern that would persist throughout their lives together. Indeed, even as Muste developed close working relationships with powerful women and often worked with them on terms of mutual respect and equality, within his personal life, there was a strict sexual division of labor, with his wife clearly subordinate to him. In this instance, Anne does not appear to have been much disturbed; according to Muste, she was not a particularly ‘‘rigid’’ sort of person, and her own horizons had been broadened by the move to New York. It was several years later, in 1917, when Muste broke with the ministry altogether over his pacifism, that clear differences emerged. Yet there was no question but that Anne would support her husband, even as his choices made her deeply anxious and perhaps even ill.⁵⁶

Gender expectations alone do not explain Anne’s support for her husband during this period. Like Muste, she was the product of a deeply religious environment in which her husband’s apparent communion with God was culturally acceptable and, indeed, a cause for rejoicing. There is no reason to doubt Muste’s recollection that both of them shared ‘‘a deep sense of. . . the ultimate rightness of things’’ when he had another mystical event soon after leaving Fort Washington. While walking along the corridor of a hotel, he suddenly experienced ‘‘a great light flooding in upon the world making things stand forth ‘in sunny outline brave and clear’ and of God being truly present and all-sufficient.’’ It was in this spirit of ‘‘having arrived’’ that the Mustes moved to Newtonville, one of five villages that made up the city of Newton, Massachusetts, to assume the pastorate of the Central Congregational Church.⁵⁷

THE Congregational Church was an ideal theological home for Muste following his break with the Reformed Church. Congregationalism shared the Puritan and Calvinist heritage of the Reformed Church, yet had a more liberal style of church organization in which local churches were autonomous in matters pertaining to faith, worship, and congregational life. It had also decisively broken with Calvinism, with Congregationalists playing a leading role in the development of the ‘‘New Theology,’’ a more optimistic, ethical creed that posited Christ as a moral exemplar.⁵⁸ Founded in 1868, Central Congregational Church in Newtonville reflected this history of liberalism; as early as 1877, the church did not require that members provide an unqualified assent to the Apostles’ Creed. It was also younger and less wealthy than some of the older, more established Congregational churches in New England; it was not one of the ‘‘top churches,’’ as Fort Washington Collegiate Church had been. Still, as with Fort Washington, Muste’s parishioners were largely progressively oriented professionals, with faculty from local preparatory schools and universities, editors, and people active in philanthropy.⁵⁹

Muste’s new pastorate placed him at the center of the Anglo-American tradition of nonconformity. Nearby Concord was the place where Henry David Thoreau went to jail rather than pay taxes to support the U.S.-Mexican War, and Muste’s parishioners and larger community felt a deep sense of identification and connection with the tradition of nonresistance and abolitionism that had played such a prominent role in the region. Soon after Muste arrived, he was accepted into a discussion club run by leading Congregational and Unitarian preachers and theologians of the area—and indeed of the United States. George A. Gordon of the Old South Church, who had been a central figure in the Congregational revolt against Calvinism, was a member of this group, as was the Reverend James Brown of King’s Chapel Church; the Reverend Ambrose Vernon of the Harvard Church in Brookline; the Reverend J. Edgar Parke, future president of Wheaton College; Willard Sperry, dean of Harvard Theological Seminary; and Bliss Perry, a specialist in the Transcendentalists, who lectured at Harvard and served as editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Perry was especially important in bringing Muste ‘‘closer to, deeper into Emerson, Thoreau, [and] Channing.’’⁶⁰ As a result of these discussions, ‘‘spiritually, as well as physically, I felt myself seeing the places that Thoreau and Emerson had looked upon, breathing the air they had breathed.’’⁶¹ The link between nonconformity and Americanism was complete: ‘‘the mere sight of Boston Common, the State House, Concord and Lexington’’ came to mean ‘‘a great deal’’ to Muste.⁶²

With the spiritualist culture of New England affirming his mystical tendencies, his sense of connection to God and his sureness of God’s love deepened. As he wrote a recently widowed parishioner, ‘‘I believe with all my being that our lives are in the hands of a God who loves each of us much more than we ever love our dearest ones.’’⁶³ In turn, his parishioners adored him, viewing him as ‘‘a man of a rarely sweet and sincere nature, a preacher of deep spiritual power,’’ and increasing their benevolent contributions more than four times from 1915 to 1917.⁶⁴ It was in this context, early in January 1916, that Muste’s first child, Anne Dorothy (called ‘‘Nancy’’), was born. ‘‘She was, naturally, a lovely baby. At heaven’s gate the lark sang; the snail was on the thorn, the bird on the wing, God in his heaven, and all was right in the world,’’ Muste recalled.⁶⁵

Muste was indeed ‘‘a liberated man’’ in Newtonville.⁶⁶ Feeling ‘‘freer in expression’’ than he had in the Reformed Church, his sermons matured and sounded themes that would be at the center of his political vision throughout his activist career.⁶⁷ A 1915 sermon, ‘‘Of What Shall We Be Afraid?’’ began, typically enough, with Jesus Christ and specifically his admonition in Matthew 10:28: ‘‘Do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul. Fear him rather who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.’’ Rather than expound upon the passage’s implications for the individual moral life, Muste was explicitly political, arguing that Americans’ preoccupation with threats from abroad, particularly German aggression, had blinded them to the dangers that ‘‘threaten us from within,’’ such as racism and economic exploitation. Referring to ‘‘serious labor disturbances in Lawrence, in New York, in Paterson, in Little Falls, in West Virginia, in Northern Michigan, in Colorado,’’ he rejected the notion that revolutionary agitators were to blame: ‘‘The only trouble with [them] from Jesus’ point of view is that they are not half revolutionary enough, for they are only tinkering away at the outward machinery of life; he would strike at the heart of man and take out of it the very desire for money, for ease, for power, for honor, which creates the outward order of industry and society.’’⁶⁸ This idea—that socialization, to be truly effective, must be accompanied by a change of heart—would be repeated throughout Muste’s long career and points to one of the central differences between Christian socialists and their secular comrades.⁶⁹

Muste’s evolving politics involved a reworking of his identity. Educated in the imperial culture of ‘‘muscular Christianity,’’ his sermons show a preoccupation with squaring his new ideals of peace and justice with an ideology of white manhood that stressed martial prowess and racial struggle. ‘‘Many people seem to think that war is hard and makes a rugged, noble race,’’ he observed, and that ‘‘peace is easy and makes degenerate men.’’ While he conceded that war might develop certain virtues, it also involved giving into base instinct; a ‘‘real man,’’ by contrast, strived for self-control, the respect of his neighbors, and cared for rather than exterminated the weak. Moreover, if anything, modern warfare spread ‘‘degeneracy’’ by killing off the ‘‘finest men’’ and leaving the ‘‘less fit’’ to breed. Social Darwinism thus continued to shape his thought even as he groped toward a more pacific male identity.⁷⁰

These two sermons, delivered about a year after Europe plunged into the Great War, also show a growing preoccupation with the threat of militarism and war. The European conflict had seemed distant and unthreatening at first, as President Woodrow Wilson promised to keep the United States out of the conflict. But, as American entry grew more likely, Muste, along with his fellow religious liberals, was forced to confront the question of whether or not he could reconcile his Christian faith and participation in war. Muste was on uncertain ground here; even his courses at Union had never given him the ‘‘inkling that there might be such a thing as a pacifist interpretation of the Gospel.’’⁷¹ In fact, in the fall of 1914, he had preached a sermon for the veterans of the Spanish-American War in which he ‘‘made the expected, conventional observations that war is a terrible and wicked thing . . . but when the strong attack the weak, and democracy and religion are in danger, then, of course, as good Christians, we must go bravely, though reluctantly, into battle.’’⁷²

On one level, Muste’s conversion to pacifism was simply a question of ‘‘Christian conscience.’’ As he recalled of those difficult days, he ultimately ‘‘could not reconcile the Sermon on the Mount, 1 Corinthians 13, the whole concept of the cross as the way of redemption, with war.’’⁷³ Yet Muste’s pacifism must also be understood within the cultural context of New England and liberal Protestantism more broadly. His discussion club, for example, had introduced him to a serious exploration of Christian mysticism and particularly the Quaker Rufus Jones whose work celebrated the Quakers and their peace testimony as illustrative of mystical religion in action.⁷⁴ Sperry, Parke, and other members of his social group were also deeply involved in Boston’s active peace movement, and they had invited Muste to attend various antiwar meetings, including one in early 1916 that featured the founders of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Soon thereafter, Muste, together with Sperry and Parke, joined the FOR; their first meeting was held in Bliss Perry’s Boston apartment.⁷⁵

Founded in 1914 by the English Quaker Henry Hodgkin, the FOR was a small yet influential international organization whose members pledged to build ‘‘a world-order based on Love’’ by following the example of ‘‘the life and death of Jesus Christ.’’⁷⁶ Hodgkin had helped to establish an American branch at a conference in Garden City, Long Island in November of 1915, soon after President Wilson initiated a preparedness campaign. The Fellowship was a ‘‘combination of Christian parochialism and expansive sentiment,’’ as one historian has put it aptly.⁷⁷ Its members were exclusively Protestant, with strong roots in the Social Gospel movement, highly educated, and often from elite backgrounds. Many of them had been active in the YMCA, and its statement of principles reflected this evangelical heritage. The organization also had a strong Quaker influence, signified by its commitment to individual spiritual autonomy. As one early statement put it, ‘‘It is intended that members shall work out personally and in their own way, what is involved in their membership. There is no program or theory of social reconstruction to which all are committed. The chief method is a life lived in loyalty to Christ, expressing itself in every activity and relation of life.’’⁷⁸

The FOR was, in other words, exactly what its name implied: both a fellowship of Christian pacifists, eager to witness for their beliefs, and a political organization committed to using ‘‘the method of Jesus’’ to resolve vexing industrial, racial, and international problems. There was some tension between these two aims, and what exactly was meant by ‘‘the method of Jesus’’ would soon become a matter of intense debate, but in its founding years the FOR functioned as an important source of support and camaraderie for opponents of war.

In becoming a pacifist in 1916, Muste remained a part of the liberal mainstream, which was largely opposed to American intervention. But all of this changed on April 2, 1917, when President Wilson summoned the Congress and the American people to war, explaining that ‘‘the world must be made safe for democracy.’’ Wilson’s language of American mission was the language of American progressivism, and the majority of progressives and even most self-described ‘‘pacifists’’ shifted from hostility to interventionism to support for the state. For progressives, the war offered an opportunity for reform. The war, John Dewey declared, was ‘‘full of social possibilities’’; it would constrain ‘‘the individualistic tradition’’ and teach ‘‘the supremacy of public need over private possessions.’’⁷⁹

The Federal Council of Churches, representing the mainline denominations, similarly viewed the war as an opportunity to modernize and liberalize the country and to extend American values to a decadent and corrupt Europe. William Adams Brown, one of Muste’s former professors at Union, headed up the Federal Council’s crusade to uplift the morals of American soldiers and make them ‘‘fit to fight.’’ Other Protestant luminaries such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Shailer Matthews, Sherwood Eddy, and John Mott also joined the effort. Especially devastating was Brown’s incisive criticism of pacifism in which he suggested that it was ‘‘a kind of fundamentalism.’’ Though he had ‘‘the greatest respect’’ for pacifists, he argued that they were attempting ‘‘to apply an absolute ideal’’ to a progressive, changing society, and thus represented a regression to the orthodoxy and dogmatism against which they had rebelled.⁸⁰

On one level, progressive optimism was not misplaced; the war offered them the opportunity to rationalize American society and to spread their values to the larger world. At home, the wartime state created agencies like the War Industries Board, which assumed greater control over industrial production, and the National War Labor Policies Board, which adjudicated labor disputes, enacted an eight-hour workday, and guaranteed collective bargaining rights for some industries. Abroad, President Wilson expressed his commitment to constructing a postwar international organization that would prevent war through planned reconstruction, liberalized trade, and democratization, and he welcomed the assistance of liberal internationalists in making his dream a reality.⁸¹

At the same time, the war exposed the dark side of the modern, managerial state and the imperial assumptions behind Wilson’s idealism. As critic Randolph Bourne predicted in his famous 1917 essay rebuking his idol John Dewey, a war of rival imperialists could not be molded to ‘‘liberal purposes,’’ but would rather empower the least democratic forces in American life.⁸² Perhaps because progressives believed so completely in the justness of their cause, they viewed any evidence of dissent as a sign of disloyalty. A repressive atmosphere soon enveloped the country; eager to quash antiwar sentiment, the federal government enacted statutes to restrict freedom of speech with the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Approximately one thousand Americans were convicted of violating these statutes, including the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. Numerous publications, including FOR’s World Tomorrow, were denied use of the mails. State governments were even more repressive; thirty-three states outlawed the possession or display of the red flag of Communism or the black flag of anarchism, and twenty-three adopted laws defining the crime of ‘‘criminal syndicalism.’’ Private groups, including churches, colluded in stifling dissent. Antiwar clergy faced harassment, were denied civil liberties, and often lost their pulpits. Many of them made their way into the FOR.⁸³

For those, like Muste, who placed their religious obligations above national loyalty, the attacks on civil liberties and the acquiescence of the churches came as a profound shock. Many of them had assumed that their ‘‘reforming religion was more or less in accord with the enlightened outlook of progressive political leaders such as Woodrow Wilson,’’ and it was distressing to find that their opposition to war and conscription placed them ‘‘outside the terms of citizenship.’’⁸⁴ The mistreatment of conscientious objectors (COs) reflected their newly marginal status. The Selective Service Act of 1917 initially only made provisions for COs who were members of the historic peace churches (i.e., Brethren, Mennonites, and Quakers), giving them a choice between noncombatant military service or confinement under military authority. Most of the four thousand COs who were confined to army camps were antimodern scriptural literalists, but a minority of them were pacifists of the FOR type, including Norman Thomas’s brother Evan, his friend Harold Gray, and the civil libertarian Roger Baldwin. Without clear guidelines, the military’s treatment of COs was inconsistent, ranging from benign neglect to beatings and abuse. At least two COs died during their internment.⁸⁵

Together, these events radicalized pacifists. Though most of them had long supported social reform, their opposition to World War I was based upon religious belief. Yet the use of government power to suppress their Christian conscience, as well as dissent more broadly, gave meaning to traditional American civil liberties to which they considered themselves heirs. During World War I, FOR member John Haynes Holmes recalled, there ‘‘suddenly came to the fore in our nation’s life the new issue of civil liberties.’’⁸⁶ In October 1917, Holmes, along with Norman Thomas, Hollingsworth Wood, Roger Baldwin, and other pacifists, founded the National Civil Liberties Bureau (later known as the American Civil Liberties Union) to defend the rights of individuals against the state and dissenters against majority opinion. In founding the ACLU, pacifists resisted the obligatory and coercive demands of modern citizenship and ‘‘gave voice to a politics that imagined the citizen first and foremost as an individual and as a bearer of rights.’’ In so doing, pacifists invented a ‘‘rights-based vision of citizenship’’ that has competed with and coexisted alongside the growth of the American national government ever since.⁸⁷

In their defense of individual rights, pacifists broke from their progressive roots and drew closer to the modernist, revolutionary milieu known as the ‘‘lyrical left.’’ As the above quote by Dewey suggests, the progressive movement had rejected the individualist creed of the nineteenth century, viewing it as the ideological cover for the selfishness, inequality, and class conflict of the industrial capitalist order. Many progressives had almost a blind faith in the federal government as the agent of social progress. But World War I had demonstrated the potentially repressive power of the state, and some progressives (Dewey included) gained an appreciation for civil liberties. Significantly, pacifists and other early members of the ACLU did not believe their support for individual liberty and social democracy was a contradiction in terms. As Doug Rossinow has commented, ‘‘the theoretical conflict between legal individualism and social reconstruction that a later generation of political liberals would assert simply did not obtain in the minds of most political activists on the left half of the political spectrum in these years.’’⁸⁸ Indeed, it was an article of faith for these modern ‘‘liberal-leftists’’ that personal liberation and social emancipation were inseparable. Thus, somewhat unexpectedly, pacifists became allied with cultural experimentalists and revolutionary socialists.⁸⁹

THE pro-war hysteria arrived gradually to Central Congregational Church and the Boston area. In part, this was due to the fact that Boston had been the center of a vigorous peace movement. Muste was also on very good terms with his parishioners who had generally expressed respect and sympathy for his antiwar stance.⁹⁰ But by Labor Day of 1917, when Muste returned from a two-month summer vacation, the situation had changed dramatically. By this time, the draft was in full effect, as private groups and voluntary associations mobilized to do the coercive work of a national government that lacked a modern administrative apparatus, a situation that fostered a mob psychology. At Central Congregational Church, some seventy parishioners had sons in the service and many others supported the war effort through the YMCA, YWCA, or the Red Cross. The church itself was militarized, actively fund-raising for a War Camp Community Recreation Fund and listing an ‘‘honor roll of men in the military and naval service’’ on the back of Sunday service programs.⁹¹ Some began to question Muste’s ability to provide adequate consolation should their sons be killed. As a result, pressure mounted on him to moderate his pacifism. Church officers proposed that he take a leave of absence for the duration of the war. Even his pacifist comrades Willard Sperry and Edgar Parke urged him to modify his pacifism publicly, as they had done, arguing that maintaining the connection between a minister and church superseded the call of prophetic witness.⁹²

Muste, however, stood his ground. On December 9, 1917, he affirmed his pacifist faith in a letter of resignation he read to the congregation in lieu of a sermon. Instead of being treasonous, his pacifism showed the utmost concern for ‘‘the boys in the service’’ and, most important, authentically reflected the spirit of Jesus and the early Christian church. Rather than support the war effort, which was the work of fallible men, the church should focus on creating ‘‘the spiritual conditions that should stop the war and render all wars unthinkable.’’ He went on to explain that another recent ‘‘mystical experience of God’’ had released him from any doubt; he was ‘‘happy and at rest in God. The war no longer has me by the throat.’’ In concluding, he offered his resignation ‘‘without the least feeling of bitterness,’’ unless the church was willing to respect their differences. Two weeks later, at a meeting that filled the chapel, church officers affirmed their ‘‘honor, respect and love’’ for Muste, while also passing a resolution supporting the American war effort. They offered him three months leave ‘‘to investigate the war situation,’’ presumably with the hope that he would change his mind. Muste accepted the leave, but ultimately tendered his resignation.⁹³

Muste stayed long enough to deliver the Christmas Day sermon. A meditation on 1 John 3:2 (‘‘Now are we the children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be’’), it reveals the powerful ways in which his radical Christian pacifism both intersected with and challenged the modernist project. The sermon began with French philosopher Henri Bergson’s comments on his 1913 visit to the United States to the effect that there was a gap between technological and industrial achievement, on the one hand, and moral and spiritual development, on the other. Nowhere was this more apparent than in modern warfare, which had multiplied humanity’s capacity to kill without a corresponding change in views of war and peace. ‘‘Our supreme immediate need,’’ Muste paraphrased Bergson, ‘‘is finer, nobler men and women, clearer minds, above all, loftier souls.’’ Modernist social scientists used the term ‘‘cultural lag’’ to describe this idea, and they believed their research would supply the information and knowledge needed to bridge the gap between science and culture. Muste, by contrast, contended that Christianity had already provided ‘‘the answer’’ with its message that ‘‘the divine can and does express itself through the human,’’ and he promised that awareness of the divinity within oneself and within others would reveal that social conventions, churches, and nations were just illusions separating people from each other.⁹⁴ In Muste’s formulation, the path out of the alienation and anxiety of modern times was not the imagined community of the nation, but to live like Christ.

Muste’s biographer Jo Ann Robinson has suggested that Central Congregational Church’s decision to fire Muste was in part due to his ‘‘erratic’’ behavior over the course of 1916 and 1917, as he alternated between expressions of pacifism and support for the war. She points to an article Muste published in the Congregationalist in late 1916 in which he called on readers to ‘‘do your bit for Belgium’’ and a patriotic service he led after the war was declared that included a paean to the ‘‘noble American ideals’’ of freedom, opportunity, and Christianity.⁹⁵ Another possible interpretation of this period, however, is that Muste did not initially understand his pacifism as contrary to ‘‘Americanism.’’ Government repression, the link made between patriotism and war, was as ‘‘unanticipated and shocking’’ for him as it was for other pacifists and dissenters. As Muste recalled in his memoirs, before the United States entered World War I, the loyalty of its inhabitants, including members of the Socialist Party, was taken for granted; ‘‘there were no F.B.I.’s or state loyalty boards to assemble dossiers on thousands of citizens,’’ he commented, adding that these trends have since ‘‘endured and gained in strength.’’⁹⁶ Certainly the work of Nick Salvatore and others bears out Muste’s perception that citizenship and socialism were not viewed as mutually exclusive until World War I and the subsequent Red Scare.⁹⁷ Reflecting these concerns, immediately after leaving Central Congregational Church, Muste became a volunteer for the nascent ACLU, serving as an advocate for COs and other persecuted pacifists in the New England area.

In staying true to his pacifism, Muste consciously chose the life of a prophet and the fellowship of dissenters over that of a minister and the obligations of modern citizenship. His memoirs provide some clues as to why he felt compelled to follow his conscience over the demands of his beloved congregation while others, such as Sperry and Parke, did not. In recalling these years, Muste reflected that, growing up in the Reformed Church, he had ‘‘received too solid a dose of Calvinism not to have a strong conviction about human frailty and corruption.’’ Thus, once he had concluded that Christianity and war were irreconcilable, he was congenitally unable to ‘‘adapt the Gospel to [external] circumstances’’ that violated his deepest sense of what was the true meaning of Christianity. Yet he had not become a new sort of fundamentalist, as William Adams Brown’s trenchant criticism of pacifism would suggest. The mystical creed he embraced saw religious vitality as growing out of a creative tension between engagement and adaptation to a changing environment, on the one hand, and those ‘‘permanent and time-transcending Realities’’ that emerged from direct communion with God, on the other. Moreover, like his spiritual mentor, Rufus Jones, Muste was fully cognizant of the psychological and cultural factors that might mediate between his experiences of the divine, and he conceded that, for some, mysticism might be a sign of pathological disturbance.⁹⁸ However we choose to interpret it, his religious experiences clearly offered him a language for breaking with the ministry, the conventions of middle-class life, and the demands of national belonging in the modern era.

UPON leaving Central Congregational Church, Muste continued his work with the ACLU of providing advocacy and legal help for pacifists throughout New England. In this context, he joined the Religious Society of Friends, a decision that apparently involved no theological crisis. Since his break from the Reformed Church, he had subscribed to the Quaker doctrine of the inner light, which holds that every person has access to God’s presence, a sentiment reinforced by his participation in his Boston-area discussion club and membership in the FOR. The Quakers’ history of nonresistance and social activism also reflected his own evolving beliefs. Becoming a member of the Society of Friends did not, moreover, exclude other religious affiliations. Indeed, for the rest of his long life (except for his years as Marxist-Leninist), he would remain a member of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, an identity and commitment that speaks to his ongoing engagement with the Calvinist tradition.⁹⁹

In January 1918, the Providence Friends’ Meeting offered him a small salary and a home in return for teaching and ministerial services and maintenance of a reading room in the meetinghouse, a center for ‘‘the various unorthodox, persecuted individuals in the city’’ to gather and ‘‘metaphorically hold hands.’’ Though Providence’s Quaker community was affluent and well established, the authorities viewed the meetinghouse as a source of irritation and concern. Reflecting his newly disreputable status, on June 7, 1918, at the annual meeting of the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, Muste narrowly escaped arrest when a local Baptist minister charged him with seditious speech.¹⁰⁰

As this experience suggests, the persecution of dissenters intensified even as the war wound to a close. By the late summer of 1918, so-called ‘‘slacker raids’’ reached a fevered pitch, as patriot volunteers rounded up men suspected of dodging the draft. By the end of the war in November 1918, the country was in the midst of a full-fledged Red Scare, culminating in the ‘‘Palmer raids’’ of 1920 in which Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up hundreds of political radicals in the labor movement and deported some five hundred of them.

Yet it would be misleading to emphasize only the repressive atmosphere of the immediate postwar years; for the left, 1918–20 was also a time of expectancy, urgency, and optimism. In Russia, the Red Army defeated counterrevolutionaries and brought their revolution into eastern Europe, while in western Europe trade unions broke free of their exclusivist traditions and became mass movements for democratic control of industry. Meanwhile, in the colonized world, uprisings suggested that the era of imperialism was nearing an end. Even in the United States, where American capital emerged from the war stronger than ever, many believed that capitalism was in its ‘‘death throes’’ and that they were part of an international movement giving birth to a more egalitarian social order. With Soviet Russia as their beacon, they looked to the labor movement to make their dreams of revolution a reality. The eruption of a massive strike wave involving some four million workers throughout the country suggested that labor was indeed realizing its historic role. There were general strikes in Seattle and Winnipeg, strikes among longshoremen, stockyard workers, carpenters, textile and clothing workers, telephone operators, and, most dramatically, the Great Steel Strike of 1919, involving 365,000 steel workers. Proposals for reconstructing the social order came from across the liberal-left political spectrum. Even the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) entertained proposals to extend wartime economic controls, establish social insurance, and nationalize the railways.¹⁰¹

Muste was deeply affected by the era’s revolutionary spirit, as well as by ‘‘the visions of the prophets of a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness would prevail and every man would sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none should be afraid.’’ Convinced that ‘‘a new world’’ was ‘‘about to be born,’’ he joined other members of the Boston FOR in founding ‘‘the Comradeship,’’ a group committed to examining ‘‘the question of how to organize our lives so that they would truly express the teachings and spirit of Jesus.’’¹⁰² In November, he moved his family from Providence to the Comradeship’s headquarters in a rented house in the working-class neighborhood adjacent to Back Bay. They lived on the second floor, while pacifist minister Harold Rotzel, his wife, and three-year-old daughter lived on the third. Other members of the Comradeship included Cedric Long, another minister who had lost his pulpit because of his opposition to the war, and three women of independent means: Anna N. Davis, a Quaker and member of the Hallowell family; Ethel Paine, a prominent Bostonian and descendant of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; and Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a socialist and a disciple of William James who believed with the philosopher in the reality and ‘‘genius of the trance phenomena.’’ To these women, Muste, Long, and Rotzel were ‘‘saintly’’ characters, and they served as essential sources of support for the Comradeship and for Muste throughout his life.¹⁰³

The headquarters of the Comradeship served as a sort of alternative community for its members and for a hodgepodge of radicals who used it as a meeting space and safe haven. The spiritual atmosphere was intense. Muste and Rotzel arose every morning at five o’clock, bundled themselves in overcoats, and ‘‘read the New Testament—especially the Sermon on the Mount—together, analyzed the passages, meditated on each phrase, even each word, prayed, and asked ourselves what obedience to those precepts meant for us.’’ Members subjected themselves to a common ‘‘spiritual discipline,’’ while individually setting aside time for Bible study, prayer, and devotional reading.¹⁰⁴ Muste appears to have been in a state of religious fervor. As Elizabeth Glendower Evans described him in the winter of 1918–19, ‘‘His face had the inner glow of one fed by spiritual manna.’’¹⁰⁵

Evans went on to comment that she ‘‘feared that he and his wife and perhaps even their little children went hungry. However, he made no complaint.’’¹⁰⁶ As this comment suggests, for Muste, the transition from upstanding, respectable minister to impoverished radial agitator was eased by the peace of mind that came from following his conscience and from joining a community of shared believers. The same could not be said for Anne Muste, who did not have ‘‘the release of being true to convictions’’ that he had experienced. ‘‘I was imposing a situation on her. What could she do about it?’’ he commented rhetorically, revealing the gender privilege upon which their marriage was based. Indeed, for Anne, the experience involved a loss of community and identity. As Muste noted in his memoir, she was more of ‘‘a social being’’ than he was, ‘‘got more out of the ordinary amenities of life’’ that came with being the wife of a minister. In Newton, the young mother had enjoyed shaded streets, parks and playgrounds, and the support network provided by the Women’s Association of the Central Congregational Church. It was therefore a struggle for her to understand her husband’s decisions and to reconcile herself to their consequences. ‘‘One night [during this period] as we were in bed and were talking things over,’’ Muste recalled, ‘‘she said ‘If you’ll just keep on talking to me as to why you think these things and why you think you have to do them, it will be all right.’ ’’¹⁰⁷

By the end of 1918, the Comradeship had drafted a proposal outlining the ideas that had come out of their meetings. As Muste wrote to the FOR, they would form a ‘‘preaching order,’’ a lay group of men and women who felt ‘‘the call’’ to ‘‘rebuke’’ the old order and ‘‘enter upon the new.’’ Members would live simply, share a common fund, submit to a shared ‘‘spiritual discipline,’’ and perhaps even have a ‘‘form of dress peculiar to the order.’’ Through their personal example, as well as through proselytizing, pamphleteering, and going to jail for their beliefs, they would explain ‘‘the facts as to the present order—extremes of wealth and poverty, unearned income, undemocratic control of industry, lack of the right spirit in international relations’’ and the need for ‘‘a radically new order’’ based on ‘‘the principles of Jesus.’’ They hoped that their message would persuade the ‘‘possessing and educated classes’’ to similarly ‘‘renounce the existing order’’ and support the working class in their struggle for economic justice. Among the workers, they hoped to inculcate the ‘‘healthy and divine discontent’’ that came from envisioning a cooperative commonwealth and recognizing the ‘‘futility of violence and the [more promising] way of reason and love.’’ The early Christians clearly served as a model for the Comradeship; just as Paul ‘‘had to cut away from old Jewish associations, in order to fulfill [the Christian] mission,’’ so too would they work independently of the organized churches and identify themselves with the impoverished and needy.¹⁰⁸

Significantly, unlike other utopian movements inspired by the vision of ‘‘bringing the Kingdom,’’ the Comradeship did not seek to separate itself from the larger society. There was some discussion of forming an economic cooperative in the country, but only as a base of support and renewal for the preaching order as it brought its message to the masses. Indeed, even as a conservative young college student, Muste had held that character and faith were built through engagement and action, not asceticism and social withdrawal. ‘‘I have a deep-seated conviction that the aim and the essence of life is love,’’ Muste explained in 1957. ‘‘And love is in its inmost nature an affirmation, not a negation; an embracing and being embraced, not rejection and withdrawal.’’¹⁰⁹

In 1918, of course, Muste was still a political novitiate and his thinking on such questions was not fully developed. But, precisely at the moment he and his comrades drafted their proposal, a dramatic textile strike erupted in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts, giving them an opportunity to translate their ideals of brotherhood and nonviolence into reality. In Lawrence, the diverse and contentious world of labor radicalism returned Muste to his working-class roots and provided him with an outlet for his idealism and his desire for a life of action, struggle, and self-sacrifice. Ironically, however, it also put distance between him and the community of Protestant liberals with whom he had found kindred spirits in Christian mysticism and pacifism.