7KHRORJLDQVLQ7KHLU2ZQ:RUGVNelson, Derek R.

Published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers

For additional information about this book

Access provided by The Ohio State University (7 Aug 2014 00:13 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9781451426403

2The Deepest Traces Harvey Cox

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with the interaction ofreligion and politics. It is not hard to understand why.

First, religion. The house in which I grew up in Malvern, Pennsylvania(population in s: ,) was nestled between First Baptist Church on oneside and St. Patricks Roman Catholic Church on the other. On warm days,when the windows were open, we could sometimes hear gospel hymns andthe chanting of the Mass at the same time. My parents were not particularlyreligious. They did not attend church, but they sent my siblings and me tothe Baptist Sunday School, which today would probably be called moderateevangelical. My grandmother, however, was a Baptist churchgoer, albeit notparticularly pious. As a small kid, I sat next to her on the hard wooden pew,endured the sermons but loved to sing the hymns, many of which I still knowby heart years later. I also sang bass in the choir, and was president of theyouth group, which often visited similar groups in the local Methodist andPresbyterian churches. As a youngster I was on friendly terms with bothFather Devers, the Catholic priest who burned leaves in the lot next door ashe smoked a cigar, and with a succession of young Baptist ministers servingour church, who were fascinating to me but did not smoke.

I never went inside the Catholic Church except for the parochial schoolsChristmas concerts, which were held in the basement, not in the sanctuary.This was decades before the Second Vatican Council, and Protestants andCatholics simply did not go into each others churches. Still, I sometimespaused in front of it when the doors were open, and peered in. It seemed dark,even mysterious, inside, in contrast to the Baptist church, which was alwaysflooded with light from banks of clear glass windows. Once, as I paused infront of St. Patricks, I noticed the words inscribed over the door: Built uponthe Foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself Being theChief Corner Stone. I did not know at the time that this was a quotation fromthe book of Ephesians. Still it seemed impressive, given that the words carvedin a similar place on the front of the Baptist church said Founded in .For me, nothing was more interesting than the differences and similarities

35

36 Theologians in Their Own Words

among the local churches, and I already knew as a teenager that I wantedto study religion and maybe even become a minister.

Next, the politics. If my family was not terribly religious, they were quitepolitical indeed. My parents and grandparents were Republicans, active inlocal, county, and state politics. Although I changed considerably in mypolitical views since my childhood, I still admire their persistence, dedication,and hard work. They not only believed politics made a real difference andseemed to enjoy it, even when they lost, which was frequently, especially innational elections in which they faithfully supported Hoover (), Landon(), Willkie (), and Dewey ( and ). But that man in theWhite House (FDR) always seemed to win. Then the local Democrats woulddrive through the streets honking their horns in celebration. They alwayspaused in front of our house, and eventually my father would step out ontothe porch and wave to them. He was a good loser. In those days he had tobe. But he did not lose in Malvern, and at the county level Republicans hada remarkable record of success. Chester County voted for the GOP year afteryear from the founding of the party until , when Barack Obama carried itand brought with him a Democratic Congressman.

Also, throughout my life I have been fascinated by religious diversity.Chester County was religiously mixed. My ancestors were Quakers, among theearliest settlers in Pennsylvania, and fervent abolitionists. They had also hadbeen involved in organizing the Republican Party there in . Conservativein many respects, my parents and grandparents were intensely anti-racist. Theabolitionist sentiment still thrived, and I am sure this influenced me to throwmyself into the civil rights movement of the s where I came to knowMartin Luther King Jr. and to move my small nuclear family to Roxbury, theblack area of Boston, when I finished my doctoral work at Harvard.

But my immediate family was no longer Quaker. Our branch of the familybecame Baptist when my grandfather was separated from meeting some-time around for marrying out of meeting. The outsider he marriedwas a Baptist woman. Neither Malvern nor Chester County was religiouslymonochrome. The area was originally settled by religious immigrantsfirstQuakers, then Amish, Brethren, and Mennonites. I went to our small publicschool with Black Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, and with Mennonite kidswhom my parents admired for their good manners and simplicity. Not far fromour house we could see Amish people working their fields with horses anddriving their buggies along narrow roads. The names of many towns in thestate, like Goshen, Ephrata, and Bethlehem, echo their religious roots.

As history unfolded, Pennsylvania diversified even more. Poles, Germans,Italians, and Irish came, some to dig coal or drill in the oil fields, others towork in the factories. Gradually some moved into Malvern. Many of themwere Catholics. Chester County became a center for little steel while thenortheastern part of the state became a section of big steel. In the s and

The Deepest Traces 37

s large numbers of southern black people moved to Philadelphia during thegreat migration. Some found their way along the mainline railway tracks,and a number eventually settled in our little town where we all attended thesame school. There were two black churches in Malvern, one Baptist and theother A.M.E. I visited both of them with my grandmother who dropped inwhile she was campaigning for town assessor, a position she held for manyyears. We were always warmly received, and this experience prepared mefor the mid-s when I served as Protestant chaplain at Temple Universityin North Philly, which has the largest concentration of blacks in that city.I became closely familiar with several of their powerful churches when Iattended them with my students.

Things change, but culture lingers. When in the federal governmenttried Father Dan Berrigan and his associates for burning draft files, they chosethe court in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, thinking it was a conservative area(which in many ways it was, and still is). But what the feds had overlooked wasthat a strong pacifist and anti-military sentiment, derived from its pietisticreligious past, still clung to the atmosphere, and there was considerablesupport for the protesters in the area. But Berrigan and his associates didnot dispute what they had done. They were convicted, given short terms, andeventually paroled.

There is some evidence recently that the traditional buttoned-down con-servative religious currents in Pennsylvania are not fusing well with thenew political conservatism of an important segment of the Republican Party.Many traditional religious conservatives, still shaped by Quaker and Pietisticinclinations, distinctly dislike both the showy religion of the TV evangelistsand the rancorousness of some of the candidates. There is also a long traditionof toleration, going back as far as William Penn, whose statue stands atop thecity hall of Philadelphia, his city of brotherly love. This helps explain whyObamas race seemed not to be an impediment. I sometimes wonder how myparents and grandparents would view these changes.

Malvern was a good place to be a kid in the s, but when I reachedseventeen I wanted to travel, so I signed on to a merchant ship headed forEurope. That turned out to be one of the most influential decisions in my life.My job was to help care for the horses on board that were being shipped by theUN Relief and Rehabilitation Authority. I was thrilled to be away, and I firstset foot in a foreign country (Germany) in July , just one year after the endof World War II. I say set foot, because it was not much more than that. Myfootstep was onto a landing platform of a lock in Kiel during the short timeit took to raise our Liberty ship, S.S. Robert Hart. Two shipmates and I hadclambered down a ladder set up for the captain and first mate to confer withcanal authorities. We were quickly chased back up by a local policeman, but Iat least felt the satisfaction that I had indeed set foot in a foreign land. But

38 Theologians in Their Own Words

what I noticed most about the area around the lock was how utterly devastatedit was. The arms of sunken cranes still hung at precarious angles.

Two days later I climbed ashore for a longer visit in a city that was evenmore devastated: it was Danzig, later renamed Gdansk when it was made partof Poland after the war. Danzig/Gdansk had been both bombed and shelledmany times over. When our ship tied up in its port area, called Gdynia, tounload our cargo, the crew was allowed to walk around what was left of it.At first I just stood and stared at the charred timbers and shattered chimneys.Endless blocks of skeletal ruins stretched in every direction. The acrid smellof smoke still hung on the air, probably not from the wartime attacks but fromthe fires the shivering populace built in the rubble to keep warm. The momentwe stepped onto the dock, crowds of young prostitutessome of them barelyteenagersswarmed around us, pathetic in their ragged skirts, torn stockings,and ridiculous makeup. Hordes of children dogged us, begging for food.

Years later I studied theology at Yale and religion at Harvard, but thoseearly impressions of the scars of war are etched more deeply than anythingI learned in the Ivy League. They deeply influenced my choice of coursesand of a calling. I developed a lasting interest in World War II. In college,I studied German and majored in modern European history. After my firstyear in seminary I worked for a summer with a church youth program inthe Lime House area of east London. Here was another war-ravaged city, evenseven years after the incendiary bombs and V-s of the blitz had leveled wholeblocks. The church I worked in had been percent destroyed, had not beenrebuilt, and the small congregation huddled for worship in an adjacent parishhall.

A few years later, in , I became the campus minister at Oberlin Collegewhere I was ordained to the Baptist ministry. That same year I led a group ofstudents to Germany, France, and Poland on a study tour. In Berlin I left thegroup in the relative safety of the western part of the city and made my wayto the eastern sector. That was before the wall was built, so it was possible,but not advisable, to make the trip. Between the western and eastern partsof the city lay a vast region of wreckage, nothing but twisted metal, chimneystacks, loose wires, and ruptured streets. At night its lack of streetlights madeit Hades dark.

Still, I was fascinated by Berlin. I admired the way people on both sidescontinued to live despite all they had been through. So, when I got a chanceto spend a year there in , I took it. By then the wall, which hadbeen built in , cut an ugly scar through the central wilderness. But myresponsibility in Berlin required me to travel back and forth between the twosectors, through Checkpoint Charlie. Consequently I was exposed to theacres of urban desolation three times a week. But during those trips I noticedsomething: Places of worship remained here and there, and some had becomesymbols of community and hints of possibility. In the heart of West Berlin

The Deepest Traces 39

near Bahnhof Zoo, stood the jagged tower of the old Kaiser Wilhelm MemorialChurch. Blasted by allied bombers, today its splintered steeple still loomsabove the surrounding shops and restaurants. After the war, Berliners decidednot to remove the wreckage but to allow it to stand as a permanent reminderof what war does. On both sides of the Wall, I found myself immersed inthe theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and even got to know some people whohad been his co-workers. He became, and has remained, one of the principalinfluences on my thinking. For a year, Berlin had been both my home and myteacher. The city has always claimed a special place in my heart; consequentlyit was one of the most memorable days of my life when in June I wasawarded an honorary doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

When I returned to America in I started a book, which was publishedin . In it I drew on my rich experiences in Berlin, including the secular-ization debate, political theology, and Bonhoeffers famous question: How dowe speak of God in a nicht-religiose idiom, in a secular age? My intendedtitle for the book was God in the Secular City, but the publisher suggestedit would sell better simply as The Secular City. He was probably right, butthe American title, without the word God, prompted some scholars to lumpme in mistakenly with the so-called death of God theologians of the s,although I had explicitly and forcefully differed with them in The Secular City.But the thesis of the book was, and still is, a response to Bonhoeffers question:How do we speak of God in a secular age?

To the publishers amazementand minethe book became a bestseller. Itwas translated into seventeen languages and eventually sold a million copies.I still do not understand quite why. Transporting Bonhoeffers nonreligioustheology from increasingly secular Europe to still famously religious Amer-ica was a daunting, perhaps even a quixotic, enterprise. Still, after nearly halfa century, the book is still undergoing translation, most recently into Chineseand Bulgarian. Returning to the opening paragraph of this essay, I am pleasedto note that questions about the relationship between the religious, the secular,and the political remain pressing.

There were other influences, and there were more books, a career ofteaching, mainly at Harvard andabove allmy enduring gratitude for theopportunity I was given to work closely with Martin Luther King Jr. in thes. But just as Melville wrote that his whaling ship, the Pequod, wasmy Harvard and my Yale, as I reach my middle eighties, it was my littlehometown and the S.S. Robert Hart that left the deepest traces.