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