American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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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