American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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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modify his pacifism publicly, as they had done, arguing that maintaining the connection between a minister and church superseded the call of prophetic witness.92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