Remembrances of Things Past: SSSR's Formative Years

Abstract

The name Society for the Scientific Study of Religion was adopted in 1956. For the period from 1951 to 1956, the organization was called the Committee for the Scientific Study of Religion. In its founding year 1949, and in 1950, it was the Committee for the Social Scientific Study of Religion. The switch from Committee to Society is understandable enough. It was simply not appropriate for a group numbering in the hundreds, as it did in 1956, to continue to be called a Committee. If anything, it is something of a mystery as to why this particular change took as long as it did. More perplexing, however, is why the word social was dropped. Even today, it would seem to be more appropriate to call ourselves the Society for the Social Scientific Study of Religion. The founding fathers J. Paul Williams and Walter Houston Clark thought so too, since they called their invention the Committee for the Social Scientific Study of Religion. Why was the designation so quickly abandoned? Bill Newman in his historical essay on the Society, to which Ralph Burhoe referred in his remarks, offers no explanation. Indeed, he was apparently unaware that the Committee had ever been called the Committee for the Social Scientific Study of Religion. My search of the archives did not provide an answer. For a long time, however, I have thought I knew the answer. In early 1950, Clark and Williams recruited Ralph Burhoe, among others, to help them in nurturing the fledgling organization. It was Ralph, I suspected, who was responsible for the name Social being dropped and the Committee being renamed. Ralph, then the Executive Director of the Massachusetts-based American Academy of Arts and Sciences, had been trained in the natural sciences and also in theology. He had no formal training in the social sciences. In becoming associated with the CSSR, it was his hope that it would come to include a natural science component and involve natural scientists working alongside social scientists and religious scholars in the study of religion and from a perspective that, among other things, would include efforts to strengthen the religious component of life. Williams and Clark and the others they had recruited to help nurture the Committee, I assumed, were open to the possibility of the Committee broadening its vision to include Burhoe's aspirations and agreeable to having this reflected in a change in the Committee's name. One problem with my surmises, I discovered when I began to do research for this paper, was that except for a paper by Burhoe himself, entitled A Scientific Theory of Soul, natural scientists were not represented among those giving papers at Committee meetings, nor were natural scientists in evidence on the early Committee mailing lists.