Three Minds, Three Books, Three Years: Reinhold Niebuhr, Perry Miller, and Mordecai Kaplan on Religion

Abstract

T hree truly exceptional books appeared in the early 1930sexceptional not only for their absolute brilliance but for emphasizing religion in history as well as modern times. In 1932, Reinhold Niebuhr published Moral Man and Immoral Society, which shook liberal Christianity to its core with its powerful denunciation of naive faith in optimism and progress and its blunt assertion of the reality of evil still darkening human achievement. A year later, Perry Miller published Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, the first in a series of stunning histories by Miller that described the intellectual power residing inside sixteenthand seventeenth-century Calvinist theology. Miller resuscitated the reputation of New England's Puritans, and his work shaped the writing of American history for half a century. Then, in 1934, Mordecai M. Kaplan publishedJudaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life, which demanded wholesale rebuilding of Judaism as traditionally conceived and practiced, and which challenged traditional theistic and prophetic conceptions of religion broadly construed.'