God-Optional Religion in Twentieth-Century America

In God-Optional Religion in Twentieth-Century America: Quakers, Unitarians, Reconstructionist Jews, and the Crisis Over Theism, Isaac Barnes May aims to provide an intellectual history of the God-optional theological movement as it took root and grew in the United States. God-optional groups tolerate diversity in approaches to divinity, potentially including pantheist, atheist, and more traditional theist beliefs—though they are less tolerant of religious conservatism and its “claims to exclusive truth and orthodoxy” (7). May explains that God-optional religious thinking emerged amid challenges to traditional theism arising from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, as well as increasing encounters with religious diversity in an urbanizing nation. Distinct from “Godless” groups that advocated jettisoning religion or God entirely, God-optional religions updated their faiths, liturgies, and/or practices in ways they believed made them relevant to modern US society; as such they represented projects of love for their religious traditions and identities. Although God-optional religious groups were a product of American religious liberalism, May distinguishes them from the larger movement; while both would concur that “theism should be left up to individuals” (7), the former involved organized religious communities.

May identifies three small movements as God-optional trailblazers: Unitarianism, liberal Quakerism, and Jewish Reconstructionism: “Each of these groups began to permit members to hold a broad range of theologies and eventually developed substantial constituencies that did not accept the existence of a personal, interventionist God” (3). More, each institutionalized their openness to theological diversity, embedding their broad-mindedness within their purpose and public statements. By the 1960s these theological trends had become increasingly adopted within the wider American culture, as well as in mainline Protestantism and Reform Judaism (though the latter has attempted “to officially check the spread of atheism” [259]).

May explores the beginnings of modern God-optional thought in the early-20^th century US via writings of (mostly) male religious leaders and public intellectuals. He shares several personal narratives of clergy who struggled as they rejected notions of supernaturalism and divine interventionism. May argues that such accounts are important for “understanding the lived theological and religious experience of American liberal religious thinkers in the early and mid-twentieth centuries,” as well as explaining the impetus for the creation of God-optional religion (25). He describes early attempts by these thinkers to retain religion in the face of modern critiques, such as by redefining “God” as immanent and pantheist or as remote and non-interventionist.

Following an introductory chapter and another that sets the theological setting, May offers one chapter on each of the three God-optional pioneers, providing detailed intellectual biographies of leaders in these religious movements. Chapter 2 focuses on early 20^th-century debates within liberal Quakerism on how to see the denomination as “a modern, scientifically plausible faith” (57); the movement eventually veered from Christianity towards universalism. Chapter 3 contrasts the theological positions (as they evolved) of Reconstructionist Judaism’s founder, Mordecai Kaplan, with those of his teacher, Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical Culture movement. Both rejected the notion of a personal, supernatural God. But where Adler felt that Jews should assimilate and replace irrelevant religion with rational, scientific thinking, Kaplan “sought a way to remain Jewish while discarding many of the trappings of traditional belief” (92). Chapter 4 centers on debates within the Unitarian movement between William Sullivan (who argued for retaining liberal Christian theology) and John Deitrich (who championed “purging supernaturalism from religion to take it to what he saw as its next phase of evolution, without the crutch of a belief in God” [122]). Long-held Unitarian commitments to individual freedom of belief kept the denomination from breaking apart over these arguments.

In three additional chapters, May complicates and rounds out the category of God-optional religion. Chapter 5 distinguishes the God-optional from the Godless. Most of the discussion follows Charles Francis Potter, who, following his expulsion from Unitarianism, launched the humanist movement. Yet May also describes humanist thought (and involvement with humanist organizations) by leading Jewish Reconstructionists. And he discusses Quaker Arthur E. Morgan’s objections to humanism, despite his sympathies to the movement. May concludes that while Godless religion emerged from the God-optional, the line between the two is thin. Chapter 6 describes how each of the three pioneering God-optional groups found substitutes for shared theology to maintain group purpose and identity. Where liberal Unitarians and Quakers coalesced around social justice organizing, Reconstructionists united around Zionism, a focus that initially distinguished them from the larger Jewish Reform movement. (May later notes that Reconstructionism has since embraced social justice as a central concern, while Reform has taken up Zionism.) Chapter 7 describes the ground-breaking 1965 Supreme Court case involving a conscientious objector to military service, United States v. Seeger, that legitimized God-optional and liberal religious groups under American law. May asserts that God-optionality has since spread throughout American society, expanding beyond the groups that initially shaped it.

May’s book is most significant for carving out “God-optional” as a category for religious study—a meaningful iteration of American liberal religion that overlaps with, yet remains distinct from the entirely “Godless” or irreligious. Focusing on the intellectual biographies of male clergy in three pioneering movements of American God-optional religion, it is less successful in contributing to the study of lived religion and lived theology, scholarly movements that May describes the book as being “informed by” (12). Throughout the book, May addresses many important questions and issues that arose amid the creation of God-optional religions. Without a unified theology, how did religious groups maintain memberships, traditions, and identities? How did they place themselves within American society at large? The three groups on the God-optional vanguard, May argues, are important to understanding the history of the “belonging without belief” trend in the US. Scholars interested in this larger phenomenon or the study of American liberal religion will find the book of interest.

C. Lynn Carr is professor of sociology at Seton Hall University.

C. Lynn Carr

Date Of Review:

December 23, 2023