An Atheist, Thank God

I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, within walking distance of two synagogues, one Reform and the other (my family’s) Conservative, housed in a concrete and glass temple that was one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s final projects. Normative Judaism had, at best, an anodyne effect on this bookish boy in the late 1950s. A four-hour service every Saturday—during which I sat near survivors of Old World shtetls, men davening mysteriously—incited a frisson of wonder, and also the thrill and uncertainty of a foreign language, but mostly a long injection of ennui. And Hebrew school on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons seemed like a holding pen for adolescents. It was all sufficient to drive me away after my bar mitzvah at thirteen.

One mile up the road was one of Philadelphia’s many Quaker meetinghouses. My act of adolescent rebellion was to prefer the Society of Friends to the society of my ethnic co-religionists. I was primed for life as a non-religious pacifist. And to prefer a one-hour silent meeting, meditating in the presence of like-minded people, to anything liturgical.

I never became a Quaker, but I developed a personal piety that could be summed up, in the words of Luis Buñuel, as “Thank God, I’m an atheist.” Or as I told my university dean many years later (he was a fine Christian gentleman who adhered to sturdy Episcopalian habits and beliefs), when he inquired about my spiritual life: “I am an atheist, of course. A Jewish atheist. Judaism is the religion I have rejected. All the others are equally unimaginable.”

So perhaps I was primed for Ethical Culture, one of our country’s venerable, if now nearly forgotten, native traditions. I have been thinking about Ethical Culture again, lately, because I often walk by the imposing Austrian Art Nouveau 1910 building (one is tempted to call it a church) on Central Park West designed by Robert D. Kohn, home of the New York branch of the Society for Ethical Culture. Engraved on one exterior wall is the motto “Dedicated to the Ever Increasing Knowledge and Practice and Love of the Right.” 

Adjacent to this building is a newer, brick building that  houses the primary school that feeds the upper school—Fieldston, in Riverdale—several of whose alumni were college friends of mine. They were the ones who familiarized me, decades ago, with the Society for Ethical Culture and its principles. The school, like its parent organization, embodied humane and liberal social ideas that appealed to a person like me, who had given up on organized religion—at least my organized religion—but wanted something more than, or slightly different from, ordinary secularity.

The Ethical Culture movement was founded by Felix Adler (1851-1931). Adler’s father, Samuel, was the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, then as now the living room of wealthy, assimilationist New York Jewry. The son went off to Heidelberg to study theology and philosophy. He lost his faith to neo-Kantianism, returning home in 1873, where he opened the Society three years later. “Deed not Creed” was its motto, and its principles partook of gleanings from Unitarianism, the Society of Friends, German idealism, American Transcendentalism, and Reform Judaism. By 1886, Ethical Culture had branches in Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis, the last of which is currently the largest. Perhaps not by coincidence, St. Louis was also the home of the St. Louis Hegelians, a group of philosophical idealists, mostly German.

I am an atheist, of course. A Jewish atheist. Judaism is the religion I have rejected. All the others are equally unimaginable.

Ethical Culture was always—as I have now discovered—small, but today it is, like most mainstream American churches, smaller still: a total of twenty individual societies, of which St. Louis has about 300 members. Until three decades ago, Manhattan was the largest, but with never more than about three thousand adherents.

Through much of the mid-twentieth century, the big draw to the Society’s building across from Central Park was Algernon Black (1900-1993), the son of Russian Jews who immigrated to the States from England. He was a scholarship boy at Harvard (Class of 1923), and he succeeded Adler as head of Ethical Culture. He was a fabulous orator. For decades he oversaw the Sunday “Platform.” This was the secular equivalent of a weekly service, held in the main auditorium, with seats for 800 people. The forums also reached out to radio audiences via WQXR. 

The highwater mark for membership and cultural relevance for the Society must have been in the immediate post-World War II years. (The American Ethical Union, a related institution, was founded in 1952.) An earlier adherent was the British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, who died in 1937, and after the war vocal supporters included both Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. One can understand why the prime minister, the first lady, and the Nobel Prize winner would offer their support. Social justice and world peace have always been prominent parts of the Ethical Culture agenda. Post-war, post-Holocaust, and contemporary with the founding of the United Nations, the times seemed ripe for a non-partisan insistence on the kind of world view Emerson argued for in “Self-Reliance”: “To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition, to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—that is to have succeeded.”

Ethical Culture inscribes its demotic, egalitarian, progressive outlook in its practice. One can understand the appeal of all this to someone, like me, with Quaker inclinations. The weekly Platform is non-doctrinal, non-religious, and non-hierarchical. A society “leader” differs from a clergyperson by being, for the moment, first among equals, a guide rather than an authority. In its resistance to a priestly caste, Ethical Culture resembles other lay-led communities, like the Friends and the Latter-day Saints. Without God, of course. 

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At the same time, there is an inescapable tension at the heart of Ethical Culture. The movement has never been able to move away from language that bears distinctive religious traces. It might be humanist, but it never feels fully secular. Felix Adler began the formulation: “The place where people meet to seek the highest is holy ground.” This is sanctity without sanctimoniousness. Einstein himself could not resist appropriating religious diction: “Without ‘Ethical Culture’ there is no salvation for humanity.”

Does this constitute old wine in new bottles? Priests in professors’ clothing? Ethical Culture offers the language, but not the substance, of religion. God may be dead, but he exists as a somewhat ghostly revenant, a presence over much of the Society’s activities and production. Perhaps like Felix Adler’s own father, the rabbi, God can be overthrown but not entirely forgotten.

On two Sunday mornings in August, I attended the weekly Platform, now relegated to a small conference room on the building’s top floor, far removed from the main auditorium below. In a casual, indeed nondescript setting, about thirty people, all of them white, most of them senior and female, sat at tables to hear “A Humanist Chaplain for Death Row,” a Zoom talk by Devin Moss (a recent Covid diagnosis kept him virtual). The morning began with an example of what has become now pro forma virtue-signaling, an announcement of how we were occupying lands that originally belonged to the Lenape tribe, etc. There followed a modest musical interlude from a formerly incarcerated singer-songwriter. Instead of a religious liturgy, in other words, we had the trappings of a hootenanny. 

Moss himself, a storyteller and podcast producer as well as a chaplain, described his ongoing relationship with Phillip Hancock, a death row prisoner in Oklahoma, who had killed two men (in self-defense, Hancock maintained). Moss had ten months of daily talks with his client and was with him at the end.

End of life questions engage moral and spiritual stances. Moss held his virtual audience spellbound; there was pin-drop silence. He disavowed the label “atheist chaplain” bestowed on him in 2024 by The New York Times, and he likewise forswears a higher power, although he is not antagonistic towards, not “anti-,” any religion. He believes in “a set of higher values,” albeit humanistic ones, to be honored and performed on a daily basis. When asked to pray with or for one of his patients, he asks to whom they pray, or to what, and why, and seeks “the spirit” that mysteriously connects us all. A colleague of his once told him that their job was “to make this experience sacred.” The secular and the transcendent merge without the presence of a divinity but, as expected, in religious diction.

In the Times article, about Moss and his chaplaincy of Hancock, the counselor allows that “it’s well known that people that really believe, that really have faith, die better. How can we help people die better that don’t have supernatural faith?” Here we are at the intersection of the personal, the civic, and something beyond—perhaps the eternal. And we are contemplating a variation on the perennial question: “What is the good death?” 

Two weeks later, I attended another Platform, this time a talk before a larger and more heterogeneous audience, on the considerably less intense topic “How to Deal with Annoying People.” However quotidian the subject, the analogies to religious issues remained clear. Instead of trying to locate the divine, or the inner light, in everyone—a staple of the Society of Friends—“we must celebrate our collective culture and our connections.” An interpersonal issue has replaced a cosmic one, and “Do unto others” has stepped aside in favor of a secular variant of the golden rule, Kant’s “categorical imperative.”

Richard Koral, the leader since 2017 of the New York Society branch, once more appropriated the language of religion, perhaps intentionally, even unavoidably: “we confer grace upon people,” he said, merely by recognizing their worth. This is not a religious argument: for the Christian, grace should come, generally undeserved, from God Himself. But simply by invoking the idea of “grace,” Koral—a therapist by training, with a doctorate in interfaith pastoral counseling from Hebrew Union College—couldn’t help but sound like a preacher. Urging calm and compassion as the proper means of achieving inner equilibrium and civic harmony; acknowledging otherness; avoiding conflict; practicing the art of coexistence; respecting everyone: the formulas are easy to understand, perhaps harder to apply. Who could disagree with them as goals?

God may be dead, but he exists as a somewhat ghostly revenant, a presence over much of the Society’s activities and production.

Are there religious equivalents? Can one believe in the sterner, more exclusionary parts of religious belief—those that divide the sheep from the goats, the righteous from the evildoers, the saved from the damned—and say that one’s neighbor’s beliefs are like other preferences? Can we acknowledge otherness while adhering to religious commandments that might damn those same others to perdition?

Sometimes, religion points us toward the hard questions that humanistic traditions prefer to avoid. Are there people who do not deserve respect? How does one deal not with annoying people but with evil ones? Those questions remained, at least that morning, unasked. Instead, the hour ended, as one might have predicted, with the assembly singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” or at least a revised, God-free redaction of Ada R. Habershon and Charles H. Gabriel’s 1907 Baptist hymn.

Instead of:

Will the circle be unbroken,
By and by, Lord, by and by,
There’s a better home awaiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky

We sang the repurposed, updated, and secularized:

Let us walk as friends together
Sharing heart and soul and mind.
Please accept my strength and weakness,
Please be honest, be gentle, be kind. 
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, oh, by and by,
There’s a better world awaiting,
We can build it, you and I

I was instantly transported back to my folksy high school days, attending concerts by the Weavers, Theodore Bikel, Odetta, and Joan Baez: solidarity forever, in a feel-good, guitar-strumming, international and utopian mode.

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While the earnest Ethical Culturalists upstairs were pondering life’s civic and psychological problems—whether petty annoyances or  the achievement of a good death—something else was happening below. The main hall (now named for Felix Adler himself) has been rented, for the past decade, to Redeemer Lincoln Square, a branch of the Presbyterian megachurch founded by the late Tim Keller, one of the most successful evangelists of the past half-century, who died last year. Instead of dozens of attendees, there were hundreds: old and young, of varying ethnicities and colors, with a jazz combo on stage (keyboard, drums, guitars, vocalists). The service program consisted of songs, prayers, private confession, Scripture readings, and a benediction. Nothing was forbidding; everything was joyful. God was a benign and overseeing presence. Smiles and laughter abounded, leavened by some dollops of theology. The epithet “user-friendly” came to mind.

And my day at church, or at least my experience of some contemporary versions of Sunday worship, did not end on Central Park West. I made a third stop. At four o’clock, I went up to St. John the Divine, Manhattan’s vast and still unfinished Episcopal cathedral in Morningside Heights. It was the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, and I arrived for the weekly one-hour Evensong, redolent of old-fashioned, high Anglican practice, in a high Anglican setting: Gothic architecture, stained glass windows, wood-paneled choir stalls, soaring columns and arches. Organ accompaniment and sacred music were being performed; readings from Scripture were offered, but no homily. The summer choir (eight singers) was smaller than usual, but their sounds filled the church. More than one hundred people, some regulars, some visitors, some tourists, occupied the stalls, and others wandered in and out on the floor. 

Whereas the Presbyterians and the Ethical Culturists were bathed in a strong, vocal sense of community and fellow feeling, the atmosphere at St. John’s was chillier, or at least private, inward-looking, impersonal. Any sense of community was acknowledged only silently. Welcome was tacit. There was nothing contemporary in the atmosphere; antiquity prevailed. One knew one was supposed to be in the presence of something larger than self, larger than civil society. The atmosphere partook as much of the aesthetic as of the spiritual. Even more: the aesthetic signified the spiritual. I could not help but think of Philip Larkin, an unbeliever like me, and the last stanza of his 1954 poem “Church Going”: 

Larkin’s language is formal and elegant (the triple “serious,” “compulsions,” “robed,” “destinies,” “proper,”) as befits an examination of eternity on earth. Even “gravitating” looks slyly outside to the graves in the country churchyard, and to our common, final end. Neither psychological or moral issues, politics or social justice, gets the poet’s attention. His gaze is fixed elsewhere, not necessarily on theology, outmoded and unbelieved-in pieties, or even God Himself, but on an eternal questing for answers that never come, to questions barely articulable.

It is not news to report that the joyfulness of community worship, especially within Pentecostal and evangelical churches, has won converts in people fleeing from the perhaps forbidding, perhaps incomprehensible demands of mainstream, orthodox denominations. More casual and user-friendly services can also be found in Jewish temples and Catholic churches. Banjos, guitars, and folksongs seem less archaic, ominous, or solemn than pipe organs, Bach cantatas and fugues, or even Sir Hubert Parry’s “Jerusalem.”

An atheist, a secular humanist, an Ethical Culturist—I guess I am, in part, all three—might argue that this is the only world we have and know, that life is not a dress rehearsal for the hereafter, that the pursuit of social justice remains the highest good and best form of self-realization, not to mention the seriousness that Larkin says people are seeking. How, and where, will they find it? Some seem to have done so. The rest of us—Larkin and I and our congregation of fellow non-believers—remain uncertain.