Telling America What It Believes

By Richard N. Ostling

A joke around the University of Chicago Divinity School: An outsider phones, asking to speak with Church Historian Martin E. Marty. A secretary says, "I'm sorry, but Professor Marty is writing a book." The caller responds, "That's all right. I'll hold."

This week the uncommonly productive subject of that jest can claim authorship of his 39th book in 27 years, the first* of four projected volumes in a work titled Modern American Religion. Judging from the first installment, the series will become a standard account of the nation's variegated religious culture during the current century. The four volumes, the fruition of decades of research, may rank as the much honored Marty's most significant contribution to U.S. studies.

Wide-ranging in his interests, lively in his prose and incisive of opinion, Marty, 58, a Lutheran clergyman, is generally acknowledged to be the most influential living interpreter of religion in the U.S. Leander Keck, dean of the Divinity School at Yale, observes that Marty is not only a noteworthy religion scholar but a "front-rank popularizer . . . In this country there isn't anyone comparable." Other academic commentators, says Keck, lack Marty's breadth of information, polish and "enormous energy."

That awesome vigor -- the tireless Marty even writes his books at a Morrow word processor while standing up -- is clearly evidenced in his daily schedule. The best-known and most solicited religion scholar working the lecture circuit, he daily receives half a dozen invitations to talk, and schedules one out-of-town appearance a week. He preaches at least once a month in various houses of worship, mainly in the area around suburban Riverside, Ill., where he lives with his second wife Harriet, a voice coach. Ever quotable, he is constantly sought by reporters looking for quick bursts of wisdom on subjects ranging from Pat Robertson's presidential campaign to baby boomers. Marty writes a column for the Christian Century, the liberal Protestant weekly. He also decides what books the Century reviews and writes for numerous other journals. A self-confessed magazine junkie, he receives 250 periodicals and culls them for a fortnightly newsletter

on religion and culture called Context. And that is not all. Last year Marty took on the presidency of the new Park Ridge Center in Illinois, which studies the relation of religious values to a broad range of medical and health issues. Modern medical treatment, says Marty, is central because it demonstrates "what we think humans are, and what justice is." Finally, there is talk that next spring Marty will be a dark-horse nominee in the election of the national bishop who will lead the large new Lutheran Church to be created by the merger of three branches of that faith.

Marty was reared in two Nebraska towns, West Point and Battle Creek. He was a member of the staunchly conservative Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod, which employed his father as an elementary school principal. He attended Synod schools from first grade through Concordia Seminary near St. Louis. The training was so European oriented, says Marty, that "I was 26 years old before I cracked a book in the field to which I have devoted my career," American religion.

In 1956, after receiving a doctorate from the University of Chicago, Marty became the founding pastor of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Elk Grove Village, Ill. It was lauded by LIFE six years later as the "fastest growing Lutheran parish in the country." In 1976, more than a decade after Marty had joined the University of Chicago faculty, advocates of a literalist interpretation of the Bible enforced theological control over the Missouri Synod. Marty was among 100,000 Lutherans who left the Synod to form a new denomination, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, that will be part of next year's church merger.

Besides works on history, current church problems and the sacraments, Marty has written A Cry of Absence, poignant reflections occasioned by his first wife's death from cancer in 1981. Although he often takes liberal stands, his writings are not always easy to pigeonhole ideologically. His new book on turn-of-the-century America is skeptical about that era's liberal Protestant leadership. As Marty sees it, theologians and church officials of the time labored mightily to tailor the Christian faith to fit then fashionable ideas in science, education and sociology. The adherents of "modernism" were certain their views would prevail, Marty writes, but they found themselves "almost instantly dated."

The new book, The Irony of It All, displays the trademark Marty strengths: nimble syntheses of large chunks of material, wry analysis and a sure eye for telling quotes and anecdotes. In a section on new immigrants, for example, Marty quotes a priest as saying of his oppressed flock, "My people do not live in America; they live underneath America."

In the era covered by his book, Marty notes, there began the gradual decline in the cultural dominance of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. He says that a major question for the late 20th century is "what will the nation look like now that it lacks a religious main line?" Marty should have the full answer at "3 p.m., March 20, 1998," his retirement date from teaching at the University of Chicago, when he expects to have completed the final words of Modern American Religion. He is convinced, however, that no group will ever again dominate American religion. The freedom to choose and the "space to try things" have always given America a religious vitality that makes things work, Marty declares, adding, "We don't have any choice but to make it work."

FOOTNOTE: *The Irony of It All: 1893-1919 (University of Chicago Press, 386 pp., $24.95)