DEAN'S LETTER

The Board of Governors of our Institute met last month and accepted my recommendation that we shift the annual Colloquium of adjunct faculty members to overlap one day of the March student course, beginning in 1997. This will provide students more exposure to more of our faculty, give the faculty some seminar experience of students, and avert the inherent risks of meeting in New York in wintry Januaries. As some of you have heard, we plan to start Class VIII this November, with Carol Wintermute and me as co-mentors. Please send good students our way.

This winter quarter, I am teaching a class for University of Minnesota’s Elder Learning Institute titled Religions: Born in America. This has provided me a chance to reread some materials. I particularly commend to you Sidney Mead’s The Nation with the Soul of a Church and The Lively Experiment. Mead decisively demolishes the notion that The United States began as a Protestant (or even Christian) nation. Instead there was a continuing dialectic between "the religion of the Republic" (Mead’s term for the deism of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Paine). He also effectively demolishes the belief that any of the American denominations ever developed a theology of democracy. They reluctantly agreed to religious freedom as the alternative to being dominated by some one group. Perhaps the phrasing we should push for the uniqueness of the US. experiment is "freedom of/for/from religion."

I also urge you to keep an eye open for an almost-forgotten work by Norman Cousins, "In God We Trust": The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers. Jefferson observed to Thomas Law in 1814 that defectors in Protestant countries tended to become Deists while those in Catholic countries tended to call themselves atheists. An interesting theory to test among our modern humanists. A recent survey of the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis found 62% preferring to call themselves "humanist," 17 percent "agnostic," and 9 percent "atheist."

The central element in the religion of the Republic was that morality was not uniquely coupled to any particular belief structure but was a common concern of civil society. This, of course, was the American Enlightenment, that much-maligned set of visions that our Institute celebrates and aspires to continue. The standard critique, Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (reissued in 1947 after their American sojourn) has served its postmodern admirers poorly by ignoring the actual flowering of Enlightenment in America. Its fate on the Continent is another matter. But many university students today parrot their judgment that there is some kind of straight descent from the 18th century to Hitler’s fascism.

What I hope humanists will emphasize more effectively is the crucial role that public education plays in maintaining democratic society, particularly in teaching moral values. There are a number of quite non-sectarian values at risk (tolerance, justice, equality, community) in our times, and we need to say so more loudly. The evangelical right is quite simply wrong on this. The only "values" that flow most consistently in their movements are homophobia and patriarchy. They certainly have never achieved consensus on children’s rights, women’s rights, intellectual and religious freedom, economics, politics, foreign policy, medical ethics, environmentalism or any of the other problem areas that face us.

Along these same lines let me urge you to get Alan Ryan’s John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (Norton, 1995). A brilliant study of Dewey in context. The chapter on "God, Beauty, and the Higher Learning" is particularly relevant to the themes of our Institute and touches on Dewey’s relations to Henry Nelson Wieman and Bertrand Russell in regard to their naturalism and atheism. Speaking of Dewey, the recent death of Sidney Ratner should remind us of the brilliant people who have lived in his debt, and in Ratner’s case, repaid that debt so publicly.

Robert Tapp