The Future of Religion

Professor Harvey Cox, Jr., and
His Extension Class Explore the Issue

Harvey Cox, Jr., Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School

"When Suzanne died, we sat shivah--the Jewish mourning custom--for seven days. We stayed home and sat low to the floor. People brought in food for us. There was no food preparation, no work. It wasn't entirely mournful--it was a time of remember-ing, joking, thinking about the good things and the bad things, but not having to deal with the outside world."

"And on the seventh day--shivah means seven in Hebrew--we took off our rent garments, in which we had made a small, symbolic tear, washed up, and went outside. We were in New York City, at 84th Street and West End Avenue. We walked around the block, back into the world, and after that the whole family returned to life and work with a new perspective."

In his office on the top floor of the Harvard Divinity School, Harvey Cox, Jr., is looking out over the trees toward Harvard Yard, remembering his family's recent observance of the death of his mother-in-law, Suzanne Tumarkin. In 1985 when he married Nina Tumarkin, a scholar of Russian history, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity, Baptist minister, and perhaps the best-known Protestant theologian since Paul Tillich, joined a Jewish family.

During this sabbatical year, Cox finished a book on Judaism. Titled Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian Husband's Journey through the Jewish Year, it is organized around the Jewish holidays, such as Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Hannukah, and what they mean to an interfaith couple. "We discovered that Judaism is calendrical and not credal. Discussing the book gave us the opportunity to reflect on our wedding--conducted by a Baptist minister but made up of Jewish prayers and customs--and our son's recent bar mitzvah, and sitting shivah for Suzanne."

Perhaps more striking than the marriage of a famous Christian theologian to a Jewish historian is the survival of religious identity in the twenty-first century. In 1965, Cox wrote: "The rise of urban civilization and the collapse of traditional religion are the two main hallmarks of our era." The book was The Secular City, which has sold nearly one million copies in 14 languages and provoked a storm of debate and protest. The following year, Cox published a revised edition to respond to critics, but not to back down from his bold assertion that mainstream religious institutions and beliefs were in decline.

Today, Harvey Cox, Jr., still wrestles with the question of religion's future--but now in dialogue with a large, outspoken class at the Harvard Extension School. RELI E-1012 The Future of the World Religions examines the encounter of the major faiths with each other--sometimes respectful and sometimes violent--and to "a swiftly changing world in which some kind of unified world civilization, for good or evil, is upon us." Cox admits that reports of the death of religion--like those of Mark Twain's death--were greatly exaggerated. While not as radical as the "death of God" theologians in the 1960s, Cox was certainly not the only thinker to predict the decline of religion in the postmodern world. Marx, Lenin, Nietsche, and Freud, figures Harvey Cox discusses in his class, began to question the future of God more than a century ago.

"You don't get to pick the book you are remembered for, but if I had a chance to go back, I would have picked something else. Secular City will probably be inscribed on my tombstone! But the fact is that I have written much more about the vitality and resurgence of the world's religions in the '70s, the '80s, and the '90s; popular religious movements and liberation theologies in Latin America and Asia; and the extraordinary dynamism of religious traditions the world over. Here you get innovation, rejection, remodeling, resymbolization, inflection, and intense interaction. We see now that secularization is only a part of the story."

Harvey Cox, Jr., was born in Malvern, Pennsylvania in 1929, attended public school there, and served briefly in the Merchant Marine on relief ships carrying horses and cattle to Europe during World War II. He earned his bachelor's degree in history with honors at the University of Pennsylvania in 1951, and his first degree in theology at the Yale Divinity School in 1955. He was ordained to the American Baptist ministry in 1956. He served as a campus minister at Temple University and Oberlin College before enrolling in the doctoral program at Harvard. While working toward his PhD in the history and philosophy of religion in the early '60s, he served the American Baptist Home Mission Society and taught part time at the Andover Newton Theological School. He joined the faculty of the Harvard Divinity School in 1965.

Professor Cox's office is lined with books, photographs, and mementos from a half-century of theological adventures. He is particularly proud of his snapshot of the Christ sculpture on the Versöhnung Kirche--Church of the Reconciliation--taken over the jagged glass shards atop the newly constructed Berlin Wall in 1964. "The irony is just too much to bear. People say, 'Look, they have poor Jesus pinned up there behind the wall.' But that's not the point at all. He is over there, not just suffering, but making the best of living in a place that wasn't too easy to live in. I was really impressed by those Christians living in East Germany."

Berlin was the city of the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was jailed and finally hanged by the Nazis for his outspoken theology of protest and liberation. "This was a very influential time for me," Cox recalled. "Bonhoeffer was a great admirer of Gandhi, but as a member of the resistance movement, he had to ponder the anguishing question of whether he would kill the Führer if he had the chance. I honestly don't know what I would have done."

On his return from Germany, Cox became involved in the American civil rights movement. He knew the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., personally. Cox was arrested several times following his participation in marches and sit-ins and spent several days in jail in Williamston and Washington, North Carolina. "I come from a long line of Pennsylvania Quakers who were opposed to unseemly pretense in religion and life and were committed to social change. It is perhaps for this reason that I admired King's 100 percent commitment to nonviolence. He was unshatterable in that--it wasn't simply tactical. He had a cosmic view that nonviolence was part of the very stuff of the universe."

Extension School students in Cox's Future of the World Religions course are invited to form "affinity groups" to make 5-10 minute videos on a topic of common interest. The groups meet in apartments, Harvard Square cafés, or Loker Commons in Memorial Hall to hash out their differences and find common ground on the sometimes prickly issues related to personal faith and institutional religion. They have taken up topics as diverse as the mystical Jewish writings of the Kabbalah, socially engaged Buddhism, and the popularity of Deepak Chopra and New-Age Healing.

"They require very little direction," Professor Cox reported proudly. "At the end of the course we have a kind of Academy Awards show to view and discuss the most successful projects. It is amazing how much they can pack into 8 or 9 minutes: an interview, some art, some music, you name it. It makes them think visually and not just textually."

Perhaps more importantly, the enthusiasm and richness of the video projects in Harvey Cox's Extension class serve as documentary proof that religion is far from dead in the twenty-first century.