Adler’s Vision: Reimagining Values-Based Community for Godless People

October 13, 2012
By James Croft

So, I’ve introduced myself and the first major interest of this blog: learning how to speak in Ingersoll’s Voice. The second part of my project here is to revive Felix Adler’s Vision. This phrase points to my interest in the development and recreation of religious practice in a more nonreligious age. I believe that there is much of value (as well as much to reject) in many practices traditionally associated with religious communities, and see no reason why nonreligious people need relinquish those practices when they abandon their religion. This insight – that there is a core of valuable social practices central to religions which can exist in institutions which do not espouse a belief in god – was the central realization of Felix Adler, 19th Century philosopher, activist, social reformer and proto-Humanist (thanks to Wikipedia for some great details on Adler’s life).

Felix Adler was the son of Samuel Adler, the influential Rabbi of New York’s Temple Emanu-El (a congregation which still exists), and was expected to take on his father’s mantle and become Rabbi after him. However, while studying at Columbia and Heidelburg Universities, Felix was heavily influenced by Neo-Kantian philosophy, and came to believe that morality can exist independent of any god, and that it was not possible, in any case, to prove that gods exist. When, at 23, he was invited to give a sermon at Temple Emanu-El, he astonished the congregation not only with his rousing oratorical abilities (he would go on to fill Carnegie Hall each week with his addresses) but also because he did not mention God once. Rather, he envisaged a “new religion” centered on ethics which focused on good deeds and right-relations between people, and which was non-theistic. Needless to say, given that he had abandoned the idea of God, Adler never became Rabbi of Temple Emanu-El. Rather, he founded a new institution dedicated to uniting all people in ethical action: The Ethical Culture Society.

This makes Adler almost unique among those with Humanist beliefs: he was an effective institution-builder. He believed that religious congregations were essential to the development of ethical character in people and to the furtherance of civic aims, and he founded a network of Ethical Culture Societies to further that end. In his lifetime the Ethical Culture movement spread to numerous countries around the world, providing a space for people with broadly Humanist beliefs to come together to deepen their commitment to those values and to act together, as a community, to improve the world. His success at providing community for non-theists is something I believe could be replicated and surpassed today in an increasingly nonreligious America.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/templeofthefuture/2012/10/adlers-vision-reimagining-values-based-community-for-godless-people/