Ethical Culture

Ethical Culture was founded on a proposition that sounded eccentric in 1876 and now sounds obvious: that people who disagree entirely about God can nonetheless agree about how to behave, and that the agreement is enough to build a congregation on.

Felix Adler was the son of the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York, and had been trained to succeed him. He returned from doctoral study in Germany unable to affirm a personal God, gave an address in 1876 setting out a religion of ethics rather than of belief, and the New York Society for Ethical Culture was formally constituted the following year. Both dates appear in the sources, and the accurate statement is that the address came in 1876 and the society in 1877.

The motto is deed before creed. Members are neither required to affirm nor to deny a god; what is asked is a commitment to act so as to elicit the best in others and thereby in oneself. Adler took from Kant the principle that persons are to be treated as ends and never merely as means, and made it the working centre of a congregation rather than a proposition in a seminar.

The form is congregational and looks, deliberately, like a church. There is a Sunday meeting with a half-hour address, called the Platform, and a Sunday school for children. The clergy are called Leaders, are formally trained and certified, and are called by societies much as Protestant ministers are.

Adler was not excommunicated and did not intend a break with Judaism so much as a move past the question that had stopped him. His father's congregation understood perfectly well what had happened, and he never took the pulpit he had been raised to take.

Ethical Culture's peculiar position is that it is legally a religion in the United States and has no theology. That has been tested, and it has held.

In Torcaso v. Watkins in 1961 the Supreme Court struck down a Maryland requirement that officeholders declare a belief in God. In a footnote, Justice Black listed religions in the United States that do not teach belief in the existence of a god, and named Ethical Culture among them. That footnote has since been quoted very widely by opponents of secular education, as though the Court had found secular humanism to be an establishment of religion. It found nothing of the kind, the footnote is an aside illustrating that a religion need not be theistic, and the misuse is a live rhetorical dispute in American church-state argument rather than a legal holding.

Courts have upheld the tax status of Ethical Societies as religious organisations, and their Leaders solemnise marriages. The dual identity attracts objection from both directions: from theists who deny that anything without a god can be a religion, and from atheists who object to the religious framing at all.

The practical record is the point Adler himself would have made. The movement founded the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, ran district nursing and a free kindergarten, was involved in the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union, and campaigned on tenement housing and child labour. Whether that is religion is a question about definitions. That it was done is not.

Ethical Culture is small, and has been for a long time. The best-supported figure is fewer than ten thousand formal members across roughly thirty societies, dating from 2014; more than a decade on, that remains the most recent reliable count available rather than a current one.

The societies are concentrated in the north-eastern United States, with the New York society, its landmark meeting house on Central Park West, and the Fieldston School as the movement's most visible institutions. The American Ethical Union, formed in 1893 when the first four societies federated, remains the national body. Sister organisations founded in Britain and Germany in the 1880s and 1890s took different paths, and the British line fed into what became that country's humanist movement rather than persisting as ethical societies.

The movement's difficulty is partly of its own making, and it knows it. Organised humanism, which Ethical Culture helped to create and which it joined as a constituent body, offers the same convictions without the Sunday meeting, the Leaders and the congregational form, and most people who share the convictions have taken the version with fewer obligations. A body that exists to supply religious community to people who do not want religion is competing against the option of simply not attending.

What it retains is a demonstrated answer to a question that recurs constantly and is usually asked rhetorically: whether the practices of religious community (weekly gathering, the moral education of children, rites for birth, marriage and death, organised charitable work), can survive the removal of the theology. In one city, for a century and a half, they have.