More to the point, Muste chose the Collegiate Church for the ‘‘challenge’’ it represented. It was a world he knew little about: mostly native-born, middle-class professionals who were active in social work and politics, and whose intellectual pursuits extended far beyond his parlance of theology and the classics. The lawyer Raymond Fosdick, then commissioner of accounts for the City of New York, was one of his congregants. Fosdick’s older brother was Harry Emerson Fosdick, then a minister in Montclair, New Jersey, who would later become famous as the pastor of Riverside Church in Morningside Heights and as a staunch defender of modernism against the rising tide of fundamentalism in the 1920s. Another congregant, John A. Fitch, former student of the labor economist John Commons, had just published The Steel Workers, an acclaimed sociological study of the steel industry. Fitch also served as industrial editor of Paul Kellogg’s Survey, the leading journal of social work, and was a professor at the New York School of Social Work. Shelby Harrison, head of the research department at the recently formed Russell Sage Foundation was yet another prominent member of the congregation, as was the Republican congressman William Stiles Bennet. Here, as Muste noted wryly in his oral history, he could not get away with popularizing a Calvin passage as he could have in a ‘‘typically Dutch-speaking congregation,’’ and he found the opportunity ‘‘decidedly stimulating.’’28
Before Muste could accept his call to the Fort Washington Collegiate Church, however, he had to pass the licensure examinations and be ordained by a classis. He also wanted to marry Anne who remained with her parents in Iowa. The preparation for ordination was lengthy and arduous. Under the care of the Grand Rapids classis, Muste had to return home to take an all-day licensing exam in Greek, Hebrew, church history, theology, and church government, as well as deliver a sermon. His father was present when he received his license, and they celebrated at the Muste home afterward. The occasion was indeed a ‘‘very important’’ and ‘‘happy one’’ for his parents, for whom it had been eleven years since their eldest son had left for Hope Preparatory Academy. On his way back to New York to be ordained by the city’s classis, Muste traveled to Iowa to marry and collect Anne. Back in New York, on June 25, 1909, Muste was examined again and then ordained in ‘‘a very solemn and impressive service’’ in which the novitiate knelt while the ministers placed their hands upon his head. The service concluded with a benediction by Muste. It was a ‘‘tremendous experience for me,’’ Muste recalled. ‘‘I felt a very strong call to the ministry and a very strong urge to preach and a feeling that I had something to give and, of course, [I had] this sense of fulfillment that my parents had.’’29
AT Fort Washington, Muste exhibited the personal traits that would make him a successful minister and, later, a beloved and effective leader. He had an unpretentious and down-to-earth temperament, keen sense of humor, and took pleasure in leisure and commercial amusements, particularly baseball. When providing pastoral care, he was an attentive and nonjudgmental listener, and when he spoke, he had a direct, personal style that sought to reconcile different points of view. Moreover, unlike stereotypically charismatic personalities, he had first-rate organizational skills that would make Fort Washington a dynamic and expanding institution. These two aspects of his character—warmhearted and catholic, on the one hand, and calculated and ambitious, on the other—help to explain why, later in his career, he was often underestimated by political and intellectual foes. At Fort Washington, it led to personal growth and professional success, endearing him to his congregation and his superiors in the collegiate system and making his break with the church, when it came, free of mutual recriminations.30
As minister, Muste continued to evolve a more modern theology. God assumed the role of loving father, not judging patriarch; his focus was on life on this earth, not on the hereafter.31 Union Theological Seminary, where he took courses from 1909 until 1913 and obtained another bachelor of divinity degree, encouraged this move away from Calvinism.32 The center of liberal Protestantism, Union had declared its independence from denominational control in 1892 following the ‘‘Briggs controversy.’’ The controversy began when the Presbyterian Church suspended a faculty member for advocating the revision of the Westminster Confession, which, among other things, asserts the doctrines of infallibility and biblical literalism. From then on, Union ‘‘moved in an increasingly liberal and nondenominational direction.’’33 It also served as a leader in the move toward a more academic, historical-critical approach to seminary education. Reflecting this orientation, its faculty did not necessarily have pastoral experience, and often held advanced degrees from German universities, making it a striking contrast to the education Muste had received at New Brunswick. At Union, Muste became acquainted with the national and international leaders in mainline Protestantism and made contacts with people who would later play a significant role in his life, such as Norman Thomas, later the leader of the American Socialist Party, and Ted Savage, who would become executive director of the Presbytery of New York.34
What Muste learned at Union challenged Calvinist doctrine to its core. Arthur McGiffert, from whom he took four classes on church history and with whom he developed a close, personal relationship, used critical historical methods to study the New Testament and early Christian history, an approach that had earned him some notoriety in the 1890s. McGiffert criticized the Reformed tradition for having a juridical conception of God, and his research emphasized that Jesus conceived of God as merciful and fatherly. He explored modern trends in religion, tracing the shift in religious authority from external, legal, and absolute terms to human, vital, changing, and as the product of personal experience. He stressed the key role of William James in rehabilitating faith for the modern world, as well as the German theologian Albrecht Ritschl for his view that religious life is love activated in service to others and in community.35 Other Union faculty members were similarly modern, stressing the need—and the inevitability—of adapting Christianity to the historical context and turning to the life of Jesus as a model for Christian living in a modern age. Christianity is ‘‘the religion of sympathizing love and of self-sacrificing service,’’ asserted George William Knox, Union’s professor of the philosophy and history of religion.36
Through his courses at Union, Muste’s sense of religion’s purview expanded, and he soon became deeply interested in politics, though not an activist. McGiffert, Knox, William Adams Brown, and other faculty were part of a larger cultural project of constructing a ‘‘radical Jesus’’ whose ideals of egalitarianism and love stood against the church and state of his time.37 Like other adherents of the Social Gospel, they understood the Kingdom of God to be a redeemed social order. Most important for Muste’s politicization was their view of Christianity as a prophetic religion that built upon the historical and ethical foundations of Judaism. As Muste recalled, studying the Hebrew prophetic tradition taught him that religion was not remote, but found ‘‘in the here and now’’ and ‘‘in the historical process,’’ thus giving action in this world meaning and ultimate significance. The prophets were ‘‘preachers of social justice, fearless agitators, political rebels . . . constantly stirred as was Moses by anger against injustice and dreams of a just nation or society.’’38
Muste’s congregants, most of them Roosevelt Republicans, encouraged his exploration of the social and political implications of Christianity in study groups and forums sponsored by the YMCA. He also attended some of the discussion clubs that sprinkled the city where ‘‘Socialist and liberal activists and intellectuals’’ came together to examine such topics as child labor, juvenile justice, peace, and international arbitration. In this context, he read Woodrow Wilson’s ‘‘New Freedom’’ and found it persuasive, as well as socialist material that popularized the ideas of Marx.39
His politicization moved ‘‘very fast’’; ‘‘by the time the [1912] election came along I voted for [Socialist candidate Eugene V.] Debs.’’40 Still, to vote for Debs in the context of progressive New York circles was not a particularly radical thing to do. As Muste stressed in his oral history, Debs was ‘‘in a way . . . a part of this progressive tradition.’’ He was ‘‘a figure associated with Abraham Lincoln,’’ not with un-Americanism or even Marxism; the marginalization of socialism would come later, during and after World War I.41 Moreover, he remained largely disconnected from