Kluckhohn Blasts New Christianity

Professors Kirtley F. Mather and Clyde M. Kluckhohn disagreed sharply last night on the value of Christianity as a universal creed. Kluckhohn told a Congregational-Presbyterian Student Fellowship forum that Christianity is an "arrogant ethnocentrism;" Mather, also speaking at the Cambridge Congregational Church, called for a "now birth of the religion of Jesus."

Kluckhohn denied neither the "historical authenticity of Christ nor the existence of God. But he criticized Christianity for posing its dogma as the single truth, for the effort of its missionaries to impose alien values on non-Christian societies, and for "barbarism and destruction unmatched" by any nation.

Mather credited these weaknesses to "so-called Christians." Christian principles, he maintained, offer a man a spiritual guide which science and art do not provide.

Kluckhohn is a professor of Anthropology, and Mather is a professor of Geology.