A Pocket of Progressivism

During its early years when Harvard was primarily a training ground for ministers, the school was not Known for its liberal attitudes. In fact, legend has it that one of the College's find Presidents, Henry Dunster, lost his position because he advocated letting students pursue their own religious beliefs.

Today Harvard's Divinity School-founded as a separate institution on 1816-carries on many of the purposes and traditions of its predecessor. But silence on political and social issues is not one of them. Over the last few decades the Div School has emerged as a pocket of progressivism in a school long known for its traditional tastes.

Only last week, 200 members of the Div School's faculty, student body and staff-an over whelming majority of the institution-signed a statement calling for a world-wide freeze on nuclear weapons. The statement, addressed to the nation's religious community, appeared as an advertisement in a nationally circulated religious magazine. The Div School's populations-both faculty and students-has been at the forefront of many other progressive movements as well. Some of the school's professors accepted burnt draft cards at the pulpit during the Vietnam War; others have led the movement to integrate the woman's perspective into religious studies.

And nearly every progressive cause on the national scene would find a group of active sympathizers on Divinity Ave In a time when Moral Majority and Christian fundamentalists dominate the nation's image of religion and hold powerful political away, the Div School is the odd kid on the block. The Rev Jerry Falwell would find no red carpet here.

While the anti-nuke advertisement published recently is the first political statement to be signed by a majority of the school's community, the message follows a pattern of activism established in earlier decades.

In the mid-1950s, when former Sen Joseph McCarthy's "Red Scares" dominated the political life of the nation, Div School activism had a different focus. As the government investigated citizens accused of Communist leanings. FBI agents frequently interrupted classes to ask questions about the backgrounds of students and alumni. "I would be interrupted in lecture sometimes by FBI agents telling me 'you've got to stop right now. James L. Adams, Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity Emeritus, recalls. "They'd ask me questions like 'Describe again the New Republic, is that a radical magazine?" But the Div School's faculty resisted. Adams, George H. Williams, Hollis Professor of Divinity Emeritus, and others, travelled frequently around the country, speaking out from-the pulpit against government investigation of private citizens and "attacking the newspapers who were disarming the Bill of Rights" by cooperating with government investigations.

During the Vietnam War, the school's faculty turned to the pulpit again, making political speeches that opposed the war from an ethical and religious standpoint. Williams often "stood up in the pulpit and accepted burned draft cards," Adams reminisces.

More recently, Div School activists have turned to the dual issues of nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Two years ago a contingent of students jointed in the protest at the Seabrook, N.H. nuclear power plant, returning to organize the Harvard Divinity School Peace Fellowship.

The fellowship, which became active last spring organized and sponsored a conference, entitled "Waging Peace," on the subject of nuclear disarmament. At the conference last April, John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvey Cox, Thomas Professor of Divinity and George Rupp Div School death, addressed 800 people from all over NEw England. Now the Rev. Larry M. Hill, a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe United Ministry. Is working with a local group of religious educators on another disarmament conference planned for this spring.

Members of the Divinity School community are not only interested in freezing nuclear arms In 1973, after much urging by women students and faculty, the School created a Women's Studies program to incorporate in ideas of women in theology into the regular curriculum.

Saying that in 1981 women comprised 44 percent of the student body, Constance H. Buchanan, head of the women's Studies program, explains. "More women were beginning to seek training for and ordination in the professional ministry." It became evident that most religious writing "focused on men's activities and perspectives on the study of religion."

"That recognition argued for an attempt to try to ask questions about what the role of gender was, and is, and the way roles are assigned." Buchanan says. "The field explicitly recognizes the connection between religious ideas and social institutions."

While more women than ever are seeking ordination as Protestant ministers, problems still exist for women in the curriculum and in religion at large. Although some men who graduate from the Div School study at Catholic seminaries and later become ordained as priests, this option is not open to women. The Women's Studies Program exists to combat what Buchanan sees as inherent inequalities passed down in religion through the ages.

Buchanan says the women's Studies program also tries to emphasize cross-cultural study and racial diversity rather than focusing on the roles of "white, Western women" in theology. A major objective of the program, eventually, is to make the curriculum include implications of the categories of race as well as gender in the study of religion.

There has also been a significant amount of feminist activity in the Divinity School outside of classes, especially as the number of omen students increases. "There's a large community of women numerically." Buchanan says, adding that many do volunteer work in the community, at rape counseling centers, shelters for battered women, and women's support groups.

While the Div School is a center for many diverse activist groups, the most vocal and visible is the movement against nuclear arms.

The recently published statement calls for an immediate halt to the manufacture of nuclear weapons and the eventual abolition of all nuclear arms. Similar to statements circulated by local secular groups such as the Coalition for a Nuclear Arms Freeze, it reads in part, "In the name of God, let us speak out now, let our silences once again make us accomplices to holocaust, this one threatening the very existence of mankind."

Signed by 27 of the Divinity School's 36 faculty members, 36 staff members, and over 100 of about 350 students, the advertisement will appear in two additional religious magazines and in the March 3 issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, the Divinity School publication. Frank Dormar the United Church of Christ minister and Div School receptionist who started the ad, says 30 additional student signatures have arrived at his office since the advertisement appeared.

Although Dorman believes every profession should "come out with its own kind of expertise on nuclear disarmament," he says religious scholars are particularly qualified to speak out on the "ethical implications" of war and nuclear weapons.

By addressing the statement to other members of the religions community, Dorman hopes to induce or persuade other religious leaders to speak out on nuclear disarmament. He was inspired to write and circulate the current statement when the read an advertisement in the Boston Globe drafted by a group of theological experts in Berlin, which "appealed to Americans to do something about" the nuclear weapons race.

In fact, one other seminary has already taken action, 95 percent of the faculty members of the Andover-Newton Theological School have already signed a statement identical to Dorman's. "The response here was almost instantaneous," says George W. Peck, dean of Andover-Newton. Dorman sees a widespread religious movement just starting for nuclear disarmament, and the Divinity School will be part of it, however unofficially. This seminary is no bastion of bible-belt conservatism.