Opening the Doors to a Pluralistic Church

Fifty years ago, when Jerome S. Bruner was a psychology professor at Harvard, he said that the fact that Memorial Church was not explicitly open to non-Protestant services damaged his perception of the University as a place that emphasized the universal aspects shared between men.

In the spring of 1958, the news that a Jewish couple had been prevented from marrying in Memorial Church a few years before was made public.

And Bruner said he felt the building—constructed in 1932 as both a church and memorial to students killed in World War I—had become a “symbol of disunity” and was undermining the solidarity of the Harvard community.

“There has been exclusion,” he wrote in an April 15, 1958 letter to The Crimson. “I cannot avoid the feeling that matters of sectarian religious doctrine have been put ahead of concern for the Harvard community.”

Although Bruner, who described himself as a secular Jew, said he felt that Memorial Church should be open to non-Protestant services, others thought that opening the church would damage the sanctity of religion.

“A church is not a cafeteria in which all religions may be served to all comers,” philosophy professors Raphael Demos and Donald C. Williams wrote in an April 21 letter to The Crimson, in response to the decision, touting the University’s Calvinist roots as grounds for maintaining a purely Protestant tradition.

Bruner, now a fellow at New York University’s School of Law, maintains the claims he made in letters and speeches from 1958 in favor of a “secular university.”

On April 22, the Harvard Corporation—the University’s highest governing body—announced that it would open the Church’s doors to the private services of all non-Protestant religions, setting off a debate at the University about the role of religion at Harvard.

THE PRESIDENT AND TRADITION

In 1955, then-Preacher to the University George A. Buttrick refused to permit a Jewish student to be married by a rabbi in Memorial Church.

“It is intellectually dishonest for Jewish and Christian marriages to be conducted under the same roof,” TIME Magazine quoted Buttrick as saying.

On April 17, a small group of faculty members secretly met with then-University President Nathan M. Pusey ’28 and presented him with a letter that forwarded many of Bruner’s ideas.

Some present at Harvard at the time said they believed that Pusey held a provincial outlook on Memorial Church that stemmed from his “narrow” outlook on faith.

“He came to Harvard from being at a college in Wisconsin with a rather narrow Christian definition of itself, and it didn’t transfer very well,” said Bruner, referring to Pusey’s time as the president of Lawrence College in Appleton, Wis. from 1944 to 1953.

But according to William Crout, a member of Memorial Church’s congregation in 1958, the controversy stemmed from a combination of issues far more complex than that of a simple battle between a president supposedly out of step with his campus.

“The Corporation’s announcement was in the context of a lot of University politics and a lot of misunderstanding from the nature of the church from its establishment,” he said recently.

And, according to Crout, the debate over the barred wedding was not a matter of religious exclusion.

“Among the most pertinent facts are that the intended wedding was a mixed marriage, a Jewish groom and a Lutheran bride, vehemently opposed by both sets of parents, a proposed marriage which the couple claimed already to have been secretly performed...and a marriage not supported by the rabbi involved,” Crout wrote in an e-mailed statement.

Despite the various interpretations over what prompted the decision, when the Corporation officially opened the church’s doors and announced that “the Harvard community is today a mixed society,” some raised strong objections.

Williams, the philosophy professor, said, “The move was a gesture in favor of religion only in the sense that polygamy is a gesture in favor of romantic love.”

TOWARD A UNIVERSAL TRADITION?

Fifty years later, Crout, who is still a member of the congregation, says the Protestant Christian ministry of Memorial Church lives on, even though the building is currently open for use for private, non-Protestant ceremonies.

Today, Harvard Hillel holds two of its largest annual ceremonies, the Reform services for Rosh Hashanah and for Yom Kippur, in Memorial Church.

But many of the College’s ever-diversifying religious communities have found other spaces to fulfill their needs.

Ameya A. Velingker ’10, co-president of Dharma, a campus Hindu organization, said that since his group acquired their own prayer space in the basement of Canaday, they have little need for other spaces.

Similarly, Harvard Islamic Society president Tariq N. Ali ’09 said the group does not make use of Memorial Church for any organizational purposes.

But looking back on the controversy of 1958, Bruner said that opening Memorial Church’s doors was significant in emphasizing what is shared.

“The notion of the greater glory of god does not mean one god in one way,” he said. “Harvard should keep alive a grand, universal tradition in the realm of religion.”

—Laura A. Moore contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Charles J. Wells can be reached at wells2@fas.harvard.edu.