John Haynes Holmes
From Philosopedia
Holmes, John Haynes (1879–1964)
A graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, Holmes was a leader of liberals in the social application of liberal theology, believing with Francis Greenwood Peabody that religions had to face the “social question.”
During World War I, he was a staunch pacifist. Holmes preached a form of economic socialism from his pulpit at New York’s Church of the Messiah, which socialist leader Norman Thomas often attended. He worked with liberal reformist institutions such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
In 1919, he led the Church of the Messiah to become the Community Church (Unitarian), hoping to use the church as a proving ground for nonsectarian religion.
Holmes was one of the first Americans to recognize the significance of Mohandas Gandhi and his nonviolent movement, becoming Gandhi’s chief American disciple and publicist. He wrote Ten Reasons for Believing in Immortality (1929), arguing that nothing in the universe is ever lost, all energy is conserved, therefore “spiritual energy” is immortal; but in dualism spiritual energy does not exist, and Holmes separated himself in his thinking from that of many of the other liberal Unitarians.
Many hold that Holmes was so unorthodox a minister that even the Unitarians were too conservative for him. Charles Francis Potter, for example, was not surprised that Holmes had refused to sign Humanist Manifesto I, saying,
- “He has reverted to theism since he was over and saw Gandhi, whose simple faith in God made a great impression on Holmes. The latter has a very theistic order of service. He is also very pessimistic about the future of liberal religion, but that is partly due to his physical condition and partly to his sad experience with his apartment-hotel proposition.”
The latter was a reference to his having to live next door to his mid-Manhattan church in a commercial hotel.
When Holmes was accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee of being “under the control of the Communist Party,” humanists Eva Ingersoll Wakefield and Warren Allen Smith wrote the committee, demanding that it apologize to Dr. Holmes.
In his Community Church (Unitarian), John Dewey’s memorial service was held at a time when Donald Harrington was minister.
In addition to his several books about religion, Holmes wrote an autobiography, I Speak for Myself (1959). He championed birth control, was a pacifist, and was a leader in the movement to abolish capital punishment.
The major biography of his Unitarianism is found at the Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography.
