Sidney Mead

From Philosopedia

Mead, Sidney Earl (1904– )

A distinguished American church historian, Mead wrote, “When the overwhelming bulk of American Protestantism turned ‘right’ in a flight from Reason (during the early 1800s), Unitarianism turned ‘left’ in defense of Reason.”

He described a “typical Unitarian” as “one for whom the standard religious formulas have failed, who lives therefore on the verge of a belief vacuum.”

Mead was president of Meadville Theological School from 1956 to 1960, after which he taught at Southern California School of Theology and at the University of Iowa.

Old Religion in the Brave New World

Among his works are The Old Religion in the Brave New World (1977) and History and Identity (1979). In the former, he wrote:

When Christians accepted the alliance with Constantine and the Roman Empire, evil because it made Jesus' kingdom-not-of-this-world the tool of very this-worldly empires, they reverted to the old principle of coercion. In doing so they repeated the fatal error so often condemned by the Jewish prophets of putting their hope for salvation in alliances with the militarily powerful. At that point "Christendom" was born, and thereafter, contrary to their true principle, for fourteen centuries with spectacular pomp and circumstance, they depended on violence and coercion, purportedly to build and maintain the kingdom of the one they worshipped as the Prince of Peace....

It was that fourteen centuries of Western history, smeared with the blood of those who consciously or inadvertently deviated from the current orthodoxy, that those we call the founders of the Republic confronted, successfully attacked, and launched "the first new nation" in Christendom. It was "new" because where religion was concerned it was launched on what seems to have been the pre-Christendom Christian principle of sole dependence on the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God. . . .

Because from the sectarian's perspective religion is an all-or-nothing matter, there can be no neutrality where his species of orthodoxy is concerned. Therefore it is impossible for him to conceive of a religiously neutral civil authority. If it is not overtly "Christian" according to his sectarian definition it perforce must be "infidel," "atheist," "godless," or, as the sophisticated now commonly say, "secular." Jefferson had such sectarians in mind when he complained that "They wish it to be believed that he can have no religion who advocates its freedom."

Mead's Impact

Mead's impact has been mainly in Unitarian circles. Specific assessments of Mead's impact as a church historian have been made by Martin Marty, of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago; Jerald Brauer, former dean of that school; and J. Ronald Engel, research professor in environmental and social ethics at the Meadville Lombard Theological School.

Quotes

• Insofar as theology is an attempt to define and clarify intellectual positions, it is apt to lead to discussion, to differences of opinion, even to controversy, and hence to be divisive. And this has had a strong tendency to dampen serious discussion of theological issues in most groups, and hence to strengthen the general anti-intellectual bias.

{U&U}