Baptist genes - a surprising reference to 'Baptist Chicago' - Column

Christian Century, Nov 8, 1995 by Martin E. Marty

HISTORIAN H. R. TREVOR-ROPER honors the late superstar sociologist Edward Shils (1910-1995) in the October New Criterion. Shils commuted for decades between the University of Chicago and Cambridge University in England. Speaking at the service at Peterhouse Chapel in Cambridge, Trevor-Roper commented on how his late friend was at home everywhere and nowhere, in the manner of cosmopolites: "When I first learned that Ed's life and his service to learning, social thought, and Peterhouse were to be commemorated in this church, I was, I admit, a little surprised. He was, after all, a Jewish agnostic, brought up in Quaker Philadelphia, matured in Baptist Chicago, and committed to secular reason. . ."

Trevor-Roper went on to say that the high Anglican setting in which he spoke, "redolent of incense, permeated math memories of elaborate ritual: golden candlesticks, swirling chasubles, archaic liturgy," etc., worked, for Shils "respected tradition and regarded religion not as revealed truth but as a necessary component of culture and human life, which are imperfect and impoverished without it."

I was hit by "matured in Baptist Chicago." Baptist Chicago? My first impulse was to call Cardinal Bernardin and Mayor Daley and tell them about the previously unnoticed takeover of Catholic Chicago. My second impulse was to look at Churches and Church Membership in the United States, 1990 (Glenmary Research Center) and look up Cook County. I found that there are 2.1 million Catholics, which means that Catholics make up about 42 percent of the county's population and about 66 percent of the total church membership.

One is cheered to note that "Black Baptists Est" attracts 290,094 members--5.7 percent of the population and 9 percent of church membership. But Ed Shils, cosmopolitan and curious though he was, was not "matured in Black Baptists Est" in Chicago, despite his many decades at the University of Chicago, in its Hyde Park ghetto within the Black Baptists Est ghetto.

Trevor-Roper had to be referring to the fact that the University of Chicago was founded by those who today make up "American Bapt USA"--which in Cook County has 21,210 members, or .4 percent of the population and.7 percent of church membership.

There is an American Baptist Campus Ministry on the campus, and I "est"--we never count--at least one Baptist on the divinity faculty. The Baptist Theological Union is the custodian of the divinity school's treasures, and the BTU is mentioned once in the university's As a Matter of Fact book. There may be some Baptist students in the divinity school, but one would have to "est" them among the sea of Catholics and everybody else. Ask me to name one, and I'd be hard pressed.

Trevor-Roper is evidently going on long memory, recalling John D. Rockefeller and William Rainey Harper, founders of the university and both Baptists. But from day one the faculty was pluralist, and Shils could have held a meeting of Baptists-who-helped-mature-him in a phone booth. Still, the view from Cambridge accords much to institutional genetics and origins, and in Trevor-Roper's eyes, at least something of the vision of the founders--liberal, open-minded, venturesome--must have endured in the framework of the school if not the city. The historian, it occurs to me, may not be wholly wrong. I can't wait to tell that to President Hugo Sonnenschein, Cardinal Bernardin and Mayor Daley. I only wish I could ask Ed Shils about it.