Originating visions and visionaries of the REA

Religious Education, Fall 2003 by Archibald, Helen Allan

Abstract

One hundred years ago an assembly of four hundred met at Chicago's Auditorium hotel to create the Religious Education Association. This article traces the influences of William Rainey Harper, John Dewey, and George Albert Coe in the REAs formation, and explores social and intellectual conditions shaping this movement in its beginnings. The author highlights contributions of George Albert Coe as the leading theorist in the religious education movement from the beginnings of the REA into the middle of the 20lh century. One hundred years ago in February 1903 an assembly of four hundred "educational demi-gods" met at Chicago's Auditorium hotel to create the Religious Education Association. The gathering was convened by the Council of Seventy, a learned society of biblical scholars, upon the urging of the renowned iirst president of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper.1

Harper persuaded forty-five presidents and deans of colleges and seminaries to add their names to his own in the invitation announcing the purpose of the convention. The purpose was simple but comprehensive: to improve the religious and moral instruction of American youth, an instruction seen as woefully inadequate and imperfectly correlated with the new learning in history, literature, and the sciences.

It was Harper's imperial mind, ranging in educational interest from the Chautauqua liberal arts program to the creation of a university center of graduate studies; from his scholarly publications in the Hebrew Bible to his teaching in the Hyde Park Baptist Sunday school, which conceived the idea of such a gathering and planned the program enlisting the talents of colleagues throughout the nation. As he brought Baptist piety and secular learning together to create the great University of Chicago eleven years before, he sought in this convention to bring together scholars, educators, and churchmen who could create new educational patterns for the local church school, the public school, the college, and the home.

The four hundred participants, almost without exception white, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestants,2 joined in hymn and prayer before hearing the first evenings papers on the next steps in religious education. In his opening address President Angell of the University of Michigan stressed that those present were already persuaded that psychological and pedagogical studies had contributed much to secular education and that the time had come to permit these studies to transform religious education as well. Intellectual advances in nearly every field had made thoughtful people aware that the new century was to be a time of transition. Although, as Angell noted judiciously, every period is a time of transition, the present transitional crisis was more portentous for religious education than any in nearly a century.

It was not merely that the new learning, emanating from the great universities like those over which Angell and Harper presided, was challenging the conventional and popular pieties of the Sunday school. It was the whole configuration of educational institutions put together by Protestants at the beginning of the nineteenth century which was being challenged by the literary and historical criticism of the Bible. After the Revolutionary War and following the period of state disestablishment of churches, Protestants sought to find new forms for transmitting their religious faith across the generations. From 1805 to 1830 Protestants created a distinctive pattern of education. It was composed of institutions with clear historical antecedents, but in their interrelationships and in the way they functioned in the broader American society of the nineteenth century, they represented something genuinely new in the history of education. The configuration included an American version of the English charity school, the Sunday school; the denominational college, narrower in sponsorship and aim than the colonial college; the truly innovative institution, the Protestant seminary, of which Andover (1818) was the pioneer; and the home. The common school crusade of this same period, led by Protestant churchmen and lay reformers, won popular support for state supported and supervised public schools which were looked upon as part of this larger educational ecology. The public schools were given the responsibility for teaching the common core of Protestant doctrine and morality; the denominational college and seminary provided the instruction in what was distinctive in the various Protestant traditions; and the home carried the chief responsibility for nurturing the sentiment and will on which all character was thought to be based (Lynn 1972). The Bible, the accepted standard of authority for all Protestants, was the key to religious training in all these institutions, the home, the school, the college, and the seminary. What Harper, Angell, and the distinguished company gathered in the Chicago Auditorium hotel on February 10, 1903 perceived was that the traditional Bible, understood as the very word of God, the center of Protestant religious authority and the source of Protestant piety, was disappearing from the world of Protestant scholarship. The dogmatic Bible increasingly being banned from the public schools, was also being challenged at the seminary level by the assured results of more than a half century of German higher criticism of the Bible. Harper, a renowned Hebrew scholar, had himself brought the new textual critical study of the Bible to Yale Divinity School in 1886. he had, too, a remarkable gift for popularization and in his Bible study guides for the laity he sought to deflect interest from what the higher critics had taken away-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, a relatively smaller matter; and the inerrancy of the scriptures as a whole based on divine authorship throughout, a much greater matter-by drawing attention to what the critics had established. Harper shared the conviction expressed by Bush Bhees, president of the University of Rochester, that whatever theories of biblical revelation were undermined by modern textual and historical criticism of the Bible, the fact that the Bible had survived because it inspired was established beyond all doubt. Shailer Mathews, a theologian brought to the Divinity School of the University of Chicago by Harper, recalled years later that Harper was motivated to convene the 1903 conference by the actual problems he encountered teaching in the Hyde Park Baptist Sunday school; however, his service on the Chicago Board of Education, as well as his scholarly interest in transforming biblical study in both seminary and college also contributed to his motivation (Goodspeed 1928).