Beyond Supernaturalism: Mordecai Kaplan and the Turn to Religious Naturalism

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed enormous changes and challenges for inhabitants of the United States. America was a land in need of a reconstructed national identity in the aftermath of the devastating Civil War and a country undergoing rapid economic and demographic change as it became increasingly industrialized and urbanized and as wave after wave of new immigrants altered its face and character. These developments had repercussions in every sector of the nation, and they placed immense pressures on all of its citizens to reconceptualize their identities both as members of particular communities and as modern Americans.

Other developments that characterized modernity more broadly also influenced America during this period. The intellectual advances of Europe reverberated across America as educational institutions proliferated and as colleges and universities increasing adopted the model of the modern university—now tied less to provincial religious standards and goals and more to the modern criteria of critical and open inquiry. Science had an enormous impact as educated persons grappled with the claims of Darwinism and evolutionary science, which undermined many of the basic religious and cultural inheritances of Judaism and Christianity. Even for the less educated, science extended its reach into everyday life through commerce, technology, and new conveniences, thus positioning itself as the operative standard for the public determination of truth.

These shifts affected all Americans but posed special challenges to religious believers and practitioners. Religious persons grappled with questions of how to affirm religious claims when modern science and modern humanistic disciplines such as history shattered the grounds on which religious identities and traditions had been founded. Religious persons also confronted what it meant to be American and the extent to which such an identity within an increasingly pluralistic environment was in conflict with particular religious or ethnic identities. They were faced, therefore, with the question of how to make religious affirmations in a context shaped by democratic ideals and scientific norms, and they struggled with creating new understandings of community that could enhance, not undermine, participation in a modern, increasingly diverse democratic America without the loss of distinctive identities and traditional communal affiliations. Across the spectrum of American life, religious persons engaged issues of pluralism, democracy, and modern science.

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Mordecai M. Kaplan's life and work were in many ways significant responses to these dynamics in American history. An immigrant from Lithuania, Kaplan's own life embodied the quest for an identity that embraced both the particularities of its own history and the new identity of the American context, the vitalities of Jewish culture and religion and the new insights of science and historical studies. This journal issue engages in an assessment of Kaplan's work occasioned by the seventieth anniversary of the publication of his great opus, Judaism as a Civilization.¹ In this article, I seek to analyze that trajectory of Kaplan's work that critically engaged traditional ideas of God and Jewish chosenness and that offered reconstructed notions of the divine and of Jewish self-understanding. Moreover, I locate Kaplan in a broader conversation that characterized Christian theologians and humanistic figures such as John Dewey during the first half of the twentieth century. Kaplan was thus responsive to the distinctive issues within his Jewish community while reacting and contributing to the wider conversations shaping American intellectual life in the twentieth century. It was therefore both as a Jewish intellectual and as a modern American intellectual— and in the interplay of the two—that his significance can be found.

In order to explicate Kaplan's critical and constructive contributions to the American and Jewish debates of his time, this article suggests that Kaplan and a number of other philosophical and theological thinkers set forth historicist, pragmatist, and naturalistic responses to the social and religious challenges of their day. First, I will explore Kaplan's work, and then, by way of comparison, I will look briefly at the work...