Felix Adler grew up inside one of the most prominent Jewish congregations in the United States. His father, Samuel Adler, served as rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York City, and the younger Adler was expected to follow him into the pulpit. He trained accordingly, studying at Columbia College and then in Germany, where he encountered the neo Kantian philosophy that would shape his thinking for the rest of his career, particularly its insistence that ethics could stand on its own footing rather than depending on any specific theological claim.
That German education put Adler at odds with the congregation waiting for him at home. When he returned and preached a sermon that avoided any mention of a personal God, Temple Emanu-El understood the message clearly enough that Adler never took up the pulpit there. Rather than searching for a different congregation willing to overlook his views, he built something new. In 1876 he founded the Society for Ethical Culture in New York, organized around the proposition that shared ethical commitment, not shared belief, was what a religious community actually needed to hold together.
Creed and Deed, published the following year, was Adler's attempt to set that proposition down in a form other people could read, argue with and, he hoped, adopt for themselves, addressed to an audience that included both the Reform Judaism he had left and the wider American religious public he was now trying to reach.