Felix Adler

Adler was the son of the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York and was expected to succeed him. He studied in Germany, concluded he could not honestly affirm a personal God, and in 1876 founded the New York Society for Ethical Culture instead.

The organising principle was deed before creed: that the ethical life is what the religions have in common and what actually matters, that it stands on its own without theological support, and that a congregation can therefore be built without requiring members either to affirm or to deny anything about God. This was not designed as a compromise. Adler held that moral obligation arises from the worth of other persons rather than from divine command, and that grounding ethics in theology in fact makes it less secure.

The interesting legal consequence is that Ethical Culture is recognised as a religion in United States law while holding no doctrine about any deity, established in the courts in the 1950s for tax and conscientious-objection purposes, and cited by the Supreme Court in Torcaso v. Watkins (1961) among religions that do not teach belief in a god. Whichever way one reads it, the case demonstrates that the legal category of religion in America turns on function and sincerity rather than on theism.

He put the principle to work rather than into doctrine: a free kindergarten that became the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, district nursing, tenement reform, and the chairmanship of the National Child Labor Committee during the campaign against child labour.

Ethical Culture's creedlessness was a building program. Within two years of the founding address of 1876, Adler's society opened a free kindergarten for the children of New York's poor, among the first in the city; from it grew the Workingman's School, offering a full education, manual training beside academics, to families who could pay nothing, which evolved into the Ethical Culture Schools that still operate. The society organised district nursing for the sick poor, an idea that fed the visiting nurse movement; Adler served on state and national bodies against child labor, chairing the National Child Labor Committee in its formative years, and threw the society into the tenement house reform fights of the 1880s and 1890s, serving on commissions whose reports changed New York housing law.

The logic was explicit: if the worth of every person is the one indemonstrable axiom, then the test of a religion is what it does about conditions that degrade persons, and doctrine can wait indefinitely. Deed, not creed, was the movement's shorthand. Adler held a chair in political and social ethics at Columbia from 1902, and the movement spread to other American cities and to Europe, always with the same signature: modest congregations, disproportionate institutions. The schools, the nursing services and the child labor laws are the argument of his philosophy conducted by other means, and he would have accepted no other proof of it.