Creed and Deed

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.

The phrase most closely associated with Creed and Deed never actually appears in that exact wording inside the book, but the argument it summarizes runs through every discourse Adler collected there. His claim was blunt: a person's actual conduct toward other people is the true measure of their religious seriousness, and theological doctrine, however sincerely held, is not. Two people could disagree completely about the existence of God, the authority of scripture or the nature of an afterlife and still recognize each other as serious about ethics, provided each actually acted on a shared commitment to human dignity and mutual obligation.

That argument let Adler do something unusual for an American religious founder in 1877. He built Ethical Culture as a community explicitly open to people who disagreed about theology, on the reasoning that requiring agreement on doctrine before people could worship, or work, together was itself the thing dividing communities that a shared ethical commitment could otherwise unite. A member could hold onto Judaism, Christianity, or no religious belief at all, and still belong, provided the ethical commitment was genuine.

Later Ethical Culture societies read Creed and Deed as their founding case for that openness, and the reasoning inside it, that shared action matters more than shared belief, remains the clearest statement of what still separates an Ethical Culture society from an ordinary congregation built around a common creed.