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Martin E. Marty, Influential Religious Historian, Dies at 97
Martin E. Marty, a pre-eminent religious historian, prolific author, dependable exponent of mainstream Protestantism and staunch champion of pluralism, died on Tuesday in Minneapolis. He was 97.
His death at a retirement home, where he had lived since 2022, was confirmed by his son Peter.
In more than 60 books, thousands of articles and as what he described as a “peregrinating lecturer,” Dr. Marty promoted what he called public theology, or the confluence of fundamental cultural and religious conventions for the common good.
He had “a knack for translating complex ideas into graspable takeaways for diverse audiences,” Peter Marty wrote in an online tribute. Time magazine said he was “generally acknowledged to be the most influential living interpreter of religion in the U.S.”
He disdained extremism and fundamentalism, both by Islamist terrorists and right-wing Protestants. And he warned, in “The One and the Many: America’s Struggle for the Common Good” (1997), that the culture wars had undermined the ideals of e pluribus unum and challenged Americans’ shared heritage.
The nation had fractured, he wrote, between “totalists,” who felt left behind and belittled, and “tribalists,” whose individual pride in race, religion, ethnicity and gender circumscribed their vision of the American mosaic.
The threat of such division to the American experiment was a theme he returned to frequently.
“Nothing is more important than to keep the richness of our pluralism alive,” Dr. Marty once wrote. “To be aware of many different people and different ways, and deal with it.”
In a review of Dr. Marty’s 1991 book, “Modern American Religion, Volume Two,” the Stanford historian David M. Kennedy wrote that “For all the raucous contention he chronicles, Mr. Marty remains an optimist. It is, he concludes in an eloquent peroration, with a nod to James Madison, precisely the plurality of religious voices that has insured the integrity of the social fabric by preventing the lasting dominance of any single group.”
Despite its historical ebb and flow, Dr. Marty insisted that mainstream Protestantism exerted profound influence over American public policy, particularly in the 19th century, though he predicted that no single denomination would ever exert the same degree of dominance again.
“Their winning — at least through their pioneering adventures on fronts dealing with civil rights, internationalism, ecumenism, many issues of sexuality and gender, friendliness to once-warred-against science, and much more — never meant complete victory,” he wrote in The Christian Century magazine in 2013.
“But it did mean,” he added, “that through the years, at least, significant leaders risked much to express their faith beyond church walls, in the larger culture.”
Dr. Marty was one of those leaders.
He marched for civil rights in Selma, Ala., with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., attended the Second Vatican Council as a Protestant observer, and helped found the antiwar organization Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. He was president of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society of Church history,
His scholarly achievements were legion. With a former student, R. Scott Appleby, he directed the six-year Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences beginning in 1988, which explored conservative religious movements.
“Only an intellectual giant with Marty’s combination of multidisciplinary fluency and vast erudition could have foreseen the inbreaking of wave upon wave of modern anti-pluralist, anti-modernist assaults upon the liberal worldviews and institutions from the ‘benighted’ margins of Western and westernized societies,” Professor Appleby, who teaches global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, said in a statement after Dr. Marty’s death.
“Marty stayed true to his instincts to come ‘not to condemn, not to praise, but to understand,’” Professor Appleby added.
In 1972 Dr. Marty won a National Book Award for “Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America” (1971).
Among his other books were “A Short History of Christianity” (1959), “A Cry of Absence” (1983), “Pilgrims in Their Own Land: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America” (1984), and “A Short History of American Catholicism” (1995).
“His published output was not only breathtaking but unparalleled among religious historians of any field,” Grant Wacker, an emeritus professor of Christian history at Duke University and a biographer of the Rev. Billy Graham, said in an email. “His wit was legendary. And his heart overflowed with simple human kindness.”
Writing for a Divinity School bulletin in 2018, Professor Wacker quoted an example: “One of the real problems in modern life is that people who are good at being civil lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions lack civility.”
Martin Emil Marty was born on Feb. 5, 1928, in West Point, Neb. His father, Emil, was a parochial school teacher and organist at Lutheran churches in Nebraska and Iowa. His mother was Anne Louise (Wuerdemann) Marty.
A graduate of a Lutheran preparatory school, he attended Concordia College, Washington University and Concordia Seminary, where he earned a bachelor’s in divinity in 1949 and a master’s in 1952. He received a Master of Sacred Theology degree from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in 1954 and a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1956.
As an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, he served as a pastor in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Chicago’s suburbs. In 1963, he was hired as an associate professor of religious history at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught until 1998.
In 1952 he married Elsa L. Schumacher; she died in 1981. In 1982, he married Harriet J. Meyer, a voice coach and the widow of a seminary classmate.
In addition to his wife and his son Peter, the publisher of The Christian Century magazine, he is survived by three other sons from his first marriage, Joel, Micah and John, who is a Minnesota state senator; a foster daughter, Fran Garcia Carlson; a foster son, Jeff Garcia; a stepdaughter, Ursula Meyer; nine grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren.
When he retired as a professor on his 70th birthday, the Divinity School honored him by naming the research center he founded in 1979 as the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion.
Asked by the University of Chicago Magazine in 1998 how he’d like to be remembered, he said: “That I was a good teacher.”
In the Mount Rushmore of American religious history and virtue, Professor Wacker once said fulsomely, Dr. Marty “might well rank as the fourth member,” after Dr. King, Billy Graham and Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century Congregationalist theologian.
“For Marty, the only real swear word was tribalism — watching out for my interest, my family, my town, my country, my tribe — at the expense of others,” Professor Wacker said in an email. “Everyone, and he meant everyone, deserved a seat at the table of public discussion as long as they were willing to play by the rules of civility and reasoned examination of the evidence.”
A streamer known for hurling racist slurs in public settings under the nickname “Chud the Builder” was charged with attempted murder after a shooting outside a Tennessee courthouse on Wednesday, the authorities said.
The streamer, Dalton Eatherly, 28, was involved in a confrontation with an unidentified man that escalated to gunfire outside the Montgomery County Court in Clarksville, about 50 miles northwest of Nashville, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. Both men sustained gunshot wounds and were in stable condition, the office said.
In addition to attempted murder, Mr. Eatherly was charged with employing a firearm during dangerous felony, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, the sheriff’s office said.
Mr. Eatherly, who is white, has accumulated an online audience by livestreaming confrontations in which he uses racist language toward Black people in public.
Law enforcement did not provide any details about the second man involved in Wednesday’s shooting. Mr. Eatherly posted an audio recording online of paramedics treating his wounds in which he claims he shot the man in self-defense.
A video posted by the website Clarksville Now shows Mr. Eatherly on a stretcher with a microphone attached to his lapel.
Mr. Eatherly is being held at the Montgomery County Jail, pending arraignment, the sheriff’s office said.
According to court records, Mr. Eatherly was scheduled to appear for a court hearing on Wednesday morning in an unrelated case brought by Midland Credit Management, a collections agency.
A lawyer listed in court records from a separate harassment case in which Mr. Eatherly was a defendant in November did not respond to a request for comment.
On Sunday, three days before the shooting in Clarksville, Mr. Eatherly was arrested in Nashville. According to a police affidavit, Mr. Eatherly live streamed his meal at a restaurant, Bob’s Steak and Chop House, on Saturday even though the restaurant had asked him ahead of time not to do so.
When he was confronted, Mr. Eatherly “became disruptive and started making racial statements, yelling, screaming and otherwise creating a scene,” according to the affidavit.
He then refused to pay for his $370 meal. Mr. Eatherly was charged with theft of services, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. He was released on $5,000 bond.
SEATTLE (KOMO) — Seattle police have arrested a suspect in the murder of a University of Washington student.
The student, a 19-year-old transgender woman, was found dead with stab wounds in a laundry room at the Nordheim Court Apartments – off-campus housing for UW students – Sunday night.
The arrest comes a day after the Seattle Police Department (SPD) released photos of a suspect described as armed and dangerous. SPD has not yet confirmed whether the man in the images is the suspect.
According to Seattle police Det. Brian Pritchard, a 31-year-old man turned himself in to Bellevue police before being transferred to SPD detectives.
The Bellevue Police Department said the man was arrested at 10:42 p.m. on Wednesday.
The suspect was booked into the King County jail for investigation of murder.
RELATED | UW students raise security concerns after deadly stabbing, report prior break-in
Anyone with more information is asked to call the SPD violent crimes tip line at 206-233-5000. Anonymous tips are welcome.
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Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, a Republican, plans to call the state legislature back for a special session that will be focused on redrawing the state’s congressional maps, lawmakers said on Wednesday evening. The effort could eliminate the state’s sole Democratic district, held by Representative James E. Clyburn.
Mr. McMaster’s decision came one day after five Republican state senators voted with Democrats to block a resolution that would have brought the legislature back to the State Capitol to consider redistricting.
That vote had seemed to close the door on the matter. Republican lawmakers had considered an agreement to extend their session only when it became clear that Mr. McMaster would not immediately call a special session himself.
But Mr. McMaster, who cannot seek re-election because of term limits, now appears willing to thrust South Carolina into the redistricting battles that have reached fever intensity, particularly in the South, ever since the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Voting Rights Act last month.
President Trump has been clear about his wish for a G.O.P. sweep of all seven of South Carolina’s congressional districts, pressing Republican officials to draw new district maps before the midterm elections.
Mr. McMaster’s office declined to comment on Wednesday. Recently, he had said that he would let the Republican-controlled General Assembly decide the matter.
If Mr. McMaster calls the special session, lawmakers would face a time crunch. South Carolina’s primaries are on June 9, but early voting begins in two weeks, so Republicans would have to pass new maps before May 26.
The South Carolina House has proposed moving the congressional primaries to August to accommodate new maps.
There are also legal hurdles to consider. Hundreds of overseas voters have already cast ballots, which could prompt lawsuits if their votes are discarded to account for a change of date in congressional elections.
It is still unclear if new maps would pass in a special session, although Republicans control the legislature and would need only a simple majority to approve them.
Davey Hiott, the Republican leader of the South Carolina House, told reporters that his chamber was ready to get things rolling on Friday morning and vote on a map as quickly as possible, ideally next week.
Shane Massey, the Republican leader of the State Senate, who drew national attention for his impassioned speech against redistricting, was much more apprehensive about moving fast. He said public input was important and continued to voice opposition to the redistricting effort.
“I haven’t heard anything that alleviates the concerns, not just for me but for other people that I’ve been talking to,” Mr. Massey said. “The concerns are there. If anything, they’re only heightened.”
He also noted that there were other pressing matters for the legislature to consider in the special session, such as finishing the budget.
Unlike their counterparts in states like Tennessee, Alabama and Louisiana, some South Carolina Republicans have been much more lukewarm about the idea of mid-decade redistricting, mostly because they are skeptical that a new map would guarantee one more Republican-leaning congressional district. Instead, they fear that Democrats could be competitive in the newly created districts as Republican strength in some current districts is diluted.
Mr. Massey said in the chamber on Tuesday that changing the maps was “extremely risky” and could allow Democrats to pick up a seat.
“Very candidly, you’re going to motivate Black turnout, and there will be repercussions from that,” including on local races, he said in that speech.
Mr. Massey and Mr. Hiott did agree that the redistricting debates were about to get even messier in Columbia, the capital.
“It’ll be like nothing we’ve ever seen,” Mr. Hiott said. “It’ll be long. It’ll be tedious. At times, hopefully, it’ll be respectful.”
He laughed when asked what he made of the governor’s change of heart on redistricting, adding, “I never thought it was out of the realm of possibility.”
Mr. Massey said Mr. McMaster had argued in a private meeting that calling the legislature back didn’t mean he was telling them what to do.
“My position on that is, if you’re calling us back, you’re telling everybody what you want us to do,” Mr. Massey said.
Mr. Massey described their redistricting dilemma as “a box within a box,” a “maze,” something he didn’t know how to escape. Sooner or later, he added, they would have to vote on new maps.
The debate over redistricting comes in the waning weeks of a crowded Republican primary battle for governor. All of the leading candidates have expressed their support for redistricting to increase Republicans’ chances of retaining control of Congress. Some of the candidates, including Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and Alan Wilson, the state attorney general, have showed up at committee hearings, urging lawmakers to move ahead.
Mr. Trump has not yet endorsed anyone in the governor’s race.
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