John Stuart Mill said that the absurdities of one generation become the truth of the next and the truism of the one after that. Over time, strangeness becomes normal. The career of the particularly grumpy Episcopalian priest William Guthrie illustrates this point. In the 1920s, he regularly provided newspapers with shocking stories about bizarre religious practices perceived as blatant violations of the most fundamental principles of faith and decency. A century later, Guthrie emerges as a revolutionary innovator, even a prophetic figure.
William Norman Guthrie (1868-1944) was born in Scotland to American parents and educated in the United States. In 1911 he became rector of St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery in New York, serving in this position until 1937. His exact religious beliefs were unclear. On occasion he seemed to deny the literal existence of God, and he described the Book of Common Prayer as a “fine museum piece”, declaring himself an “age-independent Catholic futurist”. He saw little hope for his own mainstream tradition, when educated elites had so completely deserted the churches: as he warned, “not only are Protestants doomed, but they are losing at the top “. When he took over St. Mark’s, his congregation had only 18 elderly women.
To counteract this decline, Guthrie sought massively to broaden the cultural awareness and sensitivity of the Church. He formed close ties with the avant-garde artists and thinkers of Greenwich Village, which also meant being in dialogue with the esoteric ideas then so deeply embedded in that world. Guthrie himself dabbled in esotericism, publishing The Gospel of Osiris and write the introduction of a single article
influential collection of lost and apocryphal writings, The Forgotten Books of Eden. Foreshadowing much of the opinion of modern scholars, he believed that it was impossible to understand the world of Jesus without knowing the book of Enoch and the odes and psalms of Solomon.
Cultural celebrities flocked to his cause. The committee he appointed to promote cultural awareness of the Church included Kahlil Gibran, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Vachel Lindsay. The church became a beacon for advanced culture and particularly for experimental modernism. By the end of the decade, St. Mark’s had provided a platform for such eminent speakers as the novelist John Cowper Powys, the poets Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg, the mystical artist Nicholas Roerich, and the astrologer Evangeline Adams. In 1920, dancer Isadora Duncan delivered the church’s Christmas Eve sermon.
Guthrie was dedicated to what would later be known as interfaith outreach, and on a large scale. He is said to have had more than 80 different rituals translated from their original languages for presentation in the church, usually by practitioners of the faiths in question. As the New Yorker According to one report, it was a 1922 service by a Parsi priest that “led an appreciable number of wealthy Episcopalians to regard Guthrie as the wild man of Borneo.” Among the growing critics was the very conservative Bishop of New York, William T. Manning, who launched a series of futile attempts to prevent each of Guthrie’s new extravagances.
Even without the alleged syncretism, Guthrie’s services were memorable affairs, notably, as Time noted, “incense, colored lights, gongs and other cinematic musical effects.” A 1923 liturgy finalized the break with Manning. According to sensational newspaper reports, a group of “bare legs, bare hips” dancers had undertaken a ritual dance in the church choir, involving a cross between a black mass and a vaudeville show. Time wrote of “young girls dressed in “dresses of a fragile character,” dancing, prancing lightly in the nave of Saint-Marc-dans-la-Bouwerie, glorifying God and the American girl.
What actually happened was much calmer: a group of six Barnard College students, completely covered in robes, performed an elegant liturgical dance. But even this story challenged the norms of the time. Not only were the young women heavily involved in running a department, but they actually moved their bodies (and, admittedly, yes, they were barefoot). The faithful reduced their contributions to nothing and Manning cut Saint Mark’s from the cycle of episcopal visits and therefore from the holding of confirmations.
Guthrie never gave in or repented. Interfaith dances and services continued and, in the eyes of conservatives, became even more scandalous. It was bad enough that Bahá’ís and Hindus held services at St. Mark’s, but at least many white Americans would recognize them as authentic religions, no matter how inferior. Celebrating “A Devotion on Buddha’s Birthday” may well be acceptable in the long run.
But Guthrie’s sympathies extended powerfully to Native Americans, who seemed entirely out of reach to his detractors, and he protested the theft of Native lands. Here Guthrie reflected the enthusiasm of his Greenwich Village entourage, many of whom had visited the Taos colony run by Mabel Dodge Luhan. Suddenly, white intellectual elites took indigenous spiritualities very seriously, rather than simply viewing them as sad relics of primitivism. Just before Thanksgiving 1924, Guthrie invited two Mohawks, dressed in full traditional costumes, to recite prayers in their own language.
In 1924, a pastor who opened his arms to other faiths and supported Native Americans, who welcomed liturgical dance led by women, and who brought the Church into an inextricable intimacy with avant-garde secular culture was a figure of public mockery, presumed of questionable mental health. A century later, its counterpart today would be quite close to the mainstream, with a clear niche in a prominent seminary. He would probably have a regular column in the century.
