Mark Edwards on *Margaret Mead: A Twentieth Century Faith*

We should also congratulate Baylor historian Elesha J. Coffman, whose new biography of Mead proves convincingly that her subject was always a Christian public intellectual except for when she was not. Margaret Mead: A Twentieth Century Faith (2021) is a part of Oxford’s Spiritual Lives series. This collection “features biographies of prominent men and women whose eminence is not primarily based on a specifically religious contribution.” Fittingly, Mead is not remembered as a champion of Christianity but rather as one of its chief post-World War I detractors. Yet Coffman is masterful in showing how this “thrice-divorced bisexual” (v), attacked by Christian conservatives for sparking the sexual revolution, was in fact a faithful Episcopalian who maintained and even advanced linkages between American Christianity and the social sciences. Margaret Mead is exceptional in its communicating of moral, religious, and interpersonal complexity in rich and compelling ways.

Coffman had a lot of material to work with, given that Mead’s collection is the Library of Congress’s largest with over 530,000 items. As Coffman relates, Mead was raised to be a None by her parents— Christian agnostics and social scientists. Yet they also modeled the conviction that true religion was best exercised in scientific social service, a lesson Mead never forgot. Her youth rebellion took the form of her joining the Episcopal church at age eleven and continuing on through college (“I had not been looking for something to believe in,” she would relate in her autobiography, “for it seemed to me that a relationship to God should be based not on what you believed, but rather on what you felt,” p. 5). Mead encountered the social gospel through the lectures of pastor Ernest Freemont Tittle, which reinforced her parents’ connection of Christianity and social betterment. Mead’s struggle to “cherish the life of the world” (vi) played out in microcosm through her troubled marriage to another liberal Protestant, Luther Cressman. Both were drawn toward others, Mead to fellow grad student in anthropology Ruth Benedict.

Mead and Benedict were the star pupils of cultural anthropologist Franz Boas. They would help him carry forward a new gospel of cultural relativism—that “race” and “sex” were not things. At just age 23, Mead began her fieldwork in the Pacific that would become her groundbreaking study, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Mead’s findings about what the American press called “jungle flappers” (39) furthered Boaz’s and his students’ war on Social Darwinism. Mead’s critique of Christian sex ethics made her a target of Christianity Today and the religious right even into the 1980s. But even though Mead stopped attending church during these years, she never gave up on liberal Christianity. As she wrote in 1926,

Shorn of all the things in which I can’t believe—and don’t want to—an omnipotent God, immortality, original sin—Christianity is still the most beautiful thing I know, and the fact that Jesus lived the most satisfactory justification of life. I’d amend the golden rule to “Do unto others as they would be done by” and the new law to read “Love thy neighbor for himself” (54).

Mead found it impossible to love just one “himself,” torn between Cressman, Benedict, and fellow anthropologist Reo Fortune—whom Mead would marry after divorcing Cressman and living for a season with Benedict. Mead spent the 1930s divided between fieldwork, lecturing and writing as the Pacific expert at the American Museum of Natural History, and trying to make her second marriage work.

Mead spent World War II establishing a third marriage and motherhood. Her desire to aid the allies led her back to Christianity, namely, the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Mead’s anti-racist “one world” ideal of these years reflected both her anthropological training as well as her liberal Protestant experience. According to Coffman, Mead’s Episcopal commitment was resurrected after witnessing Christian revivals during return to her Pacific fieldwork. After the war, the indefatigable Mead balanced teaching, research, fieldwork, and writing “Margaret Mead Answers” columns with “godmothering,” giving church lectures, and tackling church committee work, including involvement in prayer book revision. Mead also wrote articles and book chapters for Christianity and Crisis, the National Council of Churches, and the World Council of Churches. Up to the end of her life, she worked with Christian groups on nuclear disarmament, environmentalism, and women’s rights.

Mead wrote in 1949:

I personally accept the culture within which I live and move and have my particular being as a way of life within which it is possible to work toward the welfare of all mankind in all places on the face of the earth. . . . I accept the indomitable will to live of those who, bruised by demands greater than they can bear, demand joy, however slight and cheap, rather than sink into apathy and despair (117).

Coffman has done an excellent job offering a thick description of Mead’s own “will to live” in all its beauty, heartache, confusion, and impact upon millions. Making sense of someone who never saw the need for women’s ordination yet fought her church’s and the country’s strictures on bisexuality was no easy task. Yet Coffman effectively overviews what made Mead such a powerful public intellectual to the American Century. She shows how Mead’s amazing output was interrelated with her several lost and found loves. And, most importantly here, Coffman reanimates Mead’s homespun liberal Christianity as central to her life and career in a way that is nuanced but still highly accessible. In other words, Margaret Mead will serve as a great introduction to as well as a rethinking of the spiritual life of one of the world’s intellectual giants.

Coffman wisely avoids making too much of her conclusions about Mead. That said, I wish she would have made more of her conclusions about Mead. While considering why Mead was ignored as the pastoral and theological voice that she was, Coffman suggests that, besides our (and apparently Mead’s) gendered notions of “pastor” and “theologian,” it was also that Mead was “on the losing side of an incipient culture war” (185). That is true in the sense that the liberal-mainline-ecumenical institutions that Mead frequented began to bleed recruits and resources after 1970. However, as historians from David Hollinger, Matthew Hedstrom, and Coffman herself, to Gale Kenny, Nicholas Pruitt, and Gene Zubovich, have stressed, those same groups also exerted an outsized impact on American life and government after 1950. Mead’s own story suggests how social gospel Protestantism thrived outside of the churches. Her self-described “post-agnostic faith” (53-54) was and is quietly commonplace throughout the country even as Christian nationalism grows louder. Numerical declines among conservative Christian communities, especially their young, herald brighter days for Mead’s spiritual eclecticism. So the next time you hear someone say that the evangelicals won the culture wars, you might want ask them, “Are you calling Margaret Mead a loser?”