Protestantism and Philosophy in Wartime Princeton: The Education of John Rawls

In the late 1930s and 1940s, American public intellectuals began to respond to the Nazi threat with paeans to the intertwined importance of “Judeo-Christian” values and democratic ideals. This cultural atmosphere is well-chronicled, but how exactly did such rhetoric affect the undergraduate in the wartime classroom? Bok’s paper illuminates how several prominent Protestant professors—most significantly Theodore M. Greene and George F. Thomas—reshaped the study of philosophy and religion at Princeton in this period, and thereby formed the perspective of the young John Rawls. Specifically, they brought religion into a curriculum from which it had previously been mostly excluded. So from 1939 to 1942, the undergraduate Rawls was exposed to a distinctive fusion of philosophy and Christianity that would lead him to think of Protestant personalist ethics as the best grounding for philosophical liberalism. Greene and Thomas, along with Rawls’s mentor Walter T. Stace, all came from Anglican backgrounds and were prominent, eloquent proponents of the compatibility of Protestant Christian values and liberalism. Their teaching inspired Rawls first to consider the Episcopal ministry, then to become a philosophy professor. His mature views echoed Greene’s talk of “reflective commitment,” Thomas’s emphasis on persons, and Stace’s ideas about morality being embedded in human nature. Only after attending to these influences does it become clear how thoroughly ‘post-Protestant’ Rawls’s philosophical vision would prove, even as he learned to write in an increasingly secular, “analytic” idiom. Bok’s paper illustrates how cultural history can sharpen into intellectual history: here, rather than a general ‘climate of opinion’, we see specific sophisticated thinkers making curricular choices with consequences beyond their campus. Greene and Thomas would serve as official advisors to tens of other universities establishing academic Religious Studies programs after the war. And Rawls’s brand of post-Protestant liberalism would eventually underpin much of Anglophone political philosophy.