Martin Marty, one of the foremost interpreters of religion in American public life, died on Tuesday. He was 97 years old.
For more than half a century, Marty was the go-to interview for journalists trying to make sense of some religious moment, whether it was a presidential election or an ecumenical agreement between Catholics and Lutherans.
In 1976, he appeared on NPR's All Things Considered to explain what it might mean that born-again Christian Jimmy Carter was entering the White House.
"The Southern Baptist Tradition at its best is one that doesn't want merging of church and state," Marty said. "And all you ever have to do to someone like Carter is to remind him that he might be tilting that way and he would back off very fast."
A quarter century later, leading up to the inauguration of George W. Bush, Marty appeared on NPR's Weekend Edition to talk about concerns that presidents take their oath of office on a Bible rather than something like the U.S. Constitution. "It is terribly offensive," he explained to host Scott Simon, "if you create the impression that other believers or non-believers can't be full citizens."
More recently, Marty helped listeners understand the fiery tone of Barack Obama's pastor during the 2008 presidential campaign. "A lot of Jeremiah Wright's rhetoric matches that of Martin Luther King," he said. "When you hear King accusing the nation for an unjust war in Vietnam or for segregating, it's just as harsh."
Marty was a writer, teacher, historian, and pastor.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Catherine Albanese was a Ph.D. student studying American religious history under Marty at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He was, even then, already sought after to explain and interpret belief. "He was the primary spokesperson for religion in America," she said. "He had a way of framing the story in ways that resonated."
Marty won a National Book Award for his 1970 volume Righteous Empire, about the American Protestant tradition. In addition to his teaching and scholarly work, he was an editor and columnist at the magazine The Christian Century, always believing that his work wasn't just for academics but for both clergy and laity in churches, as well as the general public. In 1997, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal for increasing the public understanding of religion.
Albanese said that in the same way Marty invited the public into understanding, he invited his students into the conversation. "I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood," she said. "I didn't come from any kind of privileged background at all. And he welcomed me in and he made me feel like I could play ball with this crowd."
Albanese went on to become a scholar of American religion herself and taught for decades at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She served as president of the American Academy of Religion just a few years after Marty himself held that office.
Albanese said of all the things she learned from her teacher, "he taught me to listen to the other people and be generous about the other person and feel some sense of their humanity."
Marty admired the richness of American religious diversity
Marty was an ordained Lutheran pastor and for two decades co-taught a course with University of Chicago colleague Clark Gilpin called "The Public Church in America." It was the introductory class for ministry students at the school.
Gilpin said Marty always insisted that books by Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King appear on the syllabus, "These were two different ways of thinking about people whose mission in life was transformation."
For Dorothy Day, an internal change that led to her conversion to Roman Catholicism. "In the case of Martin Luther King, if change is going to occur — and it must occur — that change is going to come from the margins," Gilpin said.
These multiple ways of thinking about religion's role in personal and public life were lessons Marty taught time and again, including in his groundbreaking study of conservative religious movements, The Fundamentalism Project. It was an undertaking that led him far afield from his mainline Protestant roots, but one that helped many scholars gain a better understanding of the phenomenon.
Gilpin remembers one of the last courses he taught with Marty, called "The Bazaar of American Religion." The class was designed to help students understand how extremely different religious traditions — from conservative Lutherans who came to the U.S. in the 19th Century to social justice-focused Catholics who emerged after Vatican II to more recently arrived Muslim immigrants forming communities — influence each other in the marketplace of religious practice, and add to the richness of American public life.
The point of the class was that "difference was not going to result in polarization," said Gilpin. "For Marty it was going to result in a dialogue that led each one of us to a better place."
Copyright 2025 NPR
