In the summer of 1963, Harvey Gallagher Cox Jr. (b. 1929) sat in a jail cell in Williamston, North Carolina. He had come south with clergy supporting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to demonstrate against segregation, and the local authorities locked him up. While he sat in that cell, Andover Newton Theological School in Massachusetts installed him, in absentia, as assistant professor of theology and culture. The two events tell you most of what you need to know about the career that followed. Cox never believed theology happened at a desk. He believed it happened where history happened, and he spent seventy years going to where he thought history was.
He was born on May 19, 1929, in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Malvern, a small town west of Philadelphia. His father, Harvey Gallagher Cox Sr., worked as a painter and decorator and later as a transport manager. His mother, Dorothy Dunwoody Cox, worked as a secretary and then as a housemother at the Devereux School in Devon. The family attended Baptist services. Four children, modest means, small-town Protestant Pennsylvania in the Depression and the war years. Nothing in the setting predicted a Harvard chair.
The first departure came in 1946. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration needed volunteers to ship cattle across the Atlantic to replace the herds Europe had lost in the war. Cox, seventeen, just past his junior year at Berwyn High School, signed on. His boat went to Gdansk. A Pennsylvania teenager who had never left the mid-Atlantic states stood on a deck and watched a flattened Polish port slide into view: rubble where a Hanseatic city had stood, women in kerchiefs hauling bricks, Soviet soldiers on the docks. He later served a stint in the Merchant Marine. The pattern set early. Cox did theology by going places. Gdansk, Berlin, New Delhi, Cuernavaca, Rome, Tehran, Hiroshima. He spoke of the importance of “participating in history, not just watching it happen on TV.”
The credentials came in orderly sequence. A bachelor’s degree in history with honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951. A Bachelor of Divinity from Yale in 1955. Ordination as an American Baptist minister in 1957. Then the run of early jobs that most academic theologians treat as stepping stones and that Cox treated as fieldwork: director of religious activities at Oberlin College, Protestant chaplain at Temple University in North Philadelphia, where the campus sat inside a Black neighborhood the city had written off.
The decisive year came in 1962. Cox went to Berlin as an ecumenical fraternal worker, teaching in a church-sponsored adult education program with branches on both sides of the barbed wire. The Wall had gone up the year before. He crossed at Checkpoint Charlie carrying his papers, taught his classes among East Germans who took real risks to attend, and returned at night to the West. In those months he soaked up Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), the pastor the Nazis hanged at Flossenburg, and above all the prison letters, where Bonhoeffer speculated about a world come of age and a “religionless Christianity.” Cox read those letters in the divided city where Bonhoeffer had preached, and the question they posed became his life’s question: if institutional religion recedes, does God recede with it, or was God never confined to the institution in the first place?
He returned to Harvard to finish his doctorate under James Luther Adams (1901-1994), the Unitarian social ethicist who taught that religious liberty and democratic association belong at the center of theology, not its margins. Cox completed the Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of religion in 1963, the same year as the Williamston jail. In Berlin he had also drawn close to the Presbyterian theologian Richard Shaull (1919-2002), whose work on structural injustice anticipated the Latin American theology Cox would champion two decades later.
He had already shown a knack for finding the pressure points of the culture. In April 1961, Christianity and Crisis published his essay “Playboy’s Doctrine of Maleness,” which read Hugh Hefner’s magazine as a religious document. The centerfold, Cox argued, offered an ideal woman who made no demands and could be folded up and put away, which the genuine article does not permit. He lampooned the Miss America pageant as a fertility cult reworked for male fantasy and commodity marketing. The essay anticipated arguments feminist theologians would make a decade later, and it displayed the method that made him famous: take a secular artifact everyone consumes and nobody examines, and read it theologically.
In 1965 Macmillan published a collection of his essays. Cox’s editor in New York expected nothing unusual from it. Neither did Cox. He had titled it God and the Secular City, and the publisher cut the title down, saying the original was too complicated. The Secular City sold out its first printing, then its second, then kept selling until it passed one million copies in seventeen languages. The University of Marburg later named it among the most influential works of Protestant theology in the twentieth century. Cox was thirty-six.
The argument ran against everything the churches were telling themselves. Urbanization, technology, and the collapse of ecclesiastical authority were not catastrophes. God is the Lord of history first and the Head of the Church second, so the divine presence operates in the secular realm as much as the religious one, and the church cramps that presence when it confines God to a spiritual sector. Cox distinguished secularization, a historical process he traced to the Bible itself, from secularism, a closed ideology as oppressive as any theocracy. The church, he wrote, is a people of faith and action, not an institution, and its intrinsic conservatism kept it from joining what he called God’s permanent revolution in history. Anonymity and mobility, the features of urban life the pastors deplored, he defended as liberations. The man at the giant switchboard and the man in the cloverleaf became his figures for metropolitan freedom.
The book landed in the middle of the death-of-God moment, and reviewers lumped Cox with Altizer and Hamilton. He resisted the label. The death-of-God theologians, he said, remained obsessed with the God of classical metaphysical theism, while he started from the crucifixion, from a God disclosed in weakness and suffering and in man’s assumption of responsibility. God was not dead. God had moved, and the churches had not forwarded their mail.
The controversy made him. By 1966 both Christianity and Crisis and Commonweal had run symposia on the book, with Cox answering his critics in each. Conservatives accused him of surrendering Christianity to modernity. Neo-orthodox critics said he underestimated the alienation and depersonalization of urban life. Michael Novak, then a young Catholic philosopher who shared Cox’s Macmillan editor, thought Harvey avoided going deep, abhorred metaphysics, and squirmed in the presence of ritual. Cox issued a revised edition in 1966 that toned down the vivid passages and admitted the criticisms had force. Harvard hired him in 1965, and he began teaching at the Divinity School and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He would eventually hold the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, endowed in 1721, the oldest endowed chair in American higher education.
Success at thirty-six carried a price he named late in life as the curse of early fame. Editors wanted another Secular City. He tried for fifty years, by his own laughing admission at a 2017 Harvard lecture, and never produced one. What he produced instead was a second book that swerved hard from the first. He presented The Feast of Fools as the William Belden Noble Lectures at Harvard in 1968, an event with music, dance, film, and balloons, and published it in 1969. Modern Christianity, the book argued, had grown rational and bureaucratic and had lost festivity and fantasy. The world needed life-celebrators as much as world-changers. He drew on medieval carnival, on the feast where a boy bishop mocked the hierarchy and the low mocked the high, and argued that genuine liberation requires ritual, play, and imagination alongside political reform. He called it his favorite of his books, the one he recommended at parties. He practiced what it preached. Cox played tenor saxophone in a jazz ensemble called The Embraceables, and kept a band going for the rest of his working life.
The activism never paused. He opposed the Vietnam War from early on, helped organize clergy resistance, and counseled draft resisters. The Seduction of the Spirit (1973), part autobiography and part analysis of how individuals and institutions manipulate healthy religious instincts for control, became a National Book Award finalist. Turning East (1977) examined why young Americans were sitting zazen and chanting Hare Krishna, and gave Asian traditions a critical but respectful hearing.
Then Latin America rearranged his priorities. Travel through the region, including work at a training center in Venezuela, put him among priests and catechists who read Exodus in shantytowns while the police read their mail. He became the first to introduce liberation theology into the Harvard Divinity School curriculum, teaching Jesus the Liberator and God’s preference for the poor to students groomed for New England pulpits. In retrospect he judged liberation theology the next logical step after The Secular City, though he confessed he had been slow to see the link. The Latin Americans had read La Ciudad Secular and pushed past it: history in general was not the site of God’s action, the struggle of the poor was.
The commitment got its test in the 1980s, when the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (1927-2022), summoned the Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff (b. 1938) to Rome and silenced him. Cox, a Baptist with no standing in the Catholic fight, wrote The Silencing of Leonardo Boff (1988) in Boff’s defense, an attack on ecclesiastical suppression of theology that sided with the poor against entrenched power. The book made explicit what his whole career implied: when the institution and the marginalized conflict, the theologian belongs with the marginalized.
His personal life bent his scholarship in a new direction. His first marriage, to Nancy Neiburger in 1957, produced children and ended in divorce. In 1987 he married Nina Tumarkin, a historian of Russia at Wellesley, who is Jewish. Cox began living the Jewish calendar at home while remaining a Baptist minister, and out of that domestic arrangement came Common Prayers (2002), his account of the Jewish liturgical year experienced from inside a Christian skin. It followed Many Mansions (1988), where he described his encounters with Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam as occasions for mutual learning rather than missionary competition. He put the shift in personal terms in a 2009 interview: he had once regarded other world religions as exotic curiosities, and he had come to see Christianity as one symbolic approach to reality among others, which invalidated nothing and obligated him to look for common threads.
The largest revision of his career concerned Pentecostalism. Liberal Protestant academia treated tongues-speaking, faith healing, and storefront churches as an embarrassment. Cox went to the services. He sat through hours of worship in São Paulo and Seoul and Boston, watched women fall out in the Spirit, and listened to testimonies. Fire from Heaven (1995) argued that Pentecostalism, then adding members faster than any movement in Christendom, represented what he called primal spirituality, religion rooted in direct experience rather than doctrine, and that its growth across Latin America, Africa, and Asia refuted the secularization forecasts of his own generation. The future of Christianity, he concluded, lay in the Global South. Coming from the author of The Secular City, the argument amounted to a self-correction on the largest possible scale, and he made it without flinching. He said what fewer scholars manage to say: the thing I predicted did not happen, and here is what happened instead. Religion had not disappeared under modernization. It had diversified, globalized, and returned in forms nobody ordered.
Harvard let him go in style. On an October afternoon in 2009, after forty-four years, the Divinity School held his retirement ceremony outdoors. Because the Hollis chair dated to colonial times, when professors held grazing rights in Harvard Yard, Cox borrowed a cow for the occasion. The cow turned out to be named Pride, and Cox joked that the name might be inappropriate at a divinity school. Peter Gomes (1942-2011), the Memorial Church minister, reassured him: “Harvey, at Harvard we do not consider pride to be a sin.” There was a tuba ensemble and a speech in Latin. Then Cox stepped down from the podium, shed his academic gown in a dozen strides, picked up his tenor saxophone, and started playing with his swing band, the Soft Touch, while the cow grazed and the faculty applauded. The scene condensed the man: the oldest chair in American academia, a livestock joke, and jazz.
Retirement changed his title, Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, and little else. The Future of Faith (2009) offered his summary scheme: an Age of Faith among the earliest believers, an Age of Belief under the creeds and hierarchies, and now an emerging Age of the Spirit marked by lived experience, social engagement, and dialogue across traditions. Historians questioned the tidiness of the three ages, and the book became one of the most discussed interpretations of contemporary Christianity anyway. He co-wrote a commentary on Lamentations and the Song of Songs with Stephanie Paulsell in 2012. How to Read the Bible (2015) argued that historical criticism and devotional reading illuminate different dimensions of the text and need not war with each other. The Market as God (2016) turned his old method on economics: the market now functions as a deity, omniscient and self-correcting, with growth as its doctrine of salvation and business schools as its seminaries, and this idolatry deserves the scrutiny once aimed at churches. A New Heaven (2022), written in his nineties, took up death, resurrection, and the afterlife through scripture, comparative religion, and his own approaching horizon.
In May 2017, at the Divinity School’s bicentennial, Cox, then eighty-eight, stood at a podium and held up foreign editions of The Secular City one by one, reading the titles aloud, French, German, one he guessed was Dutch, one he could not identify at all, while the alumni laughed. He bore, he told them, the curse of an early success. Then he turned to the question the room had come to hear him answer, whatever happened to secularization, and walked them back through Bonhoeffer in his cell, sure of his own execution, writing to Eberhard Bethge that the world was proceeding toward a time of no religion at all. Bonhoeffer had been wrong about that, and so, in part, had Cox, and the admission cost him nothing visible. He had spent fifty years revising the book that made him, in symposium rejoinders, in the 1966 revision, in the twenty-fifth anniversary essay where he conceded the book spoke from the vantage of a relatively privileged urbanite and that Black theologians had good reason to find his switchboards and cloverleafs implausible, since the city had denied them both communication and mobility. Where other famous scholars fortify the positions of their youth, Cox kept the position under review and reported the findings against himself.
Critics called him faddish, a weathervane for whatever the culture was doing that decade: secularization, festivity, Eastern religion, liberation, Pentecostalism, markets. He answered that he was a church theologian in the line of Karl Barth (1886-1968), responding to the pastoral issues of a church confronting the world, and that the world kept changing the subject. Both descriptions fit. He chased the action, and the action taught him. His mentors’ names track the chase: Adams, Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich (1886-1965), Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), Dorothy Day (1897-1980), the Colombian priest-guerrilla Camilo Torres (1929-1966).
The influence outran the criticism. Cox helped move religious studies toward cities, politics, economics, and popular movements. He carried Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Buber to a mass readership. He trained generations of students at a university that had no religious studies program in the college when he arrived and a thriving one when he left, a growth he liked to cite as evidence for his case. He watched the resurgence of religion around the world contradict the confident forecasts of his early career, and he called the reversal a basic change in the nature of the civilization. E.J. Dionne judged him the most important liberal theologian of the last half century. The judgment is arguable. What is harder to argue with is the the life: a decorator’s son from Malvern who shipped cattle to a bombed Polish port at seventeen, sat in a Carolina jail at thirty-four, held Harvard’s oldest chair for four decades, defended a silenced Franciscan, kept a Jewish home, took Pentecostals seriously before his colleagues did, and marked his own retirement with a borrowed cow and a saxophone. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Tumarkin, in his ninety-eighth year, still watching for where God will turn up next.
Notes
The Williamston jail and in-absentia installation at Andover Newton come from the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives entry, which also supplied his parents’ occupations, Berwyn High School, and the Playboy essay details.
The 1946 UNRRA cattle boat to Gdansk and the “participating in history” quote come from the Encyclopedia of World Biography entry.
The retirement scene, cow named Pride, Gomes line, tuba ensemble, Latin speech, and Soft Touch band are from the PBS Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly profile. The gown-to-saxophone procession detail comes from Tom Beaudoin‘s America account.
The 2017 bicentennial lecture, foreign editions detail, “curse of an early success,” and his Bonhoeffer recollections come from the Harvard Divinity School video transcript.
The publisher’s title change from God and the Secular City, and his line about other religions as former exotic curiosities, come from the PBS extended interview.
The “privileged urbanite” concession and the Black theologians’ critique of the switchboard and cloverleaf figures come from his 1990 Christian Century essay, “The Secular City 25 Years Later”.
The Michael Novak material, including the shared Macmillan editor, low expectations, and the critique that Cox avoided metaphysics, comes from Novak’s First Things reminiscence.
The Feast of Fools Noble Lecture with balloons, The Embraceables, the “second book crisis,” and marriage details are on Wikipedia.
The Marburg designation and National Book Award finalist status are from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences page.
The death-of-God distinction and crucifixion-centered reply come from a 1969 Dialogue interview.
Extrapolations I made without direct sourcing: the visual details of Gdansk from the deck, including rubble, women hauling bricks, and Soviet soldiers, are reasonable inferences from 1946 Gdansk but not from any Cox account I found. The Checkpoint Charlie crossing detail is an inference from his documented work on both sides of the Wall. Temple’s setting in a Black North Philadelphia neighborhood is accurate for the era, but I attributed no reaction of his to it. The São Paulo, Seoul, and Boston services for Fire from Heaven are plausible composites, since the book documents fieldwork in Latin America, Asia, and American congregations, but I did not confirm those three cities.
The Buffered Prophet: Harvey Cox Through Charles Taylor’s Secular Age
In 1965, Harvey Cox stood at a lectern and told American Protestantism that the disenchanted city was good news. Thirty years later he sat in folding chairs in storefront churches and watched the Holy Spirit knock grown men to the floor. He took notes. He believed what he saw enough to write a book about it. The distance between those two rooms is the distance Charles Taylor (b. 1931) maps in A Secular Age (2007), and no career in American religion walks that distance more completely than Cox’s.
Taylor builds his 874 pages around a contrast between two ways of having a self. The porous self, the self of medieval Christendom and of most human history, stands open to the world. Spirits cross its threshold. Demons possess it, saints heal it, relics charge the space around it, and the boundary between mind and world stays thin and negotiable. Meaning lives in things, in the black mass, in the consecrated host, in the plague wind, and the self can be invaded by them. The buffered self, the modern achievement, seals the border. Meaning retreats inside the skull. The world becomes mechanism, disenchanted, and the self becomes the sole seat of thought and significance, protected, disengaged, capable of standing back from everything, including its own desires. The buffered man can feel invulnerable in a way no porous villager ever could. He can also feel, in Taylor’s telling, a peculiar flatness, a sense that something was lost when the spirits left, and that loss hums under modern life like a wire.
Taylor pairs this with a second tool. He attacks what he calls subtraction stories, the accounts that treat secular modernity as what remains when you strip away illusion. On the subtraction story, men were always secular underneath; religion was a crust, science scraped it off, and the residue is us. Taylor argues the reverse. The buffered, secular self had to be built. Exclusive humanism is a constructed achievement with its own history, its own spiritual disciplines, its own heroes, and the condition we now inhabit, which he names the immanent frame, is a frame, an interpretation that feels like a fact. Within it, belief and unbelief both persist as options, cross-pressured, neither able to rest.
Set Cox’s shelf against this apparatus and the shelf reorganizes.
Begin with The Secular City. The book celebrates the buffered self at the moment of its American triumph, and it does so in theological dress. Cox’s urban hero is Taylor’s buffered man drawn from life: anonymous, mobile, free of the village’s watching gods and watching neighbors, at home among switchboards and cloverleafs, master of systems rather than supplicant of powers. Cox blesses the disenchantment Taylor anatomizes. He tells his readers that the exorcism has biblical roots, that Genesis disenchants nature, that Exodus desacralizes politics, that the Sinai covenant desacralizes values, and that the pagan cosmos full of gods died at Hebrew hands long before it died at Newton’s. Secularization, on this account, is the gospel working through history, and the buffered city is its harvest.
Taylor would call this a subtraction story with a twist, and the twist deserves attention. The standard subtraction story credits science and progress with scraping off the sacred crust. Cox credits the Bible. He makes disenchantment a Christian accomplishment rather than a loss inflicted on Christianity, which lets him claim the secular city for God at the moment his colleagues were draping the sanctuary in black. This is subtler than the story Taylor attacks in Weber’s heirs, and in one respect Cox anticipated Taylor: he insisted from the first edition that secularization differs from secularism, that the process of unbinding differs from the closed ideology that forbids rebinding. Taylor’s immanent frame, which can be lived as open or spun as closed, restates that distinction in grander architecture forty years later. Cox got there in 1965 in a paperback that sold a million copies. The gatekeepers cite Taylor. The genealogy runs through Cox.
But Cox in 1965 shared the buffered age’s central blindness, and he later said so. He assumed the porous self was finished. The man at the giant switchboard does not expect the Spirit to seize him on the subway. Healing, possession, tongues, the invasion of the body by power from outside, none of this appears in The Secular City except as residue the metropolis would dissolve. Cox wrote the buffered self’s victory speech.
The porous self declined to attend the funeral.
What happened next reads like a controlled experiment Taylor might have designed. While the seminaries of the buffered North emptied, Pentecostalism, the most porous form of Christianity since the Middle Ages, grew faster than any religious movement on earth. In Pentecostal worship the boundary between self and Spirit stays thin by design. The Holy Ghost enters bodies, loosens tongues, straightens legs, breaks addictions, and speaks through the mouths of maids and mechanics. Demons remain live actors; deliverance ministries fight them by name. The service is a technology of porousness, and it conquered the Global South while the theorists of disenchantment graded papers.
Cox did what almost no one of his rank did. He went to look. Fire from Heaven (1995) is a report on the porous self by the man who had eulogized it, and the book’s honesty gives it standing that a Pentecostal apologist could never earn. Cox names what he finds primal spirituality: primal speech in tongues, where language cracks under the pressure of what enters; primal piety in trance, healing, and dance; primal hope in a kingdom arriving in the body now. His categories are Taylor’s porousness translated into the idiom of a Baptist who plays jazz saxophone. And his conclusion runs the knife through his own early work. The buffered condition, he concedes, turned out to be a regional and class phenomenon, the house style of the educated North Atlantic, while the porous self remained the human default, and wherever modern life ground people down, the Spirit poured back in through the cracks the buffer could not seal.
Taylor reaches for the same evidence. A Secular Age treats Pentecostalism as the great counterinstance, the festive, bodily eruption that the disenchantment thesis cannot digest. Here the essay joins a conversation with more members than Taylor. Peter Berger (1929-2017), who did as much as any sociologist to build secularization theory, recanted in public; his edited volume The Desecularization of the World (1999) declares the theory falsified by a furiously religious planet, and Berger cites the Pentecostal explosion as exhibit one. José Casanova (b. 1951) argued in Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) that religion had deprivatized, that the buffered settlement confining faith to the inner room had broken down on every continent. Cox belongs in this company as the earliest confessing witness. Berger recanted a sociological theory. Cox recanted a theology, which costs more, since he had preached it.
His late work extends the Taylor reading in a direction Taylor mostly gestures at. The Market as God (2016) argues that the immanent frame does not stay empty. Strip the cosmos of spirits and the vacancy advertises. Cox finds in market discourse a full replacement theology: The Market as omniscient providence, correction as chastisement, growth as salvation, the business press as a book of revelations, consumption as communion. This is porousness returning in disguise inside the buffered order’s own temple. The trader who scoffs at demons believes the Market punishes hubris and rewards faith, feels its moods enter him through a glowing terminal, and sacrifices to it. Taylor calls such returns the nova effect, the explosion of new positions, spiritual and pseudo-spiritual, that cross-pressure generates inside the frame. Cox supplies the case study with the best jokes.
Even his periodization converges with Taylor’s. The Future of Faith (2009) divides Christian history into an Age of Faith, an Age of Belief, and a dawning Age of the Spirit, in which lived experience outranks creed. Taylor divides Western history into the ancien régime, the Age of Mobilization, and the Age of Authenticity, in which each person must find his own spiritual path. The schemes differ in scale and rigor, and historians have roughed up both, but they describe the same weather: doctrine loses its grip, experience takes the chair, and the porous hunger for contact outlives the institutions that once managed it. Cox reads the shift as the Spirit’s work. Taylor reads it as authenticity culture. Both refuse the conclusion that it means the end of God.
The man carried the argument in his own body, which is where the frame earns its keep as biography rather than doctrine. Cox lived buffered. Harvard chair, four decades of seminars, the disengaged stance of the scholar who studies worship without surrendering to it. He also kept punching holes in his own buffer. He preached, which is porous work; the sermon assumes a Word that arrives from outside. He played tenor saxophone in swing bands into old age, and improvised music is a licensed porousness the buffered academy permits, a channel where something flows through a man and everyone agrees not to ask what. He married the historian Nina Tumarkin in 1987 and kept the Jewish liturgical year at home, candles and festivals, the enchanted calendar of a tradition not his own, and wrote Common Prayers (2002) about the experience of a Christian inside Jewish time. At his 2009 retirement he shed the academic gown, the buffered self’s ceremonial armor, in a dozen strides and raised the saxophone. A borrowed cow grazed nearby. The scene belongs in Taylor’s chapter on festivity, the carnival moments when the modern order lets the older self out on furlough. Cox had written that chapter first; The Feast of Fools (1969) mourns festivity’s death under buffered rationality and pleads for its return.
Taylor describes the honest inhabitant of the immanent frame as cross-pressured, caught between the memory of transcendence and the solidity of the disenchanted world, unable to settle in either. Cox spent sixty years as the most public cross-pressured man in American theology, and he made the condition productive rather than paralyzing. Pulled toward buffered confidence, he wrote The Secular City. Pulled back by the flatness, he wrote The Feast of Fools. Confronted with porousness rampant in São Paulo and Seoul, he wrote Fire from Heaven. Watching the buffered order secrete its own gods, he wrote The Market as God. Each book corrects the last, and the sequence, read through Taylor, stops looking faddish, the charge his critics preferred, and starts looking like one man running the full experiment on himself and publishing the lab notes.
The frame also exposes what Cox never resolved. He reported porousness; it remains unclear he ever recovered it. Fire from Heaven admires the trance from the folding chair. Cox speaks in the book of his Baptist boyhood and of moments at Pentecostal services when the music pulled at him, but he returns each night to Cambridge, to the study, to the buffered posture that made the reporting possible. Taylor would recognize the position and decline to sneer at it, since it is his own: the scholar of enchantment who writes from inside the frame he criticizes, fluent in the porous grammar, no longer a native speaker. The Age of the Spirit Cox announced is an age he could describe better than he could enter. His last book, A New Heaven (2022), written in his nineties, tests the final boundary, death, against scripture and hope, and even there the method holds: he examines the doctrine of resurrection the way a man examines a bridge he will soon have to cross, with love, with learning, and with the buffered self’s incurable habit of inspection.
Whether the buffer opens at the end is not a question a biographer can answer. What the record shows is a decorator’s son from Malvern who wrote the most confident obituary the porous self ever received, spent the rest of a long life documenting the corpse’s recovery, and told the truth about it each time the evidence turned. Taylor argues that our age makes both belief and unbelief hard, that everyone lives on the cross-pressure whether he admits it or not. Cox admitted it, in seventeen languages, for sixty years. That is the shape of his secular age: a city he blessed, a fire he could hear through the wall, and a door he kept ajar.
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, the optimistic, progressive trajectory of Cox’s entire theological career is an illusion.
Cox characterized the secular city as a place of anonymity and mobility, where the individual is freed from traditional religious myths and can operate with pragmatic, technocratic reason. He viewed the departure from tribal religion as a sign of human maturity—man finally growing up and leaving behind the absolute moral systems of his childhood.
Mearsheimer’s framework suggests that this liberated, atomistic secular citizen cannot exist. If humans are profoundly social beings from start to finish, and if reason is the least important way we determine preferences, then the secular city does not mature man; it merely starves him of his primary need. Man does not comfortably inhabit an anonymous, pragmatic vacuum. When traditional religion is stripped away, human beings do not become self-authoring, rational agents. They instead seek out new groups to satisfy their inborn tribal sentiments, transforming secular politics, ideologies, and subcultures into replacement churches.
Cox’s subsequent scholarship inadvertently tracked the failure of his own early predictions. In Fire from Heaven (1994), he examined the massive, global explosion of Pentecostalism, forced to reckon with the fact that experiential, ecstatic religion was growing faster than secular rationality. Decades later, in The Market as God (2016), he argued that the modern financial market had adopted the exact structural functions of medieval theology, complete with its own sacraments, infallible logic, and high priests.
If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct, Cox’s later observations were the inevitable correction to his early delusion. Pentecostalism succeeded globally precisely because it offers intense socialization, tight group cohesion, and deep emotional attachment—the exact collective requirements of a tribal animal. Similarly, the elevation of the Market into a pseudo-deity occurred because humans require an overarching moral code and narrative framework to survive within a society. The technocratic neutrality Cox celebrated in 1965 was a brief, unstable anomaly; the human animal will always convert its environments into sites of religious or ideological tribalism.
The foundational premise of Cox’s early theology was that secularization is an irreversible historical movement toward universal, individualist freedom, which would allow mankind to cooperate globally on a pragmatic basis.
Mearsheimer’s logic dictates that universalist projects are doomed because they run counter to human nature. Because family and society impose an enormous value infusion on an individual during a long childhood, human moral landscapes will always remain fragmented, local, and adversarial. Secularization did not pave the way for a rational global city. Instead, by dismantling the traditional religious frameworks that previously managed man’s tribal impulses, it unleashed a more chaotic, fractured landscape where competing tribes use secular tools to wage ancient battles over identity and belonging. If Mearsheimer is right, Cox did not write the blueprint for the future of human society; he merely described a brief, elite liberal dream that ignored the stubborn, tribal reality of the human species.
To David Pinsof, Cox represents a classic religious variant of the misunderstanding myth. Instead of presenting the credentialed social scientist or the policy expert as the world’s savior, Cox presents the secularized, progressive theologian. His entire framework operates on the premise that traditional religious structures and conservative piety are archaic misunderstandings of God’s true nature. In this view, if people can shed their primitive superstitions, look past the divide between the sacred and the profane, and realize that the divine is present in city planning and civil rights marches, humanity can fulfill its destiny.
Pinsof offers a colder alternative. The people clinging to traditional religious institutions or building conservative fundamentalist coalitions do not suffer from an intellectual defect or a failure to read the signs of the times. They understand their immediate incentives.
From this perspective, religious institutions and their associated moral codes are not just sets of abstract beliefs that require modernization by a Harvard professor. They serve as systems for zero-sum competition over status, resources, and the coercive apparatus of the state. Partisans do not choose their theological positions because they misunderstood secular culture. They choose them because these beliefs help them defend their lineages, unify their coalitions, and attack their political rivals. Feeling threatened by secular urbanization is a rational response to a shift in the balance of social power.
Cox frames his secular theology as an objective, liberating interpretation of Christian duty that aligns faith with modern progress. Pinsof invites an examination of the actual motives behind this progressive stance. Declaring that God is primarily present in elite, secular political movements is a powerful maneuver in the university marketplace. It gives the progressive intellectual class a monopoly on divine sanction, turning their local political preferences into universal commands of God. It allows the educated elite to view their rivals not as competitors with conflicting material interests, but as backward, superstitious actors who fail to comprehend the divine logic of the modern city.
The friction between the secular city and traditional communities does not stem from bad theology that a new book can fix. It stems from deeply conflicting motives over how society should be ordered and who should hold power. The only misunderstanding in secular theology is the belief that political warfare can be solved by declaring your side to be the work of God.
