The life of Charles Francis Potter stands for religious liberalism carried about as far as it can go—if not farther. It also stands for a small but significant segment of U.S. religious history. Raised as a Fundamentalist and proceeding from the Baptist ministry through Unitarianism and Universalism to the founding of his own "new religion" of Humanism, Dr. Potter has managed to keep himself in & out of hot water and public print for a generation.
His autobiography at 66, The Preacher and I (Crown; $4), is the story of an epoch as well as of a life.
Unitarian, All Right. Charlie Potter's devout mother and factory-worker father put him into Baptist Sunday school in Marlboro, Mass. at the age of 18 months; at 2½ he was memorizing Bible passages. At three he was preaching over the back of a chair to his parents on Sunday afternoons. He always had "a good loud voice," and he thinks his voice got him his first pulpit. In his first year at Newton Theological Institution, Baptist Potter astonished the congregation at Dover, N.H. by preaching right through the racket of a Boston & Maine train passing by just outside. Promptly they extended him a call—provided he would get ordained and married. He obliged, and took over his first parish at the age of 22.
Five years later, in his second parish at Mattapan, Mass., a visiting Unitarian pronounced his sermon the "best Unitarian sermon I ever heard!" Baptist Potter decided to find out what he really was. He marched into Unitarian headquarters on Boston's Beacon Street and preached the national secretary a sample sermon on Jesus. Yes, said the secretary, he was Unitarian all right.
Badgering Bryan. The high point of Potter's career as a Unitarian was his series of five debates in 1923-24 with Fundamentalist Dr. John Roach Straton of New York City's Calvary Baptist Church. The subjects—the infallibility of the Bible, evolution, the Virgin Birth, the divinity and second coming of Christ— were, says Potter, "part of a crisis in theology." Police and firemen had to be called out to handle the crowds, and the ding-dong battle made Potter, at West Side Unitarian Church, one of Manhattan's best-known preachers.
Potter was on hand for the famous Scopes evolution trial at Dayton, Tenn. in 1925. As part of the team of big names and intellectuals who defended Schoolteacher Scopes and the theory of evolution, Dr. Potter and his wife lived at the "Monkey House," as defense headquarters was called. One of his jobs: advising Lawyer Clarence Darrow how to badger Fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan with Biblical quiddities, such as how the Garden of Eden's serpent got around before God condemned him to wriggling on his belly.