COX, Harvey Gallagher, Jr.

(b. 19 May 1929 in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania), Baptist clergyman, theologian, university professor, and best-selling author of The Secular City.

Cox was one of four children of Harvey Gallagher Cox, Sr., and Dorothy Dunwoody Cox. His father was a painter, decorator, and, later, a transport manager. His mother was a secretary and then a housemother at the Devereaux School in Devon, Pennsylvania. He attended Berwyn High School in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, and graduated in 1947. After attending the University of Pennsylvania from 1947 to 1951, where he graduated with a B.A. in history with honors, he entered Yale University Divinity School. Cox graduated from Yale with a B.D. degree cum laude in 1955 and then went on to Oberlin College in Ohio as director of the school's religious activities program. He was ordained a minister of the American Baptist Church in 1956. He served in the U.S. Merchant Marine in 1946–1947.

In June 1957 he married Nancy Lucille Nieburger, an actress. They divorced in 1986, and later that year Cox married Nina Tumarkin, a professor of Russian history at Wellesley College. Cox had three children with his first wife and one child with his second wife.

Cox left Oberlin College in 1958 to become a program associate with the American Baptist Home Mission Society, a position he retained until 1963. His affiliation with Harvard began in December 1962, when he attended the New Delhi Conference of the World Council of Churches as an adviser to Harvard University Divinity School's department of church and society. Concurrent with his affiliation with Harvard, Cox also pursued his doctorate, which he received in history and the philosophy of religion in 1963. From 1963 to 1965 Cox was assistant professor of theology and culture at the Andover Theological School in Massachusetts, and then he joined the faculty of Harvard Divinity School in 1965.

A prolific writer, Cox first attracted wide attention with an article published in the 17 April 1961 issue of Christianity and Crisis titled "Playboy's Doctrine of Maleness." In the 21 February 1964 issue of Commonweal he published "Facing the Secular." Both articles later were rewritten and incorporated in his first book, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (1965). Although Cox went on to author numerous other books, The Secular City earned him his reputation as one of the most influential theologians of the decade. The book sold nearly a million copies in eleven languages.

In The Secular City, Cox argued that unlike the pre-modern age, when "Christendom" could control culture and the political order, the age of secularization had placed "the responsibility for the forging of human values in man's own hands." Cox carefully distinguished between secularization and secularism, which he regarded as a restrictive ideology that was as oppressive as any constrictive theology. Cox called on Christians to welcome secularization and develop a theology to embrace it. In eschewing the traditional divide between the sacred and the profane, Cox argued that God was as present in the secular as in the religious realms of life. He decried those who would cramp the divine presence by confining it to a specially delineated spiritual or theological mode and contended that secularization is not everywhere and always an evil. Cox insisted that "if theology is to survive and make any sense to the contemporary world, it must neither cling to a metaphysical world-view nor collapse into a mystical mode, but must push on into the living lexicon of the urban-secular man." Thus, according to Cox, people of faith need not flee from the allegedly godless contemporary world.

Cox also challenged the so-called death of God theologians who were influential during the 1960s. He accused them of being obsessed with the classical God of metaphysical theism, whereas Cox contended that God was very much alive and could be found in unexpected quarters. One of the places where God could be found, stated Cox, was among the poor. In the decade in which President Lyndon B. Johnson declared his War on Poverty and many idealistic Americans flocked to support the cause of civil rights as well as opposing the war in Vietnam, Cox's arguments resonated with a large segment of the public. Cox's ideas also were found compatible with the proponents of liberation theology in Latin America.

Cox contended that an act of engagement for justice in the world, and not a pause for theological reflection, should be the first "moment" of an appropriate response to God. As Cox wrote, "First hear the Voice, then get to work freeing the captives.… Theology is important, but it comes after, not before, the commitment to doing … disciple-ship." Cox agreed with a major tenet of liberation theology in its insistence that thought is embedded in the grittiness of real life. He also concurred with those who contended that accompanying the poor and the captives in their pilgrimage is not only an ethical responsibility but also the most promising context for theological reflection. Cox concluded with his contention that liberation theology "is the legitimate, though unanticipated, heir of The Secular City. "

Cox also anticipated many of the issues that later would be raised by feminist theologians. In perhaps the most widely discussed chapter in The Secular City, "Sex and Secularization," Cox exposed the pseudo-sex of the Playboy centerfold. Cox argued that the "ideal woman," as portrayed in the centerfold, was preferred because she made no demands whatsoever. As Cox phrased it, the readers "can safely fold her up whenever they want to, which is not possible with the genuine article." He also lampooned the Miss America contest as a representation of the old fertility goddess cults, reworked in the interests of male fantasies and commodity marketing.

Following the publication of The Secular City, Cox became a strong force for innovation in the churches. He was in great demand as a speaker and became a proponent of religious creative expression. Writing at a time when "white flight" to the suburbs was becoming a major problem for the cities, Cox called on Christian ministers to pay more attention to the migration of middle-class whites from the cities and address the white racism that pervaded the growing suburbs. His message, however, was not confined to the lecture circuit. Cox was also an activist. He was a co-founder of the Boston chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization then headed nationally by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and he actively supported Senator Robert F. Kennedy for president.

Following the publication of The Secular City, Cox wrote On Not Leaving It to the Snake (1967). The volume was not as popular as his best-seller, which probably had to do with the growing estrangement between the races as the Black Power movement confronted a white backlash that complicated life in the secular city. In the next four decades Cox continued to publish important books about religion. None of his other books, however, was as influential and widely read as The Secular City. In 1970 he became Victor Thomas Professor of Divinity at Harvard University.

Cox's autobiography is Just as I Am (1983). There is no biography of him. The best sources, especially on his accomplishments during the 1960s, are Current Biography (1968) and Arvind Sharma, ed., Religion in a Secular City: Essays in Honor of Harvey Cox (2001). See also Harvard Alumni Bulletin (9 Dec. 1967): 9, and Time (15 Mar. 1968): 53.

Jack Fischel