Martin E. Marty, religious historian and father of Minnesota state senator, dies at 97

Martin E. Marty, a preeminent religious historian, prolific author, dependable exponent of mainstream Protestantism and staunch champion of pluralism, died Tuesday in Minneapolis. He was 97.

His death at a retirement home, where he had lived since 2022, was confirmed by his son Peter.

In more than 60 books, thousands of articles and as what he described as a “peregrinating lecturer,” Marty promoted what he called public theology, or the confluence of fundamental cultural and religious conventions for the common good.

He had “a knack for translating complex ideas into graspable takeaways for diverse audiences,” Peter Marty wrote in an online tribute. Time magazine said he was “generally acknowledged to be the most influential living interpreter of religion in the U.S.”

He disdained extremism and fundamentalism, both by Islamist terrorists and right-wing Protestants. And he warned, in “The One and the Many: America’s Struggle for the Common Good” (1997), that the culture wars had undermined the ideals of e pluribus unum and challenged Americans’ shared heritage.

The nation had fractured, he wrote, between “totalists,” who felt left behind and belittled, and “tribalists,” whose individual pride in race, religion, ethnicity and gender circumscribed their vision of the American mosaic.

The threat of such division to the American experiment was a theme he returned to frequently.

In a review of Marty’s 1991 book, “Modern American Religion, Volume Two,” Stanford historian David M. Kennedy wrote that “For all the raucous contention he chronicles, Mr. Marty remains an optimist. It is, he concludes in an eloquent peroration, with a nod to James Madison, precisely the plurality of religious voices that has insured the integrity of the social fabric by preventing the lasting dominance of any single group.”

Despite its historical ebb and flow, Marty insisted that mainstream Protestantism exerted profound influence over U.S. public policy, particularly in the 19th century, although he predicted that no single denomination would ever exert the same degree of dominance again.

“Their winning — at least through their pioneering adventures on fronts dealing with civil rights, internationalism, ecumenism, many issues of sexuality and gender, friendliness to once-warred-against science, and much more — never meant complete victory,” he wrote in the Christian Century magazine in 2013.

“But it did mean,” he added, “that through the years, at least, significant leaders risked much to express their faith beyond church walls, in the larger culture.”

Marty was one of those leaders.

His scholarly achievements were legion. With a former student, R. Scott Appleby, he directed the six-year Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences beginning in 1988, which explored conservative religious movements.

“Only an intellectual giant with Marty’s combination of multidisciplinary fluency and vast erudition could have foreseen the inbreaking of wave upon wave of modern anti-pluralist, anti-modernist assaults upon the liberal worldviews and institutions from the ‘benighted’ margins of Western and westernized societies,” Appleby, who teaches global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, said in a statement after Marty’s death.

“Marty stayed true to his instincts to come ‘not to condemn, not to praise, but to understand,’ ” Appleby added.

In 1972, Marty won a National Book Award for “Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America” (1971).

Among his other books were “A Short History of Christianity” (1959), “A Cry of Absence” (1983), “Pilgrims in Their Own Land: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America” (1984), and “A Short History of American Catholicism” (1995).

Writing for a Divinity School bulletin in 2018, Wacker quoted an example: “One of the real problems in modern life is that people who are good at being civil lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions lack civility.”

Martin Emil Marty was born Feb. 5, 1928, in West Point, Nebraska. His father, Emil, was a parochial school teacher and organist at Lutheran churches in Nebraska and Iowa. His mother was Anne Louise (Wuerdemann) Marty.

A graduate of a Lutheran preparatory school, he attended Concordia College, Washington University and Concordia Seminary, where he earned a bachelor’s in divinity in 1949 and a master’s in 1952. He received a Master of Sacred Theology degree from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in 1954 and a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1956.

As an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, he served as a pastor in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Chicago’s suburbs. In 1963, he was hired as an associate professor of religious history at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught until 1998.

In 1952, he married Elsa L. Schumacher; she died in 1981. In 1982, he married Harriet J. Meyer, a voice coach and the widow of a seminary classmate.

When he retired as a professor on his 70th birthday, the Divinity School honored him by naming the research center he founded in 1979 as the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion.

Asked by the University of Chicago Magazine in 1998 how he’d like to be remembered, he said: “That I was a good teacher.”

In the Mount Rushmore of American religious history and virtue, Wacker once said fulsomely, Marty “might well rank as the fourth member,” after King, Billy Graham and Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century Congregationalist theologian.