Religion As Life

Religion as Life is a work by Henry Churchill King, the American Congregational minister, philosophical theologian, and president of Oberlin College who lived from 1858 to 1934. The book belongs to King’s substantial body of writing on the practical dimensions of religious life and on the relationship between religious belief and the broader conduct of a serious human life.

The title gives the central thesis. King argues throughout that religion, properly understood, is not a set of doctrines to be believed or a system of rituals to be performed but is rather a comprehensive orientation toward life itself. Genuine religious belief shows itself in the practical conduct of ordinary daily life, in the relationships a person maintains with others, in the work a person does, in the moral and ethical choices a person makes, and in the broader pattern of how a person actually lives rather than in any particular set of explicit religious convictions or practices.

This position has obvious roots in the broader American Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was reshaping American Protestant thinking about the relationship between religious commitment and social action. King was sympathetic to the Social Gospel emphases and his book reflects them throughout. He is also drawing on the German philosophical idealist tradition that had formed his thinking during his graduate studies in Berlin, with its tendency to treat religious experience as a comprehensive orientation rather than as a separate sphere alongside the other forms of human activity.

The book works through the practical implications of the religion as life thesis across various spheres of ordinary experience. There are sections on work and vocation, on family life, on social and political responsibility, on the relationship between religious commitment and intellectual integrity, and on the various small habits and choices that together constitute the actual texture of religious or non religious living. The treatment is practical rather than theoretical, with the philosophical and theological positions assumed rather than argued for at length.

The book runs about two hundred pages and is one of the more accessible of King’s works. For readers interested in early twentieth century American liberal Protestant practical theology, this is a representative example of the genre. It pairs naturally with King’s other writings and with the broader Social Gospel literature of the period.