Choosing Church

Margaret Mead’s parents were both social scientists and not religious, so their daughter was not baptized as a baby. Instead, she chose to be baptized into the Episcopal Church at age eleven, a decision to which she ascribed great significance for her spiritual life. Mead spent the rest of her years balancing her family legacy with her independently chosen religious commitments.

Back to Church

It is not possible directly to connect Mead’s return to Manus in 1953 with her return to church in 1955. She was, however, exposed to a particularly vibrant form of Christianity there, one that propelled rather than impeded social change. During the past decade, she had grown frustrated with American churches that she saw as divisive, harboring racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-scientific attitudes, but in Manus she saw the power of institutional religion in a new way. Maybe American Christianity could be a vehicle for her moral vision. Her perspective on Christian missions also shifted considerably. Not long after her trip, she renewed her church membership, and soon after that she got deeply involved in church work. She would not say that she recovered her faith, because she insisted that she never lost it. Still, something came into focus for her in the mid-1950s that had been blurry for many years, and her still-boundless energies found new, and more explicitly churchly, directions.

Bread and Wine

If Mead had only been weighing whether to stay with Luther Cressman or marry Reo Fortune, the year after her trip to Samoa would have been difficult enough. But there was another person very much on her mind and in her heart, Ruth Benedict. Mead’s attempts to parse her feelings for, and duties to, all of these people caused great agony. While the sexual and psychological dimensions of these relationships have been explored at some length by other biographers, the spiritual aspects have received less attention. It is perhaps most accurate to say that, while Mead did not find the sexual ethics of her chosen denomination compelling, the symbols and metaphors of faith continued to shape her perspective.

For the Joy of the Working

Mead stayed extraordinarily busy to the end of life, engaged with such issues as nuclear safety, Earth Day, and the women’s movement. When a cancer diagnosis threatened her forward momentum, she denied it, preferring the ministrations of a faith healer over the recommendations of medical science. This choice dismayed her closest friends, but it was not entirely a departure from a life marked by curiosity about the full range of human experiences, even those that could not be explained by science. After her death, she was widely mourned and celebrated. She was, at her request, buried at the same church where she had been baptized and married for the first time. She is recognized by some fellow Episcopalians as a saint.

Building the World New

When the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a world ended for Margaret Mead. Suddenly, the world’s problems seemed more massive and immediate than ever before in human history. Mead turned her prodigious energies to these problems by working with dozens of organizations, many of them international and interfaith. As Mead’s circle of friends, colleagues, collaborators, and students expanded, in keeping with the expansive vision of liberal Protestantism at the midpoint of the twentieth century, her family ties frayed. Only her relationship with her daughter survived to 1950. Her relationship with Christianity hit a rough patch, too. Publicly, she spoke harshly of American churches. When asked to articulate what she believed, she did not mention God. Privately, though, a stream of spirituality still flowed, feeding her moral sensibility and forming a legacy to pass on to Catherine.

Coming of Age

In 1925, Mead traveled to Samoa for the fieldwork that would become her first and still most famous book. She sought to discover whether adolescence was always marked by “storm and stress,” suggesting that these struggles were rooted in biology, or whether adolescence might proceed very differently in different societies, suggesting that human experiences were culturally constructed. Sexuality was the “sizzle” that made Coming of Age in Samoa so popular, but its argument in favor of cultural construction was even more significant, withstanding even decades-later attacks on Mead’s research. At the same time that Mead established her academic reputation, her first marriage faltered and she fell in love with a mercurial fellow anthropologist, Reo Fortune. Her Christian faith was buffeted in this period, but she insisted that she never completely lost it.

Student Marriage

The state of being in fundamental agreement, yet also at odds, characterized Mead’s marriage to Luther Cressman. They both gravitated toward socially oriented, modernist Christianity and became active in church ministry. They both eventually decided that further education and work as a social scientist were more congenial than parish service. They differed in their assessment of their brief marriage. She called it her “student marriage,” because it coincided with the years of her graduate education. That descriptor pained him, as it seemed to classify their union as an adolescent phase, on par with young people cohabiting rather than making a solid commitment. He was committed to her, and to their marriage. The commitment was less wholehearted on her part, for so many reasons that it is difficult to pinpoint which one mattered most.

Spiritual Significance

When challenged by a magazine editor in 1971 to cite any spiritually significant work she had done, Mead gave a fulsome response. “The list of my writings with spiritual significance is too long to burden your journal,” she wrote, offering just three sample citations: the essay “Cultural Man,” which she wrote for the World Council of Churches collection Man in Community; her introduction to the National Council of Churches volume Christians in a Technological Era; and “Christian Faith and Technical Assistance,” published in Christianity and Crisis in 1955. She continued, “I am at present, as I have been for many years actively engaged in various enterprises which seek to combine religion and science and religion and psychiatry, at various levels from the Committee on the Future of Earl Hall at Columbia University, to the activities of the Episcopal Church, the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.” She was, by the early 1970s, an established authority on religion. Why did so many people who knew her name not know this aspect of her life?

Margaret Mead Answers

Mead reached her largest audience through her monthly column in Redbook magazine, which ran from 1962 to Mead’s death in 1978. Examining the Redbook columns gives a good sense of Mead’s spiritual life and social ethics in her prime years. Religion was not a major theme in the columns, but it cropped up in surprising ways. The Redbook pieces also shed light on Mead’s relationship with Rhoda Metraux, who co-authored them and edited the three book collections drawn from the columns. Additionally, looking at the letters Mead received during these years shows the impact she had on her audience. By 1970, she was getting fifteen pounds of mail every day. People believed that they knew her through her media presence, and they trusted her enough to ask her practically anything. In some ways, she came to function almost as a clergywoman, making prophetic pronouncements, receiving confessions, and dispensing pastoral advice. Ironically, she came only late and reluctantly to acceptance of the idea that women could be clergy, and the slow evolution of her thinking on this subject is most clearly seen in one of the Redbook columns.

War Work

Around the time of World War II, Mead’s personal and professional lives changed dramatically. She divorced Reo Fortune to marry her third husband, Gregory Bateson. She gave birth to a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. She turned her anthropological lens on her own culture for the book And Keep Your Powder Dry, part of a larger effort to galvanize Americans for the war effort. Mead’s religiosity was attenuated in this period, for two reasons. One, Bateson, an atheist, did not want their daughter to be indoctrinated, and Mead complied. Two, Mead believed that the challenge of fascism called for a broadly ethical, humanistic response, in which religious narrowness—especially, the alliance of religion and nationalism—could be dangerous.