Tillich, Judson Church, and the Avant-Garde

André Daughtry

Updated from a presentation at the meeting of the North American Paul Tillich Society at the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature convention in November 2018. 

For its 2018 exhibition season, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City mounted a show titled Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, which was a gallery exhibition and performance retrospective highlighting the experimentation of a group of dancers and visual artists who performed in the 1960s inside the Judson Memorial Church situated in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. The exhibition, which was on view from September 16, 2018, to February 3, 2019, highlighted the activities of a collective of New York avant-garde artists who turned a Protestant Baptist church into a sanctuary for the arts. On October 13, 2018, Judson Church and MOMA co-organized an all-day event held inside the church, intended to be a celebration of Judson’s history and its continued relationship to experimental art and social justice. I co-curated the performances for that day, and I also put together and moderated a panel discussion titled “The Mutual Influence of Art and Religion.”¹

The panel included author Kay Larson, who writes extensively about the arts and Buddhism, Rev. Micah Bucey, who is currently the senior pastor of Judson Church, and Dr. John Thatamanil, professor of Theology and World Religions at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.

My intention for the panel was to bring to the MOMA audience the mostly unknown connections between modern art and religious thought that influenced the clergy of Judson Church to incorporate the arts into the ministries of the congregation as well as the spiritual influences on the artists themselves. Since the event was taking place in a New York landmark church, I felt compelled to reintroduce theology as a generative foundation to contemporary arts practices. I decided to invite Dr. Thatamanil to open the panel presentation with an introduction to the modern theologian in the West who wrote the most about the mutual influence of modern culture, theology, and church. That theologian is no other than German Christian existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich. Tillich’s thoughts of the “ultimate concern,” art, the latent church, and spiritual communities are very fecund ideas that had a huge impact on the congregation and clergy of Judson Church. Tillich’s writings directly informed Judson’s early relationships to the burgeoning artistic communities surrounding the church, and it is Tillich’s views on the institution of church and culture that served as the foundation for a veritable revolution in the arts. But before we get into how Tillich’s thoughts on the dialectics of modern culture and religious institutions affected the thinking of Judson’s clergy and congregation, let’s take a brief look at Judson’s very unique history.

In 1890, ground was broken for a new church on the southside of Washington Square Park in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. It was the vision of a young minister by the name of Edward Judson, a Baptist minister and the son of Adoniram Judson, the first well-known Protestant missionary to Asia, working in India and Burma. Edward Judson’s vision slightly differed from his father’s in that he turned his missionary impulse towards domestic immigrant communities in America. Judson wanted to erect a church in service of those particular communities beyond preaching and praying. Edward’s theology and philosophy was that church should be a community center that serves the needs of the community. 

His ideas would later be written in the form of a primer called The Institutional Church: A Primer in Pastoral Theology.² With the help of seed money from John D. Rockefeller himself, Judson would build a structure to help realize a church that was intended to serve the people. The architect was none other than Stanford White, the famous American architect who also designed the popular arch across the street at Washington Square Park. Artist John La Farge, who was the inventor of the innovative opalescent glass process that became the reigning decorative window style during the American Gilded Age, completed the stained-glass windows. The Romanesque style of the building is an intentional testament to the envisioned utilitarian mission of the church. Edward wanted to make the building familiar to the Catholic Italian immigrants who inhabited lower Manhattan at the time in order for them to come and receive services and not feel unwelcomed by an overtly Protestant-looking structure. 

For Judson’s first sixty years, its ministries served the community with services that ranged from a health clinic that maintained the only clean public water fountain accessible to the poor immigrant families, to summer camps for children, English-language courses, and American cooking and sewing classes, just to name a few services in a long list of programs. But by the 1950s the demographics of the community, which became known colloquially as “the Village,” were starting to shift quite significantly. The Village was being repopulated by a new group of people who were looking to settle a new land that would allow them a new way of life, but as opposed to the previous inhabitants who traveled to the Village from overseas to find food and work, these new pioneers were looking for a place that could lead to a new form of sustenance by way of the arts. 

In 1955 the Rev. Robert Spike, who was the senior pastor of Judson Memorial Church at that time, hired a young seminary student by the name of Bernard “Bud” Scott from Union Theological Seminary in upper Manhattan to become head of Judson’s artist outreach program. Bud Scott’s new position was created with the intention of expanding Judson’s ongoing mission of being an institution that was to serve the needs of the community. Rev. Spike saw that the mission of the church needed to evolve to meet the needs of the new community of artists who were starting to call the Village their home.

By the time of his departure from Judson Church to pursue a more national role in the civil rights movement, Bud Scott, who eventually became an associate minister at Judson, had already spent some years meeting with artists in the various pubs and cafes nearby. At the same time, Judson’s new young visionary minister, the Rev. Howard Moody, took on the role of senior pastor at Judson and quickly encouraged Scott to establish the Judson Gallery with the artist Claes Oldenburg as co-director in 1958 in the basement of the building that was known as Judson House, an adjacent building that the church owned and used for student and staff housing. Judson Gallery was where famous artists like Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, and many others would have some of their first shows in New York. After Bud Scott’s departure in 1960, Howard Moody would eventually hire another Union Seminary student named Al Carmines to work with the arts.

Associate minister Carmines’s interest in art was more related to musical theater, and he would eventually become leader of the Judson Poets Theater, which staged regular performances in the choir loft, making Judson Church one of the three original homes of off-Broadway. Judson, having quickly become the site of artistic experimentation and progressive theology, would eventually allow a group of experimental dancers to use its spaces as a sanctuary to cultivate their multivocal practices radicalizing traditional forms of dance. These dance/performance artists would come to call themselves the Judson Dance Theater, which also makes Judson the original home of postmodern dance. Dance, performance art, and visual arts departments around the world study Judson as the birthplace of postmodern dance and as the frequent venue for the happenings and Fluxus performance art movements. Major exhibitions at art institutions like MOMA are testaments to the power of Judson’s lasting influence on the world of contemporary art.

Preceding these seminal years of radical experimentation with art in shared proximity to a sacred space, there were a few Christian theologians—some of whom taught at some point at Union Seminary—who were redefining religious tradition in relationship to society in very radical ways. It is Tillich who attempted to provide a systematic theology that specifically concentrated on culture and the arts.

Tillich’s ideas had a profound influence on all the post World War II Judson ministers. Rev. Al Carmines had a personal connection to Tillich, who was at the time of their meeting the professor of theology and culture at Union Seminary. Carmines had met the influential theologian while he was still an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. Tillich encouraged Carmines to continue his studies at a seminary after Swarthmore because of his deep inquiries around faith and culture. Carmines would eventually earn a bachelor’s degree in divinity and a master’s in sacred theology at Union Seminary with the intention of becoming one of Tillich’s PhD students.

Judson Church’s congregation also embraced Tillich’s innovative ideas around theology and modern culture, which ultimately impressed a certain self-imposed responsibility on the part of the congregation to show up not only for Sunday morning church services but also for all the experimental visual and performance art works that were taking place inside the building on a weekly basis.

Many who are familiar with Tillich are aware of his ideas around a necessary interpenetration of religion and art, and it is Judson’s congregation that became acquainted with them in order to implement those ideas in the church. Decades of cross pollination between congregational life and the witnessing of artistic exploration in the church ranged from the anecdotal to the pragmatic, and finally to the theological. One memorable anecdote is artist Carolee Schneemann’s performance of Meat Joy in 1964 in Judson’s sanctuary, a work that consisted of raw fish pressed between semi-nude bodies. The performance left a stench so palpable and lingering, the following Sunday service Rev. Howard Moody was moved to give a sermon on the New Testament story of the loaves and the fishes. 

Pragmatically, the wooden pews were permanently removed to make the sanctuary more spatially fluid for performances and the worship service itself. Theologically, the weekly artistic and political activities of the church eventually led to the revision of all liturgical practices during Sunday morning worship services. The visible contrast between artistic practices and worship services led to the creation of the 1964 Worship Council, which was formed to respond to the dissonance that many felt made worship feel out of step with the times.

It is important to note that a structure like Judson’s, which was funded by one of the most famous American capitalists, would continue to fulfill its original founder’s vision of the “institutional church.” But Judson was constantly evolving by adopting Tillich’s dialectical critique of the traditional church that denies the secular world, a critique that can be understood to coincide with Tillich’s noticeable Marxist leanings, which informed his idea of a latent church that adopts a praxis of dialectical interactions between church and society.

In his book The Socialist Emigré Brian Donnelly speaks to what he convincingly claims is Tillich’s undeniable influence from Marxism’s dialectical materialism as a necessary tool when theorizing the role of church in modern society. Donnelly states that 

the awareness that Tillich gives is that secularism is not irreligious but rather the “expression of the latent religion in nonreligious forms.” The dialectical engagement of the church helps to identify and thrust forward the religious elements found in secular society. . . .  How Tillich substantiates and justifies this position is the measure by which he drew parallels from the Marxist concept of the Proletariat.³

Judson Church expresses this unique perspective not only by holding worship services for its mostly white congregation, who worship inside and administer the space, but also by renting space to other progressive congregations. Communities like the mostly LGBTQ congregation of color called Restoration Temple Ministries, a progressive Korean church named The Least of These, and a progressive Jewish community which call themselves Lab Shul have all used the space as their homes of worship for a time. This sharing of space can be viewed as an example of the internal dialectic. The myriad activists, artists, and activists/artists associations who use the church for secular social justice and experimental artistic practices show the community’s engagement with the dialectics of church and secular society. This markedly unique and singular perspective is what has been called “The Judson Model.”

At Judson, services express a belief in the total dissolution of the bifurcation between the sacred and the profane. This dissolution is clearly expressed in Judson’s main service where, for example, an ancient testimony like the Twenty-third Psalm is read alongside a modern work like the Broadway tune “Hot Patootie—Bless My Soul” from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The impact of the intentional breakdown between the two traditionally understood opposite poles allows for anyone in attendance to participate in church services because the spiritual is revealed and elevated from all aspects of human creativity. Especially for those who consider themselves “spiritual yet not religious,” Judson has provided a community that allows multivalent entry points to reach a sense of the spiritual, since the spiritual is allowed to pull from all experiences and affirmations of life as opposed to one particular Christian doctrine. 

While speaking of a church and its community as a part of a dialectical process in Tillich’s theology, Donnelly points us to Tillich’s other borrowings from Marx such as the concept of the proletariat, which was previously mentioned. The proletariat is one of those concepts that evolved over the years for Tillich, especially after moving to the United States, which was quickly becoming a postindustrial society at the time. The proletariat, according to Marxism, is the class that suffers the most from economic alienation, but in a religious socialism that Tillich proposed, the “latent church” could be a viable site for an alienated and estranged community to find resources for the creation of a new society within a dialectical process between church and contemporary culture. After his move to the United States, Tillich’s adaptation to an American material, economic, and political reality drew even more from his existentialist foundations, especially in his ideas about estrangement, which give more religious depth to the Marxist alienation that tends to stay in the materialist, economic spheres.

So when one thinks of the specific role of the bohemian artists making work at Judson who do not neatly fall under the classical Marxist category of the proletariat, one witnesses that their work speaks to the estrangement and alienation of many Americans in the 1950s and 60s. Donnelly states that Tillich believed that social organization would come from “sections of the intelligentsia, of the churches, and of the younger generation.”⁴ It is obvious that artists are useful in the fueling of a social imagination. When speaking about a community that deals with the “ultimate concern,” Tillich’s concept of the fundamental, all-encompassing concern that shapes a person’s life and gives meaning to their existence, he believed that the community did not need to be delimited by the doctrines of any religion. Tillich believed that “the Spiritual Community can be seen in ‘nonchurch’ and secular forms.”⁵ 

So, one can consider the artists who are making artworks that express ultimate concerns to be a part of a spiritual community, and in the case of Judson this happens to take place in a church while remaining to be considered secular and “nonchurch.” That is why Judson sees every community that shares its space as just another one of its many congregations. An example of a secular expression of ultimate concern inside a church can be seen in this transcript of an interview with the earlier mentioned artist Carolee Schneemann.

Performed in 1964, Meat Joy involved barely clothed performers, raw fish, sausages, and paint in Judson’s sanctuary. Schneemann said, 

I thought of Meat Joy as an erotic ritual for my starved culture, with the body extended into raw fish and chickens and sausages and layers of paper and plastic and paint. I wanted things to really break at the edges and to merge and be wet where they had been dry and on top of each other where they had been separated. The culture was starved in terms of sensuousness because sensuality was always confused with pornography. The old patriarchal morality of proper behavior and improper behavior had no threshold for the pleasures of physical contact that were not explicitly about sex but related to something more ancient—the worship of nature, worship of the body, a pleasure in sensuousness. It was performed in the center of the church and of course, the incredible aroma never left of the raw mackerel, the old chickens and the old sausages. Rev. Howard Moody accepted that and did his sermons, in regard to the smells, sermons on the loaves and the fishes. It was wonderful.⁶ 

Now to use only one anecdote, which in this case is Carollee Schneemann’s unorthodox work and Rev. Moody’s innovative response by means of homiletics, as an example to sum up the seminal decades of interaction between radical artistic performance and equally radical congregational life at Judson, is like taking the New Testament verse “Jesus wept,” found in the Gospel of John (John 11:35), to summarize Jesus’ entire character. But I wanted to give a clear example of Tillich’s concept of autonomy performing itself inside the walls of a building erected on the foundations of heteronomous religion—religion that imposes doctrine over spirit—so that the theonomous, or “God’s law,” could be powerfully expressed.

Tillich’s concentration on developing a theology for American culture in which he considers the role of the arts and the church is truly the foundation to the spiritual community of Judson, which continues to be known in the art world as a sanctuary for the secular arts today. Tillich’s profound ideas—which were partially realized by Judson’s clergy—did indeed provide a revolution in the world of contemporary arts, and I would want to believe that that was a lot of Tillich’s intentions during his time in the United States.

Tillich’s ideas that he developed in part from Marxism were in direct response to the Germany that bore and raised him, but once he found himself in his new home here in the States, there was inevitably a fundamental shift in his focus. Donnelly mentions that Tillich once said to Max Horkheimer, a famous German philosopher and friend,

“I once believed that with religious socialism I could lead a fundamental change in Christian theology. But since then, my hopes are confined to giving the American people a well-worked out theology which they have never had.”⁷

I personally enjoy discovering Tillich’s relationships to thinkers like Max Horkheimer. It reminds me of my own art school background, which was saturated with assigned readings from the writings of most of the members of the German Institute of Social Research, better known as the Frankfurt School, whose members were acquainted with Tillich like Horkheimer was. The influence of the Frankfurt School on questions of aesthetics, culture, and ideology had a real effect on Tillich’s theology, and his thoughts on providing space and pledging support to artists from inside a church sparked an invaluable place for the nurturing of new movements in performance, theater, and visual arts. It was a provocative revolution back then as it continues to be today.

Since Judson Church served as a physical, intellectual, and spiritual space in the history of experimental art, it started the careers of many avant-garde artists like video artist Nam June Paik and sculptor and performance artist Claes Oldenburg, to name just a couple of the Judson-affiliated artists whose works continue to influence experimental artists around the world. What can the Judson Model teach church institutions today about the practice of liturgy?

I recently went to Judson to see a puppet show called The Obligation to Live⁸ put on by the New York based Bread and Puppet Theater. That night’s play was a response to the ongoing struggle in the Middle East and brought into focus the lives of all those who were suffering with the current war in Gaza. Judson’s senior pastor, Micah Bucey, introduced the experimental troupe with his revivalist tone, no differently than he would speak from a Sunday morning pulpit, naming artists “as our modern-day prophets.” One would be hard pressed to see a difference in passion and conviction between his weekly Sunday sermons in worship with the Judson religious community and his opening speeches at JAW (Judson Arts Wednesdays). The way the space functions for performances and for liturgy are virtually indistinguishable. The sanctuary
has no pews, but an army of stackable chairs that can be rearranged depending on the needs of artists or clergy.

The notion of the sanctuary that functions as a laboratory allows experimentation to become part of liturgy in the way worship is crafted and the physical space organized. I also experienced this way of shaping space for experimentation without impediments while I was a student at Union Theological Seminary, as James Chapel, the worship center of campus life at Union, allowed seminary students to turn liturgical theory to praxis in a “laboratory” setting. Other churches that have freed themselves from traditional pews and have welcomed artists, like the neighboring St Mark’s in-the-Bowery Church, have become celebrated homes for artistic expression and progressive congregations as well.

A pillar and an invitation that Judson can offer to other institutions negotiating their own relationship to the arts is Judson’s rule of not censoring art performed in its space. Free expression was a part of the inception of the arts program, and over more than a half century of holding space for artists, one could even say that free expression is the only doctrine that everyone willingly agrees to at Judson. Of course, the implementation of free expression for other congregations will be contextual and will depend on many factors, including geographic location, demographics of the congregation, and liturgical-theological perspective. But it is indeed this spirit of letting art speak freely back at the church that becomes the foundation for the type of spiritual community Tillich envisioned. Church by way of the Judson Model might bring us close to the spiritual community that a post-secular world needs urgently today.

Notes

1. See https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/311569185/.

2. Edward Judson and Henry C. Potter, The Institutional Church: A Primer in Pastoral Theology (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 1899/2010). 

3. Brian Donnelly, The Socialist Emigré (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003), 87.

4. Donnelly, The Socialist Emigré, 85.

5. Donnelly, The Socialist Emigré, 96.

6. Interview with Carolee Schneemann and Thomas Lax, Museum of Modern Art, Audio Transcript #289, New York, NY,, https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/53/.

7. Donnelly, The Socialist Emigré , 20.

8. Bread and Puppet Theater, The Obligation to Live, dir. Peter Schumann, 2025, Judson Memorial Church, New York, NY.