In the early 1960s, while the attention of Catholics was focused on Vatican II, American (essentially Protestant) theology experienced a rush of intellectual mood swings that raised fundamental questions: How can we talk about God in secular societies that see no need for religion? Who or what is the God we want to talk about? Is there a God in the first place?

The titles of the most talked-about books give a flavor of those feverish few years: Honest to God (1963), in which Anglican bishop John A. T. Robinson ventured a Christianity without religion. In The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1963), Paul van Buren proposed a theology without metaphysics. In The Secular City (1965), Harvey Cox celebrated secularization as the logical outcome of biblical religion. By 1967, the mood had shifted yet again to Jürgen Moltmann’s more activist and future-oriented Theology of Hope.

All this theologizing was far from inside baseball. Both Honest to God and The Secular City were international bestsellers, and the latter eventually sold more than a million copies. Both books generated response volumes: The Honest to God Debate and The Secular City Debate, the latter edited by Daniel Callahan, the then–managing editor of Commonweal. But none of those theologians would have made the cover of Time were it not for a handful of books by three or four minor theologians, now mostly forgotten, who variously argued that God had literally died, just as Nietzsche had proclaimed a century earlier. Among these self-styled “Christian Atheists,” only the work of Thomas J. J. Altizer, whose theories drew on Hegelian dialectic and the prophetic poems of William Blake, caught the attention of intellectuals like David Tracy (in Blessed Rage for Order) and Thomas Merton (in The Sewanee Review).

Indeed, I would argue that we remember Time’s Holy Week cover of 1966 less for the story itself, which ran to more than six thousand words, than for the three words on the cover written in blood-red letters against a funereal-black background: “Is God Dead?”

Magazine covers are designed to stimulate newsstand sales, and this one instantly became Time’s all-time bestseller. That Easter Sunday, countless clergy mounted the pulpit waving a copy of Time and preached in God’s defense. Universities subsequently sponsored symposia on Nietzsche and the death of God, and defiant bumper stickers proclaimed, “My God’s Not Dead—Sorry About Yours.” In a Harris poll taken at that time, 97 percent of Americans said they believed in God, but a similar poll also showed that only 27 percent described themselves as deeply religious. Data like that makes for a responsive audience.

The story itself carried a more nuanced headline, “Toward a Hidden God,” and ran under the rubric “Theology” rather than the usual “Religion.” This was an editorial signal to the reader to prepare for a think piece. The publisher’s page declared that no project in Time’s forty-three years “ha[d] been approached with more deliberation.” The project involved more than three hundred interviews by thirty-two Time correspondents around the world. The author of the piece, religion editor John T. Elson, read forty books in preparation and ordered up a short history of the idea of God from his researcher. This was newsmagazine journalism scrambling the jets, and I, one year into the same post at the much smaller Newsweek, was deeply impressed.

A word about Elson is in order here, because the story remains very much his. I had met him briefly six years earlier because I had been a stringer for Time in Germany. He graduated from Notre Dame five years before me, but I knew of his reputation as a wrinkled-brow intellectual. His undergraduate thesis on Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” was so elevated that his professor (and later mine) Frank O’Malley incorporated parts of it into his own lectures on the novel. O’Malley was famous for telling his students on the last day of class, “Now close your blue books because I want to talk to you about the meaning of existence.” And here is Elson, sounding the theme in the second paragraph of his Time cover story: “Is God dead? The three words represent a summons to reflect on the meaning of existence.”

The Time cover nearly cost me my job. Rather than reflect on the meaning of human existence, my senior editor at Newsweek, who believed only in science, read that God was dead and promptly sent a note to our editor-in-chief urging him to replace the religion section with one devoted to philosophy. Newsweek kept the religion column but created another column, “Ideas,” and asked me to write it as well.

The theological embrace of the secular did not survive Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam. Yet within the newly ascendent Evangelical movement, Time’s cover story continued to burn like a personal insult. Ten years after it appeared, I wrote a cover story for Newsweek with two very different words splashed across the cover: “Born Again.” The issue appeared just before the presidential election, which would be won by the nation’s first self-proclaimed born-again Christian, Jimmy Carter. It was also the year that celebrities as different as Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver and stripper Candy Barr declared themselves born again. The same year, a chastened Chuck Colson, the convicted Watergate felon, published a best-selling autobiography about his behind-bars conversion that bore the same two-word title. The Monday the Newsweek issue appeared on newsstands, Colson stopped by my office: “To us Evangelicals,” he said, “your cover story is God’s answer to Time’s ‘Is God Dead?’”

Rereading the Time story today, it strikes me that most of the questioning in it was triggered by the letters of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, written from the Nazi concentration camp where he died in 1945 and published in English eight years later. In them, Bonhoeffer mused about a “world come of age,” in which men solved their problems without reference to religion. Could there be, he asked rhetorically, a “nonreligious Christianity” that dispensed with a transcendent deity and spoke “in a secular fashion” of Jesus as “a man for others?”

Could a story like Time’s be published today? No—its approach to stories with their plethora of comments culled from experts died with the newsmagazines themselves. Sixty years on, God is not dead, just routinely ignored. 

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