50 Years Later, Is God Dead?

On Good Friday in April 1966, fifty years ago this month, Time magazine published its famously controversial cover story, “Is God Dead?” Placing that stark query in bold red lettering against an all-black background, the weekly informed readers that those “three words represent a summons to reflect on the meaning of existence.” Written by Time’s religion editor, John T. Elson, the article attempted to capture the nation’s shifting theological mood from the complacent faith of the 1950s to the metaphysical confusion of the mid-1960s. The cover itself quickly became an icon of the period’s social and religious transformations—apiece with John Lennon’s suggestion that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus among contemporary youth or with Timothy Leary’s imperative to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.”

Elson framed his story as a clarion of “the new atheism” of the 1960s, a testimony to a cultural crisis of faith in which the very premise of a personal God was coming undone. In the arts, for example, he pointed to the “scrofulous hobos” of Samuel Beckett—“the anti-heroes of modern art”—who made it plain that “waiting for God” was futile “since life is without meaning.” Likewise, in contemporary Jewish philosophy, the eclipse of God in the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust remained unavoidable (Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz appeared in 1966). In social anthropology as well, Elson suggested, the “politely indifferent” atheism of Claude Lévi-Strauss made “the God issue” seem like little more than an irrelevance. Even at the grassroots level of American churchgoing, there was cause for concern. With historian Martin Marty as his authority, Elson indicated that “all too many pews are filled on Sunday with practical atheists—disguised nonbelievers who behave during the rest of the week as if God did not exist.” Most portentous of all, though, was “a small band of radical theologians,” self-described Christian atheists, who were quite sure “that God is indeed absolutely dead.” This “current death-of-God group” had managed to enshrine Nietzsche’s “taunting jest” inside American Protestantism’s own theological citadels.