`Unrepentant’ Whittaker pens his story of religion, politics

LITTLE LESS THAN GOD: A Story of Down-East Religion and Politics, by Frederick W. Whittaker, Cay-Bel, 384 pages, $17.50.

In graduate school at Yale in the 1940s, Frederick Whittaker received the ultimate insult or compliment, depending upon one’s point of view. “You are an unrepentant liberal and unreconstructed liberal,” wrote his professor on a term paper.

Whittaker remains unrepentant about his view of the traditional interpretation of “separation of church and state.” He advocates, rather, a “vital and efficient relationship” between the two.

So it was that Whittaker, as he describes in his autobiography, served not only as president of Bangor Theological Seminary from 1952 until 1978, but as a city councilor, mayor, state senator and candidate for Congress.

Whittaker — who will be recognized Wednesday evening when the seminary names a student residence in his honor — was a product of the school’s famous Bangor Plan, designed to offer a seminary education particularly to older, non-traditional students who had little or no college experience.

That was Frederick Whittaker — a young man from Connecticut who worked 10 years in a railroad office, determined to help his family financially until all his siblings had graduated from high school.

He arrived at BTS in 1939, and this volume covers not only Whittaker’s personal history through the decades, but the people he knew as student, professor, preacher and president. They include Charles Gordon Cumming, described by Whittaker as one of the “giants” of the college, Marion John Bradshaw, Mervin Deems, Harry Trust, Cecil Reynolds, Alfred Morris Perry, Andrew Banning, Daniel Fenner, Burton Throckmorton Jr., David Siegenthaler, Walter Cook, Stephen Szikszai and many others.

Whittaker was not only a leader in his Congregational denomination and in the world of higher education, but a parishioner at Hammond Street Church, and member of many civic groups. He was also, despite the “liberal” label, at various times a Republican and an independent.

His sense of the responsibilities of all of society are evident in an address he gave during a memorial service after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy:

“Have we not been responsible for the development in our land of a climate of hatred, intolerance, lust, suspicion, dishonesty, intemperance, violence, and a host of other evils, which served as a breeding place for the angry or misguided killing of our chief executive? Have we not condoned the glorification of sex, of lawlessness, and of greed for material possessions, in our literature, our legitimate stage productions, our moving pictures, and our television fare?”

A number of Whittaker’s addresses and sermons over the years are included in this volume, and even the older ones would seem appropriate to current times and today’s worshipers.

Surely, Whittaker’s book will draw readers for a variety of reasons. Some may be fond of autobiographies or know the Whittakers. Others will be interested in the theological aspects of the book, or the historical, or the educational, or the political.

They also will learn a good deal of what Frederick Whittaker believes and thinks: that “man cannot expect God to do for him what God has given man to do for himself.”

The volume’s title, by the way, comes from the Book of Psalms: “… what is man that thou art mindful of him … thou hast made him little less than God. …”