ETHICAL CULTURE, a movement dedicated to the ethical improvement of society and the ethical growth of the individual, was inaugurated with the founding of the New York Society for Ethical Culture in May 1876 by Felix Adler and a group of his Jewish supporters. Adler was the son of Rabbi Samuel Adler of New York's Temple Emanu-El, and he was expected to succeed his father in this cathedral pulpit of American Reform Judaism. But having been exposed in German universities to nineteenth-century science, Kantian philosophy, and historical criticism of religion, he came to reject theism and the finality of Jewish theology even in its most liberal form. His new faith consisted of a passionate belief in the inviolability and power of the moral law and the duty to apply it to society, especially to the problems of industrialization, urbanization, and the working poor.

What initially began as...