A. J. Muste

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Muste attended Hope College in Holland, Michigan, just west of Grand Rapids, on the coast of Lake Michigan. He graduated in 1905 with a bachelor's degree at the age of 20. At Hope College, he was class valedictorian, captain of the school's basketball team, and played second base for the baseball squad.

After his graduation, Muste taught Latin and Greek for the 1905–06 academic year at Northwestern Classical Academy (now Northwestern College) in Orange City, Iowa.

In the fall of 1906, Muste went east to the Theological Seminary of the Dutch Reformed Church, now the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, located in New Brunswick, New Jersey. There, Muste took courses in philosophy at New York University and Columbia University, attended lectures by William James, and met John Dewey, who became a personal friend. While he remained in training to become a minister of the Reformed Church, Muste seems to have begun to question the church's fundamental principles at that time.

He graduated from that institution in June 1909 and was married shortly thereafter to his sweetheart from his Hope College days, Anna Huizenga. Upon his graduation, Muste was appointed pastor of the Ft. Washington Collegiate Church in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. During his spare time, he availed himself of his parish's proximity to the theologically-liberal Union Theological Seminary to take additional courses there. He ultimately received a Bachelor of Divinity there and graduating from Union magna cum laude.

Muste was influenced by the prevalent theology of the social gospel and began reading the ideas of various radical thinkers of the day. He went so far as to vote for Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs for US president in 1912. Muste would later claim that he never again voted for a Republican or Democrat for a major national or state office.

Muste remained as pastor of the Fort Washington Collegiate Church on Washington Heights until 1914, when he became increasingly uncomfortable with the Reformed Church and left it.

Thereafter, he became an independent Congregationalist minister and accepted a pastorate at the Central Congregational Church of Newtonville, Massachusetts in February 1915.

A committed pacifist, Muste joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation shortly after its foundation in 1916. He participated in a peace demonstration late in the summer of 1916, with US entry into the First World War looming and some parishioners withdrawing from his congregation. Pressure began to build further over Muste's pacifist views in April 1917, when the United States formally declared war on the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. After taking two months of vacation leave in the summer of 1917, he decided that the time had come to leave. In December 1917, he formally resigned his pastorate position.

After his resignation, Muste did volunteer work for Boston chapter of the new Civil Liberties Bureau, a legal-aid organization that defended both political and pacifist war resisters.

Later in 1918, he moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he was enrolled as a Religious Society of Friends (Quaker) minister. He received the use of a home and money for expenses in exchange for pastoral services. An array of political publications was kept in a large room in the basement of the Providence Meeting House, and each Saturday, pacifists, radicals, and an eclectic mix of individuals gathered there to discuss issues of concern.

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