Martin E. Marty, religion historian and former Century editor, dies at 97

Martin E. Marty, an eminent church historian, prolific chronicler and interpreter of religion and its role in public life, died at the age of 97 on Tuesday in a Minneapolis care facility where he spent his final years.

Marty, who was also a warmhearted friend, mentor and pastor to many, taught for 35 years at the University of Chicago Divinity School and published a constant stream of books, articles, essays, newsletters and columns, with his book Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America winning top honors at the 1972 National Book Awards in Philosophy and Religion.

In 1987 he published the first of his three-volume survey of religion in the 20th-century US, in which he described the impact of fundamentalism on the religious landscape, depicting fundamentalism as a reaction not to liberal religion or textual criticism of the Bible alone but to modernity itself and its increasing secularism.