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He was born on October 28, 1885 in Marlboro, Massachussets, United States, the son of Charles Henry Potter, a shoe factory worker, and of Flora Ellen Lincoln. In childhood and youth his outlook was evangelical and orthodox, and the ministry was his obvious and unquestioned vocation.
Enrolled in Sunday school at the age of eighteen months, he was memorizing Bible passages at the age of two and a half, and at three he was preaching to his parents.
In 1903 he entered Bucknell University, but he spent his sophomore year (1904 - 1905) at Brown. He received the B. A. from Bucknell in 1907. He received an M. A. from Bucknell in 1916.
Potter was first licensed to preach at the age of seventeen. After being ordained at the Central Avenue Baptist Church in Dover in 1908, Potter served student pastorates there and at Mattapan, Massachussets, while attending Newton Theological Seminary. He also eked out a meager living by selling aluminum cookware door to door.
After serving parishes in Edmonton, Alberta, and in Marlboro and Wellesley Hills, Massachussets, Potter was called in 1919 to the West Side Unitarian Church in New York City, where he launched a successful building program. By that time he had left his Baptist orthodoxy far behind him, and in the fundamentalist-modernist conflict of the 1920's he emerged as a leading advocate on the modernist side. A series of radio debates in 1924 with John Roach Straton, the formidable pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church in Manhattan, on evolution, the Virgin Birth, the infallibility of the Bible, the divinity of Christ, and the Second Coming, was as inconclusive as most such exchanges; the judges awarded two of the debates to Potter and two to Stratton. This "media event" brought Potter to national attention.
In 1925 he figured in the famous "monkey trial" of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes as a Bible expert for the defense, furnishing Clarence Darrow with some of the biblical inconsistencies and logical contradictions that Darrow used to badger William Jennings Bryan on the witness stand.
He resigned the West Side Unitarian pastorate in 1925 and spent two years as professor of comparative religion at Antioch College. He returned to the ministry in New York City in 1927, as pastor of the (Universalist) Church of the Divine Paternity. There he aligned himself with the Social Gospel movement of American Protestantism. The following year he published the first of his fifteen books, The Story of Religion. This was a collection of biographical sketches of major religious leaders of the world. Potter resigned from the ministry in 1929.
He then founded the First Humanist Society of New York, whose advisory board included, at various times, such notables as Julian Huxley, John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Harry Elmer Barnes. The new organization, Potter declared, would have neither clergy, nor creed, nor baptisms, nor prayers. In 1938 he founded the Euthanasia Society of America; twenty years later it claimed 40, 000 members.
Potter also had a folklorist's interest in the origins of children's tongue twisters; Tongue Tanglers, one of several of his books on the subject, was in press at the time of his death in New York City.
Charles Francis Potter became nationally known through a series of debates with Dr. John Roach Straton, a fundamentalist Christian. Potter was one of the original 34 signers of the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933. He was also the founder of the Euthanasia Society of America, helping to raise the issue of euthanasia before the American public.
Rejecting the widely held view that the church ought not to meddle in politics, Potter argued, that it would be right for churchpeople to oppose a candidate who professed any religious belief that unfitted him for public office.
He argued that thought transference and clairvoyance, which he believed had been scientifically proved, gave sounder reasons for belief in personal survival after death than did traditional religion.
Potter campaigned against capital punishment and was an early and continuing advocate of birth control.
On June 25, 1908, he married Clara Adelaide Cook; they had three sons.
