Lift Up Your Voice Like a Trumpet: White Clergy and the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements, 1954-1973

By Michael B. Friedland

When the Supreme Court declared in 1954 that segregated public
schools were unconstitutional, the highest echelons of
Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious organizations
enthusiastically supported the ruling, and black civil rights
workers expected and actively sought the cooperation of their
white religious cohorts. Many white southern clergy, however,
were outspoken in their defense of segregation, and even those
who supported integration were wary of risking their positions by
urging parishioners to act on their avowed religious beliefs in a
common humanity. Those who did so found themselves abandoned by friends, attacked by white supremacists, and often driven from
their communities.

Michael Friedland here offers a collective biography of several
southern and nationally known white religious leaders who did
step forward to join the major social protest movements of the
mid-twentieth century, lending their support first to the civil
rights movement and later to protests over American involvement
in Vietnam. Profiling such activists as William Sloane Coffin
Jr., Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Eugene
Carson Blake, Robert McAfee Brown, and Will D. Campbell, he
reveals the passions and commitment behind their involvement in these protests and places their actions in the context of a burgeoning ecumenical movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2000
• ISBN: 9780807861592

Michael B. Friedland

Michael B. Friedland, who received his Ph.D. in history from Boston College, has worked for education reform with the National Faculty, been a Fulbright Scholar in China, and is now a high school history teacher at Seattle Urban Academy.

Book preview

Lift Up Your Voice Like a Trumpet

Lift Up Your Voice Like a Trumpet

White Clergy and the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements, 1954–1973

Michael B. Friedland

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 1998 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

This book was set in Electra by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Book design by April Leidig-Higgins

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and

durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book

Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Friedland, Michael B.

Lift up your voice like a trumpet : white clergy and the civil rights and

antiwar movements, 1954–1973 / by Michael B. Friedland,

p. cm. Based on the author’s thesis (doctoral)—Boston College, 1993.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2338-4 (cloth : alk. paper).

ISBN 0-8078-4646-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Clergy—United States—Political activity—History—20th century.

2. Civil rights workers—United States—History—20th century.

3. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Protest movements—United States

—History. 4. Whites—United States—Politics and government. I. Title.

BL65.P7F73    1998                      97-18418

261.7′0973′09045—dc21                       CIP

A portion of this work has appeared in substantially different form as

"Giving a Shout for Freedom: The Reverend Malcolm Boyd, the Right

Reverend Paul Moore, Jr., and the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements

of the 1960s and 1970s," in Nobody Gets Off the Bus: The Viet Nam

Generation Big Book, a special issue of Viet Nam Generation,

vol. 5, nos. 1–4 (April 1994): 94–107.

02  01  00  99  98  5  4  3  2  1

To Julie, Benjamin, and Rachel

contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Prophets Without Honor:

The Travails of the Southern Clergy, 1954–1960

CHAPTER TWO

Going South:

Northern Clergy and Direct-Action Protests, 1960–1962

CHAPTER THREE

The Call to Battle:

The Churches and Synagogues Enter the Civil Rights Struggle, 1963

CHAPTER FOUR

Bringing Good News to the Oppressed:

Clerical Organization in the North and South, 1964

CHAPTER FIVE

Flood Tide:

Bearing Witness in Alabama, 1965

CHAPTER SIX

Going Against the Grain:

Clergy and the Antiwar Movement, 1963–1965

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Voice for Moderation:

Clergy and the Antiwar Movement, 1966–1967

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Escalation of Dissent:

The Antiwar Movement, 1967–1968

CHAPTER NINE

The Costly Peace:

The Antiwar Movement, 1968–1973

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

acknowledgments

Of making many books there is no end,

and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

ECCLESIASTES 12:12

The writing of doctoral dissertations—of which this was one—has a tendency to be a lonely and grueling experience, not only for the scholar but also for the family members and friends who have to put up with long absences as the author faces self-imposed exile in libraries and at computer keyboards. My experience was mitigated to a large extent by the encouragement, advice, and tolerance of many people during both the original writing process and the later revisions. My parents, Stephen and Anne Friedland, my sisters Alison and Jane, brother-in-law Mark Yovella, and father-in-law David Ballard have been and continue to be exceptionally supportive and understanding about my academic career. For similar reasons I am also indebted to a number of friends and colleagues whose insights have meant a great deal to me, especially Carol M. Petillo, Thomas O’Connor, Francis Murphy, Jane Haspel, J. Randall Baldini, Nan Woodruff, Kathi Kern, James Fisher, David M. Esposito, Charles Eagles, Robert Norrell, John Dittmer, Mary Beth Ross, and Pam and Danny Lassitter. The advice and sense of humor of two friends and fellow church historians, Gardiner H. Tuck Shattuck, and Jill Gill, both models of collegiality and support, continues to be a source of inspiration. The staff at the University of North Carolina Press, especially Lewis Bateman and Katherine Malin, have been very helpful, instructive, and patient in marshaling the manuscript through the stages of publication, and their faith in this project has kept mine from flagging.

Several of the individuals discussed in the book generously made time for lengthy interviews. Paul Moore Jr. graciously invited me to his home one afternoon to discuss his involvement in the civil rights and antiwar movements; Robert Hughes, William Sloane Coffin Jr., and Robert McAfee Brown answered long and convoluted questions over the telephone, as did Malcolm Boyd, who gave up two hours of an afternoon to discuss his career just one week after an earthquake rocked his Santa Monica parish. Frequent conversations and correspondence with John B. Morris were especially helpful in understanding his work with the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity, as was his generous sharing of numerous documents and newsletters. The staffs at several archives—including the Department of Special Collections of Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University; the American Jewish Archives in Waltham, Massachusetts; and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Office of History in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—were courteous and prompt in helping track down important documents in their varied manuscript collections.

Special thanks are due two invaluable friends, Roy and Kim Robson. Their good humor, faith, support, and advice has proven to be a bulwark of encouragement and a source of much pleasure through graduate school and beyond—much more, perhaps, than they ever can understand.

Finally, a word of appreciation for the three most important people in my life. The greatest debt—one I can never repay, although I look forward to a lifetime of trying—is to my wife Julie, who has been a tower of strength throughout the entire project, putting up with stacks of books and papers and a tired and often distracted husband with an amazing combination of empathy and optimism. This work could never have been completed without her, and if anything of note shines forth from these pages, much credit is due to her inspiring influence. Special thanks are due our son Benjamin. He came into our lives on a fine spring morning when the dissertation was only half done, but his easygoing temperament made the work flow that much more quickly. More importantly, his wonderful smile, frequently bestowed on a father who spent more time staring at a computer screen than at his adorable face, served to remind me of the truly important things in life. Since that time several years ago he has found somewhat more persistent and effective ways of distracting his father, but the end result—my delight in his presence—has remained the same. And now, with the manuscript having moved well beyond dissertation committees and taking up a new life in the world of university presses, we have been blessed with a daughter, Rachel. Being the author of a monograph, especially with all the support I have received over the years, was an enjoyable enough task, but being a parent is far more gratifying. It is to my beautiful wife and two wonderful children that this work is gratefully dedicated.

Lift Up Your Voice Like a Trumpet

Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet; declare to my people their transgression, to the house of jacob their sins.

Yet they seek me daily, and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God…

ISAIAH 58:1–2

introduction

Thus says the Lord: Do Justice and righteousness …

JEREMIAH 22:3

On the afternoon of April 9, 1865, Union cavalry entered Selma, Alabama, destroyed the town’s foundries, and marched on to Montgomery, forcing its citizens to surrender. One hundred years later, a combined force of 3,200 black and white nonviolent marchers led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) followed the same route to demand voting rights for blacks. The atmosphere of the second march could not have been more distinct from that of its predecessor. It was like a Fourth of July picnic and a pilgrimage, a protest and an exultation, wrote Washington Post reporter Paul Good. It was like nothing Selma had ever seen before or dreamed of.¹

Or the rest of the nation, for that matter. It was a pilgrimage, and if its goals fell short of a strictly spiritual journey, the presence of hundreds of white Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic clergy and nuns belied that fact. Feeling the need to witness to and show repentance over the sins of racial discrimination, their participation in the march was the most dramatic sign up to that time of the comparatively recent church involvement in the civil rights movement.

Calls for the white churches to act more decisively in the racial struggle had been mounting since the Supreme Court ordered school desegregation in 1954. For the most part, the initial impetus for clerical action on behalf of civil rights in the years immediately following the Brown v. Board of Education decision came from a handful of southern white clergy, yet the pressures placed on them by parishioners hostile to racial equality quickly led to a silencing of all but the bravest of them. When the civil rights movement turned to tactics such as sit-ins and freedom rides in the early 1960s, groups of sympathetic, nonsouthern, white clergymen took part with effective results: as several were nationally known, their arrests and trials focused widespread attention on the demonstrations and their goals.

Yet the shift from moral suasion to direct action also posed a problem to the northerners’ work in the South. Although subjected to harassment and violence at the hands of segregationists during their brief sojourns in the southland, their professional positions were seldom threatened, and there were instances where their activism enhanced their status at home. It was not uncommon for northern clerics to become increasingly vexed at racial discrimination the farther they went from home, with the result that they tended to pass judgment not only on segregationists but also on southern moderates, whose challenges to the status quo, they felt, were not strong enough.

A further impediment to the effectiveness of outside white clerics among southern whites (but a considerable enhancement to their standing in northern liberal circles) was their close identification with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders of the civil rights movement. Moved by both the problems faced by African Americans in the South and their reliance on religion for strength, many northerners viewed them as embodying virtues that the more affluent, complacent society around them had lost. Caught up in the Cold War rhetoric of the era, the mainstream churches’ proclamations tended to be a celebratory paean to the American way of life, with a special emphasis on the role religion played in society. It was not hard for many Americans to perceive the United States as God’s country, leading the forces of light against totalitarianism. The fact that the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were officially atheist made this task all the easier. The dark side of this national self-righteousness, of course, was that any criticism of U.S. domestic or foreign policy was politically and ideologically suspect—either a sign of naïveté or, worse, subversion.

Realizing this, King couched his early criticism of the nation’s tolerance of racial injustice in terms of sorrow and of promises unfulfilled, an approach designed to appeal to the liberals’ belief in a society that was basically sound and whose flaws could be corrected without a drastic overhauling of the existing political, social, and economic order. Moreover, he targeted his speeches and writings to those liberal clergymen who, like himself, had studied philosophers and theologians such as John Locke, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Hegel, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and John C. Bennett, and made a point of stressing his intellectual debt to their writings.² As Keith Miller has shown, King’s theological and oratorical background did not develop solely from university and seminary education; rather, the civil rights leader was also influenced by published sermons and the black folk pulpit. Nevertheless, Miller argues, by appropriating the language of well-established white preachers, King created and maintained a self who grappled with urgent public issues and was also a scholar, a philosopher, and a theologian.³ In this way, he did not merely gain the respect of his white liberal colleagues in the pulpits. By taking up the mantle of the Social Gospel, which had a long and honored history within American Protestantism, he became for many the nation’s leading religious proponent of racial justice. To them, King represented and led the religious wing of the civil rights movement, one that showed the immediacy and relevancy of Old Testament prophecy and Christian gospel alike, as well as called attention to the traditionally weak response of the white churches to racism. The church is too little and too late, an Episcopal bishop told a black clergyman during the demonstrations in Selma. But you are going to renew us.⁴ King and his fellow black ministers in SCLC were able to put such sentiments to good use during civil rights demonstrations in cities such as Albany, St. Augustine, and Selma. It became common practice for them to call on clergymen of all denominations to join the marches when additional publicity was needed to put pressure on Congress and the White House to support the movement’s goals.

However, it would be a mistake to suggest that white liberal clergy merely reacted to the work done by black civil rights groups. Andrew Young of SCLC recalled that whenever his organization had trouble deciding on a course of action, King would ask his colleagues to [s]ee what John Bennett thinks.⁵ Another spur toward the rediscovery of an activist theological tradition was the liberal theology taught at the major American seminaries, especially Union Theological Seminary, Episcopal Theological Seminary, and Yale Divinity School. Writing in the late 1960s, sociologist Jeffrey Hadden argued that such schools had long been centers for progressive political thought and noted that churches seeking clergy from such prestigious institutions were systematically hiring men who are politically more liberal than … the congregation. This suffusion of liberally educated ministers, priests, and rabbis occurred at roughly the same time as the nation’s reawakening to the racial injustices suffered by black Americans. By the 1960s, many clergy viewed their ministry as an opportunity to challenge their parishioners to create a better society.⁶ The participation of white churches in the civil rights movement became more organized and institutionalized with the fight for the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the creation that same year of the Delta Ministry by the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCC), an interdenominational and ecumenical organization; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Ironically, as white clergy took an increasingly visible part in civil rights demonstrations, the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam changed the focus of the protest movement, though it did not necessarily follow that those clerics active in the civil rights movement were equally committed to criticizing the Vietnam War. Some of the most visible antiwar protesters in the pulpit had not been nearly so active in championing civil rights, but others who had first marched in the streets on behalf of racial justice found themselves lending their voices and their prestige to the burgeoning antiwar movement, in which they were some of the most committed and articulate participants. Distinct from both students and leftist antiwar groups, religious figures provided a rallying point for more moderate critics of the war, in a way that they could not in the civil rights movement, led as it was by black activists. Clergy who had been involved in the civil rights movement brought to their antiwar activities not only their theological beliefs about human dignity and justice but their newfound organizational and tactical tools as well, from mailing lists of liberal clerics to expertise in mounting peace conferences, demonstrations, and educational campaigns consciously patterned after events designed to combat domestic racism.

Neither the conservative clergy nor the majority of the laity admired such activism, and they reminded those who persisted in it that religious bodies in the United States are, first and foremost, voluntary associations in which the clergy have only a nominal amount of leverage that they can bring to bear on their parishioners. While traditional Judeo-Christian teaching emphasizes concern for the poor and oppressed, not all are in agreement as to how this concern should manifest itself. In 1967, theologian Harvey Cox identified three general categories of clergy: the pietists, who believed that their duty was to proclaim the word of God and focus their congregation’s attention on the afterlife and not involve themselves in protests they considered secular and political; the theologically and politically conservative clergy, who believed that religion, like politics, had a duty to uphold the status quo; and the new breed, whose liberal outlook often paved the way for their personal involvement in demonstrations.⁷

The motivation that led some pastors to take sides on such highly charged issues while others refused to involve themselves must also be understood in light of the various constraints and tensions between themselves and the laity they served. The likelihood of a clergyman becoming involved in social activism depended on several factors, including his own conception of his duties; how the laity perceived his role; the issue in question; support (or lack of it) from a religious hierarchy, if one existed; and his position on the hierarchical ladder within the denomination. Unlike other professionals who have sharply delineated roles and whose decisions are seldom determined by their clients, the clergy at the parish level live among and socialize with those they serve more than they do with peers. Such ministers, priests, and rabbis have a variety of responsibilities—including those of spiritual leader, administrator, counselor, and civic leader—and all provide close ties with a congregation that already has its own expectations.⁸

Such a multifaceted role often caused problems. If a clergyman felt that his duties included giving advice on certain social or political issues, the laity might not agree, and tell him to attend only to his spiritual functions. If their advocacy from their pulpits (in which they are, in the last analysis, the paid guest speakers) becomes sufficiently obnoxious to their listeners to cause a substantial decline in attendance and gross receipts, explained a conservative Georgian parishioner in the 1960s, the clergyman mustn’t be too surprised when the church fathers arrange for his transfer to more favorable climes.⁹ For many laypeople, the church or synagogue was viewed as a sanctuary from the pressures of the outside world, and the duty of the presiding cleric was to comfort his flock, not disturb it by bringing up potentially divisive social problems.¹⁰ Critics of clerical activism insisted that the clergy’s function should be restricted to influencing the moral tone of their members by giving them some broad, general moral guidance, and then [leaving them] free to apply their Christianity as they see fit in their daily personal and civic lives.¹¹

While racial prejudices existed on both sides of the pulpit, research suggests not only that those in the pews were often considerably more conservative and prejudiced than those who faced them from the altars but also that those who regularly attended services tended to be more prejudiced and intolerant than more sporadic churchgoers.¹² One is tempted to recall Samuel Butler’s description of parishioners in an English church: good, sensible fellows who would have been equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.¹³

In the face of lay hostility to social activism, it was natural for clergymen to turn to their denominational hierarchy for support. Yet whatever the strength or weakness of any particular hierarchical structure, no church was completely immune to pressure from the laity. As bureaucratic organizations, religious bodies have always been concerned equally with institutional self-preservation and with their mission in the world, and generally have avoided antagonizing those who tithed or filled the collection plate. Such conflicting desires often put the individual minister in an awkward position, unable to know how far to go on any given issue, unsure of how much support he would be given by ecclesiastical leaders. Not surprisingly, those who were able to devote much of their energies to social activism tended to come from positions where they were not subject to pressure from the laity and had more freedom (and job security): bishops or other members of the denominational hierarchy, administrators, seminarians or the faculty of divinity schools, and campus chaplains.¹⁴

Arriving at the same time as the civil rights and antiwar movements was a new spirit of interfaith cooperation, demonstrated markedly by the Second Vatican Council and various proposals for Protestant denominational unions in the early 1960s. In light of the limited number of ecclesiastical allies that activist clergy could muster on their behalf, it is no surprise that many of these individuals welcomed the burgeoning ecumenical movement. As Trappist monk Thomas Merton reflected toward the end of the decade, Protestants would seek out like-minded Catholics, and vice versa. Among such people, he wrote, one found new grounds of sympathy; people with a new look and a whole new background, which proved stimulating and provoked involvement with each other. To those wary of such developments, warned Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, himself an activist in the civil rights and antiwar movements, there was another ecumenical movement, worldwide in influence: nihilism. We must choose between interfaith and inter-nihilism.¹⁵

Clergymen involved in ecumenical or interfaith ventures found the religious and tolerant nature of the early civil rights movement particularly appealing.¹⁶ The civil rights marches, wrote one scholar, brought people together from … widely differing church traditions, not only Christian but also Jews and humanists, and in so doing pointed the way to cooperation in faith and action … which sometimes far transcended the achievements arrived at hitherto by the ecumenical movement.¹⁷ Joining with others to establish personal and organizational contacts in order to protest racism in the early 1960s, several religious leaders, Heschel and Merton among them, were able to maintain this interfaith cooperation to challenge the growing American involvement in Vietnam for the rest of the decade, joined by such ecumenists as John Bennett, professor of theology and later president of Union Theological Seminary, who had helped create the World Council of Churches in 1948; Baptist minister Will D. Campbell; Reverends Daniel and Philip Berrigan, the former a Jesuit and the latter a Josephite; Malcolm Boyd, a priest-playwright in the Episcopal Church; William Sloane Coffin Jr., Presbyterian chaplain of Yale University; Robert McAfee Brown, Presbyterian minister and professor of religion at Union and later Stanford University; the Reverend Eugene Carson Blake, Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America; and Bishop Paul Moore Jr. of the Episcopal Church.

One must keep in mind that such figures were able to devote much of their careers to the causes they cherished precisely because they were either employed by universities or served as high-ranking members of religious organizations, and hence were considerably freer from the constraints placed on individual ministers, priests, and rabbis. It would be false to portray this predominantly northern group as representative of the white religious community that became involved in social protest. Their ability to don the prophet’s mantle and warn the nation of its moral lapses was not open to all, and attention must be paid to southern white clergy who lived in the midst of the society they were attempting to change and often suffered as a result of their convictions—men such as Robert Hughes, Methodist minister and president of the Alabama Council on Human Relations; Dunbar Ogden Jr., Presbyterian minister in Little Rock, Arkansas; Rabbi Charles Mantinband of Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Rabbi Jacob Rothschild of Atlanta, Georgia; Robert McNeill, Presbyterian minister of a church in Columbus, Georgia; Edwin King, Methodist chaplain of Tougaloo College, a black institution in Mississippi; and John B. Morris, Episcopal priest and executive director of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU).

By studying the role of the white southern clergy in some detail, we can understand the second edge of the church: the conserving edge. Not all clergymen were called to be prophets, and many did not wish to shake society to its foundations. Clearly there were those whose conservatism was often a cloak for inaction, but there were others who emphasized the reconciliatory aspect of their vocation as much as, if not more than, their prophetic one. If there were many ministers, priests, and rabbis who refused to raise their voices to criticize the flagrant racial abuses in the South, some of them, it must be understood, felt that in order to genuinely serve as reconcilers, they had to work quietly, at the local level, in order to achieve their goals.

Substantial scholarly work on white clerical activism in this era came out of the 1950s and 1960s, but much of it was sociological in nature, and until recently such information had little counterpart in historical scholarship.¹⁸ Most monographs that discuss religious activism in the 1950s and 1960s understandably concentrate on the black clergy in the civil rights movement, particularly the leaders of SCLC. Other studies, especially Ronald Flower’s Religion in Strange Times: The 1960s and 1970s, concentrate on black civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy and then segue into an exploration of fundamentalist evangelism among whites in the 1970s, as if the liberal religious activism of white clergy in the 1960s deserved no more than a footnote. Stephen Carter addresses religious activism in the civil rights and antiwar movements in more depth in The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, but his emphasis is not to delve into that issue so much as to point out how uncomfortable contemporary Americans are with explicit references to religion made by conservative politicians. Although he contrasts this discomfort with the liberals’ embrace of King’s religious rhetoric on behalf of causes they supported, he does not address the conservative distrust and hostility toward this use of theological doctrine.¹⁹

Happily, historians recently have been correcting such omissions in the historical record. Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield treated the white clergy’s opposition to the war in Southeast Asia in great detail in An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Two more recent works, James F. Findlay Jr.’s Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 and Mitchell Hall’s Because of Their Faith: CALCAV and Religious Opposition to the Vietnam War, are excellent treatments of organized white clerical opposition to racial segregation and the war; Stephen Longenecker’s Selmas Peacemaker: Ralph Smeltzer and Civil Rights Mediation and Charles W. Eagles’s Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama are two outstanding biographies on the efforts of a Church of the Brethren minister and an Episcopal seminarian, respectively, to combat racial segregation in Alabama in the mid-1960s. Ongoing research by other scholars—including Gardiner H. Shattuck Jr.’s work-in-progress on the Episcopal Church’s stand against racism in the 1960s, tentatively titled Dwelling Together in Unity: Episcopalians and the Dilemma of Race, and Jill Gill’s dissertation, ‘Peace Is Not the Absence of War But the Presence of Justice’: The National Council of Churches’ Reaction and Response to the Vietnam War 1965–1972—promises to further our knowledge of the intersection of religious belief and social activism.

The present work attempts to add to such scholarship by focusing on the work of several white clergymen within the broader context of religious social activism as it developed through different stages in both the civil rights and antiwar movements. While some may criticize this approach as history from the top down, it does provide a sense of narrative cohesion to what is admittedly a broad topic; furthermore, by tracing these individuals’ careers—beginning in the 1950s with their growing disenchantment with the conservative religious atmosphere of that decade, through the resurgence of liberalism and activism in the 1960s—this study adds to an understanding not only of the role of the clergy in contemporary society but of the gulf between the ideals that most Americans profess and the behavior that they exemplify.

Clerical activism was not a new phenomenon in American history. Predicated on various theological and philosophical precepts that had evolved during the nineteenth century, it had been altered by the two world wars and the Cold War. The Social Gospel, dating from the turn of the century, held that the Christian essence of social justice was love toward both God and humanity. Institutions, as well as individuals, stood under God’s judgment, and as the Old Testament prophets had been concerned with moral uplift in their times, so should modern churches work to eradicate the ills in the world by involving themselves in political and social issues. Striving to create a fellowship of humanity under God, the social gospelers believed that if institutions followed Christian ethics, righteousness and justice would appear on earth.²⁰

Despite the efforts of such ecumenical organizations as the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America to implement the goals of the Social Gospel, the idealistic foundations of such a doctrine were rudely shaken by the First World War and the Great Depression. Relations within society were not quite so simple as the social gospelers believed, argued Reinhold Niebuhr, professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, in his seminal Moral Man and Immoral Society. In this 1932 work, he disabused religious liberals of their hopes that society could be reformed through goodwill, moral suasion, and education, for while all were helpful on an individual level, groups did not have the capacity to transcend their unrestricted egoism. The perfect society, Niebuhr argued, could never be created in history, and individuals who believed that education would destroy ignorance were guilty of sentimentality and romanticism; power, he insisted, not ignorance, was the real factor in group relations. Humanity had to content itself with the more modest goal of reforming existing structures.²¹ Niebuhr himself continued to work with several radical Christian action groups in their efforts to aid tenant farmers in the South, educate seminarians, and campaign for Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas in the 1932 presidential elections. While he did not singlehandedly destroy the Social Gospel, Niebuhr helped pave the way for a critical reassessment of Christianity as simply a religion of ethics.²²

Having alienated religious liberals and practitioners of the Social Gospel, in the early 1940s he directed his fire at pacifists, joining with theologian John Bennett and several other prominent clergymen to found the journal Christianity and Crisis. When men or nations must choose between two great evils, the choice of the lesser evil becomes their duty, the first editorial read. We hold that the halting of totalitarian aggression is prerequisite to world peace and order.²³ Pacifism, according to Niebuhr, was unable to distinguish between the peace of capitulation to tyranny and the peace of the Kingdom of God. Such modern liberal perfectionism, he wrote, made democratic nations weak and irresolute before a resolute and terrible foe.²⁴

By the end of 1941, the United States was engaged in fighting totalitarian and racist regimes, and in so doing, Americans began to reexamine their own patterns of racial discrimination. At war’s end, the Federal Council of Churches issued a statement renouncing the pattern of segregation as unnecessary and undesirable and a violation of the Gospel of love and human brotherhood and asked its constituent churches to work for a non-segregated church and a non-segregated society.²⁵ Unfortunately, the council failed to act on its own suggestion. During the meeting where the resolution was passed, council leaders arranged to have their vice president, Benjamin E. Mays, president of Atlanta’s Morehouse College and one of the nation’s leading black theologians, sit with the audience rather than share the stage with themselves. Members of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church, U.S., and Southern Methodists insisted that the declaration was an unwarranted interference in the activities of local churches, and instead passed resolutions calling for equal opportunity within the system of segregation.²⁶ Clergy and congregations at all levels reflected their culture more than the beliefs they professed, and it was left to smaller organizations such as the Committee on Interracial Cooperation (founded in 1919), the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, and the Catholic Interracial Council (both founded in 1934) to challenge, with little success, the complacency, conservatism, and embedded racism of the established churches.²⁷

The Cold War and its concomitant fears of domestic subversion in the late 1940s and 1950s further dampened the reform spirit. Charges of Communism were freely leveled at anyone who proposed changing the status quo, for whatever reason. Segregationists charged that Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (which detailed how Americans seldom lived up to the creeds of equality they espoused, especially with regard to race) was written by a notorious Swedish Communist and a Red psychologist when he was in fact an anticommunist economist. Religious figures were not immune to such pressures, which conspired to either limit the social activism of all but the most committed of liberal clergymen or redirect their energies toward defending themselves against charges of leftist sympathies.²⁸ Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam became the object of such vehement attacks for his wartime leadership of the Council of American-Soviet Friendship and his espousal of liberal causes (one critic claimed that he was serving God on Sunday and the Communist front for the balance of the week) that he demanded and received a hearing by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953, in which he effectively discredited all questionable evidence against him.²⁹

The following year, another liberal, Bishop Bernard J. Sheil of Chicago, director of the Catholic Youth Council, also spoke out against red-baiting at a CIO–United Automobile Workers convention. It was time to cry out against the phony anti-Communism that … flouts our traditions, and democratic procedures and sense of fair play, he urged, singling out Wisconsin’s Senator Joseph McCarthy for his questionable investigating tactics.³⁰ Partly as a result of this speech, Sheil was forced to resign as director of the CYC.³¹

Other clerics, most notably Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, went on the attack against perceived Communist infiltration. His support of McCarthy angered liberals but won him the respect of conservative Catholics and Protestants alike. Anguished cries and protests against ‘McCarthyism’ will not deter America from trying to root Communists out of the government, Spellman warned, and made a point of joining the senator at a postcommunion breakfast in New York City, afterwards shaking his hand for the photographers at a policemen’s rally in McCarthy’s honor.³²

Spellman’s frequent linkage of Catholicism with true anticommunism often angered Protestants, but nothing so infuriated them as an attack by one of their own. In July 1953, the American Mercury published an article by J. B. Matthews, a Methodist minister and former Communist, entitled Reds and Our Churches, in which the author charged that the largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant clergymen, and went on to accuse at least 7,000 Protestant clergymen of being party members, fellow travelers, espionage agents, party line adherents and unwitting dupes.³³ Predictably, moderate clergymen of all faiths rose up in protest, as did other sectors of the community. The National Conference of Christians and Jews published a strong condemnation of the article, warning that the destruction of trust in any religious leaders by wholesale condemnation is to weaken the greatest bulwark against atheistic materialism and Communism. President Dwight Eisenhower concurred, adding in his public response that the churches were citadels of faith in freedom and human dignity, and our matchless armor in the worldwide struggle against the forces of godless tyranny and oppression.³⁴

Such thoughts were reflected by the National Council of Churches of Christ (NCC), founded in 1950. Unlike its predecessor, the Federal Council of Churches, its mission was not to champion the Social Gospel but to emphasize evangelism, religious education, and, in the face of Cold War realities, support for the United States and other champions of Christian freedom and liberty against totalitarian and materialist philosophies.³⁵ When the NCC passed a resolution in 1952 criticizing racism, its tone was timid. Admitting that the church lagged behind secular institutions in integration, it renounced segregation and recommended that its member churches do likewise, recognizing that historical and social factors make it more difficult for some churches than for others to realize the Christian ideal of non-segregation.³⁶ There was room for all convictions under this resolution, and by upholding integration as an ideal rather than a tangible goal, the NCC undercut its own message. Similarly vague and inoffensive resolutions followed, leading one observer to complain that [i]n the area of prophecy, the glibness of the NCC has already taken its toll. Each pronouncement began with a lifeless theological generalization, after which it wound up with a bold proposal for solving the problems of the year before last. Such hierarchical wisdom, he continued, could lead one to the despairing cry, ‘How could so many mean so little by so much?’ ³⁷

Bennett took the NCC for task for being too concerned with internal cohesion to challenge society’s complacency. Such criticism rankled the Reverend Eugene Carson Blake, the council’s president. Broad-shouldered and square-jawed, the powerfully built, six-foot-tall Blake still resembled at age forty-eight the football player he had been at Princeton University in the late 1920s. Born into a devout Presbyterian family in St. Louis, Blake traveled to northwestern India (now Pakistan) after he graduated to teach philosophy and theology at Forman Christian College, then married and continued his theological studies at the University of Edinburgh, New College, and at Princeton Theological Seminary. After his ordination in 1932, he worked in parishes in New York and California, greatly increasing the size of his congregations through his powerful preaching style. He attended the opening session of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948 and returned to the United States a committed supporter of ecumenical and interfaith dialogue. Three years later he was named Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. That office had been created to coordinate meetings and committees, but Blake turned it into a position through which he could actively lead his church in the postwar years.³⁸

This impressive background did not qualify Blake as the standard-bearer for religious liberalism, however, nor did it give any indication of his future activism in the civil rights movement. While dangers did exist from compromise, he acknowledged, he argued that Bennett did not sufficiently recognize the danger of the equally abhorrent and typical sins of the prophet which are those of pride and arrogance. In Blake’s view, the NCC had to heed not only the voices of the prophets among us but also the voices of wise men … who do not always agree with the prophets. Hope lay in the creative combination … of a larger cross section of Christian faith and conviction than has been anywhere available to the American Churches heretofore. Such a balanced approach, retorted Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen, president of Union Theological Seminary, did not take into account the fact that the prophet strives for goods which are not primarily for his own interest but for the good of his society, while the conservative was characteristically motivated … by desire to safeguard his own security and privilege. Furthermore, said Van Dusen, Blake overlooked the historic role of the prophets in the advance of the church. Human institutions were always characterized by lethargy, and progress was almost always due to insistent, tireless, courageous (and often unreasonable, tiresome, and annoying) pressure from the prophets. It would be a great mistake, the seminary president concluded, to suppose that advance can be achieved by some simple and comfortable median way.³⁹

However, it was precisely the middle-of-the-road approach, not the call for prophecy, that symbolized the churches’ role in society in the early 1950s. Unease over the Cold War, McCarthyism, and racism did not propel religious leaders into social activism; rather, many clergy felt that their mission was evangelism. This era, wrote one sociologist, was a time of peril and promise-peril because of the fears of nuclear annihilation, Communist ideology, and subversion, but promise because with the return to financial stability after the Depression and the war, the work of the churches in spreading the Gospel could begin anew.⁴⁰

The new beginning, however, saw the churches become firmly entrenched in the secular society, often reflecting and mimicking its values of conformity, patriotism, financial success, and the need for psychological comfort. Anthropologist Margaret Mead observed the existence of a vague positive attitude toward a religious system characterized by a kindly God who stands for all good things but who, after all, will not punish you for what are mostly mild infractions of his will.⁴¹ This was not the time for a clerical campaign against social evils, for in a time of international tensions, people turned to religion for comfort and solace, and it was not coincidental that the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s books on positive thinking became bestsellers in the 1950s.⁴² Others believed that their religious beliefs were the crucial difference between them and their atheist foes, as clumsily described in Eisenhower’s comment that Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.⁴³ Evangelism became the order of the day. And of all those who proclaimed the need for personal salvation, none was more famous than William Franklin Graham.⁴⁴

Born in North Carolina in November 1918, Billy Graham (as he was more commonly known) attended Florida Bible Institute in Tampa, where he became a Southern Baptist. After his marriage and graduation from Wheaton College in Chicago, he became the pastor of a small church that sponsored a religious radio show. Polishing his considerable oratorical skills on the air, Graham was convinced that his career lay in evangelism, and he embarked on a national religious tour with the Youth for Christ in 1947. Still a relative unknown, he was asked to be the main speaker at a Los Angeles revival in the fall of 1949, and on the night of September 25, in the midst of what had been a series of mundane tent meetings, Graham captured a national audience. Capitalizing on the news of the recent detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb, he told his audience that no one knew when the first bombs in a war would fall, but we do know this, that right now the grace of God can still save a poor lost sinner. The audience enthusiastically responded to his call to accept Jesus as its savior, for he had hit a nerve. People were afraid of war, afraid of atomic bombs, fearful as they go to bed at night, and trembling because they feel that we are on the verge of a third world war, a war which could sweep civilization back into the Middle Ages.⁴⁵

His success was astounding. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst instructed his reporters to Puff Graham, and the revival was extended from three weeks to two months. Graham continued to hammer home the threat of imminent destruction throughout the next decade.⁴⁶ Personal conversion rates were high during these crusades, as he liked to call them, and doubtless his listeners felt that even if they had no control over whether war would break out, at least they would have some say where their souls ended up after the bombs fell.⁴⁷

In time, Graham would drop the apocalyptic tone, but his calls for individual salvation and personal piety disturbed the more intellectual theologians such as Niebuhr, who charged that Graham had clothed the gospel in petty moralizing which offered impossible answers to the dilemmas of this generation.⁴⁸ His crusades did not always offer petty answers to America’s dilemmas; while his contention that the hydrogen bomb would not be dangerous if people accepted Christ as their savior was theologically weak, his insistence on holding racially integrated crusades in the early 1950s, even in southern cities, did call attention to the inclusiveness of the gospel message. Graham’s methods would eventually be eclipsed by those in the