Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States

By Gene Zubovich

When we think about religion and politics in the United States today, we think of conservative evangelicals. But for much of the twentieth century it was liberal Protestants who most profoundly shaped American politics. Leaders of this religious community wielded their influence to fight for social justice by lobbying for the New Deal, marching against segregation, and protesting the Vietnam War. Gene Zubovich shows that the important role of liberal Protestants in the battles over poverty, segregation, and U.S. foreign relations must be understood in a global context. Inspired by new transnational networks, ideas, and organizations, American liberal Protestants became some of the most important backers of the United Nations and early promoters of human rights. But they also saw local events from this global vantage point, concluding that a peaceful and just world order must begin at home. In the same way that the rise of the New Right cannot be understood apart from the mobilization of evangelicals, Zubovich shows that the rise of American liberalism in the twentieth century cannot be understood without a historical account of the global political mobilization of liberal Protestants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9780812298291

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Cover: Before the Religious Right. Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States by Gene Zubovich

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE

Series Editors

Angus Burgin

Peter E. Gordon

Joel Isaac

Karuna Mantena

Samuel Moyn

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Camille Robcis

Sophia Rosenfeld

BEFORE THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

Liberal Protestants, ­Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States

Gene Zubovich

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zubovich, Gene, author.

Title: Before the religious right : liberal Protestants, human rights, and the polarization of the United States / Gene Zubovich.

Other titles: Intellectual history of the modern age.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Series: Intellectual history of the modern age | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021030566 | ISBN 9780812253689 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780812298291 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Protestant churches—United States—History—20th century. | Protestantism—United States—History—20th century. | Liberalism (Religion)—Protestant churches—History—20th century. | Human rights—Religious aspects—Protestant churches—History—20th century. | Globalization—Religious aspects—Protestant churches. | Liberalism—United States—History—20th century. | Polarization (Social sciences)—United States—History—20th century. | United States—Politics and government—20th century.

Classification: LCC BR525 .Z83 2022 | DDC 280/.40973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030566

For Katherine

CONTENTS

Note on Translation

Introduction. Global Gospel, American Politics

Part I. One World

Chapter 1. Protestant Political Mobilization in the Great Depression

Chapter 2. The Coming War and the Pacifist-Realist Split

Chapter 3. The World Order Movement

Chapter 4. A Non-Segregated Church and a Non-Segregated Society

Chapter 5. The Anti-racist Origins of Human Rights

Part II. Two Worlds

Chapter 6. Beyond the Cold War

Chapter 7. Segregation Is a Sin

Chapter 8. The Responsible Society

Chapter 9. Christian Economics and the Clergy-Laity Gap

Epilogue. Global Gospel, American Fault Lines

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

NOTE ON TRANSLATION

This book uses pinyin to romanize Chinese names and places and the Library of Congress guidelines for Russian names and locations. Exceptions were made for commonly translated names of individuals and places, and names appearing in quotations.

INTRODUCTION

Global Gospel, American Politics

In 1948, one week before the United Nations ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Federal Council of Churches asked the American public to confront the domestic implications of the UN document. The council was the largest and most influential Protestant body in the United States, and it felt a calling to proclaim these new international human rights to Americans. It announced that respecting the dignity of man required acknowledging the human right to a standard of living adequate for the welfare and security of the individual and the family. Echoing the principles of the New Deal, the council announced that every person is due an adequate living space, a good education, recreation and leisure, proper health services, and the right to join a labor union. The council’s 1948 human rights statement was also a direct and public attack on racial segregation. Denouncing Jim Crow as a violation of the gospel of love and human brotherhood, the council pledged to work for a non-segregated church and a non-segregated society.¹

For the Federal Council of Churches, the denial of freedom, justice and security to others cut across traditional boundaries between foreign and domestic. At a moment when ecumenical Protestants mobilized for a more Christian postwar international order, one that would make sure the horrors of World War II would never be repeated, they recognized that fighting injustice in the United States would be a stepping-stone to a more peaceful world. Abroad and at home, the flagrant violation of human rights in our generation has impeded the achievement of world order, proclaimed the council.²

One of the most important products of ecumenical Protestants’ new global outlook in the 1940s was their commitment to human rights. Ecumenical Protestants, sometimes called liberal or mainline Protestants, distinguished themselves from their evangelical and fundamentalist rivals by opposing Christian nationalism. Since the 1920s, ecumenical Protestants had engaged the world in new ways. In addition to longstanding missionary work, they began to tour the globe on study trips, built international NGOs, and created new connections with their fellow Protestants in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As they helped build these international networks, ecumenical Protestants began to advocate for human rights. In particular, they promoted human rights as a response to the problem of nationalism, as a way of subordinating all peoples and all nations to God’s will under a global government.

In the 1940s, ecumenical Protestants led the charge in bringing international human rights into the domestic politics of the United States. In doing so, they revitalized American conversations around race, the economy, and US foreign relations, and they became important supporters of mid-century liberalism. In the process, they transformed American politics by promoting ideas, policies, and popular movements that outlived the decline of ecumenicals’ influence in the 1970s. They also unwittingly helped create the politically polarized nation that exists today. Their global gospel was created to change the world. In due time, it transformed the United States. In some important ways, we are living in the world ecumenical Protestants helped create.

Ecumenical Protestantism and Its Power Elite

It is hard to define any religious group with precision, and that is especially true for Protestants, who today are divided into more than 30,000 denominations.³ Ecumenical Protestants are theologically liberal. Those who headed the Federal Council of Churches at mid-century accepted scientific and scholarly developments that led them to read the Bible critically and historically, and to make peace with doctrines like Darwinism. In this way, they differed from fundamentalists, who defined themselves in the early twentieth century against these innovations.⁴ Unlike evangelicals, ecumenical Protestants understood evangelism to mean more than converting others to the true faith. For ecumenical Protestants, who sent out the vast majority of American missionaries prior to the 1960s, social reform initiatives like building schools, hospitals, and agricultural stations took priority over conversion in their understanding of evangelism. But the divisions between ecumenical, fundamentalist, and evangelical Protestants were not merely theological.⁵ Ecumenical Protestants distinguished themselves by promoting religious pluralism, anti-racism, the rights of labor, governmental aid to the poor, women’s rights, and international organizations in the face of opposition from their religious rivals.

Ecumenical Protestants were also institution builders and cooperators. What made this group different from secular liberals who shared some of their political goals, and from other Christian communities, was their devotion to ecumenism.⁶ A babel of theologies competed for Protestant attention at mid-century, including realism, modernism, pacifism, personalism, the social gospel, anti-racism, and neoorthodoxy. But ecumenism, the desire to unite Christians, towered above them all, binding together these disparate views and allowing this diverse group to withstand deep disagreements about other religious questions. They were inspired by oikoumene, Greek for the whole globe, and took the biblical injunction to spread the gospel throughout the whole globe (Matt. 24:14) so that they may all be one (John 17:21) to mean that their religion demanded unity. They built organizations with the purpose of overcoming denominational and national divisions. These institutions were one of the main sources of their power in American life and in international affairs. Ecumenical Protestantism consisted of a constellation of groups that orbited around the Federal Council of Churches in the United States, and the World Council of Churches internationally.

The Federal Council of Churches—after 1950 it was called the National Council of Churches—functioned as a think-tank and a political action committee on behalf of about thirty ecumenical denominations. The most influential were the seven sisters of American Protestantism: Episcopalians, United Methodists, Northern Presbyterians, United Lutherans, Northern Baptists, Congregationalists, and the Disciples of Christ. These denominations were collectively much wealthier and more white than the United States as a whole. The seven sisters were joined by African American denominations, like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which were invited to join the council as junior partners. Collectively, these denominations represented between one-quarter and one-third of the US population at mid-century. Further ensuring that ecumenical Protestantism shaped the everyday lives of millions of Americans across the country, voluntary groups like the Young Men’s Christian Association, the Young Women’s Christian Association, and Church Women United shared membership and staff with the council.

But numbers alone do not explain the political and cultural authority ecumenical Protestants commanded at mid-century. Their members included some of the wealthiest, most educated, and most powerful Americans. The vast majority of presidents, senators, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, corporate executives, and university presidents were affiliated with ecumenical Protestant denominations before the 1960s. And the important role of religion for American elites ensured that ecumenical Protestants had access to the corridors of power. For example, on a single day in 1923, Methodist missionary leader John R. Mott had breakfast with Supreme Court Justice and former president William Howard Taft, followed by lunch with President Calvin Coolidge, and an afternoon visit with his good friend, the former president Woodrow Wilson.⁷ From the 1920s to the 1960s, ecumenical Protestants headed a moral establishment deeply intertwined with American political and cultural power.⁸

Ecumenical Protestantism involved a broad swath of the American population but it was governed by a small group of leaders. They were educators, researchers, directors of missionary organizations, denominational officers, religious bureaucrats, prominent pastors, and newspaper editors. They were often joined by influential laypersons, including diplomats, politicians, labor organizers, authors, lawyers, and corporate executives. Collectively, they had multiple responsibilities in an overlapping set of heavily bureaucratized organizations that tied together local, regional, denominational, interdenominational, and international Protestant organizations. This interlocking directorate, to borrow a phrase from the mid-century sociologist C. Wright Mills, comprised a power elite of American Protestantism that acted as the religion’s public face.⁹ Their intersecting institutional responsibilities, and their geographical concentration in a few square blocks of midtown Manhattan (before these bureaucrats moved into a single, architecturally uninspiring building in Morningside Heights nicknamed the God Box), make it possible to speak of a single ecumenical Protestant community in the United States at mid-century.

Protestant Globalism and Human Rights

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, American ecumenical Protestants mobilized their power and influence to implement what they called world order. It would be one of the most ambitious and significant political mobilizations undertaken by any American religious group. Ecumenical Protestants had long been politically active. Compared with their fundamentalist and evangelical antagonists, they were more likely to take progressive positions on the issues of the day. They proudly claimed as their own the movement for the abolition of slavery and the early twentieth-century fight against the exploitation of industrial workers, known as the social gospel. They also remembered, with some embarrassment, their role in banning alcohol in 1919. Even so, during the mid-twentieth century ecumenical Protestants mobilized again, on a scale not seen since Prohibition.

This time they rallied under the new banner of globalism. Earlier in the century, it was ecumenism—the movement to unite Christians across national and denominational boundaries—that led Protestants to create new international networks. These networks presented opportunities for American Protestants to go abroad, and, beginning in the 1920s, a generation of leaders left home on study missions, toured missionary stations, and traveled to international religious conferences. Through their travel, ecumenical Protestant leaders began to see the borders between nation-states as antiquated boundaries. They reasoned that the spread of Christianity, industrial capitalism, transportation networks, education, and science was bringing the world closer together, diminishing what were once great cultural and physical distances. In the 1930s, the Protestant establishment, for the first time, saw the world of nations as a single, interconnected whole—a view this book calls Protestant globalism.

Protestant globalism was an outlook that sought to subordinate nation-states to a world government and a universal moral code.¹⁰ Christian nationalism, the belief in the sacredness of national boundaries and a suspicion of what lies beyond the country’s borders, was a nonstarter for ecumenical Protestants.¹¹ Internationalism—the cooperation between distinct, autonomous nations embodied by the League of Nations—also did not satisfy ecumenical Protestants because it did not recognize forms of solidarity and connectedness that existed beyond the nation-state. The problem, as John Foster Dulles saw it in 1937, was that the international order was a rededication of the nations to the old principles of sovereignty, of unchanging and unchangeable compartments, the walls of which would continue as perpetual barriers to the interplay of dynamic forces.¹² In an international climate dominated by totalitarian states, Dulles, the Presbyterian layman and future secretary of state, was one of many Protestants who came to believe that nation-states were a problem that could only be solved through some kind of world government that would rein in their independence. Because they saw the world through the prism of globalism, ecumenical Protestants became enthusiastic supporters of the UN and the doctrine of human rights.

Ecumenical Protestants embraced globalism at a time when many of the world’s peoples had liberated themselves from European empires and founded their own nation-states. This development—there were approximately fifty countries at the beginning of the twentieth century while today there are nearly two hundred—was one of the seismic shifts in world affairs in the twentieth century and something that American ecumenical Protestants could hardly ignore. Nor could they ignore the rise of American power following World War II, as the country took on the role previously played by the now-declining European empires.

Protestant globalism was a waystation between the world of empires and the world of nation-states. It helped ecumenical Protestants avoid divisive debates about decolonization even as they became more critical of imperialism. From the 1920s through the 1950s, American ecumenical Protestant thought and action were neither consistently pro-colonial nor anti-colonial. The Protestants who subscribed to globalism wanted a world government, which would simultaneously end imperialism and place restrictions on the autonomy of nation-states. Beyond that point of consensus, though, their views varied. Protestants on the left emphasized that a new world government would free oppressed peoples from empires, while those on the right insisted that a world government would force newly emergent countries to behave in accordance with Christian and Western values. For those in the middle, Protestant globalism provided a justification for many of the proximate goals that anti-colonial activists advocated, such as diminishing racism, distributing wealth more fairly, and placing limits on the behavior of empires—all without necessarily endorsing self-determination.

Similarly, globalism was compatible with conflicting views about American power. Historians have typically depicted ecumenical Protestants as either zealous cold warriors or ardent dissidents opposed to American military policies.¹³ This book shows that some ecumenical Protestants, like Dulles, believed that the United States would usher in a more just world order by exporting its values, while others maintained that the United States needed to demilitarize and that it must work together with other countries—including communist ones—as a nation among nations. By focusing attention on world government instead of self-government, globalism hid deep divisions among American ecumenical Protestants about self-determination and American power. These divisions would become public by the 1960s.

Although Protestant globalism faded away in the 1960s, it had birthed institutions, ideas, and practices that would prove more enduring. The most important product of Protestant globalism was the new doctrine of human rights. Ecumenical Protestants were central players in the invention and spread of human rights discourse and were decisive in bringing human rights to bear on American politics. If the world was an interdependent whole, as ecumenical Protestants believed, then what happens in the United States matters deeply to the whole globe. Americans are as bound to respect human rights as are others, they reasoned. Human rights discourse was therefore taken up by ecumenical Protestants to deal anew with segregation, the economy, and US foreign relations.

Thinking this way about human rights may seem counterintuitive. Today, we are accustomed to seeing human rights violations as a new and distinct realm of criminal activity, like torturing political dissidents, which takes place outside the United States. But, at mid-century, ecumenical Protestants understood human rights as a way of critically appraising social, political, and economic practices, abroad and at home, in light of what they called the God-given dignity and worth of the human person. For this reason, Christian conceptions of human rights did not displace other social justice arenas with new concerns. Instead, the rights of the human person reframed and reinvigorated ongoing fights over wealth inequality, poverty, militarization, war, and racism.¹⁴

Scholars have debated the historical origins of human rights but they have only recently begun paying attention to the important role religious groups played in their formation and dissemination.¹⁵ Moreover, historians are only now starting to explore the role of human rights in the domestic politics of the United States.¹⁶ Typically, historians of the United States have presented human rights as an invention of World War II, which was followed by their dramatic disappearance during the early Cold War, and their equally dramatic revival in the 1970s. Unlike other accounts, this book locates the religious roots of human rights in the ecumenical milieu, and it highlights both the institutional and theological innovations among ecumenical Protestants to help explain how human rights developed and why they became popular in the 1940s. It shows that ecumenical Protestant initiatives sometimes resonated with the US government’s promotion of human rights, for example, in the 1940s. But this religious community’s continued evocation of human rights into the 1950s and 1960s cuts against the standard timeline. And ecumenical Protestants’ evoked human rights in arenas other than law and foreign policy, which demonstrates that the role of human rights in US history is more widespread and nuanced than is often suggested in scholarship.

This book focuses on three arenas of human rights politics that ecumenical Protestants themselves prioritized: the movements to eradicate racism, to reform the economy, and to transform America’s role in world affairs. Amid the enthusiasm for world government, some ecumenical Protestants made a compelling case that a commitment to human rights necessitated desegregation. Figures like Thelma Stevens, Channing Tobias, and Benjamin Mays convinced the Federal Council of Churches in 1946 to become the first large, predominantly white religious body—in fact, the only large, predominantly white organization aside from the Communist Party—to call out Jim Crow by name and demand its immediate abolition. We cannot hope to influence other peoples to accept the Christian way of life, or other nations to accept the democratic principles we proclaim unless we can demonstrate in our own community living that we take them seriously and are striving to translate them into effective practices, they explained.¹⁷

As this book shows, despite resistance within their own congregations, ecumenical Protestants mobilized politically from the 1940s to the 1960s to end segregation. They knocked on doors and asked their neighbors to stop signing restrictive covenants, they filed lawsuits against police brutality, lobbied Congress to end race-based immigration restrictions, and joined the NAACP’s legal battle against Jim Crow. From the streets of Los Angeles to the Supreme Court, ecumenical Protestants mobilized to end segregation in the name of human rights.

Human rights were also intertwined with debates about economic inequality. As early as 1908, the Federal Council of Churches celebrated the dignity of labor and the human brotherhood between Christians and the toilers of America.¹⁸ A concern for what would later be called human rights first led the organization to advocate for an industrial democracy that would give workers a greater say over their working lives. Their ideas anticipated many of the innovations of the New Deal. Ecumenical Protestant leaders worked to ensure passage of crucial legislation, including the Wagner Act, which legalized unions, and the Social Security Act, which created a safety net for some of the most vulnerable Americans. By the 1940s, they offered a globally inspired vision of, in their words, a Responsible Society as a middle way between capitalism and socialism. A responsible society is one where freedom is the freedom of men who acknowledge responsibility to justice and public order, they announced, and where those who hold political authority or economic power are responsible for its exercise to God and the people whose welfare is affected by it.¹⁹ They also orchestrated an ambitious mobilization to bring corporate executives and labor leaders together to agree on the ethical principles of a fair economy. Over time, they joined a growing chorus of critics worried about the poor being left behind by a thriving economy.

Ecumenical Protestants understood that segregation and the domestic economy were tied to colonial empires and the global economy. And so, they spearheaded the effort to reform international relations, especially the US role in the post–World War II world. Many of the major preconditions of a just and durable peace require changes of national policy on the part of the United States, the Federal Council of Churches announced in 1942. Among such may be mentioned: equal access to natural resources, economic collaboration, equitable treatment of racial minorities, international control of tariffs, limitation of armaments, participation in world government. We must be ready to subordinate immediate and particular national interests to the welfare of all.²⁰ On behalf of these principles they staged massive rallies, preached in tens of thousands of churches and over the airwaves, and orchestrated one of the largest letter-writing campaigns to Congress in American history. In the process, they became some of the most forceful advocates for the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and they worked closely with the State Department to shape and promote these international institutions. But during the Cold War, relations with the government soured and ecumenical Protestants became more critical of US policy, especially in East Asia. When ecumenical leaders called for the diplomatic recognition of Red China in 1958, they signaled their opposition to American Cold War policy.

Ecumenical Protestants saw it as their responsibility to advocate for racial equality, more responsible economic policies, and a demilitarized US foreign policy in order to build a more just and Christian world. To be sure, there were many disagreements about these issues. Ecumenical Protestants on the right, like Dulles, were more likely to become Cold War hawks, to preach economic individualism, and to insist that segregation should be confronted through education rather than through legal or political initiatives. Others, like Reinhold Niebuhr, defied easy political categorization. Despite disagreements, what remains remarkable is the extent to which globalism empowered activists seeking to combat segregation, lessen economic inequality, and undermine Cold War norms. Between the 1920s and 1960s, these separate strands of Protestant human rights activism were tied together into a single global outlook that transformed both international affairs and American politics.

Ecumenical Protestants and the Rise and Fall of American Liberalism

American ecumenical Protestant leaders were some of the most important supporters of liberalism at mid-century—liberalism in the sense that Franklin Roosevelt used the term, to denote a greater role for government in ensuring the prosperity of its citizens and an openness to participation in international organizations. In tandem with other liberal groups, they pushed Americans to accept the New Deal and to embrace international governance. Unlike most liberals of the era, however, they strongly backed anti-racist movements. Ecumenical Protestants justified the New Deal, the UN, and the Black freedom struggle theologically, thereby endowing political liberalism with the cultural capital of Christianity. And in a country that was as devout as the United States, this was no small thing.

Ecumenical Protestant organizations also served as gateways to progressive politics for churchgoers by providing them religious sanction and institutional support for fighting injustices. For religious women, in particular, Protestant institutions were one of the few means of escaping middle-class domesticity and engaging politically in an organized fashion.²¹ Ecumenical Protestants brought their concerns, rooted in theological commitments and developed in a global milieu, into the political arena. In the process, they transformed American liberalism by tying it to religious values and by making liberal leaders more attentive to religiously rooted concerns about racism, poverty, and international affairs.

The ecumenical Protestant establishment was so interconnected with the liberal political establishment in the United States that, in broad outline, their histories parallel one another. A socially conscious Protestantism and liberal social politics both began in the Progressive Era, they changed dramatically in the 1930s and consolidated during World War II, they enjoyed their peak from the 1940s through the 1960s, and they rapidly collapsed in the 1970s. Eschewing partisanship, ecumenical Protestant elites were closely tied to the liberal wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties of the mid-twentieth century, which nurtured the bipartisanship of the era. Ecumenical Protestants shared in the achievements of mid-century liberalism, including the New Deal, the founding of the United Nations, the legal challenge to segregation, civil rights legislation, and the War on Poverty. They also shared in the limits of liberalism, including its inclination toward consensus (which sometimes came at the expense of justice), its aversion to protest movements, and its elitism. Ecumenical Protestantism helped make liberalism—both its achievements and its limits—possible. When rapid secularization decimated their churches in the 1970s, it made the demise of liberalism probable.²² Without powerful, organized backing from religious institutions, liberalism lost an important source of its political support.²³

The decline of ecumenical power in the 1970s owed much to the growing clergy-laity gap in values. Members of the clergy, and especially those leaders in charge of Protestant institutions, had embraced political causes like the New Deal, desegregation, and demilitarization, which remained unpopular with everyday churchgoers. By the 1930s, some churchgoers mobilized against these clerics under the banner of the laity—a politicized identity that had as much to do with policy as with theology. The self-described laity was largely composed of wealthy churchgoers and conservative activists, who tried to wrest control of Protestant power. They raised important questions about ecclesiology—the theology of the nature and structure of Christianity—and about democracy and church-state relations. The battles between clergy and laity created new political and religious coalitions in the country, and created an opening for the rise of the religious Right. In these intramural fights, political and theological commitments blended with one another and portended the theological-political realignments that dominate today’s landscape.²⁴

It was through these schisms that ecumenical Protestants shaped our world most profoundly: by polarizing American politics. Just as ecumenical Protestant support bolstered the postwar liberal establishment, political divisions among Protestants cleaved the politics of the nation as a whole. When debates over Jim Crow, the welfare state, and the Cold War realigned religious communities, the new camps that emerged formed the basis of recognizably liberal and conservative coalitions. Since organizations like the Federal Council of Churches—and the council’s critics—commanded the attention of such a broad swath of the American electorate, and had hands on the levers of power in the country, this division was a political shift on a national scale.

Ecumenical Protestants also helped shape what American liberalism and conservatism looked like. Ecumenical Protestant leaders bundled together ideas and values that cohered with the initiatives of liberal politicians. And evangelicals, partly in response to their ecumenical opponents, brought together ideas and formed new partnerships that increasingly marked them as conservatives. Because ecumenical Protestants undertook liberal initiatives in ways that caused them to lose support and undermine their own institutional standing, they created an opening for the rise of the religious Right. But the laws, programs, movements, and values that ecumenical Protestants promoted outlived their cultural and political hegemony. Many of the ways in which we think and speak about race, poverty, and US foreign policy today, including the very language of human rights and human dignity, were initially fostered by this community.

Histories of Ecumenical Protestants

Ecumenical Protestants transformed American life and international politics at mid-century. But historians have been slow to grasp their importance. Partly, this is because many historians agree with Richard Hofstadter’s now classic contention that a defining feature of mid-century liberalism was its break with the religious outlook of the past.²⁵ In this book, on the other hand, I contend that religion was at the heart of mid-century liberalism. Ecumenical Protestants have also been overlooked due to the greater attention given to the rise of evangelicals. A strong collection of recent studies has reintroduced religion into the broader narratives of twentieth-century US history and, more recently, international history. Collectively, however, they create a misleading impression of the influence of evangelicals on American culture and politics, especially before the 1970s.²⁶ This book offers a corrective to the evangelical-centered narratives that predominate in modern American religious history. The point is not that evangelicals did not matter. Rather, in the same way that the rise of the New Right cannot be understood apart from the mobilization of evangelicals, the rise of American liberalism at mid-century cannot be understood without a historical account of the global political mobilization of American ecumenical Protestants.

The literature on the history of ecumenical Protestants has largely focused on the limits of the group’s influence and on the decline of their power. Broad narratives of American religious history often stress the ways mainline Protestant hegemony ended in the 1960s, giving way to greater religious pluralism.²⁷ Others have focused on exposing the fragility of mainline Protestant power and the limits of its popular influence well before the 1960s.²⁸ Both of these approaches deemphasize the vibrancy of this community’s political initiatives. By contrast, I contend that ecumenical Protestants were politically and intellectually vigorous at mid-century, and that their influence endured despite the demographic and financial challenges their churches faced in the late twentieth century. Ecumenical Protestants played an important role in creating institutions, legislation, and ideas that are still influential today.²⁹ They helped determine the landscape of American culture and politics long after the 1960s.

They also played an important role in international affairs. The traditional narrative of religion and US foreign relations focuses on the religious mobilization of the early Cold War and equates Protestantism with nationalist and anti-communist agitation.³⁰ But since the publication of William Inboden’s path-breaking 2010 account of religion and foreign policy, historians have taken a more subtle view of ecumenical Protestants’ international role. We now know that ecumenical Protestants harbored anti-nationalist sentiments in the interwar era and that some continued to resist militarism during the Cold War.³¹ Building on these insights, this book pushes the study of ecumenical Protestant international politics in two directions. First, it resists the either/or approach to the question of religious complicity in the rise of American power. Instead, it shows that critics and boosters of American military supremacy shared a single outlook of Protestant globalism.³² Second, by exploring the connections ecumenical Protestants made between international and domestic politics, this book places front and center this intermestic dimension of American history and emphasizes the links between international events, domestic political disputes, and the fracturing of American religious communities—and later, the fracturing of American politics.³³ By stressing this neglected connection, the book explores the religious roots of our present-day polarization.

From One World to Two

Before the Religious Right follows American ecumenical Protestants as they went abroad, developed new ideas about world order, and brought those ideas to bear on the domestic politics of the United States. Part 1, consisting of five chapters, chronicles the rise of Protestant globalism from the 1920s to 1948, when the Federal Council of Churches put forth its vision of human rights. Chapters 1 and 2 document the rise of a new generation of Protestant leaders, who went on study trips to places like India and the Soviet Union, and who came of age in the interwar years. Figures like G. Bromley Oxnam, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Henry Pitney Van Dusen were reared on ecumenism and the quest for international Protestant unity. In the interwar era, they transformed these theological commitments into the political doctrine of Protestant globalism. With this new framework as a guide, they became involved in the New Deal and in the debates over America’s role in World War II.

Chapter 3 focuses on World War II, when the Protestant establishment orchestrated one of the largest political mobilizations in the history of Protestantism—the World Order movement. Enthusiasm for world government was expressed in countless books, articles, and pamphlets; in carefully choreographed rallies; in university seminar rooms and in the pews and pulpits of tens of thousands of churches; and in one of the largest outpourings of mail Congress had ever received. This chapter shows how, building on this enthusiasm, ecumenical leaders worked closely with the State Department to shape what became the United Nations.

As the enthusiasm for the United Nations and for human rights grew in the 1940s, American ecumenical Protestants confronted the place of racism in the postwar world order. Chapter 4 demonstrates that Black and white activists, under the banner of human rights, convinced fellow Protestants that racism had no place in world affairs or in the United States. Channing Tobias, Benjamin Mays, Thelma Stevens, and others persuaded the Federal Council of Churches in 1946 to become the first large, predominantly white organization to call for desegregation.³⁴ As Chapter 5 shows, the anti-racist mobilization of World War II shaped how human rights were understood by the American public. In the 1940s, ecumenical Protestants produced the first worldwide academic study of racism, recasting bigotry as a truly global phenomenon. When the Federal Council of Churches declared that human rights made Jim Crow immoral and illegal in 1948, it ensured that human rights became closely tied to movements against white supremacy across the world.

Part 2 of Before the Religious Right moves from the international arena to divisive national debates about racism, poverty, and foreign policy in the United States. Chapters 6 through 9 show that human rights were brought home and, in the process, they influenced American politics. These chapters also show how human rights activism divided American Protestants and polarized their community. Chapter 6 examines the divides among Protestants about the Cold War. Unsure at first how to respond to Truman’s military doctrines, ecumenical Protestants, over time, emphasized breaking down Cold War barriers. This was especially true in Asia, where the Protestant establishment urged Americans to accept the Communist Party takeover of China and called on the US government to diplomatically recognize the new regime. In the McCarthyist atmosphere of the 1950s, it was a stance that led ecumenical Protestants to lose onetime allies, like Dulles, and to face harassment from the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Anti-racism likewise divided Protestants. As Chapter 7 shows, ecumenical Protestants transformed a commitment to human rights into concrete initiatives against segregation in the 1940s and 1950s. From going door-to-door with petitions in their local neighborhoods to filing briefs with the Supreme Court, ecumenical Protestants joined a broad coalition that attacked Jim Crow. As they made some legal headway under the banner of human rights, they encountered resistance from southern members of their own denominations, who embraced the new language of states’ rights and constitutional originalism. Disappointed with the indifference and, in some cases, outright hostility to integration in their churches, the Protestant establishment turned to its youths. These young ecumenical Protestants would go on to play an important role in the civil rights movement.

As with segregation, ecumenical Protestant activism on economic matters bolstered the liberal initiatives of the era while creating new rifts in their community. Chapter 8 documents the plan in the late 1940s and early 1950s to bring labor leaders and corporate executives together to agree on what constituted a Christian economy. Ecumenical Protestant leaders had crafted the economic vision called the Responsible Society, offering a third way between communism and capitalism. But some ecumenical Protestants resisted this economic view and had more sympathy for the Christian libertarianism of business leaders and their evangelical allies. Chapter 9 shows that under the banner of a laymen’s movement, some ecumenical Protestants mobilized against the economic initiatives they labeled socialistic. The laymen’s movement was unable to rein in the political initiatives of the National Council of Churches. But it did create new divisions around economic issues and even led some ecumenical Protestants to organize new, breakaway denominations. These rifts facilitated alliances between business leaders and evangelicals, and created an opening for the rise of evangelicals in American politics and culture.

The final chapters collectively show how, by the 1960s, ecumenical Protestantism began to fracture along the fault lines created in the previous decades. Also by the 1960s, globalism had begun to wane. The position-paper liberalism and consensus politics of the mid-century gave way to the rise of an activist approach on both the left and the right. Revolution became a buzzword in ecumenical life as the universalism symbolized by the United Nations and human rights faded into the background. Ecumenical Protestants began unambiguously criticizing American power and backing decolonization movements. They protested the Vietnam War and went so far as to send aid to Marxist rebels fighting colonialism in southern Africa and apartheid in South Africa. From the perspective of the Left, the mid-century human rights politics of ecumenical Protestants had not gone far enough. From the perspective of the Right, they had gone too far.

The mobilization of American ecumenical Protestants at mid-century left their religious community—and their country—divided into recognizably liberal and conservative camps. Even so, their support for human rights, both at home and abroad, would have a long legacy in the United States. Their activism was a pillar that supported American liberalism in the twentieth century. Its legacy continues to shape our lives today.

PART I

One World

CHAPTER 1

Protestant Political Mobilization in the Great Depression

In March 1933, the United States stood on the brink of financial ruin. Twenty-five percent of the population was unemployed, and countless Americans were without work for many years. Industrial production was cut in half from its 1929 level. The situation was even worse in large cities, where unemployment sometimes surpassed 50 percent. Yet the real worry of the era cannot be captured by statistics alone. There was a sense of fear that was palpable to those who lived in that uncertain time.¹ As the economy cratered, and as countless governments overseas collapsed, nobody was sure what would come next. This was the situation Franklin Delano Roosevelt inherited when he was inaugurated that month as the thirty-second president.

The challenge before Roosevelt was of such immensity that only the Bible captured for him, and for much of the nation, the task ahead. As he delivered his inaugural address in Washington, DC, in the cool March air under an overcast sky, he offered his listeners an account of devastation but also redemption. The economy was in tatters and hardworking men and women were destitute. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated, Roosevelt told the crowd gathered in front of the East Portico of the US Capitol. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. Like the biblical story of Jesus forcibly expelling the money changers and merchants from the temple, Roosevelt promised to restore Christian morality to the nation. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization, the new president announced. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.²

Roosevelt’s words give us a glimpse of a nation that in many ways no longer resembles the United States today. Roosevelt spoke in Christian idiom, often hinting at antisemitic tropes, to a public he presumed to be Protestant. This is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance, Roosevelt would later tell a private audience that included Jews and Catholics.³ Roosevelt, an Episcopalian, also spoke on behalf of a Protestantism that saw science and religion as compatible, tolerance as a social good, internationalism as a Christian endeavor, and the state as an ally of Christian social work. Roosevelt spoke, in other words, on behalf of an ecumenical Protestantism that dominated the public sphere in the 1930s.

Despite appearances, Roosevelt’s use of ecumenical Protestant themes at his inauguration belied a troubled relationship between Roosevelt, the spokesperson for a new political liberalism, and the Protestant leaders who spoke on behalf of theological liberalism. Between 1932, when Roosevelt won the presidential election, and 1936, when he won a landslide reelection, political liberalism and religious liberalism drew closer together through the conscious work of leaders of the Federal Council of Churches, denominational heads, missionary directors, academics and seminary heads, everyday churchgoers, labor leaders, and politicians. The coming together of the two liberalisms—political and religious—helped cement a close working relationship between ecumenical Protestant leaders and the federal government. As Roosevelt’s words show, liberal Protestantism was the language through which some Americans—including the president himself—understood the reforms of the New Deal.

Historians have not fully appreciated how central ecumenical Protestants were to mid-century liberalism. Beginning with Richard Hofstadter’s 1955 history of the New Deal, called The End of Reform, it became conventional wisdom that the New Deal shed the Protestant moralism of the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. This wisdom held that, beginning in the 1930s, a coalition of tough-minded groups discarded the religious moralizing of the past. This Roosevelt coalition governed the country until it fell apart in the 1960s.⁴ This view is misleading because it neglects the transformation of Protestant groups themselves. By 1932, ecumenical Protestants had moved beyond Progressive Era politics by adopting a political reform platform that prefigured many of the changes brought on by the New Deal. Influenced by developments abroad, they came to see the political arena as the best means of making Christian theology a living reality. Like Roosevelt, ecumenical Protestants experimented politically in the 1930s. As this chapter shows, ecumenical Protestantism emerged as a sophisticated political movement by the end of that decade and took its place among the groups that formed the core of American political liberalism.

The Triumph of Theological Liberals in the 1920s

The stock market crash of 1929 and the depression that followed sent shockwaves through American Protestantism. The money to pay ministers’ salaries, to help the poor, and to build new churches dried up. More importantly, the Great Depression came as a shock to theologians and clergy who had spent the prior decade feeling confident that civilization was making steady progress toward building the Kingdom of God on earth.

The 1920s had been a good decade for Protestantism’s Progressive Era causes. Prohibitionists finally won their decades-long battle in 1920, when the Volstead Act made the sale of alcohol illegal nationwide. Pacifists also had cause to celebrate. Recoiling from the horrors of World War I, peace groups sprung up from churches, and their work culminated in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which made war illegal under international law.⁵ The economy was booming in the 1920s, and it funded an ever-expanding number of churches, charitable organizations, and missionary groups. It was in 1925 that Bruce Barton published his blockbuster book, The Man Nobody Knows, which reimagined Jesus as the world’s greatest salesman and the apostles as his board of directors.⁶ According to Donald Meyer, in these years, Protestantism spoke with a degree of confidence and self-assertion befitting only men who felt themselves at the opening of a new era—and themselves responsible for that opening.⁷

A theological crisis emerged in the 1920s over the relationship of science and religion, but ecumenical leaders mostly viewed it as a yet further sign of progress. On one side were self-proclaimed modernists, who believed that science and religion went hand in hand and who argued that a critical reading of the Bible would yield a more enlightened religion that could withstand the demands of the modern age.⁸ On the other side were fundamentalists, who saw themselves as defenders of Christian orthodoxy. They listed nonnegotiable articles of faith, which were a line in the sand meant to defend what they saw as true Christianity from heresy.⁹ The conflict between the two groups erupted in Dayton, Tennessee, over the teaching of evolution in public schools. Although the Scopes Monkey trial was substantially about majoritarian control of schools and intellectual freedom of teachers, it was popularly understood as a battle between science and fundamentalist faith.¹⁰ Fundamentalists won the trial but lost the public, which only bolstered ecumenical confidence in the 1920s.

Confrontations between modernists and fundamentalists in the 1920s also took place within Christian institutions—churches, seminaries, and missionary organizations—and they centered on doctrine. The popular preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick became a lightning rod for these debates because of the attention he drew with his sermon Shall the Fundamentalists Win?¹¹ The sermon was printed and distributed to nearly all of the 140,000 Protestant ministers in the country, informing them that he did not believe in the Virgin Birth, the inerrancy of the scriptures, or the Second Coming of Christ. Fosdick’s conservative opponents admitted his popularity. But the question is not whether Dr. Fosdick is winning men, complained conservative Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen, but whether the thing to which he is winning them is Christianity.¹²

Fundamentalists demanded an investigation into whether Fosdick upheld the Presbyterian Confession of Faith. When an investigative body cleared him, fundamentalists demanded an investigation of the New York Presbytery for permitting heresy in its pulpits. It too was cleared of wrongdoing, thanks in part to the skillful work of their young lawyer, Presbyterian layman John Foster Dulles. Although Fosdick would indeed resign—the Baptist minister was asked to become a Presbyterian, and he refused because of his deep commitment to ecumenism—he soon took over the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York, the cathedral of ecumenical Protestantism.¹³ Mobilizing their prestige, intellectual rigor, and a widespread belief in progress, advocates of a liberal theology prevailed over their fundamentalist coreligionists. By the time of the Great Depression, theological liberals, like Fosdick, had taken over much of the institutional machinery of American Protestantism.

G. Bromley Oxnam and the Internationalization of the Social Gospel

As Protestants grappled with the Great Depression, they drew on earlier traditions focused on combatting poverty. The social gospel was foremost among these. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, theologians and activists came to two new insights as they recoiled at the terrible conditions that prevailed among the working class in that era. The first was that the clergy needed to minister to workers’ bodies as well as to their souls. The second was that salvation was not just for individuals but that it also had a social dimension. They relegated the idea of the salvation of individuals to an agrarian past that was no longer tenable in the industrial landscape of