CHAPTER 9
Just as ecumenical Protestants called on the United States to become a “Responsible Society” in the late 1940s—one that respects the human rights of workers and gives them control over their working lives—their views came under attack from the wealthiest congregants of ecumenical churches. These business moguls, who mobilized under the banner of the laity, challenged the authority of the clergy and tried to wrest control of the cultural capital of Christianity from the ministers’ hands. Although the fights largely took place over position papers and pronouncements, the corporate leaders understood that the stakes were in fact much higher. The conflicts between the laity and clergy were about who would get to decide what constitutes a “Christian” economy. And that answer mattered in a country as devout as the United States.
The most important tool that corporate executives wielded in their fight against the clergy was control over the National Council of Churches’ purse strings. Much of the money that ecumenical Protestants relied on to build a just postwar world free from racism and poverty came from their wealthiest members, many of whom threatened to withhold donations unless the clergy stopped backing labor unions, supporting Harry Truman’s universal health-care initiative, and championing redistributive taxation. But the corporate leaders also had allies in their fight against ecumenical clergy over economic policy, like the Catholic journalist John T. Flynn, the fundamentalist firebrand Carl McIntire, and the anti-communist congressman Walter Judd. These new alliances, formed in the 1940s and 1950s around a common enemy rather than a united outlook, foreshadowed the rise of the religious Right later in the twentieth century.1
The widening clergy-laity gap in the late 1940s and 1950s troubled the consciences of church leaders. The fights between clergy and laity were about economic policy but also about matters fundamental to Protestant theology and American democracy. In the tug-of-war between the laity, whose authority rested on their claim to speak on behalf of all churchgoers, and clergy, who claimed expertise over religious interpretation, important questions arose. If the Protestant tradition denied the special status of clergy, on what grounds did the clergy accumulate so much authority over economic affairs? If Protestantism was at the root of American democracy, as was widely believed at the time, did that mean the religious tradition itself needed to become more democratic? And what did this troubled relationship between clergy and laity mean for church-state relations, especially at a time when ecumenical Protestants attacked the Catholic Church for its alleged clericalism and authoritarianism? Ecumenical leaders like G. Bromley Oxnam, Douglas Horton, and John Bennett wrestled with these grave and pressing questions but never definitively answered them.2
The laity’s war on the clergy raged from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. This chapter focuses on three episodes of this conflict. The first is journalist John T. Flynn’s attack on ecumenical Protestants in his best-selling 1949 book, The Road Ahead.3 Building on decades of fundamentalists’ investigations of their fellow Protestants, Flynn aired their Red-baiting accusations to a nationwide audience. Inspired by the attention Flynn’s book garnered, Congregationalist and Methodist laymen, including Congressman Walter Judd, attempted to purge the “social action” groups of their denominations, which were responsible for political activity and were long a refuge for leftist politics. Finally, the oil magnate J. Howard Pew went after the National Council of Churches itself, attempting to use his generous pocketbook to censor its economic pronouncements. These efforts amounted to one of the most serious challenges ecumenical Protestants faced to their authority in the mid-twentieth century.
Despite the best efforts of Flynn, Judd, and Pew, the laity’s war on the clergy failed to wrest control of Christian economics from the clergy. But the anticlericalism of the laity had three important effects. First, it devastated some parts of the Protestant Left. Secondly, it facilitated new alliances between evangelicals, corporate leaders, and politicians. Finally, the laity affected a subtle but important change in the economic ideology ecumenical Protestants promoted. By the end of the 1950s, ecumenical Protestants complained that an abundant economy, which created so much plenty for so many Americans, was leaving the poorest folks behind. Ecumenical Protestants were among those refocusing the attention of liberal politicians on the problem of poverty. The benefits of the postwar mixed economy, ecumenical Protestants argued by the end of the decade, needed to be expanded to all Americans.4
Mobilizing the Laity
The relationship between laity and clergy had long been a problem for American Christianity, but the issue took on a greater urgency during World War II, when ecumenical Protestants had mobilized politically in unprecedented ways. Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam and Congregationalist leader Douglas Horton differed politically and theologically but they expressed remarkably similar concerns during the wartime years about the “clergy-laity gap.” Both Oxnam and Horton wanted to encourage churchgoers to participate more fully in public life, they wanted to create more substantial ties to the labor movement, and they hoped to move away from the local church as the center of ecumenical Protestant life in the country.
Horton, the longtime executive secretary of the Congregationalist-Christian Churches, headed a denomination that was radically decentralized. Their bureaucracy was small. The denomination had virtually no power over individual churches, which imbued Congregationalism with both an ecclesiastic and political libertarianism.5 The Congregationalists were also one of the wealthiest denominations in the United States. Oxnam’s United Methodists, on the other hand, were less affluent (although, still wealthier than the population as a whole), more hierarchical, and more thoroughly bureaucratized. Many of the controversies about hierarchy that arose among Congregationalists carried little weight for Methodists. Oxnam had long been a social gospel advocate, unlike Horton, and had since the 1920s advocated on labor’s behalf.
Oxnam and Horton lamented that their denominations’ churchgoers were much wealthier than the average American, and they knew that the people in charge of most local churches—the deacons, the fundraisers, the accountants—were most likely to be the wealthiest members of the congregation. The problem only got worse the higher you went in the ecumenical Protestant bureaucracy. Horton observed that at his denomination’s national meeting in 1944 only pastors and a few wealthy laypersons had the free time to attend and help shape policy. For Horton, this was symptomatic of a much bigger problem: “The Church does not maintain its contact with the other classes.”6 Oxnam, the social gospeler, agreed that Protestant churches needed to reestablish contact with workers because of labor’s role in the coming transition toward economic democracy. “Dare we envision,” Oxnam asked rhetorically, “the labor movement itself as a means through which the Christian ideal may indeed become real?”7
Worst of all, when ministers spoke to workers they exhibited “an old-fashioned missionary attitude,” Horton complained. He may have been thinking of evangelicals, who, in the words of Billy Graham, also believed that “organized labor unions are one of the greatest mission fields in America today.” Graham meant that ministers should proselytize to workers and “lead the laboring man in America in repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.”8 This kind of attitude, thought Horton, expressed an outdated belief, that “I have everything and you have nothing.”9 Oxnam called the labor movement “one of the greatest missionary opportunities of [Protestantism’s] history,” but he meant something quite different from Graham. Unions would transform Christianity as much as Christianity would transform labor unions, and the two would go on to transform the economy along social gospel principles. But this would only come to pass if Protestants put aside their paternalism and recognized labor’s new dignity. Oxnam was still finding inspiration from abroad in 1944. “Anyone who has seen the workers of Russia,” as he first did in 1927, “beholds this new spirit.”10
Oxnam and Horton had been at the center of the economic controversies in the 1930s, when conservatives mobilized under the banner of the “laity” to demand more power for the wealthiest congregants of their denominations. They also navigated tricky church-state issues. In fact, Oxnam was one of the leading voices of Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, an organization bent on keeping Catholic clergy out of politics. He therefore saw lay participation as a means of avoiding the very same accusations of clericalism he was directing at Catholics.11 That was exactly what layman John Foster Dulles had done for Protestantism in international affairs and that was what others could do for the economy. Preachers and ministers would articulate general principles of Protestantism, but only the laity could put them into practice. “The social gospel is the layman’s gospel,” Horton emphasized, “for the layman is on the social front line as the minister cannot possibly be.”12
Although there were many benefits to more lay involvement, the drawback was that those who claimed the mantle of the “laity” were the richest and most conservative members of Protestant denominations.13 When the Christian Century declared 1946 the year of the “layman,” they invited guest writers to submit articles on the subject. The editors hoped to attract new subscribers and raise more money, but what they got instead was fierce criticism of clerics. Stanley High wrote an article that accused Protestantism of being “preacher-ridden” and prone to “sonorous obscurities.” (High, the son of a Methodist minister and a one-time candidate for the ministry, would soon author a Red-baiting article attacking “Methodism’s Pink Fringe.”) Henry R. Luce, the millionaire media mogul who offered up “the American Century” in contrast to Protestant globalism, likewise wrote in the pages of the Christian Century that Protestants were promoting “the most fantastically fuzzy ideas … about politics and economics, about war and peace.”14 Calls for more power for the laity usually came from the wealthiest segments of Protestantism and were intertwined with conservative political agendas. It became clear to the editors of the Christian Century that if the class structure of the church remained intact, Protestantism’s laity would tilt toward conservative economic policies.
The outspoken conservatism of the Protestant laity meant that the church-worker relationship needed to be reestablished. And both Horton and Oxnam thought that this was unlikely to happen at the level of the individual church. Horton warned that “to date almost all of our thinking has been done at the level of the local church—and this is one problem which the average local church is too small to handle.”15 Oxnam likewise urged Protestants to refocus their efforts away from bringing labor into the churches and toward Christianizing the lives of people outside the church. “I am less interested in movements whose primary end is the Church,” he wrote in 1944, “than in those endeavors whose primary purpose is to enthrone the Christian ideal in the practices of the common life and to create Christian spirit in the relations of that life.”16
Oxnam focused on empowering working people, but Horton wanted to establish a role for churchgoers of all professions in order to balance political views and aim at what he viewed as a sensible middle ground. Horton proposed ad hoc groups of various professions gathering in cities across the country in order to discuss ways to mobilize churchgoers and Christianize their professions. To encourage the melding of Christianity and professional life, Horton urged churches to develop new sacraments focused on work. After all, so many sacraments emphasized family life—births, deaths, marriages—and none acknowledged work. From these informal groups, Horton hoped a laypersons’ movement would emerge into something like a “Senate-House of Representatives relationship” between the clergy and the laity in his denomination, diminishing the distance between the two groups. Moreover, Horton hoped “Christian guilds” would emerge in the professions, so that those professions “could be brought more effectively into a Christian economy.”17 By the 1940s the local church appeared to stand in the way as ecumenical leaders endorsed a bigger-is-better organization of Protestantism, and one that emphasized Christian practices outside the traditional confines of Sunday-morning services.
Oxnam and Horton hoped that establishing a closer relationship between working life and Christianity would empower their activism and political advocacy. But the problem of disunity and division remained. As Oxnam saw it, Protestant churches “speak [in] one voice when we deal with values; but the moment the question of mechanics is raised, church groups talk in many tongues, and the discussions are a modern reenactment of Babel.” The more specific Protestant proposals became, the greater the disagreement. Oxnam proposed a simple solution. To get around divisions, the technical expertise of the laity was needed. Labor and capital would come together and create a framework of cooperation, while theologians and experts on political economy, like Harold Ickes and David Lilienthal (who “writes like the prophets of old”) would be brought in to mediate between the two groups. “The moment is at hand,” Oxnam prophesized, “when the engineering and organizing genius of the world must master the mechanics essential to the realization of valid ethical ideals, create an adequate machine, and put the machine to work.”18 To Oxnam’s mind, technical expertise and social ethics would easily find common cause.
For all of Oxnam and Horton’s desire to get the laity more involved in Protestant life and to reestablish connections with workers, their enthusiasm for the laity in the 1940s would have ironic consequences. More laypersons did participate, but they were overwhelmingly the wealthiest and most conservative members of ecumenical denominations, a development that undermined Oxnam and Horton’s hopes that a broad spectrum of churchgoers would take part in ecumenical activities. In spite of Oxnam and Horton’s best efforts, in the postwar United States the very term “laymen” continued to be synonymous with a conservative revolt against liberal and leftist clergy.19
The Ambiguity of the Clergy-Laity Relationship
Corporate executives, operating under the banner of the laymen’s movement, did not begin the war over Christian economics. Attacks on the economic views of ecumenical Protestants had begun back in the days of the social gospel and had been ongoing for most of the twentieth century.20 By the 1930s, a loose web of fundamentalists and their supporters had banded together to counter the Federal Council of Churches’ support for the New Deal and organized an ill-fated anti-Roosevelt coalition. And during the 1940s, corporate executives, in concert with some Protestant clergy, promoted Christian libertarianism, though only with limited success. The ecumenical Protestant leadership largely shrugged off these mobilizations as misguided.
But it was hard to ignore the blow delivered in 1949 by journalist John T. Flynn. His book, The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution—an unmistakable reference to Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom—was wildly popular, peaking at number two on the New York Times best-seller list. The publication of The Road Ahead in 1949—at a moment when anti-communist hysteria was reaching a fever pitch in the United States and when the Federal Council was also engaged in controversies about segregation and America’s relations with China—meant that Flynn garnered more attention than the Federal Council’s earlier critics. The Road Ahead brought years of simmering controversy out into the open, especially in Flynn’s tenth chapter, which targeted the Federal Council directly.
Flynn was no fundamentalist, but his book built on the work fundamentalists had done in the 1930s. In that decade, dozens of new groups formed to keep tabs on the Federal Council and its ecumenical allies. The most important was the Church League of America, founded in 1937 by Chicago-area businessmen and religious leaders. The Church League had appealed to the FBI to keep track of the Reds in America’s churches. But J. Edgar Hoover rejected these appeals, viewing the Red-baiting accusations as an intramural fight among religious denominations that the government would do best to avoid. So the Church League organized itself as a religious version of the FBI, keeping detailed records of subversive clergy. Like other private intelligence-gathering organizations, including Verne Kaub’s Council of Christian Laymen and Myers G. Lowman’s Circuit Riders Inc., the Church League self-identified as a “laymen’s movement” and took part in the budding fundamentalist-corporate alliance of the era. Headquartered in Wheaton, Illinois, the Church League accumulated three million index cards of information about thousands of religious individuals they suspected of communist activities. The organization publicized its findings in their National Layman’s Digest. The Church League regularly shared information with fundamentalists like Carl McIntire, who wrote scathing books about radical clergy and warned of the communist connections in the Federal Council in his nationally syndicated radio program. When Flynn wrote The Road Ahead in the late 1940s, he did not have to dig deep for information on the Federal Council. He relied on the legwork done by the ecumenists’ theological and corporate opponents.21
Flynn was born in 1882 outside of Washington, DC, to “a good Catholic home.” His Irish-Catholic father, a lawyer, eventually moved the family to New York City, where Flynn continued his parochial school education and attended a small Catholic college, followed by law school at Georgetown University, a Catholic institution. He did not write much about religion before the 1940s, but he did gravitate to the religious socialism of Norman Thomas, who became a good friend. A precocious writer since his teens, Flynn contributed a regular column on economics, called “Other People’s Money,” to the New Republic in the 1930s, in which he regularly lambasted the rich.22 What seems to have turned him rightward were international affairs.23 Flynn became a member of New York’s America First Committee and had spent the wartime years writing screeds against Roosevelt’s foreign policy blunders, from Pearl Harbor to Yalta. After the war he emerged as a full-throated conservative, warning about creeping socialism and the loss of America’s freedom. By the end of his life, according to his biographer, Flynn embraced “an agenda that was virtually identical to that of the John Birch Society.”24
Flynn considered his attack on the Federal Council in The Road Ahead to be just one part of a bigger story of America’s march toward socialism. “My purpose in writing this book,” Flynn explained, “is to attempt to describe the road along which this country is traveling to its destruction.” That road was paved by a creeping socialism promoted by a group of people “more dangerous” than communists, he argued, “because they are more numerous and more respectable and they are not tainted with the odium of treachery.” Flynn called out these socialists, who occupied “positions of power” and who “have in their hands immense sections of our political machinery,” in the hope that it was not too late to change the country’s course.25
Chapter 10 of The Road Ahead focused on the clergy who occupied positions of power in the Federal Council of Churches. Flynn argued that since the 1932 “Social Ideals of the Churches,” the Federal Council had supported socialism. The organization had repeatedly praised cooperatives, applauded federal interference in the economy, criticized capitalism, and argued on behalf of collectivism. And he showed that leading ecumenical thinkers approved of many parts of the Soviet economy and that they believed the United States had much to learn from the USSR. These accusations had a grain of truth to them, even if Flynn exaggerated their implications.
Flynn singled out G. Bromley Oxnam and John C. Bennett, who had long been targets of fundamentalist critics. Flynn accused Oxnam of mingling with “strange companions” at the Massachusetts Council for American-Soviet Friendship and in the Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. Flynn was more fair-minded about what the evidence gathered against Oxnam revealed than other critics had been. “There is no point in calling him a Communist,” Flynn counseled his readers. “He is a Socialist.”26 But to Flynn, this made Oxnam even more dangerous.
With his best-selling book of 1949, Flynn joined a wide chorus of critics attacking the clergy in the name of the laity. Flynn astutely identified the gap between the leaders of the Federal Council and the majority of churchgoers. Flynn quoted what he called John Bennett’s “profound confession” in Bennett’s 1948 book, Christianity and Communism: “The rank and file of Christians, still in considerable measure represent the conventional assumptions of their nation or class but what has happened is that the change in thought and commitment on the part of those who exercise leadership has been so marked that the churches are moving in a new direction.”27 “Here is an admission,” Flynn exclaimed, “that these leaders are running away with the machinery of the churches of Christ without the knowledge or approval of the faithful.”28 Flynn went on to praise the efforts of the ecumenists’ least favorite person—Carl McIntire—for his role in creating the American Council of Churches and the International Council of Churches, both of which Flynn claimed were resisting the Federal Council’s tyranny.29 Flynn’s praise for McIntire, along with his use of information gathered by McIntire and other fundamentalists, signaled one part of the alliance he was forming.
The other part of the alliance was with the corporate elite, who welcomed Flynn as an ally against Truman’s economic policies. Flynn’s book was used as a weapon during the political debates over Truman’s universal health-care initiative. Truman had first proposed universal health care in 1945, delivering on a promise in his “Economic Bill of Rights” to make real the “right to adequate protection from economic fears of … sickness.” Among the changes Truman proposed was for all Americans to join a single insurance pool. “This is not socialized medicine,” the president insisted in a speech that hardly satisfied critics.30
Corporate opponents of Truman’s health-care plan were eager to ally themselves with Flynn. For example, the anti–New Deal “Committee for Constitutional Government, Inc.” distributed Flynn’s book at a discount to “all physicians, dentists, nurses, all in teaching professions, [and] clergymen.” The American Medical Association sent a copy of the book to every member of Congress. One congressman from western New York even sent the book as a Christmas gift to some of his supporters. By the end of 1949, The Road Ahead had sold a total of two million copies, and an additional four million copies were read the following year when an abridged version was published by Reader’s Digest, where Stanley High, another vocal critic of the Federal Council, worked as an editor.31 Flynn acted as a bridge between the fundamentalist mobilization against the theological and political liberalism of the Federal Council and the corporate mobilization against the New Deal.
The Federal Council had previously responded to attacks by discrediting its opponents. In 1944, for example, it published a pamphlet defending itself from attacks by fundamentalists like McIntire by pointing out how many of their opponents “have been associated either with anti-Semitic or pro-Fascist groups, or both.” The organization urged Americans to disregard the wartime attacks because “the unity of the nation is involved.”32
Responding to Flynn required more subtlety. Bennett was one of the accused in Flynn’s book, and he wrote a memorandum to Federal Council leaders defending himself and the organization. Bennett was defiant in the face of Flynn’s criticism: “I am not sorry to have Mr. Flynn as an opponent and I do not regret the company in which he has placed me.” Bennett insisted that Flynn misrepresented his positions and was either “careless beyond excuse” or “deliberately unfair.” After showing where his words had been abridged or distorted, Bennett challenged Flynn’s assertion that Bennett’s emphasis had been entirely on the virtues of socialism. Bennett showed that his books included praise for aspects of capitalism that he believed “should find a place in any future economic system.” These included the seriousness given to the problem of incentives, the encouragement of “many different centers of economic initiative,” and the need to have part of the economy “left to automatic forms of regulation.” But Bennett knew this would not satisfy Flynn, who viewed socialism and capitalism as polar opposites. Bennett continued to insist “that we should move toward an economy which might, from one point of view, seem to be a revised Capitalism, and from another point of view, a revised Socialism.”33
The Federal Council’s response to Flynn’s attacks was one of the few times that the organization had to defend itself so publicly and so directly. Unlike Bennett, the Federal Council stayed away from the specifics of economic policy and instead presented itself as a moderate organization that promoted reasonable ideas. In a pamphlet titled The Truth About the Federal Council of Churches, its leaders insisted that it was an institution focused on education and evangelism, not on politics.34 But it was clear that ecumenical leaders felt vulnerable and this had to do with the uncomfortable truth about the clergy-laity gap in values that Flynn had made public. “I recognize that Mr. Flynn does point to a real problem in Protestantism,” Bennett admitted.35 Catholicism does not share this problem, Bennett suggested, because clergy face few restrictions in espousing religious positions on controversial issues. For Protestants it was not that simple. Ministers and preachers had no special privilege in the interpretation of religious teachings, and yet their beliefs differed so much from those of churchgoers. Bennett believed simultaneously in the seriousness of theological understanding, which took years of training and study, and in the necessity of lay leadership and participation, which had been increasing in recent years. And because Bennett did not believe in biblical literalism, he could not cite lines from scripture as a straightforward guide to Christian economics in the way that evangelicals sometimes did. There was no clear way out of the dilemma for Bennett, except to continue the ambiguity of the clergy-laity relationship.
Bennett’s answer to Flynn’s criticism instead highlighted the reasons why Bennett thought the ideas of the laity should not be taken as gospel. Bennett had long been accustomed to staking out positions that were deeply unpopular with churchgoers, whether defending Japanese Americans during wartime incarceration or promoting left-of-center economic views. “It is too easy for Protestant Churches to reflect the prevailing opinion in the community rather than the convictions that have a distinctively Christian basis,” Bennett warned. Controversial issues cannot be resolved by “majority vote,” he insisted, and in that sense the “Protestant Churches are not democratic.” Instead, “leaders in theology and in ethical thinking” should continue to push the churches to change, as long as their “guidance” is “distinctively Christian” and “comes from the revelation of God in Christ and in the historic teaching of the Church.” While publicly espousing the democratic and inclusive nature of Protestant institutions, ecumenical leaders like Bennett defended their authority by stressing their unique ability to distinguish between “secular” and “Christian” beliefs.36
The significance of Flynn’s attacks was not in the ideas his book presented but in the publicity those ideas received and in the bridges Flynn built between fundamentalists and corporate executives. The theological disagreements of the fundamentalist and ecumenical traditions stretched back decades and by 1949 had taken on an economic character. Flynn publicized these intramural fights to the public at large. The Road Ahead became one of the vehicles in which decades of fundamentalist criticisms were delivered to the American public. That Flynn’s book was published at a moment when the Federal Council was already under siege from segregationists, communist hunters, and conservative business leaders made the impact of the work even greater. Economics became one of many fault lines in an American Protestantism that mixed theological and political concerns, and which weakened some alliances and strengthened others. While Flynn’s book did little to dissuade Bennett and others from their economic views, it did raise difficult questions about the clergy-laity gap and foreshadowed the new alignment of the political Right.
The Laymen’s War on the Protestant Left
The Federal Council managed to weather Flynn’s attack by being more cautious about their economic pronouncements and by accelerating their earlier project of getting more of the laity involved in the organization’s activities. As the Federal Council transformed into the National Council of Churches in late 1950, it continued to tout prominent laypersons, like John Foster Dulles and Charles P. Taft, as proof of the organization’s moderation. In the early 1950s the National Council of Churches’ activism was inhibited as warring factions of laity and clergy battled for control of the new organization. But the National Council survived. Nobody on its staff was purged or publicly repudiated. The same leaders carried on under the changed circumstances of the early Cold War.
Other ecumenical Protestant activists were less fortunate. During the late 1940s social action groups—long a haven for leftist activists—came under attack by committees of “laymen” for their alleged promotion of socialism. These attacks culminated in attempted purges in the early 1950s. The fates of the Congregational Council for Social Action (which survived the attacks) and the Methodist Federation for Social Action (which did not) show that a rightward turn in American ecumenical Protestantism occurred in the early 1950s but that the growing conservatism was only part of the story.
The Council for Social Action had to defend itself from the moment of its formation in 1934, when the Congregationalist denomination mobilized to fight the injustices brought on by the Great Depression. The council was created to be the brain trust of Congregationalism as well as its political arm. At the 1934 meeting where Congregationalist leaders voted to form the council, they also voted to denounce the “profit motive,” which set off conservative wrath, especially by an organized laymen’s group from Minneapolis.37 These laymen believed that the council had been created to fight the profit motive, but their protests fell on deaf ears during the Great Depression. The Council for Social Action, under the leadership of John C. Bennett and Liston Pope, went to work and emerged during World War II as a sophisticated political lobbying group and a major force within its denomination.38
The Minneapolis laymen nevertheless continued their attacks on the Council for Social Action, and by the early 1950s they had incorporated themselves as the nationwide “Committee Opposing Congregational Political Action.” Minneapolis had long been a home for fundamentalists, and after World War II it became a refuge for evangelicals. The founder of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, William B. Riley, was the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Minneapolis and the president of nearby Northwestern College. Billy Graham, the scion of evangelicalism, took over Northwestern College in 1948, and, two years later, he located the headquarters of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in Minneapolis.
The Committee Opposing Congregational Political Action purported to oppose any kind of politics by official Congregational bodies, and it gained the most support when it played upon the ecclesiastically and politically libertarian inclinations in Congregational life. The conservative group’s most famous member, the Republican congressman from Minneapolis Walter Judd, explained, “I am for both social and political action by Congregational-Christians. I am against political action by the Congregational-Christian church or its official agencies.”39 But the group’s conservative political leanings were transparent. A pamphlet circulating in the early 1950s said that the Council for Social Action “thought our system of government was outmoded; they disliked the American way of doing business, freely, as individuals. Particularly, they did not like people to make profits.” The pamphlet warned its Congregationalist readers that the council “has suggested to Congress that: you are for socialized medicine (compulsory health insurance) … for national regimentation of the economy (full employment bill, peacetime price control and rationing),” and it went on to accuse the group of promoting socialism and associating with communists.40
The Council for Social Action worried about its critics, and it tried to stave off a confrontation by carrying out an internal audit. Its leaders heard testimony from opposing sides of the debate about the role of the state in the economy. Russell J. Clinchy represented the libertarian strand of the Congregationalist tradition, and his testimony was made more compelling by his role in helping found the council. He supported anti-poverty programs when they were done on a voluntary basis but balked at the statism of the New Deal.41 “I believe that a great mistake has been made during the past 15 years in allowing the responsibility of persons and of private agencies in the fields of social welfare to be taken over into the functions of the secular state,” he argued. It was quite clear to him that Protestantism taught individual responsibility through and through, and that transferring responsibility to the state was undermining this religious insight. The kind of collectivism the Council for Social Action advocated was not what Clinchy had signed up for.42
Another member of the Council for Social Action, Buell G. Gallagher, argued instead that “condemnation of the activities of the so-called ‘secular’ agencies which are ‘invading the province of the Church’ might legitimately be directed toward the institutions of religion.” The state took over, he explained, because churches were not doing enough. Gallagher argued that Protestants should embrace all projects that are “of the essence of religious values,” even if they are pursued by secular organizations. After all, “Who shall say that the Spirit has not been at work” in government efforts against poverty?43
The most forceful backer of Congregational political action was longtime council member Bennett. His retort to Clinchy was short. Acknowledging the risk of state tyranny, he nonetheless focused on corporate tyranny. Christian freedom was not the same thing as “the freedom of the strong to control the community in their own interests.” In other words, while Clinchy worried about the rise of state power, Bennett saw both state and corporate power as twin threats to the human person, both capable of wreaking havoc on the lives of Americans and both in need of restraint. If anything, he argued, corporate power is a greater threat than the power of government because government is at least nominally controlled by the will of the people.44
Despite Bennett’s defense, conservatives convinced enough Congregationalists that the Council for Social Action was acting too politically, and by 1952 there was sufficient pressure to force an investigation of the council. A nine-person committee—three from the council, three from the Committee Opposing Congregational Political Action (from Minneapolis and from a Los Angeles auxiliary led by James Fifield), and three “neutral” members—heard testimony and reviewed the actions of the Council for Social Action. Gallagher was among the supporters of the group, while Congressman Judd joined the critics. The neutral party included the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, the president of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and the head of the YMCA.45
The investigators wrestled with the same questions about democracy, representation, and the clergy-laity relationship that had plagued the Federal and National Councils. The big question was whether the Council for Social Action ought to speak on behalf of its denomination at congressional hearings or in the courts when churchgoers were divided on an issue. The investigators gave a muddled answer. The Congregational Council for Social Action should continue to be an effective witness for its denomination’s social and political interests, the investigators concluded, but the organization needed to be careful about how it did so. Sometimes the council should speak out on behalf of “ends” but be careful about supporting specific “means” to those ends. It “should be extremely cautious in linking the denomination to any particular program.” Similarly, “when it lobbies it should do so with a complete sense of its responsibility to the churches and should not take a partisan position on matters on which the churches are not substantially united.”46 The investigation raised important questions about religious politics but largely avoided answering them with any clarity. And despite words of caution, the investigators found no reason to change the organization’s mandate or its personnel.
The report was signed unanimously, but it was clear that Congressman Judd was incensed. Judd urged the denomination to revoke the council’s mandate of “cultivation of public opinion” and the group’s ability to “on occasion intercede directly in specific situations.” The council, Judd believed, should focus on talking to the churches, not the general public, and should be expressly forbidden from advocating any political positions. He added that the Washington office of the group, which regularly lobbied Congress, should be closed. The staff should be fired and replaced (“engage new personnel,” he advised), and the group should be defunded and forced to rely on voluntary contributions.47 In other words, Judd wanted the council to do nothing beyond presenting information to the local churches, and he wanted it to pay its own way. He was not opposed to Christian action per se but insisted that those who engaged in it should first disassociate themselves from church titles, like he did when he ran for Congress.
Figure 15. Congressman Walter Judd, right, meeting with Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling, in Taiwan in 1953. Judd was among Chiang’s most fervent supporters. Image courtesy of Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
Unable to sway his own denomination to muzzle its progressive wing, Judd sought out allies among evangelicals. In 1950, he reached out to evangelist Billy Graham, a fellow Minneapolis resident. Judd was good friends with Graham’s father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell, who, like Judd, had been a medical missionary in China. Graham wanted a meeting with Truman, and he asked for Judd’s help. Graham was seeking greater visibility for evangelicals, and he wanted more influence in national politics for his growing religious movement. Judd wrote a letter of introduction to the president on Graham’s behalf, facilitating what would be the evangelist’s first of decades of visits to the White House. Graham obliged Judd, his patron, by reporting back that he had spoken to Truman about the fate of China—the issue closest to Judd’s heart. “I brought up the Far Eastern situation,” Graham assured Judd. Meeting with Truman just weeks after the start of the Korean War, Graham reported that “I urged [Truman] to total mobilization, pointing out that the Bible often implies that we should be prepared for war at any time.”48 It appeared that evangelicals were much more cooperative political partners than members of Judd’s own denomination.
The same commitments that led Judd to oppose the Council for Social Action and to work with evangelicals also led him to oppose a denominational merger the Congregationalists were planning. Since the late 1940s, the Congregationalists had been in talks to merge with the Evangelical and Reformed denomination, a German American denomination that had over time lost much of its ethnic character. The eventual merger of these two denominations, one from the Congregational tradition and one from the Reformed tradition, was widely seen as an expression of ecumenism and a herald of a postdenominational Christian future. Despite Judd’s opposition, the “organic union” was consummated in 1957, after years of setbacks and lawsuits, when the two groups merged and created the United Church of Christ.49
Judd’s Committee Opposing Congregational Political Action reemerged as the League to Uphold Congregational Principles in the battle against the merger. Judd worried that the union would lead to greater centralization in the new denomination and more political action. For Judd, the Congregationalists were loosely affiliated individual churches that came together regularly to make joint decisions, like funding missionary endeavors. But in the Congregational tradition, individual churches were the ultimate judges of doctrine and politics. For Judd, there was hardly a “Congregationalism” to speak of. This was “the principle of decentralization,” a principle that “is the foundation of our American form of government,” Judd claimed. He did not see the necessity of organic union, by which he meant the merger of the two denominations into one. There were other means of cooperating that would leave the radical decentralization of Congregationalism intact, he insisted.50
Just before the creation of the United Church of Christ, a group of about 100,000 Congregationalists broke away and formed their own denomination, which they called the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches. Judd threw his support to this new denomination, which remained officially apolitical in the ensuing years and focused instead on missionary work and conversion.51 Theological considerations had propelled Judd to oppose the political mobilization of Congregationalists and, by the late 1950s, the political battles in his denomination led him to vigorously oppose ecumenism. For nearly a decade, Judd had tried to stop the political activism of Congregationalists. Although he did not succeed, he managed to create a major rift within the denomination, causing it to lose 100,000 members. In the process, he created new alliances with the evangelical movement.
The Laymen’s War on “Methodism’s Pink Fringe”
The Congregational Council for Social Action survived the turmoil of the 1950s, but the Methodist Federation for Social Action, a left-leaning group that underwent a similar attack, did not fare as well. It was an ironic outcome, given the decentralized ecclesiology of Congregationalists and the greater tolerance for hierarchy and authority among Methodists. The Methodist Federation for Social Action was much older than its Congregationalist cousin, having been founded in 1908, when the Methodist Church and the Federal Council had adopted the “Social Creed of the Churches.” This social gospel group was a voluntary one, officially unaffiliated with the denomination, freeing it to pursue more radical activism. But the federation enjoyed privileges from the denomination, including the use of office space in the denomination’s New York City headquarters. And its membership included many leading Methodists.52
Having been closely tied to Harry F. Ward’s pro-Soviet policies during the 1930s, the organization transformed during World War II, refocusing on the problem of racism while maintaining a leftist approach to economic policy. Local affiliates had accused the Methodist Federation of not doing enough to fight segregation. “It is said that the Communists and Labor Unions succeed better than Christians in divesting their thoughts and actions of all traces of race prejudice,” one local group charged. In response, the Methodist Federation desegregated its locals across the country in 1945. By the end of that year the group even organized an unsegregated local in Alabama, which quickly mobilized against the poll tax in the state.53
Despite a long history of activism, it was not until a meeting in Kansas City in 1947, which was documented in a series of exposé-style articles in the New York World-Telegram by communist hunter and Pulitzer Prize winner Frederick Woltman, that serious trouble began. The meeting was addressed by Harry Ward and Jerome Davis, both of whom had faced accusations of communist sympathy. At that meeting, the federation made history by electing Bishop Robert Nathaniel Brooks as president, the first African American to hold the position.54 But the exposé focused instead on the allegedly communistic ideas and affiliations of the participants. Chinese general Feng Yuxiang, known popularly as the “Christian general” for his zealous efforts to promote the religion among his troops, denounced Chiang Kai-shek at the Methodist meeting, referring to the embattled Chinese president as “cruel and unscrupulous.”55 The Methodist organization responded by calling on the United States to withdraw all military aid and all missionaries from China, and for both the United States and the USSR to withdraw troops from the Korean peninsula and hold elections there. They also attacked the emerging Judeo-Christian Cold War coalition, urging the United States to “decline the call of the ‘holy war’ being preached by the Vatican,” and arguing that “freedom of religion has been eliminated in Spain and many other fascist or Catholic countries, while there is freedom of religion in Russia.”56
The ensuing controversy played out within the Methodist Church along the fault lines already emerging, with those who supported anti-communism, laissez-faire capitalism, and segregation emerging as the federation’s biggest critics. White southerners were especially incensed. A Houston, Texas, pastor’s conference unanimously condemned the Methodist Federation and called the federation’s ideas “atheistic communism.”57 The drama played out as far away as California, where the state’s Joint Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities (a state-level HUAC) condemned the federation as one of the “conspicuous fronts for Communist activity.”58
The federation’s leaders defended their actions, as did several prominent Methodist bishops, who spoke out against the Red-baiting attacks. Some blamed the Catholic Church for inflaming tensions. Black Methodist leaders, who recognized the importance of the federation’s anti-racist activism, blasted the “false and immoral report of the New York World Telegram and other Scripps-Howard newspapers.”59
Opponents of the Methodist Federation tried to censure the organization in 1948 at the national Methodist gathering, and again in 1950, but with little luck.60 In 1950, however, the charges of communism were revived by Stanley High, who published an article in Reader’s Digest called “Methodism’s Pink Fringe.” High revived many of the familiar charges, bolstered by information he received from J. B. Matthews, who had worked for the Dies Committee and would soon become Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man.61 Now millions of Americans were reading about the alleged communist sympathies of the Methodist Federation.
A wealthy attorney for a Texas oil company named Clarence Lohman, who was also a prominent layman in Houston, used the sensation created by Reader’s Digest to translate outrage into a purge of Reds in the Methodist churches. That was his hope for the new organization he founded in late 1950, which he called “The Committee for the Preservation of Methodism.” This group wanted “to cleanse the churches as McCarthy is cleansing the government,” he explained.62 Frustrated by the clergy’s unwillingness to disavow the leftist federation, in 1951 Lohman organized a conference of laymen in Chicago, and out of this meeting came the “Circuit Riders, Inc.,” a name that recalled American Methodism’s beginnings of itinerant preachers spreading the gospel across the country on horseback. The organization was headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and headed by Myers G. Lowman, who styled the group after the Church League of America and other imitators of the FBI. The new Circuit Riders were spreading the gospel of anti-communism in Methodist churches from coast to coast.
Lowman finally brought down the Methodist Federation by getting the government involved. He lobbied the State of Georgia’s House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate the Methodist Federation. Georgia’s HUAC produced an eighty-eight-page report called Review of the Methodist Federation for Social Action, which the Circuit Riders distributed in support of their accusations.63 In 1952 the Circuit Riders finally succeeded in censuring the federation, something others had tried to do for decades. The federation was asked to stop using the name “Methodist” and to leave its office space in the Methodist building in midtown Manhattan. The move also put pressure on clergy to disaffiliate from the organization and to abandon its leaders. Crushed organizationally, the group carried on with a skeleton staff, not recovering until 1960, when it returned to New York.64 It was a crushing blow for the Methodist Left.
That was not the end of the story, however. The same clergy that censured the Methodist Federation also created an official denominational social action group to take over many of the functions of the federation. Its official status and denominational funding ensured that the new group would not go too far afield in its politics. And yet, it also meant that, like most other ecumenical Protestant denominations, the politics of the Methodist clergy had a political outlet and that the denomination would stake out political positions in an official capacity. The “laymen” were able to make a public showing of their opposition to leftist ideas, but their anti-ecumenical and Christian libertarian impulses failed to produce the results they hoped for. If anything, the trial of the Methodist Federation for Social Action only led to the expansion of the denomination’s clerical bureaucracy. The Methodist Left was clearly wounded, but Methodist liberalism continued to thrive and the political mobilization of ecumenical Protestantism carried on even during the trying years of the early Cold War.
The Failed Laymen’s Takeover of the National Council and the Drift Toward Evangelicalism
The mixed results that laymen achieved in their fight against the clergy’s views on the economy, segregation, and foreign relations came at a moment when the National Council was advocating the “Responsible Society” as a middle way between capitalism and communism. In the wake of the 1950 Detroit conference, where the new ideology made its US debut, conservatives reevaluated their strategy of opposition to the newly created National Council. Oil magnate J. Howard Pew, the self-described “fundamentalist,” had been bankrolling James Fifield’s anti-statist organization, Spiritual Mobilization, and had recently helped finance the conservative Christian Freedom Foundation, which sent its journal, Christian Economics, for free to 175,000 ministers. Like other conservatives, Pew had failed to stop ecumenical Protestant economic reform efforts at Detroit. He now decided he would try to stop them by attempting to gain control of the National Council of Churches.65
The National Council had its own reasons for wanting to work with Pew. It continued to desire the legitimacy that arose from working with the laity, and it wanted to shield itself from Red-baiting by parading its conservative members. The National Council also felt confident in its ability to work with businessmen following the successful Detroit conference. It also wanted to enhance its prestige and access to power—both elements that Pew could provide. Finally, the National Council needed money. After all, it was the biggest Protestant organization of the time, with dozens of institutions to fund and countless new ventures to launch. Pew was happy to provide money to the organization, but he made clear that his connections and his pocketbook came with strings attached.66
Pew agreed to chair the National Council’s new National Lay Committee, which was designed to fulfill the hopes of Oxnam and Horton for greater participation of the laity in ecumenical affairs. The new committee would help to guide the National Council and to fundraise for the organization. While the National Council’s Department of Church and Economic Life was balanced between representatives from labor unions and corporations, “laity” in this case meant the participation of Protestantism’s wealthiest churchgoers. Pew insisted, and the National Council agreed, that he appoint all of the nearly two hundred members of the lay committee, which he filled mostly with very conservative businessmen and a few moderate members of the American Federation of Labor.
Pew’s most audacious demand was that the National Lay Committee have absolute autonomy and the ability to censor National Council statements, something National Council leaders never agreed to. At the first meeting of his new committee, Pew unilaterally announced to the group that its members would have the power to review all National Council proclamations before they went to the General Council (the successor to the Federal Council’s Executive Committee and the organization’s highest authority, consisting of representatives from member denominations). Appalled by this threat of censorship, Oxnam urged his fellow church leaders to “dare not set a precedent which in any way gives to a group of men not in the organization and not chosen by the churches the right to review, directly or indirectly, the pronouncements of a great church.”67 After a several-month inquiry, a compromise was reached, whereby ten Lay Committee members would join the National Council’s General Council without voting privileges. In the ensuing years, the relationship between the Lay Committee and the National Council developed: Corporate donations rose by 60 percent, and Lay Committee members gained prominent positions within the sprawling National Council bureaucracy.68
Pew’s push to silence the National Council’s economic pronouncements coincided with attacks on social action groups, with McCarthyism, the Korean War, and a rapidly growing economy, all of which inclined the organization to moderate its proclamations. Lacking formal power, Pew repeatedly threatened to withdraw his sizable personal contributions and to shut off the stream of donations he had facilitated. The National Council’s leadership tried placating him by agreeing to limit the number of their proclamations, by creating a “screening committee” to watch over the Department of Church and Economic Life’s statements, and by occasionally censuring department head Cameron Hall over his close relationship with unions. As Elizabeth Fones-Wolf observes, “business leaders played an important role in helping to silence an important segment of the religious community and to prod the institutions of the church in more moderate directions.”69 However, even by this point, many economic ideas that had been controversial in the 1930s and 1940s had already become orthodoxy. In 1953 the ecumenists began pushing back against Pew’s committee, either by issuing proclamations as individuals or by simply ignoring Pew. The following year, he was no longer able to stop National Council calls for more government intervention in the economy, for federal aid to education, and for more public housing. Pew, unwilling to accept overtures of compromise from moderates, allowed the Lay Committee to die in 1955.70
Following the collapse of the Lay Committee, Pew redoubled his efforts on behalf of evangelicals. He had already invested money into the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary, but now he financed the 1956 launch of Christianity Today, which served as the main platform for evangelical views, and he helped Billy Graham become the new face of US Protestantism by financially backing the broadcasts of his New York City revivals in 1957.71 From the very beginning, Christianity Today took a conservative attitude toward the power of unions and the reach of the government. Evangelicals did not yet see themselves as part of a broader conservative movement in the 1950s, but the emerging network of donors they cultivated and the alliances they created in opposition to their ecumenical counterparts moved them in conservative directions. According to Molly Worthen, “Despite Carl Henry’s 1947 manifesto decrying fundamentalists’ neglect of social justice, he and the other editors toed the conservative line on every significant political and theological issue from foreign policy and civil rights to evolution and the ecumenical movement” in the 1950s.72
In one of the first issues of Christianity Today, the magazine’s editors attacked the power of labor unions. They also decidedly stood against “the plea for more foreign economic aid and for expanded welfare programs at home” because of the “coercive element” involved in taxation. Signaling that there was now a new voice in American Protestantism, the magazine declared, “even if influential Protestant clergymen during the past generation tried to make collectivism out to be Christian, and Capitalism satanic, they were false prophets. By their proclamations they revealed that they misunderstood Christianity, and that their devotion to the writings of Marx ran deeper than their fidelity to the Hebrew-Christian Scriptures.” The editors proclaimed, “Capitalism is biblical.”73 The rise of evangelicalism, signaled by the ascendancy of Graham and Christianity Today, benefited from the growing rift between clergy and laity in ecumenical churches. Focused in their opposition to the ecumenical “false prophets,” evangelicals cultivated alliances with corporate leaders, helping pave the way for the rise of the religious Right later in the twentieth century.74
Toward the Great Society
Just as evangelicals were finding their voice on economic matters, ecumenical Protestants proceeded down two separate tracks. Oxnam, Bennett, and other clergy began to once again call for an end to poverty and to proclaim their support for the Responsible Society. Their efforts would come to fruition in the 1960s in the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. Charles P. Taft, by contrast, influenced laymen to support a moderate program that led to the modest reforms of the Eisenhower years.
With Pew gone, Taft promoted the laity as a bastion of moderation standing between the radicalism of some clergy and the reactionary politics of the National Association of Manufacturers. Speaking in 1956, Taft, the National Council’s best-known layman, recounted the brief history of Christian laypersons’ economic thought. The liberal Republican began with the 1937 Oxford conference, where he, “a very green and ignorant young lawyer,” had first joined the ecumenical movement. In 1947, the Federal Council had held a laity-dominated study conference at Pittsburgh and soon after created the new Department of Church and Economic Life, which Taft headed. He skipped over the 1948 meeting of the World Council of Churches, which introduced the Responsible Society (the meeting was dominated by clergy, after all), and instead went on to discuss the 1950 gathering in Detroit and a laypersons’ meeting in Buffalo in 1952. Thanks to these “gatherings of laymen with their professional advisers,” Taft said, “the churches have a reservoir of know-how and a far greater concern for what keeps laymen awake at nights.” After the tug-of-war between clergy and laity for much of the 1940s and early 1950s, Taft concluded in 1956 that Christian economics were in the safe hands of those responsible men who, unlike clergy, had a realistic sense of how the economy works.75
Taft overstated the victory of the laity over the clergy, which still held tremendous sway over economic ideas in the United States. With the departure of Pew from the National Council, the organization’s leaders once again issued broad pronouncements on economic policy that made nationwide headlines. And clergy could still hold forth on economic matters from tens of thousands of pulpits across the country. As important, Taft’s maneuvering was a triumph for a certain kind of Christian economics, one that had little use for the Christian libertarianism of Pew, Judd, Flynn, and High. Taft supported the economic moderation of President Eisenhower, who refused to deliver on the Republican Party’s promise, first made in 1936, to dismantle the New Deal. It had been so controversial for so long, but its acceptance by Eisenhower and Taft signaled that it had achieved mainstream status among some of the laity as well as the clergy.
During the second half of the 1950s, conflict ensued between Taft and the clergy. Taft would not entertain Christian libertarianism, but he also rejected the more ambitious reform efforts to tame corporate power and implement economic democracy. Meanwhile, Bennett and Oxnam continued to push to limit economic inequality and to give workers a greater say in the operation of industry. But these disagreements never reached the fever pitch of the 1930s debates about the New Deal or the fights over the Responsible Society in the early 1950s. The thriving economy had a lot to do with the level of civility. High tax rates on the rich and widespread unionization meant that income inequality was at a historic low and worker representation was at an all-time high in the mid-1950s. The stakes appeared to be lower than they had been previously. In this atmosphere, both sides began focusing on raising the conditions of the poorest Americans.
National Council leaders joined other liberal intellectuals in focusing attention on the problems of poverty. The popular economist John Kenneth Galbraith used his 1958 book, The Affluent Society, to direct Americans’ attention away from “the obsolete and contrived preoccupations … rooted in the poverty, inequality and economic peril of the past” and toward the problems which arise from an affluent economy.76 The Catholic socialist writer Michael Harrington complained that all this talk of affluence masked the persistent poverty of Americans being left behind in a thriving economy. “While this discussion was carried on, there existed another America,” he wrote in his best-selling book. “In it dwelt somewhere between 40,000,000 and 50,000,000 citizens of this land. They were poor. They still are.”77
National Council leaders likewise emphasized in the mid-1950s the persistence of poverty in an affluent society, a theme proposed by union leader Walter Reuther at the 1950 Detroit conference. In 1956, the National Council held a follow-up conference in Detroit on the theme of “The Christian Conscience and an Economy of Abundance.”78 The conference’s focus helped sway the national dialogue toward the elimination of poverty in the language of human rights. “From the Christian standpoint, a minimum goal for the distribution of abundance is the right of all persons to a reasonable level of living, including food, shelter, clothing, health care, and access to cultural interests,” announced the National Council.79 The United States was leaving “past ages of economic scarcity” and was “entering a new age” in which “enough can be produced to meet the basic needs of man.”80 Many were better off, thanks to the “mixed economy” of the United States, but more needed to be done to “recognize the dignity of each person and each group.” “One-fourth of all families in the United States,” the National Council lamented, “do not share in the general abundance” and earn too little to “sustain a life of health and hope.”81
According to the National Council, the more equal “distribution of income in our country” was profoundly encouraging, and the role of “the labor union” in bringing “some control over the worker’s economic life back into his own hands” was praised. These things remained a source of friction between clergy and laity. “Our group is not agreed upon the extent to which the individual is free to effectively control his own role in the economy and community life,” National Council leaders wrote in 1956. But they agreed on raising the poor up to the standard that Christian human rights and human dignity demanded. Providing a floor for the poor without necessarily providing a ceiling for the rich, an idea Samuel Moyn calls “sufficient provision,” created common ground in the debates over Christian economics.82
This new human rights advocacy closed certain avenues but opened up new ones. The “poverty amid plenty” idea was broad and generative, at least in the United States. To take one example, four years after the 1956 Detroit meeting, a report on East Coast migrant workers conducted by the National Council made its way into a documentary called Harvest of Shame.83 The program was narrated by Edward R. Murrow and was broadcast nationwide the day after Thanksgiving, 1960, on CBS. It was especially poignant because it dramatized conditions laborers had to endure to bring the middle-class viewers the meals they were enjoying. As Americans gathered around the television and ate their Turkey leftovers, they were exposed to the depths of poverty that millions of their fellow citizens continued to endure.
Harvest of Shame was one of the ways that ecumenical Protestant reforms gained traction in the 1960s. By drawing attention to the dissonance between poverty and prosperity, the National Council helped pave the way for the Great Society programs of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. When Johnson called on University of Michigan graduates to help build the Great Society in 1964, he repeated many of the ideas expressed by ecumenical Protestants in the previous decade. It would be “a society where the demands of morality, the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation,” according to Johnson. The Great Society “rests on abundance and liberty for all.”84 Protestant economic debates took a winding path in the 1950s in response to pressure from laypersons and evangelical critics, but the new understanding of Christian human rights still served as a tributary to the liberal economic policies of the Johnson administration in the 1960s.
The clergy-laity gap had several important consequences for the postwar United States. In the short term, it encouraged the National Council to create a platform for Charles Taft, whose efforts helped sustain the so-called consensus politics of the 1950s. But over the long term, the clergy-laity gap widened and transformed into something more than a division within a single religious community. The clergy-laity gap led to the realignment of coalitions and the formation of new partnerships, on the left as well as on the right, which became influential in the ensuing decades. The political mobilization by ecumenical Protestants against poverty reached its apogee in the liberal reforms of the 1960s while also fomenting a conservative, religious backlash that would challenge these initiatives in later years.