A generation of ecumenical Protestant leaders came of age and traveled abroad in the 1920s, rose to power in the 1930s, mobilized during World War II, came under attack during the early Cold War, and shaped the movements of the 1960s. These men and women wielded tremendous influence in their religious community and in liberal politics. Inspired by Protestant globalism, ecumenical Protestants brought their religiously rooted concerns about race, poverty, and foreign relations into the corridors of power and deeply influenced national political debates around these issues. Caged in by a devotion to procedure and consensus, and by many blind spots, their activism shaped both the accomplishments and limits of American liberalism in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
Beginning in the 1960s this generation of leaders passed from the scene. Channing Tobias died in 1961, and G. Bromley Oxnam in 1963. Reinhold Niebuhr passed away in 1971 after years of declining health. Other members of the mid-century ecumenical Protestant elite retired in the 1960s and 1970s but lived into old age. Thelma Stevens retired from service to the United Methodists in 1968 and lived until the age of eighty-eight. Benjamin Mays retired in 1971 from Morehouse College and lived to the age of eighty-nine. John C. Bennett retired in 1970 and lived until the age of ninety-two. Most dramatically, Henry Pitney Van Dusen suffered a stroke in 1970, and, after five years of declining health, he and his wife, Elizabeth Van Dusen, jointly committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. She passed away immediately, while Henry died of related medical complications two weeks later.1 As this generation retired and passed, they relinquished their hold on American ecumenical Protestantism to a younger generation during the 1960s.
The change that this generational turnover brought was unmistakable. Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, for one, identified a “New Breed” of ministers who rejected the position-paper liberalism of their predecessors and embraced the tactics of the protest movements so popular in the 1960s. “In Buffalo, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Chicago, Oakland and dozens of other cities, the New Breed can be found organizing welfare unions, tenants’ councils, rent strikes, and school boycotts,” Cox wrote in 1967. “The Christian churches are now taking the leadership in social change,” observed community organizer Saul Alinsky. There is a “pure flame of passion for justice you find in these young ministers today.”2
Among the best-known members of this new generation was Eugene Carson Blake. He was in his fifties but nonetheless embodied the revolutionary spirit of the age. Already famous for getting arrested while integrating a Baltimore amusement park and for delivering an address at the 1963 March on Washington, Blake soon took his activism to the international arena. As the head of the World Council of Churches, Blake launched the Program to Combat Racism in 1969. This massive human rights mobilization sent $4 million of aid to independence movements and anti-apartheid groups. At a time when Amnesty International refused to sponsor Nelson Mandela as a prisoner of conscience because his organization engaged in violence, Blake’s program unflinchingly sent aid to Marxist rebels, including Mandela’s African National Congress.3 The Program to Combat Racism was a response to the worldwide “revolution” ecumenical Protestants had diagnosed and an attempt at overcoming the Cold War divide. It was just one measure of how radical some members of this community had become by the 1960s.
The earlier developments in the ecumenical Protestant milieu chronicled in this book shaped the 1960s-era movements against racism, poverty, and colonialism. Ecumenical Protestants also helped popularize human rights in the postwar world, among both civil society groups and governments. In the 1960s, countries in the Global South adopted the language of human rights in debates at the United Nations. The countries’ diplomats understood human rights as interweaving race and religion, much like American ecumenical Protestants.4 Indeed, in the 1960s most Americans experienced human rights rhetoric as a condemnation of Jim Crow from people living abroad, which helped sway the federal government to back desegregation.5 The language of human rights also permeated the church-based civil rights movement in the United States.6 Beginning in the 1960s, veterans of the civil rights movement and activists in ecumenical Protestant organizations, especially missionaries and members of the Christian peace movements, began to take governmental positions and to staff secular NGOs that advocated for human rights. Ecumenical Protestants helped create new human rights organizations like the Washington Office on Latin America and the Committee for Human Rights in Korea. Ecumenical Protestants also swelled the ranks of these organizations.7 Moreover, the promotion of human rights by ecumenical leaders to their Protestant communities in the 1950s, when such ideas otherwise dropped out of the national conversation, helped make human rights “an everyday vernacular” language by the 1960s and 1970s.8 In both organization and popularization, ecumenical Protestantism was a critical part of the ascendancy of human rights by the time the Carter administration incorporated them into US foreign policy in the late 1970s.
Human rights serve as an example of how ecumenical Protestant activism, from the 1920s to the 1960s, transformed American liberalism—but it is only one of many. American ecumenical Protestant institutions served as gateways to a variety of progressive causes, including those that fought racism and poverty, and criticized American foreign policy. Historians have underplayed the contributions of ecumenical Protestants to these movements partly because religious actors sometimes worked outside the boundaries of church-based organizations. Increasingly, Americans who grew up in the ecumenical Protestant milieu found ways of expressing their political commitments outside the confines of their religious communities. And religiously motivated people, who continued to affiliate with ecumenical denominations, became more comfortable working with, or for, secular political organizations in the 1960s. From the 1920s to the 1960s, American ecumenical Protestants transformed American politics as Protestants working through Protestant institutions. But even after the 1960s many “post-Protestants”—those shaped by a Protestant upbringing but who no longer associated with religious organizations—ensured that ecumenical Protestant values endured into the late twentieth century and into our own day.9
Although ecumenical Protestants had addressed racial, economic, and international problems from the 1920s to the 1960s, critics from the left argued that it was not enough. Younger ecumenical Protestants, in particular, criticized organizations like the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches for not following through on their many proclamations. A torrent of criticism of the “middle way” and “middle axioms” emerged from grassroots activists. And Protestant leaders from the Global South criticized the ideology of “globalism,” which had underwritten ecumenical Protestant activism from the 1930s into the 1960s.10 Globalism minimized the controversial issues of decolonization and the rise of American power, and sometimes presented the United Nations as a panacea. But foreign and domestic critics urged American ecumenical Protestant leaders to wholeheartedly back anti-colonial movements, to welcome marginalized voices into positions of power, and to abandon their working relationship with the US state. To be relevant in the modern world, religion must “speak truth to power” instead of working with it, wrote a group of activists that included Bayard Rustin and A. J. Muste.11 Others criticized the decades-long quest to find a middle ground between liberal activists and conservative churchgoers. Critics argued that ecumenical Protestant leaders ought to choose justice over consensus.
Although many of these newly empowered activists were indebted to the ecumenical tradition, they nonetheless criticized the National Council of Churches as a moribund bureaucracy too embedded in the structures of American power to witness effectively on behalf of social justice. Students at Union Theological Seminary, located on New York’s Upper West Side, staged sit-ins at the school in May 1969. Soon the sit-ins spread one block west to Riverside Church, the cathedral of ecumenical Protestantism. Just one block south, a months-long occupation began in the Interchurch Center. Students demonstrated in the offices of the United Presbyterians, the United Methodists, the United Church of Christ, and the National Council of Churches itself.12 A year earlier, student delegates at the meeting of the World Council of Churches had staged a sit-in, demanding the organization do more to combat poverty and racial injustice.13
Many of these critics voiced the theology of revolution, a tradition that emerged within the ecumenical Protestant milieu. In this way, the passionate criticism by ecumenical Protestant youths of the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches built upon the work and activism of their elders. The YMCAs and YWCAs, the Student Christian Movement, the National Council of Churches, and the World Council of Churches—along with university campuses, neighborhood organizations, and civil rights groups—became places where radical politics could find expression, encouragement, and sometimes wield tremendous influence. Institutionally and ideologically, the mid-century ecumenical leadership and the more activist generation of the 1960s were more entangled than either group was willing to admit. Each one, in their own ways, would bring about important changes to the Left-liberal tradition in the United States and to American politics.
The Lasting Legacy of Religious Fault Lines
The new spirit of activism intensified divisions among American Protestants in the 1960s and 1970s along the fault lines that emerged in earlier decades. While protests and sit-ins worsened generational divides and intensified the rift between liberals and the Left, still more criticism came from the Right. Political conservatives, evangelicals, the laity, and many southerners grew increasingly alarmed as the National Council of Churches encouraged protests against the Vietnam War, segregation, and poverty with unprecedented vigor. Meanwhile, the World Council of Churches turned sharply against colonialism. The gap in values between ecumenical leaders and ordinary churchgoers became extraordinarily wide. One mid-1960s poll, which was gleefully promoted by evangelicals, reported that “on civil rights, 67 percent of [National Council of Churches general] assembly delegates thought change was proceeding too slowly, whereas 70 percent of average Americans thought it was going too fast.” The gap was as wide for the Vietnam War. Fifty-two percent of National Council of Churches delegates wanted US troops withdrawn from Vietnam, but only 18 percent of Americans did. In fact, 55 percent of Americans advocated increased bombings in Vietnam, according to the poll. Most devastatingly, it appeared that Protestants who attended church regularly were more conservative on these issues than Americans who rarely went to religious services.14
By the 1970s and 1980s, gender and sexuality became a more pressing issue and drove a wedge between ecumenical Protestants, the laity, and evangelicals. Ecumenical leaders had never championed women’s rights with the same intensity as they had the United Nations or desegregation. But they had lent support for birth control, sex education, and sometimes even spoke up in support of interracial marriage. After the rise of feminism in the 1960s, and especially the legalization of abortion following the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, gender became an intensely debated topic among ecumenical Protestants. The role of women in church and family life, abortion, the AIDS epidemic, and homosexuality became some of the most pressing and divisive issues for ecumenical Protestant leaders. Like the political controversies at mid-century, the fault lines were similar, with ecumenical leaders largely accommodating the demands of feminists and LGBTQ groups, while evangelicals made the patriarchal heterosexual family and opposition to abortion the hallmarks of their political identity. The big difference at the end of the twentieth century, compared to earlier decades, was that many Protestants in the Global South supported a conservative line on gender and stood against the liberal leadership of ecumenical Protestant denominations. The more recent debates about gay clergy led to the split of the United Methodist Church, a further blow to the ecumenical movement. New York Methodist bishop Thomas Bickerton woefully observed in 2020 that “the line in the sand” over homosexuality “had turned into a canyon.”15
For ecumenical Protestant leaders, political and theological divisions were exacerbated by demographic changes in their churches. Among the most significant of these changes was the exodus of youths from ecumenical churches and the aging of their congregations. Some Protestant youths, who turned further to the left than their elders, remained faithful members of their denominations.16 But, beginning in the 1960s, and accelerating in the following decades, many ecumenical Protestant youths left their denominations altogether. They were shaped by the values promoted by national Protestant leaders but did not find those values expressed in their home churches. Many young activists sought out secular groups, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or Amnesty International, which better expressed their religiously motivated ethical commitments to human rights than did Methodist, Congregationalist, or Presbyterian churches. Others, encouraged by the religious pluralism promoted by ecumenical institutions, explored other outlets for their faith or simply stopped believing. Although they were shaped by the values and politics of ecumenical Protestantism, some of these young people left the churches in which they grew up and never returned.17
Evangelicals held on to their young members, at least for a time, and Catholic churches were replenished by immigrants, while ecumenical Protestant denominations began shrinking in the late 1960s. The term “mainline Protestant” came into use in the 1960s and quickly became synonymous with “decline.”18 To the present day, these congregations are growing smaller and older with each passing year. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2014 ecumenical Protestants (which Pew calls “mainline” Protestants) constituted only 14.7 percent of the population, down from 18.1 percent in 2007 and nearly 30 percent of the population in the early 1970s.19 As churches shrank, the average churchgoer aged. The number of Methodists, Lutherans, and Episcopalians over the age of fifty rose by 10 percent between 1957 and 1983.20 As younger and more progressive members of ecumenical Protestant churches left, congregations sometimes became more conservative. Today, slightly more ecumenical Protestant churchgoers identify as Republicans than as Democrats.21 As churches became more conservative, they began withholding funds from activist organizations like the National Council of Churches, which now struggles with financial shortfalls.22
As telling as these statistics are, what ecumenical Protestants have lost cannot be measured by numbers alone. Most crucially, ecumenical Protestants lost control of the cultural capital of Christianity to the Christian Right. From the 1920s to the 1960s, ecumenical Protestants had commanded the attention of the press, the sympathy of America’s political elites, and a popular understanding that their specific religious tradition was at the heart of American democracy and represented the best hope for a more just and peaceful world. While historians have rightly celebrated the decline of Protestant hegemony and the burgeoning religious pluralism that followed, they have not fully accounted for the ways in which ecumenical Protestants used their privilege at mid-century and the effects that had on the United States and beyond. Ecumenical Protestants wielded their power in surprising ways, by choosing to fight racial injustice, poverty, and imperialism. These very initiatives were partly responsible for their sudden loss of status in American public life, which would be ceded to evangelicals and conservative Catholics.
Evangelical Protestants, in particular, positioned themselves as Christianity’s defenders against the hostile forces of political and theological liberalism, which they viewed as a slippery slope to secularism. The modern evangelical movement was born in 1942, with the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in the same year that ecumenical Protestants launched the World Order movement. Since that moment, it has been a Janus-faced movement, with Billy Graham representing the polite, purportedly apolitical wing, and Carl McIntire leading the dissenting, anti-ecumenical wing. At first, the evangelical movement was modeled on the ecumenical movement: the National Association of Evangelicals was inspired by the Federal Council of Churches, and the evangelical Christianity Today was modeled on the ecumenical Christian Century. But evangelicals were also innovators who sought out new ways to gain the public’s attention. Soon, new models of worship, like megachurches and TV ministries, helped propel evangelicals to new heights and gave platforms to their more radical activists.23 The fundamentalist wing—led by Jerry Falwell in the 1970s—emerged as the public face of evangelicalism as this religious group became a major player in Republican politics. Internationally, evangelicals expanded their missionary outreach in the 1970s, while ecumenical Protestants had pulled back because of concerns about cultural imperialism.
The evangelical movement in the 1970s was the mirror image of ecumenical Protestantism: It policed racial boundaries, attacked welfare programs, and voiced support for the Vietnam War and for South Africa’s apartheid government on anti-communist grounds.24 None of this was new. The political orientation and alliances of evangelicalism had been shaped, in part, in the 1940s in reaction to what ecumenical Protestants were doing, placing evangelicals on a path that led from opposition to the United Nations and human rights to support for Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.25 Despite the best efforts of their leaders, however, evangelicals could not replicate the cultural and political authority that the Protestant establishment had wielded at mid-century. Evangelicalism is politically effective but its power is derived partly from its partisanship. So long as religious pluralism remains an accepted norm in the United States, it is hard to imagine evangelicalism becoming more than it is now: one group among many competing for public influence.
It was no coincidence that American conservatism and American evangelicalism rose together, just as it was not coincidental that American liberalism and American ecumenism had risen together at mid-century. Ecumenical Protestants supported economic reform from Roosevelt’s New Deal to Johnson’s Great Society. They took part in anti-racist activism beginning during World War II and proved to be reliable allies for the NAACP and for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Less successfully but still significantly, ecumenical Protestants worked to diminish anti-communism, transcend the Cold War, and reduce the arms buildup in the United States.
Ecumenical Protestantism was at the heart of mid-century liberalism’s rise and fall. This was the case because ecumenical Protestants were important players in liberal politics. It was also the case because they had tied their political initiatives so closely with their theology, thereby entangling religious and political battles in new ways. Ecumenical Protestants avoided partisanship, and it was partly their ties to the liberal wings of the Democratic and Republican parties that made mid-century liberalism as durable as it was. They worked alongside a group that historians call the “New Deal coalition”—an unstable alliance between Jews, African Americans, working-class European ethnics, and southern whites backing the Democratic Party. They also worked with liberal Republicans to press their agenda. The New Deal coalition came apart in the 1970s along many of the racial, regional, and economic fault lines that ecumenical Protestant human rights activism had widened. Moreover, many of the organizations that had supported mid-century liberalism began to collapse. Just as ecumenical Protestants faced declining numbers and rebellion among their ranks, so too did some labor unions and civil rights organizations. To take one example, in the same way as the laity rebelled against the political initiatives of ecumenical leaders, so too did workers in the 1970s rebel against the actions of union leaders.26
The ecumenical Protestant leadership’s move away from consensus politics, and the unpopularity of their views with churchgoers, helped make it possible for evangelicals to capture the Republican Party and move it rightward. Divisions in the United States greatly sharpened in the 1960s and 1970s over segregation, affirmative action, and the Vietnam War—but also, as this book has shown, over religion. These divisions realigned American politics and created an opening for the rise of modern conservatism. Ecumenical Protestantism contributed to the rise of liberalism at mid-century, and the religion’s decline accelerated the decline of political liberalism in the 1970s.
But the story of “mainline” decline is misleading partly because it misses the political work ecumenical Protestants have done—and continue to do—that shapes our world today. The most obvious example is that the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches, along with dozens of denominations and thousands of religious groups, continue to pursue a progressive political agenda. Leading voices calling for racial justice continue to come from ecumenical denominations—figures like Disciples of Christ minister William Barber and United Church of Christ minister Traci Blackmon. Liberal politicians, like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, continue to be shaped by an ecumenical Protestant heritage.27 They are joined by the many people whose values were shaped by their Protestant upbringing but who are no longer churchgoers. Although they get less attention than evangelicals, ecumenical Protestants and post-Protestants continue their political work in towns and cities across the nation, in the nation’s capital, and at the United Nations.28
Inspired by ecumenism and the political doctrine of globalism, ecumenical Protestants sought to reshape the world at mid-century. By bringing international ideas to bear on domestic politics, ecumenical Protestants assured that their global gospel would have its most dramatic impact on the United States. Their human rights activism would politicize and transform religious life in America. But their mobilization also had repercussions well beyond their churches. It reshaped American liberalism and polarized US politics in ways that reverberate into the present day.