PART II
CHAPTER 6
On March 5, 1946, the former British prime minister Winston Churchill stood before a crowd of dignitaries gathered at Westminster College and announced that the Cold War had begun. Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace” speech was delivered in the small college town of Fulton, Missouri, but its message was heard across the world. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill roared, “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”1 Delivered with Harry Truman’s blessing and with the president in attendance, Churchill’s speech was a first draft of what would become Cold War orthodoxy only a few years later.
“Sinews of Peace” was a call to arms. “The Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization,” Churchill warned. He was “convinced that there is nothing [the Soviets] admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.”2 In a brief forty-six minutes and twenty-four seconds, Churchill had called upon US president Harry Truman to join forces with the British Empire, to strengthen Western military alliances at the expense of the United Nations, to defend “Christian” nations against communist infiltration, and to oppose the Soviet Union with force.
Soon after Churchill finished his speech, he and Truman boarded a train that barreled toward Columbus, Ohio, arriving the following day. An emergency meeting of the Federal Council of Churches had just begun in Columbus, and Truman was due to deliver the keynote address. Welcomed by a crowd of 35,000 onlookers, Churchill made a brief public appearance in his pajamas. But the seventy-two-year-old statesman was too tired to attend the Federal Council’s conference and opted for a nap on the train instead. Had he joined Truman at the Deshler-Wallick Hotel, where five hundred ecumenical Protestant leaders gathered with another three hundred prominent intellectuals, politicians, business and labor leaders, military officers, and State Department officials, Churchill would have encountered a vision of the postwar world starkly different from his own.3
G. Bromley Oxnam, the Federal Council president, had called the emergency meeting in May 1946 precisely to oppose Churchill’s outlook and to push for the human rights vision ecumenical Protestants had articulated during the war. Oxnam differed from Churchill in his hope to reduce armies and end conscription, to move colonies toward autonomy, and to limit national sovereignty for the sake of the United Nations, while expanding the rights of racial minorities and lessening poverty.
This ecumenical Protestant vision for the postwar world had emerged out of the debates and struggles of the wartime years, but it was difficult to square with the emerging Cold War. In the decade that followed, American ecumenical Protestants would find it hard to reconcile their one-world universalism with the bipolar world that Churchill had announced in Fulton and that Truman would soon make real. From 1946 to 1958, ecumenical Protestant leaders struggled to maintain their commitment to a UN-centered world order, all while grappling with a new and increasingly urgent sense that communism was a danger that needed to be opposed.
At first, American ecumenical Protestants responded to Churchill’s challenge by trying to make peace with the Cold War. Their interests dovetailed with Truman’s political initiatives at times, but they never entirely overlapped. Because of the important differences between Churchill and Truman’s Cold War and the globalism of ecumenical Protestants, Oxnam was never willing to fully accept the new international framework that came to dominate the postwar world. Although ecumenical Protestants took a winding path after 1946, one that led them to focus on Asia rather than Europe, by the mid-1950s they openly rejected the Cold War framework. American ecumenical Protestants subtly transformed their carefully crafted wartime doctrine in ways that offered Americans a robust alternative to the Cold War.4
One World versus the Cold War
In 1946, Oxnam called an emergency session of the Federal Council of Churches in order to weigh in on the postwar settlement. As president of the organization, Oxnam hoped the meeting would be a defining moment that would see the churches reaffirm the UN-centered vision they had so carefully elaborated during the war. But, just days before the conference began, the Soviet Union failed to meet a deadline for withdrawing its troops from Iran. The impasse and the subsequent war scare hovered over the conference, leading ministers and foreign policy experts to huddle in the hallways and conference rooms in Columbus, asking one another whether a third world war was on the horizon. The outlook seemed even more grim because the United States had developed atomic weapons only a year earlier. This terrible new weaponry promised to wreak havoc on cities and made imaginable for the first time in human history, as the Federal Council put it, “the prospect of swift ruin for civilization and even the possibility of a speedy end to man’s life on earth.”5
These circumstances were drastically different than just one year before, when American ecumenical Protestants had proudly proclaimed that a new international order had arrived. Many of the anti-communist dignitaries at the Columbus conference referred to their present moment as a time of choosing. Congressman Walter Judd, a Congregationalist layman, referred to 1946 as “the year of decision” in his address at the Ash Wednesday service.6 In his keynote address, President Harry Truman said that the world stood “in the doorway to destruction or upon the threshold of the greatest age in history.” Reflecting on the paradox of 1946, John Foster Dulles spoke of being “full of hope because the situation is so hopeless.”7 All three made the case that a UN-centered world order was incompatible with the values promoted by the Soviet Union. Whether Oxnam liked it or not, the Cold War was already beginning to shape discussions among members of the Federal Council.
There was good reason to be skeptical of the United Nations in 1946. The UN charter’s call to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small” was undermined from the start by a security council that gave outsized power to the five permanent members, including the ability to shut down any talk of human rights in their home countries.8 As Mark Mazower notes, some of the United Nation’s founders treated the ideals of the organization’s charter “as promissory notes” that were “never intended to be cashed.”9 But this was not exactly what Dulles and Judd were thinking. They were enamored with the aims of the United Nations in 1946 and it was their passion for liberal internationalism that drove their opposition to illiberal countries like the Soviet Union. There were certainly ecumenical Protestant critics of the United Nations who treated the organization as a new form of imperialism.10 But most ecumenical Protestants were neither fervent anti-imperialists nor committed anti-communists. They hoped that the United Nations would be effective.
The United Nations remained wildly popular among ecumenical Protestants, who hoped that the organization was just a beginning. In surveys conducted during 1951–52, Episcopalians were asked whether “it would be a good thing if U.N. were some day replaced by some kind of world gov’t.” The polls were taken at a flashpoint of the Cold War, when the Korean War was raging and when Ohio senator John W. Bricker first introduced legislation designed to limit what he called the United Nation’s promotion of “human slavery.” The Episcopalians were among the most politically restrained of ecumenical denominations, representing as they did some of the wealthiest Americans. And yet their bishops and priests said yes to world government overwhelmingly. Even parishioners, who were generally more conservative than the clergy and national leaders, said yes by a wide margin. As the Cold War reached a fever pitch, bishops nonetheless affirmed a world government by a margin of 60 percent “yes” to 15 percent “no”, priests 60 percent “yes” to 22 percent “no”, and churchgoers 47 percent “yes” to 33 percent “no.” The hope ecumenical Protestants projected onto the United Nations in the 1940s and 1950s was not solely about what the organization was then but about what the organization could one day become.11
There was a utopian quality to ecumenical Protestant thought about the United Nations that dimmed in the late 1940s but never went away. In 1946 anti-communism was only beginning to emerge as the primary international posture of the United States. And it was only just becoming clear that the United States would soon take over many of the functions of the British and French empires in the world. The ideals and hopes that ecumenical Protestant leaders and churchgoers projected onto the United Nations did not prevent them from supporting some of the anti-communist policies of the Truman administration, but they did serve as an alternative to “containment” and the Truman Doctrine.
Most ecumenical leaders did not prioritize fighting communism in 1946. At the Columbus conference, they acknowledged a world of differing “religious, social, economic, and political patterns … particularly true in the case of the Soviet Union and the western democracies.”12 Differences, however, were not to prevent “sympathetic understanding [and] every friendly negotiation,” especially the undertaking of “constructive tasks of common concern” through the United Nations.13 Echoing the Six Pillars of Peace produced by the Dulles Commission in 1943, they called for an international agreement negotiated through the United Nations to reduce armaments and end peacetime conscription worldwide. Oxnam and his allies also called for the strengthening of the UN mandate system, for the creation of a path to independence for colonial nations within definite time frames, and for a more equitable distribution of wealth among the world’s nations.14
Most notably, American ecumenical Protestants were among the most forceful backers of the internationalization of atomic energy. A theological who’s who—consisting of Robert Calhoun, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Roland Bainton, John Bennett, and Henry Pitney Van Dusen—delivered a stern condemnation of the US use of nuclear weapons against Japan and called for the United Nations to safeguard the weapons.15 They directly repudiated Churchill, who had insisted that “it would be criminal madness” to entrust atomic secrets to the United Nations and risk the possibility of it getting into communist hands.16
Ecumenical Protestants once again called on the United States to demonstrate that it too subscribed to the new international norms proclaimed by the UN charter. At the 1946 meeting at Columbus the Federal Council broke decisively with Jim Crow, pledging to create a “non-segregated church and a non-segregated society.”17 In addition, the Federal Council of Churches called for “full employment,” because “the nature of man and the structure of modern industrial society have caused the right to an opportunity for employment at an equitable wage to become a basic right.”18 For the ecumenists gathered at Columbus, expanding rights at home went hand-in-hand with a rights-based internationalism centered on the United Nations.
In the spring of 1946, ecumenical Protestants reaffirmed their faith in the United Nations and mostly ignored Churchill’s warnings about communism. Instead, they continued to push for the development of a moral and legal framework that applied to all nations and necessitated actions, like disarmament and internationalization of nuclear power, at odds with Truman’s plans. But in the ensuing years they faced a test of loyalties between the United States and the United Nations. How ecumenical Protestants should react when the US government behaved in line with their values but did so unilaterally, thereby undermining the United Nations, became an urgent problem.
The dilemma first arose with the European Recovery Program, which was better known as the “Marshall Plan.” It was announced by Truman’s secretary of state, George Marshall, during the Harvard commencement address he delivered in June 1947. The United States would help rebuild the economies of European countries, as Marshall put it, to engineer the “return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.”19 Between 1948 and 1953, approximately $13 billion in aid was sent to Europe. Britain, France, West Germany, and Italy were the biggest beneficiaries, along with Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Turkey, and Norway.20
Ecumenical Protestants enthusiastically embraced the Marshall Plan as “one of history’s most momentous affirmations of faith in the curative power of freedom and in the creative capacity of free men.”21 But they had a problem on their hands. Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union did not participate in the plan. Soviet leaders chaffed at the economic and political requirements that came along with the aid, and they interpreted the plan as a form of American imperialism.22 So too did leftist critics in Western Europe. Ecumenical Protestants acknowledged Western Europeans’ fears “that the United States may seek to make Europe over in its political and economic image,” and they disliked how the plan bypassed the United Nations and therefore undermined the multilateralism that ecumenical Protestants believed the new organization encouraged. In spite of these reservations, however, the Marshall Plan fit so well with ecumenical Protestants’ belief in altruism that they called on the government to implement price controls to fund the program. Focusing on the “moral and spiritual” motives and insisting it “should be above political partisanship,” ecumenical Protestants refused to recognize that the Marshall Plan was driving the United States toward a standoff with the Soviet Union.23
Ecumenical Protestants paid little attention to the Marshall Plan’s Cold War consequences, but Truman’s more militaristic policies could hardly be ignored. In 1947, Truman announced to Congress that communist infiltrators in Greece and Turkey would topple the nations’ governments unless the United States intervened with massive military aid. Americans were led to believe—wrongly, it turned out—that the Soviet Union had stoked these civil wars. This was the Truman Doctrine, which proclaimed that the United States would defend countries against external communist threats anywhere in the world. “The situation is an urgent one requiring immediate action and the United Nations and its related organizations are not in a position to extend help of the kind that is required,” the president announced to Congress in 1947. But he assured Americans that “the United States will be giving effect to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations” by “helping free and independent nations to maintain their freedom” against “coercion” and “subterfuges.”24
Truman knew many Americans remained devoted to the United Nations in 1947, a popularity that ecumenical Protestants had promoted with a messianic fervor. The president cleverly split apart the “principles” of the United Nation from its institutional mechanisms. Forced to choose between the aims of the UN preamble, on behalf of which Truman claimed to speak, and the actual organization, which the president bypassed, ecumenists had only a muddled response. The Federal Council applauded Truman for opposing “the attempted subjugation of peoples by armed minorities and outside powers using coercion and infiltration.” “If Soviet foreign policy is aggressive and expansionist in character, we have the obligation not only to discourage expansionist action but also to seek a comprehensive settlement,” the Federal Council insisted. Not only did they temporarily put aside their opposition to America’s large military budget but also their commitment to the United Nations, recognizing that it was “not yet equipped to deal with all the immediate problems” in Greece and Turkey.25
The Federal Council tried to have it both ways about the United Nations. The United States should “give the United Nations full information” about the aid to Greece and Turkey, and should “seek the counsel and cooperation” of the United Nations in how the funds were distributed, in addition to inviting UN inspectors to monitor the distribution of aid, the Federal Council pleaded.26 Ecumenical Protestants did not praise the massive military aid to Greece and Turkey in the way they had done for the Marshall Plan, but they did lend their support, with important caveats, to the Truman Doctrine in 1947.
The Federal Council had only recently begun to grapple with Soviet-American tensions. The first major statement from the Federal Council on the subject had come in October 11, 1946.27 This was the statement that philosopher George A. Coe would later say signaled the abandonment of the principles of the wartime World Order movement and marked the beginning of the Protestant drift toward complicity in the Cold War.28 Written under John Foster Dulles’s oversight, the report began with a sharp contrast between both Christian and democratic values and the ideals of the USSR. The only way the two sides could find peace, Dulles argued, was through worldwide acceptance of liberal values. “All men must renounce the effort to spread abroad their way of life by methods of intolerance,” he wrote. International peace “begins with recognition of the sacredness of the individual human personality.” Freedom of conscience was paramount to global peace, with individuals “free to believe as their reason and conscience dictate.” For Dulles in particular, religious freedom had become a weapon to use against the Soviet Union.29
Although the Federal Council was critical of the Soviet Union in late 1946, the organization was not endorsing the emerging Cold War. It made clear, in language that was difficult to imagine only several years later, that “the United States should set an example by renouncing the acquisition of new military bases so far distant from the continental United States and so close to the Soviet Union that the offensive threat is both disproportionate to the defensive value to the United States.” While this principle applied to all nations, the authors argued, America should go first in good faith.30 Moreover, the Federal Council avoided the rhetoric of Truman and Churchill that presented the United States and the USSR as polar opposites. “Neither state socialism nor free enterprise provides a perfect economic system; each can learn from the experience of the other,” the organization pronounced. The American economy had yet to prove that it could “assure steady production and employment” or “continuously provide industrial workers with that sense of individual creativeness which gives greater satisfaction than mere material possession.”31 To show the world the value of democracy, the United States should first tackle “certain inadequacies of democracy” that could be fixed through “remedial action within their own borders.” In a self-critical spirit, the Federal Council called on the United States to observe human rights at home. “There is need to bring about greater observance of human rights and freedoms for all without distinction as to race or religion,” Federal Council leaders wrote. “Particularly must America do away with the widely prevalent double standard of personal relations and citizenship applied to Negro Americans.”32 While critical of the Soviet Union, American ecumenical Protestants took pains to demonstrate that human rights were not merely an anti-communist weapon.
The tension between anti-communism and support for Protestant globalism troubled G. Bromley Oxnam. He insisted in 1947 that the United States “must be strong” because Russians “respect strength.” But the threat of communism was not solely or even primarily a military threat, Oxnam argued. It was the spread of communist ideas that needed to be fought most urgently. Instead of weapons, the best defense of political democracy was the eradication of poverty and the spread of economic democracy. “Communism makes no headway where plenty exists and justice abounds. Poverty is the open door through which [communism] enters,” Oxnam wrote. To make the United States immune from communism, full employment needed to be guaranteed and democracy needed to be extended to industry “so that the worker may participate fully in determining the conditions under which he works, and share equitably in the wealth he produces.”33 He urged the United States to avoid military competition and focus instead on the welfare of its citizens.
Oxnam argued that civil society, not the military, should take the lead in Soviet-American relations. He proposed exchanges of “religious, educational, scientific, artistic and business leaders” between the two countries in order to establish personal ties, build trust, set a precedent of regular dialogue, and create an atmosphere more conducive to sorting out big problems. As Oxnam put it, “The only way to get rid of an iron curtain is to lift it.”34 But Oxnam recognized that exchanges between civil societies were long-term solutions at best. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States were mounting, and the ideological differences appeared too stark to overcome.
Reaffirming his faith in the United Nations, Oxnam suggested that the United States announce its “intent to work through the United Nations, with or without Russia, that we are ready to abolish the veto, and will stand consistently for the facing of these issues in terms of the democratic decision of the representatives of the peoples of the world.”35 By calling for the abolition of the veto, Oxnam was trying to save what he saw as the most important function of the United Nations: checking the autonomy of each nation, including the United States, by embedding it in a broader community of nations. This would ensure that any decisions the United States made in its foreign policy would be broadly multilateral. If war should ever come between the United States and the Soviet Union, “we will be doing it in terms of the judgment of humanity, rather than in the decision of a single nation,” Oxnam explained.36 He was speaking for a broad swath of ecumenical Protestants when he spoke of “humanity” in narrow terms.
While Oxnam struggled to find a way forward with the USSR, others, like Dulles and Reinhold Niebuhr, became more hawkish toward the Soviet Union. Earlier, Dulles had urged the United States to relinquish some of its national sovereignty for the sake of international cooperation, but he dropped this demand in 1945 at the UN negotiations in San Francisco. There were subtle shifts in his outlook over time that were partly motivated by his antipathy toward the Soviet Union. But Dulles’s globalism was always easy to reconcile with US priorities, such as free trade and the proliferation of liberal values. Unlike most ecumenical Protestant leaders, he was rarely critical of the United States when he spoke about world order. His vision of the postwar world did not require Americans to significantly change their values or behavior.
Niebuhr, on the other hand, was more subtle in his anti-communism than was Dulles. He called on the United States to behave more responsibly in wielding its power and drew attention to the ironies and contradictions of US global supremacy. And yet, he repeatedly attacked the pacifist wing of ecumenical Protestantism, helping silence some of the most trenchant critics of American militarism. In the 1930s his calls for Americans to cast off their “innocence” sounded prophetic because of deep divisions about US foreign policy at the time. But repeating those calls in the late 1940s, and especially in the 1950s, when there was near unanimity among policy makers about the Cold War, sounded more like an endorsement of the status quo. In the early days of the Cold War, Niebuhr and Dulles often found themselves on the same side of key issues. Only later would their differences become magnified and lead to public fights over US foreign policy.
The emphasis Niebuhr placed on the necessity of US power came at the expense of his earlier advocacy of an American demonstration of goodwill through unilateral disarmament and through international control of atomic energy. Symbolic of this embrace of the Cold War by many realists, some of the same theologians who had earlier advocated handing over nuclear weapons to the United Nations now believed it would be immoral for their country to do so. “For the United States to abandon its atomic weapons, or to give the impression that they would not be used,” Niebuhr and the other theologians reasoned in 1950, “would leave the non-Communist world with totally inadequate defense.”37 It was not only nuclear weapons that troubled ecumenical Protestants. In the late 1940s there was an abiding sense that conditions had changed drastically since 1946, when ecumenical Protestants confidently proclaimed their postwar plans. The editors of the Christian Century observed, “The problem of securing a just and lasting peace grows more baffling, more difficult with every passing week. The ‘one world’ hope which flamed high four years ago has all but vanished in the presence of a two-world reality.”38
Sensing the uncertainty that the Cold War was producing, Dulles decided in 1949 to gather ecumenical Protestants at another mass meeting. The first large-scale gathering organized by the Dulles Commission took place in 1942 in Delaware, Ohio, and had created the first outlines of a postwar international organization. At the second meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1945, the Dulles Commission had detailed a plan for the United Nations. Dulles hoped that the third meeting, in March 1949, which would take place again in Cleveland, would produce the outlines of a united Protestant approach to the Cold War.
With Dulles at the helm, criticism of his close ties to the US government resurfaced. James A. Craine, the executive secretary of the Commission on World Order of the Disciples of Christ, complained that “the leadership of the churches since [1945], has been too closely affiliated with the policies of the State Department to make our witness effective.” Craine urged the Federal Council to express Christian convictions in “positive terms” that are “unmodified by the precautions and expediencies which are necessary in political negotiation.”39 The desire to distance Christianity from US government policy was growing among a wing of ecumenical Protestants.
The growing divide among ecumenical Protestants over the Cold War came to a head during the debates over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which was being negotiated as Dulles gathered ecumenical Protestant leaders in 1949. Many ecumenical Protestants were suspicious of NATO. They were deeply attached to the United Nations, which was partly their creation, and feared that a regional military alliance would undermine the mission of the United Nations. The State Department was so concerned with ecumenical Protestant opinion that it sent one of its senior experts on the USSR, Charles E. Bohlen, to Cleveland for a one and a half hour off-the-record discussion. Bohlen apparently did not release any information about the NATO pact that was not publicly available. He was there to interpret the treaty and answer questions. Were the Scandinavian countries being forced into the treaty? Was NATO a violation of the UN charter? Would NATO take the power to declare war out of the hands of the US Senate? Did this treaty create the potential for minor conflicts between proxy nations to trigger a global war that no one could win? Bohlen tried to reassure ecumenical Protestants. For example, he told listeners that the treaty would not force the United States to go to war. An attack on an ally could be “considered” an attack on the United States, but the Senate would still have the prerogative on whether to declare war or handle the matter in some other way, he explained.40
Despite Bohlen’s assurances, the NATO issue led to an intense debate. Dulles spoke more than anyone else during the NATO discussion, urging caution and humility in crafting a position about a treaty whose text was not yet available for public scrutiny. Others were not so cautious. Ernest Edwin Ryden, the editor of the Lutheran Companion, called NATO a “military scheme” that would destroy the United Nations.41 If Dulles wanted explicit approval of NATO, his hopes now fell short because of organized opposition. Instead, Dulles urged that no action be taken until there was more information. In the end, the delegates could not come to an agreement on NATO in Cleveland.42
For Dulles, the outcome of the conference was less important than the platform the occasion provided him. Dulles took full advantage of the coverage Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times provided, deciding to use the occasion to criticize Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Dulles supported NATO, but he was critical of the idea of arming Scandinavian countries. At a news conference after the close of the first day of the Cleveland conference he declared that Norwegian sources had told him there would be no American bases placed in that country. He called for an explicit statement on the matter in order to publicize the defensive nature of the alliance. Journalist Walter Lippmann praised Dulles’s comments as a responsible alternative to the views of the more aggressive members of the State and Defense Departments, who would “back the Russian into a corner.”43 But Acheson did not respond kindly to Dulles’s criticism. A report noted that Acheson was “boiling mad” and “blew up” after reading Dulles’s speech, complaining that “Dulles just can’t get over the fact that Dewey lost the [1948] election and he isn’t now Secretary of State.”44
Dulles was acting like a shadow secretary of state and that placed the ecumenists in the uncomfortable position of having their views at the center of a political controversy. Not only was Dulles engaging in partisan politics, but he was widely perceived to be the steward of these ideas at a moment when his values diverged with those of many ecumenists. The 1949 Cleveland meeting was widely reported as a one-man act. Time depicted Dulles as a paternalistic figure giving aid to a clergy that were largely out of their depth.45 Referring to him as an “expert and conscientious coach,” the Time reporter explained that “from the moment U.N. Delegate John Foster Dulles ended his opening address, most of the delegates looked to him for guidance on the question for which he had done his best to prepare them: the North Atlantic Security Pact.” The editors of the Christian Century complained that every single position Dulles took at the Cleveland conference was ratified.46
The drift away from the United Nations and toward US unilateralism in 1949 by a wing of ecumenical Protestants was captured by a document called “Moral Responsibility and United States Power: A Message to the Churches.”47 Niebuhr drafted the document. Niebuhr began by calling American power providential. This did not mean that the United States attained its power “as chiefly the fruit of virtue.” Rather, that power was granted to the United States so that it might be used wisely and responsibly. The United States “has the confidence of many in other lands who believe that our people have no lust for conquest and genuinely desire a just and lasting peace in the free world,” wrote Niebuhr. “Freedom-loving peoples look to us for leadership, and without that leadership there would be demoralization in the world.” Niebuhr worried about US inexperience at wielding power and that it might use this power for its own advantage.48
Niebuhr was rehearsing many of the ideas that appeared in his 1953 book, The Irony of American History.49 The book garnered him invitations to meetings of the State Department and made him a favorite of Henry Luce’s publishing empire. Yet the same qualities that made him America’s most important Cold War theologian opened him up for criticism from his fellow ecumenical Protestants. After all, Niebuhr never explained why he believed the United States would exercise its power responsibly. In Niebuhr’s formulation, irresponsible use of power was something that could and might happen, not something that was already occurring. Niebuhr’s unwillingness to criticize American power sounded to his critics like a capitulation to the state at a moment when many others were calling for distance from the government.50
Paul Hutchinson, who had taken over as editor of the Christian Century from Charles Clayton Morrison in 1947, took the lead in attacking Niebuhr and Dulles. The Christian Century editorialized soon after the close of the 1949 Cleveland conference that Niebuhr’s writings were “cautious and equivocal, secularist and confused. The conference itself was groping, baffled and herd-minded.” Niebuhr and Dulles’s “discussion of justice and human rights consistently dealt with these in terms of expediency, as means to curb Russia rather than to express Christian brotherhood,” ecumenical Protestantism’s most important journal argued.51 Hutchison went on to list what he saw as the “amazing blind spots” of Niebuhr’s analysis: “The use in war of atomic and other weapons of mass destruction, the continuance of peacetime conscription, the reduction of our colossal arms budget, the curbing of our worldwide spy network, the threat of universal military training, the reduction of the number of military bases around the world or the relaxation of military domination of education, industry, commerce and science.”52 What the editors viewed as the heart of the matter—the confrontation between Christian values and the naked power the US government was resorting to—was dodged by the Dulles Commission. They charged Niebuhr with placing “the stamp of church approval on the bipartisan foreign policy of our government.”53
Time magazine, whose publisher, Henry Luce, had a very different agenda for the postwar world than did the editors of the Christian Century, also pronounced the conference a failure because it did not endorse Luce’s vision of the “American Century.” The Federal Council’s position on NATO “bore none of the ringing affirmations that distinguished the conference’s meetings of 1942, when it called for a postwar world organization, or of 1945, when it called for the Christian concepts of justice, law and human rights in the UN Charter. The delegates sidestepped the issue” of NATO.54 To a wide range of observers, the Federal Council offered little of value in the face of the Cold War. And the old rivalry between pacifists and realists reemerged in a new form, once again dividing ecumenical Protestants.
China and the Search for an Alternative to the Cold War
American ecumenical Protestants reached a stalemate on the Cold War in Europe at the end of the 1940s. Split between rival factions, they did not present a united front on the most important policy debates, including NATO. But by the end of the 1950s, ecumenical Protestants finally had an answer to the challenge the Cold War presented. Focusing mostly on Asia, while the gaze of Dulles and Niebuhr was fixed on Europe, ecumenical Protestant intellectuals found a new way of understanding world politics. Rather than seeing the world in spatial terms by imagining the globe split into a first world, second world, and third world, they came to conceive of international affairs as governed by “revolutions” taking place both between nations and within each country. The pioneers of this theology of revolution argued that movements for justice, both abroad and at home, were part of a providential plan, and they urged religious and political leaders to take them seriously. In contrast to anti-communism, the theology of revolution emphasized the need to accommodate demands for land reform, decolonization, economic redistribution, and desegregation—even if those demands came from socialist movements. It was an outlook that would become widespread among ecumenical Protestants by the 1960s and would lead them to more fully embrace the social movements of that era.
Why did Asia become the focus of attention by ecumenical Protestants in the 1950s? Ecumenical Protestants had long been concerned about the effects of imperialism, the spread of Western modernity, and the question of cultural and religious pluralism in Asia. The postwar debates about US economic power in Western Europe and the “Coca-colonization” of the Continent did not carry the same weight for ecumenical Protestants as the century-long criticism of imperialism in places like China and India.55 And ecumenical Protestants with connections to Asia believed that the Truman and Eisenhower administrations did not appreciate just how much US policy in the region would have to depart from the imperialism of the past.56 In Asia, the context and the salient issues were different from those in Europe. Intellectuals like Kenneth Scott Latourette, John Mackay, and Richard Shaull came to believe that the Cold War could be avoided in Asia. Understanding international affairs as a process of revolution and accommodation presented ecumenical Protestants with an alternative to the Cold War framework, belatedly offering a reply to Churchill’s challenge.
In developing an alternative to the Cold War framework, two important things changed for ecumenical Protestants. First, partly through the crucible of McCarthyism, ecumenical Protestants could no longer take for granted that US interests closely aligned with Christian interests. Although they had paid lip service to this idea before, the oppositional posture toward US policy was something quite new for ecumenical Protestants in the 1950s. Second, rethinking the Cold War in Asia involved relocating the locus of humanity away from the United Nations and toward the revolutionary movements of the Global South and among movements for economic and racial justice mobilizing within every country. In this way, American ecumenical Protestants reinvented their 1940s-era universalism in light of two of the twentieth century’s most important developments: the Cold War and decolonization.
With all eyes on Europe, Americans only belatedly recognized East Asia as an important region where world-historical events were unfolding. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China. The creation of a new country under the communist banner capped decades of fighting in the country between “Red” and “White” forces that began in the 1920s, was interrupted briefly by the Japanese invasion in 1937, and resumed in full force in 1945. By 1949, Chiang Kai-shek’s White forces had fled to the island of Taiwan, ceding control of the mainland to Mao.
It is hard to overemphasize how troubled US ecumenical Protestants were by this development. For a century, China was imagined as a new frontier for the spread of Christianity, a land of backward peasants living in the depth of depravity, who hungered for charity, compassion, and conversion. More recently, the Chinese people had become long-suffering protagonists in the novels of Pearl Buck and heroes of the resistance against Japanese aggression. That the land that Protestants had devoted themselves to winning for Christianity was now in communist hands weighed on their minds. Ecumenical Protestants worried so much about losing ties with China that they elected Zhao Zichen, a strong supporter of Mao’s communist government, as one of the World Council of Churches’ co-presidents in 1948.
Ecumenists considered their options in a political climate that vilified liberals for “losing” China. Congressman Walter Judd, who had so eagerly participated in the World Order movement during World War II, was also Congress’s most vocal supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, and he became the most outspoken critic of the State Department’s experts on the country, who were widely known as “China hands.”57 In order to navigate this maze of changing circumstances, the Federal Council of Churches asked Kenneth Scott Latourette to take charge. Latourette headed the small but influential part of the Dulles Commission called the Committee on East Asian Affairs. Throughout the 1940s Latourette acted as the liaison between the Federal Council and the State Department on issues relating to East Asia. Now, in 1949, he was being asked to revise Protestant views in light of the communist consolidation of China.58
Latourette had been a missionary in China in the early 1910s and he continued working with missionary organizations in the decades that followed. He was also a professional historian who had written books on the country’s past. In a vacuum of serious scholarship on China, Latourette became the dean of Chinese studies from his position as professor at Yale Divinity School. By 1945, he had completed his seven-volume History of the Expansion of Christianity, which detailed the long history of the missionary movement. Serving as president of the American Historical Association in honor of his large body of scholarship on China, he delivered the organization’s presidential address in December 1948 on the Christian understanding of history.59
What made Asia different from Europe, to Latourette’s mind, was the long history of Western imperialism and racism. Drawing on long-standing discourses on religious and racial pluralism, Latourette found a way of understanding events in Asia that resembled the wartime universalism of the World Order movement and allowed him to downplay the importance of the Cold War in Asia. As the historian looked at contemporary events in China, he predicted a long period of instability in the country resulting from a population explosion, economic devastation, and a cultural transition resulting from the decline of Confucianism and the intrusion of Western ideas. For these reasons, Latourette was confident that “Communism will probably not have a long life in China” because “it will be unable to solve China’s basic problems.” “The Chinese cannot be regimented in the thoroughgoing fashion that long pre-communist precedent had facilitated in Russia,” he believed. Chinese nationalism was too strong for China to become a puppet state of the Soviet Union, and China’s weak economy and frayed social structure would prove to be a liability rather than an asset for the USSR.60
The United States was powerless in the situation, Latourette cautioned. American military intervention would only provoke Chinese nationalism. Chinese Christian churches would face a tough time under communism, he acknowledged, but they would survive. The best policy was to focus on economic aid to China, no matter who was in charge, and to let events play out.61 Latourette saw little reason to alter the main tenets of the World Order movement’s policy toward East Asia, which included massive developmental aid, an end to colonialism, ending race-based immigration quotas, and a spirit of partnership and good-faith negotiation. Latourette insisted that communism’s growth should not change this position.
Henry P. Van Dusen, president of Union Theological Seminary since 1945, disagreed with Latourette’s assessment of the situation in China, and he argued that Chinese communism was dangerous precisely because it was different from Stalinism. Van Dusen believed that China’s indigenization of communism meant that it was likely to spread throughout Asia and needed to be stopped by military force. To emphasize this early version of the domino theory, which held that the growth of communism in one Asian nation would quickly spread to neighboring countries, Van Dusen quoted from one of Latourette’s historical monographs, reminding Latourette that in the middle ages “[only] armed force has … made it possible for the spirit of Jesus to survive.”62
Van Dusen insisted that military force was the best means of controlling the spread of communism in East Asia but his pessimism about China’s future was not shared by other members of the group charged with coordinating the Federal Council’s Asia policy. Van Dusen suggested to Walter Van Kirk that his comments might be incorporated into the position paper on East Asia being written in advance of the 1949 Cleveland conference but only if “others share my misgivings about Ken’s paper.” If the “criticism is mine” alone, Van Dusen wrote, “by all means disregard the matter.”63 From the records of the committee, it appears that Van Dusen’s objections were promptly disregarded. Latourette’s view became the Federal Council’s official stance.
By the end of 1949 ecumenical Protestants formalized their policies on East Asia. The Foreign Missions Council called on the United States and the United Nations to “labour incessantly for the observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for the peoples of Asia.”64 The Federal Council urged the American government to fight poverty rather than communism in China.65 Drawing on the ideas of Latourette, the Federal Council argued that communism takes advantage of poverty, and the best means of stopping communism was not through military aid but through the creation of economic prosperity and social stability. “Neither the creation of a Pacific military alliance, nor the granting of military assistance by the United States to the non-communist forces of the Far East, would alone suffice to establish in that area the conditions of a just and durable peace,” the Federal Council warned. “The primary resources with which the West must promote peace in the Pacific are ideas, not atomic bombs; food, not guns; plowshares, not swords; tools of production, not implements of destruction.”66
Ecumenical Protestant leaders were heading toward a call for the diplomatic recognition of “Red” China at the end of the 1940s. They staked out this position with little backing from churchgoers. One poll in November 1949 showed that 42 percent of Americans opposed recognition of mainland China, with only 12 percent supporting it. College graduates, who were more likely to be represented by ecumenical Protestant denominations, also stood in opposition. Fifty-two percent of US college graduates opposed diplomatic relations with mainland China, while 33 percent favored recognition.67 The policies of the Federal Council of Churches were unpopular with their constituency, but they pursued them nonetheless.
After completing a tour of East and Southeast Asia in 1949, Princeton Theological Seminary president John Mackay announced in January 1950 his support for recognition of China in order to bring it into the community of nations. “Otherwise,” Mackay wrote, “we will be alienating the Chinese people who by their attitude repudiated the other regime.”68 A few months later, a group of sixty-eight missionaries endorsed the diplomatic recognition of China, and Mackay elaborated some of the reasons for the endorsement. The arguments were grounded in both geopolitical and religious concerns, and they repeated many of Latourette’s earlier points.69 Mackay presciently emphasized that Chinese nationalism created a possibility for the United States to court China and lead it away from the Soviet Union. He also believed that diplomatic recognition would help protect the Christian minority in China. Proud of the missionary encouragement of self-rule and national development, Mackay believed that “Communists in China, despite their Marxism, have no natural quarrel with the Christian religion as Communists in Russia had good reason to have.” Echoing Oxnam’s observations of the USSR in the 1920s, Mackay believed Russia’s Orthodox Church had been the handmaid of the oppressive monarchy prior to the Russian Revolution. But in China, Christianity was represented by missionaries who encouraged national development and progressive measures against poverty. Surely the communist government would recognize this history, Mackay believed.70
By the time he clarified his position in the New York Times it was two months after the Korean War had begun, and Mackay acknowledged “new complications” and admitted “it may indeed be advisable, and even necessary, to postpone such recognition.”71 Diplomatic recognition of China remained off the agenda for the duration of the Korean War, which began in 1950, and for several years after the armistice in 1953.
As the Korean War broke out, a new organization—the National Council of Churches, which succeeded the Federal Council in 1950—took the lead in formulating ecumenical Protestant policy. The National Council was created through a merger between the Federal Council of Churches with several other large national bureaucracies, including the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, the Home Missions Council, and the United Council of Church Women. By the end of the 1950s this yet larger bureaucracy moved from their midtown offices in Manhattan to the nineteen-story modernist Interchurch Center on the Upper West Side of New York City, directly across the street from Riverside Church. The new building, which occupied a whole city block and was affectionately nicknamed the “God Box” after its uninspired architecture, housed many of the same committees, councils, and commissions that had operated under the Federal Council.
Figure 8. Princeton Theological Seminary president John Mackay surveying the 38th parallel on the Korean Peninsula in 1949. Mackay would later become one of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s fiercest critics. Image courtesy of the Presbyterian Historical Society and the Presbyterian Church (USA).
The National Council of Churches gave full support to the Korean War. The new organization saw the North’s invasion of South Korea as a violation of the moral aims of the United Nations, and ecumenical leaders applauded the use of the United Nations as the coordinating body defending South Korea. If there must be war, ecumenical Protestants reasoned, it should be a war organized through the United Nations and fought in the name of humanity. In fact, the National Council believed that the credibility and efficacy of the United Nations were at stake in the war. “Because the fate of the United Nations is closely linked with the fate of Korea,” the organization announced, “the armed attack on the Republic of Korea presents a grave menace to the whole effort to develop an effective international organization for peace.” The National Council reminded Americans that the South Korean Republic was established through the United Nations, and the international organization continued to monitor elections. “And even as the United Nations Commission on the scene sought a peaceful solution to the problems of Korea, the attack from North Korea was launched,” the National Council explained. “The aggression is a most direct challenge to the authority of the United Nations as an instrument for the maintenance of international peace and security.”72 Thus, in 1950, their solidarity with the United Nations led ecumenical Protestants to support the Korean War.
Protestant globalism could sometimes lead to criticism of US policy, as it had in the cases of Latourette and Mackay, or to support of it, as it had during the Korean War. The patriotic atmosphere during the Korean War muted earlier criticism. So too did McCarthyite attacks on the National Council. The climate of the early Cold War also emboldened evangelicals in their attacks against ecumenical Protestant leaders for being insufficiently patriotic. And American Catholic clergy, like Cardinal Francis Spellman, were among the loudest anti-communist voices in the country.73 As a consequence, ecumenical Protestants were forced to turn their attention from shaping international affairs to protecting their right to simply speak out on them.
Ecumenical Protestant leaders became terribly worried when Senator Joseph McCarthy appointed J. B. Matthews to be his chief anti-communist investigator in 1953. Matthews was an unlikely choice for such a role because he was a product of ecumenical Protestantism. He grew up in a Methodist household and departed in 1915 for Java (today, part of Indonesia) for six years of missionary work. Matthews had been ordained as a Methodist minister when he returned to the United States, but his passion was for languages (he was proficient in Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Malay, Persian, Sanskrit, and Sudanese). Having received degrees at Drew University, Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, and the School of Oriental Languages at the University of Vienna, he went on to teach languages at Methodist-run schools. He later taught at the historically Black Fisk University and Howard University as an expression of his commitment to anti-racism. As a proponent of the social gospel, Matthews worked on behalf of many left-wing causes in the 1920s and 1930s, including serving as a secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation and becoming a dues-paying member of the Socialist Party of America in 1929. In many ways, this was a typical profile for an ecumenical Protestant leader. But during the Great Depression he veered further left than most. In 1935, he had accused Protestant clergy of being “partners in plunder” with American capitalists.74
Like a handful of others, Matthews had been put off by the aggressive tactics of the Communist Party. By 1938 he had switched sides from the Far Left to the Far Right and began accusing Protestant churches of being run by communists and fellow travelers. Shortly after publicly breaking with the Left, he became a witness for the Dies Committee and served as the committee’s research director until he left in 1945 to conduct investigations on communism for the newspapers of the anti-communist Hearst Corporation. In 1953, Senator McCarthy hired Matthews to lead the staff of the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee.75
Matthews’s appointment coincided with the publication of his article “Reds and Our Churches” in the American Mercury, a right-wing paper.76 The article was provocative by design, insisting that “the largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant Clergymen.”77 “Reds and Our Churches” was so inflammatory that both Republican and Democratic senators rallied against Matthews. After reading the article, John McClellan, a Democratic senator from Arkansas who generally supported McCarthy, “was so enraged by the article that he promptly assumed leadership of the group” attacking Matthews. Shortly after the story broke on the front pages of newspapers across the country, countless clergy called their senators in protest. After the episcopal bishop from Detroit put pressure on the Republican senator from Michigan, Charles E. Potter, Potter withdrew his support for McCarthy during this controversy and called for Matthews’s resignation.78
Ecumenical Protestant leaders not only swayed senators to oppose Matthews but also had a direct line to the White House. Eisenhower’s closest aides worked with ecumenical Protestant leaders and religious leaders from other faiths to engineer a protesting note to be sent out by Eisenhower. The president called the attack on Protestant clergy “unjustifiable and deplorable” and an attack on “the principles of freedom and decency.” Eisenhower’s statement was put out as response to a letter written by members of the National Council of Christians and Jews. As the New York Times noted, “the President’s reply was apparently immediate,” which revealed coordination between the administration and religious leaders. The President’s sharply worded rebuke led to Matthews’s resignation the following day.79
Matthews was unrepentant and claimed he had proof that seven thousand clergymen were communists or fellow travelers. But both McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had refused to let him testify. A few years later, Matthews revived his career by cooperating with state-level Un-American Activities Committees in the South, helping white southern politicians discredit civil rights leaders with accusations of communism.80 In Congress, however, Matthews’s resignation was a major coup for McCarthy’s opponents. According to Robert Griffith, this episode “proved that McCarthy could be beaten, that the ‘myth of invincibility’ was just that.”81
Matthews had resigned on July 10, 1953. Eleven days later, on July 21, G. Bromley Oxnam testified before HUAC.82 When members of HUAC began to raise accusatory questions about his association with several popular front groups during the 1930s, Oxnam initially hoped to stave off a public confrontation. After unsuccessfully pursuing a private settlement with the committee’s chairman, Oxnam became disillusioned, and he instead prepared for a public fight. He now insisted on testifying before the committee in response to charges calling him a communist and a fellow traveler first made by fundamentalist Carl McIntire and later repeated by HUAC staff and witnesses. When Oxnam testified, most of the questions came from McIntire’s list of accusations.83
Oxnam testified about his involvement with left-leaning organizations, clarified his views on communism, and explained his past associations with individuals suspected of being communists. His testimony also delved into some of his close associates and fellow Methodists, like Harry F. Ward and Jack McMichael, whom he publicly criticized in front of the House committee. For example, he refused to call his former teacher and mentor Harry Ward a friend. Oxnam spoke about an episode “in 1940 when the American Civil Liberties Union took action barring anyone who believes in totalitarianism from the organization. Professor Ward resigned in protest, which indicated, I think, his attitude upon several matters.”84
Similarly, Oxnam made public his disagreements with Jack McMichael, the secretary of the embattled Methodist Federation for Social Action. “I did not know that he was a member of the Communist Party but I found myself in such fundamental opposition to Jack McMichael that I had to face one of two decisions, either to stay in [the Methodist Federation for Social Action] and get him out or to get out myself,” Oxnam announced. “And it seemed to me wiser to resign and sever all relations because I was a little fearful it would take a bit longer to get him out than I had time to give.”85 Oxnam then went on to assure HUAC that he already knew that McMichael was a Communist Party member and was willing to share his source of the information with the committee in private.
Figure 9. Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam is sworn in for testimony at a meeting of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1953. Photo by George Skadding / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
In the process of vindicating himself, Oxnam had thrown Ward and McMichael under the bus. Like countless others, Oxnam sought to protect his own authority by touting his anti-communist credentials and by disassociating himself with the Far Left of his own community. His tactics were cruel but successful. Richard M. Friend concludes that “after Oxnam’s effective rebuttal, HUAC soon moved on” from attacking ecumenical Protestants. And Angela M. Lahr concluded that “media response overwhelmingly favored Bishop Oxnam.” His testimony and disavowal of the Protestant Left made it safer for ecumenical Protestants in positions of power and encouraged governmental anti-communist crusaders to move on from focusing on religious groups.86
John Mackay’s “Letter to Presbyterians” capitalized on the momentum created by Matthews’s resignation and Oxnam’s vindication. It was written in the fall of 1953 and distributed to Northern Presbyterians across the country. Mackay’s letter was the product of a newfound confidence that the tide was turning against Red-baiters. Earlier that year, when Matthews had publicly accused Protestantism of supporting communism, he singled out Mackay. In his response on July 10, 1953, the day Matthews resigned, Mackay previewed many of the arguments that would reappear in his “Letter to Presbyterians.” Mackay defended his right to join any cause he believed was worthwhile, even if communists had joined the same cause. Calling McCarthyism a “New Inquisition,” Mackay announced that “we have come to a moment when in certain circles in our country you can be anything you want, if you are anti-Communist. You may be a liar, a rake, or a Fascist: everything is condoned so long as you vociferate against communism.” Calling out McCarthy in all but name, Mackay wrote that “the new inquisition already has its ‘Grand Inquisitor,’ who, like his famous prototype, thinks in patterns which have been made familiar to the world by totalitarian regimes.”87
When Mackay wrote the “Letter to Presbyterians” later in the fall of 1953, he was more measured in his rhetoric but emphasized the same points. He again referred to an inquisition that was confusing dissent with treason. Referencing religious freedom, Mackay warned that “the shrine of conscience and private judgment, which God alone has a right to enter, is being invaded” by congressional committees.88 The political developments were leading to a “fanatical negativism” and a “spiritual vacuum” that could “be occupied with ease by a Fascist tyranny.”89 The problem of communism was being solely dealt with as a police problem. Instead, Mackay suggested that a providential reading of history—that the “revolutionary forces of our time are in great part the judgment of God upon human selfishness and complacency”—should lead us to “a sincere attempt to organize society in accordance with the everlasting principles of God’s moral government of the world.”90 Mackay wanted Americans to “always be ready to meet around a conference table with the rulers of Communist countries … whatever their ignominious record, and regardless of the suffering they may have caused.”91 Quoting a passage from Isaiah, “Come now, and let us reason together,” Mackay insisted that dialogue was a Christian duty.92
The Northern Presbyterian denomination asked every one of their ministers to read and discuss Mackay’s letter with their congregations. Mackay’s letter grabbed nationwide headlines and became a model for other Protestant denominations.93 By 1953, Mackay had returned to his earlier calls for direct dialogue with communist China, and through his battles with McCarthyism he developed a critical spirit toward US foreign policy.
Theology of Revolution
In his fight against McCarthyism, Mackay hinted at a new idea that would become Protestant orthodoxy by the 1960s. In his “Letter to Presbyterians” he suggested that “revolutionary forces” represent God’s judgment on humanity.94 The idea that “revolution” was happening worldwide and that it provided clues to God’s work on earth, if only it were read in light of the Christian conception of time and history, did not receive much attention. But other ecumenists, most notably Presbyterian missionary educator in Brazil Richard Shaull, took up this idea of seeing world events as a series of providential revolutions. Shaull developed the theology of revolution as an alternative to the bipolar Cold War outlook. He argued that the world was not divided between capitalism and socialism or between democracy and communism. Instead of dividing the world spatially, he believed that all nations faced internal revolutions against injustice. The choice each country had to make was between accommodating revolutionary movements by transforming its society in the name of justice or risking the turmoil and violence that often result from revolutions. This theology of revolution led some ecumenical Protestants to see the struggles for economic justice, racial justice, and decolonization as providential and to more fully embrace these movements.
Ecumenical intellectuals writing about revolution in the mid-1950s pushed further than their predecessors in a few directions. First, the new dialogue made clearer that Christians should not view communism as the religion’s enemy. Rather, they should recognize, and even embrace, some aspects of socialism. Second, ecumenical authors argued that their religion was political in nature and that their fellow believers should more fully embrace political activism, including protest movements. Third, ecumenical Protestants more clearly shifted their focus to the Global South, with greater attention to the destabilizing effects of US power in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Finally, a new sense of urgency about the need to quickly transform the world replaced notions that Christianity was a “leaven” that changed society imperceptibly over long stretches of time. On the whole, the theology of revolution offered an alternative to the Cold War framework and it pushed some ecumenical Protestants to embrace the protest movements of the 1960s.
Ecumenical intellectuals developed a theology of revolution partly because they listened to their fellow Protestants abroad who were on the front lines of revolution. Zhao Zichen, a Chinese Protestant minister and a supporter of Mao who sat on the World Council of Churches’ governing body, wrote to the Christian Century in 1949, announcing that China has a distinctive history and its adoption of communism should come as no surprise. He pointed to the long history of Euro-American imperialism in the country and praised Mao for liberating China from both the West and from the country’s feudal past. In the new era that was dawning, religion would no longer be the handmaiden of imperialism, wrote Zhao. The task henceforth was for Christianity to “confess its sins and shortcomings in seeking to save its own life by occasionally siding with reactionary forces,” he wrote. At a moment when ecumenists were uniting their coreligionists from many lands and translating their religious values into a purportedly universal system of human rights, Zhao insisted that China would go its own way and that Protestants should accept, and even celebrate, national differences.95
American ecumenical Protestants listened carefully to foreign critics like Zhao. They also listened to American missionaries, who were themselves on the front lines of revolutionary movements. M. Richard Shaull was one of these figures. His 1955 book, Encounter with Revolution, was an influential account of international affairs that abandoned the bipolar divisions of Cold War thinking.96 The book reads like an open letter to Protestants from a missionary whose work abroad endowed him with a cosmopolitan knowledge Americans desperately needed. Shaull’s goal was to explain to Americans why people abroad become communists, and how to combat the spread of the ideology. But he also wanted Americans to look beyond communism and to see God’s hand in the revolutionary movements across the world. The book was a clear illustration of the shifting dialogue in the mid-1950s from the threat of communism to the causes of revolution. Encounter with Revolution was adopted as a study manual by the Student Volunteer Movement and was frequently cited by ecumenical Protestant activists in the 1960s who had joined the New Left.97
Warnings that the spread of Western modernity was destabilizing other parts of the world were not new. Ecumenical Protestant intellectuals had long warned about the destabilizing effects of capitalism in the Global South. William Ernest Hocking gave a full account of the harmful effects of modernity in Asia in his 1932 report on the missionary movement. “Modernization has arrived” in Asia, Hocking had announced, and brought with it “problems similar in character to those which accompanied such development in the West.”98 In 1937, theologians meeting in Oxford, England, echoed Hocking’s conclusion that the “same forces which had produced material progress have often enhanced inequalities, created permanent insecurity, and subjected all members of modern society to the domination of the so-called independent economic ‘laws.’ ” India and China witnessed modernization in other nations and observed firsthand “economic exploitation by capitalistic powers,” prompting “a widespread demand for radical social change through which the benefits of industrialization might be secured and the evils from which the industrialized nations of the West are suffering might be avoided,” ecumenical Protestants explained. “A consequence of this development of capitalism was the rise of socialism and communism,” they argued in 1937.99
Shaull built on these earlier criticisms as he implicated the United States in the world’s disorder and held it responsible for its consequences. The root of the problem was the spread of industrialization and technological modernity across the world promoted by the United States and Western Europe, Shaull wrote, along with promises of a better life, and the failure of the West to deliver what it promised. Peasants and workers across the world were demanding a rapid end to poverty. Shaull pointed out the irony that “Communism appeals to many of these people as the one power capable of finishing the revolution which the United States and Western Europe started.”100 This view contradicted the widely held notion that American capitalism was an inherently attractive alternative to communism because of the consumer goods it offered to the masses.101 Instead, capitalism was creating instability that often led to communism, according to Shaull.
Shaull’s diagnosis of revolutionary movements led him to conclude that US Protestants must undo the harm their country was causing. To do so, ecumenical Protestants had to support political movements that could rival the communist parties in appealing to the masses. A new movement was needed in the Global South, Shaull argued, and ecumenical Protestants should lead the way. Repeating a well-worn criticism of secularism that had become orthodoxy in some ecumenical circles, Shaull argued that liberals were not up to the job because their rationalism “makes them unaware of the irrational forces in men and society, and blinds their eyes to the depth of the revolution.” China’s Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, was a tragic example of this defunct liberal spirit, according to Shaull. The party’s leadership was full of Protestants, including its leader Chiang Kai-shek, but this did not keep Shaull from blaming their flaws on liberalism. These Chinese leaders were Christian in name only, Shaull argued, and their politics had little to offer the Chinese masses, who yearned for land reform.102 Despite Shaull’s hazy assessment of liberalism, his call for a more politically engaged Christianity, one that veered leftward, was clear. Prophetic Christianity offered an alternative to both liberalism and communism, according to Shaull.
By proposing a third way between capitalism and communism, Shaull smuggled in socialist ideas into his book under the banner of Christianity, making it safer for Americans to discuss these taboo ideas. “We are living ‘between the times,’ in a moment in which many of the political and social structures of the past have collapsed and in which new ones, more adequate for the future, have not yet been born,” he wrote. Events “may demand radical changes in our thinking and in our lives.” Dealing with revolution may “require confiscation of land, government planning, and in some cases, a degree of socialism.”103 Shaull took ideas long circulating in ecumenical Protestant circles, made them systematic, and offered them explicitly as an alternative to the predominant Cold War framework. Subtly, he shifted the focus of ecumenical Protestants from the United Nations and the problem of the anarchy of nation-states to emancipating peoples from the dominating forces of imperialism and poverty. He urged readers to look past Cold War geographic divides and see poverty as the world’s central problem. “The Communist ‘liberation’ of China, the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, the unrest in Southeast Asia and South America—all these are but tongues of a revolutionary flame that smolders in the depths and threatens to burst out and engulf us all,” he warned. “As we Americans peer into the mouth of the volcano, we see only the red fires of Communism and assume that it, and it alone, is the cause of all our trouble. Here is our first great mistake.”104 Accommodating revolutionary demands was the next great task for American Christians.
Recognizing “Red” China
By articulating an alternative to the Cold War framework, Shaull helped justify crossing its spatial divisions. And although he did not address the issue of China’s isolation directly, his ideas created a context in which recognition of the People’s Republic made sense. Shaull had little hope for the Soviet Union, but he believed other communist nations could reform themselves. He cited Yugoslavia as an example of a country that was critical of the USSR and open to dialogue with the West. Shaull believed “it is possible that similar movements may develop in other parts of the world.… If we refuse to enter into contact with them, we force them into Russia’s arms. If we keep all doors of contact open to them, we offer them this possibility of development in encounter with the thought and movements of the Western world.”105
Amid the receding sway of McCarthyism and the new understanding of world “revolution,” Mackay called again for diplomatic recognition of mainland China in 1956.106 He reemphasized the freedom of American and Chinese Christians to meet one another, a human right that the state could not take away. When exchanges between American and Chinese Protestants were endorsed by the National Council of Churches later that year, the New York Times reported that “some observers described it as the first major move to crack what has been called the Bamboo Curtain.”107 In fact, ecumenists had pursued the strategy of meeting with Christians in communist nations with success earlier that year, when a major meeting of the World Council of Churches executive committee took place in Budapest (a month before the Hungarian Crisis of 1956) and a National Council delegation visited Moscow shortly thereafter.108
The National Council took up the cause of recognizing mainland China and became the idea’s most enthusiastic backer. The organization spotlighted the issue of diplomatic recognition at the Fifth World Order Conference in 1958. Dulles, who was now Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, reunited with many old friends at the conference. But the reunion was not a happy one. As evangelical critic Carl Henry observed, the ecumenists “virtually repudiated major facets of Free World strategy shaped by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, one of the National Council of Churches’ own elder statesmen.”109 Dulles spoke out against diplomatic recognition of China in an address at the conference and was publicly humiliated and personally insulted when ecumenical Protestants overwhelmingly passed a resolution that called for recognition.110 John C. Bennett explained why excluding China from the international community was wrong. Isolating China “helps to preserve a false image of the United States and of other nations in the minds of Chinese people. It keeps people in ignorance of what is taking place in China. It hampers negotiations for disarmament. It limits the functioning of international organizations. We have a strong hope that the resumption of relationships between the peoples of China and of the United States may make possible also a restoration of relationships between their churches and ours.”111 For these reasons, in 1958 the ecumenists called on the United States to diplomatically recognize the People’s Republic of China and to allow it to join the United Nations.
Figure 10. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles speaking in 1958. That year, the National Council of Churches became the first large US organization to call for the diplomatic recognition of mainland China and for its inclusion in the United Nations, which Dulles personally lobbied against. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Bennett understood the call for recognition would not translate into policy immediately. He described the repudiation of Dulles as “part of a larger consideration—the attempt to move beyond more rigid Cold War attitudes of recent years.”112 By this time even Van Dusen had come around to support the recognition of China, and defended the position to his good friend Henry Luce. Both Luce and Van Dusen agreed that China would eventually need to be recognized, but Van Dusen worried that the State Department was not giving any thought “as to how the American public is to be prepared for this inevitability.”113 The call for recognition was one piece of a broader effort to wind down the Cold War and offer an alternative worldview.
When ecumenical Protestants discussed China in the 1950s, they emphasized the long history of imperialism and racism, while minimizing concerns about communism. They saw the communist takeover of mainland China as a product of economic and ideological upheaval, and they believed that communism would have a short life there. They consistently refused to see communism as monolithic, and while they affirmed the need to oppose the Soviet Union militarily, ecumenical Protestant leaders saw the way forward with China through economic development. The debates over Chinese recognition were one of the ways they had come not only to oppose specific policies of the United States but also criticize the Cold War itself. In doing so, however, they invited attacks by their enemies.
The Evangelical Countermobilization and the Clergy-Laity Gap
The National Council of Churches’ “Red China” resolution of 1958, which signaled a more confrontational stance toward the US government, occurred at the precise moment that evangelicals completed their nationwide consolidation. Evangelist Billy Graham reached the height of his powers, commanding enormous audiences and receiving regular access to President Eisenhower. Evangelical intellectuals, like Carl F. H. Henry, also began building bridges with disaffected ecumenical leaders like John Foster Dulles, Walter Judd, and Daniel A. Poling. Henry, the editor of Christianity Today, which was the evangelical alternative to the ecumenical Christian Century, criticized the National Council’s stance on China.114 He also orchestrated an attack on the National Council designed to drive a wedge between the organization and its denominations, and between national leaders and their local constituencies.
The budding alliances between disillusioned ecumenists and neo-fundamentalists like Henry were central to the increasing salience of the term “evangelical,” which distinguished this group from ecumenical Protestants, who were less and less interested in evangelization in the orthodox sense of the term. Only a decade before, during the World Order movement, Dulles, Judd, and Poling were active participants and supporters of the movement to create a just peace based on Protestant principles. In the late 1940s they began diverging from other ecumenical leaders because of the Cold War. But these divergences were tentative, and the three leaders kept their worries about the National Council private until the mid-1950s. Dulles and Judd continued to participate in events sponsored by the National Council, and Poling rarely went after ecumenical policy in his journal, the Christian Herald. But by the mid-1950s their reluctance to criticize their fellow ecumenical Protestants disappeared.
Their new willingness to attack ecumenists was aided by the National Council’s quarrel with the Eisenhower administration. Calling the Red China statement “rank hypocrisy” and “a brutal betrayal of our Protestant brothers in China,” Poling declared, “With every influence that I have, I repudiate it.” Judd likewise condemned the statement as soon as it came out, arguing that it would hurt American morale.115 Henry highlighted evangelicals’ dissatisfaction in the pages of Christianity Today, and the newfound common political grievances against the ecumenists made Judd and Poling more willing to think of evangelicals as natural allies.
Dulles also repudiated ecumenical views on China. “I attach great weight to judgments taken by church people which relate primarily to the realm of moral principles and the like,” he told journalists. “When it comes down to practical details such as whom you recognize and whom you don’t, then I think the judgment does not carry the same weight.”116 Henry, aligning himself with Dulles, gave the secretary of state a respectful treatment in Christianity Today. Henry’s own words about ecumenical Protestants were less judicious. “The modern Herods and Pilates crowded God out of centrality in ecumenical deliberations” about China, he wrote.117
In an editorial published shortly after the National Council called for the recognition of mainland China, Henry’s Christianity Today blasted the ecumenists for their “naïve confidence … that recognition and admission into the family of nations has a reformatory effect.” This struck at the core of the ecumenical worldview, which held that all nations could be brought into greater accord through their participation in the United Nations and through their exposure to human rights norms.118 Henry also chastised ecumenists for being far too sympathetic to the atheistic Soviet Union and too critical of the United States. He wondered “whether the antithesis between Christianity and unbelief had now been diluted.” Henry also criticized the direct political intervention by the National Council, lamenting that “the historic American principle of separation of church and state is clearly on the wane.” Henry’s attacks on ecumenical Protestant politics were disingenuous. After all, many of the institutions he helped organize were designed to create greater political influence for evangelicals. Henry’s more incisive criticism was aimed at the clergy-laity gap. “Direct pressure upon government policies by religious leaders of institutionalized Protestantism … is more and more approved, despite a lack of mandate at the grass-roots level,” he observed, “and frequent conflict with convictions of lay constituencies” has been occurring. This was inevitable “when political influence and power is concentrated in any religious collectivity.”119 For Henry, the problem was that a small group of ecumenical Protestant elites was speaking on behalf of a constituency that did not agree with them.
Henry recognized the discord among ecumenical denominations and between the laity and the clergy—and he fanned the flames. Christianity Today surveyed its readers about recognition of “Red China.”120 Unsurprisingly, the 1,400 responses overwhelmingly disapproved of the positions taken by the National Council, a fact that Christianity Today used over and over to insinuate that the National Council had lost connection with everyday churchgoers and was increasingly acting like the Catholic Church.121 The journal repeatedly called on the National Council’s executive committee to repudiate the “Red China” report, and it kept the coverage of the issue alive for many months after the conference.122
When it became clear the National Council was not backing down, Henry focused on the denominations. The editors applauded the Southern Baptists, who expressed their “shock” over the proposals on China, and supported the Southern Presbyterians, who “deplored the actions” of the National Council.123 Based on “independent surveys,” the call for recognition of China was “contrary to the convictions of the vast majority of their constituencies,” Christianity Today insisted. “Yet NCC-affiliated denominational leaders maintained public silence or, at most, curiously emphasized that the conference did not speak for the NCC, while ignoring the question whether the delegates authentically represented their respective denominations.”124 This was not merely an evaluation but a threat. “In this climate of affairs, denominational silence will inevitably be taken for acceptance,” Henry insisted.
Henry scored a victory when the Northern Baptists repudiated the Red China report by a close vote of 245 to 234. And under the leadership of O. K. Armstrong, a former congressman known for his hawkish views on communism, the Northern Baptists went on record against admitting mainland China into the United Nations until the country showed respect for human rights.125
The National Council did not appear especially shaken. While a few denominations repudiated the China recommendations, most did not. And support for the National Council remained strong. The Southern Presbyterians, for example, affirmed their “basic support” for the National Council while disapproving of their specific stance on China.126 In general, ecumenical Protestants showed that they were willing to oppose government policy publicly and dramatically, and were willing to suffer the consequences of their actions.
From Protestant Globalism to a Theology of Revolution
By 1958, ecumenical Protestants had shown themselves willing to confront US foreign policy and to challenge Cold War orthodoxy with a new understanding of international relations. In the decade-long process of reconciling a UN-centered globalism with anti-communism, American ecumenical Protestants came to terms with a fact they had long had the luxury of ignoring: They could no longer take for granted that the interests of the US government and of Christianity were aligned. In the process, they had lost some of their allies and ceded some of their public stature to old and new rivals.
But ecumenical leaders were emboldened by the controversy they had created in their calls for the recognition of China. Mired in indecision about US foreign policy in Europe and split over NATO, ecumenical Protestants turned their sights on Asia in the 1950s. With Asia on their minds, intellectuals like Latourette, Mackay, and Shaull built on a strand of anti-colonial thought missing in the discussions of Europe to offer an alternative to the prevailing Cold War framework and focus attention instead on the theology of revolution. Most importantly, their deliberations on China paved the way for their influential opposition to the Vietnam War in the following decade.127
In the crucible of the Cold War, US ecumenical Protestants preserved their earlier emphases on universalism, anti-colonialism, and social-democratic and anti-racist reforms. Without ever giving up on the United Nations, which they continued to revere for both its moral aims and its institutional workings, they shifted their attention toward revolutionary forces. They had originally conceived of the United Nations and human rights as a means of solving the crisis of unlimited national sovereignty. From the 1930s to the 1950s, ecumenical Protestants debated whether Protestant globalism would free countries in the Global South from European and American domination or whether it would force newly emergent nations to behave in accordance with Christian and Western values. By the late 1950s, ecumenical Protestants moved decisively toward liberation. The new focus on revolution provided ecumenical Protestants with an escape from Cold War orthodoxy.
The ecumenists’ new confidence in opposing government measures and in the need to engage politically on behalf of providential revolution had immediate effects. Ecumenical Protestants recognized that a “revolution” was taking place against segregation in the United States. Inspired by events abroad, ecumenical Protestants mobilized on behalf of revolutionary movements at home in the schools of Little Rock and in the streets of Selma.