CHAPTER 8
In the wake of World War II, ecumenical Protestants hoped to build upon the successes of the New Deal and ensure the American economy took care of the country’s citizens. Like their mobilization against segregation, the new economic campaign was inspired by the World Order movement and empowered by their commitment to human rights. They evoked the rights-bearing human person as they came together around a third way between capitalism and communism. In their view, a Christian economy was one that balanced freedom and order and was organized around a mixed economy that borrowed elements of both socialism and free enterprise. They called it the “Responsible Society.” As the World Council of Churches explained in 1948, “A responsible society is one where freedom is the freedom of men who acknowledge responsibility to justice and public order, and where those who hold political authority or economic power are responsible for its exercise to God and the people whose welfare is affected by it.”1 With this pithy slogan, ecumenical Protestants defended a mixed economy from corporate and libertarian detractors.
The Responsible Society was forged in a context of competing constituencies, turbulent geopolitics, a hostile mass media, and occasionally disagreements among family members. Church leaders convened grand conferences in Pittsburgh in 1947, in Amsterdam in 1948, and Detroit in 1950. As they gathered an illustrious cast of business moguls and union organizers with leading theologians, ecumenical Protestants hoped to get around thorny church-state separation issues by getting the laity to translate Christian theology into a concrete economic reform agenda. What they encountered, instead, was the clergy-laity gap in values and the realities of a religion segregated by social class. The quest for a Responsible Society also ran headlong into the Cold War framework, which intertwined discussions of the economy with debates about geopolitics. In the crucible of the early Cold War, ecumenical Protestants subtly refashioned their economic views, even as they remained stalwart backers of the mixed economy.
As this chapter shows, ecumenical Protestants desired to preserve and expand upon the New Deal, and their efforts were both attention grabbing and influential. Contrary to still-too-common depictions of postwar “mainline” Protestants as virulent anti-communists and defenders of free enterprise, many ecumenical Protestants were reformers who were part of a growing international interest in the welfare state.2 Ever focused on consensus and order, they built bridges between labor and capital, Republicans and Democrats. Although their efforts fell short of creating the consensus they so desperately desired, they bolstered unions, governmental regulation, and economic equality by connecting these issues to Christian theology and by mobilizing Americans on behalf of these religious ideas. Ecumenical Protestants made connections between their religious beliefs and the liberal political initiatives of the era, blessing them as Christian before a devout nation.
Toward a Middle Way
Things were looking up for ecumenical Protestant churches during the early years of the Cold War, but the clergy was in no celebratory mood. By most measures we have of religious devotion, ecumenical Protestantism was growing and expanding its influence. Church attendance and membership were rising, Americans read the Bible more often and prayed more frequently, and the number of their churches grew, especially in the suburbs. But despite the financial health of ecumenical Protestant denominations, many of their leaders worried that something was deeply wrong with American culture. And they blamed the economy, or at least Americans’ veneration of it. “American civilization is secular at heart,” remarked African American theologian George D. Kelsey to a group of Protestant students in 1951. The country is driven by “a practical materialism with no explicit philosophy.” Kelsey, who worked for the National Council of Churches and as a professor at Morehouse College, where he mentored a young Martin Luther King Jr., saw religion being overtaken by capitalism. “In our cities the towering skyscrapers of business enterprise dwarf the few churches which have not yet retreated to the suburbs,” he lamented. Kelsey held the philosophy of Adam Smith “primarily responsible” for this development.3 In a similar vein, Presbyterian minister George Docherty felt compelled to remind Americans that their country was more than “the material total of baseball games, hot dogs, Coca-Cola, television, deep freezers, and other gadgets.”4 Ecumenical Protestants were anxious about the new economic climate, despite their growing churches, swelling budgets, and the enormous public attention they continued to receive.
Ecumenical Protestants also contended with the Christian libertarianism of their co-religionists. As had been evident for at least a decade, broad swaths of churchgoers—especially those in positions of power in individual churches—were sympathetic to the laissez-faire economic policies championed by the Republican Party for much of the 1930s and 1940s. They also contended with the economic libertarianism of evangelicals. While evangelicals focused their criticism of “materialism” on the Soviet Union, communists, and “godless” union leaders, ecumenical Protestants’ anti-materialism focused broadly on American culture and the country’s economy. Eschewing the Cold War dichotomy between capitalism and communism, ecumenical Protestants searched for a middle path between the two.
Church leaders worried about the power of America’s corporate elite and the effects consumer capitalism was having on everyday Americans. Ecumenical Protestants wanted to tame capitalism’s harmful effects, but they also recognized that they had limited options in pressing for reform. Their churches were disproportionately middle class and much of the white working class was Catholic. And as churches relocated to the suburbs, it only worsened ecumenical Protestantism’s disconnect from industrial life. Ecumenical Protestants’ paths toward economic reform were circumscribed by these structural limitations. Their class-bound churches precluded mobilizing workers. Their anxiety about their own laity led them to work not through their economically segregated churches but around them.
Ecumenical Protestants focused their attention on the manufacturing belt along the Great Lakes, encompassing cities like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. After all, the region’s industrial output had just helped the United States win World War II by becoming an “arsenal of democracy,” and much of the country’s economic activity remained concentrated there. But on the horizon was the growth of the Sunbelt, stretching from Florida to Southern California. Because of cheap labor, government investment, and a political climate friendly to corporate interests, economic activity slowly pivoted toward that region. Not coincidentally, the Sunbelt was dominated by evangelicals.5
As ecumenical Protestants became involved in the postwar economic debates, they positioned themselves as mediators between labor leaders and corporate executives, casting themselves as a neutral party. Before the Federal Council of Churches brought the two sides together, the organization’s chief researcher, F. Ernest Johnson, urged ecumenical Protestants to elaborate their values, so they could present a united front. In the new postwar economy and amid broad demographic changes, what economic values did American ecumenical Protestants hold? Johnson was the perfect person to lead the investigation. After all, he had run the Federal Council’s research bureau since the strikes of 1919 and was an influential supporter of the New Deal. Johnson was born in a small town in Ontario, Canada, and grew up in central Michigan. He attended Union Theological Seminary in New York and was ordained in the Methodist Church before leaving the ministry in 1916 and becoming involved with the Federal Council in 1918. He stayed with the organization until his retirement in 1952. He had also taken an academic position at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1931. Johnson was a devoted social gospeler throughout his life. As a Methodist and labor activist, he was drawn to personalism. Along with other Methodists, Johnson took the lead in translating the philosophical language of personalism into a language of the “rights” and “dignity” of labor.6 By intervening at a decisive moment, Johnson hoped to do for the American economy what the Dulles Commission had done for the United Nations and the postwar settlement.
Johnson believed that the basic questions of Protestant values were already answered. Instead, his economic inquiry would focus on the major policy questions in the postwar United States.7 Johnson’s study ran from early 1946 through the end of 1950. His research assistants raised twelve questions about the economy and invited comments by theologians, academics, corporate executives, and labor leaders. Their studies, too technical for most churchgoers, outlined what Johnson presented as his religious community’s consensus on the economy and paved the way for ecumenical Protestant leaders to bring labor and capital together.
The study hoped to find what social ethicist John Bennett referred to as “middle axioms.” Expanding upon the idea first developed by British theologian J. H. Oldham, Bennett defined middle axioms as ideas that have a “substantial consensus” but which related broad theological postulates to “concrete reality.” They are propositions that give guidance only at a particular time, rather than being true for all time, and help define the direction in which Christians should be moving. Bennett gave the example of the Six Pillars of Peace developed by the Dulles Commission as ideal middle axioms. They were specific enough to apply only to the World War II era and would have made little sense only a decade or two earlier. But they were also general enough to give guidance without offering the kinds of details that were best left to the experts. This, thought Bennett, was the best way to apply Christian ethics in the field of economics while leaving room for honest disagreement about technical matters.8
Bennett acknowledged that it was more difficult to find consensus around middle axioms in economic policy than in international affairs because Americans were so divided over the government’s role in the economy. And economic matters were extremely complex, often leaving religious leaders at a loss in addressing them. Developing middle axioms was not a perfect solution, but it was the best way forward. And Bennett proposed two middle axioms of his own. The first was that the government ought to ensure full employment. The second was that private centers of power should not exceed government power, because the state was more responsive to the will of the people than were corporations.9
Inspired by Bennett’s framework, Johnson began his study by identifying several problems that seemed most troubling in 1946. The first was the tension between freedom and social control.10 The issue of social control had long been raised by critics of the New Deal, but it gained a new currency in the late 1930s when big business, reeling from loss after loss against the Roosevelt administration, reached out to ecumenical Protestant ministers like James Fifield for help. “Christian libertarianism,” as Kevin Kruse calls it, grew in the late 1930s and flourished during the early Cold War. Christian libertarianism was the idea that Christianity was a radically individualistic tradition and that “the sacredness of individual personality” was threatened by the New Deal.11 Christianity had promoted “thrift, initiative, industriousness and resourcefulness which have been among our best assets since the Pilgrim days,” Fifield argued, but it was now being destroyed in the political realm by Roosevelt and in the spiritual realm by social gospelers like Bennett and Johnson. Echoing economist Friedrich von Hayek, Fifield condemned “America’s movement toward dictatorship,” which “has already eliminated the checks and balances in its concentration of powers in our chief executive.”12 Fifield, a Congregationalist and the minister to some of the wealthiest residents in Los Angeles, succeeded in promoting Christian libertarianism because, unlike fundamentalists, he shared the corporate elite’s liberal theology, their denominational affiliation, and because he steered clear of bigoted and conspiratorial rhetoric fundamentalists often employed.
Johnson confronted Christian libertarianism by indicting classical liberalism and the “profit motive”—a target of criticism since at least the 1930s. Economic self-interest ran counter to the sense of selflessness that the Christian faith was supposed to instill. Many people eschew a search for profit in favor of some higher calling, Johnson argued, including administrators of cooperatives, public servants, inventors, and scientists. Likewise, workers value security, a good quality of life, and the “satisfaction from a job well done.” Johnson argued the service motive would wither away if it was not expressed in all aspects of people’s lives. “Service motives must find large expression in industry if they are to prevail in other sectors of our common life.”13
Johnson was certain that ecumenical Protestants would lead America toward the “middle way” in economics. The “Christian religion,” he assured readers, will provide Americans with a level of disinterestedness from economic gain because Christians sit “somewhat loose to earthly circumstances, to property, position and power.” He was expressing the misleading but common view among ecumenical Protestants that they spoke on behalf of universal principles while others—Catholics, Jews, African Americans, Japanese Americans, women—merely pleaded on behalf of the special interests of their group. “The ingredients for the economy of a great age are here,” he wrote assuredly, and ecumenical Protestants would help bring it about.14
Confident that ecumenical Protestants represented universal truths, Johnson delved into the issues that were “uppermost in the minds of most of our readers” in 1946. The most pressing, he argued, were tensions between labor and management. In January of that year, 750,000 steelworkers walked off their jobs in protest of low wages and high prices. Meatpackers, coalminers, and railroad workers soon followed suit. A general strike in Oakland, California, brought the city to a standstill. When Johnson printed his position paper defending the role of unions, he was taking a position that was unpopular with many middle-class churchgoers. Johnson reminded readers that labor unions arose out of a desire to uphold human rights. Although “work is a commodity,” which could be freely contracted out by laborers, “the worker is not.” Unions protect the humanity of the workers, Johnson argued, by ensuring living wages, creating equal bargaining power with employers, educating workers, training them, and pushing for regulatory legislation. Johnson placed some qualifications on his support for collective bargaining: It needed to be done in good faith, involve continuous communication, and respect the “reciprocal functions” of management and labor. In the long run, Johnson hoped unions would become more transparent, more professional, and rely more on voluntary participation. But the problems unions were created to address would not disappear anytime soon. He supported the “union shop”—meaning all workers at a factory must join the union, whether they want to or not—because labor unions arose and continue to exist “in a social situation that is full of injustices.”15
The problems inherent in both labor and management, Johnson believed, meant that a third force, representing the common good, needed to step in between the two warring sides. “A combination of administrative and judicial authority vested in a permanent board or special court may, we believe without infringing any democratic principle, make decisions regarding the proper interpretation of existing contracts,” Johnson wrote. This was especially necessary in industries like utilities, where the public interest would be greatly harmed by strikes. That mediating force would be the state, bolstered by the moral authority of Christianity, Johnson argued.16
In these ways, Johnson’s studies articulated a Christian defense of the mixed economy and justified key middle axioms: the centrality of the service motive, support of the union shop, and an active state that mediated between labor and capital. The next big challenge was to place the studies in the hands of laypersons and have them put the new middle axioms into practice.
Mobilizing the Laity
The first great attempt to put Johnson’s middle way into practice came at the National Study Conference on the Church and Economic Life, which was held in Pittsburgh in 1947. Two-thirds of the participants were laypersons, representing labor, agriculture, business, and cooperatives.17 They arrived having pored over Johnson’s economic studies and were ready to debate questions outlined by Yale Divinity School social ethicist Liston Pope. “What are the issues in economic life about which the Christian Church should be most concerned?” asked Pope. “What is the responsibility, function and contribution of the Protestant churches toward the resolving of these issues on Christian principles?” Most importantly, “What should be the program of the churches in discharging their responsibility?”18
Figure 14. The liberal Republican political leader Charles P. Taft, pictured here at a Senate hearing on unemployment in 1938, was a prominent layman and a proponent of ecumenical Protestant economic reform efforts throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The National Study Conference on Church and Economic Life was modeled on the gatherings put on by the Dulles Commission, which was held up as a model for Protestant consensus building and political mobilization.19 And, like the Dulles Commission, the economic discussions were led by a well-connected layman, Charles P. Taft. He was the son of the former president William Howard Taft and brother of the influential senator Robert A. Taft. Like his father and brother, Charles was also involved in politics, devoting himself to the civic reform movements in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a longtime councilmember and briefly as the city’s mayor in the 1950s. He also held federal administrative posts during World War II, including as an advisor to the State Department’s delegation at the San Francisco UN conference. But unlike much of his family, Charles stood firmly in the liberal wing of the Republican Party and often feuded with his conservative brother. Charles was a lawyer by training, but his true passion was for religion. This devout Episcopalian had been the youngest head of the YMCA and in 1947 became the Federal Council’s first layman co-president in the organization’s history.20 Charles Taft was as well positioned as anyone to bring labor and capital to a middle ground.
Taft joined the elites of America’s corporations and unions at Pittsburgh. On the program committee alone were Eric A. Johnston, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America; William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL); Walter P. Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW); Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric; James G. Patton, president of the National Farmers Union; Frank P. Graham, president of the University of North Carolina; and Frances Perkins, the former secretary of labor.21 In addition, Fifield, the godfather of Christian libertarianism, joined numerous businessmen, labor leaders, civil servants, and several members of Congress. The Federal Council of Churches was flexing its muscles by gathering together this illustrious group, but finding a consensus on economic policy appeared unlikely.22
Proceedings were dull until a working group voted down Adam Smith and the profit motive. Smith’s dictum that “the individual in pursuit of his selfish gain will be led by an invisible hand to work the common good” was an “unsatisfactory answer” to contemporary economic problems. The working group looked to the World Council of Churches for justification, citing the organization’s statement that “Christians believe that property represents a trusteeship under God, and that it should be held subject to the needs of the community.” They added that the profit motive was “irreconciliable [sic] with the emphasis of Jesus upon service as the basic motivation of life.”23
The issue of the “union” or “closed” shop was among the most hotly contested subjects among ecumenical Protestants in 1947. Indeed, the topic was being passionately debated as the Taft-Hartley Act made its way through Congress (it passed a few months after the Pittsburgh meeting). Taft-Hartley prohibited the closed shop, which required that managers hire only union members. The legislation also allowed states to ban the union shop, which meant that individual workers in those states could refuse to join the labor union, even if the company they worked for was unionized. In these and other ways, the act would erode the power of unions.
With the law being debated in Congress, Representative Howard Buffett, Republican of Nebraska and active Presbyterian layman, wanted “some idea of the Christian viewpoint on the closed shop.” After all, he would have to vote on the issue in a few weeks. Opinions in the room were sharply divided. W. L. Goldston, a Texas oil executive, urged his coreligionists to declare the closed shop “unchristian” because it impinged on individual choice. The Reverend Armand Guerrero of the leftist Methodist Federation for Social Action countered that “ministers have a closed shop of their own,” and could therefore not go on record in opposition without being hypocrites. Sensing that the issue was divisive, Boris Shishkin, the AFL’s director of research and the chairman of the group, moved to table the issue. The conference “skittered around the closed shop issue like an infielder dodging a hot grounder,” the Chicago Tribune sarcastically put it.24
The controversy did not end there. “A section on wages provoked the sharpest discussion,” according to an observer. After the group agreed that wages should provide a decent standard of living and be judged in terms of a company’s income, the conversation got bogged down over Keynes’s purchasing power parity theory. Proponents of Keynes’s views argued that “wages ought to be set in terms of the purchasing power necessary for a prosperous and stable economy” and that “the Christian conscience can approve the goal.” Charles P. Taft arrived in the room as Keynes was being discussed. He tried to dissuade the group from taking a position because the theory was “controversial.”25 Taft got his way. But the phrase reappeared in altered form when the committee charged with writing the official conference statement inserted it noncommittedly: “lack of sufficient purchasing power … has been cited among the restrictions that may interfere with” a well-functioning economy.26
Labor, capital, and the ministry agreed that Christianity had a big role to play in the economy. But some dissenting voices thought churches had no business discussing the economy at all. This was a position more prevalent among southern laymen, who tended to eschew the social gospel and instead preferred one that focused on individual salvation. Ervin Jackson, a realtor from Birmingham, Alabama, urged the churches to stay out of economics: “Its job,” a witness paraphrased him saying, “must be to promote a spirit of Christian love and respect for the individual man.” Victor Reuther of the United Auto Workers could not have disagreed more. “The Church will gain authority only when it evolves a program in the field of economics and social relationships which will gain public respect.”27 He thought ecumenical Protestants had not done this yet.
In the tradition of such conferences, the organizers put out an official statement summarizing the conclusions they had reached. It conveyed little of the controversy that had raged. Admitting the “sharp differences of opinion” aired at the conference, they nonetheless emphasized their “substantial agreement.” But the agreements were largely on questions, not answers. These questions included how to balance “economic stability” and “progress” with the “essential liberties of man,” how full employment and equitable distribution of income ought to be achieved, what the effects of the “concentration of ownership” on the economy have been, what role the government ought to play in economic life, and how industrial relations could be “made more harmonious.” Answers would be found later.28
Organizers did offer a few tenuous conclusions, ones that were rooted in the ethical deliberations of the clergy but not widely accepted by the ecumenical Protestant laity. They reasserted the primacy of the human person “in religion and in human relations, including economics.” The person “is not primarily an economic self-seeker” and must be provided with “social conditions, under which it will be less difficult to express in daily living the spirit of redemptive love that is enshrined in the New Testament.” Certain “social institutions, such as the state, may serve to restrain man’s egoism” when moral instruction fails and that person is motivated more by profit than by Christian teachings. Furthermore, where ownership by individuals is “difficult to regulate for the common welfare, encouragement should be given to further experimentation in the forms of private, cooperative, and public ownership.” And the American economy ought to provide an “adequate annual income for every family.” The ultimate goal, ecumenical Protestants announced in 1947, was to work for “the abolition of preventable poverty.”29
Some business leaders expressed frustration about their inability to make headway against the economic views of the ecumenical Protestant leadership. And they recognized just how important religion was to the postwar economy. In the wake of the Pittsburgh conference, they caught on to the religious anxiety about the profit motive and to the explosion of public religiosity in the postwar United States. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), for example, renamed their journal Trends in Education-Industry Cooperation in 1949 to Trends in Church, Education and Industry Cooperation. The rebranded magazine extolled the piety of business leaders through biographical profiles and showed that businessmen were promoting Christianity at work. NAM also held meetings between management and religious leaders (leaving labor out, unlike at Pittsburgh) that sought to reconcile the profit system with religious teachings. But they struggled to get traction as economic regulation and labor unions remained popular during the postwar period, thanks in part to the work of ecumenical Protestants.30
As ecumenical leaders shrugged off the obvious attempt by NAM to co-opt Christianity on behalf of free enterprise, they nonetheless worried that their own efforts were too closely linked to corporate elites. They showed awareness that ecumenical Protestant denominations represented middle-class churches and that they had lost contact with the working class. Pittsburgh meeting organizers chastised the local churches for their history of excluding workers from membership and urged them to “avoid the stultification of a class Church.” Protestant churches, the official Pittsburgh report said, have “tended to move out of an area as it became industrial,” leaving working-class folks behind.31 It was a trend that was accelerating with postwar suburbanization.
Statistics bore out these observations. According to polls taken in 1945–46, 23.9 percent of churchgoers belonging to the Congregational Christian denomination were in the upper class, 42.6 percent in the middle, and 33.5 percent in the lower class. Presbyterians (Northern, Southern, and others) collectively registered as 21.9 percent upper class, 40 percent middle class, and 38.1 percent lower class. Methodists were one of the few traditions to register a majority (51.7%) lower-class membership, thanks partly to their large southern and African American constituency. Protestants of all traditions were less likely to belong to a union than were Jews, and especially Catholics. If voting behavior is any indication of economic preference, polls noted that more Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists voted for Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey in 1944 than for Franklin Roosevelt.32
Although these polls showed most ecumenical Protestant denominations, especially ones with few southern or African American members, were more affluent, educated, and individualistic in outlook than Americans as a whole, it is important to point out that they were divided on key issues. A plurality of Episcopalians, 34.7 percent, believed that working people should have more power, while a minority of 21.8 percent believed they should have less power. Methodists were even more supportive: 45.1 percent to 16.6 percent. Other surveys indicated that ecumenical Protestant churchgoers generally sided with individualistic economic ideas but also that there were substantial disagreements among the faithful. Asked whether the government’s job is to “make certain that there are good opportunities for each person to get ahead on his own” or “to guarantee every person a decent and steady job and standard of living,” the individualistic choice won out in most ecumenical denominations. Presbyterians chose “on his own” at a rate of 65.3 percent, Episcopalians at 64.9 percent, Congregationalists at 71.6 percent, and Methodists at 57.6 percent. But in each tradition a substantial portion of churchgoers preferred the “guaranteed economic security” option: 31.1, 33.1, 25.8, and 37.9 percent, respectively.33
Although churchgoers in ecumenical denominations preferred economic individualism more strongly than Americans as a whole, the structure of ecumenical Protestant institutions made the situation even more lopsided. Churchgoers with the most money were more likely to take leadership roles in local churches, which meant that they were more likely to be sent as representatives to conferences like the 1947 Pittsburgh gathering. This only reinforced ecumenical leaders’ feeling that they were disconnected from the working class. While the ecclesiastical structure of ecumenical denominations produced a “laity” composed of wealthy members and conservative activists, ecumenical leaders had to go outside the churches to represent their working-class members. At Pittsburgh, they brought in union leaders who were not organically connected to church institutions to represent those Protestants who supported more economic regulation.
Despite the disconnect with everyday churchgoers, most ecumenical leaders thought the Pittsburgh meeting had been important because it empowered the clergy to get more involved in economic matters. Few went as far as Taft, who thought the event “has succeeded beyond our hopes.”34 John Bennett observed that the 1947 Pittsburgh conference “report is actually more conservative than the Social Creed of the Churches of 1932.” The major accomplishment, as Bennett saw it, was that the meeting “magnified the function of the church” in economic matters. The Reverend Paul Silas Heath thought that the conference gave local ministers a green light to get involved in economic debates, which those in “the cloistered sanctuaries of the Seminaries” had been doing for years. Although the conference said little new theologically, observed Heath, the propositions it endorsed “have never been said before by the people who said them at Pittsburgh.” In other words, Protestant clergy were being encouraged to get involved in economic reform. Bennett agreed that although the conference was unimpressive “as an episode in the history of Christian Ethics,” it was successful as “a strategic event in contemporary American Christianity.”35
The postmortem of the Pittsburgh meeting raised old questions about the role of the laity, ecclesiology, and democracy in Protestant life. Fears of the “laity,” a politicized term synonymous with conservative corporate executives and anti-clergy activists, were echoed in the wake of the Pittsburgh meeting. The unprecedented experiment with the laity was a step in the right direction, argued Walter George Muelder. But their ideas should be taken with a grain of salt. “The church, even in her accommodated social reality, bears a conscience and a Word quite other than the words of an agreement which a cross-section of the church membership might assent to,” he wrote. In other words, what Christianity has to say about the economy was not up for referendum. According to Muelder, the point was not to convince everyone of the left-leaning ideas held by much of the clergy but instead to gain consent from the laity for the Federal Council to carry on its work. “Now that a large number of laymen have collectively agreed that the church has a responsibility in economic life,” Muelder noted, “it will be easier to carry forward ethico-economic education in the churches.”36
The National Study Conference on the Church and Economic Life in Pittsburgh in 1947 was a strategic victory for the Federal Council. It answered the critique that the laity did not have enough control over Protestantism while simultaneously ensuring that ecumenical institutions would continue to provide guidance on economic issues. The conference also expressed the ecumenists’ confidence in the power of Christianity to discipline business and labor leaders. But the debates about who gets to speak on behalf of Protestantism and what the proper relationship was between church and state would not go away.
Taft emphasized that the Pittsburgh gathering was only a starting point and many hoped it would be the “Delaware” of Christian economics—a reference to the landmark conference organized by Dulles in 1942. Several participants suggested that a version of the Dulles Commission be convened for economic affairs and be charged with solving economic problems.37 The idea of an independent commission that had free rein was a nonstarter in 1947. The Dulles Commission had been an unusually independent venture during the war, but in 1947 its independence had been curbed as it was reincorporated into the Department of International Justice and Goodwill. An independent commission on economics like the Dulles group, run by Taft, was therefore ruled out quickly for bureaucratic reasons.
But something new was needed. Taft was among those pushing for a broader approach to Protestant involvement in economic policy. Having Taft on board was a major coup for the Federal Council. Not only did Taft lend prestige and facilitate political access for ecumenists, as had Dulles, but Taft’s liberal Republican politics helped shield ecumenical Protestants from accusations of socialist sympathies. He believed a focus on the entire economy—not just industry and labor—would move ecumenical Protestantism away from what he considered an overly sympathetic view of unions. Federal Council secretary Samuel McCrea Cavert reported that Taft “apparently feels strongly that we need to do something in our organizational structure which will stand as a symbol of the fact that Pittsburgh marks a fresh method of approach.” Cavert agreed with Taft that it would give the Federal Council “a psychological advantage” and ensure their ability to “lay hold continuously of the kind of personnel which we had at Pittsburgh.”38 At Taft’s urging, the Federal Council reorganized the Industrial Division into the Department of Church and Economic Life.39 The board of the newly organized department included many of the most prominent attendees of the Pittsburgh conference, including Walter Reuther (UAW), Boris Shishkin (AFL), Nelson Cruikshank (AFL), Paul Hoffman (Studebaker Corp), and James G. Patton (National Farmers’ Union).40 The representation of businessmen in the Federal Council was not new; the presence of labor leaders in the ecumenical bureaucracy, however, was a major development.41
The newly formed Department of Church and Economic Life was headed by Cameron Hall. He was a Presbyterian minister who had led the Northern Presbyterians’ social action group. Hall, like the social gospel minister Walter Rauschenbusch before him, held a pastorate in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. Hall had only recently taken charge of the Federal Council’s economic efforts, following the retirement of longtime activist James Myers (who joined the Socialist Party immediately after his departure).42
Hall’s first task was to convene thirty follow-up conferences he called “little Pittsburghs.”43 They were weekend conferences sponsored by local and regional councils of churches, with participation ranging from one to two hundred people. Hall proceeded to organize conferences in cities mostly along the manufacturing belt “because of the importance of the area or community to the economic life of the country.”44 In places like Buffalo, Baltimore, Wilkes-Barre (PA), Chicago, Flint, and Kansas City, Hall was bringing the ideas and values of national Federal Council leaders to local churches.45
This regional approach strengthened ecumenical involvement in the industrial affairs of the country. Ecumenical Protestants became more involved in industrial disputes across the region and helped bring about a period of relatively stable relations between unions and corporations. But the regional focus also reinforced the territorial divide in political economy between ecumenical and evangelical Protestants. By focusing on the manufacturing belt, ecumenical Protestants ceded the Sunbelt to evangelicals. The Sunbelt’s economy and evangelicals’ economic views reinforced one another and, over the decades, the fortunes of evangelicalism rose with the growing wealth of the region. In the here-and-now of the late 1940s, however, the manufacturing belt predominated, and ecumenical Protestants made sure they were closely involved in the region’s economic debates.46
The “Responsible Society” as a Middle Way Between Capitalism and Communism
Just as the Federal Council of Churches was promoting its economic views publicly, the World Council of Churches spearheaded a new economic doctrine that became known as the “Responsible Society.” It became a rallying cry for ecumenical Protestant leaders in the postwar decades. The World Council was created in 1948 to give Protestants a single voice in world affairs, but it came into being in the early days of the Cold War, when the world was being split in two. The relationship between Christianity and the economy, which had been so contentiously debated in the United States, took on a global and geopolitical dimension at the World Council’s inaugural meeting in Amsterdam. Given the immense press coverage of the event, American ecumenists traveling to Amsterdam knew they would be asked to take sides in the new bipolar world.
The Americans sailing to Europe in the summer of 1948 were torn between two rival impulses. The first was to criticize the Soviet Union and Marxism and to clearly distinguish their views from the materialist philosophy and the brutality of the USSR. This was especially important to the politicized laity at home, who were seeking to rein in the activism of the clergy. The other impulse was to create a truly global communion, one that would transcend the political divisions of the Cold War. Abroad, American ecumenists had to deal with foreign clergy who enthusiastically backed the welfare state and were sometimes sympathetic to communist regimes. Although the Russian Orthodox Church had not yet joined the World Council, many Eastern European and Chinese churches that lived under communist governments were represented at Amsterdam. Chinese theologian Zhao Zichen, for example, railed against Western economic imperialism and defended Mao’s revolution.47 He was elected co-president of the World Council at the Amsterdam assembly. And theologians like Zhao had important European allies, including the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who had long sympathized with socialism. For these reasons, at Amsterdam the American ecumenists were hesitant about taking sides in the Cold War.
John Foster Dulles, however, was less hesitant. Transformed by the Cold War, Dulles was veering away by the late 1940s from an idealistic internationalism toward the stauncher nationalism that would characterize his career as secretary of state in the 1950s.48 In his address at Amsterdam in 1948, Dulles focused on the evils of Soviet communism. His own views of the economy provided a striking contrast to the opinions of most ecumenical leaders. “I believe in the free enterprise system very strongly,” he wrote to a friend in 1947. “I have that economic belief just as I have my own personal religious belief.”49 At Amsterdam, he told an audience of nearly 1,500 Protestant and Orthodox leaders from forty countries that Christianity provided two ideas central to world peace. The first was the idea that moral law undergirds international relations. The second idea was that “every human individual, as such, has dignity and worth that no man-made law, no human power, can rightly desecrate.” His words echoed the human rights talk widely shared by his fellow believers, but their purpose was closer to the Christian libertarianism of James Fifield than to the social gospel tradition. For Dulles, the purpose of human rights was to protect individuals from the power of the state—especially the Soviet state—rather than to make industry more humane and democratic, as the Federal Council advocated. Dulles scored the USSR for being “atheistic and materialistic” and for constantly resorting to violence and coercion. In the face of this great evil, Christians ought to “more vigorously translate their faith into works” and provide “an example that others will follow.”50
Theologian Josef L. Hromadka took exception to Dulles’s words. Hromadka had spent the war years at Princeton Theological Seminary and had recently returned to Czechoslovakia, where he cooperated with the country’s communist government. Hromadka’s historical account of Soviet-American tensions stood in contrast to Dulles’s. The theologian emphasized the destruction of the West’s monopoly on power and the rise of “the underdogs of society.” “I am not speaking about the fall or decline of the West,” Hromadka told the same audience that Dulles had just finished addressing. “What I have in mind is simply the fact the Western nations have ceased to be the exclusive masters and architects of the world.” He argued that communism, although atheistic, represents “much of the social impetus of the living church from the apostolic age down through the days of monastic orders to the reformation and liberal humanism.” Hromadka also insisted the ecumenical movement must transcend Cold War politics. “No kind of curtain, be it gold or silken or iron, must separate us one from another,” he emphasized. “All national and class obsessions must be removed.”51
Dulles soon left Amsterdam, disappointed that his words of caution against the USSR did not find a more receptive audience there. The creation of the World Council of Churches marked a dramatic breaking point between Dulles and many of his ecumenical allies. Despite long-standing concerns about his leadership, Dulles was used to getting his way at US gatherings. But he was marginalized and publicly criticized at this international meeting. Noting the alliances they were building abroad, Dulles soured on American ecumenical Protestants. A few years later, he would accuse in private the Federal Council of being filled with people of “Left Wing and Socialist tendencies.”52
Dulles and Hromadka aired their conflict in public, but the World Council worked out the merits of capitalism and communism away from the prying eyes of journalists. “Church Council Closes Its Doors for Discussion of Communism,” a Washington Post headline announced.53 With Dulles absent, the group charged with economic policy went to work on this sensitive matter. It was chaired by C. L. Patijn, a member of the UN Social and Economic Council, which was then drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The group also included realists and former socialists, like Reinhold Niebuhr and John Bennett. Henry P. Van Dusen and Charles P. Taft, who were no fans of communism, were also on the committee.
Theologian Karl Barth hoped the World Council would issue a Christian manifesto that would rival the influence of the Communist Manifesto.54 Although the World Council’s call for a “Responsible Society” fell short of Marx’s work, it nonetheless was an influential endorsement of the welfare state as a middle ground between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. “A responsible society is one where freedom is the freedom of men who acknowledge responsibility to justice and public order, and where those who hold political authority or economic power are responsible for its exercise to God and the people whose welfare is affected by it,” the World Council announced. This dense sentence tried to capture the complexity of the many rights and responsibilities modern industrial societies needed to hold in tension with one another. “The basic problem of finding the right balance between planning and freedom, between centralization and the emphasis upon the initiative of many different units in society, individuals, small communities, voluntary associations, etc.” can never be solved outright, the ecumenists argued.55 Like other intellectuals, the World Council’s theologians proclaimed the end of ideology in the postwar era.56 What the world needed was the “experimental method,” which borrows from a variety of systems in seeking to work out concrete problems. In this sense, “the Responsible Society is not another system,” they explained. “It points to a society which accepts the fact of a deep tension between justice and freedom, a tension that will always force men to break through the stereotypes which are formed by history, and to seek new and fresh solutions.”57
The ecumenists had no trouble pointing to concrete examples of the Responsible Society at work. It was evident in the “democratic socialism” being employed across Europe, where governments were building welfare states that carefully balanced freedom and social control, avoiding the pitfalls of both “doctrinaire Socialism and doctrinaire Capitalism.” To the ecumenists, even the United States appeared to be heading in the same direction thanks to the New Deal and World War II–era regulations. “In the one remaining large center of Capitalism, the United States, in this respect the situation is less different from that in the partly-socialistic countries than is usually believed.”58
The World Council was joining mid-century American liberals in promoting pluralism and pragmatism in economic policy.59 Ecumenists agreed with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who argued in his 1949 manifesto, The Vital Center, that “science and technology have ushered man into a new cycle of civilization, and the consequences have been a terrifying problem.” The new system replaced personal communal bonds with impersonal corporations, which “had neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned.”60 The new global economy turned business owners into ruthless profiteers and condemned workers to a life of servitude, where they would be treated more like machines than human persons.
What separated the World Council from liberal groups like Schlesinger’s Americans for Democratic Action was the ecumenists’ insistence that secularism was the cause of economic problems and that religion would be their solution. They argued, “Secularists assume that democracy itself is a sufficient object of faith, but to make a specific type of society its own absolute end is to destroy it.” They repeated a well-worn argument that the only assurance that social order will not disintegrate into anarchy or devolve into totalitarianism is to worship something above the nation-state. Only through worship of a God who sits above all nation-states, the ecumenists explained, would the welfare state endure. The “responsible society will last only when responsibility is being learned in the practice of true religious faith.”61 But this criticism of “secularism” rarely prevented cooperation between ecumenical Protestants and liberals in the United States, who at that time appeared to be working toward the same goal. Just as European countries began building welfare states that would take care of their citizens from cradle to grave, and as the Truman administration pushed to expand the New Deal, the largest Protestant and Orthodox body in the world appeared to be endorsing both of these efforts.
The American ecumenists hoped to create a postideological world, but when they returned home from Amsterdam they found many of their fellow citizens were still deeply committed to the capitalist system. In their attempt to separate Christianity from all prevailing economic systems they had equated capitalism with communism, the Los Angeles Times charged. The theologians’ ideas revealed “an all too prevalent bewilderment and a possibly dangerous misconception.” Just look at how the two systems differ in practice, the editors exclaimed. Capitalism has not solved all the world’s problems but “where there is free enterprise, the world is improving.” The article claimed that by equating communism with capitalism, the theologians at Amsterdam were acting both foolishly and dangerously.62
The American ecumenists at the World Council tried to head off this criticism. Charles P. Taft convinced his colleagues to insert the modifier “laissez-faire” when talking about capitalism. After revision, the conference report read: “The Christian churches should reject the ideologies of both communism and laissez-faire capitalism.” The new phrase placed emphasis on the theories of both systems, rather than their practices, and left open the possibility that some other forms of capitalism might be superior to communism. Upon his return from Amsterdam, Ralph Sockman commented that “the Americans were in a minority group because most of the delegates live under some kind of socialized government.… They don’t know what our American capitalism really is.” Sockman thought his country’s economy was becoming more humane, and he was happy to criticize both capitalism and communism without necessarily equating the two. But according to the Los Angeles Times, the insertion of “laissez-faire” simply “evades the issue.” “Genuine laissez-faire capitalism never has existed anywhere; there have been always some restrictions,” they insisted, and added that the ecumenists’ critique “either applies to existing capitalism or is meaningless.”63
Some of the attacks were more personal. John Bennett was criticized by his uncle, who accused Bennett of having “harmed, rather than aided, the advance of spiritual leadership.” Bennett’s uncle admired Dulles’s speech but felt that Bennett’s committee did not measure up to that high standard. By equating capitalism and communism, the uncle wrote accusingly, Bennett was expressing his desire for “the Protestant Church to stand for revolution rather than evolution.” Communists “can hardly fail to find comfort and gratification in the co-defendant named in your indictment.”64
Bennett was nonplussed. “Dear Uncle Eversley,” Bennett wrote back, “I am rather baffled that you should condemn [the Responsible Society] so strongly.” He pointed out that it was the ideologies of capitalism and communism that the Amsterdam assembly condemned and not the actual operations of both systems. Bennett also believed that the criticism of communism was more “fundamental” than that of capitalism. Regardless, he ended his letter by urging his uncle to “take seriously the reasons why many people become Communists.”65
The success of the World Council assembly at Amsterdam and its endorsement of a Responsible Society gave Bennett reasons to celebrate, despite both public and personal attacks. Ecumenism was a goal onto itself and the coming together of Protestant and Orthodox communions from across the world was a feat that he had spent his entire life pursuing. That many of the economic policies he had long advocated were reflected in the idea of the Responsible Society gave him further evidence of his world-historical role in transforming the economy. The meaning of a Christian economy would not be worked out by the laity or by the local church or, for that matter, by a referendum of workers and owners. It was not up for a vote, Bennett believed. It was for Americans to accept their responsibility to God and to the welfare of the human person, which obligated them to build a Responsible Society.
Back home, the American ecumenists were now empowered by a definitive theological statement on the economy, and they urged Americans to embrace its principles. In February 1950, they brought together laypersons at a conference in Detroit as a follow up to the dialogue begun at Pittsburgh three years earlier. They now had a more precise theological agenda to push. But they also had to contend with increasing right-wing attacks and conservative suspicion of their work. “Many businessmen had not liked what they knew about the Pittsburgh conference and even less what came out of the Amsterdam Assembly,” Cameron Hall reported. Another observer explained that Stanley High, author of “Methodism’s Pink Fringe,” and John T. Flynn, author of The Road Ahead: America’s Creeping Revolution, were referenced “in muffled conversation” and “their writings, with rebuttals in both pamphlets and news reprints, formed at least a portion of the backdrop” for the Detroit conference. Opponents of the Federal Council “had filled the delegates’ mail with pre-conference pamphlets and letters which implied, if they did not clearly state, that we had better watch out for communists, socialists and other unfortunate and misled characters,” another participant reported.66
While businessmen were skeptical, labor leaders came with enthusiasm and a strategy for pressing their agenda among a group of ministers and theologians who they knew to be sympathetic to their cause. UAW leader Walter Reuther was not a layman, but his union values had been shaped by Protestant Christianity. During the strike wave in 1919, when Reuther was twelve years old, the minister at his Lutheran church in Wheeling, West Virginia, denounced unions in a sermon. Reuther’s father, a committed Christian socialist, stood up from his pew, denounced the minister, and marched the family out of the church. Although Reuther’s mother insisted that the kids continue to attend the church, Reuther and his siblings would be interrogated over lunch later in the afternoon about what they had heard in Sunday school and how it squared with their father’s understanding of theology.67 Reuther had developed a moralizing streak because of this upbringing.
When he arrived at Detroit in 1950, having recently survived an assassination attempt, he radiated a martyr’s aura. Reuther delivered a “rousing” and “well staged piece of oratory,” a businessman reluctantly admitted.68 In his speech Reuther stressed the gap between the impressive technological efficiency of the modern economy and the poverty of the human and social sciences, which had yet to find ways to fairly distribute the benefits the modern world had to offer. Echoing the World Council’s criticism of industrial modernity, Reuther lamented that “we know how to split the atom, but we don’t know how to feed hungry people when there is too much to eat in the world.”69 Reuther knew his dramatization of human need amid industrial plenty would play well with the clergy that made up a third of the conference participants.
Reuther’s words signaled a subtle but important shift in these ecumenical deliberations. More and more, ecumenical Protestants would emphasize poverty in an otherwise thriving economy. The New Deal had reformed capitalism and transformed the laissez-faire approach into a mixed economy. For this reason, ecumenical Protestants began focusing on the needs of the most vulnerable members of society. Earlier ideas, like government takeover of key industries, would fade away as poverty prevention took center stage. And new initiatives came to the fore, like using taxation to create greater economic equality. This transition began by 1950 among ecumenical Protestants. They would soon be joined by organizations like the Americans for Democratic Action and liberal intellectuals later in the decade.70
The new emphasis on alleviating poverty and inequality did not stave off controversy at Detroit in 1950. During a small-group discussion headed by Victor Reuther (Walter Reuther’s brother) on the theme of “Freedom of Enterprise and Social Controls,” the participants voted that using taxation to redistribute wealth was a Christian thing to do. “Extensive use of taxation to reduce inequalities” was desirable from a Christian standpoint as long as it did not severely disrupt the economy, the group concluded.71 George S. Benson, the president of Harding College in Arkansas, which was affiliated with the conservative Church of Christ, shot back that redistributive taxation is “socialism regardless of who it is who holds the position.” The “policy of taxing for the sake of erasing inequalities is socialistic and is totally contrary to the purposes of taxation in our past history.”72 Benson had just launched his own “Freedom Forums” that brought leading politicians, businessmen, and religious figures to Searcy, Arkansas, to rally for free enterprise. Harding College would become a leading center of evangelical economic thought and a counterpoint to the ecumenical gatherings.73
Many businessmen agreed with Benson, but they did not blame ecumenical leaders. Despite the bad things the businessmen had heard about the Federal Council prior to the Detroit conference, Hall reported that most had walked away with a feeling that “the churches are open to the participation and contribution of businessmen,” even though they were repeatedly outvoted at the conference. While these managers and owners were annoyed with the Reuther brothers, they nonetheless “indicated a strong opposition to the extreme and ‘intemperate’ opponents of the Federal Council and the interest of the churches represented by the Conference.” In other words, the 1950 Detroit conference convinced businessmen to defend ecumenical Protestants against attacks by the likes of Fifield and Flynn. Hall felt Detroit had carried Christian work on economics “beyond Pittsburgh” because businessmen were “ready and eager to work with the churches.”74 Reinhold Niebuhr agreed: “This is the most significant meeting of this kind in which I have taken part. It surpasses the Amsterdam conference in that it is more representative of all sections of life in a modern industrial economy.”75
The labor delegation felt they had come out victorious. One labor delegate was delighted by the strong Congress of Industrial Organizations and AFL showing. Although he was hoping for “a Malvern Conference”—referring to the 1941 British gathering that endorsed the creation of a welfare state and had served as the inspiration for Dulles’s Delaware conference—the union leader nonetheless came away with a good impression of the meeting. “The labor people found (I think somewhat to their surprise) a tremendous support for liberal ideas among the young clergy and the active leaders in the national Protestant organizations.” In all, he reported, “the progressive view held” at Detroit.76 Except for a few cranks, it seemed that everyone was happy with the Federal Council’s leadership.
One delegate reported that the remarkable thing about the conference was that “nobody hit anybody else on the jaw, and nobody walked out!” But much more had been accomplished than simply getting capital and labor to behave. Hall pointed out that the statement on taxes “breaks new ground” because Protestantism had given so little consideration to taxes in the past. The conference affirmed the “Responsible Society” statement in all but name, urging a “middle way” between communism and capitalism. The ecumenists attacked communism and “practical atheism” but also argued that atheism “is present in contemporary capitalism” as well. The libertarian paper Faith and Freedom ungenerously dubbed this “The Extreme Middle,” which captured the center-left character of ecumenical Protestant thought on the economy in 1950.77
Ecumenical Protestants had chimed in on practical matters as well. Amid partisan debates in Congress, the Detroit declaration urged federal aid for public education; “positive action” to assure “full access to adequate modern medical, surgical and other health services”; setting up “industrial councils” to mediate disputes between labor and management; and the use of the union label on church press materials.78 These were some positions akin to Bennett’s middle axioms. Ecumenical leaders were more forthright in their support for labor unions and for the government having a role in regulating the economy than they had been just three years earlier at Pittsburgh. At the end of the 1940s, a decade that had seen depression and world war, ecumenical Protestants succeeded in translating their support for economic and social human rights into a workable program. Whether in the theology of the Responsible Society or in their more concrete middle axioms, they pursued their theological and political agenda with great vigor.
The Revolt Against the New Deal That Wasn’t
In the United States and in the international arena, ecumenical Protestants defended a middle way between capitalism and communism that they called the “Responsible Society.” What they meant by the middle way differed in national and international contexts. The members of the World Council of Churches were more likely to defend the emerging welfare state, which had been articulated by the British bureaucrat William Beveridge in his famous wartime report and which was being put into place across Western and Central Europe (and served as inspiration to many nations across the world).79 In the United States, most American ecumenical Protestants rejected the welfare state as a model for their country and instead defended the “mixed economy” created by Roosevelt and expanded by Truman. While many ecumenical Protestants hoped to create a political economy that would take care of people “from cradle to grave,” as the welfare state aimed to do, they nonetheless tempered expectations by publicly insisting that American reforms would not need to go as far as the European ones. The desire to bring the laity along with them forced ecumenical leaders to compromise. As they made alliances, they moderated their sentiments and placed qualifiers in their speeches and writings. In the heated atmosphere of the early Cold War, they were repeatedly forced to reassure their domestic constituencies that the Responsible Society would not lead America on the road toward socialism.
By 1950 American ecumenical Protestants grew more articulate in their defense of liberal economics (“liberal” in the sense that Roosevelt and Truman used the term) in the face of libertarian detractors. They also worked successfully to bolster their authority to speak on these issues. They made great efforts to bring labor and capital together after World War II and, although they had little luck getting the two sides to agree on common principles, the clergy succeeded in getting assent from key constituencies in their community to carry on their work on behalf of a Responsible Society. And, by promoting the fiction that Christians could serve as impartial mediators by standing aloof from worldly events, they managed to defend more effectively the legacy of the New Deal—and to promote Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, which promised to expand access to health care, education, and other critical services to more Americans. Under the guise of a “middle way,” ecumenical Protestants smuggled center-left economic ideas into public discussions and defended a mixed economy by connecting it to Protestant Christianity. Their defense came at a critical moment, when these principles were under siege, and it proved crucial to the survival of the New Deal.
Promotion of the Responsible Society helped create the liberal economic consensus of the era. In 1946, the Republican Party regained control of Congress. They had run under the election slogan “Had Enough?”—a slogan that asked Americans whether they had had enough of the New Deal and wartime regulation.80 Churchgoers in the ecumenical denominations should have been especially receptive to this call to bring the New Deal to an end. They voted Republican overwhelmingly in 1946, as they had in most elections. And their most active laypersons were often hostile to government intervention in the economy. With organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers turning their attention to religious organizations in the 1940s, with wealthy donors funding anti-statist Christian journals and universities, and with the threat of the USSR—an atheist state with a socialist economy—the ecumenical Protestant churches were primed to turn toward the Right in the wake of World War II. That did not happen. It is a testimony to the effectiveness of the maneuvering of ecumenical Protestants and the strong defense of the mixed economy they provided that the New Deal was not disassembled.
Indeed, partly through the efforts of Charles P. Taft, the liberal Republican faction cheered on president-elect Dwight Eisenhower as he accepted many of the changes brought about by the New Deal (much to the chagrin of Taft’s brother, the conservative Senator Robert A. Taft). While Charles Taft celebrated the triumph of moderation in his party, Bennett, Hall, and Niebuhr lamented the limits of Eisenhower’s plans. Hoping for a broad expansion of government programs to assure the welfare of all Americans, their efforts in the 1940s only managed to help preserve the status quo in the 1950s.
After 1950, however, the Federal Council—and its successor organization, the National Council of Churches—faced a challenge from a new alliance between corporate executives and evangelicals. In the 1950s ecumenical Protestants had to fend off new threats to their authority. Although initially successful, their efforts would pave the way for divisions within their own religious community and in American politics.