5
Am I a soldier of the cross? …
Must I be carried to the skies
On flow’ry beds of ease,
While others fought to win the prize,
And sailed through bloody seas? …
Must I not stem the flood?
—ISAAC WATTS, 1721
AMERICANS ARE not “a Christian people” and should stop describing themselves that way, insisted Union Seminary theologian and political theorist John C. Bennett in 1958. In Christians and the State, Bennett explained to his own Protestant tribe that T. S. Eliot’s widely admired The Idea of a Christian Society could not apply to the United States. The American government was properly understood as a secular instrument. American society and its civic instruments were religiously pluralistic.
Jews and missionaries were helping the nation to understand its own true character. Bennett knew that Jews were not the only diversifiers, but he was explicit about their centrality. He said that the entirety of Christians and the State—a book that reflected the progressive opinions of the ecumenical intelligentsia of the late 1950s—was informed by “the contributions of the Jewish people to the common morality.” Jews were a reminder of the necessity for a pluralistic perspective, but they were more than that. Jews “have often been more sensitive than Christians to the problems of justice.” Jews could help Christians recognize their own calling to make the world a better place. Missionaries, too, helped American Christians recognize this, and to understand the limits of their own sectarianism and ethnocentrism. “The missionary movement,” Bennett wrote, is an “astonishing example of the capacity of Christians to identify themselves with people in other nations.” In keeping with the boomerang effect, missionaries often become “so identified with the nations to which they go that they represent them to the nations from which they come.”1
Bennett was surrounded by well-positioned defenders of the idea of a “Christian nation.” Only a few years before, in 1949, the National Association of Evangelicals, the largest transdenominational organization of conservative Christians, had proposed an amendment to the Constitution: “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of nations, through whom we are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.” Then in 1954 Republican senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont proposed a similar amendment, inserting God and Jesus into the Constitution. Neither effort prevailed, partly because ecumenical leaders like Bennett allied themselves with the forty-one Jewish organizations that formally registered their opposition to the “Flanders Amendment.”2
These mid-twentieth-century victories by the ecumenical leaders over their evangelical rivals were brief moments in a multidecade campaign to achieve a more cosmopolitan Protestantism. This campaign developed by fits and starts as its leaders responded to and participated in a succession of political and cultural movements in the society at large. What most defined the campaign was a series of demands it made, one after another, on American Protestants. The liberalizers called on the faithful to renounce a number of inherited ideas and practices the ecumenical elite decided were racist, sexist, imperialist, homophobic, unscientific, and chauvinistic, and thus inconsistent with the gospel as it should apply to modern American society.
But these ideas and practices remained popular with much of the white population, within and beyond the churches. How far could the leadership go without losing the people in the pews? How little change would suffice to remain true to the gospel as the ecumenical elite were coming to understand it?
The campaign had strong support from many congregations, but it was largely a top-down operation. A globally conscious ecclesiastical intelligentsia sought to inspire churchgoers to discard anachronisms and to embrace a gospel whose timelessness was proven by its ability to adapt to changing conditions. The campaign was never a single, tightly organized enterprise with a fixed agenda; rather, it was a series of loosely connected initiatives advanced through the Federal Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, Church Women United, the YMCA, the YWCA, and the social justice committees of several major denominations, especially the Congregationalists and the Methodists. In contrast to the “Christian nationalism” favored by evangelicals, the ecumenicals led a movement that a number of historians have recently come to call “Christian globalism.”3
The campaign went through several chronologically distinct phases. It achieved its greatest influence on public affairs during the 1940s. Conservative opposition in the early and mid-1950s forced it to be more cautious. The campaign rebounded in the early 1960s and intensified when ecumenical leaders, in an unprecedented episode in collective self-criticism, demanded more of their churchgoers than ever before. Later in that decade, ecumenical denominations began to lose members just as their officers took bolder stands on the political issues of the day, especially civil rights and the Vietnam War. By the end of the twentieth century, leaders of the campaign were confronted with an altogether unexpected and deeply distressing reality: the evangelicals had grown in numbers and public influence while ecumenical churches had lost about a third of their members. In this last phase, which continues into the third decade of the twenty-first century, ecumenical leaders were inclined to think of their churches as a “prophetic minority,” bearing progressive witness against an alliance of evangelicals and conservative, antistatist political forces.
In the early 1920s the ecumenical campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism got going, building on the Social Gospel that had flourished during the Progressive Era.4 The liberalizers, often called “modernists” in this early period, prioritized what they saw as Christian responsibilities in the world. Individual salvation was important, but more pressing was the duty to make the world a better place. “I will show you my faith by my works,” wrote the biblical James.5 The modernists were not troubled by evolution, and they engaged modern science sympathetically. They welcomed scholarly discoveries about the historical origins of the books of the Bible. Many of them continued to endorse Wilsonian visions of world order even in the face of popular isolationism.
Opposing these relatively cosmopolitan views—and defined in large part by reaction against them—were the fundamentalists. In historian George M. Marsden’s classic formulation, the Fundamentalist movement was a “federation of co-belligerents united by their fierce opposition to modernist attempts to bring Christianity into line with modern thought.”6
But the fundamentalists were innovators of their own kind. What they often claimed was a stable orthodoxy was in fact only a particular slice of the Protestant tradition. The notion that the Bible was “inerrant,” for example, was not central to the teachings of either of the two Protestant families in the nineteenth century and did not gain much traction among theological conservatives until very late in that century. The ferocity with which early twentieth-century fundamentalists asserted the inerrancy doctrine was quite novel. The fundamentalists also had an innovative theory of history, according to which an elaborate series of divine “dispensations” led to the apocalypse and the eventual reign of Christ. Moreover, the fundamentalists developed the evangelical family’s individualist theme in tune with the free-market ideology of modern business corporations.7
The liberalizers made extensive use of the Federal Council of Churches, founded in 1908 as a Social Gospel coalition of denominational bodies that previously had lacked a means of acting together. While overwhelmingly a white organization, the FCC by the early 1920s included the four largest African American denominations among its affiliates: the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African American Episcopal Zion Church, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and the National Baptist Convention. The missionary-saturated FCC opposed immigration restrictions and hired a full-time organizer—former missionary Sidney Gulick—to lobby against them.8 This liberal immigration policy typified the ecumenical elite’s willingness to get well out in front of the people in the pews. Many rural and small-town churchgoers affiliated with FCC-affiliated denominations joined their fundamentalist neighbors in swelling the size of the nativist and racist rallies of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s.9
The campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism was visible in almost every issue of two prominent magazines, World Tomorrow and Christian Century. It was in vogue at several leading schools of divinity, most conspicuously Union Theological Seminary in New York. Union’s Reinhold Niebuhr cemented his reputation in 1932 with Moral Man and Immoral Society, a book urging Christians to recognize that violence on the part of oppressed workers might well be necessary.10 Further to the left, Union’s Harry F. Ward was credited with—and blamed for—inspiring students to raise a red flag over the seminary on May Day 1934. Ward served for twenty years as chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. Congregationalists and Methodists took the lead against Jim Crow and economic inequality at home and against colonialism abroad. The dean of Methodist-sponsored Duke Divinity School warned a convention of Methodists in 1926 that Americans had no business telling people in foreign lands about their moral failings so long as the United States tolerated racial segregation.11 Elsewhere, activist clergy decried inhumane working conditions in mines and factories. The National Conference of Christians and Jews promoted the full acceptance of Jews into American life and opposed the urban missions designed to convert immigrant Jews to Christianity.
During these interwar years, Protestantism’s two-party system was on full display but did not map exactly onto denominational distinctions, nor was it coterminal with the two-party system of electoral politics. Throughout the 1920s, most ecumenical Protestants outside the Democrats’ “Solid South” were comfortable with the relatively conservative Republican Party. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt eventually did win the support of many of these northern, midwestern, and western ecumenicals, especially after he became president, but Republican loyalty remained strong. The Republican tilt of these ecumenical Protestants should not be confused with support for the more sweeping antistate ideologies embraced by the loudest voices in the evangelical camp.12 As the ecumenical-evangelical divide sharpened, it tracked long-term conflicts between narrowly individual and more broadly social narratives of salvation. Simply declaring one’s “belief in Christ” appeared to be enough for many Christians who could then celebrate money making and free enterprise with a clear conscience.13 For others, what mattered was applying the lessons of the parable of the Good Samaritan.14
In the 1940s Samaritan-inspired ecumenical leaders of both political parties gave particular attention to the evils of racism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, colonialism, and economic inequality. Individuals with missionary connections wrote the campaign’s most influential theoretical treatises, staffed its major transdenominational organizations, and supervised its most important conferences. The FCC convened several wartime conventions that brought hundreds of church leaders together, demanding economic justice in the United States and, in some instances, even asking for a reconsideration of the whole notion of private ownership. These conferences were organized by the FCC’s Commission for a Just and Durable Peace, chaired by John Foster Dulles, who was then known primarily as a Presbyterian layman.15 The voting delegates in these gatherings called for the liberation of colonized peoples, a category in which they included Puerto Ricans along with the inhabitants of Japanese-occupied Korea. The Dulles Commission encouraged the creation of institutions capable of defending human rights globally and expressed sympathy even for the notion of what was frankly called “world government.” Time magazine described the leftward tilt of the FCC as “sensational.”16
The Roosevelt administration encouraged and supported the FCC’s work during the war years. The State Department invited the Dulles Commission’s March 1942 conference to discuss a draft of what became one of Roosevelt’s most celebrated speeches, his radical 1944 State of the Union address proposing an “economic bill of rights.” Federal authorities authorized exceptions to wartime restrictions on travel to enable the FCC to bring its forces together to advance progressive agendas. Roosevelt’s team solicited the FCC as an ally in creating the United Nations and welcomed its influence in drafting the UN Charter.
At the San Francisco meeting founding the UN in 1945, the campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism made its most striking and enduring mark on the history of the era. The FCC group argued successfully for a Commission on Human Rights and for a Trusteeship Council charged with facilitating the movement of colonized peoples to independence. The ecumenical lobby also defeated an effort by the British delegation to guarantee the right to proselytize, which the American group opposed on the grounds that it would insult Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and other non-Christians. Despite elements of patronizing paternalism, the anticolonialism and antiracism of the ecumenical leadership was far from routine for the time. Saturated with former missionaries and other missionary-connected Americans, and working in close cooperation with lobbyists from the American Jewish Committee, the FCC so substantially influenced the UN Charter that, in the words of historian Samuel Moyn, its leaders “were by any standard most responsible for the original move to the internationalization of religious freedom and, in fact, for the presence of the entire notion of human rights in international affairs.”17 The FCC “issued its own list of human rights,” historian Gene Zubovich observes, “encompassing virtually every demand of the African American political struggle of the era.”18
The ecumenical intelligentsia at this 1940s high point took for granted that Protestant Christianity was the proper foundation for world order and that it was up to Americans to establish it. Although these ecumenical leaders worked closely with Jewish groups, they had no doubt that their authority derived from their position as the authentic spokespersons for global Christianity. They were highly suspicious of Catholics, whose record on human rights in Europe fueled their contempt. They paid no attention to fundamentalist constructions of the faith then being proclaimed with new fervor by the National Association of Evangelicals.
Throughout the 1940s, these liberalizers continued to speak casually of the United States as “a Christian nation.” Only gradually did the ecumenical elite come around to renouncing this characterization, first through an embrace of the intermediate notion of a Judeo-Christian America and then, by the 1960s, dispensing with it altogether. The FCC leaders also assumed that it was no great challenge to identify just what were the truly Christian principles. Now and then, someone spelled out those principles. Lutheran official Frederick Nolde, the leader of the FCC group at the San Francisco meeting of the UN, proclaimed their liberal universalism in 1946: “The Christian gospel relates to all men, regardless of race, language, or color.… There is no Christian basis to support a fancied intrinsic superiority of any one race.… The rights and freedoms of all peoples in all lands should be recognized and safeguarded. Freedom of religion and religious worship, of speech, of assembly, of the press, of cultural interchange, of scientific inquiry and teaching are fundamental to human development and in keeping with the moral law. International cooperation is needed to create conditions under which these freedoms become a reality.”19
At this 1940s moment, the FCC represented more than thirty denominations. It was by far the largest predominantly white organization in the United States to demand an end to racial segregation as early as 1946, declaring it to be “a violation of the Gospel of love and human brotherhood.”20 At a time when nearly all national organizations, including the National Association of Evangelicals, were willing to hold conventions in cities whose hotels would not accommodate African Americans, the FCC repeatedly scheduled its meetings in Philadelphia and Cleveland, two cities whose hotel associations promised that African American delegates would not be refused service.
In 1946, too, the Congregationalists called for an end to Jim Crow throughout the country, and both the YMCA and the YWCA integrated their national organizations. Many local congregations and Y offices in the southern states resisted the integrationist initiatives of the national leadership. But the FCC encouraged its southern affiliates to work toward “a non-segregated society” as well as “a non-segregated church.” Local congregations in every region of the country remained overwhelming white or Black. A handful of Black religious leaders became regulars on FCC committees and commissions, including George C. Haynes, C. E. Tobias, Howard Thurman, and especially Benjamin Mays, who in 1944 was elected an FCC vice president.21 Beyond the FCC, a radical fringe of ecumenical activists associated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, led by missionary son George Houser and African American activist Bayard Rustin, carried out the first “freedom ride” in 1947, challenging segregated public accommodations in Virginia and North Carolina.22
Newly organized churchwomen added heft to the campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism. Women from throughout ecumenical Protestantism joined together in 1941 to form what was eventually called Church Women United. The immediate impetus was the ostensibly egalitarian decision of one denomination after another in the 1930s to abolish separate women’s missionary boards, traditionally the largest women’s organizations in American Protestantism. But men overwhelmingly dominated the comprehensive boards and commissions into which the women’s groups were folded. Irritated by this manifest demotion under the guise of integration, activist women from several major denominations established a transdenominational organization that claimed from its start to represent ten million women from seventy denominations. It accepted into membership any women, including African Americans, who shared their goals even if they were not members of any church.
Church Women United was consistently more liberal than the FCC itself and most of the denominational governing bodies. These women generally shared with their husbands a loyalty to the liberal wing of the Republican Party, but “they prided themselves,” notes one historian, “on taking positions and making public pronouncements with little regard” for what the male-dominated “officialdom” might say.23 They were “Christians,” of course, but their focus was institutional rather than doctrinal. Their most important identity was as “churchwomen.” They were less inclined than their male counterparts to cite scripture. While they pressed for more authority in governance, they usually downplayed the ordination of women because they understood it as a trap, whereby women would be obliged to conform to a decidedly male frame for leadership. Some feared that men would leave the churches if they lost their monopoly on the pulpit. But as soon as they organized themselves, the churchwomen became formidable players in the campaign for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism. Church Women United was “often in the vanguard,” observes historian Martin E. Marty, “on issues of world affairs, civil rights, human rights, employed women … and ecumenism.”24
Antiracist treatises written by two male seminary professors further illustrate the nature of the liberalizers campaign during the 1940s. Color and Conscience: The Irrepressible Conflict (1946), by Congregationalist Buell G. Gallagher of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, was a systematic distillation of lessons American Protestants had learned through the foreign missionary project. Gallagher complained that “the Christian Church” had failed to produce “an ethical attack” on racism nearly as strong as that produced by the Communist Party. At Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, Methodist Edmund D. Soper, a Japan-born missionary son, published Racism: A World Issue (1947). Like Gallagher, Soper attacked anti-Semitism as well as anti-Black racism and other kinds of prejudice against communities of descent. Both writers treated racism within the United States as a national instantiation of worldwide white supremacy. Here, as in the wartime conferences of the FCC, domestic antiracism and Christian globalism reinforced each other.25
The writings of intellectuals like Soper and Gallagher did not reflect the opinions of the average churchgoer, even within the Congregationalists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and other liberal denominations. But the relative indifference the liberalizers often encountered in their own churches was nothing compared to the open and volatile opposition they faced from their evangelical rivals. Representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals asked the State Department to reject the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights because its inclusion of social and economic rights was “socialistic.” The United Nations itself, in which the ecumenicals had so much invested, troubled evangelicals because it lacked an avowed biblical foundation. Some evangelicals described the World Council of Churches, founded in Amsterdam in 1948 but dominated by American ecumenical leaders, as an instrument of Satan. Evangelicals routinely accused officers of the WCC and the National Council of Churches of communist sympathies and even of Communist Party affiliations, charges that increased in frequency and volume during the period of the Red Scare from the late 1940s through the 1950s.
One McCarthy Era episode had especially far-ranging consequences for the balance of power between ecumenical and evangelical Protestants. This was oil magnate J. Howard Pew’s shift of financial support from the former to the latter. In 1950, when the FCC was in the process of reconstituting itself as the National Council of Churches and bringing in a number of new affiliate denominations, Pew organized the National Lay Committee, a group of eighty-five politically conservative Presbyterian and Episcopalian laymen determined to ensure that the newly powerful National Council did not promote the federal regulation of American business. Pew hosted retreats and conferences for conservative churchmen and corporate leaders. When the NCC issued “Basic Christian Principles and Assumptions for Economic Life,” reflecting a broadly social democratic outlook, Pew’s committee repudiated it as “socialist” and demanded that the NCC honor the American “free enterprise” system for its contributions to “human welfare, to the establishment of freedom, justice, and order and in the implementation of Christian principles.” The quarrel simmered along for several years until 1955, when a new NCC president, Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake, wrote Pew a letter highly critical of the activities of the Lay Committee. Pew then left the NCC and took his money and his wealthy supporters to the evangelicals, immediately funding the new magazine, Christianity Today. Central to the imbroglio was the demand of Pew and his allies for “a more militant voice in the Cold War, consistent defense of laissez-faire free enterprise economics as the sole Christian pattern, and theological conservatism.”26
Yet even in the restrained atmosphere of the 1950s, when Pew’s departure cut the campaign’s financial resources, transdenominational youth organizations engaged in activities that were far to the left. The Student Volunteer Movement, which had originated as a major recruiter of missionaries but had become an all-purpose youth organization, brought thousands of Black and white college students together in a series of weeklong conferences led by Methodist and Presbyterian women with missionary experience. Attendees of these Christian globalist and antiracist events, held on university campuses in Ohio, included three groups of young people otherwise largely isolated from one another: foreign students from Africa and Asia then studying in the United States, Black students from Morehouse, Fisk, and other African American colleges, and white students from leading universities and liberal arts colleges. Until then, hardly any of the white attendees had ever experienced personal contact with their Black contemporaries.
One historian describes these multiracial events as “a subversive thread within mainline Protestantism,” recruiting at the height of the Cold War a generation of students who in the following decade participated in Freedom Rides and other kinds of civil rights activism.27 Several of these conferences asked attendees to be prepared to discuss the anti-imperialist book Encounter with Revolution (1955), by the radical Presbyterian missionary to Latin America M. Richard Shaull.28 Later recognized as a precursor of Liberation Theology, this book insisted that religion and politics could not be separated and that it was the duty of Christians to join indigenous revolutionary movements.
John C. Bennett was not as extreme as Shaull, but his Christians and the State invites further attention as a revealing window on how the ecumenical leaders at the end of the 1950s felt about themselves and about the United States. The NCC had enjoyed a few years to catch its political and financial breath following Pew’s epic departure. Bennett called upon “the ecumenical Christian community,” as he referred to his own tribe, to perfect its witness in domestic and international political arenas. He welcomed Jewish allies, religious or secular, as well as “atheists or agnostics or Naturalistic Humanists,” as citizens of equal standing. Bennett urged Christians to listen to the criticisms of traditional religion voiced by nonbelievers. We should “recognize without the least condescension” that these secular intellectuals offer criticisms of traditional religion that “are often valid.” The atheists, Bennett explained, “represent a challenge to obscurantism and clericalism that is needed.” Religious people tend toward “stuffiness” if they “never have to face this kind of opposition.”29 Throughout Christians and the State, Bennett remained confident that ecumenical Protestantism was strong enough to survive any challenge. Even atheists could be welcomed into the conversation.
In offering a collegial hand to atheists, Bennett was pushing against a well-established ecumenical as well as evangelical habit of railing against “secularism.” Ecumenical leaders raised relatively few objections in 1954 when Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Writing God into the Constitution was too much, but putting him in the pledge was a step they could tolerate even if was not consistent with their cosmopolitan aspirations. Eisenhower’s endlessly quoted assertion that “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is” dates from this era.30 References to the deity in the pledge and, after 1956, in the official national motto, “In God We Trust,” were only a minor annoyance for Bennett and his colleagues as long as they were in charge of what “God” meant.
And they did expect to remain in charge. They had the franchise. They approached the 1960s with high hopes about the capacity of the nation to respond to their ongoing campaign. Since the evangelicals soon eclipsed them in the national arena, one can wonder what made people like Bennett so sure of themselves. Several historic conditions inspired this confidence.
Church membership in the ecumenical denominations was at an all-time high by the late 1950s, reversing a decline experienced during the interwar years. Many of the new Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists in the growing suburbs were upwardly mobile whites who left the Church of the Nazarene or the Seventh-day Adventists to join recognizably middle-class congregations. Yet a demographic fact rarely noticed at the time was that increases in ecumenical membership barely kept pace with the growth of the national population. Even in the great “joining” years of the 1950s, no more than one-third of the national population ever became formally affiliated with “mainline” denominations, even though two-thirds identified with them when polled by social scientists and journalists. Individuals with at least a tribal connection to the mainline denominations remained in charge of nearly all major public and private institutions. One way to join the establishment was to go to the right church, or to say that you did.
Bennett and his cohort had additional reasons to feel optimistic. By the end of the 1950s McCarthyism had been defeated. The NCC celebrated in 1958 by calling for the diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China. The NCC was by far the largest American organization to do so by that time. Time paid close attention to the doings of the NCC and featured several of its leaders on its cover, including Blake and Henry Pitney Van Dusen. President Eisenhower, while always vague theologically, offered regular symbolic deference to churches, one of which—a Presbyterian congregation near the White House—he joined shortly after coming into office. Oxnam enjoyed regular, private correspondence with his old friend Dulles, then secretary of state, although Dulles consistently rejected Oxnam’s counsel that the best way to defeat communism was not through military containment but through greater global economic equality. Further, the activities of Martin Luther King Jr. were a source of special pride for the ecumenical elite. King, who won national stature for his leadership of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott and for his powerful preaching, was literally one of their own. He was trained at Boston University by L. Harold DeWolf, one of the most respected ecumenical theologians of the era. King’s work in Alabama was a vital fulfilment of ecumenical appreciation for Gandhi’s nonviolent approach to political change.
The ecumenical elite also took pride and comfort from the continued standing of Reinhold Niebuhr as a national sage. Niebuhr’s reputation depended heavily upon his decades of espousing ideas that he defined as Christian but were consistent with the ethical self-conception of secular liberals. He credited Christianity with a series of insights necessary to a healthy democracy. He listed “a sense of awe before the vastness of the historical drama” of the times, “a sense of modesty” about the nation’s capacities, “a sense of contrition about the common frailties” behind Soviet bravado and American vanity, and “a sense of gratitude for the divine mercies which are promised to those who humble themselves.”31 Secular critics complained that Niebuhr’s “Christian realism” did not differ from the non-Christian realism of Cold War politics. But there were many “atheists for Niebuhr,” as his secular admirers were sardonically called, because so many of his ideas could be accepted without having to “get religion.” This was especially true of the insight Niebuhr is now most widely appreciated for proclaiming: that Americans too often approached world affairs with a dangerous innocence, failing to recognize America’s own capacity for evildoing.32 Niebuhr gradually came around to agree with Bennett that it had been a mistake to keep calling the United States a “Christian nation” or even a “Judeo-Christian nation,” but the great theologian coasted through the 1950s on the vague but widespread feeling that these still-popular ideas about American nationality were fully compatible with political liberalism.33
The high standing of another theologian, Paul Tillich, further contributed to the upbeat attitude with which most campaigners for a more cosmopolitan Protestantism rounded out the 1950s. The cultural narrowness of American Christians had been Tillich’s bane since he immigrated from Germany in the 1930s, but now, at the height of his fame, he vowed more fiercely than ever to wage war “against any groups working for American provincialism.” He pledged to help build “an America in which every provincialism, including theological and philosophical provincialism, is resisted and conquered.”34
Operating in this confident manner, ecumenical leaders continued to regard white evangelicals as poor country cousins. Yet these alleged rustics, many of whom occupied urban pulpits and showed a media savvy well beyond that of most of their ecumenical peers, managed during the 1940s and 1950s to put in place an extensive institutional network that gradually gained more and more traction. Veteran preachers Harold Ockenga, Carl F. H. Henry, and Charles Fuller tried to discard the widely discredited “fundamentalist” label and present their relatively unchanged movement to the world as “evangelical,” appropriating for themselves a label that traditionally embraced a variety of nonfundamentalist orientations.
These enterprising captors of the old, honored label established their own transdenominational associations, schools, publishing houses, and radio and television networks. The National Association of Evangelicals was founded in 1942 as a lobbying organization and then proceeded to oppose one measure after another promoted by the Federal and National Councils of Churches. Fuller Theological Seminary, founded in 1947, became a concentrated intellectual force against the influence of the liberal seminaries. Christianity Today was founded in 1956 to counter the Christian Century and thanks to Pew, who financed the sending of free copies to thousands of Protestant clergy, immediately outpaced the Century in circulation. The old link between fundamentalist religion and antistatist politics was strengthened. Evangelicalism flourished not so much as the elongation of an old conservative theological tradition but as an aspect of social and economic modernization, closely tied to business and up-to-date methods of communication.
In two excellent books, historians Darren Dochuk and Kevin Kruse show how vital conservative oil money was to the rise of a religious right identifying antiregulation politics with Christianity.35 Christianity Today, in its early years, encouraged its readers to regard racism as a sin to be cured not by the action of civil governments but by changes in the hearts of individuals. This magazine’s editors debated among themselves what they should say about racial segregation and decided not to oppose it. The first article on the topic they published was indeed a defense of segregation.36 Many evangelical magazines and radio programs disparaged the UN as insufficiently supportive of a Christian agenda, excoriated the NCC for its support of the recognition of “Red China,” and depicted King’s movement of African Americans as heavily influenced by communists. In 1959 Christianity Today editor Carl F. H. Henry declared that 105 ecumenical leaders had “Communist affiliations.”37 An expanding network of evangelical radio and television programs surrounded and eventually drowned out the radio sermons of the trademark ecumenical program, Ralph W. Sockman’s National Radio Pulpit, broadcast by NBC Radio from 1928 to 1962. Although the full force of this evangelical apparatus was not felt until the 1970s and thereafter, even in the late 1950s it frustrated the ecumenical leadership’s efforts to ignore it.
The ecumenical intelligentsia had an especially hard time ignoring Billy Graham, whose popularity soared in the 1950s. While building on the traditional population base of the fundamentalists, Graham reached out to Pentecostals. He was much less rigid, doctrinally, than most fundamentalist preachers, writers, and seminarians had been. He embraced more of contemporary popular culture than had the fundamentalists of old. He deliberately developed a celebrity image congruent with Hollywood conventions. Graham luxuriated in a personality that seemed garish to many “mainliners,” and he often used undignified sales techniques, “pitching” the gospel to the public. He was “down to earth” in ways that most Presbyterian and Congregationalist ministers had been taught they should never be. Graham’s style of religion amused and appalled seminary graduates proud of their learning in theology and biblical hermeneutics. Even as sympathetic a biographer as Grant Wacker finds “little evidence that Graham clearly understood” even the basics of the “higher criticism or related critical methods taught in the mainline seminaries.”38
“The Bible says,” Graham would proclaim, and what then might follow in Graham’s sermons often amazed the seminary establishment, which generally agreed with Reinhold Niebuhr that Graham’s religion lacked spiritual maturity and intellectual depth. Graham, wrote Niebuhr in Life, was unable to speak to anyone “aware of the continuing possibilities of good and evil in every advance of civilization, every discipline of culture, and every religious convention.”39 Graham was a prominent example of Niebuhr’s trademark target, American innocence.
But Graham was most definitely changing the face of American Protestantism. His huge audiences were all the more relevant to the role of religion in American life when it became clear that they included an astonishing number of Presbyterians, Methodists, Disciples, and members of other ecumenically aligned denominations. Some mainline churchgoers were puzzled that their ministers were ambivalent about the charismatic preacher who brought real zing to religion, put it on the map of popular culture, and offered an easily accessible understanding of the Bible. Many of the millions drawn to Graham paid little attention to the political positions taken by the National Association of Evangelicals and by fundamentalist rabble-rousers like Carl McIntire but appreciated something Graham offered: a straightforward faith, apparently pure and simple.
Evangelical leaders further discredited themselves, in the eyes of the ecumenical intelligentsia, by opposing the election of a Catholic to the presidency in 1960. The National Association of Evangelicals warned that if John F. Kennedy were to be elected, “the United States will no longer be recognized as a Protestant nation in the eyes of the world.”40 The NAE did not formally endorse Richard M. Nixon’s presidential candidacy, but its national office encouraged evangelical churches throughout the country to offer special election prayers on every Sunday prior to the November election. Graham pretended to be neutral, but his friendship with Nixon was well known and his de facto partisanship was obvious. The Christian Century welcomed Kennedy’s inauguration day “as marking the end of Protestantism as a national religion and its advent as the distinctive faith of a creative minority,”41 but evangelical vices were having none of that compromise.
Moreover, evangelicals had no intention of immersing themselves, through a grand series of mergers, into some megachurch led by the despised liberals. The culture of their own neighborhoods demanded vigorous defense, they believed, rather than the critical reassessments generated by sympathetic appreciation of other cultures. The evangelicals came to support Israel on grounds highly problematic even for ecumenical allies of Israel: the gathering of Jews in Israel was said to be a step toward the “second coming of Christ.” The ostensibly biblical basis (Deuteronomy 30:1–5 promised the Jews a homeland before the appearance of the Messiah) for this closer alliance with American Zionists was thoroughly Christian-centered and bore no meaningful relationship to the ecumenical welcoming of secular as well as religious Jews as full partners in American life.42
All these signs of provinciality seemed to mark evangelicals as destined for oblivion.
Hence, the mainline cadres entered the battles of the sixties with imperfect intelligence. They failed to measure the strength of the forces carrying Graham from triumph to triumph. The ecumenical leaders also greatly underestimated the appeals of secular ideas and communities. Ecumenical Protestantism, flanked by a formidable opponent within the community of faith and hemorrhaging troops who deserted the ranks to vanish in the secular ether, lost its prominent place in the United States, perhaps forever.