The National Council of Churches (NCC), which once represented
America’s premier churches, sort of celebrated its 100th
anniversary recently. Although the NCC was not created until
1950, in a flurry of post-war enthusiasm, its predecessor, the
Federal Council of Churches, was founded in 1908.
Meeting in Denver just after the Obama win, the NCC’s General
Assembly was notably excited about a new administration more akin
to its own century-long liberalism. The pastor of Obama’s former
Chicago church, the Rev. Otis Moss, successor to the infamous
Jeremiah Wright, keynoted the NCC gathering and was received
fulsomely, of course.
But the NCC fête also included more serious self-reflection than
is customary. Both in 1908 and in 1950, the NCC and its
predecessor represented the prestige denominations of American
religion: primarily the Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians,
Lutherans, Congregationalists, northern Baptists, and Disciples.
All of those denominations are now facing their fifth decades of
membership decline and cultural marginalization.
About 30 denominations were present at the start and, remarkably,
the NCC is only a few denominations larger a century later. Roman
Catholics and Southern Baptists, not to mention Pentecostals,
were never persuaded. Most of the Eastern Orthodox, viewing the
church councils as the pathway to America’s religious mainstream,
gladly did join, though remaining parsimonious in their
contributions. About 40 million American church members, or about
25 percent of the estimated total American church membership,
today belong to NCC denominations.
The old Federal Council of Churches was founded in the heart of
the Progressive era amid vast cultural optimism. Its churches
were America’s oldest and wealthiest, and its members included
most of America’s political and economic elites. Having accepted
doctrinaire Darwinism and Germanic critical attitudes towards the
Bible, the council was theologically and politically liberal from
the start. Anxious for consensus, it fudged about theology,
claiming to locate Christian unity instead in charity and
progressive political reforms. The NCC’s predecessor was the old
Social Gospel’s chief promoter and legitimizer.
Reminding the NCC crowd in Denver about some of this history
appropriately was Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of
Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Following a trajectory like the NCC, and now a shadow of its
former self, Union Seminary was once the premier school of
ascendant liberal Protestants in America. Niebuhr, of course, was
the premier American Protestant ethicist of the mid-20th century.
At first a leftist critic of the NCC’s predecessor and its Social
Gospel, he later espoused Christian realism, which was still
liberal, but rejected utopianism.
Sadly, Dorrien repeated many left-wing buzz phrases that are
customary for the NCC, and which would probably have irritated
Niebuhr. “If those of us who are Caucasian fail to interrogate
white supremacism and its privileges, we will resist any
recognition of our own racism,” Dorrien inclusively implored. “If
those of us who are male fail to interrogate our complicity in
sexism, we will perpetuate it. If those of us who are Christian
fail to repudiate anti-Semitism and Christian supercessionism, we
will perpetuate the evils that come with them. If those of us who
are heterosexual fail to stand up for the rights of gays and
lesbians, we will have an oppressive church. If we sign up for
militarism and empire, we will betray the way of Christ. We need
a wider community of the divine good.”
Dorrien did not identify the ostensible Christian promoters of
“militarism and empire,” but fortunately his other comments were
more thoughtful. He recalled that the 19th century religious
revivals included crusades for temperance, anti-slavery, and
anti-war causes. In the early 1880s, the Social Gospel began to
congeal. No longer entirely believing in the Bible as historical
truth, the Social Gospelers thought that “modern scholarship had
rediscovered the social meaning of Christianity in the
kingdom-centered religion of Jesus.” The social gospel movement
was “sentimental, moralistic, idealistic, and politically naïve,”
preaching “cultural optimism and a Jesus of middle-class
idealism,” Dorrien admitted. It sometimes baptized “U.S. American
imperialism,” built schools for blacks but rarely demanded wider
justice for them; supported women’s suffrage but did not press
for other women’s rights, opposed World War I until the U.S.
intervened, and then after the war “overreacted by reducing the
social gospel to pacifist idealism.”
Later promoters of more radical Liberation Theology would condemn
the Social Gospel as “too middle-class, white, male-dominated,
nationalistic, and socially privileged to be agents of
liberation,” Dorrien recalled. But the Social Gospel movement,
across 60 years, produced a “greater progressive religious legacy
than any generation before or after it,” he claimed, probably
accurately. Its platform was embodied in the 1908 “social creed”
of the NCC’s predecessor, which advocated “equal rights and
complete justice” for all people, the abolition of child labor; a
“living wage as a minimum in every industry,” social security, an
equitable distribution of income and wealth, and the “abatement
of poverty.” Operating through the church council, and other
organs of Mainline Protestantism, the Social Gospel was
progressive but not radical. It defended democracy against
Bolshevism and fascism, and largely rejected socialism in favor
of regulated private property.
Dorrien hoped that the new era under Obama will help the true
believers within the old liberal ecumenical movement revive their
old passions for social justice, dormant too long since the Civil
Rights era. And he touted the NCC’s new update of its old 1908
social creed, which now calls for “full civil, political and
economic rights for women and men of all races,” full employment
and a “family-sustaining living wage,” equal pay for “comparable
work,” abolishing the death penalty, universal healthcare and
progressive tax policies, environmentalism, liberalized
immigration laws, nuclear disarmament and reduced military
spending. Dorrien admitted that the new creed is “more verbose”
than the old one but still “superb.”
Perhaps the expanded social creed excited the mostly gray heads
who filled the NCC assembly and who predominate in most of the
NCC’s member denominations. But the mass movements behind civil
rights and other Social Gospel causes still relied on traditional
Christianity’s moral legacy. That legacy ultimately depends more
on the Nicene Creed than any social creed. The old ecumenical
approach of fudging theology in favor of generic do-goodism could
only work for so long. If serious about having a future, the NCC
might consider espousing creeds that predate even 1908.
