President Obama has appointed a 26-year-old Pentecostal minister
as his White House chief of faith-based initiatives. Himself
comfortable with religious language, Obama’s campaign appealed
strongly to liberal-leaning Christians. Inevitably,
self-professed “social justice” religionists will have White
House access. Evangelical left activist Jim Wallis has already
boasted of the administration’s appreciation for his viewpoint.
The National Council of Churches (NCC) has also boasted of its
presence at recent Obama events. But the NCC, as primarily the
organ of diminished Mainline Protestantism, is only a ghost of
its former prestigious self. It’s been decades since a U.S.
President has addressed an NCC event. In 1995, President Clinton
did receive in the Oval Office an NCC delegation, which “prayed”
with him to be “strong” in resisting the new Republican Congress.
But Clinton declined to address the NCC on its 50th anniversary
in 2000.
In headier days, presidents paid more attention. In 1933, facing
a more drastic economic crisis, Franklin Roosevelt addressed the
25th anniversary of the NCC’s predecessor, the old Federal
Council of Churches (FCC). Founded in 1908, the FCC was liberal
from the start, focusing on labor rights, and largely siding with
theological modernists against “fundamentalists.” Infamously,
Methodist Bishop Francis McConnell, FCC president from 1928 to
1932, had once asked: “Is not this tendency to deify Jesus more
heathen than Christian?” Many FCC elites were openly socialist
and to FDR’s left, espousing pacifism and state ownership of
industry.
The FCC’s founding social creed originated with Methodist
activist Harry F. Ward, a Union Seminary professor. Ward fumed
that FDR’s New Deal “works top-heavily in favor of big
businessmen and bankers” and aims at “recovery for the profit
system,” which is “the exact opposite of what liberals, including
leaders in the social movement in the churches, have envisaged.…”
More temperately, the FCC as a whole would say of the New Deal:
“The measures proposed are of human origin and therefore
fallible. But the purposes sought are divine.”
Despite the disappointment by some FCC elites about FDR’s
commitment to preserving capitalism, he was received warmly at
the DAR Hall in Washington in November 1933. His speech to the
group representing 25 denominations and 22 million church members
was broadcast nationally by radio. Listeners across America heard
some loud applause from the churchmen, especially when FDR
denounced recent lynchings.
Roosevelt denounced “pagan ethics” as he acclaimed the churches
for standing ready to “lead in a new war of peace — the war for
social justice.” And he insisted that “government is seeking
through social and economic means the same goal which the
churches are seeking through social and spiritual means,” to
achieve for every American a “more abundant life.”
“We recognize the right of the individual to seek and to obtain
his own fair wage, his own fair profit, in his own fair way —
just so long as in the doing of it he does not push down or hold
down his own neighbor. And at the same time, we are at one in
calling for collective effort on broad lines of social planning
— a collective effort which is wholly in accord with the social
teachings of Christianity.”
FDR aroused the loudest applause from the FCC audience when he
denounced lynching as “that vile form of collective murder.”
Lynchings had recently occurred in Maryland, Mississippi and
California. FDR roared: “We know that it is murder, and a
deliberate and definite disobedience of the Commandment, ‘Thou
shalt not kill.’” A San Jose lynching had received tacit support
from California’s governor, whom FDR rebuked, if not by name. “We
do not excuse those in high places or in low who condone lynch
law.”
Afterwards, African Methodist Eiscopal Bishop John Gregg of
Kansas City praised FDR: “Every Negro in America lifted up his
head this morning and thanked God for the statement of President
Roosevelt on lynching last night.”
But FDR mostly heralded economic issues. “The churches, while
they remain wholly free from even the suggestion of interference
in Government, can at the same time teach their millions of
followers that they have the right to demand of the Government of
their own choosing, the maintenance and furtherance of a ‘more
abundant life.’”
After FDR’s speech, FCC President Albert Beaven, a Baptist
minister, acclaimed the New Deal as embodying “Christian social
ideals for which we of the churches have long contended.” Yet
Beaven lamented: “Altogether too easily have we accepted the
thesis that men would not act unless they could selfishly gain.”
And he bemoaned: “All too eagerly have we fallen down to worship
the gods of gold, only to find the very temples of our
selfishness come crashing about our heads.”
The FCC was not unmindful of another recently elected world
leader, Adolf Hitler. As a guest speaker, Swiss Bishop John
Nuelsen of Zurich cautioned the FCC “not to praise or denounce
but to understand” the Hitler regime, which he called the “work
of the new generation” and the “revolt of youth.”
“Whatever his mistakes, and some of them are serious, Hitler has
turned the current that was sweeping Germany into the chaos of
Godless communism,” Nuelsen claimed. “He saved Germany and then
Europe from the Red communist revolution, and he has put a new
spirit into millions of hopeless aimless, almost depondent young
men and women.” The bishop insisted that Nazism’s “crudities,
stupidities and the ferocities” were due to the youth of its
leaders. According to the New York Times, the FCC
audience laughed when he asserted that some German Christians see
Hitler as the “chosen instrument of God” for restoring the Jews
to Palestine.
The FCC was thankfully not sympathetic to Hitler, despite the
foolishness from Nuelsen. But neither was the FCC prepared to
surrender its post-World War I pacifism. “Unless the churches put
an end to war they might as well close their doors,” one FCC
official disclaimed. “For war is the enemy of every human
interest and especially the enemy of the moral and spiritual
welfare of mankind.”
FDR had supported the recent repeal of Prohibition, and the FCC
declined specifically to criticize him for it. But one delegate
did grouse that FDR’s stance had contributed to a “moral sag” in
the nation. Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace, a Methodist, told
the FCC that he was “appalled” by the “great amount of social
drinking in Washington among extraordinarily decent people,”
which he had never seen before.
Today’s National Council of Churches, as the FCC’s successor, is
not likely to chide the Obama Administration for any social
drinking. But the church council, and other liberal religionists,
will certainly give enthusiastic support, until the new President
fails to live up to exalted expectations.
