Apparently Christian “fundamentalism” briefly seized the pulpit
of America’s most famously liberal church, but, as the New
York Times reported,
the invasion has been repulsed.
Built in 1930 with Rockefeller money as a cathedral to
progressive Protestantism, Riverside Church was pastored by
Social Gospel proponent Henry Emerson Fosdick and protest-era
radical William Sloane Coffin. Across the decades, Martin Luther
King, Olof Palme, Daniel Ortega, Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro
have disclaimed from its pulpit. Rev. Brad Braxton presumably was
expected to follow his predecessors’ politically prophetic
example when he ascended to the church’s pastorate late last
year. But he was forced into resignation this summer after only
nine months, amid allegations that he had preached
“fundamentalism,” compounded by concerns over his allegedly
$600,000 salary package, as chronicled by the Times.
Even at the Depression’s advent, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. spared
no expense on Riverside, which was modeled after Chartres
Cathedral. Its statues and stained glass honor Charles Darwin,
Mohammed, Buddha, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, and Booker T.
Washington, along with more traditionally honored saints and
apostles. Rockefeller constructed it primarily as a stage for the
golden tongued, fellow liberal Baptist Fosdick, who had been
removed from a Presbyterian pulpit after a celebrated heresy
trial, during which later Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
was his defense counsel. Fosdick rejected the Virgin Birth and
bodily Resurrection in favor of a social justice gospel
emphasizing an earthly rather than a heavenly kingdom. A
pacifist, Fosdick carefully avoided any support for World War II,
preferring idealism to realism. No fool, he was also a shrewd
politician who kept his liberal, and mostly wealthy, Manhattan
congregants happy, or at least mesmerized by his oratory.
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once laughingly pronounced that
Fosdick, though a friend, was a chameleon who would explode if he
walked across plaid.
As an interesting aside, Fosdick’s daughter was the distinguished
Democratic Party Cold War strategist Dorothy Fosdick who,
apparently rejecting her father’s pacifism and preferring
Niebuhr’s realism, worked for hawkish, anti-Soviet Democratic
Senator Henry Jackson for 20 years. According to one biographer,
she was also a paramour to an earlier Democratic patron, Adlai
Stevenson.
Rev. Fosdick’s critic and friend, Niebuhr, taught across the
street from Riverside Church at equally liberal and famous Union
Seminary, also amply endowed by Rockefeller dollars. Eventually,
next door, Rockefeller largesse would also construct the imposing
Interchurch Center, as a headquarters for the National Council of
Churches and a host of Mainline Protestant agencies. President
Eisenhower attended its dedication. These several blocks along
the Hudson River, near Grant’s Tomb and Columbia University,
formed a sort of Vatican for liberal Mainline Protestantism when
Mainline Protestants still sat in the driver’s seat of American
culture at mid-20th century.
Mainline is now sideline, Union Seminary is now a ghost of its
former self, most of the Interchurch Center’s major
denominational tenants have either departed or downsized, the
Rockefellers’ commitment to liberal church causes has receded,
and Riverside Church has become embroiled in controversy over its
true mission, which had once seemed so clear.
Guided by his philanthropy advisor, Henry Fosdick’s equally
liberal brother Raymond, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. envisioned
Riverside Church as an enlightened monument to inclusive
Christianity, progressive politics, and aggressive
humanitarianism. Powerful pulpiteers from Fosdick through Coffin
largely upheld this vision. Coffin was the former radical
chaplain of Yale University who helped burn draft cards, and he
regaled his Riverside listeners during the 1980s with stinging
denunciations of the Reagan Administration. Coffin’s successor,
James Forbes, was the church’s first black pastor. Although
conventionally liberal in politics and theology, he came from a
southern Pentecostal background, and he preached with an
evangelical cadence, even as he remained politically correct, and
avoided substantive controversy. His pastorate helped Riverside
evolve from mostly white to majority black. Some liberal whites,
accustomed to Coffin’s endless political jeremiads, were
disappointed by Forbes’s lack of polemical fire.
Rev. Braxton, who is also black and southern, seemed to follow
Forbes’s example, though he was much younger, only 39 when he was
appointed. But hardly a few months had passed since his arrival
at Riverside when the Times reported a lawsuit by some
congregants to prevent his installation. Citing lack of
transparency about his large salary, they also “complained that
Dr. Braxton was moving Riverside away from its tradition of
interracial progressivism and toward a conservative style of
religious practice.” One litigant alleged the new pastor
subscribed to a “more fundamentalist brand of religion.” Other
critics accused him of being “Afrocentrist” and having “no
connection to the prophetic witness that has been our
cornerstone.”
“What he says consistently in sermons is talking about the only
way to God is through a particular fundamentalist path, which is
to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and that’s a huge
change in our theology,” complained one anti-Braxton congregant
to PBS’s Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly. “It’s a huge
change in our openness and our inclusiveness.”
Braxton called the charge of fundamentalism “laughable” and
pointed to his support for same-sex marriage and alliance with
“lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer persons.” He also
called for Christians “to repent of their Christian imperialism
that belief that Jesus Christ is the only way.” But he admitted
he thinks that Jesus and Scripture are “non-negotiables” for
Christian congregations. Defenders of Braxton alleged that his
white critics were “afraid…that the church will turn black” and
were accustomed to WASPish, patrician and independently wealthy
pastors like Coffin.
The Times described the church as divided between older
whites with “emotional roots in the civil rights era,” and
younger middle-class blacks with a “less politicized set of
religious beliefs.” Although a powerful orator, Braxton was
unable to quell the controversy and abruptly resigned in June,
hoping the church could “address its internal tensions” after his
departure. Seemingly to rebut charges of “fundamentalism,”
Braxton’s farewell letter emphasized that he is a “progressive
Christian” who seeks social justice through “deeds” and “creeds.”
Noting that the over 2000-member congregation had “struggled
publicly for decades” about its identity, he complained that the
recent “antagonism” and “consistent discord” had made his
ministry impossible.
That the old guard at Riverside Church could not even adapt to a
“progressive” evangelical from a black Baptist tradition bodes
ill for aging, liberal Protestantism, which derides any dissent
as “fundamentalism.” But the inertia well matches the overall
state of Mainline religion, aptly represented by the still
glorious but fading Rockefeller-built monuments along the Hudson
River, where the spiritual tone increasingly resembles the nearby
marble silence of Grant’s Tomb.
