The National Conference of Christians and Jews has promoted inter-religious brotherhood in the United States since 1928. Some 10,000 American communities now observe Roman Catholic-Protestant-Jewish “Brotherhood Week” every February. (Metropolitan church editors are more and more persuaded, however, that the categories of Protestant-Catholic-Jew are an oversimplification of American life. Non-religious humanists are a powerful minority, and Christian Scientists also; evangelical Protestants, moreover, claim to be poorly represented in the inter-religious “brotherhood.”) An international World Brotherhood in 1950 widened the movement’s horizons. In 1951 the Ford Fund gave the Conference a million dollars; in 1957 Mrs. Roger W. Straus added another million to promote national and world objectives.
Fuller understanding among adherents of the world religions is necessary to advance religious freedom and civic cooperation. Earnest conversation between leaders of theistic persuasion could forge a strategic link in the world conflict against atheistic communism and naturalism. Moslems might also be included in the world program with good reason. The spiritual dearth of our foreign policy (the majority of United States citizens are church members) is attested by the effective slander of Arab propagandists who speak disdainfully of America’s “materialistic atheism.”
The unity of mankind is fundamentally a spiritual conception; sooner or later “brethren” who gloss over spiritual ultimates in their togetherness will demean the dignity of human nature and will begin goosestepping to the siren call of false gods.
Among the great religious traditions none has the design and dynamic for materializing brotherhood more than the Hebrew-Christian revelation of God and the world, which stresses the universal rational and moral responsibility of the race as well as its physical similarities. Biblical religion declares that all men by creation are children of the one Creator (Acts 17:28 f.); that they are obliged to love each other (Luke 10:27, 36 f.); that as sinners they have forfeited man’s original spiritual sonship to God (John 8:42 ff.); that they are restored to divine sonship through supernatural grace and saving faith in Jesus Christ (John 1:12; 3:5). A long view of the Western world discloses that redemptive religion alone unleashed such reservoirs of neighbor-love that caused even astonished pagans to exclaim: “See how they love one another!”
If the modern emphasis on “brotherhood” energized the preaching of the good news of man’s redemption to a lost world, evangelical Christians would soon show some enthusiasm for it. Even if these notions of brotherhood sought only to rebuke the tides of hatred in the world, and nourished man’s confidence in his created dignity, and quickened conscience in terms of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, much could be said in their favor.
But the distressing fact is that some of the modern “partnership” programs become agencies that not only militate against the missionary zeal and message of the Christian religion, but may even camouflage special and selfish interests in American life while they bask in the propaganda impression of devotion to the common good. By virtue of their very titles the “brotherhood” agencies have the psychological advantage of making anyone who questions their validity appear to be unbrotherly. That risk seems necessary, however, for the issues involved are worthy of examination. If today the idea of love is so often perverted (in Washington, D. C., a former theology student some months ago murdered a Howard University coed, explaining to police: “I shot her because I loved her”) it is quite possible that some prevalent ideas of brotherhood are faulty as well. At any rate, since the National and World Brotherhood Conferences hope to ply schools, colleges, churches, synagogues and community and youth and adult agencies with educational films, the underlying philosophy of brotherhood will bear scrutiny. The Christian churches will welcome every sign of concern for “the family of man” provided “the family of redemption” is not thereby subtly dissolved.
Biblical Christianity finds the restoration of the broken unity of the race in man’s supernatural redemption from sin. Without his central consideration, the “brotherhood ideal” remains too tenuous a moral and spiritual foundation for universal peace and justice. Doubtless the twentieth century cannot wait for the luxury of world conversion to repress the threat of mass annihilation, but neither dare it be betrayed into an abandonment of the decisive significance of personal regeneration. Unfortunately, because some Christian leaders minimize the importance of revealed truths even in their search for Christian unity, the churches themselves may be misled into romantic and disillusioning programs that underestimate the strategic theological basis for true brotherhood. Brotherhood has become a cliché through which the twentieth century often misunderstands and even repudiates the Bible.
Brotherhood, if it is real, expresses a loving concern for others that is not easily come by. Slogans of “togetherness” are not enough. Too many solutions to the problem of prejudice, intolerance, religious disagreement are too hurried, too parochial, too cheap. Even a brotherhood that is skin deep may go further than the spirit of the times, but for genuine understanding, brotherhood must be soul deep.
If we win a lasting brotherhood, it will mean that we can disagree without rancor and engage with maturity in constructive debate. The Bible extends a sobering lesson. Both Old and New Testaments exhort men to love God with their whole being, and their neighbor as themselves. Such love is not to be restricted to men of similar religious convictions—on the authority of revealed religion. Jesus’ great parable on neighbor-love characterizes the priest and the Levite as derelict onlookers, while the Samaritan—whose religious views were in low repute (cf. John 4:22)—Jesus made the bearer of neighbor-love.
Such brotherhood has the right, the necessity, to explore all areas of truth, including Church-State tensions; it does not consist in an evasive denial or concealment of differences, but in facing such differences in frankness and love. Loss of interest in truth leads inevitably to loss of interest in love as well.
Evidence is not hard to find that the National Conference operates not only as an inter-faith agency alongside existing religious thrusts, but in the case of Protestantism even functions over and above it, thereby sapping its evangelistic and missionary vitality. In many communities the YMCA, a Protestant movement with a tradition of evangelistic emphasis, has become the channel for inter-faith agencies whose entire and only gospel is the notion of world brotherhood. In turn, this interfaith emphasis sometimes infuses the thinking of Protestant councils of churches.
For example, during the closing days of the Graham Madison Square Garden Crusade, a Lutheran missionary among the Hebrews of New York asked if a page of paid, dignified advertisement could be placed in the metropolitan dailies inviting the Jews to a meeting which would present evidences that Jesus is the Messiah of Old Testament promise. A representative of the Protestant Council of New York protested that this would undo the gains achieved in inter-faith relations. In rejoinder, the Editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY questioned why suppression of Protestant missionary proclamation should be the price of inter-faith cooperation. The Council spokesman yielded the point, but felt another approach would be less offensive. The upshot of the matter was that no specific appeal of any kind was officially directed to the Jews of New York. The modern emphasis on religious brotherhood does more than repudiate religious bigotry in its emphasis on love-for-neighbor; it objectively implies that the very preaching of the Christian Gospel is an ugly prejudice menacing human brotherhood.
On the other hand, Roman Catholic participation in inter-faith activities curiously involves not the slightest suppression of that church’s missionary program. It was a Roman Catholic priest, in fact, who a quarter century ago suggested the first Brotherhood Week. Yet Rome has never wavered in its highly questionable teaching that all Protestants are heretics, nor ceased to pray that all outside the Roman church will enter its fold. While New York Protestant leaders hesitated to invite Hebrews to Madison Square Garden, the National Catholic Welfare Conference did not fail to warn Roman Catholics against attending. The Jesuit weekly America constructively publicized the Lutheran World Federation’s establishment of a Confessional Research Institute to study Roman Catholic theology but only as a hopeful means of converting Lutherans to Romanism! The Roman church commends Protestant “openness” but deplores and, where Romanism is predominant, not infrequently opposes and persecutes Protestant missions. Indeed, the inter-faith movement is a serviceable framework for promoting the long-term goals of Romanism.
Through its propaganda agencies Romanism, at least in the United States, may speak flatteringly now and then about certain Protestant or Jewish virtues which it commends to its own constituency for emulation. The editor of America, for example, emphasizes that Catholics and Jews have a long common spiritual tie reaching back to Abraham. And the Rev. John A. O’Brien of Notre Dame University urges 4,800 school teachers in the New York Archdiocese to emulate Protestant evangelistic zeal. Father Gustave Weigel, distinguished Jesuit theologian, thinks the time long overdue for Catholics and Protestants to “live together and talk together in harmony and fellowship.” Only a cynical spirit could resent such expressions of sentiment; they are worthy in mood and to be encouraged.
The National Conference of Christians and Jews gives Rome strategic opportunity to participate in interfaith pronouncements against social evils and for their correction. Roman pleas for inter-faith collective moral force sometimes carry broader overtones as well. The Catholic Legion of Decency, formed in 1934 to combat immoral movies, not only failed to gain effective support from Romanists, but also experienced opposition from Protestant leaders hostile to ecclesiastical censorship. Some pleas for Protestant cooperation in the Roman Catholic battle against lewd and immoral films imply that lack of Protestant enthusiasm for the Legion of Decency approach reflects a weak social conscience.
The same double turn sometimes seems latent in Roman Catholic enthusiasm for inter-faith pronouncements against religious prejudice that stress the Constitution’s exclusion of any religious test as a qualification for high office. This Roman Catholic public enthusiasm for equality of political opportunity is linked with private pursuit of special privilege alongside the shaming of all public criticism of Rome as bias and bigotry. The force of inter-faith efforts today is thus a means to nullify Protestant criticism of Romanism, while Rome proceeds to stigmatize Protestants with everything from heresy to religious prejudice. An NCCJ spokesman urged Chicago editors for the sake of brotherhood not to print the address of a leader in Protestants and Other Americans United.
If brotherhood is to gain headway, Catholicism must face the historic fact that Protestantism in America, by and large, is committed to a separation of Church and State. Certain matters will have to be faced, and it is no service either to Church or State to cry “bias” when an open political discussion of Church-State issues is at once essential and desirable. But what is the reaction when matters involving the nature of the American tradition are brought up? Catholic spokesmen react critically to an emphasis on the historic Roman Catholic view of State and Church, to a questioning of the legitimacy of an American envoy to the Vatican, citing this as a form of prejudice and even making public charges of bigotry in the local press. Using inter-faith spirit as an umbrella, Rome can discredit any challenge to its partisan ambitions. Although repudiating tolerance when it has a majority, Rome publicly emphasizes tolerance as a means of “softening up” a resistance movement, whose public disclosure of this contradiction in Romanism is scurrilized as poor taste and intolerance.
This situation has a repressive effect upon Protestant analysis and criticism. Since Catholics foster the notion that any criticism of Romanism is bigotry, non-Catholics prefer to maintain silence rather than to protest infractions lest they jeopardize their community status. This is seen in current misgivings of some Protestants over the 10-year-old organization of POAU. Certainly human movements are imperfect, and certainly POAU has never claimed infallibility for its spokesmen. CHRISTIANITY TODAY has private reservations concerning some of its statements that sound not simply non-sectarian but actually secular in tone. So absorbed has been the POAU in fighting sectarianism that the evil of secularism has been too much overlooked. Some POAU statements sound not simply non-sectarian, but actually secular in tone. Had the dangers of secularism as well as sectarianism been stressed by POAU, the joint statement of Roman Catholic bishops that secularism is the great peril in our national life would hardly have been news. Most Americans are as eager to keep the nation from falling into the lap of the devil as from kneeling at the feet of the Pope.
Undoubtedly POAU has been preoccupied mostly with Roman Catholic infractions, and has therefore sometimes been accused (mainly by Roman Catholics) of an anti-Catholic bias. The fact remains, however, that no organization has so provoked Protestants to scrutinize their own inconsistencies on Church-State issues. Whatever may be said against POAU—that it has concentrated one-sidedly on the Roman Catholic issue, and that it sometimes defines the American “wall of separation” in a secular mood—nonetheless this organization has performed the necessary service of pressing the important question of American traditions and sectarian political ambitions. Furthermore, it has required a verdict of the American conscience on Roman Catholic goals in view of that church’s traditions and contemporary policies and practices. Those inclined to dismiss POAU as “too reactionary” dare not dismiss its concerns as unimportant. Silence becomes irresponsibility when great matters are at issue.
No fact is clearer than the world’s need of brotherhood. It needs more than “Brotherhood Week,” however. It needs more than a brotherhood in America that is repudiated in Colombia. Absence of the biblical ideal of neighbor-love threatens more than society; in the modern world, it jeopardizes Christianity and democracy alike.
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Even The Devil Wears A Smile
Americans are guilty of the grossest folly whenever they fail to distinguish between the good will, friendliness and colossal ignorance of the Russian people about the free world, and the cold calculating smile of a godless leadership which has been guilty of the murder of millions; of every form of intrigue, subversion, infiltration, intimidation, oppressing and double-cross; of every device for the immediate and ultimate destruction of human freedom; of open and blatant suppression of faith in God and the Church; and, of the murder of young people’s minds through atheistic indoctrination.
No right thinking person hates either the Russian or the Chinese people. But Christians must hate that for which communism stands like they hate the devil himself, for communism has its source in him.
Some have been impressed by the smiling, if cynical, countenance of Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas I. Mikoyan during his recent visit to the United States. News cameras have followed him everywhere and we have seen him in stores and shops and in innumerable interviews. His apparent friendliness has been disarming, and, to some people, very convincing.
It will be a sad day for America when we accept communism or any ism at a prearranged propaganda value. Let us not forget: Satan also can wear a smile.
Protestant Muddle In Social Welfare
Increasing reliance upon Federal funds for Protestant social welfare activity is currently provoking a good deal of denominational soul-searching, as a special report in CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S news section indicates. Misgivings reach far and wide, but the vexing problem is how to resolve a compromising situation.
The analogy between Big Government and the devil, fortunately, lacks universal application. But Protestantism’s staggering involvement of social welfare in government subsidies recalls words uttered in another connection by an early critic of higher criticism. Give the devil your little finger, he warned, and soon he will possess your soul.
In view of growing sectarian pressures for Federal funds, some Protestant leaders now sense that their own eagerness for government monies may have provided Roman Catholic agencies with effective leverage for obtaining enlarged public funds serviceable to a highly objectionable Church-State philosophy.
Protestantism’s largest denomination is open to the charge of “fund grabs” as assuredly as Roman Catholicism. As the 75th hospital affiliated with its Board of Hospitals and Homes, The Methodist Church has just added the hospital in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Now being government-built for $3,000,000, the hospital by law must be removed from federal control by 1960 along with other community installations. In its November, 1958, issue, Tell-A-Scope, newsletter of the Board of Hospitals and Homes, notes: “Residents of Oak Ridge favored Methodism by a vote of 4,209 to 2,950 for sponsorship of the 175-bed hospital.… The hospital … will be turned over to the Church for operation.… Dr. Carroll H. Long, of Johnson City, Tenn., is chairman of the Holston Conference Board of Hospitals and Homes, and has worked untiringly in gaining support for Methodist operation.… The hospital at Oak Ridge was not ‘born’ into the Methodist family. It was adopted. And it was adopted after careful study, considerate thought, and understanding action. It is an example of ‘what can be done’ to provide expanded and quality care under Church sponsorship, if enough persons are interested and willing to speak for their ‘Cause.’ At least one other group in Oak Ridge was being considered as sponsor of the hospital.… What was done at Oak Ridge can be done in a hundred other communities if people care enough.” What troubles us deeply is this denominational assumption that use of Federal funds to expand church welfare services becomes sacrosanct when it benefits Methodism rather than Romanism.
Sentimental support for welfare statism as a species of Christian, social action unfortunately has blurred the American vision for a generation. Many denominational leaders still fail to discern the semi-socialistic shadows of the times, moving in an environment that dims the distinctives of free enterprise and voluntarism. The growing provision of government security from cradle to crematory is hailed as a magnificent application of Jesus’ “love your neighbor” commandment; few detect the outlines of the omnicompetent State more and more arrogating to itself the powers of free men.
In this social climate many church social welfare workers were satisfied that national churchmen gave their blessing to federal programs, that denominations in turn were allowed to cooperate in their implementation, and that the government reimbursed such church welfare efforts for value received. The fact that the job was getting done was the all-important consideration. Other facts—the progressive curtailment of voluntarism, the growing denominational reliance on government initiative and implementation in social welfare fields, the government’s growing use of the Church to expedite State programs of welfare—meant little.
For what comfort it now affords, welfare workers lean upon the present lack of clear policy in Church-State relations to excuse their variance and diversity in practice. Instead of frank admission of Protestant inconsistencies, they point out that the churches do not know what they mean by separation of Church and State or by cooperation between Church and State. Discrepancies, they say, imply that practice is not in accord with policy—and such policy is lacking.
That these variances spring from lack of attention to Church-State relations is surely no matter of surprise. The urgent need for a serious study of Church-State frontiers and of the theology of social welfare is apparent. During the past generation highly organized Protestant social action has been less efficient in its pursuit of consistent controlling principles than in its promotion of costly and comprehensive programs. The drive for unity in action that neglects changeless principles is always in danger of running zestfully toward the wrong goal post. News that denominational leaders are taking an earnest look at divergencies in social welfare activity, now so deeply indebted to federal funds, is therefore more than welcome. What the lofty affirmation that Jesus Christ is Saviour and Lord implies for a Protestant theology of social welfare, and of the State, and of the Church, and their mutual interrelations, is a worthy and imperative study.
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