New York State this month held the first major plebiscite on church-state separation since the concept was added to the U. S. Constitution in 1791. And nearly three-fourths of the 4.7 million voters opposed the new state constitution, with its weakened limits on state aid to church schools.
The dramatic, lopsided “no” vote followed weeks of intense religious lobbying and confusing political endorsements (see box below). National Catholic Reporter said the pro-constitution drive showed “a militant fervor unequalled” in the history of the state’s Catholic bloc. The lay weekly Commonweal said you’d have to hark back to the Massachusetts birth-control furor of the forties “to find anything quite like it.”
Thus Glenn Archer, chief of the strictly separationist Americans United, had special praise for Catholic laymen. “Born free, they have now voted to preserve this birthright for their children,” he exulted. Since 41 per cent of the electorate is Roman Catholic, for the constitution to lose a sizable chunk of the laity had to reject explicit pleas from the hierarchy. As it turned out, the charter not only failed in New York City but couldn’t carry the city’s Catholic strongholds, Queens and Staten Island.
New York spent ten years of agitation, six months of convention sessions, three million delegate words, and ten million tax dollars to revise the state’s 1894 constitution. The delegates decided to replace the “Blaine amendment,” which banned any aid to religious schools, with the wording of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Democrats, with an apparent eye on the Catholic vote, forced the constitution as a take-it-or-leave-it package, despite pleas for a separate ballot on the church-state question. The gamble was that conservative Catholics who feared higher spending under other charter provisions would vote yes in order to boost a parochial school aid. The one-package handling, and state aid itself, became the major campaign issues.
The strategy backfired. In addition, the mostly-Catholic Citizens for Educational Freedom overplayed its hand during its million-dollar drive1By contrast, the state council of churches had a war chest of about $15,000. with a series of ads hinting that anybody who didn’t want state money to go to church schools was a bigot or a meany. One TV spot showed a tow truck hauling away a smashed car while the announcer sobbed, “Unless we have a new constitution, one out of every four kids in New York State—Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant—may never be taught to drive safely.”
Choosing Sides
Here’s how some of the New York State stars fell during the furious politicking over the proposed constitution:
Pro—The state Roman Catholic hierarchy and lay lobbyists, the Democratic party, Governor Rockefeller, Bobby Kennedy, New York City’s council president, state AFL-CIO executives, many Orthodox Jews, and some Lutherans and Episcopalians who sought more aid for their church schools.
Con—State and New York City church councils, many Protestant groups, Senator Javits, Mayor Lindsay, the lieutenant governor, Liberal and Conservative parties, League of Woman Voters, American Civil Liberties Union, CORE, three New York City dailies, city Episcopal Bishop Horace Donegan, most Reform and many Conservative Jews and such secular groups as B’nai B’rith—and Mrs. Helen Sweeney, a Roman Catholic who said she got $50 a week to spy on an anti-constitution lobby for a pro-constitution lobby.
Liberal Party Chairman Donald Harrington, a Unitarian minister, called the tactics “essentially dishonest.” Even Christianity and Crisis—New York-based Protestant journal that supports a liberalized reading in church-state matters—was ashamed. Another liberal voice, the Christian Century, lost its ecumenical cool long enough to charge that Catholic lobbyists were “determined to overthrow the church-state principles on which this country was founded and by means of which it has endured.”
Among Catholic money-raising plans to support the constitution was an alleged blind collection through a charity in the Diocese of Brooklyn. Laymen charged that parish funds were secretly “tapped” for the campaign.
The major irony in the constitutional fuss was that the new charter would have allowed taxpayers—for the first time—to challenge constitutionality of church-school aid programs. Sophisticated separationists were torn between having an aid ban without the right to legal challenges, or having the First Amendment plus the right to oppose grants in the courts.
Even with Blaine in force, New York church-school pupils get $38 million a year in state aid, under the “child benefit” loophole. The major categories are busing, $16.4 million; textbooks, $3.5 million; and health services, $3.3 million. The U. S. Supreme Court has agreed to rule this term on Flast v. Gardner, a New York suit challenging state and federal aid for books, guidance services, and reading instruction.
Repeal of Blaine is not a dead issue. Both Republican and Democratic legislative leaders are planning to work for repeal in the next session, and predict success. Presbyterians in Albany, the state capital, are pledged to work with Catholics to seek repeal.
The New York results may indicate not only an increasingly independent Catholic laity but disenchantment with the parochial-school idea. Not only the state’s system, with 640,000 elementary students alone, but church schools across the country are having trouble getting support. In Philadelphia the predominantly white parochial system is thinking of charging tuition because half the parishes are already behind in high-school assessments this year. A hot-potato move for Pennsylvania state help for church schools was postponed until after election day by the legislature.
In neighboring Maryland, a constitutional convention is trying to decide what to do about aid, as well as formal recognition of the Deity.
ACTIVISM ALL OVER
Church activists—and their critics—grabbed the spotlight in recent anti-war, civil-rights, crime, and vice skirmishes.
Jail doors clicked shut on Martin Luther King, Jr., in Bessemer, Jefferson County, Alabama, and—in Baltimore, Maryland—on Roman Catholic priest Philip Berrigan, United Church of Christ minister James Mengel, and two members of the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission. These four were charged with destroying property and records after they entered the U. S. Customs House and poured blood into Selective Service filing cabinets to protest U. S. policy in Viet Nam. The blood was a mixture of their own and that of ducks, the protesters said.
King and three Negro clergy companions surrendered to sheriff’s deputies at the Birmingham airport and served five-day terms for contempt-of-court convictions received in 1963. Small demonstrations against the jailings were staged in Baltimore and Birmingham.
At Yale’s New Haven, Connecticut, campus, University President Kingman Brewster, Jr., scored Chaplain William S. Coffin as a “strident voice of draft-resistance” after Coffin turned in fifty draft cards of students to Justice Department officials. The ruckus touched off a campus investigation. FBI agents withdrew after Divinity School Dean Robert C. Johnson charged their presence was disrupting classes. Coffin has also proposed that Yale’s Battell Chapel be used as a “sanctuary” for draft-resisters.
In a different style of protest, New York’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine apparently will remain unfinished as a symbol of the “anguish” of nearby slums. Episcopal Bishop Horace Donegan said last summer’s riots and the urban crisis had changed his mind about going ahead with plans to complete the seventy-six-year-old Gothic edifice.
In Philadelphia, a controversy over the Church’s role in civil disobedience prompted Negro Episcopal Rector Arthur Wooley to demand the resignation of his bishop, Robert L. DeWitt, who spoke out against civil disobedience.
In Cambridge, Maryland, Negro Bishop James L. Eure of the Churches of God in Christ padlocked the Rev. Ernest Dupree’s church to prevent the Black Action Federation from meeting there, and persuaded Dupree to resign as local president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Civil-rights and liberal groups put pressure on St. Louis Episcopal Bishop George L. Cadigan, and he decided to back down on his suspension of militant civil-rights clergymen Walter W. Witte and William L. Matheus. The two charged they were fired for civil-rights activities. Several church and rights groups picketed Cadigan’s office to protest their dismissal.
With a different militancy, crimefighting Presbyterian minister Albert F. Hill of New Rochelle, New York, recently organized brigades of housewife-spies to stamp out the “Mafia guerrilla army in our midst.” His petticoated-commandos use walkie-talkies and a movie camera in their crusade against organized crime and illegal gambling in the suburban city.
BEYOND BIAFRA WHAT?
The six-month-old civil war in Nigeria has left virtually the entire southern section of the country without a foreign missionary. Last month, several missionaries were still reported working in Biafra, the breakaway eastern regime which was near collapse under attacks by federal troops. But most had been evacuated.
Refusal by the United States to sell planes to the central government and its subsequent criticism of the Nigerian purchase of Communist planes has created serious anti-American feeling, Missionary News Service reported. However, MNS said, “there is no indication as yet of the extent of this on missionary relations with the people.”
Sir Francis Ibiam, former governor of Eastern Nigeria, who is currently one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, has reportedly written to Queen Elizabeth, returning the knighthood conferred upon him. He condemned both “Christian Britain and Communist Russia for their shameless support of Muslim Nigeria.”
Actually, about half of the 60,000,000 people of Nigeria are Muslim and one-fourth are nominally Christian. The federal head of state, military leader Yakubu Gowon, is an outspoken Christian, the son of an evangelist. He challenges the contention that the war is in any sense religious.
Gowon has ordered his men to treat prisoners humanely, not to molest women or children, and not to desecrate churches and mosques. There have been numerous reports of atrocities by federal troops against the 7.5 million Ibo people, who dominate the eastern region.
Nigeria, whose population makes it one of the ten largest countries in the world, has been a relatively fertile field for missionary effort. Particularly dramatic has been the “New Life for All” movement, an interdenominational effort along the lines of Latin America Mission’s “Evangelism-in-depth.” The movement hopes for a saturation campaign for the north of Nigeria by next year. Meanwhile, Sudan Interior Mission spokesmen say that “even if the East and West and North decide to work together, any peace will be a delicate, uneasy balance for years to come.”
WITTENBERG SOURS
Partly because Communists fear the Christian community and partly because East German authorities tried to make political hay of Martin Luther, the 450th anniversary of the Reformation at Wittenberg went sour.
A sample of the Communist tack is a quote in the Washington Post from Leo Stern, vice-president of the East Germany Academy of Science. Luther’s teachings, said Stern, “although cloaked in religious terms, were eminently political teachings.”
“The foundations of Luther’s teaching that man is justified by faith alone meant, under the circumstances … not only a proclamation of fundamental religious differences of dogma with the Catholic Church, but, at the same time, a revolutionary program of extraordinary political explosiveness,” Stern reportedly said.
Things got so bad at Wittenberg that even so eminent a bridge-builder as Eugene Carson Blake was miffed. Complaining of restrictions, Blake joined two other churchmen in issuing a statement that said they doubted they would have come if they had known of the hindrances in advance.
An East German Protestant bishop and two senior Lutheran clergymen from Wittenberg resigned from a state-organized commemoration committee in protest against Communist interpretations of the Reformation.
Numerous churchmen from the West were turned away at the border. Some had come long distances, hopeful of securing East German entry visas. (Some Communist countries do not normally issue visas in advance but instruct travelers to apply at border crossings.)
Dr. Eugene Smathers, moderator of the United Presbyterian General Assembly, was slightly injured when a car in which he was riding overturned in Czechoslovakia. Stated Clerk William P. Thompson and three other United Presbyterians were excluded from East Germany, but Markus Barth got in.
Dr. George W. Forell of the University of Iowa, described as the only American invited to speak at the East German Reformation ceremonies, seized the occasion for some candid commentary. The university’s news service released an English version of his lecture said to have been given in German.
Forell lashed out against “Utopians who see the historical process itself as the agent of redemption.” He noted that a prevalent kind of thinking “attributes a moral conscience to the evolutionary process itself. It is almost tragic how rapidly these optimistic theologians of evolution are crushed by the events that were to redeem mankind.”
“The same William Hamilton who only yesterday described the great changes taking place in the relationship of the races in the United States of America in terms of what he called ‘the new optimism’ stands today condemned as the typical false prophet by the events he so completely misunderstood,” said Forell.
“Hamilton quoted the sentimental song of the civil-rights movement ‘We Shall Overcome’ as evidence for the power of the new optimism produced by ‘the death of God.’ Today, only a few years later, these same young people in America sing ‘Burn, baby, burn,’ rejecting the naïve optimism of the civil-rights movement and demanding instead ‘black power,’ ” Forell declared.
He also criticized advocates of the new morality for assuming that “the life of love, the life of discipleship, is a simple human possibility, without the need for justification by faith.” And he called attention to Luther’s argument that the problem of man is man.
New Day For Japanese Christmas
An estimated 16,000 Christians live in Tokyo, the world’s largest city, and nearly that many persons responded to invitations to Christian commitment during Billy Graham’s crusade there (see November 10 issue, page 53). The attendance total for the evangelist’s meetings was 191,950.
The day after the final game of Japan’s World Series, Graham also drew a standing-room-only crowd of 36,000 at Korakuen Stadium for his closing meeting. The throng braved a cold north wind of fifteen miles an hour in the aftermath of Typhoon Dinah.
Students predominated in the audiences Graham attracted, and more than half the inquirers were in the 19-to-29 age group. Despite student unrest over the Viet Nam war, no anti-American demonstrations disrupted the meetings.
The ten-day crusade was probably the largest ecumenical Christian effort in Japan’s history. Japanese church leaders hailed it as a significant turning point in national church life.
“This is the rising sun of a new day for the church in Japan,” declared radio evangelist Akira Hatori, who served as Graham’s translator.
Anglican Bishop Tsunenori Takase said, “I believe from this day on the Church in Japan will be a missionary, sending Church rather than just a receiving church.” Shuichi Matsumura, a leader of the Baptist World Alliance, said that “our churches will never be the same again.”
Graham’s own comment: “This crusade indicates to me that regardless of race, nationality, or language, man is the same the world over and the message of Jesus Christ meets man’s deepest needs.”
NEW QUMRAN SCROLL
Another ancient parchment manuscript, tentatively called the “Temple Scroll,” has been found near the Qumran community in the Dead Sea area, according to the Israel Exploration Society. The document, said to be the longest found in the area, measures almost twenty-six feet and dates from the Herodian period (55 B. C. to A. D. 93).
Archaeologists say that the scroll contains previously unknown details of a temple and its courts, vessels, and service. The scroll apparently was in the hands of a Bethlehem merchant during the Israeli-Arab war last June and was obtained when Israel captured the city. Religious News Service said the merchant still claims ownership of the scroll and may sue to regain possession.
Hebrew University archeologist Yigeal Yadin says the scroll indicates that one group of Jesus’ followers joined the Qumran community shortly after the Crucifixion and influenced it to adopt some Christian doctrine.
The first Qumran scrolls were found in 1947 by Bedouin tribesmen who were seeking lost goats in hillside caves.
EVANGELICALS INHIBITED
During an annual retreat of evangelical mission executives at Winona Lake, Indiana, some criticism was expressed of the lack of evangelical interaction in the social sphere. An unofficial report on the retreat by a “findings committee” said: “The evangelical mind-set … has inhibited constructive thought and action. These attitudes may be summarized as follows:
“A fear that any form of social action or concern will pre-empt or displace evangelistic witness; an assumed correlation between a conservative theological position and a non-interventionist attitude toward social problems; an insensitivity and apathy because of generations of silence on social issues; a predominantly status quo mentality; a narrow view of the compass of Christian ethics and morality; an unwillingness to accept criticism and a persistent tendency to blame conspiratorial sources for social problems.”
The committee said the report merely expressed concerns that had come up during the four-day retreat, sponsored by the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, and did not represent a consensus of the 100 participants.
The committee urged Christians to express their convictions more effectively in personal as well as social righteousness.
