JOHN DUNCAN SOMEWHERE TELLS of an election campaign meeting in the Scottish border country at which an unbriefed but resourceful speaker hit on a winning formula. “Will you have your daughters sold into simony?” he demanded of his startled rustic audience. “Will you have a chasuble set up in your market place?” In no time at all he had them crying, “No! No!”

Similar tactics are not unknown on the contemporary ecumenical scene in Scotland. Smoke screens originating in secondary or irrelevant issues have bedeviled Anglican-Presbyterian conversations in the past and continue to do so, making it incredibly difficult to follow and make sense of what is happening. Contributing to this situation is a Scottish newspaper of large circulation and dogmatic views, dedicated to the exposure of plottings designed at enslaving Scots again in the yoke of episcopacy loathed long since and lost awhile.

The paper does this partly by giving the impression that the purpose and sole topic of inter-church conversations is negotiation of the terms on which the Kirk would accept bishops. Whenever there is a further development in Presbyterian-Anglican relations, the publication in question (founded by Lord Beaverbrook, himself a son of the manse) sounds that come-to-the-battle note that stirs Auld Scotia’s pride. Even that section of the populace loosely identifiable as “Presbyterian atheists” rushes suitably outraged to the conflict at the sound of this uncertain trumpet. Viet Nam and Rhodesia are edged off the front page as religion becomes again big news in a land that can never quite forget John Knox. Mention bishops in Presbyterian Scotland (even “bishops-in-presbytery,” as recommended by the 1957 report) and you will get virtually the same response that was elicited nearly four centuries ago: “Busk [dress] him, busk him as bonnilie as ye can … we see the horns of his mitre.”

That this relentless opposition has shaken even English imperturbability was seen in the Convocation of Canterbury last month. Dr. Oliver Tomkins, Bishop of Bristol, usually the most irenic of men, was rash enough to make a public attack on his newspaper adversary. In exasperation he referred to the “tyrannous pretensions of this strident spokesman of the Fourth Estate” that vitiated all discussion by “shrill vituperation and gross distortion” and by playing on the “least pleasing aspects of Scottish sentiment.”

The conversing committees in one way have only themselves to blame. If Anglicans and Presbyterians had given more thought to public relations at their January meeting in Edinburgh, there would have been no scope for sensational press disclosures of “secret plots.” The fact that a confidential document was leaked to the offending paper (which naturally made the most of the shining hour), and that unwarranted assumptions were drawn from it, gave ammunition to the anti-bishop faction and did far more harm than would have been caused had the ecumenical officials been more forthright.

The Bishop of Bristol’s was not the only convocation commentary on the Scottish ecclesiastical scene. With excellent motive and dubious wisdom, Canon Hugh Montefiore of Cambridge broached the explosive subject of the Rev. John Tirrell, the American Episcopalian who jumped the ecumenical gun by becoming assistant at Presbyterian St. Giles’ (see “Edinburgh: A Jurisdictional Dispute,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, December 3, 1965, p. 46). Montefiore, with mysterious references here and there to his “Edinburgh friends,” took the convocation step by step through the complexities of this whole sorry business, which has enhanced the reputation of none of the parties involved and has profited nothing but opportunistic journalism. Thereafter, in proceeding to recommend any action at all on a domestic Scottish issue, the Convocation of Canterbury was a two-time loser. Though wisely rejecting a proposal to send a message to the Church of Scotland General Assembly, it encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury to write personally to the moderator (quite the wrong way to deal with Presbyterianism), expressing the hope that the Tirrell affair would not influence the assembly’s deliberations later that month. This letter, relayed with the purest of intentions, was doomed to condemnation in some Scottish circles as an impertinent intrusion. The Tirrell case is no cause célèbre but a squalid dispute in which pride and clashing personalities are more conspicuous than elements of high principle.

I have been concerned to spell out these various details and problems in Scotland partly to show how easy it is in matters ecumenical for spiritual concerns to be squeezed out when controversy looms large. Cautious ecumenicals are accused of shiftiness and evasion (overmuch definition of terms is unhappily deemed ecumenically dangerous), Scottish national pride has been made a more vital factor than Christian humility, and the ghost of Jenny Geddes is conjured up, with stool ready poised to hurl at Episcopal heads. So loaded is the atmosphere in Scotland at present that it confirms the view of moderate Presbyterians that conversations have been pushed on too quickly after the Bishops’ Report of 1957, and that it would be better if the whole matter were put into cold storage for a generation.

It must be added, however, that there is little in this latest report on Anglican-Presbyterian conversations that will offend. It recommends the development of bilateral conversations within the two countries—that is, between the Presbyterian establishment and the Episcopal minority in Scotland, and between the Episcopal majority and the Presbyterian group in England. The report goes on to deal briefly with such questions as the meaning of unity as distinct from uniformity in church order; the meaning of “validity” as applied to ministerial orders; the doctrine of Holy Communion: the meaning of the Apostolic Succession as related to the foregoing matters; the Church as Royal Priesthood; and the place of the laity in the Church. The report calls each church “to sacrifice in order that a Church united and enriched in God’s truth may emerge.”

Whether in all this the Scottish Daily Express will see something akin to establishing chasubles in public, I don’t know. It seems to me the real crisis will come when Anglicans and Presbyterians are caught practising intercommunion in secret.

A new cult is making its appearance across North America. The rationale, if it is to be taken seriously, is the bizarre theory of what its proponents call “expanding consciousness.” Principal promotion comes from the attention currently being given to lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, and other drugs that, taken internally, produce outlandish mental images.

High priest of the LSD cult is ex-Roman Catholic Timothy Leary, 45-year-old psychologist who in 1963 was fired from Harvard University for using students in LSD experiments. He then went on to become the world’s leading exponent of “mind-opening substances.”

“We regard him with the same special love and respect as was reserved by the early Christians for Jesus, by the Moslems for Mohammed, or the Buddhists for Gautama,” said Arthur Kleps in testimony last month before a United States Senate subcommittee. Kleps is identified as director of the “Neo-American Church,” which is supposed to have 500 members and churches in the Northeast, Florida, and California and is spreading.

Kleps, 38, says his title is sometimes given as “Chief Boo Hoo,” which leads observers to wonder whether the whole thing is a joke. In his testimony on Leary, however, Kleps was not funny. He issued a warning on what might happen if the movement’s leader were ever jailed (Leary is appealing a thirty-year prison sentence on a conviction of possession of narcotics).

“On the day prison doors close behind Tim Leary,” Kleps declared, “if these ill-considered laws of religious suppression are upheld by the courts, this country will face religious war.”

“Open conflict will most certainly result if the courts uphold these laws against us … and I would certainly advise my people to use LSD to fight back, to flood the prisons with LSD, and make life impossible for the prison administrators rather than resort to actual violence.”

Leary and Kleps say they believe human beings are capable of levels of consciousness beyond and superior to normality. LSD and other drugs and foods are said to be a means to achieve those higher levels, though not the only means.

“It is our belief that the sacred bio-chemicals such as peyote, mescaline, LSD, and cannobis are the true host of God and not drugs at all as that term is commonly understood,” says Kleps. “We do not feel that the government has the right to interfere in our religious practice and that the present persecution of our co-religionists is not only constitutionally illegal but a crude and savage repression of our basic and inalienable rights as human beings.”

In a speech during a brief return visit to Harvard recently, Leary contended that “drugs don’t necessarily mean doctors and disease, but beauty, art, music, revelation, enhanced learning.” He said that nearly every American uses some sort of a drug—pep pills, sedatives, or alcohol—to help him move from “sleep or stupor to what he calls normal consciousness.” He charged that “middle-aged, whiskey-drinking people are making it a crime for the young, creative and racial minorities to want to improve their lives and open their minds.”

LSD was discovered accidentally in a laboratory about twenty-five or thirty years ago. Not until recently, however, has it been claimed to have any wide usage. It is now becoming popular among college students—especially beatnik types—who take it in sugar cubes, and states are beginning to enact laws restricting its sale and use. Leary recently called for a moratorium on LSD use during the current uproar.

Proponents insist LSD is not habit-forming or hazardous to health, even in large doses. But reports are increasing of LSD-takers who have gone berserk, endangering their own lives and those of others. The chemical is colorless, odorless, and tasteless when dissolved in water.

Among religious scholars who are impressed with the potential of LSD-like substances is Dr. Walter H. Clark, professor of the psychology of religion at Andover Newton Theological School. Clark, an Episcopalian, has been a subject in Leary’s experiments along with a number of other faculty members and students from various seminaries.

On Campus

Samuel J. Wylie, 47, who was raised in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, became a Presbyterian clergyman, then entered the Episcopal ministry, will be new dean of that denomination’s General Theological Seminary in New York.

Harold Haas, executive secretary of the Lutheran Church in America’s Board of Social Ministry, on August 31 becomes dean of Wagner College, Staten Island, New York, where he graduated in 1939 and later taught sociology.

Boston’s Richard Cardinal Cushing is worried about Catholic seminary dropouts. Years ago, his archdiocese ordained seventy graduates a year; this year, St. John’s Seminary has only thirty-one graduates.

Urban problems are the special focus for the new missions-evangelism professor at California’s Golden Gate Theological Seminary (Southern Baptist); Francis M. DuBose has been Detroit missions superintendent for the denomination. James W. McClendon, Jr., of the Golden Gate faculty, has been named a joint professor of Protestant theology by Stanford University and the University of San Francisco (Jesuit).

Arthur K. Tyson is switching Southern Baptist college presidencies—from Mary Hardin-Baylor College in Texas to Grand Canyon College in Arizona.

Grayson L. Tucker, new professor of church administration at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, will co-direct the school’s field education.

Frederick Borsch of Queen’s College, Birmingham, England, will teach New Testament at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary (Episcopal).

J. Allen Fleece will leave the presidency of Columbia (South Carolina) Bible College in September to become a freelance Bible teacher.

On a motion by John R. Rice, the board of Bob Jones University unanimously backed the administration in its fight against Billy Graham’s evangelistic strategy in Greenville, South Carolina, and in general.

Personalia

Father Charles Coughlin of Detroit—whose years of radio campaigning against the New Deal and Communism caused a sensation until Edward Cardinal Mooney stopped the broadcasts in 1940—resigned his pastorate on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination last month. He is 74.

George H. Muedeking, professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, was chosen editor-in-chief of the Lutheran Standard, official newsmagazine of The American Lutheran Church.

Jarrell McCracken, president of gospel music-oriented Word Records, America’s biggest religious record producer, is the new vice-president of Record Industry Association of America, whose officers usually come from the major secular firms.

Alfred F. Larson was named general director of the Unevangelized Fields Mission for North America.

Dr. Robert V. Moss, Jr., head of Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Theological Seminary of the United Church of Christ, was elected president of the American Association of Theological Schools.

Religious Heritage in America gives awards this month to Francis Cardinal Spellman (churchman of the year), Dr. Walter H. Judd (layman of the year), and Marian Anderson (church woman of the year).

Leonidas C. Contos on August 1 will become the first American-born priest to be dean of Holy Cross Orthodox Theological School, Brookline, Massachusetts. Last fall, Contos became director of communications and interchurch relations for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese.

United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy, in South Africa, met with three Christian foes of the nation’s apartheid policy—Roman Catholic Archbishop Denis Hurley, Anglican Bishop Clarence Crowther, and Chief Albert Luthuli, political leader and Nobel prizewinner who is now under house arrest. Kennedy reports Luthuli has no “hatred or bitterness toward whites; he reads the Bible and believes in the compassion of man toward man.”

Protestant Panorama

By a 6 per cent margin, the Canada Conference of the Evangelical United Brethren voted to merge with the United Church •of Canada if the EUBs in the United States unite with The Methodist Church. The United Church of Canada biennial this fall will consider the EUB merger as well as its major negotiations with the Anglican Church of Canada.

Presiding Bishop John E. Hines of the Episcopal Church announced that a majority of bishops has consented to the resignation of Bishop James A. Pike as bishop of California (see May 27 issue, page 49). A twenty-three-member committee will nominate at least four candidates to succeed Pike at a special diocesan convention September 13.

The Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, formed from two conservative bodies last year, voted to explore possible union with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which is similar in size (12,500 members) and shares support of the Westminster Confession and separation from church councils. RPCES now has eighty-four foreign missionaries.

The Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, after a seven-hour debate, beat down moves to censure Erskine College, Due West, South Carolina, for signing compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and taking a $150,100 federal building grant. It suggested, however, that Erskine cut federal ties if theological standards are threatened.

Miscellany

The American Association of Theological Schools decided last month to allow a Master of Divinity degree in place of the Bachelor of Divinity after three years’ work, and to set standards for a four-year professional doctorate.

Chancellor Murray O. Reed of Little Rock, Arkansas, ruled that the state law against teaching evolution is unconstitutional (see April 29 issue, p. 45). But Attorney General Bruce Bennet will appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court.

Four more denominations are applying for membership in the National Council of Churches: the Progressive National Baptist Convention, which claims 500,000 members; the Antiochian Orthodox Catholic Archdiocese of Toledo and Dependencies, 35,000; the Russian Orthodox Church in the Americas, 24,000; and the Church of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian), 4,538.

Lutheran theologian Carl Braaten is calling on Protestants to return to Roman Catholicism, which he regards as their “ecclesiastical homeland.” He expresses hope for early reunion in the quarterly Una Sancta.

Deaths

FRANCIS DAVID NICHOL, 69, Australia-born editor of the Seventh-day Adventist weekly Review and Herald since 1945 and noted Adventist author-scholar; in Takoma Park, Maryland, after a heart attack.

CYRIL. M. ARMITAGE, 66, Anglican chaplain to four British monarchs; in Dymchurch, England.

A signal to the choir from ebullient emcee Cliff Barrows and the Greater London Crusade was under way. Billy was back, at the invitation of a group of laymen who thought “God has given him special gifts.” It was Graham’s biggest British effort since the famous Harringay meeting twelve years ago.

The opening-night crowd at the Earls Court indoor stadium was 19,000 (the hall holds 27,000), 2,000 of whom were in the choir. Oddly symbolic was the announcement that a lost and found department was operating. The meeting followed the familiar Graham pattern until he invited listeners to make a commitment or rededication by coming forward. Where the music ought to have started up, the choir and organ remained silent.

A lithe young Negro came first; then from all over the arena a steady stream of people: well-dressed, shabby, flamboyant, young, old, Oriental, European, African, at least as many men as women. They overflowed the platform area until the line was halfway up one aisle, 447 of them. It was three times the first-night response in 1954.

The second night’s meeting, aimed primarily at youth, drew 15,000, who heard a remarkable testimony halfway through from weight-lifter Paul Anderson, called the world’s strongest man. Once again, Billy Graham’s appeal was given without musical accompaniment. There were 734 inquirers, three-fourths of them under twenty-five.

Two newsmen watching such scenes were baffled. Finally one muttered a shade uneasily, “At least none of us are going forward.” “How do you explain it?” whispered the other. Answer came there none, but they had a whole month to pursue their inquiries.

The press reception in general has been more favorable than in 1954. Some news hawks have moved into Graham’s hotel, and others follow him and his team around constantly. One zealous photographer burst into Graham’s hotel room one morning and got a picture of the evangelist in his pajamas.

The British Broadcasting Corporation invited Graham to appear on a current affairs program but didn’t tell him until two minutes before air time that two of his most implacable enemies had been lined up for a confrontation. Graham went through with the program.

In other pre-crusade activities, Graham preached to the students at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. And at Southampton, he said he had come to present the Gospel, the good news, to people with a guilt complex, to the lonely, to those unable to find fulfillment in life.

He stressed that the crusade is a British one, run by a British committee. As if to underscore the point, the platform on opening night contained a brace of bishops, Major-General D. J. Wilson-Haffenden (executive committee chairman), and Viscount Brentford, who read the lesson.

The American preacher seemed well prepared for the continuous press probings. Asked about his “total world following,” Graham immediately responded: “I hope, none.” He termed himself a proclaimer, and not a leader of a separate movement but a churchman who does his work within the church.

Since Graham is a Southerner, his ideas on race also rated close scrutiny. Graham said the South has no monopoly on bias. The point was soon driven home when one of Graham’s Negro associates, Howard O. Jones, was asked to leave a rented flat at Drayton Place, Earls Court, after only one night.

Mrs. Gilda Jago, director of the dwellings for Langton Property and Investment Company, which owns the flat, said flatly, “We do not allow Negroes here.” When she took the booking she had no idea any of Graham’s colleagues would be colored. “With a name like Jones, for all I know he could have been Welsh,” she remarked. Two other team members, Danny Lotz and Irv Chambers, left the flats in protest,

Graham’s publicity in the States calls the London effort “the most carefully planned crusade we have ever led. Several of our team members have been in London nearly two years. The city has been organized block by block.…” Along with the central Earls Court effort, team members are holding scores of meetings all over town. Considerable TV and radio time also is being purchased.

All this is costly, and crusade treasurer Sir Cyril Black, M. P., will have about $840,000 in bills to meet. But the salaries of Graham, twelve other evangelists, and fifteen other staffers will be met by contributions to his American organization.

Graham told the press the crusade “costs about what Cassius Clay got for less than three minutes in the ring with Sonny Liston. It costs about one-fourth of one fighter plane that is used to destroy life. It costs one-fifth of what Elizabeth Taylor got for playing Cleopatra. It costs about what Julie Christie can now demand for one movie.”

Scotland: Pomp And Circumlocution

For hundreds of years, ministers and elders have made their annual trek to Edinburgh for the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, one of the more democratic of the world’s forums. Money is always in short supply, but debate is as profuse as ceremony.

The Lord High Commissioner, installed as Her Majesty’s representative, emerges—in the tight little streets where Montrose was executed and Covenanters driven to slaughter like sheep—with an entourage in which all centuries contribute their particular dress and custom. He meets the city fathers, clothed in scarlet and ermine; they rendezvous with the moderators and fathers of the church, splashed in black, white, and scarlet, Siege is laid to the ear by a Highland pipe band.

And once begun, what does the assembly speak about? According to one editor, “about everything and anything except God.” Rhodesia, women in the eldership, the minimum stipend, industrial chaplains, the return of the Birch—you mention it and you will find it in the Blue Book.

The minutiae of organizational affairs are not without significance. In an assertion of individuality at this year’s assembly, the ranks closed in opposition to a move to require all congregations to accept the Model Constitution for “efficiency and unity.” Some of the churches still have their own constitution and rights over property, a legacy of former years.

In deliberations on church union, more divisiveness was inevitable. Conversations with Anglicans and Methodists were reported as hopeful, but slow and dangerous. On balance, it seems the Presbyterians are more “open” than Anglicans. The 245-to-223 vote to continue church union discussions showed the sharp feelings on the topic.

Meantime, a lively ecumenical diversion was provided by protesters, led by a Baptist minister. They infiltrated the assembly and, at a given moment, opened their coats to reveal canvas vests with such slogans as “No Bishops.” The same ploy was used by others when the Archbishop of Canterbury went to the Vatican recently.

If the Presbyterian-Anglican breach is unbridged, the gap with Roman Catholics is wider still. A major cause of offense is the odious ne temere policy—children of a mixed marriage must be pledged to the Roman Church—essentially unchanged despite Pope Paul’s recent “new” policy on the subject. Delegates recalled a recent instance in which a Presbyterian minister was unable to officiate at the marriage of his own daughter to a Roman Catholic.

On the floor, the church complained to broadcasting authorities about programs that more and more lapse into vulgarity and obscenity. The Scots are concerned with the “remote control” of programs from London, which some nearly equate with Sodom and Gomorrah. In another item, the church came down against “breathalisers” to check alcoholic consumption by auto drivers as an “invasion of liberty.”

The commissioners, conditioned to suspicion about Scottish weather, filed into the capital with umbrellas and mackintoshes, but the sun took over. At one outdoor session, a grueling, all-day sitting was necessary to deal with the crowded agenda. Summer heat, augmented by television arc-lamps, had the Scots melting in their tweeds.

GEORGE NICHOLSON

Conservative Baptist Splinter

All the talk at the Conservative Baptist Association’s annual “fellowship” this month was about unity, but this troublesome fact remains: after a year of internal struggle, the CBA has been unable to placate its small strongly conservative wing, and peace now appears impossible.

The breakdown became clear during the CBA meeting in Philadelphia. At an almost simultaneous meeting in Indianapolis, dissident churches that were represented at last year’s CBA meeting in Denver but have since pulled out of the association formed a new organization.

The new group, the New Testament Association of Baptist Churches, was first proposed at that Denver meeting in a separate session attended by about 200 delegates, but it then failed to materialize.

Since that meeting, according to this year’s annual CBA report, forty-four churches have withdrawn from the association. Most of them were represented at that private meeting in Denver, and form the core of the new organization.

The differences between the two associations are not so much doctrinal as operational. Leaders of the new group fear a “mood of tolerance” in the CBA that they claim will first tend toward more centralized power and eventually lead to doctrinal compromise. They claim a decline in financial support and in new membership in the CBA as evidence of grass-roots sympathy with their criticisms.

The CBA, which had an average annual increase of seventy churches and reached a total of more than 1,200 in 1963, has since lost ninety churches. Finances increased until 1963 but have since remained constant.

To counter charges, CBA officials point first to their two mission groups, which have grown to a combined yearly budget of almost $3.5 million and which this year appointed twenty-one new missionaries, the largest class in more than ten years.

As for the CBA itself, loyalists say its present decline is the result of two factors: dissatisfaction and suspicion stirred by the right-wing element, and a natural leveling-off period after twenty years of expansion.

The guess among Baptists in Philadelphia was that Baptists in Indianapolis had picked up about as much support from CBA ranks as they could expect.

WILLIAM FREELAND

Christian Science And Redevelopment

The Christian Science Church may have a “wholly spiritual” mission, but 15,000 of Mary Baker Eddy’s disciples who convened at the Mother Church this month witnessed the beginning of a church-sponsored redevelopment project that will alter the Boston skyline.

As Erwin D. Canham, editor-in-chief of the Christian Science Monitor, took office as church president for the coming year, wrecking crews began to make way for an $8 million church center, including a twenty-six-story headquarters building.

Canham told the Scientists—who filled the Mother Church sanctuaries and overflowed to the nearby War Memorial Auditorium in observance of the hundredth anniversary of Mrs. Eddy’s healing—that the threats of nuclear war, population growth, and “sensuality and licentiousness” could be countered only “as individuals strive to understand God’s laws … the truth of being.” With Christian Science’s special insight into spiritual healing, he said, “there is no problem facing mankind today which cannot be solved.”

At a news conference, the veteran editor said that while his church has no interest in church union, it welcomes “all aspects of this new atmosphere” of ecumenicity. Informal explorations of matters of common interest have been held with Presbyterians. Responding to a question on whether Scientists were seeking recognition as Christians, Canham said, “I didn’t know we were not.… Was there any serious doubt?” At last year’s annual meeting, the five-member Board of Directors offered fellowship “to every true Christian, to every adherent of any God-centered faith.”

In its report to the assembly, which was closed to non-Scientists, the board called for renewed spiritual discipline to bring “to the world a higher concept of God as divine Principle, in the realms of business, government, social service, the political sphere, and in every phase of human thought and action.” It also announced a new international department and a new youth division to meet growing demands. Four hundred campus organizations and 1,200 informal student groups have been established.

The board also took heart from the “God is dead” movement, which meshes neatly with its own ideas of the “nature of God as infinite Spirit, which Christ Jesus declared Him to be; as omnipresent divine Mind, that mind which was also in Christ Jesus.…”

After the one-day business meeting (which was not deliberative, since the board makes all decisions), the visitors divided their remaining 2½ days between standing in line at restaurants and sharing in workshops. Unlike most denominational meetings, the Christian Science assemblies are devoted more to education and inspiration than to issuing pronouncements on social issues. A Mother Church staffer explained that the church’s social outreach comes chiefly through spiritually healed individuals.

Faced with image problems outside the church, Christian Scientists are often lumped together with “positive thinkers,” but they refuse the label. Within the church, said a member of the Committee on Publications, there are difficulties in getting information between the Mother Church and the branches and individual members.

The redevelopment program planned by famed architect I. M. Pei will renovate and expand the Mother Church area and include high-rise offices and apartments and middle-income housing.

JOSEPH MORTENSEN

Unitarians Write Off God

God really is not controversial enough to merit our attention, some 1,500 delegates and observers at the Unitarian Universalist Association assembly seemed to agree.

The Creator was written off by one of the first speakers, along with outmoded concepts of order, reality, and morality. He was barely mentioned again in the six-day annual session at Hollywood, Florida, the first UUA meeting in the South. The group concentrated instead on treating the world’s social ills with thousands of pungent words in a multitude of up-to-the-minute, though repetitious, resolutions.

The Rev. Jack Mendelsohn of Boston’s Arlington Street Church put the gathering at the swank, beachside Diplomat Hotel in motion by observing that “the Christian mind [which he equates with the Middle Ages] assumed that reality, though beyond man’s ken and really beyond his proper concern, was controlled by a personal and beneficent God. The modern mind assumed that reality is ordered and that it is man’s glory to search it out and use it. The post-modern mind assumes that reality is not ordered in any way that man’s mind can comprehend.”

The result: “We will probably never again speak meaningfully of reality, morality, or God as existing by themselves apart from us.… I, for one, can hardly wait to see what divinities, what moralities … await us round the bend.”

From there, the Unitarian Universalists moved to more controversial subjects such as civil rights and Viet Nam. Most of the debate in the smoke-filled Regency Room and around the cocktail tables in hotel lounges centered more on the choice of words for the many resolutions than on the actual stand to be taken.

The closest thing to real controversy appeared in divergent views expressed by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the annual Ware Lecture, considered the highlight of the annual assembly, and by Harvard theologian James Luther Adams in the principal worship service.

Adams insisted that persistent, violent civil rights agitation is necessary if the United States is to “become an authentic democracy”—“sweet and slow persuasion” won’t accomplish needed changes. But King defended his philosophy of non-violent action and pleaded that violence never be used as a weapon to fight for racial equality.

The UUA members responded quickly to King’s plea for support, adopting a 3,500-word statement that, among other things, urged a federal open-occupancy law.

The civil rights resolution was one of many which reiterated past stands by the denomination. Others urged negotiations with “any and all principals” in Viet Nam, a U.N. seat for Red China, and more federal impetus for birth control. A call for investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency was turned down for technical reasons.

ADON TAFT

The Sex Conference

A Roman Catholic observer was surprised that the Second North American Conference on Church and Family was “80 per cent sociological-psychological and only 20 per cent theological.” Joan Lark, theologian and staff member of the Grail Movement, said that in a similar Roman Catholic conference, the percentages would be reversed.

She also was surprised that sex led the delegates into so many other fields of social life. As if bent on proving Freud right, the more than 600 delegates meeting at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, led off with sex and, without ever really leaving it, branched out into economic, political, religious, educational, legal, and cultural matters.

Some few voices thought there was nothing really new in American sex life. But the majority of delegates and speakers spoke of a “sex crisis” and of a “sexual revolution.” The crisis was attributed to reaction against a Puritan ethic, the fluidity of modern society, and the tensions of modern life. Many delegates said these tensions result because Protestant American capitalism lives and sets its values not “by grace” but by the norms of a “work-achievement ethic.” Seeking antidotes, Alvin Pitcher of the University of Chicago Divinity School said “we ought to have a guaranteed family income for everybody,” and contended American family life would also be stabilized by public health clinics (including mental health services), legal aid services, consumer credit protection, and cooperative credit unions.

Several delegates wondered how such environmental factors relate to the good life. One reminded the conference that some of the finest Americans come up out of culturally deprived ghettos. Another responded to Pitcher’s call for a fixed guaranteed income by pointing out that many children from a good environment have no initiative, and added, “I wish some of these kids had a little capitalistic spirit.” One confessed adherent of “liberal Christianity” called for a full discussion of environment. He said “evangelicals challenge liberal Christianity at this point,” and admitted, “I do not know the answer.” No one challenged Pitcher’s application of the Bible’s description of the Church as a “body” to society in general.

The conference was marked by deep-seated differences over the question of law, love, and freedom.

Dr. Gibson Winter, another professor at Chicago, said “personal responsibility is going to be the essence of any morality of sex in our time.… We will have to determine appropriate rules and relevant sanctions. We may spend a lot of time in our deliberations talking laws, sanctions and obligations to external authorities—human or divine—but this will be rhetoric largely for our own gratification and quite irrelevant to the issues at hand. Rules of the game are needed, but we shall have to seek them as guides and supports for personal responsibility. Hence, our basic task is to grasp the criteria of personal responsibility.”

Cynthia C. Wedel said it is “presumptuous” to ask about “the place of marriage and family in God’s plan for his children,” since “none of us can pretend to comprehend the wisdom or the plan of God,” but then went on to show she did comprehend a considerable amount of biblical wisdom on family and marriage. Dr. Harvey G. Cox looked to Christ for the norm, contending he is the “new man” from whom a “new community” is emerging. Cox lives in a Negro ghetto in Roxbury, Massachusetts, by a choice he described as “Christological,” for he sees emerging in the suffering of the ghetto that new community which is “the miracle of God’s grace.”

Dr. Pieter de Jong, visiting professor of systematic theology at New York Theological Seminary, was even more explicitly Christocentric than Cox and called for a “new living style.” He said we must “get back to the story of Jesus and his relation with his family.” De Jong asked what many regarded as extremely indiscreet, intimate questions about Jesus’ sexual life. The sudden embarrassed silence was not broken by answers, presumably because of the Bible’s silence and because Jesus neither courted women nor took a wife.

Dr. Lester Kirkendall, professor of family life at Oregon State University, countered De Jong’s appeal to biblical teaching authority by warning against “dependence on revelation for authority,” alluding to what Romans (ch. 1) has to say about the homosexual. The Rev. Dr. George Johnston, professor of New Testament theology at McGill University, said he did not see “how a Christian could say he could approve of any homosexual act,” but added that the Church should ask itself whether its judgmental attitude toward the homosexual has done “more harm than good.”

Dr. Mary S. Calderone, executive director of the Sex Information and Education Council of the U. S., said, “People don’t have to marry today to get a housekeeper, or for sex—so what do we marry for? Shall we have marriage in twenty-five years?” At the same press conference she asserted, “Men and men can live together—and women can live together—as decent, God-fearing people,” for it is the “general view” of psychiatrists, sociologists, clergymen, and businessmen who make up the SIECUS board of directors that “homosexuality can be as constructive as marriage can be destructive.”

On the last day, Professor J. C. Wynn of Colgate Rochester Divinity School spoke of the conference’s self-pity and tried to comfort the delegates, reminding them that they were not “orphans,” but stood in the long moral tradition of the Church. He said there is no reason to believe that the “only alternative to heavy-handed legalism is moral anarchy.” He also told the delegates it is a mistake to think that “sexuality depends on complete candidness”; there is a mystery, he said, about “our sexuality which is hidden in God.”

Dubbed by newsmen as a “sex conference,” the May 30-June 3 gathering was co-sponsored by the Canadian Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches.

The conference, in its Message to the Churches, complained that those professionally working “with family members have not been heard seriously by theologians.” The Message avoided any specific, substantive stands on family or sex issues, but called for budget and personnel to clarify the relationship of “love, law, and freedom,” a broad program of education, and greater research into family disintegration, abortion, homosexuality, and social responsibility. The final message spoke of a “sexual revolution” demanding “as radical a call to ministry and involvement as the civil rights movement,” and concluded, “We welcome the ferment of this hour … and its reaffirmation of God’s creative action.”

The conference as a whole moved uneasily and with little sure-footedness on the question of the objective moral standards within which authentic love and freedom move. A telling sign of the critical uncertainty was the often asserted, and rarely challenged contention that today’s sexual rebellion stems from the fact that the moral norms of our society confront us as decisions already made, in whose making we have had no part.

JAMES DAANE

Churchmen at White House Conference ponder strategy once laws are passed; question guest list, U. S. policies

There was one complaint after another about this month’s White House Conference “To Fulfill These Rights”—the procedure was wrong, the pre-fab legislation wasn’t specific enough, the wrong people were invited. But some steam was let off and some eyes were opened during two days of discussion by 2,800 invitees (200 of them from religious organizations).

Largely because of church pressure, the hottest issue at last November’s planning session for the conference—the stability of the Negro family—disappeared (see December 17, 1965, issue, page 38).

The Washington Post contended editorially that civil rights is a dead issue, since legal rights are established. But several Southern pastors at the capital conference found some unfinished business on this agenda. The Rev. James McRee of Canton, Mississippi, said that as long as federal school funds are channeled through his state government, Negroes will continue to get second-class education. The Negro is free to attend an all-white school, he said, but if he does he will be harassed constantly.

The ambush shooting of James Meredith days later was a graphic reminder of the remaining problems in law and order.

But such Southern eddies off the mainstream of American democracy seem quaint at a time when the civil rights movement is increasingly concerned with the North, with jobs, and with housing.

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a blue-ribbon front including many religious leaders, held a press conference to back President Johnson’s national fair-housing bill and other 1966 civil rights proposals. The President made a surprise visit to the White House conference and attempted to soothe dissidents by saying one man can’t work miracles.

Vice-President Hubert Humphrey said churches and other community groups are “among the most potentially effective agents,” but he noted that some local congregations are still segregated and “many more do not speak out affirmatively on urgent questions of racial justice which arise in our communities.”

The conference was blander than expected, partly because militants tended to boycott it. Stokely Carmichael, new head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who has been accused of reverse segregation and black nationalism, was among those who hovered around the edges of the meeting and talked to reporters but didn’t participate. Significantly, a group of Negro protesters who considered the meeting at the President’s request a “sellout” refused to let whites join their picket line.

Inside, the protest was led by Floyd McKissick, national director of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He tried to get a resolution stating that the United States should get out of Viet Nam and spend all those millions at home, and thus make equal opportunity “the number one priority.” But his discussion committee voted this down ten to one.

As set up, the conference would have forbidden motions from the floor, but the uproar about “rigging” was so great that conference planners changed policies in midstream.

The dozen discussion groups made significant additions to the block of recommendations prepared in advance by the 29-member planning council.¹Council members included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Robert Spike of Chicago Divinity School, and J. Irwin Miller, industrialist and former NCC president. They backed home rule for Washington, D.C., stronger enforcement of existing civil rights laws, an emergency conference on law enforcement (Watts and Los Angeles were much in the air), and a revision of the council’s report to add such specifics as cost, timetables, and priorities in national efforts in human rights.

Dr. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, one of the more outspoken representatives from the National Council of Churches, was so disappointed she wants the NCC to send the President an official protest. Her main criticism was that “the NCC clergy” and churchmen in general got the short end of representation, and those not left out were added at the last minute.

Among the missing were top officials and race experts from the Episcopal and Methodist churches, long active in the field. Dr. Benjamin Payton, NCC race director, sent a list of fifty key denominational staff people in the area, but only a handful were invited.

The long list of those inside had an unusual flavor: small-town Americans who admitted little concern with civil rights, funeral directors, mayors and governors, and such personalities as McGeorge Bundy, Sammy Davis, Jr., Theodore Bikel, Marlon Brando, Duke Ellington, and Jimmy Brown.

And there was Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Negro comedienne who has made good on off-color jokes, who opined that schools—whether segregated or integrated—will never be great until the “Bible is returned.” She urged those who “outlawed the Bible from the schools to law it back.”

Delta Ministry Wins Reprieve

Not since the widely disputed Cleveland conference of 1958²Reflecting on adverse reaction to the conference’s bid for Red China recognition, ecumenist Eugene Carson Blake observed, “Boy, did we get clobbered!” has anything piled so much grief upon the National Council of Churches. The Delta Ministry, a two-year-old effort to relieve the plight of Mississippi Negroes, costs NCC nearly half a million dollars annually and an untold measure of good will among race-conscious Southerners. Militant DM staffers complain, meanwhile, that “northern churchmen who were originally enthusiastic about the concept now find their interests monopolized by newer or more highly publicized concerns.”

While digging into reserves because most of its member denominations have refused to support the Delta Ministry, NCC set up an “evaluation committee” headed by Baptist layman Brooks Hays and President A. Dale Fiers of the Disciples’ United Christian Missionary Society. The committee’s report to the NCC General Board this month lauded achievements of the DM, but charged that it was fiscally irresponsible and too freewheeling. A stringent overhaul was recommended to curtail DM voter registration drives, political workshops, and relief efforts in a dozen or so counties of western Mississippi where the soil is rich but the people are poor.

At the General Board’s two-day meeting in New York, an attractive young Negro lawyer pleaded emotionally for the DM. The board, with fewer than 100 of its 250 seats occupied, was left in no mood for a full-dress debate. It put off consideration of the report and merely reaffirmed the “purpose and direction” of the DM.

Left hanging was the question of where the money is to come from. One of the board members suggested that they each try to raise $100 by July 1. None rose to the challenge.

Meredith And The ‘Fringe’

Churchmen around the world issued statements deploring the act that sent Mississippi marcher James Meredith to a hospital with shotgun wounds.

One of the first to speak up was Arthur Thomas, 34-year-old head of the Delta Ministry (see box), who denounced Mississippi politicians for “encouraging the unbalanced fringe.” Thomas said the shooting of Meredith, first Negro admitted to the University of Mississippi, was “only one of thousands of harassments of voters.” He charged that the Rev. Clint Collier, seeking a seat in Congress for the Freedom Democratic Party, has been “continually harassed by law enforcement officers in Neshoba County ever since declaring his candidacy.”

Thomas also asserted that “in the last few months, the state legislature passed, without protest from ‘white moderates’ and without notice of the national press, numerous laws to wipe out Negro votes. Congressional districts have been gerrymandered, qualification dates hastily moved up, and election procedures changed.”

“When they encourage such circumvention of the Constitution, the state’s leaders cannot escape responsibility for encouraging the unbalanced fringe who use more violent means to the same end.”

Thomas, a native of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, is an ordained Methodist and a graduate of Colgate University and Duke Divinity School, where he specialized in the relation of economics and ethics. He offered Meredith “full support in your efforts to increase the participation of the Negro people in democratic procedures.”

Religious News Service reported that the Delta Ministry had already assigned all staff members as poll-watchers when word of the Meredith shooting came, the day before the June 7 Mississippi primary. Meredith was felled while on a 225-mile march to encourage Negroes to vote. One of his co-marchers was the Rev. Robert H. Weeks, an Episcopal priest from Monroe, New York.

Also in the state, as poll-watchers, were Dr. David R. Hunter of New York, deputy general secretary of the National Council of Churches, and the Rev. James P. Breeden, assistant director of the NCC Commission on Religion and Race.

Meanwhile, Dr. Benjamin Payton, director of the NCC race commission, declared that the “treacherous attack” on Meredith “reminds us once again that we have only just set out on our halting march as a nation toward justice and equal opportunity.” Payton pointed to an urgent need for vigilance by federal and state governments in the Mississippi primary and called on Congress for prompt action on the 1966 Civil Rights Bill with its protective features: “The shotgun pellets that wounded James Meredith, it is hoped, will have stung our Congress into performing quickly the duty set so clearly before it.”

In London, evangelist Billy Graham led nearly 18,000 Britons in prayer for Meredith’s recovery. The Southern clergyman said, “We hope God will see in our hearts the solution to this problem.”

Negro Rights At Church Assemblies

Church conventions may become a target of civil rights groups if delegates are chosen in a manner that Negro leaders believe discriminates against colored parishioners.

This new development may confront, in particular, the Protestant Episcopal Church’s triennial convention in Seattle next year. A resolution recently adopted at the National Negro Republican Assembly gave strong support to the independent Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU), which plans to challenge the seating of delegates from dioceses in which Negro members allegedly suffer discrimination.

The church convention challenge could be a trial run for the national political convention. The Negro Republicans resolved that their organization should keep close contact with ESCRU because “in spite of anticipated difficulty [at Seattle], much can be learned to prepare for an effort to prevent the seating of delegates elected on a racially discriminatory basis for the 1968 Republican National Convention.”

In another move of interest to churchmen, the NNRA resolved to “set up a close working relationship with ESCRU and similar organizations in the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths, so that the Republican Party may have the benefit of and experience of friends and sympathizers in various religious movements as we join in the effort to clean up the next Republican convention.”

The NNRA was addressed by Michigan Governor George Romney, a Mormon. Elected chairman was former baseball star Jackie Robinson, an active layman in the United Church of Christ.

GLENN D. EVERETT

“Chaplain, sho am comfortin’ to see you there!” The young paratrooper, hugging the sun-baked ground, had spotted his chaplain close by. The entire company lay flat on their faces eating red dust. The Viet Cong, out of sight somewhere beyond, pulled pins on clamore mines extended from bushes and trees. Deadly shrapnel ripped up the area. Automatic weapon fire cut the air. Stand up and you’d die.

Here crouched men of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, one of the first full combat units to enter the Viet Nam war. The chaplain was 34-year-old Major John B. Porter, a Southern Baptist from Cordele, Georgia. The assignment: a routine search-and-destroy mission that had penetrated a VC domain. The chaplain was there. He carried no weapon, not even a sidearm, but his presence was indeed a “comfort.” Ask the men—they’ll tell you.

While en route to Viet Nam with the unit last year aboard the troopship U.S.S. “Mann,” Porter found himself with seventeen days at sea—plenty of time, and a restless congregation. He pondered, “What would the Apostle Paul do if he were in my combat boots? He’d preach, no doubt!” Hold number five, a busy thoroughfare deep below, became the “sanctuary.” Seventeen nights, seventeen decisions for Christ.

A one-night liberty at Subic in the Philippines gave cause for concern. How would the new converts fare ashore? One rugged new believer, determined to live for Christ, spotted another new Christian “sinning.” He walked and talked him back on board ship, straight to the chaplain. A bit embarrassed at this kind of brotherly concern, Porter nonetheless knelt with them as the man confessed his sin to God. He took a peek as they prayed. There was the husky trooper, right arm over the shoulder of his penitent buddy, left arm bracing the deck. His rolled-up sleeve revealed a gaudy tattoo with just two big words: “RAISE HELL!” On arrival at Quinhon, eight of the seventeen waded into the surf for baptism.

The 173rd Airborne’s assignment was sprawling Bien Hoa Air Base near Saigon, sometimes mortared by the VC. The airborne troopers are to secure the base and provide a defense against the continual probing actions of the Viet Cong. Jungle brush must be cut back to make camp. Night after night flares illuminate the sky. Harrassing fire by friendly forces rocks the air from sunset to dawn. Periodically the VC attempt to penetrate the air base. A savage firelight ensues, and under cover of darkness they pull off their dead and wounded. The vast jungle beyond the perimeter is constantly probed for enemy infiltration. Search-and-destroy operations cause the most casualties, for wary VC patiently await the patrols, laying mines and booby traps along their path.

It’s a dirty kind of war, and a long year for the combat men.

One sight stands out in all this turmoil. Amid the tents and bunkers, artillery positions, and barbed-wire barricades, a modern A-frame chapel towers above all else, with a colorful French tile roof, stained glass windows, a quiet green garden, a reading lounge and the chaplain’s office. It can be spotted from miles away, and the question is invariably asked, How did it come to rise above these grim scenes of war?

The answer is a simple story of the sincere faith of many American soldiers and their determination to express that faith in tangible terms.

After the company’s arrival at Bien Hoa, Porter conducted worship wherever he could. Scorching sun, torrential downpours, powder-fine dust, or hot winds were common companions to a Sunday morning service. Low-flying helicopters or the roaring blast of a jet fighter on take-off would often drown out the words.

One afternoon, Porter suggested a permanent chapel to the men of the second battalion. A command-provided chapel might be long in coming. The paratroopers, noted for aggressiveness and determination, reacted quickly. Within a few days they raised $3,500 for the project. Then the men volunteered to construct the building. This had to be done on free time between operations. Because some of these men never came back, the task became a kind of sacred obligation.

Many months and many operations later, the final nail was driven. The chapel’s bell was a gift from a group of men in Odessa, Texas. A Vietnamese Christian craftsman designed and donated the large wooden cross suspended above the altar. An Episcopal church in Atlanta, Georgia, presented a beautiful silver chalice, inscribed with one Latin word, pax (peace). The chapel had found its name.

Peace Chapel is of symbolic design. The lectern, pulpit, and altar are of triangular shape, and the lines point upward toward God. Men can kneel near the cross, a silent, vivid reminder that true peace comes only through Christ and Calvary. Above the altar the mid-day sun sends shafts of gold, blue, and amber light across the quiet interior as men kneel. Sent to fight for peace, these men—many with two, three, even five Purple Hearts—kneel, pray, and leave to fight again with the hope that someday soon it will all be over.

The chapel brings memories of the past and hope for the future. Chaplain’s Assistant SP/4 Raymond Bowen of New York eagerly anticipated its completion. But on an operation deep in VC territory he was killed by a mine while assisting a wounded buddy. Others remember SP/4 Robert P. Gibson of Georgia, who on his last Sunday in camp sang the morning solo. He was killed as he rushed ammunition to the front during an enemy attack a few days later.

While visiting casualties in the field hospital after one particularly heavy encounter, Porter approached one young GI who had had both legs blown off. Before he could speak, the young soldier asked eagerly, “Chaplain, how is our new chapel coming along?”

The chaplain, himself up for the Purple Heart, has had four young assistants, three wounded and one killed in action. Yet he recalls the providential care of God on more than one occasion.

Porter will return to the States this summer with many memories—memories of brave fighting men, some who won’t come back, others who will come carrying the terrible scars of war, still others deeply thankful to be alive and untouched. If Peace Chapel survives bombing, it will remain a symbol of that peace which Jesus Christ promised, peace he gave, peace the world desperately needs but cannot provide.

The Cross On A Stamp

For the first time since 1892, a United States postage stamp will depict the Christian cross.

The stamp will be issued July 30 to commemorate the birth of the Polish nation and the introduction of Christianity to the Polish people.

It will be the first U. S. commemorative to honor a specific religious event, although it follows by a year the stamp honoring the Salvation Army on the hundredth anniversary of the founding of its welfare work in the United States.

The stamp, to be printed in red, will feature a shield bearing the Polish crowned eagle, ancient symbol of the Polish kingdom (which the present Communist regime has tried to replace with the hammer and sickle). Above it will be the cross, with the inscription, “Poland’s Millennium 96 6–1966.”

The U. S. stamp originally was to have been issued on August 15 (Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and national feast day of Poland), to mark the arrival in the United States of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, primate of Poland, for a two-week visit. Apparently, however, Polish authorities will not permit the cardinal to make the projected U. S. tour.

American observance of the millennium will be climaxed August 28 at Soldiers Field, Chicago, by a service at which the cardinal was expected to offer Mass. The Catholic bishops of the United States are sponsoring the rites, at which Archbishop John J. Krol of Philadelphia will preside, whether or not the cardinal can attend.

Postmaster General Lawrence F. O’Brien, in a move to play down religious aspects of the stamp, has moved up the first-day-of-sale ceremony to Washington, D. C., July 30, a date with no particular significance.

The only other American stamp on which a cross was significant was a two-cent commemorative—the first ever issued by the United States—that showed Columbus planting the cross in the New World. It was issued October 12, 1892, on the four-hundredth anniversary of the event. Crosses have appeared in the background on other U. S. stamps, on church steeples and the like, but not as part of the central design.

GLENN D. EVERETT

Protesting Priests Suspended

Two young priests in Moscow were suspended last month for writing a letter of protest against alleged infringement of religious liberties in the Soviet Union. Patriarch Alexei, the nation’s top-ranking Orthodox churchman, said it was a coincidence that the suspensions were handed down at just about the same time—late May—that the National Council of Churches in the United States made public the letter.

The priests, Nicholas Eshliman and Glebe Yakunin, both 35, wrote that Soviet authorities had closed at least 10,000 churches. Their letter, addressed to Soviet President N. V. Podgorny, accused government leaders of repeated violations of laws which are supposed to allow churches to run their own affairs.

Patriarch Alexei says the pair will not be reinstated until they stop what he called their campaign against the government.

College Aid Showdown

A showdown legal test of government subsidies to church-related institutions moved past Maryland’s highest court this month. The case is designed to get a ruling ultimately from the U. S. Supreme Court, which has never set any guidelines for the use of public money by religious schools and other agencies.

The Maryland Court of Appeals, overturning a lower-court decision, said church-affiliated colleges are not entitled to state grants. The judges, in a 4-to-3 decision, declared unconstitutional grants of $750,000 each to St. Joseph’s College and Notre Dame of Maryland (both Roman Catholic). A $500,000 state grant to Western Maryland College (Methodist) was also ruled invalid, but a similar amount to Hood College was held constitutional because the school’s legal relationship to the United Church of Christ is tenuous.

The case against state grants has been pressed by the Horace Mann League, a non-profit educational organization, and thirteen private citizens. Chief attorney for the plaintiffs was Leo Pfeffer, special counsel for the American Jewish Congress. An amicus curiae (friend of the court) action was filed by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Commented Americans United Executive Director Glenn L. Archer, “Since the constitutionality of all such grants is now in question, it would seem advisable for church college administrators to hold requests for federal aid to their institutions in abeyance until there is a final determination of this issue.”

Religious Rumble At U.S.C.

With graduate studies in religion at secular universities the coming thing, a tug-of-war at the University of Southern California will be watched closely. Three of six graduate-religion staffers plan to quit because of the university administration’s handling of a merger of graduate with undergraduate religion studies.

Under the dissidents’ interpretation, the higher-ups not only made this major academic decision without consulting the faculty but also did it to force out their dean, Geddes MacGregor, 56, a Church of Scotland clergyman and noted author.

MacGregor has led the department since it was organized in 1960, following the departure of USC’s professional seminary staff to form the School of Theology at Claremont (Methodist). Enrollment rose to 100 by 1962 but is now half that, perhaps because of rigorous requirements in Hebrew, Greek, and other fields.

Academic Vice-President Tracy Strevey, who broke the news to the faculty in February, says USC’s undergraduate religion department (two fulltime teachers plus University Chaplain John Cantelon) teaches “hundreds,” while MacGregor’s department draws a “handful.”

Since the graduate faculty boosted a grad-undergrad merger two years ago and the administration showed no interest, it considers the current move a ploy to unseat MacGregor, who has been offered a “distinguished professorship” in the merged department.

The grad teachers thought Cantelon, a Presbyterian, was the university administration’s choice for the new dean. In the wake of their protest, a study committee was named. Strevey says the complainers “jumped the gun,” because the new dean has not yet been named and could be MacGregor. A report on the whole controversy is due this summer.

Matters of budget, enrollment, and academic requirements might be at issue, but not the general orientation of the departments. Both the graduate and undergraduate programs espouse an objective, detached study of religion. As MacGregor puts it, “We are purely academic, pursuing our disciplines in a purely scholarly way. We have individual allegiances but they do not affect our academic work, nor do we ask students for information on this.”

Publicity Slams A Door

Several highly placed evangelical churchmen are withdrawing from a so-called consultation with ecumenical leaders following its public disclosure.

The evangelicals say they had been guaranteed, as a condition of their participation, that the meetings would be conducted with utmost secrecy. They charge that the public disclosure, although it did not identify any of the evangelical participants by name or organization, was a violation of the original agreement.

The consultation has embraced a dozen or so well-known evangelical leaders in a very general dialogue with three churchmen of strongly ecumenical persuasion. The meetings have been held each summer, several days at a time, for at least five years. Participants insist that no new ecumenical alignments were discussed and that the sole purpose of the talks was better understanding of one another.

General Secretary John Coventry Smith of the United Presbyterian Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations referred to the talks in a published report to his denomination’s General Assembly this spring. Kay Long-cope, United Presbyterian publicist, expanded on the disclosure in a widely circulated four-page news release.

Miss Longcope’s release identified the Presbyterian official as one of the ecumenical participants. She named the other two as Dr. Eugene L. Smith, U. S. executive secretary for the World Council of Churches, and Dr. Frank Price, retired missionary and former moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.

The release was interpreted by some as heralding a possible shift in the traditional conservative Protestant opposition to the ecumenical movement.