NCC, God and the Schools

The crucial question of moral and spiritual values in public schools will come up for another round of discussion and debate this summer when the NCC Committee on Religion and Public Education meets in Chicago from July 13–15 to draft a policy statement for approval by member denominations. Dr. R. Lanier Hunt of the NCC Division of Christian Education is hopeful that Protestant ecumenical efforts will yield an official platform on vexing public school questions by June, 1960.

Successive drafts and executive committee revisions thus far prohibit their identification with “any official position of the NCC, or of its Committee on Religion and Public Education.” Serving on the Committee are 102 members named by 25 denominations, 12 state councils of churches, and several related agencies. The present document is the work of subcommittees of three to eleven people but no vote on its contents has yet been taken by the full committee. The 47-page working paper discloses that NCC leaders face herculean problems in shaping a new position on values in the public schoolroom.

The tentative draft declares that all educational theory and practice rest on implicit theological presuppositions, and that questions of ethical and ultimate values involved in the educational process are theological issues. It affirms that for the theist God is the source of truth which public education seeks to discover, and that Christian churches assert the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The public schools “recognize the historic and present truth that the great mass of the American people acknowledge the existence and reality of a Supreme Being.” Public schools, however, cannot be required “to teach in a formal way the concept of God.” “The public schools cannot corporately be committed to the Christian God.”

The influence of secular leaders from National Education Association has in recent years been more determinative than the influence of Christian educators in NCC ranks in respect to values and deity. Both NEA and NCC in the past have issued documents that teaching “about religion” is acceptable, although NCC has so far not said that this is enough. This marks the limits approved by NEA’s Educational Policy Committee, however, and many public school teachers, apprehensive over any “objective study of religion,” opposed even this concession. The 1955 White House Conference on Education, in which one participant in three was an educator, also shied away from it.

But ever since John Dewey’s day—and his pragmatic retention of the concept of deity alongside his rejection of supernaturalism—evangelical critics of public education have noted that any reintroduction of an undefined God into the classroom would carry little significance whatever, except to provide a pious covering for the revolt against Christian theism.

The NCC subcommittee position, reflected in the present working paper, goes beyond “strict neutrality” touching major religious faiths and on the question of God’s existence as well. “This neutrality is practically impossible, historically unjustified, and unfair to the cherished beliefs of the vast majority of the American people,” the report states. “The actual results of a studied neutrality is practical support for the view that God does not count.” (Observers note that this argument is based merely on pragmatic and historical considerations.)

Two key questions remain: whether NCC is elaborating an effective alternative to religious neutrality, and whether its position genuinely reflects its formal determination to speak from the standpoint of Jesus Christ as God and Saviour.

In Chicago last summer, where NCC delegates and consultants divided into working committees, subcommittee discussion centered vigorously on public school teaching about religion and values. Workers edited a preliminary draft which had run the gamut of a wide sampling of reaction without unanimity [“There’s not a line in it,” noted Dr. Hunt, “that isn’t controversial for somebody”]. The group started out with a keynote plea that public school teachers overcome their fear and overcaution in mentioning words like God, religion, and church, that they put more emphasis on moral and spiritual values instead of leaving these to incidental recognition and that they be encouraged to “teach about religion objectively.” It ended up with a synthesis of conservative, neo-orthodox, liberal, and humanist exchange that referred these recommendations to the plenary session:

• In a democracy erected on the principle of church-state separation, public schools must not indoctrinate in the tenets of sectarian religion.

• Objective study should take note of the role that religion plays in contemporary life.

• Educators and religious leaders should explore the question of “the common core” of theistic religion. (If a common essence exists, it may be possible to incorporate this into the instructional program, it was noted, but such action is now premature because theologians disagree whether a common core exists. Such a “common core” is easily transformed, it was agreed, into a self-sufficient religion.)

• The religious assumptions in the background of American culture (viz., “belief in God and in inalienable rights stemming from God”) should be explicitly recognized and presented.

• Elective studies in Bible and comparative religions are a proper offering on the high school level.

• Public schools have taught moral and spiritual values and should continue to teach them and to seek commitment to them.

• Teachers may properly include in their instruction the historical and cultural fact that Christians and Jews find the principal and essential support (or “sanctions”) of values in theistic faith, and that much support for these values is also drawn from experience and is professedly non-theistic “and teachers should present this evidence.”

• The importance of generally accepted values—including the recognition of human personality and brotherhood, truthfulness, honesty, loyalty and forgiveness—should be stressed in teacher training institutions.

• The conviction that “diverse religious groups can only live together in a democratic society as they recognize the common source of all religious truth and hold to their convictions in a humility that admits the limited character of all men’s apprehension of truth and makes possible a true respect for diverse convictions.”

When these suggestions reached the plenary session, where a 30-minute limit was placed on the discussion of themes handled by each of the six working committees, the question of God and values in the schools was virtually ignored. Group III handled not only these issues, but such other subjects as bus transportation and free textbooks, and delegates exhausted most of their debates with an eye on increasing Roman Catholic pressures for public funds.

Present at the invitation of NCC as a consultant, the Editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY noted that discussion of the place of God and values in the classroom had been overlooked. Comments were invited for the record in an after period. He voiced four observations and criticisms of the subcommittee statement on values:

1. To many people the values men choose involve also a choice between gods. If propaganda for commitment to a particular God is improper in public education, why not propaganda for commitment to particular values? Can we disjoin values and the will of God in this way? Or does the statement presuppose the humanist assumption that values exist independently of God?

2. The section speaks of reason and experience on the side of the nontheistic values (even if designated as “professedly” nontheistic); it adduces only tradition in behalf of the theistic values. Should a formulation assertedly from the vantage point of the Saviourhood and Lordship of Christ, defer so much to humanism, and say so little for theism?

3. There is too large a stress on “generally accepted” values, too little sensitivity to a transcendent drive with a resulting avoidance of commandments and divine sanctions, and of any vocabulary of sin and righteousness.

4. The present statement bases tolerance on man’s assertedly skeptical predicament in relation to absolutes. But we would be on firmer ground if we base tolerance on what we know, rather than on what we do not know.

This precipitated spirited discussion. One observer declared the subcommittee’s statement gave a less positive impression than NCC’s 1950 document. “While many do divorce values from theistic faith, religious people do not, and the American view of government does not.”

Dr. Gerald E. Knoff concurred. “This says less than that [the earlier document]. We ought to come off that limb deliberately, or reaffirm it deliberately.” Dr. Claud Nelson appealed rather to the opening theological preamble as setting the mood for the report.

But Dr. John Hanns of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago disapproved the statement’s inclusion of a theological ground of religious faith and urged its simple recognition of God.

Dr. Huber F. Klemme of the Evangelical and Reformed church countered that this antitheological temperament “was not a strong feeling of the group.… A theological framework will not cut us off from being understood [by public school educators]. We should speak out of a Christian concern, not an expedient concern for a series of isolated problems. A theological preamble should be judged on its merits, not by a ‘hands off—don’t touch’ approach.”

The drafts of the Chicago subcommittees, read in plenary session as tentative formulations not to be quoted as official NCC documents, then went to the standing Committee on Religion and Public Education for editorial revision and for reconciliation of discordant points of view. The delegates were to have their next round in July, 1959. Meanwhile, they were reminded by Dr. Knoff that they were “not a free wheeling group passionately interested but responsible to no one, but sent here by the churches of the National Council.”

One major problem facing Chicago delegates is whether any content whatever is to be assigned to the God idea in the public schools. A generation ago the “Chicago school” of empiricists, rejecting theism and the supernatural, nonetheless defended the functional validity (as against the ontological validity) of the God idea. Will classroom emphasis on a vacuous God concept be most serviceable to humanist propaganda? As one writer put it recently, “If God is a vague amorphous nothing to us, the ‘nothing’ will be filled by more compelling gods, the concrete idols of our cultural life, such as nation, race, and personal prestige. As the Old Testament struggle against idolatry shows, only a clear and honest concept of God can drive the fertility and tribal idols from our religious life” (Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth, p. 78, Doubleday & Company, 1959). And what gain is there if God is taken to be simply some content of experience in which anybody exercises a religious interest (as by many humanists), and not really as a transcendent Reality, an antecedent Being to whom men and women everywhere are answerable? Among supernaturalists, moreover, the emphasis that God is, without stipulating what God is, is especially palatable to Roman Catholicism. Thomas Aquinas argued that knowledge of God’s existence can be attained by man’s natural reason (apart from a revelation of Jesus Christ)—a position rejected by many Protestant theologians. Will reintroduction of the God idea, while discriminating against the self-revealing God of Christian theism, spawn a new era of religious incredulity and superstitious supernaturalism? The theological implications of NCC’s tentative proposals are likely to elicit more vigorous consideration in July than was the case a year ago.

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Dulles Gone; World Peace Still An Elusive Hope

By quirk of irony, funeral services for John Foster Dulles, 71, his “lifetime of labor for world peace … ended,” fell the very day Communists had set for the free world to abandon West Berlin. A man of intellectual power, principled morality and religious piety, Mr. Dulles had the high courage to make the world his parish in challenging Communist chicanery.

Mr. Dulles expected much from international law, viewing government ideally as ministering justice and restraining evil. As President Eisenhower noted in his Gettysburg farm tribute, “Because he believed in the dignity of men and in their brotherhood under God, he was an ardent supporter of their deepest hopes and aspirations.” But Dulles also expected much, too much, from unregenerate human nature. He trusted human treaty and military restraint to guard the peace, and relied too little on indispensable spiritual means.

One must see these convictions in their setting of Protestant activism. The son of a Presbyterian minister and professor in one-time Auburn Theological Seminary, Dulles preferred international law to the ministry for a career. He drifted from his religious heritage until the moral nihilism of the emerging beast-states in Europe in the ’30s kindled the conviction that politico-economic programs demand a religious ethic.

In these circumstances Dulles was more and more consulted by the Federal Council of Churches, and encouraged leaders of the Council actively to shape and support the cause of peace. In 1941 he became chairman of its Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace. This commission propelled the recognition of a moral order revealed in Jesus Christ into a specific program which corporate Protestantism more and more championed: the U.S.A. supporting the United Nations to promote international morality.

The ecumenical movement last heard Dulles in Cleveland at the 1958 World Order Study Conference. There the Secretary of State stood markedly to the right of most social action spokesmen. Quoting from the guiding principles of the 1942 conference, Dulles stressed the responsibility of the churches to proclaim the enduring moral principles by which government and private action is inspired and tested. “The churches do not have a primary responsibility to devise the details of world order,” he said. And to Cleveland delegates eager for a flexible policy toward Red China he added pointedly: “While we seek to adapt our policies to the inevitability of change, we resist aspects of change which counter enduring principles of moral law.”

Those close to Mr. Dulles know that he was dismayed by Cleveland approval of U.S. recognition and U.N. admission of Red China. He found little in subsequent NCC assurances to relieve his troubled heart. He shared the view that the “good things” at Cleveland were lost through the “bad things” and felt that Protestant ecumenism had done great damage to the American image throughout the Far East. Within 48 hours leftist outlets were reminding the world that America is a Protestant nation, that Americans had repudiated their government, and that the American people favor recognition of Red China. What they neglected to say was that the Cleveland conference spoke neither for America nor for American Protestantism.

But the Cleveland conference had in fact merely compounded the weaknesses in Mr. Dulles’ social vision. If he expected too much from unregenerate human nature, Cleveland enlarged that expectation to atheistic naturalists; if he relied too little upon spiritual regeneration, Cleveland meshed the Church to specific politico-economic programs to the neglect of the Church’s revealed mission and revealed moral precepts.

Mr. Dulles did not live to see the defeat of Communist aggression, let alone the achievement of a just peace. But more than many contemporaries, churchmen included, he saw that any state building on moral expedience is doomed, that truth and right are worth dying for, and in the end supply the only real basis of civilization. In an age of moral nihilism he fixed men’s sights on changeless principles. In this mission stood his enduring greatness as the voice of the Free World.

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