The War on Church Establishment

The increasingly serious problem of keeping American churches from “excessive entanglement” with government came into sharper focus last month. Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed suit against the Office of Economic Opportunity for granting $123,050 to the Lutheran Resources Mobilization. Americans United officials regard the grant as a flouting of the First Amendment. According to C. Stanley Lowell, associate director, there seems to be a “creeping union of state and church in endeavors of this kind throughout the country.”

Filing of the suit coincided with the group’s twenty-fourth annual conference, held in Boston. Program participants urged Americans to heed the dangers of religious liberty implicit in parochaid and voucher plans.

Speaking at the conference, Lowell said of the defendants in the suit: “While their aim is no doubt good, the resulting entanglement of government in church affairs is anything but good.… It is certainly not the function of government to direct churches in their religious concerns, whether it does so directly or through a third party. We feel that a program concerned as this one is with mobilizing the resources of the Lutheran Church of America to deal with poverty programs is not one for government to undertake or finance.… Americans United has long encouraged churches to set up independent corporations to operate in the fight against poverty.”Edd Doerr, research director for Americans United, charges that an OEO program in San Jose, California, is also suspect: “Goebbels would have been proud of the methods they are using.”

We may be forgetting. Lowell argues, that church-state separation is a phenomenon original to these shores. He sees separation as the “richest jewel in America’s crown” and a prime contributor to the nation’s religious as well as political strength. Another participant in the conference, the Unitarian scholar James Luther Adams, described religious voluntarism as “America’s greatest contribution to civilization.”

Church-state experts point to Viet Nam and Northern Ireland as examples of the turmoil that can result from sectarian political pressures. Lowell, just back from Southeast Asia, said that “the steadfast refusal of U. S. officialdom to come to grips with the church-state problem in Viet Nam is one of the many tragic mysteries enshrouding that pathetic land.… Roman Catholics, although comprising only 10 per cent of the population of South Viet Nam, are the dominant political force there.”

Other observers contend that had there not been separate Protestant and Catholic schools in Northern Ireland, religious cultural enclaves would not have been perpetuated and allowed to fester.

Michael Bordeaux, an Anglican who is probably the world’s foremost expert on the state of Christianity in the Soviet Union, told the Americans United conference of the effects when atheism becomes the established religion. He noted that there has been much publicity of the Jewish rights movement of the last year or two but very little of the Christian rights movement, which preceded it by six years. He challenged the use of the term underground church, saying that Christians in the Soviet Union by and large operate unregistered churches only because their applications for registration have been refused.

Bordeaux takes a dim view of smuggling in Bibles and religious literature. Quantities of such materials confiscated by guards at the border have later been sold on the black market, he said.

Americans United, now approaching its twenty-fifth birthday, seems to be tackling issues as vigorously as ever. Not even the recent illness of its longtime executive director, Glenn L. Archer, has slowed the pace. But some influential leaders are beginning to call for changes in tactics to keep up with the times. Jimmy Allen, well-known Southern Baptist pastor who is now president of the organization, wants the issues laid bare in a way that will arouse support among today’s young people. “It’s the religiously insecure that are trying for tax money,” he contends.

The Making Of A Jew

Dr. George Tamarin, an atheist and former senior lecturer in psychology at Tel Aviv University, lost his appeal before Israel’s High Court of Justice to change his listing in the national population registry from “Jew by nationality” to “Israeli.” When Tamarin emigrated to Israel from Yugoslavia in 1949, he registered as a Jew by nationality with no religion. A religiously motivated law change in 1970, said Tamarin, gave his registration a “religious racist tinge.” He also claims he was removed from his teaching post because of religious bias.

In what was the most important decision in two years on the question “Who is a Jew?” Chief Justice Shimon Agranat reasoned that designating some people as Israelis (denoting citizenship only) and others as Jewish nationals (linking religion to citizenship) would create a schism and negate a principle upon which Israel was founded.

Agranat rested his decision on the 1970 law, defining a Jew as one who qualified under rabbinic law, which makes religion and ethnic background inseparable: “one born of a Jewish mother, or a convert.” Also under rabbinic law, a child assumes his mother’s religion.

In a related incident, naval officer Benjamin Shalit, a psychologist, and his wife, who is a British Gentile, were refused permission to register their third child as a Jew with no religion. The Shalits’ successful attempt to register their first two children that way led to the enactment of the 1970 law.

These two rulings maintain that there can be no difference between the Jewish religion and the Jewish nationality. As Prime Minister Golda Meir explained at the Twenty-eighth World Zionist Congress, “Without that identity, the Jewish people would never have survived.”

Religion In Transit

Press sources say the Internal Revenue Service has been probing into fiscal records of churches and religious organizations to determine if they have violated their tax-exempt status by excessive involvement in political and social activities.

Ninety-three students of the six-month-old Lynchburg (Virginia) Baptist College got a free nine-day tour of Bible lands, for both PR and academic reasons. The school is sponsored by the town’s 11,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church, which telecasts its services on 140 stations and operates a big IBM computer to keep track of all its people and programs.

Amid charges of a secret sell-out, the historic Hartford Seminary Foundation announced it is dropping all traditional degree programs and will become instead an institution servicing those already in the ministry. It has an endowment of $11.5 million.

Deaths

CAREY A. GIBBS, 79, bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Tennessee and Kentucky; at Jacksonville, Florida.

ROGER HULL, 64, chairman and chief executive of Mutual of New York insurance company, influential Christian layman and philanthropist; in Stamford, Connecticut, of cancer.

SAMUEL JASPER PATTERSON, 72, former moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U. S. (Southern), and director of United Church Men, an agency of the National Council of Churches; in Richmond, Virginia.

The big Park Road Baptist Church of Charlotte. North Carolina, has voted—contrary to Southern Baptist policy—to stop requiring rebaptism by immersion of membership applicants baptized by other means in other denominations. Earlier, three other Charlotte churches were ousted from the local Southern Baptist association for adopting the same procedure.

Congressman John H. Kyl, an Iowa Presbyterian, speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives, pointed to the all-night prayer vigils held at the First Church of the Open Bible in Ottumwa, Iowa, as “an example for all.” The vigils are held Friday nights for American prisoners of war and servicemen missing in action.

Zion Investment Associates, a black self-help project headed by Philadelphia minister Leon H. Sullivan, has won approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell stock. The company has lost more than $1.5 million since 1965.

The United Church Observer, official publication of the United Church of Canada, has come out editorially against its denomination’s liberal stance on abortion.

Personalia

Peruvian editor-author Samuel Escobar, 34, has been appointed general director of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship in Canada.

The United Methodist Church has tapped Topeka, Kansas, pastor Ewart G. Watts, 56, to head up denominational church-school publications. He was educated at Southern Methodist, Yale, Duke, and the Pacific School of Religion.

Controversy has ripped ranks at the deficit-ridden Church Federation of Greater Chicago. The board fired administrator Robert Burns outright after his supporters tried to rescind an earlier decision not to renew his contract upon expiration later in the year. Denominational staffers and a black churchmen’s committee accused him of insensitivity to black concerns.

Evangelist Billy Graham will receive the 1972 Distinguished Service Award at next month’s annual meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters.

United World Mission’s president of twenty-six years, Sidney Correll, has retired. Vice-president Gerald Boyer, a former Rockford, Illinois, pastor, will succeed him.

Pastor Herbert R. Howard of the big Park Cities Baptist Church of Dallas got applause from his congregation when he declared he would go to jail rather than allow a child of his to be bused to school by court order.

Comedian Dick Van Dyke, a United Presbyterian who has served as a National Bible Week chairman and local church elder, says he “regrets” a program in his TV series in which a “priest” and “nun” renounced celibacy and planned to marry. Reaction came from “thousands,” he says.

President Richard M. Nixon plans to speak at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Philadelphia on June 8 but will not confirm until a month in advance.

World Scene

The government of Singapore has “deregistered” Jehovah’s Witnesses and “dissolved” the local congregation of approximately 300 on grounds it is a hazard to “public welfare and good order.” Anti-government teachings and opposition by Witnesses to military service were said to underlie the action.

Latin America Mission’s (LAM) work in Colombia passed into Colombian hands in reconstitution as the Federation of Evangelical Ministries, with layman Orlando Hernandez of Cartagena as its first president. The Federation is a member of the international Community of Latin American Evangelical Ministries.

Protestant and Catholic churches in West Germany have collected nearly $250,000 to help underwrite building of a $1.4 million ecumenical center in Munich for the summer Olympic Games.

East German Protestant bishops have urged women not to make use of the country’s liberalized abortion law, which permits abortion on demand during the first three months of pregnancy.

An Italian weekly newspaper says that behind-the-scenes mediation of the Arab-Israeli Suez Canal impasse by high Vatican officials, including the papal secretary of state Cardinal Jean Villot, is taking place at the urging of United Nations executive Kurt Waldheim. The secret talks have obtained “satisfactory results” so far, the paper quotes.

Bible translation, production, and distribution continue on the upswing inside Yugoslavia, Bible Society sources report. Orthodox scholars have completed a Bulgarian translation of the New Testament and Psalms, expected to be acceptable to all Christian churches in Bulgaria. Negotiations are under way with the government for production and distribution.

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