Peace Causes: New Players on the Bandwagon

Southern Baptists are more often noted for evangelism than social activism. But at least 400 Baptists joined a growing movement for peace causes, now being exhibited by certain evangelical groups. They attended a Convocation on Peacemaking and the Nuclear Arms Race, which was held with the blessings of prominent Baptists including President Jimmy Carter and Pastor W.A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas.

The two-day conference, held last month at Deer Park Baptist Church in Louisville, was billed as a response to a resolution passed at the denomination’s annual conference last June, which called for greater nuclear arms control. Appropriately, conference delegates issued a call for nuclear disarmament. They also endorsed the proposed strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union. Local Baptist churches were asked to actively preach peace causes.

Responsible for organizing the conference were Glen H. Stassen, an ethics professor at Southern Baptist seminary; Robert Parham, student government president at the seminary (who introduced the arms control resolution at the conference); and Carman Sharp, Deer Park pastor. Conference speakers came from government and church sectors, and not all were Baptists.

Speakers, identified closely with the peace movement, included Dale Brown, professor of theology at Bethany Theological Seminary (Church of the Brethren); Gordon Cosby, pastor of Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C.; and Richard Barnet, director of the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington.

Further to the north last month, another peacemaking activity took place—this time in the form of a protest. Groups from the historic peace churches—Quakers, Church of the Brethren, and Mennonites—joined a diverse contingent of antiwar activists, senior citizens, and civic groups in opposition to a military arms and equipment exhibit being held near O’Hare International Airport in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont.

At one time, the arms bazaar had been promoted as one of the world’s most important defense marketing confabs. Its sponsor, a Washington-based publishing firm, Defense and Foreign Affairs Publications, invited over forty thousand military defense specialists.

However, of a predicted turnout of 100 exhibitors, only thirty showed up. Participants at the arms exhibit, “Defense Technology ’79,” were few. Protest groups took credit for curtailing interest in the exhibit. (Antiwar groups earlier succeeded in getting the exhibit canceled in Florida, hence the move to Chicago.)

An interfaith group that was formed to protest the Viet Nam War, Clergy and Laity Concerned, engineered the most visible protests. Its Midwest director, Ron Freund, organized demonstrations at the exhibition center. Over two thousand persons demonstrated on the first day of the exhibit. Freund, who has a Quaker background, also was a spokesman for a conglomeration of fifty secular and religious groups, the Mobilization for Survival, that protested the exhibit.

Interestingly, the peace activists were joined by a faculty group from nearby Wheaton College. Prior to the arms exhibit, they issued a printed statement that labeled the exhibit “a flagrant violation of the Judeo-Christian ethic regarding war and violence.” The professors urged a letter-writing campaign to seek cancellation of the event.

Signing the protest statement, “An Evangelical Protest,” were twenty-one persons—mostly Wheaton faculty but including a few area evangelicals. The coalition of protesting faculty was unique since it joined avowed pacifists with “just war” advocates, according to Wheaton professor Morris Inch. Inch, a military veteran, opposed the exhibit with the others as a “commercialization of war.”

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