The Methodists Join the War

Two years and 150 days after Pearl Harbor, the Methodist Church endorsed the war. The Church told its 8,000,000 members that their prayers for the 1,000,000 Methodist servicemen and women, the 1,300 Methodist chaplains, were now authorized. Methodists may now also pray for victory. But it took a whole day's tense debate on the floor of the Church's quadrennial General Conference,* which met (for ten days) in Kansas City's municipal auditorium, to make Methodism reverse its antiwar stand.

The decision made this General Conference one of the most momentous in Methodist history. Long has the Methodist Church been a stronghold of pacifism.

Methodist leaders like Evanston's Dr. Ernest Fremont Tittle, Detroit's Dr. Henry Hitt Crane, Pasadena's Dr. Albert Edward Day, New York City's Dr. Ralph Washington Sockman are uncompromising pacifists. These pacifists led the last General Conference (at Atlantic City) to declare: "The Methodist Church, although making no attempt to bind the consciences of its individual members, will not officially endorse, support or participate in war. . . . Agencies of the Church shall not be used in preparation for war. . . . Buildings of the Church, dedicated to the worship of God, shall be used only for that holy purpose, and not by any agency for the promotion of war."

A Tribal God. But when Dr. Tittle's Committee on State of the Church tried to have this pacifist declaration reaffirmed last week, 17 of the 74 committee members balked. Led by a layman and World War I veteran, Lawyer Charles C. Parlin, of Englewood, N.J., the dissidents drew up a minority report, placing the Church squarely behind the war, took their report to the Conference floor for a showdown.

Said Dr. Tittle: "We do not think that a Christian should pray for victory. . . . It is a tribal God to which men have prayed in history for military victory, not the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ."

Minority Leader Parlin called the majority report "a direct statement of pacifism," declared it "offers to our brothers in China no message except to lay down their arms and surrender to Japan."

He particularly resented the majority's plan to send "greetings and love" alike to servicemen, conscientious objectors, and those "in prison." Said he: "We claim that our Church has no right to honor the man convicted of obstructing the administration of the Selective Service Act." Neither did he see "the propriety" of honoring conscientious objectors "in the same manner as soldiers."

Get a Whip. Cried Cincinnati's energetic Preacher R. Gammon Morris: "I am for war. I am an American, I am a Methodist, and I am a Negro. . . . Jesus Christ, when things got into confusion, didn't stand up in the temple and preach to men that after a while things would be all right. ... He went and got Him a whip. I declare to you that it is time for us to get a whip and stay by that whip until totalitarianism has been driven from the face of the earth."

Said Methodist Publishing House's Dr. Nolan B. Harmon Jr.: "America is fighting for her life, but we, the greatest Protestant denomination in this nation, cannot officially join in the struggle. I do not forget that there was another occasion when a Roman Government official washed his hands of a dark and dirty business. . . . We have spent more time calling attention to the plight of 600 Methodist conscientious objectors than we have to twice that many crosses over dead Methodist boys in the far-flung corners of this earth."

Said Drew University's Dean Lynn Harold Hough: "Now we say to our boys, 'Go without God to this war and when you come back perhaps God will meet you in those peaceful days.' If we make God irrelevant in the supreme crisis in the life of those boys, He will never be relevant to them."

By One. The issue was too grave to vote on by a show of hands. Result of the secret ballot: 300 for the pacifist stand, 373 against. Laymen voted almost 2-to-1 against pacifism, but the clergy repudiated it by only one vote.

Many a layman was jubilant that the pacifist grip on the Church had been broken. But the score of Army and Navy chaplains present were not so happy. Said one: "The Church has lowered her flag." Said another: "When this bloody business is over, there is going to be a wave of revulsion against war, and Methodist men are not going to be proud that their Church had any part in it."

The Conference also:

P: Voted to raise $25,000,000 (in addition to the Church's normal $95,000,000 budget) for a nationwide "Crusade for Christ." Purpose: to raise money for Methodism's churches, missions, schools, hospitals, colleges.

P: Unanimously demanded wartime prohibition.

* Present were 37 bishops, 762 delegates -- half ministerial and half lay.

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