THE CHURCHES INFLUENCE ON SECULAR SOCIETY

CHRISTIANS are enjoined to be in the world but not of it, and that has been a difficult rule to follow. Time and again, the churches have slipped over in one direction or the other--too much in the world or too much out of it. From its Puritan beginnings, U.S. Christianity has been deeply concerned with the world, addressing society on its multitude of problems. To a growing number of clergymen, however, being in the world really means being in it--not just talking to it. If they have their way, it may be hard in the future to tell where the church begins and the world leaves off. The role of the churches in the past 100 years can be seen in several distinct phases. The first big social problem confronting them was slavery, and the resulting North-South split of the denominations. Next came the problem of industrialization, with bitter conflicts between capital and labor that led the churches into preaching the optimistic "Social Gospel" of the early 1900s. But the Depression and World War II were too harsh a reality for many ministers, and they followed Reinhold Niebuhr into acceptance of a Bible-centered "crisis theology." Man's best efforts, Niebuhr reminded Christians, were flawed by sin; God's kingdom was not to come until the end of the world.

The Major Concerns

While Niebuhr and some of his colleagues leaned leftward, U.S. Protestantism was politically cautious during the postwar and cold-war years. There was much emphasis on individual redemption, on "faith in faith," as exemplified by the evangelism of Billy Graham. Since then, the churches have entered a new phase of involvement and activism, of protests and politics. This latest era is not all action, as it may occasionally seem, or all emotion. In recent years the churches have evolved a body of ideas and positions notable for their wide range, their relative readiness to accept change and (on the whole) their growing liberalism.

.WELFARE & LABOR. The time is long past when the churches saw the lot of the workingman in terms of charity or when labor unions were denounced as Communist from the pulpit. As early as 1910, the Presbyterians set up the Labor Temple in New York City as "a special mission to workingmen." In 1908, about 30 Protestant denominations formed the Federal Council of Churches, which announced its allegiance "to the toilers of America and to those who by organized effort are seeking to lift the crushing burdens of the poor." Until the outbreak of World War I, the 20th century was an exuberant time. As Congregationalist Minister Gaius Glenn Atkins remembers: "The people were ready [to conquer] 'the World for Christ in this Generation.' The air was full of banners." How Christ would react to the modern world was a favorite topic for sermons and books, including If Christ Came to Chicago, all designed to inspire social reform. A great many churchmen remained stolidly conservative, of course, but the Methodists and other denominations criticized laissez-faire capitalism, and by the time the '30s arrived, many Protestant clergymen were plumping for socialism.

After the reforms of the New Deal and postwar affluence changed the face of America, it was sometimes said that the churches' real mission was henceforth among the rich. Still, despite the wealth of the Great Society, the churches (along with everyone else) have rediscovered the poor, from the National Council's Delta Ministry organizing the Negro cotton pickers to the interdenominational California Migrant Ministry trying to better the lot of the grape pickers.

.WAR & PEACE. War always means heartbreaking decisions for the church, as it must find a precarious position somewhere between two extremes: at one end, the belief that all war is wrong, on the other, the notion that God is on the side of one's own country. It is perhaps the one area in which the churches are notably at a loss. They still recall the enthusiastic backing that both Protestants and Catholics gave the U.S. in World War I, and the excessive hopes for peace that followed; the Federal Council characterized the League of Nations as "the political expression of the kingdom of God on earth." In the disillusionment that followed World War I, pacifism grew apace. Still, when war came to the U.S. in 1941, the churches accepted it, bowing to what the Christian Century called an "unnecessary necessity."

The war in Viet Nam has given rise to what might be called selective pacifism. Relatively few clerics condemn fighting under all circumstances, but Protestant churchmen exhibit pacifist reflexes about Viet Nam. This is noticeably less true of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, although many priests have joined Protestants in peace marches, vigils and the signing of petitions. Few advocate flat-out U.S. withdrawal, and many (the number is impossible to estimate) perhaps support the U.S. stand without making themselves heard. The war often reduces the divided Protestant witness to hand-wringing statements, such as that of the National Council on December 3, 1965, which alternately stated the hawk and the dove positions: "We hold that within the spectrum of their concern, Christians can and do espouse one or the other of these views, or still other views, and should not have the integrity of their conscience faulted because they do."

It can be said for the churchmen's attitude about Viet Nam that they have shown an almost agonizingly active conscience and that a country with such pastors in its pulpits is in no danger of confusing its cause with God's.

.CHURCH & STATE. The separation of church and state in the U.S. is so secure that for millions of Americans the question arises only in the limited context of education. For at least a century, Protestant and other non-Catholic clerics maintained that any public funds for education had to go to public schools only: Catholics argued for a share for parochial schools. This deadlock effectively prevented federal aid to education, although since World War II exceptions began to appear--first in public bus service, then in publicly-paid-for milk for parochial schools. When the Johnson Administration in 1965 devised a bill under which parochial schools did receive federal aid--in the shape of textbooks and many other classroom facilities--there was no major Protestant opposition. And there may be little objection to more direct aid for parochial schools in the future. But some rearguard battles are being waged. New York State, which is currently rewriting its constitution, is witnessing a hassle about an 1894 clause barring direct or indirect state aid to parochial schools. Some Protestant and Jewish groups are fighting to keep this ban in the new constitution, and so is the New York Civil Liberties Union, which normally would fight against this sort of restrictive law.

.CIVIL RIGHTS. Beginning with the 1954 Supreme Court decision against school segregation, the civil rights movement was the major cause of the churches' new activism. Most denominations already paid lip service at least to integration, but the growing national concern and the direct challenge to the Christian conscience brought about a flurry of new resolutions and exhortations. In the 1960s, the civil rights struggle moved the churches further and further along from talk to action.

Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel of New Orleans excommunicated three Roman Catholics who opposed his decision to desegregate the city's Roman Catholic schools. Asked in 1962 by Martin Luther King to join in a prayer vigil at Albany, Ga., 75 Protestant, Jewish and Catholic clergymen and laymen submitted to arrest and jail for praying on behalf of desegregation. In 1963, more than 200 clergymen were arrested for taking part in picket lines and demonstrations. Hundreds of clergymen joined the Civil Rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The Episcopal diocese of New York City recently asked all church agencies to confine their investments to corporations that have "demonstrated their commitment to equal opportunity in employment." The United Presbyterian Church has a fair-employment clause in all its contracts. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church and the Board of Homeland Ministries of the Union Church of Christ have sided with a militant Negro organization called FIGHT in a dispute with the Eastman Kodak Co., which is being accused of discriminating against hiring Negroes. Joseph Cardinal Ritter of St. Louis and Catholic Archbishop John F. Dearden of Detroit have announced that they will give preferential treatment to suppliers who give equal opportunity to members of minorities. In innumerable communities, churchmen are fighting for open housing. It is the struggle for civil rights that has most visibly changed the U.S. churches' style and approach, and has given at least some of them a chance to consider themselves radical.

.PRIVATE MORALS. If the civil rights movement has been the most dramatic, it is in the area of morals that the deepest changes have occured. The large-scale, disastrous attempt to legislate morality, exemplified by Prohibition, will hardly be repeated. And since World War II, Protestants--increasingly, Catholics as well--have witnessed an unprecedented evolution of their churches' attitude toward marriage and sex. In 1956, the United Lutheran Church in America abolished the denomination's long-standing restriction on remarriage of the guilty party in divorce, decided to permit Lutheran pastors to remarry any divorced person who showed repentance. Marriage is a "lifelong, indissoluble union," declared the delegates, "but God in his love does accept the sinner." The Methodist Social Creed was similarly revised to allow a minister to perform a marriage when the divorced person "is sufficiently aware of the factors leading to the failure of the previous marriage" and "sincerely preparing to make the proposed marriage truly Christian."

On the subject of birth control, the Methodists' 1944 creed is totally silent, while that of 1964 declares that "planned parenthood, practiced in Christian conscience, fulfills the will of God." Before World War I, the U.S. Episcopalians, like the Anglicans, still called birth control "demoralizing." In October 1966, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church declared that "we affirm and support programs of population control." Even the Roman Catholic Church, until recently a staunch battler against liberalized birth control and divorce laws wherever they turned up, has begun to soft-pedal its opposition. Last year such liberalized laws have been passed by the legislature in New York and Massachusetts where they had previously been blocked by Catholic pressure.

The new battle in Protestant-Catholic relations is over a number of bills to liberalize abortion laws that are currently pending in state legislatures, designed to provide for legal abortions in cases of rape, incest, and a threat to the mother's health attested to by qualified physicians. In every case the Catholic Church, which considers abortion equivalent to murder, is fighting hard to kill these measures. In Chicago last week, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops authorized a new "educational campaign" against the proposed laws, with a first-year budget of $50,000. In New York, an abortion bill was defeated last month. In Colorado, where Catholic influence is weaker, such a law was passed.

The controversy raises an important issue. There is no question that such matters as abortion must be regulated; but is it proper for this regulation to be imposed by the moral precepts of a particular church? For that matter, is it proper for Christian precepts to be imposed on a society, including its non-Christian citizens?

When the Roman Catholic Church speaks on moral problems, Protestant Theologian Jaroslav Pelikan points out, it speaks on one of three levels: 1) natural law, which it considers applicable to all men, Christian or not, by virtue of their creation; 2) revealed law, applicable to all Christians "in a state of grace"; and 3) church law, applicable only to members of a particular church. There is little dispute left over the last two categories. Few Catholics would argue any longer that revealed law (for instance, the Christian sacrament of marriage) or church law (for instance, the celibacy of priests) should be made part of state law. But Catholics still retain the belief that natural law, or their interpretation of it, should be embodied in human legislation--and that is the point where they clash with their critics.

In general, though, most churchmen would agree that in a free market of ideas, the churches should have the same rights as any other organization to fight for their principles. Barring undue influence or chicanery, if the majority does not want them, they will presumably not be accepted. The old-fashioned view that churches should stay out of the political, social and economic spheres altogether and stick to preaching and saving souls, is still sharply expressed by some laymen and clerics. But they are in the distinct minority. Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, declares: "Surely, if the chambers of commerce, labor unions, university faculties and women's clubs properly influence political decisions, it is a basic rejection of the importance of God himself if the church is to be inactive or silent." The Hebrew prophets as well as the New Testament, believes Blake, give grounds for church involvement. "The gospel is no longer being misunderstood as simply a spiritual affair. The church cannot be merely interested in the salvation of souls. It must be interested in the salvation of men, both souls and bodies."

The Possible Pitfalls

That is precisely the belief of a new generation of churchmen who are carrying the American activist tradition a step or two further than the Social Gospel. They have learned their lessons from Niebuhr. They are less likely than their spiritual forebears two generations ago to identify any set pattern, such as pacifism or socialism, with the gospel. They are more open to secular allies and more realistic in the uses of power. In city halls and state legislatures, and on Capitol Hill itself, they are turning up to buttonhole, cajole and twist an arm or two, right alongside the other lobbyists. Methodist Minister Tex S. Sample, Director of Social Relations for the Massachusetts Council of Churches, says: "The church should be involved wherever there are human values at stake. If a company is trying to decide whether to make the heels of shoes from wood or plastic, that is not a church issue. But if making them from plastic puts people out of work, obviously the entire community has a right to have a say in this issue, and the church should as well. There are human values in more things than some people admit."

If the church's mission is to be defined that broadly, its ministers will obviously face some pitfalls. They may become involved in complicated situations they do not understand, and they may tarnish the spiritual aura of the church. The intellectual hero of many of the new activists is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran minister who was executed by the Nazis at the age of 39 for participating in an assassination plot against Hitler. He called for a new "worldly Christianity" to serve a civilization that had "come of age" and no longer needed to be pointed to a "beyond." The new church, he said, must stop talking about a transcendent God and concentrate on God as immanent--"the Divine in the midst of things." The question thus posed but left unanswered, is what in this scheme of things is to distinguish a Christian from any other humanistic do-gooder. The simplistic solution of some of the new activists seems to be to talk about Jesus as the original good Joe out to organize the underdogs into getting a decent shake from the Establishment.

In that view there is indeed danger of making the church too much of the world, too much an instrument of merely human designs. But that, the most enterprising of today's churchmen believe, is one risk among many others that they must take. Only thus, they feel, can the world relearn that no aspect of life or death--neither love nor money, neither government nor war--is beyond the reach of God's word and the Christian faith.

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