God and Watergate

Every Sunday in Los Angeles' First Unitarian Church, the Rev. Peter Christiansen passes petitions among his congregation calling for the impeachment of President Nixon. In Kansas City, the United Prayer Movement calls a day of prayer to ask God's help for the country. On Long Island, the Jewish journal Sh 'ma cites Talmudic teaching that "the executive is not above the law."

Thus, like many laymen, a number of churchmen have reacted with prayer and indignation to Watergate (now an entry, along with words like Adiaphora and Suttee, in the new Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics). Yet moral outrage from the pulpit is not as widespread as it might be; Sam Ervin has quoted the Bible on the issue ("God is not mocked") more often and more effectively than many a preacher. Items:

> When U.S. Roman Catholic bishops met in Washington last month, Philadelphia's John Cardinal Krol, their conference president, assailed the Supreme Court for its decisions on abortion and federal aid to parochial schools.

But Krol skirted any specific mention of Watergate, lumping it with other evils as part of "a serious departure from ethical and moral principles."

>U.S. Episcopalians, gathered for their triennial General Convention in Louisville in October, failed to go on record about Watergate.

> The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) held its general assembly in Cincinnati after the "Saturday Night Massacre" in which Archibald Cox was fired, but a motion calling for Nixon's impeachment was defeated.

> The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, meeting in New York City last month (TIME, Nov. 26), was expected to issue a strong statement on Watergate. The union's retiring president, Maurice Eisendrath, who died suddenly as the meeting began, had planned to scold Jews for their silence in the face of "the heinously immoral cesspool" of the Nixon Administration. But some delegates, nervous about U.S. aid to Israel, decided, as one of them put it, that it was "the height of folly to bite the hand that feeds us." Though the convention deplored Watergate as "a dangerous assault on constitutional liberties," it defeated resolutions calling for Nixon's impeachment or resignation.

> Perhaps the most notable silence, though, was that of the Rev. Billy Graham, who over the years has preached many a fiery sermon on individual responsibility for good or evil. In the case of Watergate, Graham seems unwilling to blame his friend Nixon, for whom he has conducted Sunday services in the East Room. Graham implies that a general moral permissiveness is responsible for the disaster. (The Jesuit weekly America has challenged Graham's analysis. "The men of Watergate were not playboys of permissiveness," it said, "but true believers in the work ethic.") Other churchmen and groups have been more outspokenly critical of the President, especially since the Cox firing. The very next week, for instance, two United Methodist church boards joined the call for Nixon's impeachment. Last fortnight the legislative committee of a New York Quaker group adopted a resolution asking for impeachment, noting that "Richard Nixon and members of his Administration have indulged in acts which render them suspect of betrayal of our democracy."

So far, Nixon's church, the East Whittier Friends Church, has steadfastly refused pleas from Quakers round the U.S. that it expel the President from the congregation--a congregation he has not worshiped with since 1967, when he attended his mother's funeral. "That would be an un-Christian thing to do," maintains the Rev. T. Eugene Coffin, pastor of the church. "We don't condone wrongdoing, but want to create an atmosphere in which wrongdoing can be repented." On the other hand, James Daane, professor of preaching at Pasadena's Fuller Theological Seminary, feels that churches have not been severe enough in disciplining members involved in Watergate. "There is more honest morality in the courts than in the churches," he complains.

Some of the most trenchant religious comment on Watergate has come from efforts to put it in a moral context--or in terms of divine providence. Father George Clements, pastor of a black Roman Catholic church on Chicago's South Side, sees the scandal as divine retribution. "Nixon had a vendetta against black people," he says. "Watergate gives us hope in justice. God will overcome." The Rev. Dupree Jordan Jr., Baptist president of the Atlanta Christian Council, regards Watergate as a different kind of judgment--on the apathy of "good church members who refuse to take part in the political process."

A number of sermons and editorials in the religious press have echoed Billy Graham in charging that Watergate mirrors a general decline in morality in many areas of life. The Rev. Jack Mendelsohn of Chicago's First Unitarian Church cites Dostoevsky's observation in The Brothers Karamazov: If God is dead, everything is permitted. Watergate, says Mendelsohn, "forces us to ask the question, 'What standards are there?' The Administration is as pious as can be in its Sunday services, but in its operation, God might as well be dead."

Spiritual Ballast. Some preachers agree with the Jeb Magruder excuse that "situation ethics"--justifying civil disobedience in the name of higher principle--helped create the atmosphere for Watergate. But Religious Historian Martin Marty of the University of Chicago's Divinity School dismisses that argument outright: "Everyone knows these guys weren't acting on higher principle." Marty sees a deeper moral problem at the root of Watergate. It is the phenomenon of 20th century "amorality --a combination of technology, propaganda and administrative mentality; the kind of dangers Kafka and Orwell warned us of. The problem of the future is not ideology but technicians. Albert Speer [Hitler's industrial commissar] held conventional political views, was a family man, but Speer lacked any psychological and spiritual ballast. Our problem now is a general belieflessness, a nonideological commitment to the system."

Still, the Rt. Rev. Richard S. Emrich, retired Episcopal Bishop of Michigan, cautions against overemphasizing the idea that "an evil system is corrupting good men." In Watergate, Emrich believes, "we are facing a more profound truth--that men corrupt good institutions, that the corruption must be traced back to the human heart."

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