Church and Estate by Thomas F. Rzeznik

Author:Thomas F. Rzeznik [Rzeznik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780271059686
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press
Published: 2013-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Confronting the “Money Interests”

On Sunday, 20 June 1915, Rev. George Chalmers Richmond preached a sermon in defense of Professor Scott Nearing, who had been dismissed from the Wharton School faculty the preceding Monday, when the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania had simply informed him, without explanation, that they would not renew his teaching contract for the forthcoming academic year. At first glance, it may seem odd that Richmond, the rector of St. John’s Church, a humble parish in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, and an outspoken critic of the “money interests” that dominated the Episcopal Church, should advocate on behalf of an academic dismissed from the faculty of a prestigious university. Yet Richmond saw a deep kinship between himself and Nearing: both had been mistreated by the city’s social and economic elite, whose moral standing both had questioned. Although the “Nearing case” has been widely studied as one of the earliest tests of academic freedom in the country, most accounts overlook the religious tensions that gave rise to it: Nearing’s progressive message challenged not only the university trustees’ dominant social and economic beliefs, but their religious self-image as well. “I have known for years,” Richmond declared, “that the same forces which have desired my deposition from the ministry in the Episcopal Church have also been seeking Nearing’s downfall.” And, indeed, a few short months later, Richmond was brought before an ecclesiastical court for the first of a series of trials that would lead to his suspension and eventual defrocking.1

The Nearing case and the Richmond trial might easily have remained internal institutional affairs. But in the class-charged atmosphere of the progressive era, they captured public interest and drew attention to the union of economic and religious interests that had come to dominate affairs in Philadelphia—and indeed the nation. Authority rested locally in the hands of an elite class that, by virtue of pedigree and prowess, controlled the city’s principal social, financial, educational, and religious institutions. Many of the same university officials who pushed for Nearing’s dismissal were leading laymen of the Episcopal diocese, whose considerable influence in denominational affairs Richmond assailed. They viewed themselves as a patrician class with the moral sanction to exercise their authority.

As the two intertwined controversies engaged the members of Philadelphia’s Episcopal establishment, currents of social reform were also stirring up tensions within the city’s Quaker community. In 1917, the Yearly Meeting of Orthodox Friends established a “Committee on Social and Industrial Problems,” whose task it was to study the social and economic conditions of the day. Although the committee’s initial charge was limited to the “consideration of social questions,” its members soon felt compelled to go further. Sensing “the seeds of war in our own social order,” they committed themselves to investigating the ways in which traditional Quaker principles could be reinterpreted and applied to the needs of contemporary society. Led by Morris E. Leeds, the “Social Order Committee,” as the committee came to be known, pushed for inclusion of a new paragraph to the Advices and for adding a line to a “social query” in the Quaker Discipline.

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