Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States by Gene Zubovich

Author:Gene Zubovich [Zubovich, Gene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Religion, Religion; Politics & State, Christianity, Denominations
ISBN: 9780812253689
Google: TdR-zgEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2022-09-15T20:30:46+00:00

The Evangelical Countermobilization and the Clergy-Laity Gap

The National Council of Churches’ “Red China” resolution of 1958, which signaled a more confrontational stance toward the US government, occurred at the precise moment that evangelicals completed their nationwide consolidation. Evangelist Billy Graham reached the height of his powers, commanding enormous audiences and receiving regular access to President Eisenhower. Evangelical intellectuals, like Carl F. H. Henry, also began building bridges with disaffected ecumenical leaders like John Foster Dulles, Walter Judd, and Daniel A. Poling. Henry, the editor of Christianity Today, which was the evangelical alternative to the ecumenical Christian Century, criticized the National Council’s stance on China.114 He also orchestrated an attack on the National Council designed to drive a wedge between the organization and its denominations, and between national leaders and their local constituencies.

The budding alliances between disillusioned ecumenists and neo-fundamentalists like Henry were central to the increasing salience of the term “evangelical,” which distinguished this group from ecumenical Protestants, who were less and less interested in evangelization in the orthodox sense of the term. Only a decade before, during the World Order movement, Dulles, Judd, and Poling were active participants and supporters of the movement to create a just peace based on Protestant principles. In the late 1940s they began diverging from other ecumenical leaders because of the Cold War. But these divergences were tentative, and the three leaders kept their worries about the National Council private until the mid-1950s. Dulles and Judd continued to participate in events sponsored by the National Council, and Poling rarely went after ecumenical policy in his journal, the Christian Herald. But by the mid-1950s their reluctance to criticize their fellow ecumenical Protestants disappeared.

Their new willingness to attack ecumenists was aided by the National Council’s quarrel with the Eisenhower administration. Calling the Red China statement “rank hypocrisy” and “a brutal betrayal of our Protestant brothers in China,” Poling declared, “With every influence that I have, I repudiate it.” Judd likewise condemned the statement as soon as it came out, arguing that it would hurt American morale.115 Henry highlighted evangelicals’ dissatisfaction in the pages of Christianity Today, and the newfound common political grievances against the ecumenists made Judd and Poling more willing to think of evangelicals as natural allies.

Dulles also repudiated ecumenical views on China. “I attach great weight to judgments taken by church people which relate primarily to the realm of moral principles and the like,” he told journalists. “When it comes down to practical details such as whom you recognize and whom you don’t, then I think the judgment does not carry the same weight.”116 Henry, aligning himself with Dulles, gave the secretary of state a respectful treatment in Christianity Today. Henry’s own words about ecumenical Protestants were less judicious. “The modern Herods and Pilates crowded God out of centrality in ecumenical deliberations” about China, he wrote.117

In an editorial published shortly after the National Council called for the recognition of mainland China, Henry’s Christianity Today blasted the ecumenists for their “naïve confidence … that recognition and admission into the family of nations has a reformatory effect.

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