Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future by Glen H. Stassen & Lawrence S. Wittner

Author:Glen H. Stassen & Lawrence S. Wittner [Stassen, Glen H. & Wittner, Lawrence S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317254584
Google: awoHDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30001411
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Institutional Faith Organizations Engage

By 1983, the institutional churches had joined the debate that the Freeze campaign had raised, and they did so in a big way. The most prominent were the U.S. Catholic Bishops, whose seminal 1983 pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response shaped the whole discourse, in churches and in society at large, around the moral dimensions of war and peace. “Catholic teaching on peace and war,” the bishops wrote, “has had two purposes: to help Catholics form their consciences and to contribute to the public policy debate about the morality of war.… The wider civil community, although it does not share the same vision of faith, is equally bound by certain key moral principles.” In particular, the bishops offered “support for immediate, bilateral, verifiable agreements to halt the testing, production, and deployment of new nuclear weapons systems.”

Catholics and Jews supported the Freeze with larger percentages than did Protestants. For example, “in May 1983, when the Catholic bishops adopted their pastoral letter, polls reported that 82 percent of Jews, 78 percent of Catholics, and 57 percent of Protestants supported a Nuclear Freeze.”1 Lawrence Wittner reports:

Among Jewish groups, the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly of America endorsed the Freeze, as did its Reform counterpart, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), which also demanded a 50 percent cut in nuclear stockpiles. In February 1983, the Synagogue Council of America, a loose umbrella group for all branches of Judaism, called upon Reagan and Andropov “to implement a bilateral mutual cessation of the production and deployment of nuclear weapons.” Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the UAHC, declared that the nuclear arms race was the “central moral issue of our day.”2

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