Protestants: The Gentle Demurrers

The Southern Presbyterian Church is a gently, insistently conservative group, both theologically and politically. Its 928,056 members, 99% white, officially support racial integration, applaud those of their churches that practice it, do not chide those that don’t. They see merit in testing the literal Bible by scholarship—yet many quietly hold that every word is true. They hearken more closely to Calvin than do their more numerous Northern Presbyterian cousins. They anxiously question the need to lose their identity in ecumenicism. Last week, though under the pervading pressures of world Christianity to become a bit more liberal, they stuck politely to their moderate views.

Meeting in Huntington, W. Va., the denomination commissioners defeated scholarly Dr. Frank Caldwell, president of Louisville Theological Seminary, in his liberal bid for the top post of moderator. But to beat him, conservatives cautiously picked a man less distinguished for conservatism than for middle-of-the-road moderation. Squeaking in by a vote of 229 to 218 was the Rev. William H. McCorkle, 61, a onetime insurance man who gave up policy pushing for “higher life insurance.”

“Earlier in life I fought a constant inner urge to go into church work,” he recalls. “I was praying, but I didn’t feel I was doing what the Lord wished me to do. One night I sat alone with the Bible and settled the matter. I wrote in the Bible, ‘Tonight I give in. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.’ ” He became one of the most decorated Navy chaplains of World War II. After collecting the Silver Star for tending a wounded marine under fire, McCorkle finished the war as an Annapolis chaplain. Now he tends a 1,100-member church in Bristol, Tenn., and describes himself as a “garden variety pastor.”

If ecumenicism has to come, Southern Presbyterian conservatives prefer a face-saving union with the Reformed Church in America, a smaller, 230,210-member body concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest. Yet Moderator McCorkle is not an unyielding roadblock to unity: “Eventually I think we will get together and all of the Presbyterian families will be as one.”

The assembly rejected an overture by the Presbytery of Northwest Missouri to bar meetings in cities where discrimination is generally practiced in hotels and restaurants, reaffirmed their stand, first taken in 1954, that calls enforced racial segregation “out of harmony with Christian theology and ethics.” And the commissioners did get around to some emancipating: by a vote of 249 to 173, they approved a proposal for women to become ordained deacons, elders or ministers.