Churches: Speaking Out on Foreign Policy

Civil rights is old hat. Now, the area in which clergymen are seeking to prove the contemporary relevance of Christianity is foreign policy.

Recently, a “Clergymen’s Emergency Committee for Vietnam,” representing 3,000 Protestant, Jewish and Roman Catholic clerics, sent twelve of its members on a “ministry of reconciliation” to Viet Nam. Among the delegates were Unitarian Universalist President Dana McLean Greeley; Baptist Minister Edwin T. Dahlberg, a former president of the National Council of Churches; and the Rev. Harold Bosley, pastor of Manhattan’s Christ Methodist Church. On returning, the clerics proposed an immediate peace conference, including both Communist China and the National Liberation Front (meaning the Viet Cong).

Last April the emergency committee, which is sponsored by the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, took a two-page ad in the New York Times to proclaim: MR. PRESIDENT: IN THE NAME OF GOD, STOP IT! Many of its members showed up in Washington a month later for a mass vigil at the Pentagon, protesting escalation of the Viet Nam war.

Organizing Debate. Attacks on the Administration’s actions have not been limited to individual pastors. This year the annual conferences of the Church of the Brethren and the Central Conference of American Rabbis issued formal statements criticizing U.S. policy in Viet Nam; so did the executive committee of the Methodist Board of Christian Social Concerns. The Protestant magazines Christianity & Crisis and The Christian Century recently published a joint appeal to the National Council of Churches, urging it to take a more active role in organizing debates on foreign policy. As it happens, the council twice this year has issued resolutions urging that the U.S. negotiate a ceasefire in Viet Nam.

When and how should churchmen speak out on foreign affairs? A radical minority would commit the churches to total opposition to war. The Rev. Stephen Rose, editor of Chicago’s interdenominational monthly Renewal, suggests that the church should give moral backing to soldiers who refuse to fight in Viet Nam. Says the Rev. Gardiner Day, rector of Christ Church (Episcopal) in Cambridge, Mass., who has denounced Red China’s exclusion from the U.N. in a sermon: “The church should speak out on all social, political and economic matters. If you don’t speak when the crisis is with you, you never get another chance.”

Another Pressure Group? Yet many more clergymen agree with the Rev. Frank Ross, rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Atlanta, who fears that organized Christianity’s increasing involvement in social and political affairs may be turning it into “just another pressure group.” Ross and others see a clear difference between civil rights, where the facts to support a moral judgment are nearly all on the public record, and foreign policy, where so much essential background for decision is top secret. “There are times when we must trust our leaders to make the right moral decisions,” says the Rev. Edward L. R. Elson of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, “since not all the alternatives can be placed in church channels or the public forum.”

Some church leaders believe that politically activist clerics should make it clearer that when they take a stand on Viet Nam they do so as private citizens—and not as spokesmen and surrogates for Christianity. But the church should speak out with a united voice, suggests Dr. Tex S. Sample of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, when the war creates issues—such as the torture of prisoners, or bombing of civilian centers—”in which human values are at stake. We are as capable of judging human values as politicians are.” At such times, adds Benjamin Seaver of the American Friends Service Committee, the churches have a right to “act as the country’s conscience.”