Churches: The Price of Conviction

U.S. churchgoers have a tradition of generous giving—more than $3 billion in 1964 alone. Normally, pledges are made with no strings attached and without regard to the minister’s policies or convictions, but the churches’ strong commitment to civil rights has been a divisive issue. In anger, some givers have withheld pledges; in respect for this kind of contemporary Christian witness, others have donated with even greater enthusiasm.

This new passion for selective giving reached a peak last month when New York’s Episcopal Bishop Horace Donegan, at a ceremony marking his 15th year as head of the diocese, announced that a parishioner had stricken from his will a pledge of $600,000 toward completion of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.* Although he named no names, Donegan said that two other rich benefactors were threatening to withdraw bequests much larger than that. The purpose of withholding the money, said Donegan, was to show disapproval of his stand on civil rights—including speeches, sending priests to Selma, installing a Negro canon at the cathedral, and integrating parishes.

Rescinded Gifts. Other clergymen have received similar threats. Although controversial Bishop James A. Pike of San Francisco has given Episcopalians numberless reasons for withholding donations, gifts to the diocese of California appear to be down 15% in 1965 chiefly because he opposed the constitutional amendment that repealed the state’s fair housing act. Methodist Bishop Gerald Kennedy, who also opposed the amendment, says that some of his Los Angeles churches “had a harder time than usual meeting the budget” for the same reason. When Episcopal Father James Jones of Chicago, the director of diocesan charities, was jailed last June for taking part in a civil rights demonstration, one layman rescinded a $750,000 pledge to the church’s charitable agencies.

More often than not, however, ministers have found that a strong stand on civil rights pays off in the collection plate. A common experience is that attempts to silence the church through financial pressure inspire more sympathetic laymen to make up for any lost pledges.

Reverse Backlash. In Nashville one parishioner canceled a $500 pledge to Calvary Methodist Church after the pastor, the Rev. Sam R. Dodson Jr., led a protest march of ministers against segregation; another layman at once raised his pledge by $500. In Alabama, when one Presbyterian church cut off the minister’s car allowance because he had helped out-of-state civil rights demonstrators, a group of laymen within the church formed a committee to make up the difference out of their own pockets. Presbyterian Frank H. Stroup, chief executive of the Philadelphia presbytery, acknowledges opposition to his church’s allowing the use of its Corinthian Avenue Chapel as a gathering place for demonstrators who oppose segregation at Girard College, but notes: “We are in the middle of collect ing $1,125,000, and everyone is coming through on their pledges.”

Even when churchgoers do withhold gifts, the gesture often proves empty. A rich woman who refused a donation to East Texas Baptist College after it desegregated was asked where she expected to find any segregated institution worthy of her beneficence. “That’s what’s worrying me,” she said.

Chicago’s Father Jones is convinced that sooner or later his angry benefactor will eventually come to see things in a different light. “I am confident that if you can weather the immediate storm you can visually finish up on top,” he says. “It’s just a matter of letting these people see for themselves the implications and consequences of their decisions. In the end they see the point.”

* Long known to New Yorkers as “St. John the Unfinished,” the massive, somewhat Gothic structure was begun in 1891, still lacks towers and transepts. In length, it is the world’s second largest church—601 ft., compared to 718 ft. for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.