Religion: Mr. Rockefeller Regrets

“To the Northern Baptist Convention

“Gentlemen:

“Some months ago I sent you my contribution for the current fiscal year, and in doing so stated that it would be my final annual gift to the unified budget of the Northern Baptist Convention. Hereafter, such sums as I may donate to general religious work, it is my present thought to contribute to specific projects, chiefly interdenominational or nondenominational in character, which interpret the Christian task in the light of present day needs and which are based not so much on denominational affiliation as on broad, forward-looking principles of cooperation.”

Thus began a letter written and mailed last March by John D. Rockefeller Jr., made public last week by his public relations representatives who still bear the name of their late head, Ivy Lee. The letter went on at length to explain piously why Mr. Rockefeller would no longer give money for denominational use to the church “with which I have all my life been so happily associated.”

Increasingly an advocate of church unity, Baptist Rockefeller best stated his case in a speech in 1927: “I have seemed to see in my mind’s eye the forces of evil drawn up on one side in closely compacted ranks, standing solidly together with complete understanding andcooperating fully. And on the other side of the picture I see the forces of righteousness, the Christian men and women of this land, huddled together in some scores of pitifully small groups, each moreinterested in seeking to increase the consumption of his own particular brand of denominationalism or sectarianism than having in mind administering to the souls and bodies of suffering humanity!”

Most concrete expression of Mr. Rockefeller’s unsectarian liberalism is Manhattan’s large, Gothic Riverside Church, a place of worship for “all the disciples of Jesus,” which he built for $4,000,000 and in which he installed Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick. No less monumental was the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry, to which Mr. Rockefeller was the largest contributor (TIME, Oct. 17, 1932 et seq.). That this survey, which found great need of interdenominational cooperation in foreign missions, was received “unenthusiastically” by the Northern Baptist Convention, its onetime President Charles Oscar Johnson was quick to recall last week in St. Louis. Added he: “If Mr. Rockefeller can get along without us, we’ll do our best to get along without him.”

Other Baptists were less ungracious. Said Dr. James Henry Franklin, present president of the Convention: “We have absolutely no criticism to make. … He has always exhibited a rare discernment in his appropriations.” Though the Baptists have not received any Rockefeller money since last March, the Council of Finance and Promotion’s Executive Secretary Rev. William Howard Bowler said, “The year is not yet over.”

John D. Rockefeller Sr. set his son an example by giving Northern and Southern Baptist causes between $20,000,000 and $30,000,000 during his active life. His giving spread over a wider front, the younger Rockefeller confers with his advisers over each benefaction, which may be one in which he has a special interest, or one put before him by friends, or one which competes for his attention on its own. To his church John D. Jr. has been no less generous than his father. A list of Rockefeller donations compiled confidentially for its clients a few years ago by John Price Jones Corp. (professional money-raisers) included such Baptist items as, for 1923, the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society ($5,725,000), the Ministers and Missionaries Benefit Board ($5,475.000), the American Baptist Home Mission Society ($5,475,000). In 1927 the Northern Baptist General Board of Promotion got $1,300,000. Mr. Rockefeller’s growing feelings about interdenominational giving were reflected in his donations to the Baptist general budget. From $500,000 in 1928. these dropped to $400,000 in 1931, then dwindled by $100,000 a year to nothing in 1935. Mr. Rockefeller’s Baptist gifts of record since 1923, plus the cost of the Riverside Church, plus $2,000,000 from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial for Missions in 1929, total $27,947,000.