Religion: Christian Politics

When the social reformers were tall in the saddle back in 1934, the U.S. Congregationalists set up a Council for Social Action. Its aim was to help make “the Christian gospel more effective in society,” and its membership was drawn heavily from the ranks of those who feared many things more than creeping socialism. Among the causes the council plugged: the consumer cooperative movement, compulsory health insurance, federal aid to education. By last year, such council gospel had drawn so much Congregational counterfire (TIME, March 17, 1952) that a nine-man committee was set up to investigate it. Last week came the investigators’ report.

Signed by such prominent committeemen as Chester I. Barnard, onetime president of New Jersey Bell Telephone Co., Eugene E. Barnett, general secretary of the Y.M.C.A. National Council, and Congressman Walter H. Judd of Minnesota, the report found “no reason to believe that any members of the [council] staff are dishonest, disloyal, subversive, proCommunist, or other than conscientious and sincere Christians.” But at the same time the committee decided that the council had been getting itself (and Congregationalism) out on the limbs of politics more often than was necessary or wise.

“It should be noted,” said the report, “that differences of Christian opinion usually occur in the realm of means rather than that of ends.” Granted a desirable end, it is rare that one means of achieving it “can be singled out as the only ‘Christian’ way, and therefore most deserving of the support of the church”—whereas the literature of the council “has sometimes been definitely slanted in the direction of a particular political or economic program.” In lobbying, if ever, the council “should not take a partisan position on matters on which the churches are not substantially united.”

To Congressman Judd, it seemed that his fellow committee members had not gone far enough. He submitted a supplementary letter recommending that the council’s Washington office be shut down, and that the council be reduced to something with a more limited purview, such as a “Commission on Education for Social Action.”

“I am more certain than ever,” he wrote, “that the best way to get Christian social and political action is not by pronouncements or pressures by church bodies but by inspiring Christian men and women to become politicians—that is, to work on social and political problems as individual Christian citizens, and in voluntary association with other right-minded citizens.”