Religion: Whose Side Is God On?

Could God sometimes be on the side of the Communists? “I’ve been suggesting that possibility for years,” John Bennett smiled to a friend last week. “But all of a sudden they kick up a fuss about it.” One reason for the fuss is that the cold war is hotter than ever; another is that slight, smiling Congregationalist John Coleman Bennett, 59, is now dean of the faculty at Manhattan’s prestigious Union Theological Seminary and one of the leaders of U.S. Protestant thought.

Like his famed predecessor, Reinhold Niebuhr, Bennett is a liberal with a somewhat acid view of the goodness of man. The son of a Presbyterian pastor in Morristown, N.J., he pointed for the ministry as an undergraduate at Williams, went on to Oxford for an A.B. in theology and to Union for his bachelor of divinity degree. He has spent his whole career teaching in seminaries, and has made “idolatrous” Communism his major study. In 1948 he published (and last year updated) the book for which he is best known: Christianity and Communism. He co-edits the liberal religious biweekly Christianity and Crisis, supports U.N. recognition of Red China (“The isolating of China is the worst possible policy”). Bennett’s teaching subject at Union is social ethics, and in the speech, made before a Roman Catholic group in Washington, that “kicked up a fuss” last week, he grappled with the ethical agonies of Atomic Man.

• ON COMMUNISM, Dr. Bennett has long warned Christians against thinking that God is automatically on the side of the West: “The very atheism of Communism is a judgment upon the churches, which for so long were unconcerned about the victims of the Industrial Revolution and early capitalism and which have usually been ornaments of the status quo, no matter how unjust it has been. The temptation to turn the cold war into a holy crusade is ever with us, and insofar as we yield to it, we make impossible the tolerance and humaneness which must yet come into international relations if there is to be a future for mankind.”

• ON COEXISTENCE, Bennett thinks that those who talk of “complete victory” in the cold war are really talking about complete defeat. “To all such people I must say that one element in the moral life is the kind of prudence that seeks to prevent the greater evil, and that their view of the cold war will almost certainly lead to hot war and to the nuclear catastrophe which will add to the victims of tyranny scores and perhaps hundreds of millions of new victims of war. Also, I say to them that the institutions of freedom in which they claim to believe so fervently are not likely to survive such a war. Whenever people say to me, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ and from these noble words deduce a cold war policy that is likely to lead to a nuclear catastrophe, I say, ‘If such a war should come, liberty will probably not survive, and as for death, it is not only your death that is involved but the death of countless people who never made this choice.”’

• ON U.S. CONSERVATIVES: “The fact that the United States is a status quo nation, fearful of radical change and influenced by a large body of opinion that is still committed to an uncritical capitalistic ideology, is one of the greatest obstacles to the success of the free world in holding its own against Communism. The utterly self-defeating character of the intransigent forms of conservative anti-Communism in this country is amazing to contemplate.”

• ON THE NUCLEAR DILEMMA, which he feels is “the most baffling of all our problems,” Bennett thinks that a progressive moral deterioration has taken place in U.S. thinking, which began with the obliteration bombings of German and Japanese cities in World War II. “It has seemed ever since that the assumption underlying most attitudes is that there are no moral limits to the damage we may inflict on the enemy at a distance,” though there are still some scruples about what may be done to individuals at close hand. The U.S., Bennett feels, is in danger of making “a moral leap from the posture of deterrence to the will to initiate nuclear war at some stage in a conflict, and that this moral leap has not been faced and discussed among us.” The churches, he feels, can do little or nothing to condition the course of the Berlin crisis. “But it is not too late for us to ask what are the Christian resources, Protestant and Catholic, to change the patterns of thought about nuclear war in this country and to prepare us for a wider range of choice in the next crisis and the next.”