The World We Want

A new high in religious interventionism was set last week by the fourth biennial Williamstown Conference,* which drew 850 Protestant, Catholic and Jewish leaders to Williamstown, Mass. last week to discuss "The World We Want to Live In." No votes were taken, but anti-Hitler sentiment ran so strong (particularly among the Jewish delegates) that a ballot might have revealed an actual majority for a shooting war now.

"The first concern of all," said Jewish Co-Chairman Roger W. Straus in summing up the conference, "was that totalitarianism be crushed." Catholic Co-Chairman Carlton J. H. Hayes was applauded for saying America must end her "aloofness and holier-than-thou attitude." Even Protestant Pacifist Walter Van Kirk, head of the National Peace Conference and secretary of the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, acknowledged that "the use of force is not immoral for the preservation of law and order by a world society that is heroically bent upon establishing justice."

Some other specifications for the world the conferees wanted to live in:

> Imperialism Out. Said Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Augustus Berle Jr.: "No one wants an 'American Empire' with an American Rudyard Kipling to sing the glories of the White Man's burden. . . . The American genius is the genius of a commonwealth and not of an Imperial system."

> Regional free trade, and free access to raw materials for every nation.

> A compulsory World Court, whose decisions would be binding on all countries.

> A League of Nations with teeth, "Equipped with an international police force empowered to prevent aggression and capable of doing so successfully."

> Full religious and racial toleration.

> Acceptance of Responsibility. Said Professor Hayes: "We were the finally determining factor in winning the last World War, but . . . even more than Nazi Germany, we have been responsible for losing the peace and bringing on the present World War. We insisted on our rights and spurned our duties. . . . We repudiated the League of Nations . . . and thus set the pace for all its later floutings by other powers. Moreover, we selfishly and shortsightedly refused to forgive the Inter-Allied debts and thereby prevented any timely forgiving of the fateful German reparations. The result is that Germany now has Hitler, while we are accumulating a debt for national defense which makes the Inter-Allied debts and the reparations of the last war seem trivial."

The National Conference of Christians and Jews sponsors the Williamstown Conferences, which are notable as the only full-dress occasions when leaders of the three major American faiths come together as churchmen to work on a common front for common ends. Last week's session was also the first nationwide forum on peace objectives and post-war problems.

Strength of the N.C.C.J. is that it makes no attempt to water down the religious convictions of Protestants, Catholics and Jews to a least common denominator. Instead, it tries to promote inter-faith and interracial good will by eliminating mutual mistrust based on ignorance. The movement's ultimate aim: to make the world safe for differences.

The delegates fervently echoed Thomas E. Dewey's conclusion: "Religion must reassert its leadership as a living force in the moral values of the nation. Our form of government was devised on principles flowing from deep religious conviction. . . . Every essential of any free society springs from the concepts of morality, family life and duties and faith in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Each of these is denied by the purely materialistic philosophies of totalitarianism."

* The third conference ended the day Germany invaded Poland.

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