Conservatives

Liberalism in religion came in for some harsh words last week. In Chicago's Hotel La Salle, for the first convention of the National Association of Evangelicals for United Action, nearly 1,000 conservatives and fundamentalists gathered from all parts of the U.S. Some belonged to the big Protestant denominations, others to smaller groups such as the Free Methodists, Sixth Principle Baptists, Assemblies of God.

Urging delegates to "think deeply or be damned," young Congregationalist Dr. Harold J. Ockenga, Association president and pastor of Boston's big Park Street Church (TIME, April 5), led off with an exhortation on literal v. liberal Christianity, passed naturally into a subject dear to all Fundamentalists.

Cried he: "The moral crisis is evident from the wave of licentiousness . . . which is now having such a rage in America. . . . What Russia did under the Bolsheviks in the twenties, what Germany did in the thirties, and what Japan practiced with her Geisha girls has now become introduced into American life. . . . Joined with this is the elevation of Bacchus to a new position of God. . . .

"Dishonesty in the life of individual people . . . has been brought to the surface by national rationing. Rationing did not make a nation of liars out of our people. We were liars before we were rationed. . . ."

Pagans & Saints. "Christians today are altogether too much like the pagan and heathen world. . . . What the evangelical church needs most is saints. . . . Our salvation after the war is not a new economic or social order nor a political new deal, but . . . Biblical Christianity."

Speakers roundly walloped radio chains which give free time to the "vociferous liberals" of the Federal Council of Churches but, said the speakers, deny it to conservatives. The Baptist Watchman-Examiner's editor, Dr. John W. Bradbury, attacked "the American Embassy to the Vatican," called for united action "to demand of our Government that it cease this invasion of Constitutional provision . . . close the Vatican Embassy . . . cancel the appointment of even so much as a personal ambassador of the President to the Pope."

Although leaders declared that "a break with the Federal Council has not been made a prerequisite for membership in the Association," nothing good was said about the Federal Council. Noting that the Council claims to represent 23,000,000 Protestants, the Association declared that left some 24,000,000 others without representation, suggested the conservative Association was just the thing for them, suggested also a common end: to thwart "rampant liberalism and humanism . . . that strips from Christianity many of its essentials."

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