Politics for Protestantism

Once every two years, the growing spirit of unity in U.S. Protestantism becomes a visible thing. The occasion: the biennial meeting of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. Here delegates from the Council's 24 denominations come together to elect a new president, and lay new plans for enlarging the growing area in which U.S. Protestants work and think and speak as one.

In Seattle last week, the Federal Council met for the 14th time. Olympic Hotel bellhops thought it was a funny kind of convention--no midnight calls for ice & soda, no singing in the corridors, no big tips. But to ecumenical-minded Protestants it was a tremendous success.

Christian Politics. Walking among the delegates as a symbol of both totalitarian oppression and church unity was frail Pastor Martin Niemoeller, who after eight years in concentration camps is a leader of Germany's newly combined churches.* His presence helped the assembled churchmen to see that the Council's major objectives--upholding the Christian witness in the secular world, and uniting the Church of Christ--were really two different aspects of the same thing.

Declared the Council's retiring president, Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam:

"The church must lead. It refuses to identify the Christian gospel with any social reform or economic system. It refuses to take its economics from the National Association of Manufacturers* or the Communist Party. . . .

"Personally, I reject Communism ... I am convinced that democracy is a better society than dictatorship can build and that the su est way to destroy dictatorship abroad is to establish democracy at home; but it must be a democracy that preserves political liberty and uses it to establish equality and fraternity. . . ."

Job for a Layman. High point of the convention's business was election of a new president. The choice was no surprise: Episcopal Layman Charles Phelps Taft, 49, son of William Howard Taft, 26th President of the U.S. (and Unitarian), brother of Republican Senator Robert A. Taft. A lawyer with a long record of service in public affairs, Charles Taft came to the Council presidency without the theological background characteristic of his 13 predecessors. Knowing delegates saw his election as presaging a new era of lay leadership and political activity for U.S. Protestantism. In his vigorous statement on taking office, Layman Taft left no doubt as to his policies. Said he:

"I can welcome this important significant departure from precedent in electing a layman as president of the Federal Council as a recognition ... of the obvious fact that the men and women of the congregations, the blessed company of all faithful people, make the Christian church. Its weakness is their weakness and its strength is their strength.... The world cries for the effective and universal Christian ministry of all believers. . . .

"We face a Russia . . . [whose] leaders are conditioned in a philosophy which rejects as silly our Christian emphasis on the supreme importance of the individual soul and which looks with contempt on our scruples about the means to achieve a doctrinaire purpose. . . . The atomoic bomb, serious as it is, does not change the . . . profoundly difficult problem of how to live with international neighbors with whom we disagree violently. . . .

"I can criticize the political direction of our foreign policy in the last three years . . . . because I know a good deal about it from the inside.* But I say to you that there can be no direction of foreign policy. . . except a political direction, because government and foreign relations are politics. The churches must understand that, must study politics and must find a gospel which helps a Christian politician."

* Just arrived with his wife for a U.S. lecture tour under Federal Council auspices, Pastor Niemoeller drew the fire of Columnist Eleanor Roosevelt (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

* Bishop Oxnam spoke beforethe N.A.M. last week had modified its economic line (see BUSINESS).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.