On the Horns

Back from ten days on the Red red carpet, the nine-man delegation from the National Council of Churches issued a care fully drafted formal statement about their get-acquainted expedition to Russia (TIME, March 26): "The experience was profitable. We understand the Russian church men better as a result of our conversations . . . The most severe limitation of the church is in the area of education . . ."

But the group's leader, the Rev. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, president of the National Council and stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., went into more revealing detail last week in a series of three articles for the Associated Press. Writing for himself only, Dr. Blake showed he had a good journalist's eye, though it was, he confessed, "almost permanently closed against klieg lights and flashbulbs."

Divided Mind. Prague he found beautiful but "empty not only of traffic but also of moral animation." In Moscow the varied and enthusiastic ballet audiences taught him "to forever abandon that stereotype of the Communist Russian which is too prevalent in American thinking." But the Americans found some troublesome stereotypes in Russian thinking. The Russians translated the National Council's "Policy and Strategy Committee" as "Politics and War Committee," and "it took several minutes of discussion to make clear that we really did believe in a true separation of church and state . . ."

Dr. Blake came home with a divided mind about how closely U.S. churchmen should commune with Russian churchmen.

"It would appear that the only result of any common effort for peace on the part of American and Russian churches would be to put the American churches in the position of being used by the Soviet Union for its political policy and propaganda, only to be dropped at any moment when they would be no longer useful.

"Our cynical advisers tell us that this is obvious and that any cooperation on our part can only lead to disillusionment and regret. But look at the other horn of the dilemma. It is clear that since the Nov. 10, 1954 decree by Khrushchev, outlining the new party line on religion, the churches in Russia are going to be free to establish ecclesiastical ties with other churches in the East and West, as they have not been since 1918.

"If the churches in the West are cynically unwilling to give or to respond to gestures of friendship, they are false to their own conviction that one ought to love even his enemies. Furthermore, such reluctance would forfeit the chance of Western churches to help the Russian churches resist the more subtle but not less effective propaganda attack against religion . . ."

Clear Convictions. Considering all the risks, the American churchmen found that "our only choice was to respond to every friendly gesture, to continue to make our own moral, spiritual and political convictions clear, thus being true to our own Christian convictions and possibly making more contribution to some just and peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union, which must be the goal of all thoughtful people in the age of the hydrogen bomb . . . There is no reason to suppose that their propaganda will be more effective than ours. But if we behave in this situation cynically and without hope, we will be rightly charged with being faithless and hopeless."

Blake sees U.S. Christians engaged in a two-front war, and on one front the Russian church can be an ally. In "the contest for the souls of men being waged by religion against secular, atheistic and materialistic forces all over the world, the Russian churches must be reckoned as allies that are in the front line of the battle and fighting for survival.'' But in the contest between totalitarian Communism and Western democracy, "the Russian churches must be accounted loyal to the Soviet Union as American churches are loyal to the United States." But, concludes Presbyterian Blake, "we do not expect them to perform the function of a conscience of the state in the way we feel our own churches are required to be a conscience to our nation."

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