"That Awful Fatalism"

The churches of the U.S., which have never summoned enough resolution, originality or unity to help the country significantly in dealing with racial discrimination, last week in Chicago held their first National Conference on Religion and Race--and proved themselves still unable to offer much wisdom.

The dominant mood of the four-day meeting, attended by 1,000 delegates and observers from 65 Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish groups, was what one participant called "that awful fatalism.'' The Rev. Will D. Campbell, former chaplain at Ole Miss and an executive of the National Council of Churches, said flatly that "it is too late now for us to establish harmonious relationships between the races on a worldwide scale." In his prepared text, distributed but prudently omitted from the spoken version, Campbell claimed that racial hatred has reached such a pitch that "in our generation white children will be marched into gas chambers by dark-skinned masters, clutching their little toys to their breasts in. Auschwitz fashion." In the same mood, Episcopal Layman William Stringfellow gloomed that "the most practical thing to do now is weep."

Such doleful hand wringing left many churchmen aghast, and at the conference's end, delegates approved a well-meant "Appeal to the Conscience of the American People," which called for a reign of justice, love, courage and prayer in which "voting rights and equal protection of the law will everywhere be enjoyed" and "the wounds of past injustices will not be used as excuses for new ones." The call to action was not binding on any of the religious groups represented.

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