Waking Up to Race

Perhaps because of the site, the Sunday school killings in Birmingham brought forth in churches throughout the U.S. last week a great outpouring of wrath, sympathy--and hard-cash collections to help rebuild the bombed Baptist church. The reaction demonstrated what is best about religion's responsibilities toward mending the nation's racial division: white ministers and priests are everywhere waking up to the need to help Negroes through secular action --fund drives, picket lines, finding jobs, breaking down housing segregation. But at the same time, the hatred that brought on the bombing showed what clergymen confess to be the worst in their role: their inability to stand in pulpits and to preach Acts 17:26 (God "hath made of one blood all the na tions of men") with sufficient eloquence to change hearts in great numbers.

Churches have, of course, been condemning segregation for decades. But clergymen acknowledge that more often than not these declarations were given lip service approval by local churches, and then forgotten. "Love thy neighbor" was the parish rule--if the neighbor happened to be white.

Setting Arrested. Now hardly a day goes by without some new, well-aimed deed by a religious leader--such as the recent pronouncement by St. Louis' Joseph Cardinal Ritter that Catholics guilty of discrimination should not receive Holy Communion without first confessing their sin. At its convention this year, the United Presbyterian Church voted $5,000,000 to help the cause of integration; the United Church of Christ plans to raise $1,000,000 by the end of 1964 for a new committee on racial justice.

Hundreds of clergymen took part in the August civil rights march on Washington, including two Roman Catholic archbishops, at least ten Episcopal bishops, about 50 rabbis. So far in 1963, more than 200 clergymen have been arrested for taking part in picket lines and demonstrations, including the nation's No. 1 Presbyterian, the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake, in Maryland.

Battle Stars. Most of the nation's churches have already earned a few battle stars for the contribution to the 1963 civil rights campaigns. Roman Catholics have been particularly active in Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans and Boston--but not in Los Angeles, where James Cardinal Mclntyre prefers, as one priest puts it, "the evolutionary process"; the cardinal has discouraged priests who want to take an active role in civil rights campaigns. Episcopalians have a good civil rights record in Boston and San Francisco, but have less to be proud of in the South. Presbyterians have been particularly active in Pittsburgh and Methodists in Los Angeles, where Bishop Gerald Kennedy has told associates that he wants to integrate his church services even if it means losing popularity and income.

Lutherans are generally less engaged, and in the rearguard of the civil rights battle comes the big Southern Baptist Convention, many of whose 10.2 million members believe that segregation derives from the law of God. "If the

Southern Baptists would really go to work on civil rights, it could change the whole situation overnight," says one Episcopalian priest in Washington.

Elusive Dream. Some churchmen believe that they cannot take an effective role in civil rights campaigns without a massive inter-faith campaign--a dream that has so far eluded them. Last Jan uary 650 Protestant, Catholic and Jewish leaders at the first National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago agreed to set up action committees in ten pilot cities (five more were added later). The results so far have been unimpressive; the committees have proved very effective in Chicago and Washington, but the one in Boston is a paper tiger, the committee in St. Louis is still haggling over its budget, and no organization at all has been set up in New Orleans.

Where the clergy has decided on open action, it has often achieved small but significant victories. In Seattle, clergymen helped win a fair share of jobs for Negroes at the Bon Marche, the city's largest department store, by organizing a buyers' boycott and a freedom march on the store, then negotiating with the management. In Boston, one local baking company agreed to hire more Negroes after ministers backed a "selected patronage" campaign from their pulpits, helped dent the company's bread sales.

Yet many clergymen believe that the job of the priest is to be a prophet rather than a provocateur, and that his divine calling involves much more than helping Negroes win equality. They argue that Christianity should persuade rather than make peremptory demands since, says one New Orleans Protestant minister, "unless you win men by love, you never really win them."

But many signs show that preaching alone is disappointingly ineffective. Chief among them is the segregation that still thrives within the church de spite a striking increase in sermons on integration since the January conference in Chicago. Most Southern Protestant churches are rigidly segregated, and dozens of Southern Baptist and Methodist ministers have lost their pulpits for attempting even token integration. In theory, few Northern churches are closed to Negro membership, yet because of segregated housing, most parishes have at best only limited, "back-pew" integration. "Our Sunday schools are about ten years behind the public schools in integration," complains the Rev. Richard Cain, superintendent of Los Angeles' Methodist district.

So far, the white churches of the U.S. seem to have been followers rather than leaders in the civil rights struggle--a condition that many clergymen wonder if even time will correct. "When the tide turns at Jackson, Mississippi," says one Southerner, "it will be because of business people acting for business reasons rather than church people acting for religious reasons."

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