Despite full-scale resumption of hostilities after the four-day Lunar New Year cease-fire in Viet Nam, informed analysts kept detecting a smell of settlement. A few vocal clergymen added to the complexities with continued insistence that the U. S. government yield enough ground to Hanoi to bring the warring factions to a conference table.
Two unrelated developments last month dramatized the Church’s implication in the war: the sudden death of an octogenarian pacifist who had just returned from North Viet Nam, and the flurry of publicity over a poem by a teen-ager, already a church dropout, who is “concerned” over American use of napalm in Viet Nam.
But the most prominent ecclesiastical personality to make his views known is still Pope Paul VI. After granting a half-hour audience to U. S. Senator Robert Kennedy, the Pope issued pleas for extending the Lunar New Year truce. North Viet Nam’s President Ho Chi Minh responded with a tirade against the United States.
In New York, the Rev. A. J. Muste, 82, held a news conference to answer questions about his newly formed Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam. A few days later Muste died in his apartment of an apparent heart attack. The tall, gaunt Presbyterian clergyman had just returned from Hanoi and talks with Ho Chi Minh to report Ho’s “offer” to meet with President Johnson in Hanoi. He had been a pacifist for fifty years and since 1948 had refused to pay income taxes because the money was spent for armaments.
Muste’s new movement was understood to be a more radical protest group than the ad hoc “Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam,” which held a two-day rally and demonstration in Washington several weeks ago and called a three-day fast consonant with the beginning of Lent and the Lunar New Year (see Feb. 17 issue, p. 48). Another “visitation” to Washington was scheduled for March 1.
In Philadelphia, the United Presbyterian Board of Christian Education announced that the Defense Department had canceled 13,000 subscriptions to a junior-high Sunday-school publication because of a poem on napalm. The poem was composed by Barbara Beidler, 13, of Vero Beach, Florida, and published by Venture, which paid her one dollar for it. Barbara’s parents are members of a Presbyterian church in Vero Beach. Barbara, however, doesn’t attend much any more. Her poem—which her father had not seen until the controversy hit the front pages—goes like this:
All was still.
The sun rose through silver pine boughs,
Over sleeping green-straw huts,
Over cool rice ponds,
Through the emerald jungles,
Into the sky.
The men rose and went out to the fields and ponds.
The women set pots on the fire, boiling rice and jungle berries, and some with baskets went for fish.
The children played in the streams and danced through the weeds.
Then there was the flash—silver and gold
Silver and gold,
Silver birds flying,
Golden water raining.
The rice ponds blazed with the new water.
The jungles burst into gold and sent up little birds of fire.
Little animals with fur of flame.
Then the children flamed.
Running—their clothes flying like fiery kites.
Screaming—their screams dying as their faces seared.
The women’s baskets burned on their heads.
The men’s boats blazed on the rice waters.
Then the rains came.
A rag, fire black, fluttered.
A curl of smoke rose from a lone rice stem.
The forest lay singed, seared.
A hut crumbled.
And all was still.
Listen, Americans,
Listen, clear and long.
The children are screaming
In the jungles of Haiphong.
Upon learning of the cancellation, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a Presbyterian layman, reversed his department’s ruling and announced that Venture was being put back on the recommended curriculum roster for U. S. military chaplains.
Kennedy, during a ten-day trip to Europe, fanned rumors that secret negotiations on the Viet Nam war were under way or imminent. He was reportedly rebuked for his remarks by President Johnson.
In Nashville, two prominent churchmen wired Secretary of State Dean Rusk to say that he had “hardened the U. S. position” on possible peace negotiations with North Viet Nam.
A Christian To Lead Nazareth
For the first time in seven years, Nazareth, Israel, has a Christian mayor. He is Musa (Moses) Iktaily, a Greek Orthodox farm-machinery salesman who was chosen as a compromise candidate after round-the-clock negotiations.
For six years, Seif ed-Din Zoibe, head of a large Muslim clan in Galilee, had been mayor of the predominantly Arab Christian town that was the home of Jesus. After a 1965 election deadlock in which Communists suddenly won half (six) the city council seats, a Muslim cousin of the former mayor, Abdul Aziz Zoibe, agreed to serve as mayor, but this compromise failed last year.
So another vote was held late in 1966. The Communists held five seats and demanded concessions. Then Seif ed-Din Zoibe, now a member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), further fragmented the picture by offering to return as mayor. But townsmen charged that his regime had been corrupt. Iktaily, whose brother is Israel’s only Arab judge and whose wife is a public school headmistress, emerged as a dark-horse candidate. The Iktailys have a married son who is studying medicine in the United States.
DWIGHT L. BAKER
L.B.J. To Worship ‘Privately’
Calling it a “private matter,” the White House last month announced that the time and place of the First Family’s church attendance will no longer automatically be made public.
This ends a long Washington tradition in which Presidential church attendance has generally been given advance announcement, at least to the press corps.
The Rev. George R. Davis, pastor of National City Christian Church, which the Johnsons often attend, expressed approval: “I believe the President has every right to privacy in his worship.”
But at least one other Washington clergyman disagrees. Dr. Edward L. R. Elson, pastor of Washington’s National Presbyterian Church, which has issued pew-reservation receipts to nine former Presidents, rebutted: “What a public figure of his eminence does in a public institution (a church) is in the public domain.”
Bible In Wax
Eve ate the apple at age 20. Daniel was in the den with African lions. Christ was blond and blue-eyed. Or at least so says Frank L. Dennis, a Washington, D. C., public relations man turned waxworks kingpin, who is spending $250,000 to convert an old pipeorgan factory into America’s first Bible History Wax Museum.
The museum, scheduled to open in the nation’s capital in late June, will have seventeen tableaus of events from Creation to Crucifixion. Each will be accompanied by an appropriate King James Scripture portion. The total effect, Dennis hopes, will be to “stimulate interest in the meaning of various events in the Bible.”
The Bible Museum will be waxworks number nine for Dennis. The others, located across the country, deal with American history. The departure this time comes from a recognition that the Bible “is fundamental to our whole way of living.”
The museum will depict scenes from both the Old and the New Testament. A figure of Lot’s wife will turn to salt at the touch of a button. Noah will be loading the Ark in the rain. Jesus will be shown as a “teen-ager” working as a carpenter and later on, walking on the water at “three in the morning.”
Future expansion plans include a wing on important religious leaders.
Along with the religious significance, non-aligned Protestant Dennis expects his new museum to be big box office as well. An American history museum he now operates in the city saw 700,000 people pass the cashier last year.
Misappropriating a biblical term, Dennis added, “We expect the Bible History Museum to do damn near as well.”
WILLIAM D. FREELAND
Under New Management
Faced with a $1.5 million debt that hasn’t been reduced in three years, trustees of Bibletown, U. S. A., in Boca Raton, Florida, are putting a new man in charge—evangelist Torrey Johnson.
He replaces flamboyant founder Ira Eshleman, who seventeen years ago began turning the former Air Force radar station into the nation’s biggest winter Bible conference and built two 150-acre residential communities near the grounds.
The biggest monkey on Bibletown’s back is a 2,500-seat auditorium completed in 1960 for $1 million. It is the center of a thirteen-week winter program that draws Christian tourists to Florida’s sunny Gold Coast.
Meanwhile, a tax battle with local officials is in process. The auditorium and a Sunday school building have been ruled tax-exempt, but still in question is an $8,000-a-year levy on 105 motel units and other facilities.
ADON TAFT
The Making Of A Marxist
How does a youth “converted” in an evangelical Baptist church, active in youth work, and “called” to the ministry, end up a Communist?
Ask Steve Hamilton, 22, who now awaits sentencing for trespass in last year’s University of California student uprising. Hamilton is one of several well-known revolutionists at UC’s Berkeley campus who had planned to become clergymen. Mario Savio had his sights set on the Jesuit priesthood. Stewart Albert had planned to be a rabbi.
Hamilton says that while attending Wheaton (Illinois) College and working in a Chicago slum Sunday school, he began reading liberal theologians and soon found himself doubting the relevance of traditional Christianity.
Restless, he explored the Episcopal Church and attended laying-on-of-hands services. After transferring to the Berkeley campus, he decided to enter the Episcopal priesthood and was confirmed by Bishop James A. Pike, whose “courage and convictions” he is said to have admired. Through classes with Pike and other Episcopal contacts, he became involved in civil-rights protests.
When police “roughed him up” during his first arrest, Hamilton says, he turned completely against the “establishment.” In 1964, he represented the University Church Council in the leadership of the campus Free Speech Movement, which led student strikes.
During this period, Hamilton absorbed the Communist interpretation of history after taking a course that presented Marxism “sympathetically.” By 1965, he had discarded all theological belief. To him, “the height of irrelevance during an era of social struggle” was a theologian droning on for hours about “the ground of being.”
Communism has wrought drastic changes in Hamilton’s moral outlook. He now feels no guilt about the use of violence—even murder—by those attempting to bring about “change.” He considers himself a true atheist. As for Christ, “he disappeared with the theology, I guess, and I haven’t thought about him since.”
Another 22-year-old ex-evangelical in the Bay Area is Patrick Taggart. As a teen-ager in the First Baptist Church of Chatsworth, California, Taggart was active in church youth activities and Youth for Christ and served as a counselor in Billy Graham’s last Los Angeles crusade. But he said he was ousted from church leadership when he began to discuss “liberal” ideas. He left for the Bay and met Lois Murgenstrumm, 21, who introduced him to the Satan-worship cult in which he is now the right-hand man. The girl served as a nude “living altar” during a recent well-publicized satanist wedding (Feb. 17 issue, page 49).
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
