Everyone who values the legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr will welcome this opportunity to share in his daughter Elisabeth’s celebration of the privilege of his company, his instruction, and his example. This privilege—shared with her brother Christopher—permitted her as well to sit around the edges of the vast circle of the friends of Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr—all of them great minds, and most of them (we now see) wonderful characters.
The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War
W. W. Norton & Company
368 pages
$16.95
Elisabeth Sifton has worked hardest at recalling these friends in the setting of the summer home in Heath, in Western Massachusetts, which the Niebuhrs owned and seasonally inhabited from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. Regular summer inhabitants or visitors included Felix Frankfurter, W.H. Auden, H.R. Niebuhr, Robert McAfee Brown, Isaiah Berlin, Alan Paton, James Dombrowski, and an awesome gaggle of bishops of many denominations. Intermixed with these are recollections of friendships in other settings—in New York, in England, in Germany, and elsewhere—with such dignitaries as the preachers and theologians Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, George Florovksy, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Visser ‘t Hooft, and (at some enlightening length) Dietrich Bonhoeffer and several of the Bonhoeffer connection in Germany and in England; with Anglican Archbishops and Bishops Bell and Temple; with bishops of other stripes, notably, Will Scarlett and Angus Dun (Episcopalian) and Church of Scotland Moderator James Baillie; with politicians and political commentators (Stafford Cripps, John Strachey, Jonathan Bingham, Joseph Rau, Hubert Humphrey, Jim Lowe, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.); and with many literary artists and scholars.
Sifton has given us an insight on a time when literate learning was at the heart of scholarship, when the largest questions of meaning, those to which religion proposes answers, were welcome and engaged without embarrassment by the best minds. For this, we owe unstinted gratitude. She is rightly nostalgic for those dear dead days and that company. So many of the best spirits and the best intellectuals and many of those who dedicated their minds and energies to public life! What a gift it is to the rest of us to share this story!
But why was it necessary to turn this magnificent gift into a stick to beat other Christians with? Sifton’s title alludes to the famous prayer written by her father, but “serenity” is not the word that comes to mind when we close this book. On every other page, “bigots” are summarily dismissed. When Sifton is done, there is virtually no one left inside. She asks: why have “the traditions of liberal Protestantism [that] … I remember from Heath … been eclipsed?” After all, “It was Lutherans, Methodists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists who over the centuries worked out the most innovative, varied and challenging new perspectives on the issue of how a person’s spiritual and civic obligations might be charged in a secular world. The plausible, humane voices of the heirs of these diverse Protestant traditions … are mostly missing from the national conversation in America today.” And what took their place? “Ministers all over America might have been pounding the lecterns and delivering their fire-and-brimstone sermons, but their social conformism was pretty complete… . They pussy-footed around feel-good mega-preachers like Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham—who like so many of their successors never risked their tremendous personal popularity to help a social cause. They checked up on their pension funds and ignored their parishioners’ lives.” Somebody ought to sue, but I am not sure who.
Evangelicals and Pentecostals, the whole job-lot of them, and all the others who never got to send delegates to the feast at Heath, are simply cast out into darkness—and with language so defamatory, in the full no-nonsense Abraham Foxman sense, that had such people the standing of, say, aboriginals or gays and lesbians, the police would be at the door. Sifton speaks of the “the many Pentecostalist and Evangelical sects then exploding [in the 1920s] across America” who stood in the way of the efforts of the liberal churchmen “to assuage the social injuries, to cure the racist and nationalist malignities. … Their hostility is part of the story.” All Pentecostals and evangelicals were then and are now governed by “ironclad dislike of other Christians” and “hysterical rigidity of belief.”
Incidentally: how do Pentecostal and evangelical communions qualify as “sects”? This cannot be true in the Max Weber sense, since they are certainly not marginal. It is the Presbyterians and Anglicans that are now marginal. All of the presidents since Franklin Roosevelt (with the exception of JFK and George 41) were raised in churches well to the right of mainstream center—Disciples, Quakers, Southern Baptists, River Brethren—although not all of them stayed there. “Evangelicalism,” correctly understood in the American setting, refers to having origins in revivalism. The term has an utterly different meaning in the context of European history—a point which Sifton deliberately obscures when speaking of her father’s original German-derived denomination called Evangelical and Reformed.
As a student of church history, one who began life as a Baptist but is now an active member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, I have given considerable thought to this distinction. An evangelical church (in the American setting) is one that teaches that God does not have grandchildren. Because it expects that the membership of the Church (or at least the active part) is going to be recruited anew, decade by decade, as people turn to Christ and accept the discipline of living along the lines prescribed in the letters of Paul, the evangelical part of the Church is marked by its provision for adult declaration of faith. (Niebuhr’s friend Franklin Littell has written with considerable wisdom on this theme.) I suspect that what Sifton means by evangelical is a church that lacks a historically derived liturgy.
It is a Sadducean canard that Christians who are to the intellectual right of the company which young Elisabeth Niebuhr kept are by nature and upbringing uneducated on social issues, deaf to the cries of the suffering, arrogant, heartless, and hell-bent on profits. What does she make of the honorable ministries of the Salvation Army, or of the missions to the people in the streets which have always been a feature of the work of the Christian and Missionary Alliance? What does she make of residential programs for recovering alcoholics and drug-addicts and of the ministries to aboriginal people which are supported overwhelmingly nowadays by faith-missions? While the equally worthy social ministries supported out of the budgets of mainline churches are shrinking (because their membership rolls are shrinking), more and more of the work among the poor to which (as Sifton rightly points out) the Gospel directs us, is funded by Christians of conservative persuasion who tirelessly pass the hat for funds throughout the great world of parachurch, outside the denominational tents.
The other canard, the one about the Pentecostal pastors wallowing in wealth fleeced from the gullible, is a standard-issue myth of secular liberalism, parroted by New York journalists, and is simply unworthy of a scholar. We can be quite sure that the median income of the membership of (for example) the Pentecostal Assemblies of America is well below the median in the company which Elisabeth Niebuhr kept then and Elisabeth Sifton keeps now; and we can be perfectly sure that the salaries paid to the pastors in this company are well-below the medians obtaining in Protestant ministry generally—or, for that matter, among semi-skilled laborers. The millions in this company fully share the insight which informed discussion within her father’s circle but which Sifton imagines is beyond their ken: “a deeply grounded belief in the relevance and essential value of the Christian faith in dealing with the human crises of our time.” The true difference is an existential one: Pentecostal laity, by and large, have little need to have the lives and problems of the poor explained to them.
Let’s not start up a contest about which leaders of which churches have spoken the most words about immorality and social injustice nor about who has done the most to raise the living conditions of the masses. This is a totally unworthy exercise. It is—let us use the word—bigoted. Such abuse of fellow-Christians can only cheer the enemies of Christian faith.
Among the most brutal of the judgments which Sifton delivers is that upon Christian Zionists. This is a matter about which I feel strongly, and on which, having published two academic books with a third in the offing, I feel I am entitled to exercise a right-of-reply. This is her judgment: “Christian Zionists, who bear a distant doctrinal relation to today’s right-wing Christian supporters of right-wing [right wing twice over] Israeli politicians … hide their natural anti-Semitism under a strident support for the most intransigent forms of Zionism” (p. 222).
This is simple slander (which is why I have made a note of the page number). Give us the names of these anti-Semites and we will have them up before the ADL. The truth is that Christian Zionism is marked by a profound, unflagging, wall-to-wall commitment to the preservation of Israel and of Judaism and of Jews, at a time when Christian anti-Zionism is fully in control of the institutional voices of the NCCUSA, WCC, and all the mainline denominations—not to mention the secular-academic mainstream. It is not true today and never was true that most Christian Zionists are dispensationalists. Of course most Christian Zionists are premillennialist, in precisely the sense that the Creed is premillennialist (“He will come again to judge the living and the dead“). Christian activity directed to shoring up Israel, morally, financially, politically, is not driven by the dispensationalist agenda. It is unalloyed philo-Judaism, flourishing in a time when philo-Judaism is leaching out of all the other seats of learning and power. It is sustained by daily searching of Scripture, Old Testament and New Testament, issuing in the most authentic efforts at Jewish-Christian dialogue going on anywhere on earth. There can be no excuse for slandering the best friends that Israel has.
What makes this judgment so painful is that Reinhold Niebuhr was, as Sifton acknowledges, one of the relative handful of American clergymen who played a forward role in presenting the case for the Jewish state through the wartime years, making key interventions before Congressional bodies and before the bodies appointed by the United Nations in 1947-48 to study the matter of partition of the Palestine Mandate and the creation of both a Jewish and an Arab state.
As Sifton remembers it, the average Christian Zionist friend of the Jews in those days—not anyone related to her, of course, but the average one—was “a type of mild bigot who thought the real solution to the Jewish Problem was to send all the Jews—especially East European Jews—to Palestine, and thus to avoid the question of what to do about them in the countries of which they plausibly or implausibly wanted to be normal citizens.” I don’t know where this slanderous generalization could come from. It is certainly not from the literature of the Christian Zionists of the time, nor from their correspondence with each other, nor from the record of their proceedings nor from the record of their dealings with the Jewish Zionists. It is simply one more gem from the treasury of ancient liberal myths about conservative Christians. It was not bigotry, mild or potent, that caused people like her father to say out loud before the UN Committee that the Jews displaced by the war in Europe no longer had a future in Europe—nothing “implausible” about it—and that therefore justice required that the nations of the world establish a homeland in Israel. So also said all the Christian Zionists.
Christian Zionists in America drew their arguments from the same source as did the distinguished, better-bred, English Christian Zionists, like Lord Josiah Wedgwood, Blanche Dugdale, Arthur Balfour, and Lloyd George—none of whom qualifies, surely, as a bigot, even a mild one. They all believed, simply and boldly, that the restoration of the Jews to Israel would accomplish what both Jewish and Christian Scriptures had always said would be accomplished—the beginning of the process which will culminate in the lion lying down with the lamb. The failure over many decades of Western politicians to assist this accomplishment was a large part of the reason why it had been necessary for the world to go through the holocaust engineered by the pagan nationalist movement called Nazism.
Reinhold Niebuhr and the groups that he spoke for did not (as Sifton claims they did) ruminate on “the question [of] how to bring about international support for some kind of organized ‘home’ [emphasis added] for the Jews.” They demanded the implementation of the Balfour pledge to which the League, Great Britain, and the United States were committed. They demanded the creation of the Jewish State. They also said that the creation of a Jewish state would establish a foothold for “civilization” (you can look this up—they actually said “civilization”) in the midst of a “feudal” sea (they actually said that too); and they said that this would assist in the advance of reason, education, science, and the public good generally in the region.
This concern for the otherwise hopeless plight of the Jews, coupled with confidence in the capacity of Jews to build civilization, was the leitmotif of Reinhold Niebuhr’s public testimony and his writing on this theme. Why do we apologize for this? Why is it necessary to denigrate, with the accusation of bigotry, the motives of the good and godly people who were the most constant Christian friends of the Jews in those years when mainstream Christian voices (with the striking exception of Reinhold Niebuhr and a few friends) were still expressing doubts about the historicity of the Holocaust?
Reinhold Niebuhr did not live to see our day, when the intellectual and clerical Élites of America and Europe are saying out loud and in print, in the most official of official publications, that allowing the State of Israel to come into existence was a great mistake which can be rectified. The word bigot is used liberally in those circles. The words “illegitimate” and “occupation” are likewise very big in WCC documents. Also big in the same circle is the word “fundamentalist,” used with the same degree of historical wisdom which Sifton has shown in her slanderous dismissals of people whose Christian conscience was formed below the salt.
Truth to tell, there is plenty of company for the “Pentecostalists and Evangelicals” outside Elisabeth Sifton’s pale. The whole “barbarous, self-congratulatory sloth of what journalists call Mainstream American Protestantism” is spewn from her mouth.
Presbyterians, we learn, have “pursed mouths.” (My Scotch soul detects a racist stereotype there.) Methodists? Well, “while there was something fine in Methodism’s intensity and color … one didn’t like its politics.” And as for Roman Catholics, there are, it is true, a billion of them, but they are mired in “ritual rigamarole” and lamentably lacking in the “candor” of Protestant disputes over matters of dogma, preferring to “imagine that two millennia of self-appointed, celibate, hierarchical priests can better lay down the law for them.”
Sifton is quite embittered (I don’t think there is a better word) about this present world in which such unworthy people are the prominent religious and political figures. “It angers and saddens me,” she says, “on behalf of the spirited men and women in whose company I first encountered these issues, when I see the very term ‘religious’ hijacked all over the world by political forces who claim a godly right to organize society as they deem it best.” Well, we all feel like that at times. Nevertheless, we all have to get a grip on the desire to cast out those who are not “truly religious people.” It can only sadden us that one who has had the privileges which I have noted, and which we all should covet, should fall for the temptation of imagining herself qualified to distinguish the truly religious and cast out all the rest.
Paul C. Merkley is professor emeritus of history at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Of his several books on politics, theology, and history, the first was Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Account (McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press), and the two most recent are The Politics of Christian Zionism, 1891-1948 (Frank Cass) and Christian Attitudes Towards the State of Israel (McGill-Queen’s). A new book, Presidents, Religion and History, is forthcoming from Praeger.
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