Six Missionaries Martyred in Viet Nam

Six American missionaries—three men and three women—died at the hands of Viet Cong terrorists during the Tet lunar New Year offensive in Viet Nam. The slayings occurred at Ban Me Thuot, some 150 miles northeast of Saigon. They are thought to have been carried out January 30 and 31 (see account on page 16).

The Viet Cong also took at least two American missionaries captive.

The dead were:

• Miss Ruth Wilting, 42, of Cleveland, Ohio.

• The Rev. Robert Ziemer, 49, of Toledo, Ohio.

• The Rev. C. Edward Thompson, 43, and his wife, Ruth, 44, of New Kensington, Pennsylvania.

• Leon Griswold, 66, and his daughter, Carolyn, 41, of White Plains, New York.

All served under the Christian and Missionary Alliance, an 81-year-old evangelical denomination that gives top priority to foreign missionary work.

Several buildings on the CMA compound at Ban Me Thuot were destroyed during the Viet Cong attacks.

The two Americans seized by the Viet Cong were Henry Blood, of Portland, Oregon, and Miss Betty Olsen, of Nyack, New York. Miss Olsen is a nurse whose services presumably were deemed valuable to the Viet Cong.

Freed by the Viet Cong was Mrs. Marie Ziemer, whose husband was killed. Mrs. Ziemer was wounded but not seriously.

Only about three days before the attack, the three Ziemer children and the five Thompson children had left Ban Me Thuot for a boarding school in Malaysia.

Dr. Nathan Bailey, CMA president, said that although the Viet Cong marauders had invaded a number of South Vietnamese cities, only the missionaries in Ban Me Thuot were victimized. “Word from the State Department indicates that all of our other missionaries are considered safe,” Bailey said. CMA missionaries have been serving in a number of areas of South Viet Nam.

Missionaries in Dalat had a close call. Some thirty-four men, women, and children were evacuated by the American military only minutes before the Viet Cong attacked in force.

Dr. Louis L. King, CMA foreign secretary, was on a tour of Europe and Africa when the slayings occurred. He went immediately to Saigon after learning the news.

Ironically, while the news broke of the Viet Nam martyrdoms, a group of prominent clergymen were releasing in New York a 421-page, soft-cover “war crimes study.” The preface states that in Viet Nam the United States “must be judged guilty of having broken almost every established agreement for standards of human decency in times of war.”

The book was published by Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam, a two-year-old organization that claims a membership of 16,000. The group sponsored a two-day Washington protest demonstration against U. S. involvement in Viet Nam after the release of the volume.

The study, entitled In the Name of America, is signed by twenty-nine Christian and Jewish leaders, most of whom are familiar faces among the activists who have been protesting American policies in Viet Nam. They include Martin Luther King, Union Seminary President John Bennett, and Robert McAfee Brown.

A State Department official told Religious News Service the allegations against the United States “are not at all true legally and they are morally debatable.” He suggested that this war appears more awesome and gruesome than others because “for the first time in history people have been able to watch a war over a bowl of potato chips.”

Highlight of the Washington event was a silent vigil at Arlington National Cemetery by about 2,000 persons. Despite a series of legal appeals, the “Clergy Concerned” group was unable to get permission to hold a service at which King had been asked to speak. The Pentagon issued a statement saying that only a silent march would be allowed, and the courts upheld it.

ILLEGAL VOYAGES TO END?

The “Phoenix,” a fifty-foot ketch, has completed what its sponsors say will be the crew’s last effort “personally to deliver medical aid to suffering Vietnamese, no matter what the politics of the government under which they live.”

According to its Quaker sponsors in Philadelphia, the craft sailed into Haiphong, North Viet Nam, January 29 and unloaded $5,000 in surgical instruments and $2,000 worth of medicine. It was the third trip to Viet Nam for the “Phoenix” within a year. A load for South Viet Nam was never delivered because of a dispute over who should distribute it.

Quakers have acknowledged that the trips were illegal, but according to a spokesman they feel “conscience bound to do so … and … obligated to protest the brutal United States policy of terror.…”

SELECTIVE SOCIAL ACTION

Prominent churchmen joined in the condemnation of legal proceedings in South Africa under which thirty tribesmen were given prison sentences for terrorist activity. Some $37,500 in American church money had been given to aid the defendants, some of whom were accused of receiving guerrilla training in Communist China and the Soviet Union.

Dr. Arthur Larson, who flew to Pretoria to appear as an “observer” on behalf of the major ecumenical groups, called the sentencing a “monstrous travesty of law.” Larson, a Lutheran layman, teaches in a law research center at Duke University.

Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, called the sentencing a “tragedy.” The NCC, along with the Lutheran World Federation and the World Council of Churches, had tried to win leniency for the tribesmen, many of whom were members of the militant South-West Africa People’s Organization. Nineteen of them were sentenced to life imprisonment on charges that they returned to South-West Africa from abroad with weapons, that they took part in raids and skirmishes with police, and that they organized a plot to kill tribal leaders.

Ecumenical spokesmen agreed with a group of 200 American lawyers who condemned the trial of the tribesmen as a “flagrant violation of international law.” The lawyers said in a statement that the prosecution was illegal because the defendants were arrested in South-West Africa. The U. N. General Assembly ended South Africa’s jurisdiction over South-West Africa in 1966, but South Africa does not recognize the action.

South Africa prosecutors also were condemned because the tribesmen were convicted under an act passed in 1967 but made retroactive to 1962. The defendants could have received the death sentence.

The American denominations that contributed to the defense of the accused terrorists were the United Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, and United Church of Christ. The U. S. committee for the Lutheran World Federation also donated money, all of which was channeled through the NCC Africa Department.

That the case was a travesty of justice seemed quite clear. Similar travesties occur with discouraging regularity in Communist and other totalitarian countries. But the ecumenists ignore most of these—including those involving religious persecution—and chose instead to support apparently pro-Communist guerrillas.

DETROIT: MORE VIOLENCE?

Recent bomb threats to two moderate Negro ministers in Detroit raise fears of new racial violence in the riot-scarred city, National Catholic Reporter says.

An unexploded gasoline bomb was found at the home of the Rev. Roy Allen, head of the Detroit Council of Organizations, twenty-eight Negro groups opposing the militant-action committee headed by the Rev. Albert Cleage. The day after that bomb was found, a bomb exploded in the offices of the Baptist Pastors Council, headed by the Rev. Charles Williams, who takes a moderate civil-rights stance.

When Milwaukee activist Father James Groppi came to town recently, the meeting was disrupted by “Breakthrough,” a group that is urging whites to arm themselves.

Such activity comes in the wake of the worst city riot in American history, and a matter of weeks after participants in a social-ethics conference called by the National Council of Churches said violence may be a morally justifiable means to eradicate “systemic” violence in U. S. society.

DIGESTING THE NEW RELIGION

In honor of one of its February articles, “Are You Disturbed by the ‘New Religion’?,” Reader’s Digest sponsored a New York seminar to give the “new religionists an opportunity to speak for themselves” (which ones don’t?). The moderator was article-writer David Edman, an Episcopalian, ecumenical chaplain at Rochester Institute of Technology, and son of the late chancellor of Wheaton College, V. Raymond Edman.

First there was “new religion” jazz worship. Then a luncheon well attended by Digest brass and secretaries and by Union Seminary students who were not averse to gleaning a free lunch from a magazine few would admit ever reading.

Over lunch, the soft-spoken Edman said he left the evangelical camp after Wheaton because of its “man-centered” thrust. Now his contact with evangelicals “is rather slim—governed by their exclusiveness rather than mine.” “Biblical literalism is just uncongenial,” he added, but he refused classification as a thoroughgoing “new religionist.” His “first responsibility is Christ, out of which grow certain imperatives that deal with sins private and public.”

At the panel, Malcolm Boyd said explosively that the total death of the institutional church was needed. William Hamilton prophesied a “post-Christian, post-political mysticism” with people “who want to build a community without sin.” Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, immortalized in Time last month, said Judaism and Protestantism are in trouble because they are “religions of the Book,” whereas Catholicism is a “turned-on sensualism.”

Besides downgrading the man-God confrontation, speakers scornfully dismissed the printed word as inadequate for the new age. Yet in this McLuhan age more printed material is disseminated, and presumably read, than ever. We can wait to read the new religionists’ next books (or magazine articles).

JOHN EVENSON

The Diverse Dr. Poling

Few clergymen have involved themselves in a wider range of causes than Daniel A. Poling. The 83-year-old Poling died last month in Philadelphia, four days after attending the silver anniversary of one of these causes, the city’s Chapel of the Four Chaplains. It honors the World War II death at sea of his son Clark and three other clergymen who gave their lifebelts to others.

When Poling was a young Baptist pastor in Ohio, he ran for governor on the Prohibition ticket and got 47,000 votes, even though he was too young to serve. In his youth he also earned two college degrees, worked as a lumberjack, farmer, railroad man, and reporter, and suffered a severe gassing while doing YMCA relief work in Europe during World War I.

In the 1920s Poling entered the Reformed Church in America and became pastor of the venerable Marble Collegiate Church, New York City. He was once president of the RCA General Synod but switched again in 1936 to become pastor of Philadelphia’s Baptist Temple.

During the twenties Poling began a pioneer radio talk show on the NBC network and became editor of the sagging Christian Herald, which he turned into the biggest independent Protestant journal in the country. The journal also undertook such charitable works as the Bowery Mission, and Poling helped set up philanthropies for retailer J. C. Penney. In 1925 Poling was elected president of the International Society of Christian Endeavor, where he served for twenty-two years.

Poling’s most controversial activities were political. He lobbied long and hard for the successful Prohibition amendment. A lifelong Republican, he backed Roosevelt for president in 1944; but he believed enough in church-state separation to hire the Academy of Music in Philadelphia to announce it.

In 1951, the faltering Philadelphia Republican machine nominated Poling as its candidate for mayor, but he lost by 122,000 votes to the reform Democratic candidate Joseph Clark, now a U. S. Senator.

Poling was theologically conservative, anti-Communist, and anti-pacifist, and was one of the few big-name church leaders to oppose the Supreme Court prayer decision.

Poling received fourteen honorary degrees and all sorts of other honors. He was the author of more than two dozen books. Twice widowed, he is survived by one son, Daniel K., minister of an RCA church in New York City.

A VESSEL FOR EVANGELISM?

After plying the seas for three decades, the luxury liner “Queen Elizabeth” soon may enter her final berth. The world’s biggest passenger ship is up for sale, and chances are the buyer will put her at permanent anchor. Her sister ship the “Queen Mary” seems to have set a precedent in her new role at the dock in Long Beach, California.

One possibility for the “Queen Elizabeth” was raised by evangelist Billy Graham, who thought that use of the vessel as a floating school and/or Bible-conference facility might be worth exploring. Graham asked George Wilson, treasurer of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, to look into it. Wilson was in London in February attending a meeting.

The 83,000-ton vessel is more than 1,000 feet long and carries 2,288 passengers. The city of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reportedly offered its harbor to the ship if it is purchased by Graham’s organization.

Graham says he has suspended consideration—at least for the time being—of starting a university. He feels his role in such a school would be a “great diversion” from evangelism and speaking to secular audiences. He said world conditions give these priority status.

For a number of years there has been discussion of the feasibility of establishing a new Christian university, and Graham has at times expressed an interest in spearheading the project. He estimates it might cost $50,000,000 or more just to build the plant. “Twenty-two cities over the nation have offered property and finances for the school,” Graham said.

The prime site seemed recently to be along Florida’s eastern Gold Coast, where millionaire developer John D. MacArthur is said to have offered the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association a 1,000-acre plot for a campus in Palm Beach Gardens. The Florida Baptist Convention has been holding up its own plans for a new college pending Graham’s decision on whether he would start a school there.

NOT FOR TV-WATCHERS?

“I’m trying to reach some kid who is hung up on LSD and probably hates TV,” declared adman-satirist Stan Freberg, discussing the new color TV spot he produced for the United Presbyterian Church.

The spot features a well-groomed hippie, on camera, whose “bag” is reading psychedelic posters, talking with Freberg, who is off camera.

“It’s not so much that I want people to believe in God as opposed to not believing in God,” Freberg says. “I would just like to remind them of his existence.… I believe God is present in this world and that Christ died for us and was killed and rose again and I think if you believe this you will try to stop war and nonsense and bigotry.”

Freberg is also preparing a new series of radio spots based on the “God-Is-Dead” theme. “… While it has been pretty well covered from the pulpit,” he said, “I felt that somebody should say something out here in the so-called mass media for the benefit of those people who might have been tied up the last couple of Easter Sundays.”

The spots will be distributed as public-service announcements in cooperation with the Broadcasting and Film Commission of the National Council of Churches.

CHURCH-STATE MONOLOGUE

“I gather from looking at your program you are going to be carrying on a dialogue among yourselves,” chided a Roman Catholic lawyer as the national conference of Americans United for Separation of Church and State opened last month. “You have nothing to lose by creating a little more dialogue with those with whom you differ.” Whatever the merits of the suggestion, it was ignored as the Cincinnati convention raised its traditional warning flag over blurring lines between church and state.

The opening debate on “Should Churches Pay Taxes?” proved the most provocative session. Dr. Paul A. Reynolds, philosophy professor at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, took thirty-two pages to say “yes.” Dr. Roy Nichols, Negro minister of Salem Methodist in New York City, needed only six to say “no.”

Three reactors—a Jewish rabbi, a fundamentalist Bible-college president, and the Catholic layman—agreed with Nichols. William R. Schumacher, the Catholic layman, who is active in ecumenical circles in Cincinnati, also suggested that men of reason will have to settle the thorny problem of federal assistance to parochial schools. He said he doubted whether the courts could ever settle the issue.

Dr. C. Stanley Lowell, associate director, said many mainline Protestant denominational leaders who once were friendly to the organization have now turned against it. “We haven’t changed, they have,” he explained. “We still stand at the same place we did twenty-one years ago. The reason for their change is that they now seek … public funds for the support of their programs and institutions.”

He said activist clergymen now leave the pulpit for bureaucratic positions without missing a step or even bothering to change their collars. He estimates that 1,000 Protestant clergymen have left their parishes to work for the Office of Economic Opportunity.

Dr. Glenn L. Archer, executive director, told the 150 delegates that history shows that when church and government meet at the public treasury, the church is put in jeopardy.

“More recently, a few politicians and churchmen, tipsy with the new wine of brotherhood, have involved the church and state in social-welfare programs at public expense until the American public is beginning to wonder which is church and which is state,” he said.

During the conference Archer received a bomb threat, the fourth in his career. Someone called the hotel to say he had planted a bomb in Archer’s room. Hotel and city police combed the room carefully but found nothing.

The longest applause during the conference came at the request of the camera crew that was filming part of the program for the upcoming CBS documentary on church wealth. They asked the delegates to applaud three times for the camera.

In a 7 A. M. board meeting on the last day, an enlarged program for 1968 was adopted, calling for:

• Expanded educational program with chapters and committees in many new communities and special appearances on at least 100 college campuses.

• Broadening of already extensive legal assistance in the church-state field. Much of this is predicated on the hope the organization can win standing in courts.

• A goal of 60,000 new members, a figure well beyond that achieved in any previous year. (The group now claims 200,000 members.)

• A direct appeal to churches to refuse all tax funds for support and to exercise their ministries in the deepening of spiritual concerns.

JAMES L. ADAMS

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.