Reshaping a Peace Lobby

If anything specific came forth from this month’s third National Mobilization for Peace in the nation’s capital, it was the apparent shift in emphasis from Viet Nam to “healing the wounds” war has caused within the nation. With the shape of the peace table resolved in Paris, the nation’s most conspicuous ecumenical peace movement—Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam—lost most of its thunder. The result: a dramatic reshaping of its own raison d’etre.

As spokesmen tried to weld the woes of the home front—racial unrest, unheeded cries of the poor, moribund cities—to what they decried as an “immoral” political debacle in Viet Nam, a number of observers failed to see the catenation holding. But from ascendant rights leader Coretta King through Yale’s jail-bound William Sloane Coffin, Jr., they insisted on forging the links.

Energetic 34-year-old United Church of Christ minister Richard R. Fernandez—administrator of the group, which has a mailing list of 25,000—sought in vain an audience with President Richard M. Nixon. Instead, leaders settled for a forty-minute interview with top foreignpolicy aide Henry Kissinger. Lyndon Johnson hadn’t allowed them any contact with his staff the previous two years.

The bitterest note of all, however, was directed not toward the President nor toward the United States as “aggressor” in Viet Nam, as in previous years, but toward unspecified religious leaders who were ostentatious before the Justice Department turned its guns on Coffin and baby doctor Benjamin Spock but went into hiding when the trial came up.

“We are scandalized,” a position paper fumed, “by the failure of bishops and religious leaders to follow through their support for selective conscientious objection. With few exceptions, they have refused to testify in court for selective objectors, to marshal public opinion for the legislative changes they profess to desire, or even to visit objectors in prison.”

Fernandez said “it is understandable that churchmen do not want to come to the defense of those who have broken the law,” but intimated they were well aware the time would come when such a stand would be necessary.

Confrontation-prone parson Carl McIntire put it a lot more bluntly: “There is a great deal of fear and weakness in this ecumenical movement. The clergymen are afraid of the man in the pulpit and his reaction against this.” Keeping his cool, the separationist preacher tried to make the most of an open forum the peacemakers invited him to. After an hour of give-and-take on the meaning of “love thy enemy,” each side agreed only that the other person’s “love” was an unlovely “love.”

Mrs. King led an entourage of 500—mostly clerics and seminarians, though the group’s paid-up constituency is mostly lay—to the Justice Department steps.

She said she would not be satisfied with the old Johnson priorities of guns and butter. “I want it made explicitly clear,” she said, “I do not want guns—with or without butter.” She wants so to organize the black and white poor that there will be no political leader “who will have the temerity to offer us guns or butter.”

A different forum from Clergy and Laymen Concerned would have to be her choice for enlisting blacks to her cause, judging from the makeup of the group. Aside from a few showcase Negroes addressing workshops and an occasional one in the ranks, the anti-war effort was youthful, middle-class white. There was also a noticeable absence of members from the historic “peace churches.”

When several newsmen started picking away at often repeated allegations that make America the villain by sliding over Viet Cong hostilities, Washington Post religion writer William Mac-Kaye saved Fernandez from obvious discomfort when he injected, “Can’t we talk about something else?” Last year, a high-ranking State Department spokesman raked the same group over the coals for an imbalanced “documentary” entitled, In the Name of America, Stop! He claimed, among other things, that the book was a unilateral indictment of the United States, unsupported by objectivity.

Despite de-emphasis on the war itself, New York’s Rabbi Abraham Heschel said Nixon can with one word—“pardon”—do much to heal the rift in the nation. “Jail must not be the price” for expressing one’s conscience against the war, he said. With the Paris palaver stilling many of the guns of Viet Nam, amnesty and draft reform are becoming the major new war-related objectives of the peace movement.

Prayer Amendment No. 3

Since Madalyn Murray O’Hair knocked school devotional life into a tizzy, Presbyterian-Reformed Senator Everett M. Dirksen (R.-Ill.) has battled to let Americans demonstrate their faith on tax-supported property. Partially because of his uphill fight, Dirksen has become a hero among religious and political conservatives.

Early in his drive he joshed journalists that his plan for getting a prayer amendment passed was “simply devilish.” That session he came to within six votes of the two-thirds needed in the Senate to get the bill on the way to its next big hurdle.* He started again the first day of the next session with a streamlined version that never got past the Senate Judiciary Committee. For years, in the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Emanuel Celler (D.-N.Y.) has sat on a similar but stronger measure.

The Ninety-first Congress is now faced with the identical measure:

“Nothing contained in this Constitution shall abridge the right of persons lawfully assembled, in any public building which is supported in whole or in part through the expenditure of public funds, to participate in nondenominational prayer.”

It is doubtful that Dirksen can muster the required two-thirds head count. But more ominous to opposing legislators is a sleeping giant: the possibility of calling a constitutional convention. One by one, thirty-two of the required thirty-four states have called for one. There is some debate whether Congress would be obligated to call a convention even if the thirty-fourth state did approve. This way to amend the Constitution has never been employed, and many legislators fear its use.

Most feel Dirksen also fears it but will use its threat to force a second thought in Congress. Even many opponents of the bill, though they don’t think Congress will ever approve, know full well that if the grass roots gets a chance at it, it probably will stand a good chance of passing. Polls have repeatedly shown that a majority of Americans favor public-school devotional exercises.

Curve For ‘Vinegar Bend’

Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell, one-time major-league pitcher, got a fast curve thrown at him in the first inning of his congressional career when the Federal Communications Commission served up a complete ban on cigarette advertising over radio and television.

Mizell is described by fellow churchmen at Faith Missionary Alliance Church near tobacco capital Winston-Salem as “Mr. Clean Living himself.” He is dead set against cigarette smoking—“I don’t smoke and I don’t want my boys to”—and until entering Congress last month was a Sunday-school teacher and deacon in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a denomination where smoking is strongly frowned upon and, in many churches, strongly denounced.

But Winston-Salem, whose very streets smell of freshly shredded tobacco, is no place for a congressman to be on the wrong side of this particular question.

Mizell’s approach is to attack the FCC for overextending its bounds, a theme most Southern fundamentalists will sympathize with. He is sponsoring legislation to “restrict the FCC or any other federal agency from prohibiting the advertising of any product that is legally produced and sold in the United States and its territories.”

Mizell feels the agency is arbitrarily taking on itself what only Congress should do. He said the FCC’s action is directed “toward a single industry with no recourse to that industry to defend itself.”

The Tarheel legislator filtertipped his announcement, however: “Requiring that warnings of the hazards of cigarette smoking be printed on packages and cartons of cigarettes is one thing, but to prohibit all advertising of cigarettes by administrative decree, to my way of thinking, exceeds the statutory powers of the FCC as provided by law.”

Although the ban would take away $244.4 million in advertising annually, other sponsors are eagerly standing in line and any network loss would probably be slight and temporary.

Government reports on the dangers of smoking, along with a convincing ad campaign to dissuade smokers from the habit, underline the health question.

Top foes of cigarette advertising—including Mormon, non-smoking Senator Frank E. Moss of Utah—have the precedent of many foreign nations to bolster their plea. Cigarette ads are restricted in one way or another from Israel to Iceland. France and England don’t permit ads on television. In Finland, the ad ration is one a night, and that after nine so children won’t get any ideas. Communist Czechoslovakia won’t allow any cigarette ads over radio or television, and in Ireland they are being phased out by 1971. Even the most optimistic reformers acknowledge it will be a hard fight to duplicate this in America. But they see the smoke clearing.

WILLIAM WILLOUGHBY

Interfaith Scaffold In Iraq

During the Mideast’s game of action and reaction between Israel and the Arabs, relations between U. S. Jews and Christians wax alternately hot and cold, depending on the most recent retaliatory attack.

When Israel all but destroyed Lebanon’s commercial air fleet, general Christian reaction was against the Jews (see January 31 issue, page 36). Now emotions and rhetoric have swung dramatically the other way, denouncing as “racist” and “barbarian” the hanging and public display of fourteen persons in Baghdad, among them nine Jews.

Pope Paul VI had pleaded in vain that the Iraqis would show mercy to those branded as traitors or spies. His was one of the more forceful denunciations of the hangings.

Numerous ranking churchmen issued condemnations, and some dispatched a message to President Nixon, asking him to go to the United Nations and criticize the action “with the same vigor with which we have condemned other acts of terrorism and reprisal in the Middle East.”

The President did not take the case to the international forum, but behind-the-scenes actions gained assurances from Israel that she would not act in reprisal against Iraq, and thus burst a badly strained situation.

One evangelical leader spoke out against the Iraq action. Dr. Harold John Ockenga, minister of Boston’s historic Park Street (Congregational) Church, said the Church should condemn Iraq if the executions were merely retaliatory. But he cautioned: “We have to find out if they really were spies. If they were, it is purely a matter for Iraq to handle and the churches should not interfere.”

Many American Jewish leaders, among them former U. N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, complained of general Christian lassitude over the seemingly endless blowups in the Bible lands. Goldberg, now president of the American Jewish Congress, also appealed for the United States to open its doors to Jews locked in Iraq if they are able to leave. He said “Iraq’s Jews have only one hope—that the outraged voice of the world’s conscience will persuade the Iraqi authorities to let them leave the country.”

CHRISTIANITY TODAY Beirut correspondent Lillian Harris Dean reports that Iraq’s ambassador to Britain, Kadhim Khalaf, denied that the hangings were anti-Jewish “since both Christians and Muslims also were among those condemned. Six Jews were among those acquitted.” And the chief rabbi of Iraq’s embattled Jews likewise followed the national party line. Arab newspapers gave full coverage to the Iraqi situation, though even some Arab governments were not overly enthusiastic in their backing. The fear was that Israel, by showing restraint in the face of advertising, would win the big propaganda struggle.

Although few question that the spy charges were trumped up against the Jews, the lot of Christians in Iraq since 1958 has also been less than sanguine. That year the few missionaries there were ordered out. Last month, all foreign teachers at the Jesuit Al Hikma University in Baghdad were expelled, as they had been before. The university was the only one in the country that that would admit Jews.

Estimates put the evangelical population in the nation of eight million at 300 to 500. These are in four small Arab Evangelical churches (Presbyterian) and a small Arab assembly at Basra. Baghdad, a city of one million, claims an Assyrian Evangelical Church as well as two small Armenian churches.

Little more than a decade ago there were some 200,000 Jews in Iraq, tracing their history back to the biblical days of the captivity under Nebuchadnezzar. Now there are only 2,000, and many of these have been jerked into prison or are under virtual house arrest, unable to leave the country. Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, ordinarily ready to extract at least a tooth for a tooth, held back, largely in fear for this remnant.

Directly related to the Iraq and Lebanon incidents was the closing—for the first time in 1,630 years—of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, believed to mark the burial site of Jesus. Over the protests of Patriarch Cyrillos of the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Jewish government closed the shrine until Christian and Muslim leaders could convince some Arab women to call off a sit-in and hunger strike protesting Israeli occupation of Arab lands.

Ghana: No More Nkrumahs

Three years after the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah, a message read from Protestant pulpits throughout Ghana calls on Christians to discharge civic responsibilities as faithfully as they can at this crucial juncture in the nation’s history.

The country is cautiously returning to civilian rule, and the new constitution has glamorous promises. But Ghanians still nurse a deep-seated distrust of politicians. They remember corruption and loss of individual liberty under Nkrumah. They have experienced the bitter irony of being oppressed by the hero of their national liberation struggle, who “redeemed” them from the yoke of colonial oppression.

The pulpit message from the Christian Council of Ghana admits guilt: “One of the major reasons why the terrible evils of the Nkrumah regime were allowed to develop was that many of us Christians failed to stand up for justice and truth.”

The council attacks the attitude that politics is the devil’s playground and decent Christians should shun it. “God wants us to serve him in civic matters,” it says, and without political action Christians cannot effectively apply God’s will against such social evils as bad housing, unemployment, poverty, disease, drugs, and obscene films and literature.

The council calls on educated Christians to inform themselves and other church members on local and national affairs and to try to see them in the light of God’s will; to promote public discussion on important issues; to join political parties and bring Christian influence and criticism to bear on their policies; and to oppose publicly unfair character attacks, misleading promises, and appeals to tribal feelings.

Educated Christians should also participate fully in government as individuals, the council says. “Honest and efficient government can bring great benefits—and bad government can cause great misery”; bribery and corruption will wither away only if Christians and others are in positions to counteract these evils. The church council also urges Christians to pray for the development of sound political life, and for the emergence of leaders of integrity and ability.

ODHIAMBO W. OKITE

Miscellany

After two robberies in two days and a plague of previous thefts, the rector of St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie (Episcopal) in New York City said he might be forced to close the historic church.… Twenty pieces of jewelry and other valuables valued at $30,000 were stolen from showcases at the Washington, D. C., Episcopal cathedral, but recov the 175,000 Greeks in Germany, and in other nations. Preacher Costas Vangis was halted at an Athens airport and had his passport confiscated. Evangelicals fear the Greek Orthodox Church, which supports the military, is pressing such controls.

Christian and Missionary Alliance missionaries are restoring the leprosy center at Ban Me Thuot, South Viet Nam, which was heavily damaged in a Communist attack a year ago.

DEATHS

WINFRED E. GARRISON, 94, liberal leader in the Disciples of Christ; ecumenist, educator, theologian, and prolific author; leader in New Mexico statehood; president of three colleges; professor at the University of Chicago and dean of Disciples Divinity House; later religion chairman at the University of Houston; in Houston, three weeks after a heart attack.

LEONARD S. MEYER, 60, Christian Century staffer for thirty-seven years, most of them as business manager; in Chicago, of lung cancer and influenza.

SAM HERSCH, 62, general manager of Family Films, one of the biggest U. S. religious movie producers; in Hollywood, of a heart attack.

FRIEDRICH MULLER, 84, bishop of the Lutheran church in Transylvania, Rumania, which lost half of its membership under Communism; of a heart attack.

DOMINIQUE PIRE, 58, Belgian Dominican who won the 1958 Nobel Peace Prize for work with refugees from Eastern Europe; after surgery in a Louvain hospital.

JOHANNES P. VAN HEEST, 79, president of Holland’s Evangelical Lutheran Church when it merged with the “Restored” Lutheran church; in Amsterdam.

EDUARDO CHIVAMBO MONDLANE, 48, Presbyterian layman who led the underground against Portuguese rule in Mozambique with some U. S. church support; killed by a bomb blast in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Church Panorama

In President Nixon’s mailbox: A plea from Church Women United for action on the Kerner Commission proposals, a ban on police force against dissenters, putting farm workers under the NLRB, sending of 1 per cent of the gross national product to underdeveloped lands, freer trade, and lots more.… A less wide-ranging statement from Lutheran Church Women (LCA).… And notice from the National Council of Churches’ race director that the administration’s “apparent support” of delayed enforcement of school desegregation is inexcusable.

The Methodist higher-education division will continue to publish motive for the next three years, while making “every effort” to line up an ecumenical sponsor for the arty campus monthly.

A trust fund to back Anglican churches that want to stay outside the merger with the United Church of Canada has been set up in Winnipeg, reports the Anglican monthly. The paper’s former Editor A. Gordon Baker cites lay opposition and fears merger procedures will so compromise members of both churches that they will be forced “to seek a church home elsewhere.”

The Vatican denied reports that a major consistory for elevation of new cardinals was postponed indefinitely because some nominees declined the offer of a red hat in opposition to church policies.

Peru’s Catholic bishops coupled a call for sweeping changes in the nation’s ownership of farms and industry with a promise to reform operations on land owned by the church itself. They said that “Peruvian society lives in a state of sin because of the social, economic, cultural, and political injustices that burden the country.”

A Lutheran spokesman said South Africa’s plan to resettle two million of Natal’s blacks in the next several years could have dire consequences for the 600 Lutheran churches there.

Some 1,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses are said to have fled Zambia after violent attacks from the ruling party over their refusal to join in politics.

Personalia

John A. T. Robinson, 50, Britain’s Honest to God Bishop of Woolwich, is resigning to become dean of Trinity College, Cambridge University, where he will run the chapel and administer theological students.

A Mexican government airliner this month carried from Cuba long-imprisoned Southern Baptist missionaries Herbert Caudill, 65, his son-in-law David Fite, 35, their wives, and two Fite children.

The Rev. Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland’s most militant Protestant, served notice he would run against Prime Minister Terence O’Neill for his seat in this month’s election. Paisley’s anti-Catholic crusaders are also putting up candidates to challenge other incumbent legislators.

For reasons that were not immediately clear, the Vatican reportedly shut down the “Center for Intercultural Documentation” in Cuernavaca, Mexico. A letter imposing the ban cited “many complaints” against “the unfortunate effects that the instruction given in the aforesaid center brings about.” The center, headed by Msgr. Ivan Illich, stressed courses in Latin American culture and included a highly regarded language school that drew both Catholic and Protestant missionaries.

Roman Catholic “progressives” hailed the Vatican’s selection of the Most Rev. Vincente Enrique y Tarancón as primate of Spain, but some say the primacy has little practical significance because real leadership is exercised by the national bishops’ council.

Dr. Clarence C. Walton, a prominent social scientist, will become the first lay head of the Catholic University of America. Walton, 53, is now a dean at Columbia and has also taught at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh.

A liturgical commission of the Church of England wants to set festival days for such thorns in Anglican flesh as George Fox, John and Charles Wesley, and John Bunyan.

A Negro clergyman from Chicago is a candidate for the presidency of the United Church of Christ. The Rev. Arthur D. Gray is expected to be a formidable opponent for the official nominee, the Rev. Robert V. Moss, Jr., president of Lancaster Theological Seminary.

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