Free Churches and Social Change: A Critical Study of the Council for Social Action of the Congregational Christian Churches of the United States

258 Pages·013.414 MB·English

by  Pangborn, Cyrus Ransom

FREE CHURCHES AND SOCIAL CHANGE
A Critical Study of
THE COUNCIL FOR SOCIAL ACTION
of the
Congregational Christian Churches
of the
United States
By
CYRUS RANSOM PANGBORN
Submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,
under the Joint Committee on Graduate Instruction,
Columbia University.
1951
PREFACE
When the idea of studying the Council for Social Action was born,
it did not occur to me that the task would so completely and unflaggingly
engage my interest from the moment research was begun until the lastp age
of the manuscript was proofread and corrected. That interest in the topic
should be so sustained is due to Ray Gibbons, Director of the Council, and
to his predecessors and the staff for having made the agency's work an ab­
sorbing subject. My gratitude to them cannot be more forcefully expressed.
I thank Professor John C. Bennett of Union Theological Seminary for
the enthusiasm with which he endorsed the topic and guided the study from
outline to conclusion. Professor Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological
Seminary suggested that the Council be examined in the context of the
whole social history of American Congregationalism. Both he and Professor
Herbert W. Schneider of Columbia University have placed me in their debt
for the valued guidance they have so willingly given.
The finished work is dedicated to my wife, Roberta, who has gladly-
employed her own professional skills in order to make full-time graduate
study possible, and to our daughter, Wendy, who accepted many hours of
care by others for loyalty to a goal she little understood but sensed
was incomparably important.
In point of time my father and mother are my first creditors.
Thirty years ago a college education was considered by most people in our
small farm community a luxury that "turned young people's heads." But as
far back as I can remember, it was taken for granted by my parents that I
ii
would "go away to college." Their assumption carried me there. Professor
Ben F. Kimpel, now of Brothers College, Drew University, sent me on, with
a vision of the goal inspired by his own intellectual vitality and warm
interest in students.
At denominational headquarters Miss Jennie Evans, competent office
manager for the Council for Social Action, refused to be irked by ny prying,
maintaining instead a consistently cheerful willingness to give the appear­
ance of working for me rather than the Council. Miss Florence Debus of
the General Council office lent indispensable materials and ofttimes spared
me trouble by looking up information herself. Dean Listen Fope and Professor
Kenneth Und^-wood kindly opened to me their editors' files of Social Action
magazine in V Social Ethics Research Library of the Yale Divinity School.
Several staff secretaries and friends have helpfully suggested problems to
be explored and corrections for errors of fact. For the frequently ex­
pressed convictions and the final conclusions, however, I alone am respon­
sible. Harper and Brothers have permitted me to quote from Toward a Reborn
Church by Walter Marshall Horton.
It is my hope that this volume, to which so many have thus con­
tributed, will invite reflection by churchmen of many denominations on
"the relation of the church to the world," and suggest the urgency of
finding ever more adequate institutional means of enabling the free
churches of congregational polity to bear a Christian social witness.
May 1951 C.R.P.
iii
CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION 1
Chapter
I. HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION: THE FIRST THREE CENTURIES 4
New England Theocracy 4.
The Social Basis of Religious Institutions
The Structure of New England Theocracy
Social "Views Consistent with the Theocratic Structure
Congregationalism: Church and Sect
Congregationalism Becomes a Denomination 18
Good Works
Denominational Consciousness
Ethical Awakening
A "Limited Church11
II. THE COUNCIL FOR SOCIAL ACTION: FRUIT OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 28
The National Council: Index of Socialized Congregationalism 28
Incarnations and Institutions of the Social Spirit ... 34
III. THE CREATION OF THE COUNCIL FOR SOCIAL ACTION 41
Proposed 4-1
Created ..... 44
Organized and Defended 4-8
IV. THE WORK OF THE COUNCIL FOR SOCIAL ACTION 56
The Program Departments 56
International Relations
Industrial Relations
Agricultural Relations
Race Relations
Legislative Department
Varied Moral and Ethical Concerns . 115
V. THE CHARACTER OF THE COUNCIL FOR SOCIAL ACTION 120
Publications 120
Personnel 128
The Directors
The Secretarial Staff
Committees and Procedures
The Formulation of Policy 136
iv
Chapter Page
VI. THE COUNCIL FOR SOCIAL ACTION AND THE DENOMINATION U3
- Heir to Many Fortunes > » . . 143
The Council for Social Action, the GeneralC ouncil, and
Established Boards 146
The Struggle for Autonomy
Dollar Diplomacy
Agent, Critic, and Student of Other Boards
Author of General Council Social Resolutions
Prophetic Voice for a Conservative Constituency
VII. PRAISE AND BLAME 167
Lengthening Shadows Cast by the Profit-Motive Resolution 168
Fury Unleashed 171
Storm Centers 173
Contemporary Tempests 178
Riding out the Storm 187
VIII. GOD, THE WORLD, THE CHURCH, AND THE C.S.A 189
Theology 189
The Nev/ Theology
Theology and the C.S.A.
Theories of the Church 196
Trends in Congregationalism
Theories of the Church and the C.S.A.
Protestant Social Christianity . 214.
Protestant Denominations in Social Action
The Federal Council of Churches and the C.S.A.
The Ecumenical Movement and the C.S.A.
Church and Society 224.
APPENDICES 235
BIBLIOGRAPHY 242
v
INTRODUCTION
A Congregationalist seldom refers to his denomination as the
Congregational Church. He knows the larger fellowship on its institu­
tional side as the congregational Churches.1 He belongs not to the
Church but to a church—that is, to a local church which is one of
many Congregational Christian Churches. Except for reference to a
particular local church, a lapse into the singular represents a gramma­
tical license scarcely justified by ecclesiastical polity.
Practice often affirms, however, what theory denies. In
principle the churches are free and autonomous. Taken together they do
not constitute a Church. But in practice the Congregational Churches
of the United States, as gathered into a denomination, have been Church-
type at least as much as they have been independent, sect-type churches.
This truth will serve as a guide without carrying the heavier
burden of contributing the thesis of this study. The aim is not to es­
tablish a sociological typology and then to distinguish Congregationalism
by its conformity to a particular pattern in an order of types. This
approach had for its pioneer Ernst Troeltsch. Any study of the social
evolution of the churches would suffer scholarly impoverishment if it
did not give evidence of indebtedness for insight to his The Social
Teaching of the Christian Churches. But the present study is not the
elaboration of a type. It is an inquiry into the social thinking and
^Since 1951, when the Congregational Churches and the Christian
Churches were united by a merger of their national representative councils,
the proper designation has been Congregational Christian Churchesj but in
practice the combined groups are probably more often called simply Congre-
'gational.
1
2
the social program of a denomination. The difference in method emerges
more clearly when Troeltsch speaks for himself. After distinguishing the
Church-type from the sect-type religious fellowship, he v/rote:
Thus, in reality we are faced with two different-sociological
types. This is true in spite of"the fact (which is quite immaterial)
that incidentally in actual practice they may often impinge upon one
another.1
What was immaterial to Troeltsch, however, is exactly thec oncern of this
study: "actual practice"—what one denomination has actually believed and
done. Whereas his analyses of religious fellowships illustrated his types
and supported the validity of his typology, these types and their combina­
tions will here serve only as a kind of illuminating commentary on a partic­
ular denominational tradition.
Sociological method—given the measure in which it is used—will
serve a second purpose. It will qualify the use made of historical method
and dictate the selection of only that historical material which has the
most distinctive sociological relevance. The resulting method may best be
called socio-historical.
Beyond describing method, it remains to be said that interest in
the present and the recent past will take precedence over the long three
hundred years of earlier American Congregationalism. It is the Council
for Social Action and its "life and work" which will monopolize the
greater number of these pages. To anticipate, Congregationalism has
always treated social problems as quite within its domain. Its voice
for three centuries was by and large one of conservative social orthodoxy.
The query of this study is whether or not, and in what measure, the de­
nomination has spoken with different accent in the first half of this
century—and particularly in the last sixteen years—since the Council
lErnst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches,
trans. Olive Vfy-on (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), I> .34-0.
3
for Social Action was given its mandate toe ngage in social research,
education, and action.
The past is our starting point for the reason that the Council
is explicable only as a genetic offspring of remote ancestors. Among
"the monuments and tombs of a buried antiquity"1 lie clues to the nature
of the social mind of a denomination that has found the means of pro­
pagating itself although the tradition which first gave it nurture died.
^Herbert W. Schneider, The Puritan Mind (New York: Henry Holt
and Company, 1930), p. 5.
CHAPTER I
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION: THE FIRST THREE CENTURIES
New England Theocracy
The Social Basis of Religious Institutions
The institutions of our common life are the products of ideologies
and situations in interaction. Congregationalism in America, as one
form of institutionalized religious experience, is no exception. It is
the product of doctrines that have been revised under the influence of
at least three broad changes in social situation. In turn, social situa­
tions have been given structure, sustained, and transformed in no small
degree by doctrines of Congregationalism. It cannot be said here which
has been more cause, and which, more effect. We may go back of both
doctrine and situation to the values which men cherish—values which
they seek to preserve intact either by constructing doctrines and creat­
ing situations which incorporate them, or by revs.mping doctrinal formulas
and altering situs.tions in order to insure if possible the survival of
timeless values within a new context.^- But the question of which is
cause and which effect remains, since we may still ask if, among the
timeless values cherished by Congregationalists, the distinctively re­
ligious have always taken precedence over other social values, or vice
versa. Perhaps the most that can be said is that no ideal has more
^For a discussion bearing on this point, see F. Ernest Johnson,
The Social Gospel Re-examined (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers,
1940), pp. 31, 3U*
4
5
continuously commanded Congregationalists1 loyalty than the ideal of
realizing the kingdom of God—if not in this world, then in the next.
Nevertheless, philosophers of history will have to decidew hether the
ideal has been primary or derivative. Social historians, like Parring-
ton,1 have argued that the loyalties of early New Englanders were
primarily social, while Richard Niebuhr has averred quite the opposite:
. . . the Kingdom of God to which these men .. . w ere loyal was
not simply American culture or political and economic interest
exalted and ioealized; it was rather a kingdom that was prior to
America and to which this nation, in its politics and economics,
was required to conform.^
These early American Protestants believed in the kingdom of God
... the living reality of God's present rule not only in
human spirits but also in the world of nature and of human history
• . . ; loyalty to it and obedience to its laws were the conditions
of their temporal and eternal welfare.^
It may seem that Niebuhr contradicts himself when he writes
elsewhere that "doctrines and practice change with mutations of social
structure, not vice versa . . .and that the relationships of dif­
ferent forms of church polity to the political experience and desire of
various groups is "considerably more pertinent than is their relation­
ship to the New Testament."5 But in the first instance he is speaking
of values, and in the other, of the doctrines and situations that embody
values. We agree with his ordering of doctrines and situations while
resisting the temptation to arbitrate between philosophers of history
^See Vernon Louis Parrington, The Colonial Mind. 1620-1800.
Vol. I, Main Currents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1927), p. 6.
%. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (Chicago:
Willett, Clark & Company, 1937), p. 10.
5Ibid.. p. 51.
Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1929), p. 21.
5Ibid., p. 15.