ebook img

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

258 Pages·013.414 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

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

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.

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.