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11 Shifting Perspectives on Africa in Mainline Protestant Social Thought “Among the many journals of opinion published in the United States is one of comparatively short years and small circulation, having a title that suggests a parochial concern relevant only to the very devout.”1 So began an article on the December 1, 1966 financial page of the Rockland Record, a newspaper serving a suburb of New York. Why should this newspaper care if, as its article discussed, the small Protestant journal Christianity and Crisis withdrew $25,000 from First National City Bank to protest its investments in South Africa?2 The Record provided clues. “With most periodicals the measure of influence is how many readers,” it said. “With ‘C&C’ as it is called in church circles , the measure of its readers is who they are.” Quoting Time magazine, the Record judged that “[C&C’s] influence is well out of proportion to its size,” with subscribers like former secretary of state John Foster Dulles, theologian Paul Tillich, liberal pundit Walter Lippmann, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.3 C&C enjoyed the prestige of its founder Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the nation’s most influential liberal intellectuals, and his longtime colleague and coeditor, John Coleman Bennett of Union Theological Seminary in New York. Its influence was strongest among liberal Protestant academics, clergy, and bureaucrats, including many leaders of mainline seminaries, religious social action agencies, and ecumenical organizations.4 Mark Hulsether The Case of the Christianity and Crisis Magazine Chapter 1 12 Shifting Perspectives on Africa C&C also gained attention from secular elites. Consider how it boosted the career of Ernest Lefever, who later helped to spearhead attacks on the programs of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Africa and was nominated in 1981 to be Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights. According to Lefever, his big break came in 1954 when he wrote a C&C article pressing the WCC to be more realistic about communism. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s notice of the article led Paul Nitze (the head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff) to arrange a grant for Lefever to work with him.5 Although Lefever’s career path is atypical for C&C because he was among the journal’s most conservative writers, stories about C&C’s links to power are easy to multiply. Many prominent religious intellectuals, from Cornel West on the left to Michael Novak on the right, built their early reputations largely through writing in C&C. Senator Eugene McCarthy and Walter Lippmann helped with fund-raising. Nitze and famed anthropologist Margaret Mead served on its editorial board. Niebuhr served on George Kennan’s Policy Planning Team at the State Department and was a key organizer of Americans for Democratic Action. All this involvement meant that C&C’s trickle-down importance was considerable . In 1946 Niebuhr published an article in two versions, one for C&C’s seven thousand readers and one for Life Magazine’s four million.6 The New York Times often reported on C&C editorials. Such evidence does not prove any direct correspondence between C&C and an average churchgoer’s ideas, or even between C&C and the sermons of mainline ministers. It does suggest some broad correlation between trends inside C&C and among a wider mainline Protestant constituency. The Rockland Record, thus, had some reason to care about C&C’s stance toward South African divestment. This concern in turn helps explain why the Record concluded with a warning shot across C&C’s bow. It used an argument that hit C&C where it hurt. C&C prided itself on religiously motivated actions for social justice that remained within the bounds of the pragmatically attainable; its watchword was responsible realism as opposed to idealistic utopianism. But the Record pointed out that the return on South African investments was 19 percent compared to an average of 11 percent elsewhere in the world. Therefore, the Record noted, C&C’s “impact on the realities of business with South Africa remains to be seen.”7 Such skeptical comments were destined to increase. C&C’s protest against First National City Bank was only one blip amid C&C’s overall concerns in 1966, a year in which the journal threw itself into protesting the Vietnam War, struggled to come to terms with black power, and debated whether God was dead. Moreover, 1966 was only one moment in a five-decade process in which C&C played a key role: the transformation of liberal Protestant social thought in the postwar U.S., and especially the emergence of liberation theologies during the 1960s and 1970s. In this regard we might consider C&C’s divestment decision as the tip...

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