Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left

Notes

N o t e s Abbreviations Used in the Notes APP Allan Parrent Personal Papers, private collection C&C Christianity and Crisis CALC Clergy and Laity Concerned Records CC Christian Century CCAV Clergy Concerned About Vietnam EE R. H. Edwin Espy ERWP E. Raymond Wilson Papers, SCPC GCAH General Commission on Archives and History, United Methodist Church, Madison, New Jersey LBJ Lyndon Baines Johnson NAII National Archives II, College Park, Maryland NCC National Council of Churches Records, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania NCCNyo National Council of Churches Communication and Research Department office Files, New york, New york NCCWoF National Council of Churches Washington office Files, Washington, D.C. PHS Presbyterian Historical Society REB Robert E. Bilheimer (Bobby) RG Record Group RSB Robert S. Bilheimer RSBP Robert S. Bilheimer Personal Papers, private collection SCPC Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania UTS Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary, New york, New york 432 Notes to Pages 3–7 Introduction—Ecumenism and the Vietnam War 1. Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (New york: oxford University Press, 1989). 2. “NCC” and “National Council of Churches” are the original acronym and shortened name of the organization used during the Vietnam War. More recently, the Council has sometimes used “NCCC” for “National Council of the Churches of Christ.” 3. James F. Findlay Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 (New york: oxford University Press, 1993), 48–75. Herman Will, Methodist leader, called the ecumenical churches’ work on civil rights legislation their “high water mark not reached before or since.” Herman Will Jr., “How Churches Influence National Policy,” Christian Advocate, 24 December 1970, 9–10. Many saw religious mobilization for ratification of the UN charter similarly. 4. According to Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks, in 1960 mainline Protestants comprised 46 percent of the American electorate. By 1996, they made up less than 28 percent. “The Changing Political Fortunes of Mainline Protestants,” in Robert Wuthnow and John H. Evans, eds., The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2002), 160. 5. See Mark Hulsether, Building a Protestant Left: Christianity and Crisis Magazine , 1941–1993 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999). In the 1960s the magazine’s offices moved from Union into space a block or two away. 6. In terms of members, mainline Protestant churches had been losing religious market share slowly for decades, but their fortunes and sense of public political clout remained strong until the mid-1960s. 7. I draw parallels between the ecumenical vision and the Axial sages in the conclusion. For more, see Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions (New york: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); also Michael Kinnamon , The Vision of the Ecumenical Movement and How It Has Been Impoverished by Its Friends (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003). 8. Kinnamon in Vision confirms this. 9. For a few classic works on transformations in mainline Protestantism, see Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War Two (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Robert S. Ellwood, The 60s Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from Modern to Postmodern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); David W. Lotz, ed., Altered Landscapes : Christianity in America, 1935–1985 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1989); Amanda Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late-Twentieth-Century Awakening (New york: oxford University Press, 2001); Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Jeffrey K. Hadden, The Gathering Storm in the Churches (Garden City, Ny: Doubleday, 1969) discusses the clergy-laity gap and the civil rights movement in detail. Wuthnow and Evans, in Quiet Hand of God, examine the public actions and status of mainline Protestantism from 1970 to about 2000. Most books on the antiwar movement barely Notes to Page 8 433 mention religious organizations. For one exception, see Charles DeBenedetti, An American ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse, Ny: Syracuse University Press, 1990); but it does not talk much about the churches themselves. Two books that focus on the antiwar activism of individual clergy and clergy groups are...