Building a Protestant Left: Christianity and Crisis Magazine, 1941-1993

Theology Today, Jan 2000 by Smylie, James H

Building a Protestant Left: Christianity and Crisis Magazine, 1941-1993 By Mark Hulsether

Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1999. 374 pp. $38-00.

Charles Clayton Morrison expressed optimistic "Social Gospel" tendencies when he bought the Chicago journal, the Christian Centuiy (CC), in 1908. This was some thirty years before the optimistic conservative Henry Luce, publisher of Titne/Life, challenged citizens to accept an American Century (1941) by playing "Good Samaritan" to the world. Morrison was somewhat suspicious of such nationalistic expressions even under the best of intentions. In 1941, Reinhold Niebuhr and his colleagues at Union Theological Seminary, New York, had already founded Christianity and Crisis (C&C), in part, according to Mark Hulsether, because Morrison appeared too naive about the dangers of fascism, Naziism. Shintoism, and communism, which rose in the 1920s and 1930s. Morrison, it should be noted, had published Niebuhr regularly, including the latter's "How My Mind has Changed" toward a Christian realism in 1939. For over a half century until its dernise in 1993, C&C contributed to religious discussions and informed our debate over national and world issues in competition with CC.

Hulsether offers us a valuable case study of these years, supplementing, as he sees it, Robert Wuthnow's overview, The Restnicturing of American Religion (1988). He offers us a richly textured and documented story about a journal whose prominent publishers, editors, and contributors helped shape its readers and America's attitudes during World War 11 as well as its aftermath covering years of liberal-conservative realignments that began in the 1960s and carried us through the Reagan years.

With editorial offices headquartered in New York, C&C was planned by religious stars, such as Henry Sloan Coffin, Henry Pitney Van Dusen, and Francis Pickens Miller, supported by internationally known laymen, such as Luce, John Foster Dulles, and Wall Street mogul Benjamin Strong. It was edited by Niebuhr, John C. Bennett, Listen Pope, and included such noted contributors as Paul Tillich, Amos Wilder, M. Seale Bates, and a galaxy of so-called Christian realists dissatisfied with some dimensions of their liberal heritage. They held to a neoorthodoxy somewhere between the older "modernism" and "fundamentalism," trying to avoid what the journal considered to be a Barthian "half-way house to fundamentalism." C&C pacesetters offered a God whose transcendence, rather than whose immanence, provided critical perspective on all human pretensions, a view of human sinfulness as the source of all self-centered pretensions, a language that questioned all abuses of authority and power, and a summons to social action "self-critical enough to avoid utopian illusions and corruptions to which all power is tempted." Bennett, associated with C&C even after Niebuhr's death, maintained that contributors followed a method that allowed them to express particular points of view, but left the door opened for alternate opinions and choices. This method, he claimed, preserved inclusiveness, the possibility of change, and thus a continuity in C&C editorial approach as realignments took place over the years.

During World War 11 and its aftermath, C&C editoral policy was dominated largely, although not exclusively, by brilliant "white male protestants." It supported the "Four Freedoms" and the "Free World" causes during the "Cold War" against communism, even adopting a position favorable to the use of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. C&C gradually broadened its editorial staff, its contributors, and its commitments, even raising questions over time about the nation's nuclear policies. It faced a variety of societal injustices and a growing multiculturalism. It carried on discussions about being "Honest to God," the "Death of God," and Harvey Cox's early celebration of The Secular City (1966). It discussed Edward R. Murrow's "Harvest of Shame," Michael Harrington's "Other America," the "War of Poverty," and various global liberation theologies, for the "Wretched of the Earth." It supported Martin Luther King's "Dream." "Civil Disobedience," "Reparations," and James Cone's "Black Theology." It introduced its readers to Roman Catholic Rosemary Reuther, and Beverly Harrison. who discussed Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique (1963) and covered a variety of "feminist theologies."

The Vietnam War, cautiously supported at first, produced Niebuhrian Hawks such as Paul Ramsay, and Niebuhrian Doves such as John Bennett. While attending C&C's twenty-fifth anniversary event, Vice President Hubert Humphrey claimed Niebuhr's support for the war. Niebuhr, sick at the time, expressed anger that his old friend should apply a Munich analogy of World War 11 so carelessly to the conflict in Southeast Asia. Bennett's wife. Anne, unveiled a large white dove on her dress while Humphrey spoke. After Niebuhr's death, when C&C editors and writers began to express more sympathy for Palestinians, C&C Zionists such as Franklin Littell protested. Siding with Littell. Ursula Niebuhr insisted that her husband's name be removed from the masthead, exposing more strain at C&C. Bennett's suggestion about C&Cs method and continuity may not have been as consistent and as helpful as Hulsether seems to suggest.