“I hope that the matter of the agreement not to discuss the war can be satisfactorily clarified,” Walter M. Horton wrote to the office of the Federal Council of Churches in November of 1941, referring to a meeting of several hundred liberal Protestant leaders the FCC was planning for the following March. “I found some questioning about it” at a recent meeting of peace advocates, some of whom, Horton continued, expressed fear that if they went to the conference they would be obliged “to swear an oath not to say a word about the dominant reality on the horizon.”Footnote ¹ The distinguished Oberlin theologian worried that the question of “a just and durable peace” that was to be addressed at the “Delaware Conference”—so named on account of its being held on the Delaware, Ohio, campus of Ohio Wesleyan University—might not be effectively engaged because opponents of American entry into World War II were being asked to shut up in the presence of the self-styled “political realists” who were chiefly behind the conclave.

The Delaware Conference of March 3–5, 1942, invites the attention of historians because it was the first moment at which large numbers of Protestant leaders confronted each other face to face once their own country was actually at war.Footnote ² It amounted to a summit meeting of the rival groups within the leadership of ecumenical Protestantism. These groups discovered on this occasion that they could work together in trying to diminish the power of several specific evils they agreed were inimical to “a just and durable peace”: racism, imperialism, nationalism, and economic structures that perpetuated inequality. The sudden elimination, through American entry into the war, of the defining cause of the pacifist faction made that faction's considerable inventory of ideas and feelings about these other evils available for deployment within the realists' favorite framework: a world political body stronger than the League of Nations. Once the realist faction was released from the imperative to attack isolationists and other anti-interventionists, that faction's well-developed internationalism could be articulated in more direct and sustained relation to the deeply structured evils believed to make warfare more likely.

The realists in this family included President Henry Pitney Van Dusen of Union Theological Seminary, President John A. Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary, and future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, then known chiefly for his roles as a Presbyterian lay leader and as an out-of-office Republican expert on foreign affairs. The “agreement” to which Horton referred was an understanding promoted by the FCC that the conference should not be distracted by the well-worn but deeply felt disagreements between a peace-oriented group, for which the Christian Century was a leading voice, and a more interventionist group led by Union professor Reinhold Niebuhr, who early in 1941 had been instrumental in establishing a rival periodical, Christianity and Crisis, to counteract what Niebuhr took to be the persistently naive political attitudes of the peace faction.Footnote ³ In 1940 the FCC had established the Commission for a Just and Durable Peace, chaired by Dulles and supported by Niebuhr, among many others, which was designed to map a Christian blueprint for the world once the Axis powers had been defeated. This body, which came to be known as “the Dulles Commission,” generally took for granted that the United States would eventually join the war but in the meantime sought to establish a Protestant voice in debates about the post-war political order. The commission's Delaware Conference was a means toward that end.

No wonder Horton got a reassuring response by return mail from the FCC official in charge of the conference. Anyone who told you “that the mouths of the delegates would be sealed with respect to the war as such certainly is in a mental fog,” declared Walter W. Van Kirk, who continued that people coming to Delaware “may say anything that is on their minds.”Footnote ⁴ Van Kirk had good reason to be defensive and to overstate the case. Documents circulated within the commission's leadership marked “confidential” made explicit—and underscored—the plan that “the question of America's relation to the war will not be on the agenda.”Footnote ⁵ The FCC had labored quietly to make sure that the commission and its crucial “Committee of Direction” included at least a few prominent figures in the pacifist camp. This Committee of Direction, on whose stationary the call to the Delaware Conference was issued, included pacifists Ernest Fremont Tittle, Albert Buckner Coe, Mary E. Wooley, and Georgia Harkness alongside such realist stalwarts as Van Dusen, Mackay, Dulles, and John C. Bennett.Footnote ⁶ When Van Kirk replied to Horton, he knew his job was to keep the pacifists on board for the big event in Ohio.

Van Kirk's job got much easier three weeks later when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. With the United States in the war, the old pacifist–realist tussle lost some of its tension. The FCC had a better chance to redirect the conversation toward the new agenda of post-war planning. And it worked. The two antagonistic groups within the leadership of ecumenical Protestantism came together to establish a new political orientation, the character and consequences of which have been insufficiently recognized by historians still in the thrall of the “realism vs. innocence” narrative of the religious history the 1940s and 1950s propagated at the time by Niebuhr himself and perpetuated by Niebuhr's countless, and often uncritical, admirers ever since.

This new alliance was not achieved without one last and dramatic skirmish. The dynamics of this clash attest to the “summit meeting” character of the conference, and also to the magnitude of the transformation the conference effected. Once the nearly four hundred delegates sent by twenty-seven Protestant denominations and nearly forty interdenominational organizations convened at Ohio Wesleyan, some of the pacifists insisted on what turned out to be a last stand. The early stages of the conference were divided into several “section” meetings, including one charged with clarifying “The Relation of the Church to a Just and Durable Peace” at which a move from the floor declared that “The Church as such is not at war”—a motion vociferously debated. Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of the Christian Century and one of the peace faction's most indefatigable voices, offered the portentous motion. In Niebuhr's absence at the conference, opposition was led by Mackay, a Scottish-born former missionary to Latin America whose position as the president of Princeton Theological Seminary made him one of the most influential Presbyterians in the world. The debate was later described by Van Dusen in Christianity and Crisis as the “single incident” that “somewhat marred the otherwise orderly and amicable progress” by which the Delaware Conference achieved “significant agreements.” The motion actually passed in the section meeting by a vote of 64–58. Such strong support—four months after Pearl Harbor—for a resolution distancing the churches of the United States from their own government's military effort against the Axis powers indicates how formidable the pacifist persuasion remained within the ranks of the delegates. But when the report of this section was presented to the plenary session, this resolution was ruled out of order by the presiding officers, Dulles and FCC President Luther Weigle, on the grounds that the issue addressed by the motion was not relevant to the conference.Footnote ⁷

Whatever grousing there was about this parliamentary ruling died down remarkably quickly. Within a month the Christian Century not only ran an enthusiastic editorial written by Morrison's protégé, Paul Hutchinson, but also devoted a seven-page special feature to publishing the resolutions of the Delaware Conference in their entirety.Footnote ⁸ Soon thereafter the editors published and widely distributed a massive study booklet developing long lists of questions designed to facilitate the sympathetic discussion of the conference's resolutions in local churches and other organizations throughout the country.Footnote ⁹ The leaders of the peace faction had bought into the new agenda designed largely by Dulles but given a more critical edge (more about that below) by the input of the pacifist faction's own somewhat more left-leaning constituency. To be sure, Niebuhr and his comrades at Christianity and Crisis continued throughout the war to castigate pacifists for their lack of wholehearted support for the war effort, but Niebuhr's journal, no less than Morrison's, gave positive attention to the ongoing efforts of the FCC to direct discussions of the post-war world along the lines outlined at the Delaware Conference.Footnote ¹⁰ Scarcely a year after the conference, Niebuhr himself acknowledged that “The pronouncements on world problems by the Federal Council Commission on a Just and Durable Peace have become increasingly realistic and continue to stress America's responsibility to the world community.”Footnote ¹¹ So the old alignments did not disappear, but their relative importance diminished substantially.

Just what did the Delaware Conference agree upon and proclaim to the world? Which Protestant leaders, in addition to those named above, were present at the conference and/or helped to bring it about and to endow it with the character of a summit meeting? In what respects did the new political orientation established at the conference affect the destiny of ecumenical Protestantism? This article is directed at these three questions.

I. What Was the Summit Meeting's Position on the Salient Issues?

The most striking features of the conference's message to Christendom when read today are two that were not very controversial at the time. One such feature was the repeatedly articulated presumption of a proprietary relationship between Protestant Christianity and the American nation. The leaders of ecumenical Protestantism in the 1940s took for granted that their churches had a unique role to play in guiding the United States—and the world—toward an ideal political order, and they displayed no doubt that Christian principles should be the foundation of such an order. They were certain, as they explicitly affirmed at the beginning of their resolutions, that “Christians and non-Christians can alike accept” these principles.Footnote ¹² These confident men and women alluded often in their writings to the evils of secularism, but until the Cold War fostered the talk of “Godless Communism” that churchly Americans of all persuasions could easily exploit, this crowd displayed very little feeling that they needed to energetically contest, to say nothing of sympathetically consider, any ideas other than the ones they understood as Christian.

The second relatively non-controversial feature that catches our attention today is the assumption that there was no great challenge in identifying what were the truly Christian principles. The leaders of ecumenical Protestantism had trouble taking seriously any construction of these principles put forth either by Catholics or by the more evangelical and fundamentalist segments of American Protestantism. It may be ironic that during same month of March 1942, the leaders of these “other” Protestants, who disdained the ecumenists as too liberal, were meeting in St. Louis to found the National Association of Evangelicals, which would eventually achieve a prominent place in American politics and today garners more press attention than the FCC's successor organization, the National Council of Churches. The “Protestant Establishment,” as historians have come to call the ecumenical Protestant leadership of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, did not doubt that it had the standing to speak for all of Christianity.

These two features of the Delaware Conference merely flag the distance between the 1940s and what the United States had become only a quarter-century later. More to the point of a more comprehensive interpretation of the event is an understanding of the positions the delegates took on issues that were alive at the time. Chief among these issues was the relation of national sovereignty to some kind of yet-to-be-created transnational political authority. “A world of irresponsible, competing and unrestrained national sovereignties, whether acting alone or in alliance or in coalitions, is a world of international anarchy,” the conference declared. “The ultimate requirement” for a “just and durable peace” was “a duly constituted world government of delegated powers” complete with legislature, court, police, “and provision for world-wide economic sanctions.”Footnote ¹³ It was in connection with this advocacy of “world government,” as it was colloquially shortened, that ecumenical Protestants so closely followed the formation of the United Nations three years later.

In relation to this call for greater international organization, the conferees also called for an end to the colonial system. “Autonomy for all subject and colonial peoples” was to be realized, and in the interim “the task of colonial government” was to be taken away from colonial powers and “recognized as a common responsibility of mankind,” with colonized people themselves assured “a voice in their government.” Registering their sense that the process of decolonization was not likely to be achieved in one stroke, the delegates allowed that some colonized peoples might be “not yet capable of self-government,” but they emphasized that the role of international authority was to substantially push forward the goal of “self-government” for all colonized populations. The conference repudiated the notions of racial hierarchy on which the colonial system was based, declaring that “no group of men is inherently superior or inferior to any other.”Footnote ¹⁴

The delegates applied this rejection of racialized thinking to the domestic American scene, too, and more controversially given the reality of Jim Crow. They clearly connected racism abroad and racism at home. “The securing of justice now for racial groups is essential if America is to make its full contribution in securing a just and durable peace,” the conference resolved, while it acknowledged “with profound contrition the sin of racial discrimination.” The United States “cannot safely be trusted with the making” of peace “so long as our attitudes and policies deny peoples of other races in our own or other lands the essential position of brothers.” Citing recent, specific cases of anti-black rioting and lynching, the delegates demanded an end to “unequal treatment” of “American Negroes” in education, employment, working conditions, housing, transportation, the administration of justice, and voting. “We condemn all such inequalities and call upon our fellow Christians and fellow citizens to initiate and support” measures to achieve equality among “minority and cultural groups.” More specifically, the conference called for action by the federal government to end “discrimination in industry and the public services against Negroes and persons of other racial and national origin,” and it called, further, for the welcoming of Negroes and other racial minorities “into the membership, administrative personnel and fellowship of our churches, local and national.”Footnote ¹⁵

The conference's pronouncements on economic issues were less forthright, but did include the need for “experimentation with various forms of ownership and control, private, cooperative, and public.” This was a definite nod toward the idea that the prevailing capitalist order needed to be altered in socialistic directions, but the delegates could not overcome their disagreements as to how this idea might be formulated more precisely. They offered a list of twelve recommendations for “special consideration and study,” allowing that the conference “did not reach the same unanimity” on these recommendations as it did on the rest of its resolutions. These recommendations included what were described as a series of “rights,” including the “right to employment of a kind that is consistent with human dignity and self-respect,” and “the right to full-time educational opportunities” in youth and “economic security in retirement.” Other recommendations in this list called for a revision of the tax system to promote a more equitable distribution of wealth, a greater role for labor in managing industry, and more effective “regulatory measures” that would control business cycles and protect against unemployment, “a universal system of money,” and “a democratically controlled international bank” that would make capital available “in all parts of the world without the predatory or imperialistic aftermath so characteristic of large-scale private or governmental loans.”Footnote ¹⁶

Hence, the positions the delegates took on nationalism, empire, race, and the economy were understandably read as tilting toward the left-liberal, rather than the right-conservative side of American political discourse as constituted in 1942. Time magazine described the Delaware Conference as “sensational” in its collectivist economic ideas and in its “extreme internationalism,” but allowed that it was not quite “as far to the left as it's definitely pinko British counterpart, the now famous Malvern Conference.”Footnote ¹⁷ Here, Time referred to a January 1941 meeting of British church leaders led by Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple that had indeed been an inspiration for the Delaware Conference: a suggestion that “an American ‘Malvern’ Conference be convened at the earliest possible moment” was “discussed at some length” at the initial meeting of the Dulles Commission's Committee of Direction on March 21, 1941.Footnote ¹⁸Time's characterization of the Delaware Conference as radically leftist reflected, of course, the magazine's political orientation, but Time's summary account of the specific points agreed to at the conference was basically accurate. Time focused on the proposed migration of sovereignty from nation states to international authorities, but also represented, with accurate quotations, the conference's pronouncements on colonial peoples and American Negroes, on labor's role in industrial management, on economic “rights,” and on the generally self-critical tone with reference to the United States.

Time also sensed that the number of distinguished and influential Americans who participated made the Delaware Conference highly unique:

Time's description of the conferees can turn us toward the second question I stated above, just who, among American Protestant leaders, were present at the conference and/or helped to bring it about and to endow it with the character of a summit meeting?

II. Who Made the New Progressive Consensus Happen, and How?

Since John R. Mott is no longer a household name, it is important to underscore his eminence in 1942. It made sense for Time to mention Mott, a figure so well-connected that he once in a single day paid social calls on the president of the United States (Coolidge) and two former presidents (Taft and Wilson).Footnote ²⁰ Four years after the conference, Mott would win the Nobel Peace Prize for his several decades of leadership of the Young Men's Christian Association and a host of missionary organizations. Irving Fisher, the Yale economist and mathematician now most remembered as the founder of monetarist economic theory, was then known more for his energetic advocacy of peace, vegetarianism, and other progressive causes. Firestone's name is still recognized on account of the automobile tire company, but at the time of the conference, at which he was a delegate from the Episcopal Church, Firestone was one of a number of super wealthy men whose names appeared regularly in lists of supporters of church-sponsored causes.Footnote ²¹ Alfred Landon, the Republican presidential candidate in 1936, was registered as a delegate for the Methodist Church and was among the other immediately recognized public figures present at Delaware.

It is understandable that Time would focus on some of the more famous delegates and would remark upon the heavy representation of heads of seminaries, colleges, and denominational bodies. But the character of the Delaware Conference is best grasped through its organizational makeup and through the delegates' selection process. Notes kept by FCC General Secretaries Van Kirk and Bradford S. Abernethy during the late fall and early winter of 1941–1942, along with records of their correspondence, trace two sets of administrative actions that maximized the chances for a broad-based, high-stakes conference.

First, the FCC office invited the officials of each major denomination to select delegates. The number of delegates depended in part on the size of the denominational bodies affiliated with the FCC, resulting in heavy representation by Methodists, Congregationalists, Northern Baptists, and both Northern and Southern Presbyterians. Smaller but substantial delegations were also sent by the Episcopalians, the Unitarians, the Disciples of Christ, the Quakers, both the Dutch and the German Reformed, several Lutheran bodies, the Church of the Brethren, the Mennonites, the Salvation Army, the Moravians, and two historically black churches, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion and the Colored Methodist Episcopal. The FCC worked directly through denominational headquarters to ensure that each cooperating denomination had a stake in the conference and would send delegates capable of reflecting well on their own communion while interacting with other communions within the increasingly important FCC. Ecumenical conferences were not new, but this one had a distinctive and timely agenda. It was soon understood by all parties as the most important meeting of American church leaders in a generation. Prominent individuals writing to Van Kirk or Abernethy asking to be named delegates were sometimes referred back to their own denominational organizations with expressions of confidence that the applicant would, indeed, be chosen.Footnote ²²

A second set of administrative acts by Van Kirk and Abernethy, taken with counsel from Dulles, Mackay, and others on the commission's Committee of Direction, was the appointing of regionally based drafting committees charged with presenting the conference with written reports that could be the basis for discussion and enactment. There were four such committees, each assigned a specific cluster of issues (the exact terms of which shifted somewhat during the process, but were essentially social, political, economic, and ecclesiastical), based in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Subcommittees in Tennessee and Ohio were also asked to offer suggestions. In each case, the FCC office sought to mobilize each region's recognized lay and clerical elites, especially as connected with such institutions as missionary societies, magazines, women's groups, seminaries, and denominational boards. If a first choice was not available for a given slot, another prominent figure usually was. These drafting groups were closely controlled by the Committee of Direction and usually chaired by one of its members. The realist Mackay chaired the Philadelphia group. The pacifist Tittle, who was then the most popular Methodist preacher in the United States, chaired the Chicago committee (which included the volatile Morrison) and consulted with Dulles personally about his group's deliberations.Footnote ²³

The detailed operations of the New York regional committee in January and February of 1942 provide a telling instance of how the peace faction endowed the Delaware Conference with an edge more critical than it probably would have displayed in the absence of a vibrant contingent from that faction. The New York Committee was chaired by Leslie B. Moss, not a member of the Committee of Direction but who, as the Executive Secretary of the Committee on Foreign Relief Appeals in the Churches, was a bona fide presence in the Protestant Establishment. Another member of the New York group was A. J. Muste, the head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and one of the most consistent and outspoken pacifists in all of American history. Muste first gained fame when he was dismissed by his Massachusetts congregation forthwith upon delivering a sermon opposing American involvement in World War I and was obliged to vacate his family from the parsonage that very afternoon. Muste was always “out there” and, at the end of his life, was an adamant opponent of the Vietnam War. But in this committee, Muste was not functioning as a pacifist. Moss assigned Muste the job of thinking through the position on “race” to recommend to the conference as a whole.

In that capacity, Muste wrote a four-paged, single spaced memorandum labeled “tentative and confidential,” concerning the failure of churches to “more thoroughly” eliminate the attitudes of superiority found especially among “white races toward Orientals and Negroes.” Muste was enough of a diplomat to quote Dulles approvingly—twice—although not specifically on the racial question, on which Dulles was never loquacious. As it happened, this New York group's report formed the basis of the Delaware Conference's striking statements about racism in general and about Jim Crow discrimination in particular. This document—“Report of the Section on the Social Basis of a Just and Durable Peace”—when compared to the text adopted by the conference, shows minor editing, mostly rearranged paragraphs, but for the most part the New York group's language was adopted word for word by the conference. To be sure, a number of the realists of that era, as well as many of the pacifists, held anti-racist views, but prior to the Delaware Conference their anti-racism had taken a decidedly marginal place in a discourse dominated by issues of peace and war, and to a lesser extent by labor and management. The New York group thus generated what turned out to be some of the most liberal of the resolutions of the Delaware Conference. The group also included Channing Tobias, the only black member of the Committee of Direction, and two notably anti-racist former missionaries, Luman J. Shafer and A. L. Warnshuis, but there is no doubt that Muste's influence was decisive.Footnote ²⁴

Beyond the orchestration of the drafting committees and the mobilization of denominationally defined constituencies, the FCC office did something else that made the Delaware Conference a landmark event. Van Kirk and Abernethy invited many local and national councils of churches and virtually all of the major cross-denominational organizations associated in any way with the ecumenical movement to send representatives, although not as voting delegates. The most important of these affiliated organizations were the Foreign Missions Conference, the United Council of Church Women, the YMCA, the YWCA, the Student Volunteer Movement, and the Layman's Missionary Movement.Footnote ²⁵

The FCC achieved another organizational triumph by arranging for high-level State Department participation. Abernethy and Van Kirk had originally wanted Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle. When Berle was unavailable the State Department, after some private conversations arranged by Dulles, sent economist Leo Pasvolsky, a special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull then assigned to the National Resources Planning Board. Pasvolsky was one of six plenary lecturers at the conference, along with Dulles himself, the Methodist Bishop Francis J. McConnell, and three carefully selected foreign leaders, Hu Shih (the Chinese ambassador to the United States), C. J. Hambro (the exiled president of the Norwegian parliament), and William Paton (a leading ecumenist from Britain).Footnote ²⁶ But Pasvolsky's presence at the conference was more than symbolic.

Pasvolsky circulated a fifty-two-page document summarizing his agency's thinking about the post-war peace. That Pasvolsky was willing to do this (a decision presumably made with the approval of Hull himself) signals the seriousness with which the government was taking the Protestant Establishment. Moreover, Pasvolsky's document included what is in fact a draft of the key sections of President Roosevelt's legendary State of the Union Address of 1944, in which Roosevelt proposed his never-enacted “economic bill of rights.” Historians have long understood that Roosevelt's speech, often hailed as his finest, was based on work done within the National Resources Planning Board. But here at Delaware the government's own representative was encouraging the Protestant Establishment to be thinking in line with the most radical trajectories of the New Deal concerning “rights” to “adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care” as well as to “education” and to “equality before the law.”Footnote ²⁷

All of these actions by Abernethy, Van Kirk, and Dulles took place in the matrix of the commission for a Just and Durable Peace, an organization intended from the start to reach extensively into the ecumenical Protestant ranks but largely developed by the leaders of the realist persuasion who were simultaneously supporting Niebuhr's launching of Christianity and Crisis.Footnote ²⁸ The commission itself rarely met and was mostly a list of names, but the smaller Committee of Direction that actually ran the enterprise quickly understood that success depended on mobilizing a broad base of support. The minutes of the committee's initial meeting of March 21, 1941, record the agreement that the commission's task is “difficult and delicate” because of “differences particularly” about possible American “participation in the war.”Footnote ²⁹ The first and apparently only meeting of the entire commission prior to the Delaware Conference was attended by fifty-three members, of whom Morrison was one. So, too, was Niebuhr.Footnote ³⁰ The relatively weak representation of pacifists on the commission itself apparently mattered little given their stronger presence on the Committee of Direction and given the efforts of Van Kirk and others, as described above, to provide a big tent for the conference.

Hence, the “summit meeting” aspect of the conference was in part a product of the FCC's inability to proceed with a large-scale enterprise focused on world affairs without incorporating a pacifist element, the strength of which was then shown at Delaware in the measure of support given Morrison's motion even after Pearl Harbor. But this aspect was also a product of the contingencies of timing: had the conference been held three months earlier, or had the Japanese attack come three months later, there is no way of knowing how the assembled churchmen and churchwomen would have dealt with one another. Moreover, it is far from clear who, and how many, would have shown up. Since Abernethy did not even begin to empanel the strategically pivotal regional committees until December 10 (after the American declaration of war) and only some weeks later issued invitations to the various groups to send delegates, it is not clear how differently—or how similarly?—the entire process of organizing the conference would have proceeded absent the war declaration, and how many of the pacifists would have agreed to participate.

The agreements reached at Delaware need to be interpreted in the context of the popular, “arms linked across the sea” mood for which Wendell Willkie's bestselling book of 1943, One World,Footnote ³¹ is the most recognized and enduring emblem. Criticism of imperialism in general and of the British Empire in particular, which were themes of One World, diminished by the end of the war in specific relation to worries about Soviet influence. But for a few years, the notion of a species-wide solidarity—supervised by a benevolent United States and enacted in concert with the varieties of humankind—appealed enormously to Republicans like Willkie and Dulles as well as to New Dealers and to a great range of liberal Protestants. While this extravagant idealism flourished well beyond the ranks of churchmen and churchwomen, among them it took deeper root on account of the Delaware Conference's institutionalization of it. A sign of this institutionalization, and hence another indicator of the unique significance of the Delaware Conference, is the character of a second commission “study conference” held in Cleveland, January 16–19, 1945.Footnote ³²

The commission brought nearly five hundred ecumenical Protestants to Cleveland for an event that tracked the Delaware Conference of three years earlier in both its basic doctrinal content and in its organizational dynamics. The focal point at Cleveland was the Dumbarton Oaks proposal of 1944 for the structure of the United Nations, which the Cleveland Conference endorsed with a series of recommendations for revision. Prominent among these proposed revisions was the creation of a “Commission on Human Rights,” the greater limiting of the powers of large nations in relation to the small, and the imperative to end colonialism and to turn responsibility for “dependent peoples” over to an international commission operated by the United Nations.Footnote ³³ Press attention understandably concentrated on the relation of the Cleveland Conference's declarations to the Dumbarton Oaks proposals,Footnote ³⁴ but what is most significant about the Cleveland Conference as viewed in historical context is its function in consolidating the political orientation established at Delaware. To be sure, a number of ecumenical Protestant leaders, most conspicuously Dulles, would in the post-war years turn away from the most left-liberal of the elements of that orientation and orient their own politics more to anti-communism. But several features of the Cleveland Conference invite attention here as they attest to the state of ecumenical Protestant leadership three years after the Delaware Conference.

The FCC facilitated a sternly controlled conference in Cleveland aided by the assuredness that its affiliates had consented to the organization's new direction and had abandoned serious quarrels about the war. The FCC office successfully mobilized delegates through most of the same denominations and organizations, even during a time when war rationing often required negotiation for travel authorizations.Footnote ³⁵ Dulles was still the chair, but this time the new president of the FCC and a good friend of Dulles's, the forceful Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, took a strong hand. A few years later, Oxnam would become the first president of the World Council of Churches. The drafting committees and the delegate body again consisted of a wide range of church leaders, expanded somewhat from three years before. Among the most well known of the new faces were Republican Congressman Walter H. Judd of Minnesota, who was then leading the eventually successful effort to eliminate the restrictions on Asian immigration, and E. Stanley Jones, perhaps then the most famous missionary in the world after Albert Schweitzer. In the plenary session, Jones offered a motion, seconded by Muste, pushing even farther the idea of diminishing the role of the great powers in the United Nations and strengthening the role of smaller powers, but after Oxnam spoke against it the motion failed.Footnote ³⁶ However, what most matters is what the Cleveland Conference agreed upon.

The Cleveland delegates not only explicitly endorsed the principles adopted at Delaware, but also adopted stronger language on some points. The Christian Century noted the diminished equivocation on economic issues, and indeed the Cleveland Conference insisted that the “right of private property” be “qualified by the public interest,” presumably entailing “a larger measure of social planning and control than characterized our pre-war system.” And even at a time when representatives of the great ally, Britain, were known to be lobbying at Dumbarton Oaks and elsewhere against the anti-imperialism to which Winston Churchill believed Americans were naively attracted, the Cleveland delegates demanded that “the imperialism of the white man,” which they explicitly compared to that of the Japanese, be “brought to the speediest possible end.” They also proclaimed that no “sound or stable world community” can be achieved “so long as there is enforced submission of one people to the will of another whether in Korea, in India, in the Congo, in Puerto Rico, or anywhere else.” The willingness to list American-controlled Puerto Rico alongside the Belgian Congo and British India, to say nothing of Japanese-held Korea, is a sign of the level of anti-imperialism that flourished at Cleveland. On domestic racism in the United States, the Cleveland declarations were no less forthright than their Delaware antecedents, asking churches to actively support legislation that would make the Federal Fair Employment Practices Commission permanent, to repeal “poll tax and other discriminatory laws,” and to guarantee an end to discrimination in housing.Footnote ³⁷

Discrimination against black people was of sufficient concern to the FCC leaders that it was the deciding factor in the decision to hold the conference in Cleveland. Van Kirk reported to the planning group that the Cleveland hotels had directly assured him that they would welcome black delegates. Philadephia, where the FCC often held meetings of many kinds, and Cleveland were among the few major cities in the Northeast and Midwest at that time that would provide this guarantee. FCC leaders considered Philadelphia to be “too Eastern” for this particular meeting, and that appears to have been a basis, also, for the earlier decision to hold the 1942 conference on a Midwestern campus.Footnote ³⁸ At that event, delegates stayed mostly in the homes of local church families and faculty members of Ohio Wesleyan University. Such considerations not to hold its conventions in cities where its black members would be humiliated were unusual among similarly overwhelming white national organizations of the FCC's size. Hence, the anti-racist pronouncements of the Delaware and Cleveland Conferences, while well short of the measures that full-fledged civil rights organizations might have wished, were substantive.

Since the Cleveland Conference essentially validated the transformation that had been effected at Delaware, the Cleveland event is a convenient point at which to turn to my third question: In what respects did the new political orientation established at the March 1942 meeting affect the destiny of ecumenical Protestantism?

III. How Was Ecumenical Protestantism Affected?

In the 1940s and 1950s the influence of the ecumenical Protestant leadership was at its peak, historians often observe. Even William Inboden's recent Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment, which attends carefully to the internal disagreements within that leadership, documents this climactic stage in imposing detail.Footnote ³⁹ Among the widely recognized precursors to the historical moment are the extensive participation of the Delaware Conference's cast of characters in the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and in the proclamation of the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. This part of the story has now been documented compellingly by John S. Nurser in For All Peoples and All Nations: The Ecumenical Church and Human Rights.Footnote ⁴⁰ The frequency with which Niebuhr was able to consult with officials of the State Department during the presidency of Harry Truman is another well-known part of this story, as is Dulles's appointment in 1953 as President Eisenhower's Secretary of State. Time and other journalistic media covered the church affairs of this period extensively.

Religion was “in” as measured by a host of indicators, and despite the vaunted pluralism of American culture, religion in the 1940s and 1950s mostly meant liberal Protestantism and the other varieties of faith easily translated into its terms. This feature of the period was promoted by many conditions, including the Cold War's sharpening of a politicized secular–religious divide, the popularity of mainstream church affiliation as a basis for community in the suburbs and for upward social mobility, and the relative absence until slightly later of strong competition from Catholics and evangelical Protestants for the religious leadership of the nation. But the Delaware Conference contributed to Protestant Establishment's high tide by bringing the extended family of ecumenical Protestants together in relation to a set of challenges understood to largely define the post-war world, especially the challenges of deciding just how the power of the United States should be exercised in the world arena, and with what other powers to cooperate.

Yet the measuring of the relative institutional influence of ecumenical Protestantism on public affairs, while a valuable inquiry, misses much of the impact of the Delaware Conference on the destiny of ecumenical Protestantism and thus on the latter's long-term role in American life. More relevant to understanding that destiny and later role are the consequences for the ecumenical Protestant community itself of the specific political orientation articulated in the conference's resolutions and reinforced at Cleveland three years later.

Even in the chastened post-war years, the positions ecumenical Protestant leaders had taken on race, empire, economic inequality, and nationalism propelled them in directions that placed them on the defensive during the McCarthy era and rendered them all the more at odds with the National Association of Evangelicals as the latter gained strength in the 1950s. By 1958, when the NCC declared itself in favor of American recognition of the People's Republic of China and of the latter's admission to the United Nations, the reaction of the evangelical right wing was, as Inboden and others have shown, apoplectic.Footnote ⁴¹ The rise of the evangelical right placed into bolder and bolder relief on the American religious map the political orientation the ecumenists had inherited from Delaware as reinforced at Cleveland.

Prominent among the directions that placed the ecumenists on a collision course with the evangelicals was the accelerated ecumenism that the Van Dusens and Oxnams of American Protestantism pursued as coterminus with the internationalism that infused their support for the United Nations and for human rights. Through their expansion of the FCC into the even larger National Council of Churches in 1950 and through their leadership in the World Council of Churches (officially established at Amsterdam in 1948, and meeting for its second convention in Evanston in 1954), the energetic ecumenists blurred denominational boundaries and diminished the standing and authority of many local communities. These men and women took seriously the Cleveland Conference's disdain for “the present structure of denominational Protestantism” as “not adequate to deal with the issues of our time” and its demand that churches seek greater unification on every level.Footnote ⁴²

Cold War cautions against the ability of communists to exploit decolonizing situations blunted the critique of imperialism in the world arena, but that critique was actually intensified in the one area the churchmen and churchwomen could control: missions. The fear that their own missions had participated too extensively in Western imperialism was voiced occasionally by participants in both the Delaware and Cleveland Conferences. But even as most of the ecumenical Protestant leaders of the war years expressed hopes for the future of missions, they were in the process of changing the notion of “foreign missions” to one of “world mission,” with the implication that indigenous peoples were no less qualified to preach and exemplify the gospel than Methodists and Presbyterians from the United States.Footnote ⁴³ The American Protestant foreign missionary project was subjected to increasingly severe critique from within during the quarter-century after the Delaware Conference with the result that, by the late 1960s, the mainstream denominations had drastically diminished their missionary operations and redirected most of those that remained in the direction of service rather than evangelism, and in close cooperation with indigenous authorities. In the meantime, evangelicals found fewer faults with the old missionary ideology and accused the liberals of being sellouts.Footnote ⁴⁴

But no legacy of the political reorientation of ecumenical Protestantism at the Delaware Conference was more important than an intensified opposition to anti-black racism. In March 1946, the FCC formally denounced racial segregation as a violation of the gospel and entreated its affiliated churches to work for a non-segregated society and a non-segregated church. David W. Wills calls this “the great landmark” in the process by which “the Protestant Establishment increasingly lent its influence to the cause of racial desegregation” because here was a position taken by the FCC itself in its full, official capacity.Footnote ⁴⁵ The declarations of the two study conferences were important, but these sentiments were now strong enough to produce this official stand even on the part of an FCC that was desperately trying to keep several white southern churches in the fold. Although neither the FCC nor its larger successor, the NCC, ever pulled away from this position, the most thorough student of the NCC's engagement with civil rights, James F. Findlay, Jr., finds that during the 1950s and very early 1960s the NCC was generally more reserved about civil rights than the FCC had been. The more cautious NCC was then under heavy and persistent attack for being too far to the left, and, as Findlay notes, repeatedly disappointed black church leaders who expected more from it.Footnote ⁴⁶

Still, when the early 1960s arrived, it was the NCC and the Christian Century that offered support to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil rights organizations while the National Association of Evangelicals and its closely associated journal, Christianity Today (founded in 1956 to offer a conservative alternative to the Christian Century) would have nothing to do with the cause. As late as 1963 even Billy Graham, who, unlike many of his followers, refused to actually defend segregation, would not support King's March on Washington and criticized civil rights demonstrations as counterproductive. In that same year, the Christian Century published King's “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Martin Luther King, Jr., moreover, was a product of liberal bastions of Crozier Theological Seminar and Boston University, not the more evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary. Ecumenical Protestant leadership continued, if haltingly, the path of the Delaware Conference, and in so doing was all the more conspicuously distinct from the evangelicals who came to political prominence while continuing to hold to the individualist view that racism was a problem of the human heart, not a priority for institutional engagement.

Beyond institutions, the ecumenical Protestant engagement with racism produced a number of the immediate post–war era's most sustained and probing anti-racist books, including some of the most searching written by any white American prior to the 1960s. Two examples from the heart of the Protestant Establishment can illustrate this. Racism: A World Issue (1947) by Garrett Biblical Seminary professor Edmund Soper was a sweeping, critical account of racism worldwide, connecting Jim Crow with the practice of racial domination found in imperial, colonial systems around the globe. Soper, who grew up in Japan as the child of Methodist missionaries, wrote this book on the basis of a series of seminars on “Christianity and the Race Problem” that he convened for Chicago area academics and church leaders during the war at the invitation of the national office of the Methodist Church. Among Soper's chief consultants was George E. Haynes, the black director of the FCC's Department of Race Relations, but Soper's acknowledgements are a “who's who” of the period's leading liberal missionary theorists. It is no coincidence that Soper was also the author, four years earlier, of The Philosophy of the World Christian Mission, the major book that outlined the transition in missions from “foreign missions” to a vision in which indigenous peoples shared equally in the missionary project.Footnote ⁴⁸

A second example is Color and Conscience: The Irrepressible Conflict (1946) by Buell G. Gallagher, then a professor at the Pacific School of Religion. Not only did Gallagher call for legislation and court action against the Jim Crow system; in an era when the issue of “miscegenation” was usually avoided by advocates of racial integration, Gallagher also went on to insist that there was no sound basis for restrictions on interracial marriage and he reminded his readers of the extent of race mixing that had already taken place but was conventionally denied through the deeply racist one-drop rule. In a milieu in which most liberals represented the American race problem as peculiarly southern, Gallagher condemned “color caste” in every region of the country and provided examples of its ordinance. Moreover, writing as an ordained Congregationalist minister, Gallagher declared that his own vaunted Protestant tribe was being put to shame by the greater anti-racist commitment of the most extremely secular of all the groups in the country, the Communist Party of the United States: “The Christian Church . . . has not produced an ethical attack on color caste which approaches the vigor and virility of the attack launched by American Communists.” Color and Conscience was informed not only by the latest cultural anthropology of Ruth Benedict, but also by the contemporary work of black intellectuals. Gallagher thanked Alain Locke for advice, and he respectfully and repeatedly quoted W. E. B. Du Bois. Gallagher also quoted at length the declarations of both the Delaware and Cleveland Conferences on racism at home and imperialism abroad, and he cited the Malvern Conference that had inspired the FCC to convene its own study conferences. “There is enough dynamite in the Malvern declarations to blow the whole of the white man's imperialism with its racial inequities off the face of the earth—if it is acted upon,” he remarked. Gallagher came within one percentage point of being elected to congress as a democrat in 1948, and he later gained fame in 1969 as the president of the City College of New York when his career was destroyed by the conflict over open admissions during which the City University trustees perceived Gallagher as too sympathetic to the demands of protesting black and Hispanic students.Footnote ⁴⁹

Gallagher and Soper were not typical ecumenical Protestants, but their writings flowed directly out of the political reorientation effected at Delaware, and they illustrate the trajectory that created enormous space between the Protestant Establishment and the growing movement of politically mobilized evangelical Protestants. In 1953, when Oxnam was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee to answer charges that he was too close to communists, the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals passed a resolution supporting the federal government's investigation of religious leaders for possible subversion. Indeed, HUAC's investigation of Oxnam had been prompted by a widely distributed pamphlet, Bishop Oxnam: Prophet of Marxism, by evangelical leader Carl McIntire, a New Jersey radio preacher with a huge national following. McIntire described the National Council of Churches as the country's “strongest ally of Russia and of the radical labor movement within the U.S.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The quarrel between evangelical and ecumenical Protestantism, given enduring structure by the political reorientation the latter achieved at the Delaware Conference, would not have been so consequential for the Protestant Establishment were it not for a second development at the opposite end of the religious spectrum. Many of the reform and radical movements of the 1960s and early 1970s were overwhelmingly secular in foundation and were often led by Americans of Jewish rather than either Protestant or Catholic origin. This was especially true of feminism, but also of the anti-war movement and of the white allies of the black-led civil rights movement. If earlier left-wing movements had been discredited by associations with communism, whether real or imagined, the newer movements were less encumbered. These newer movements presented themselves as vehicles for some of the causes that ecumenical Protestants had advanced. In this context, the old claim of Dulles's generation that only Christianity could provide a sound basis for reform was persuasive to a diminished segment of their heirs: looking around them, they saw many non-Christians who were advancing many of the causes that the Protestant Establishment of old had championed. Who said one had to be Christian to do the right thing? Especially—and this is an important point too often missed—if what counted as Christian was now as credibly claimed by politically right-wing evangelicals as by the ecumenicals. The decades from the 1960s onward witnessed the expansion of post-Protestant spaces in which men and women who had grown up in ecumenical circles found engines other than the church for pursuing goals for which the church had been a primary vehicle.Footnote ⁵¹

Prominent among those goals were the decidedly liberal aspirations set forth in the name of Christianity at the Delaware Conference of 1942, then variously defended and altered under the attacks of a Cold War–invigorated evangelical constituency that defined itself against many of these very aspirations. That the National Association of Evangelicals was founded at almost exactly the same historical moment can remind us that 1942 is a pivotal year in the history of the relation of religion to politics in the history of the United States, and can remind us, further, that the fortunes of ecumenical and evangelical Protestants have been determined to a large extent in dialectical relation to one another's religious politics as developed during the first decade and a half after 1942.

The realist–pacifist summit meeting, the concords of which were made possible by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, enabled ecumenical leadership to advance liberal politics with a measure of unity and confidence that would not survive, but that sustained the “Protestant Establishment” during the years of its greatest public authority. The agreements made at Delaware were achieved within an extended family of ecumenical Protestants already quite intimate as a result of a robust network of interlocking committees, study groups, and issue-specific agencies that flourished during the 1930s despite the ferocity of the realist–pacifist debate. But the Delaware Conference brought this extended, somewhat fractious family together at a time when the conditions were right for something new to happen to it. And it did.