In Fighting to Preserve a Nation's Soul: America's Ecumenical War on Poverty, Washington State University historian Robert Bauman provides a valuable corrective to standard accounts in which Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty is described almost entirely as a government-orchestrated (and largely ineffective) effort to provide public welfare. That account has been politicized on both the Right and the Left in narratives that pit New Deal-style “big government” against private faith-based charity and social service. But Bauman demonstrates that religious organizations were an integral part of the War on Poverty.
The story begins in May 1965 when R. Sargent Shriver, John F. Kennedy's brother-in-law who had helped launch the Peace Corps and who Lyndon Johnson tapped to head the War on Poverty, addressed the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church, asking: “When a nation fights for its soul, who but the Church should set the context for that struggle?” (1) and traces the events that followed, culminating with James Forman's “Black Manifesto” speech at Riverside Church in New York City four years later. The book draws on unpublished reports, letters, and transcripts from the American Jewish Committee, the National Conference of Catholic Charities, the National Council of Churches, the Presbyterian Historical Society, and the United Methodist Archives, as well as the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. It situates these materials in the context of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Moynihan Report, and the subsequent literature on poverty, race relations, and social movements which, Bauman argues, has hinted at the role of religion but has otherwise failed to address the topic directly.
Chapters 1 and 2 focus respectively on Catholic and Protestant antipoverty efforts, featuring the work of the former through the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice and the Campaign for Human Development and the latter through the National Council of Churches in Christ. These were largely separate efforts that reflected the divisions between Catholics and Protestants and grew from each tradition's history of charity, labor, and relief ministry and their more recent engagement with the civil rights movement. The centerpiece of the story, which occurs in chapter 3, is the 1967 founding of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), which truly was ecumenical in enlisting the cooperation of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish organizations and working intentionally with African American organizations such as the National Committee of Black Churchmen and the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus. The IFCO became a principal conduit through which funds from its various affiliated organizations were channeled to local community organizations—many of them in black neighborhoods—through which grants were made for training, economic development, and leadership programs. It was also through the IFCO that controversial connections were made with black power organizations and with Forman's Black Manifesto speech. The IFCO furthered the War on Poverty's focus on economic development, but from the start it was a fraught enterprise straddling multiple agendas, hampered by meager and declining funding, and struggling with too many constituencies with differing ideas about poverty and how best to combat it. Although it has survived to the present, its history poses questions about ecumenism as an effective strategy for social action.
In subsequent chapters, Bauman surveys in detail the ideas about reparations that became the focus of Forman's 1969 manifesto and the largely negative responses that the speech evoked from white mainline Protestant leaders and from some black clergy. Even this many years later, it is difficult to know whether those responses would have been different had Martin Luther King not been assassinated and some other call for racial justice had prevailed or whether the reaction against black power and an appeal for reparations merely became the flashpoint for more deeply held racist animosities. What does come through is the vision, mostly rejected by ordinary churchgoers but embraced by the few who momentarily held power in denominational social action agencies, that this was no time to think small. It was time to imagine that radical social transformation was possible and that a biblical vision of anti-racist repentance and mercy could begin in the churches.
A final chapter briefly traces key developments in faith-based anti-poverty efforts from Richard Nixon's administration to the first years of Donald Trump's. While the trajectory has mostly been downhill, Bauman credits faith-based community organizations such as Gamaliel, the Industrial Areas Foundation, Communities Organized for Public Service, and Las Hermanas, as well as the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, with carrying forward the work of IFCO. In noting the faith-based initiatives that began with “Charitable Choice” during the Clinton administration and their evolution during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, Bauman suggests that some version of hybrid church-state programs like these may be the most the nation can hope for. Nevertheless, he reminds us that America is a long way from overcoming the racism that has inhibited its anti-poverty efforts and that it falls far short of the Christian ideals that have sometimes animated these efforts.
The book, which incidentally is also available on JSTOR, needs to be read in conjunction with studies of the conservative opposition to Lyndon Johnson that grew under Barry Goldwater's candidacy and eventuated in Ronald Reagan's presidency and with attention to Nixon's Family Assistance Policy as well as the impact of Vatican II and the growing influence of evangelical Protestantism. The book's strength lies in its disciplined focus on the War on Poverty, which for a few short years opened a policy space in which progressive faith-based social justice movements could flourish.
