The letters were portrayed as a goodwill gesture toward the three more dominant religious traditions in America and, as far as President Franklin Roosevelt was concerned, the world. After being carefully constructed over the preceding weeks, they were held in strict secrecy until they were released to the media on December 24, 1939. Each was written to the leader of his respective religion: as president of Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Cyrus Adler represented American Jews and George A. Buttrick, president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (FCC), received a letter on behalf of American Protestants, with the last letter going to Pope Pius XII, head of the Roman Catholic Church. Each letter was, at least ostensibly, a Christmas greeting.Footnote 47 Roosevelt offered each man warm wishes and his hearty thanks for all that he had done for his people and the world. Yet Roosevelt also noted the fear and uncertainty of the time. War had again come to Europe and threatened to envelop the globe. It was the responsibility of all people of goodwill, Roosevelt argued, to come together in any way they could for the cause of peace. He hoped the three men, and those they represented, would put aside religious differences and join together for the common good.Footnote 48
Granted, the Roosevelt administration might have had ulterior motives behind the letters, not least of which was the assumed positive public reception of such overtures on the eve of an election year. The administration would make a similar political calculation less than a year later, when it attempted to garner support for the first peacetime draft in American history through a contrived media campaign promoting religious solidarity. However, President Roosevelt, at least, seemed sincere in his desire for a unified religious effort against the war. Germany and the Soviet Union had invaded Poland merely three months prior to the Christmas letters, and the conflict only intensified throughout 1940. In a series of events too long overlooked, Roosevelt thought that if he could get American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews to at least publicly cooperate in matters of humanitarian aid and present a united front to the world, it would go a long way to securing the peace each tradition sought.Footnote 49
As a lifelong Episcopalian and member of the vestry of the St. James Episcopal Church, he treasured religious liberty and did not want to push the boundaries of church and state power.Footnote 50 However, he also ardently believed that America desperately needed to enter the war—he was convinced it would soon do so—as a unified front, and he needed America's religious leaders to cooperate for such a united front to emerge. The way he sought this united front betrayed his misunderstanding of, and general lack of concern for, the many theological and social distinctives that had historically separated the groups. The Christmas letters were his first public overture toward such collaboration, and he was initially optimistic in his first real foray into the religious realm. He would soon be sorely disappointed.
I. The Christmas Letters
It was amid a flourish of both religious conflict and an increasing rhetoric of unity and reconciliation that President Roosevelt wrote his Christmas letters of 1939, hopeful that, for the sake of the nation and the world, a spirit of cooperation and goodwill might truly arise. Several Protestant groups, many of whom had originally split in the years leading up to and during the Civil War, began to reconcile and merge. Yet this propensity toward unification came about even as conservative and liberal Protestants became further divided on theological, doctrinal, and political grounds. Similarly, groups, such as the National Council of Christians and Jews, advanced cooperation among, and the inherent unity of, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, even while anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism reached high points in American culture.Footnote 51
The official replies to Roosevelt's letters showed a great deal of promise, though. All three were warm and gracious. Rabbi Cyrus Adler wrote that “it [was] a noble deed to bring the forces of religion together. I have a confident hope,” he assured the president, “that the leaders will unite the members of their churches and synagogues into a unanimous support of your efforts.”Footnote 52 Roosevelt's letter to Pope Pius XII was delivered through Archbishop Francis Spellman of New York, who also wrote a gracious note of thanks to the president. The Catholic press similarly expressed great satisfaction over the president's overtures for peace, and the White House was flooded with favorable telegrams almost immediately after the letters were made public. One enthusiastic Catholic even called Roosevelt a “gift from God” in his congratulatory message.Footnote 53 FCC president George Buttrick issued a formal reply that was equally gracious. He echoed Roosevelt's belief that in the present world of “chaos and darkness” people of faith offer the best hope of finding “a better way.”Footnote 54 However, this public response was not Buttrick's only reply to the president.
Even as telegrams of congratulations and thanks were coming in from American Catholics and Jews, Buttrick called the White House to clear up a troubling issue in Roosevelt's letter to Pope Pius XII. In his letter to Buttrick and Adler, Roosevelt had expressed his desire that, as representatives of their respective religious communities, each man come to the White House from time to time to inform the president of his people's concerns and desires. However, in his letter to the Pope, Roosevelt announced that he was sending a personal representative to the Vatican: Myron Taylor. Taylor would be the president's intermediary between the Vatican and himself. Buttrick worried that such an appointment signaled the inauguration of formal diplomatic relations between the United States government and the Vatican. Although it is not certain with whom Buttrick spoke, one of Roosevelt's aides assured him that Taylor's appointment meant no such thing.
The assurances were not enough. On January 16, he again wrote to Roosevelt asking for a formal declaration of Taylor's exact purpose and role in Rome. Roosevelt, thinking that the issue was merely a matter of diplomatic position, referred the letter to the Department of State. After Roosevelt had expressly written that Buttrick was invited to come to him with any concerns he or his group had, a rather bureaucratic reply from the assistant secretary of state did not sit well with Buttrick or the members of the FCC.Footnote 55 Consequently, during a meeting of the executive committee of the FCC on January 26, 1940, Buttrick and the committee members crafted an official response to Taylor's appointment. They claimed that their objections stemmed only from the appointment's implications for the separation of church and state in America. Diplomatic ties with the Vatican, they claimed, would give both undo privilege and access to one religious group to the detriment of all others. Consequently, a formal diplomatic relationship between the Vatican and the U.S. government could very well serve as an “ultimate injury to all faiths.”Footnote 56
The FCC was not the only Protestant group that objected to Taylor's appointment. Indeed, a great many found exception to Taylor's assignment, but Baptists were, by far, the most vehement of these groups. In their official letter to the president, representatives of the Southern, Northern, and American Baptists all opposed the appointment. First, they declared that it ran contrary to the president's stated purpose of inculcating religious unity throughout the nation. By showing favoritism to one group over all others, Roosevelt was only creating further divisions. Their primary concern was over the political implications of diplomatic ties between the U.S. government and an ecclesiastical body. Such an act ran contrary to the traditional separation of church and state. Religious bodies did, the letter stated, overlap the political sphere in that they worked toward peace and justice. However, to officially blend the church and state was dangerous to both and ran contrary to the very foundation of American liberty.Footnote 57
Many Baptists were far less gracious than their national representatives. Just as the White House was flooded with congratulatory notes, American Baptists quickly wrote to their president expressing their dissatisfaction, anger, and/or disgust with the appointment. One representative of Washington D.C. Baptists informed the president that, should Taylor's appointment not be rescinded, he and his brethren could no longer, in good conscience, support the federal government through income taxes.Footnote 58 Another Baptist leader warned Roosevelt that “all rulers are subject to God, and [Roosevelt] will give account to Him for trying to get this nation to take sides with the Devil.”Footnote 59 The Devil was, of course, the pope, a sentiment felt by many conservative Protestants of the time and expressed explicitly in their periodicals.
Yet their ire was not reserved for Catholics alone. The very idea that the U.S. president would write directly to religious groups asking for their cooperation and support was absurd and perhaps idolatrous. Moreover, all of the recipients of the Christmas letters were viewed as both un-Christian and un-American. One Baptist preacher wrote that “to employ the conglomeration of politics and heresy represented by the government, the Vatican, the Federal Council of Churches, and Judaism, respectively, is an effort to achieve by earthly means and from the top down what can only be done by spiritual means and from the bottom up.”Footnote 60 After referring to the Catholic Church as Satan's temple and the whore of Babylon, another Baptist leader went on to call the FCC “a conglomeration of infidelity, communism, a third-rate paganism, with plenty of the mash of a superiority-complex.” He displayed little explicit vitriol for Judaism, but merely weeped that they reject Jesus as their “rightful” Christ. He then lamented that on December 23, “religious liberty in the United States was officially trampled” and may have “officially passed away.”Footnote 61
Neither Roosevelt nor his advisors seemed to have anticipated so much resistance from American Protestants. Roosevelt also seemed unaware that there were American Protestants outside of the FCC's purview. Although they were certainly glad to coordinate with the president on matters of national importance and often presented themselves, at least implicitly, as if they indeed spoke for all American Protestants, the FCC actually had to call to inform Roosevelt that they represented only twenty million of the approximately thirty-five million American Protestants, and that most Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians were not members.Footnote 62 Due to this glaring omission, and his inability to recognize the inherent acrimony that lay just beneath the surface of both religious organizations' and leaders' public declarations of community and support, Roosevelt's public overture for religious cooperation ended up causing even further divisions.
He was especially confused and upset by the reaction of the Baptists. In a private letter to Buttrick, Roosevelt wrote that he was currently trying to find out if there was a single representative of the “Mohammedan churches” to whom he could express a similar sentiment as that in the Christmas messages. He derisively asked if their “Baptists friends” would think such an overture was contrary to the Constitution or “by some wild and utterly crazy stretch of the imagination” would violate the separation of church and state. Near the end of the letter, Roosevelt recalled a song in an Episcopal hymnal he once used that advocated the killing of Jews, Turks, and other infidels. He wrote that he hoped America's churches were beyond such notions and extolled Christ's command that his followers love their neighbors as they loved themselves.Footnote 63 Roosevelt never found a Muslim representative, and his search never came to public attention. No doubt his “Baptist friends” would have indeed objected to such a proposition, and it would have only heightened their fears of and distrust in the president.
By the spring of 1940, it became clear, even to Roosevelt, that his early attempts at an American religious consensus were clumsy and ineffectual. He had little understanding of the theological, doctrinal, and even political divisions within America's religious community. Yet he still did not particularly care about these internecine quarrels. He was convinced that America would soon be drawn into the ever-expanding European conflict and was determined to have the support of America's religious forces. As the war raged on, he became even more determined, even if it meant compelling or entirely circumventing religious representatives.
II. A God of Blood and Iron
Roosevelt's frustration over Protestants' seeming inability to produce the type of united front he had envisioned only increased throughout 1940 as the conflict in Europe escalated. Confronted with a stubborn anti-war and isolationist faction in Congress, Roosevelt struggled to find a way to prepare the country for a war he deemed inevitable. He worked with sympathetic politicians to raise the nation's total defense budget nearly five-fold by the end of the year. Yet a well-funded military meant nothing without well-trained soldiers and sailors to use the new equipment. Consequently, Roosevelt and his administration worked tirelessly through the spring and summer to secure the backing of the first peacetime military draft in America's history. The Selective Service Act passed Congress in September 1940, more than a year before America entered the war. On October 29, Roosevelt, along with government and military leaders, gathered in Washington, D.C. to draw draft numbers, determining who would be called into military service for a war that had not yet begun. Roosevelt precluded all fanfare for the event. Public support of the measure had been growing, but drafts had never been popular in the United States, and this one was no exception.Footnote 64
Consequently, Roosevelt demanded letters of support for the Selective Service Act of 1940 from “representatives of the three great faiths, Protestant and Jewish and Catholic.” Edward L. Israel, president of the Synagogue Council of America, wrote a letter of support on behalf of American Jews. Not surprisingly, Francis Spellman, a stalwart supporter of the war effort, wrote on behalf of American Catholics. Finally, George Buttrick was called on to represent American Protestants yet again. Although the debacle of the Christmas letters had proven that Buttrick could not speak for a large swath of Protestants, including many in his own organization, he was still the closest thing to a single representative Protestant Roosevelt could find, and he had proven amenable to the president's influence. He did so again. Along with the others, Buttrick endorsed the draft and promised both prayer and aid to the men in the armed forces. Roosevelt read excerpts of the letters during his speech emphasizing that the war in Europe was a moral as well as martial conflict and that America's religious leaders understood this.Footnote 65 He was stretching the truth.
Roosevelt felt further urgency to unite the nation through its religious traditions when, in June, Germany broke its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, launching a full-scale invasion of the country. Roosevelt and most of his military advisors viewed the Soviets' resistance as essential to an Allied victory. Consequently, Roosevelt petitioned Congress to extend the Lend-Lease policy to Russia, aiding them in their struggle with the Nazis. It was a difficult sell. Roosevelt himself had been anti-communist for many years, and the American public, particularly the religious community, was almost wholly opposed to the Soviets. They had been cast as anti-religious and anti-democratic for years, and an alliance seemed duplicitous and anti-American. Roosevelt faced particular opposition from American Catholics, who had been stalwart anti-communists since the Bolshevik Revolution over two decades before.
Throughout the summer of 1941, Roosevelt set out to convince the papacy and the American people both that the Russian stance toward religious freedom was not as bad as many thought and that Germany's threat to religion was far worse. In a letter to Pope Pius XII, personally delivered by Myron Taylor, Roosevelt laid out his hopes for the future of Russia and his fears about a future under Hitler's reign. He informed the Pontiff that he believed “there [was] a real possibility that Russia as a result of the present conflict [would] recognize freedom of religion.” In case Pius did not share his optimism for Russia's religious future, Roosevelt then laid out the heart of his rather pragmatic argument: “I believe that the survival of Russia is less dangerous to religion, to the church as such, and to humanity in general than would be the survival of the German form of dictatorship.” He closed with a criticism of the U.S. religious community, adding that he believed “that the leaders of all churches in the United States should recognize these facts clearly and should not . . . by their present attitude on this question directly assist Germany in her present objectives.”Footnote 66 The pope's response was, at best, noncommittal.Footnote 67
Pius XII's hesitations looked like enthusiastic support compared to the incredulity of the American public when Roosevelt tried to convince them of the Soviet's support of religious freedom the next month. During an October press conference, the president made an apparently impromptu assertion of the Soviet's support for religious liberty, claiming that “freedom of religion [was] definitely on its way.” When reporters pressed him, Roosevelt referred them to Article 124 of the Constitution of Russia, which he claimed guaranteed freedom of religion. Though expressed in different terms, notably the freedom to use propaganda against religion, Roosevelt claimed that the article made the Soviet government as essentially neutral toward religion as the United States government, thus granting religious liberty to the people.Footnote 68 Few agreed with the president's interpretation. As historian Andrew Preston pointedly notes, “Roosevelt's clumsy portrayal of faith in a communist society was universally, indeed ecumenically, mocked.”Footnote 69Time magazine dismissed the remarks as “a deep-laid Roosevelt plan to make Russia's atheism look a bit better to U.S. churchmen.”Footnote 70
Later that October, Roosevelt chose to emphasize the other side of the Soviet-German conflict by warning Americans of the Nazi threat to religion. In the address, he announced that he had acquired a Nazi document detailing Hitler's plans for the world after his final victory. Roosevelt informed the public that Hitler planned to abolish all religions, remove all religious symbols, and silence all religious witness under penalty of death or life imprisonment in a concentration camp. These religions would be replaced by an international Nazi church. Roosevelt closed his address by solemnly warning his audience that unless Hitler was stopped, “a god of blood and iron will take the place of the God of love and mercy.”Footnote 71
Already incredulous over the president's earlier claims, a few leaders of the FCC went out of their way to dismiss Roosevelt's warning as political hyperbole.Footnote 72 Yet several American Catholics, including Francis Spellman, agreed with Roosevelt and had even previously made a similar argument. The Paulist Press, a Catholic press out of New York, had published a popular pamphlet in 1940 called “Nazism versus Religion,” which argued exactly what the title suggests. Many conservative Protestants felt a similar foreboding, and had been ramping up their condemnation of the Nazi scourge over the summer. Perhaps if Roosevelt could have combined the political support of Christian fundamentalists and Catholics, he could have avoided the religious bickering and constant power plays of the FCC.
He did not do so. As Roosevelt continued both to court and goad liberal Protestants, conservatives declared, “faith in liberty, faith in democracy, faith in victory—all are meaningless unless they be accompanied by deeds. Right now, the battle of democracy demands more than honeyed words, more than moral support.”Footnote 73 This last phrase might have very well been in direct reference to Charles Clayton Morrison's earlier response to the Christmas letters in 1940. In a Christian Century editorial, Morrison clarified the root of his opposition to Taylor's appointment. He wrote that “the cooperation which the president desired from the Vatican was not ‘spiritual,’ but political. This type of cooperation Protestantism could not give. It [was] not organized politically, nor [was] its federal council a political agency.” He went on to say Protestants could give moral support, but that is not what the president desired, and it would have been given anyway.Footnote 74
III. Conclusion
Morrison was half right. While he might have very well desired moral support as well, Roosevelt was certainly looking for political cooperation from America's religious leaders. Like the Director General of the conservative American Protestant Defense League, Roosevelt thought “moral support” provided little consolation to the victims of an expanding war in Europe, a war that he was convinced might soon envelop America. Political cooperation was needed, and he expected as much from religious organizations who, he presumed, held common cause with his administration.Footnote 75 Yet Roosevelt underestimated both the anti-Catholic sentiment within Protestantism as a whole and liberal Protestants' hesitance to explicitly enter the political arena.
Instead, he saw America's religious institutions racked with “unnecessary and artificial divisions,” and did not believe a country at war, or one preparing for war, could harbor such divisions.Footnote 76 He needed political support from America's religious institutions and leaders, so he asked, and sometimes demanded, that support. Roosevelt saw little need to attend to the theological and social commitments that many of his religious constituents held so dear; he saw greater forces at work. Many of his successors would make similar mistakes, but the confluence of religious and political power would become far more refined in the ensuing decades, as “moral issues” and “family values” came to straddle the supposed divide between the political and religious spheres. To Roosevelt, America's reaction to Hitler's campaign was also a moral issue, and his stumbling, bumbling steps to unite America's religious forces paved the way for future leaders' attempts to marshal America's religious forces for political ends.
