Vietnam and the Clergy

VIETNAM AND THE CLERGY

Clergy Opposed to War

One of the centers of opposition to the American involvement in the war in Vietnam was the clergy. From the beginning, pacifists, such as A. J. Muste of the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA), and antiwar organizations, such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Quakers, and the American Friends Service Committee, raised questions about the U.S. support for the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam).

Minister's Vietnam Committee

In September 1963, in the wake of Buddhist protests against the Diem regime's oppression, Rienhold Niebuhr and Harry Emerson Fosdick joined ten other clergymen to form the Ministers' Vietnam Committee, which took a full-page advertisement in The New York Times to protest American support for the repressive South Vietnamese government.

Presidential Issue

After President Diem was toppled by the military, the situation in Vietnam deteriorated, and the question of America's role in the region became an election issue in the presidential campaign of 1964. While the crucial issues in the campaign between President Lyndon Johnson and Republican candidate Barry Goldwater were domestic, Goldwater's militaristic views on the war helped lead the traditionally nonpolitical journals Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis to support Johnson, who seemed less likely to increase American military involvement in Southeast Asia.

Increased Involvement

With the election over, the Johnson administration began a program to keep South Vietnam from being lost to communism—one which included a massive expansion of U.S. forces and direct military action in Southeast Asia. The hostilities in Vietnam became an undeclared American war. In 1965 the escalation of American involvement and growing preoccupation of the Johnson administration with foreign issues led Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., by then a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to speak out against the expanding conflict even though his advisers tried to prevent his public opposition.

Clergy Concerned About Vietnam

In October 1965 Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, then a Lutheran; Rabbi Abraham Heschel; and Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J., organized Clergy Concerned About Vietnam, which became the central organization of coordinated clergy opposition to the war. By May 1966 the organization had become permanent and took the name Clergy and Laymen Concerned About the War in Vietnam (CALCAV). Prominent clergymen such as John C. Bennett (president of Union Theological Seminary in New York), William Sloane Coffin (chaplin at Yale University), Robert McAfee Brown (Stanford University), and Martin Luther King, Jr., supported the efforts of CALCAV to organize opposition to the war among the clergy whose individual congregations or denominations were unwilling to engage in antiwar activity. CALCAV stayed independent of the direct action of the increasingly volatile antiwar movement, favoring negotiations to bring about an end to the conflict.

Religious Split

While liberal Protestant and Jewish clergy urged negotiations, conservative clergy, particularly in the Roman Catholic hierarchy and Evangelicals, openly or tacitly supported the war effort. Cardinal Spellman, vicar of the Catholics in the U.S. military, remarked in 1965, "I fully support everything it [the United States] does … My country, may it always be right. Right or wrong, my country," and he continued his Christmas trips to see the troops in Vietnam. It was widely believed the Cardinal Spellman was responsible for sending Father Berrigan to South America for a brief period after the creation of CALCAV in 1965 to silence his antiwar activism. Few Catholic clergy joined the antiwar movement until after 1969.

The Evangelical Perspective

Evangelicals, still believing the way to change the world was through personal conversion, ignored the questions raised by the war, although some ultraconservatives such as Rev. Carl McIntire organized demonstrations countering those organized by the clergy against the war. Billy Graham, at the request of President Johnson, made a Christmas visit to Vietnam in 1966, seemingly endorsing the American effort, and his actions later seemed to give support not just to the American troops but to the American aims themselves.

Civil Rights and the Antiwar Movement

There was a clear link between the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement among the clergy as well as the laity. The moral issues raised by the struggle against legal segregation made it easier to see the moral issues in the war and at the same time encouraged the clergy to speak out on public issues. Although the red-baiting tendency at the height of the cold war had declined, the antiwar clergy felt forced to insist they did not criticize the Johnson administration's military action because they favored communism. Rather, they wanted the nation to live up to its religious and moral values. As Martin Luther King, Jr., remarked in a speech shortly before becoming cochair of CALCAV in 1967, "I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America." But, he insisted, the heart of the religious opposition came from the values of religion: "Our allegiance to our nation is held under a higher allegiance to the God who is the sovereign of all nations, …"

Draft Strategy

As the war continued and the American commitment escalated, the number of young men drafted rose. While still supporting a bombing halt and negotiations to end the conflict, the attention of some clergy shifted to the issue of conscription and the right of young men to oppose this particular war, if not war in general. In October 1967 CALCAV issued the "Statement on Conscience and Conscription," in which they endorsed the right to oppose this war alone and said they would "publicly counsel all who in conscience cannot today serve… to refuse such service by non-violent means.…" Within a matter of weeks thirteen hundred clergymen had signed the statement. More dramatically, William Sloane Coffin and Dana Mclean Greely, president of the Unitarian-Universalist Association, joined four thousand demonstrators in turning in their draft cards. Shortly after that, Coffin and Dr. Benjamin Spock delivered one thousand draft cards to the Justice Department in Washington in open defiance of federal laws. They and their three associates in turn were indicted, tried, and convicted. The convictions were later overturned.

Tet Offensive

While public opinion rallied to support the war during the fighting of the Tet offensive in early 1968, the continuing death toll as the year wore on evoked even more angry antiwar feelings and direct action. Philip Berrigan, a Josephite priest, and his brother Daniel joined in a demonstration in which blood was poured onto the records of a draft board in Baltimore. In May 1968 the Berrigan brothers and seven others broke into the draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, to burn the draft records with napalm, used extensively in Vietnam. The demonstrators filmed the incident, and the Berrigans and their fellow demonstrators were tried, convicted, and imprisoned for their actions.

Election Support

By 1968 the conflict in Vietnam was an overriding election issue which sharply divided the religious community. Some antiwar clergy supported Hubert Humphrey as the least offensive choice on the war and reform issues. Some Evangelicals, especially in the South and West, supported Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, running on the American Independent ticket. His running mate, Gen. Curtis LeMay, had once suggested bombing North Vietnam back to the Stone Age, and many liked Wallace's criticism of the reforms in social relations forced by the federal government during the decade. Republican Richard Nixon benefited from the votes of those who found the other candidates unacceptable on other issues, but some voted for him because they believed Nixon had a secret plan to end American involvement in the war.

Moratorium

The antiwar movement was quiet in the early months of the Nixon administration, waiting for the new president to bring an end to the conflict. When by the end of the summer of 1969 his efforts seemed ineffectual, the antiwar movement revived. On 15 October moderates, including many members of the clergy, joined in the Moratorium, a peaceful demonstration in cities around the country rather than in the traditional protest centers of New York, Washington, and San Francisco. The organizers of the Moratorium planned to repeat the rallies in the following months, until the war was ended for the United States.

Washington March

Two days before the November Moratorium a "March Against Death" was organized for Washington, D.C. Over forty thousand marchers, each carrying a candle and representing one of the Americans killed in Vietnam, marched silently through the streets until each called out the name of the person represented. The following night five thousand heard a sermon by Eugene Carson Blake at the National Cathedral in Washington. The service closed with the congregation singing "We Shall Overcome." On 15 November hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrated their desire for an end to the war.

Sources:

"Berrigan Brothers Say They Rob Draft Boards," Time, 91 (7 June 1968): 62;

Daniel Berrigan, To Dwell in Peace: An Autobiography (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987);

Robert McAfee Brown, "Because of Vietnam, in Conscience I Must Break the Law: Civil Disobedience," Look, 31 (31 October 1967): 48;

"Putting First Things Second: Social Activists of the Protestant Establishment," Christianity Today, 12 (1 March 1968): 27;

Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up?: American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984).