COMMUNISM AND THE FAITHFUL

Red Churches

By the end of the 1940s, among anti-Communist crusaders it had become almost axiomatic that communism had infiltrated American churches and was using the pulpit as a base from which to subvert American society. Such beliefs were common among many church leaders, congressional investigators, and policy makers, as seen in the National Security Council Memorandum 68 (1950), which listed the churches as one of the institutions that worldwide communism "sought to stultify and turn against our purposes." As American churches in the 1930s and 1940s had been instrumental in pursuing progressive political causes, anti-Communists suspicious of anything left of center interpreted church advocacy of causes such as civil rights as proof of a Communist conspiracy among the congregations. If anything, however, American churches in the 1940s were foremost among institutions opposing communism and contributing to the McCarthyism of the period. When it came to communism, American churches were first among its opponents.

Catholic Anticommunism

Perhaps the most militantly anti-Communist church in the United States was the Catholic Church. The Vatican had denounced communism following the publication of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's The Communist Manifesto in. 1.848. Echoing Rome, American Catholic leaders objected to the atheism and materialism of communism and were suspicious of Communist activity in American trade unions as well as distrusting of Soviet activities abroad. Even during the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, Catholic leaders criticized Russian activities in Catholic publications. As the Red Army liberated Eastern Europe, American Catholics feared for the fate of East European Catholic churches. The situation was complicated by the fact that some Catholic officials in Eastern Europe had been active or passive collaborators with the Fascists, but Americans viewed the situation unambiguously. For them suppression of Catholicism in the East was symptomatic of Communist authoritarianism. While Pope Pius XII failed to excommunicate any Nazis, even after the Holocaust, he excommunicated Catholics who embraced communism in 1949. Responding to the suppression of Catholicism in the East, archbishop Francis Spellman of New York announced that "Communism is Unamerican" in February 1946. Archbishop Richard J. Cushing of Boston argued that same year that Catholicism was one of America's "greatest bulwarks" against communism. In 1948 the Catechetical Guild of Saint Paul produced a comic book, Is This Tomorrow?, that featured Communists storming Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York and nailing Archbishop Spellman to the door. The Catholic War Veterans and the Knights of Columbus acted as active anti-Communist groups in the late 1940s, and Fulton J. Sheen used his radio pulpit and books such as Communism and the Conscience of the West and Philosophy of Religion (both 1948) to espouse the anti-Communist cause. Catholics who had long contended with Communists for leadership in many unions were instrumental in purging the labor unions of Communist influence in 1948 and 1949. And lay Catholics—such as former Communist informants Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley and senators Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, Pat McCarran of Nevada, and Brian McMahon of Connecticut—were among the foremost anti-Communist leaders in America.

Protestant Anticommunism

The Catholic Church was not alone in its religious opposition to communism. Many mainline Protestant churches and evangelical church leaders also opposed communism in principle and the Soviet Union in practice. Billy Graham, the evangelical preacher who became a media sensation in the late 1940s, preached an unabashed anti-Communist doctrine during a 1949 Los Angeles revival:

God is giving us a desperate choice, a choice of either revival or judgment. There is no alternative!…The world is divided into two camps! On one side we see Communism…[which] has declared war against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion!…Unless the Western world has an old-fashioned revival, we cannot last!

Graham's black-and-white worldview was echoed by many and led many church leaders to advocate anti-Communist political positions. Graham himself backed McCarthy's investigations of the State Department and seconded Republican criticisms of the Truman administration's Asian policy. Anti-Communist Protestants echoed Graham's equation of communism and evil. To the Presbyterian director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, communism was "the moral foe of Christianity." For the most part, however, mainline Protestant church leaders were ambivalent about the anti-Communist crusade, judging it likely to damage progressive political causes in its sweeping attack on communism. Reinhold Niebuhr, the foremost Protestant theologian in the United States, deplored McCarthyism both for its blind assault on progressive political causes and because he believed McCarthy's sweeping charges limited the effectiveness of a genuine anti-Communist crusade. His 1944 book, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, was often cited by anti-Communists who glossed over the book's subtle anti-authoritarian arguments in their rush to use it to disparage Russia. Their zeal helps to explain the ambivalence many mainline Protestant leaders felt toward anti-communism.

THE CULT OF FATIMA

No better example of the penetration of the Cold War into American theology can be found than in the cult of Fátima. Fátima was the Portuguese location of a purported visit of the Virgin Mary in 1917—the same year of the Bolshevik Revolution and an aborted radical attack in Portugal. A shepherd child, Lucia dos Santos, claimed to have witnessed the Marian visitation and later connected the event to a prophecy that the Communist regime in Russia would be overthrown and the Soviet Union reclaimed for Christianity. Thereafter, Fátima became central to Cold War Catholicism, and praying to Fátima was claimed to assist the heavenly forces struggling against the Communists.

Jews and Anticommunism

The response of American Jews to the anti-Communist crusade of the late 1940s was even more ambiguous than that of Protestant leaders. While many secular Jews had participated in Communist activities in the 1930s, some were soured on communism by the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. Many Jews nonetheless remained favorably disposed to left-wing activity because of the tradition of Jewish trade unionism in America and because the Soviet Union had outlawed anti-Semitism. Such Jews became targets of anti-Communist wrath in the late 1940s, which was heavily tinged with anti-Semitism. In a sense much of the Red Scare of the 1940s was a continuation of the anti-Semitism of the 1930s by other means. With the Holocaust repudiating overt displays of anti-Semitism in the United States, American anti-Semites attacked Jews through the vehicle of anti-communism. The Dies committee, militantly anti-Semitic in the 1930s, was better known as the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the 1940s. HUAC focused its investigations on education and the motion-picture and television industries, in part because of the influence of Jews in these fields; Jews within the defense establishment—including the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer—were the focus of anti-Communist suspicions. At the same time, Jews were becoming increasingly a part of the American mainstream, and some Jews adopted an anti-Communist perspective as part of their general ascent into the mainstream. Some Jews, including Joseph McCarthy's counsels Roy Cohn and David Schine, even became leading anti-Communists, but the anti-Semitic tinges of the crusade limited its appeal to most Jews.

Sources:

James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981);

Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

COMMUNISM IN THE CHURCHES

Red Religion

In the wildly anti-Communist climate of the cold war some American religious leaders, mostly Protestant, became targets of red-baiters. While some clergymen had been Communists or fellow travelers, particularly in the 1930s, few remained allied with Soviet communism after World War II. In many cases the postwar charges of Communist sympathy were made and supported by conservative Protestants, often labeled fundamentalists, who were angry with what they perceived as a liberal drift by the mainline denominations.

Senate Hearings

In 1951 the Reader's Digest carried an article, "Methodism's Pink Fringe," which charged that organizations within Methodism, the largest Protestant church in the United States, were filled with Communists and fellow travelers. In 1952 the House Committee on Un-American Activities extended that attack when it issued an eighty-seven-page pamphlet, Review of the Methodist Foundation for Social Action, charging that the organization generally followed the Communist party line.

Eisenhower's Response

These issues came to a head in March 1953 when Harold H. Velde, the Republican representative from Indiana and the new chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), remarked in a radio interview that the Protestant churches offered an area for investigation by his committee. His offhand comment triggered an uproar and charges and countercharges filled the air. On 19 March President Dwight D. Eisenhower blandly observed that an investigation into the clergy for communism was unnecessary and would do no good.

"Reds in Our Churches."

The issue drifted from public attention until July, when Joseph Brown Matthews, a former member of the Communist party and the new staff director of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, the McCarthy Committee, published an article, "Reds in Our Churches" in the ultra right-wing magazine American Mercury. He charged that "the largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant clergymen." He added that while the vast majority of the clergy was loyal, at least seven thousand Protestant ministers had served the Kremlin conspiracy. Once again there was an uproar. Again President Eisenhower was forced to speak out against the excesses of the anti-Communist movement. In a vague statement the president stated that "generalized and irresponsible attacks that sweepingly condemn the whole of any group of citizens are alien to America." Matthews was forced to resign his position with the Senate committee.

FLOCKING TO CHURCH,
FORGETTING ABOUT CHRIST

Will Herberg's classic book Protestant, Catholic, Jew was published in 1956 and offered a sober response to those who hailed a rise in religious behavior in midcentury America. In his introduction Herberg cites evidence that at the time discouraged more-sanguine outlooks on the revival of religious fervor in the United States:

In the five years from 1949 to 1953 the distribution of Scripture in the United States increased 140 per cent, reaching an alltime high of 9,726, 391 volumes a year. People were apparently buying and distributing the Bible at an unprecedented rate. Furthermore, over four-fifths of adult Americans said they believed the Bible to be the "revealed word of God," rather than merely a "great piece of literature." Yet when these same Americans were asked to give the "names of the first four books of the New Testament of the Bible, that is, the first four gospels," 53 per cent could not name even one. The Bible can hardly be said to enter into the life and thought of Americans quite as much as their views on its divine inspiration and their eagerness to buy and distribute it might suggest.

This is at least part of the picture presented by religion in contemporary America: Christians flocking to church, yet forgetting about Christ.…

The religion which actually prevails among Americans today has lost much of its authentic Christian (or Jewish) content. Even when they are thinking, feeling, or acting religiously, their thinking, feeling, and acting do not bear an unequivocal relation to the faiths they profess. Americans think, feel, and act in terms quite obviously secularist at the very same time that they exhibit every sign of a widespread religious revival. It is this secularism of a religious people, this religiousness in a secularist framework, that constitutes the problem posed by the contemporary religious situation in America.

Source:

Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 14, 15.

Oxnam's Appearance

In the ongoing furor G. Bromley Oxnam, Methodist bishop of Washington, D.C., asked to appear before the HUAC to defend himself against the charges he supported communism or Communist organizations, charges which had long circulated in right-wing circles and had been repeated by members of the committee. Oxnam was a pronounced liberal who had a long, distinguished career as a defender of civil liberties and of the weaker segments of society, including organized labor and blacks. One of the out-standing leaders of his denomination, he was one of the leaders of the modern ecumenical movement. He was a founder of the National Council of Churches and one of the presidents of the World Council of Churches. A longtime member of the executive board of the American Civil Liberties Union, he was a critic of HUAC and the anti-Communist excesses of Senator McCarthy, He was not a Communist.

End of the Furor

It was generally agreed that Oxnam defended himself effectively in the nearly ten hours he appeared before the committee. Liberal commentators, most newspapers, and large numbers of his fellow Methodists applauded not only his defense, but the questions he raised about the procedures and tactics of the committee. His appearance paved the way for the decline in anti-Communist hysteria in the following year. No formal investigation of communism in the churches took place.

Sources:

Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);

Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968);

Brooks R. Walker, Christian Fright Peddlers (Garden City, N.Y.r Doubleday & Company, 1964).

COMMUNISM AND THE CHURCHES

Continued Suspicions

Although the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy period had weakened by the beginning of the 1960s, charges of Communist influence and infiltration of the society in general and Protestant churches in particular continued. These charges found support from ultraright religious leaders, who in turn gained support from the military.

Military Charges

In 1960 the U.S. Air Force released a training manual that charged there was "overwhelming evidence" that Communist fellow travelers had infiltrated churches and educational institutions. Further, the manual charged, thirty of the ninety-five people who translated the Revised Standard Version of the Bible were "affiliated with pro-Communist fronts, projects, and publications."

More Controversy

In the face of sharp protests the training manual was withdrawn, but public debate continued when it was revealed that Fred C. Schwarz, president of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, joinedE. Merrill Root, author of Collectivism on Campus: The Battle for the Mind in American Colleges (1955), and Herbert Philbrick, author of I Led Three Lives: Citizen, "Communist," Counterspy (1952), in a seminar, Education for American Security, at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Glenville, Illinois. Critics of these programs wondered that the military aligned itself against the nation's leading religious institutions.

John Birch Society

The following year public attention focused on the John Birch Society, a right-wing group named for a Baptist missionary who had been an American intelligence agent in China at the end of World War II. The society insisted that his death at the hands of the Chinese Communists made him the first casualty in the war against communism. But less paranoid people, even conservative politicians, were appalled when it was revealed that the John Birch Society's founder charged that former president Eisenhower was a "conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." Nearly over-looked in the resulting furor were the continuing charges that the National Council of Churches was infiltrated by Communists. The founder of the John Birch Society insisted that 3 percent of the Protestant clergy were either Communists or Communist sympathizers.

Christian Echoes Ministry

Billy James Hargis of Tulsa, Oklahoma, made a career of his religious anticommunism. In 1948 he organized the Christian Echoes Ministry to fight communism and its godless allies. He attracted attention when he organized an airlift of Bibles by balloons to people in Eastern Europe. He established a headquarters in Tulsa, where he organized a National Anti-Communist Leadership School and attacked Communists and their alleged influence. He was the source of the information contained in the controversial air force training manual. In 1966 he organized the Church of the Christian Crusade and made anticommunism a tenet of faith.

Fewer Tensions

While right-wing groups and individuals in and out of the churches continued to attack the social and ecumenical actions of individuals and mainline churches, the anti-red hysteria declined, and the redbaiters drifted to the shadows of political life.

Sources:

Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press);

Ralph A. Roy, Communism and the Churches (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1960).