A Coalition of Conscience & Power

CHURCH & STATE

In Mississippi, a $7,000,000 Government-financed program for retraining unemployed poor, mostly Negroes, is being run through an agency organized by a Roman Catholic diocese. In New Mexico, the $1,261,000 appropriated to retrain migrant workers was granted by the Federal Government to an organization set up by the state Council of Churches. In city after U.S. city this summer, churches played a major role in launching Project Head Start, the preschool training program for underprivileged children. In all, more than 100 federal programs are providing vast amounts of Government money to church-related agencies--and uncounted millions of dollars more will be heading their way as a result of Lyndon Johnson's education and medicare legislation.

In a nation that has staked much--and sometimes too much--on t he hallowed concept of the separation of church and state, the federal funding of projects and institutions with church ties has become commonplace. Whatever happened to the impregnable "wall of separation between Church and State" that Thomas Jefferson "contemplated with solemn reverence"? The answer is that the wall is still there, invulnerable as ever, but that reasonable men have found gates in it that can be opened, yet guarded. Says Presidential Press Secretary Bill Moyers, himself a Baptist teacher: "Separation of church and state meant one thing when government and religion were at cross-purposes. It means something different when they have common purposes."

Abolition & Prohibition. Today, unquestionably, the purposes of religion and government are more common than cross. Los Angeles Jesuit James Vizzard calls this new era of good feeling "a coalition of conscience and power." It marks a new phase in U.S. church-state relations, which has seen, as a National Council of Churches study committee put it last year, "both separation and interaction, harmony and tension."

Despite the fact that America's first settlers were zealous seekers of religious liberty, nine of Britain's 13 colonies in the New World created harmony of a sort by establishing state churches of their own--the Anglican faith in Virginia, for example, and the Congregational in Massachusetts and Connecticut. That kind of "harmony" began to give way during the Revolution, when most of the infant states of the future republic dropped their legal ties to a particular church. Later, Congress formally affirmed the right of free exercise of religion in the First Amendment and clearly forbade the establishment of any one faith.

Even as law courts and legislators were slowly building Jefferson's wall, history created situations where the paths of church and state converged. During the 19th century, for example, the Government subsidized frontier preachers to help pacify--even as they tried to convert--warring Indian tribes. In the Reconstruction era, church agencies were given public grants to assist freed slaves. Moreover, the U.S. came to accept the right and duty of the churches to influence legislation when a moral issue was involved--happily, before the Civil War, in the case of Northern Protestants who fought for abolition, less so later when Prohibition was imposed on the nation largely through efforts of Baptists and Methodists.

No Special Favors. Yet never before in U.S. history has the work of the churches and the Government coalesced on such a scale as now. The ecumenical movement, for one thing, has soothed old Protestant fears of a Roman Catholic-engineered, European-style church state. "When we Protestants talked of separation of church and state," admits Methodist Bishop Gerald Kennedy of Los Angeles, "we really meant that we were afraid of the Catholic Church." He attributes the relaxed attitude to "the two Johns"--Pope John XXIII, whose expressions of love for all men transcended the boundaries of doctrine, and John Kennedy, who convinced even the most wary fundamentalists that a Catholic in the White House did not automatically mean special favors for his church.

As a result, arguments over church-state issues raised by sectarian pressures of individual churches are far fewer than they were a decade ago. Last February, for example, the Catholic Council on Civil Liberties submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court, attacking the Connecticut law against birth control that so long offended Protestants. The National Council of Churches, traditionally opposed to direct federal aid for parochial schools, accepted with only minor qualms this year's education act that provides for certain assistance to children who attend such schools. The breakdown of hostility has taken place on both sides of the fence: even those who oppose direct aid to church-related schools and colleges recognize the vital educational role they play; schools once fearful that federal aid meant federal control now realize that they cannot survive economically without some measure of Government help.

The Launching Pad. Another factor in the new atmosphere has been the feeling that the church should be, as San Francisco's Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike puts it, "a launching pad, not a comfort station." American Christianity's desire to say and do something relevant about social problems of the day has propelled clergymen out of the pulpit and onto civil rights picket lines. "From there," says the Rt. Rev. James Montgomery, Episcopal Suffragan Bishop of Chicago, "it is only another short step into deliberate partnership in the war on poverty and in educational projects." One reason that the co operation has been so easily accepted, suggests Chicago's Lutheran Theologian Martin Marty, is found in the widespread agreement with St. Augustine's notion that "necessity has no law." In other words, it is more important to eradicate poverty and social inequality than to fight about who is doing the job.

Still, the nation's perennial watchdogs of secularism inevitably have plenty of misgivings about the coalition. The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Jewish Congress, and Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State--all remain on the lookout for what they feel are violations of the separation wall. In Jackson County, Mo., P.O.A.U. is backing a taxpayers' suit to stop participation of three churches in Project Head Start. The American Jewish Congress warns that it will keep a close watch on how the 1965 Education Act is administered. Yet some members of these organizations feel that the current climate of opinion may make it harder for them to win future legal battles. Says Howard Squadron, chairman of the A.J.C.'s Commission on Law and Social Action: "It's difficult to find oneself in opposition to the spirit of progress."

That Bogy. Some churchmen also wonder whether the churches' willingness to accept Government aid is progress at all. Particularly concerned are Baptists and conservative Lutherans, whose spiritual tradition strongly emphasizes absolute separation of religion and government. Although some Baptist colleges plan to apply for federal funds under the Higher Education Facilities Act, Baptists in Massachusetts have rejected public loans for hospital expansion under the Hill-Burton Hospital Construction Act or for low-income housing under the National Housing Act. This summer, despite their sympathy for the aims of Project Head Start, they reluctantly decided not to participate directly, instead plan to start a similar program of their own.

The reason for the fears about churches accepting federal funds is that worrisome ecclesiastical bogy, Erastianism*--state control of the church. "If I take a Government program, I have to accept the strings," says Rabbi Robert Kahn of Houston's Temple Emanu-El. "I don't want the Government to dictate policy in my church or synagogue." Chicago's Bishop Montgomery, who basically favors church-state cooperation, nonetheless says that there should be "watchful vigilance," lest the church become "just another social agency." The Rev. Dean Kelley of the National Council of Churches also worries that U.S. Christianity may become so involved in social projects that it runs the risk of becoming just another client of government. "The greatest function of the modern church," he says, "is that of focusing moral power, not exercising public administration."

Consider the Context. Nonetheless, a majority of church leaders see no or little danger in federal support of church-associated agencies. Methodist Bishop James Mathews of Boston argues that Project Head Start, for example, is not Government subsidy of religion, since "the church is not receiving the benefit of the money but offering itself as a channel. The church, as a church, is not receiving the money." The president of the Lutheran Church in America, Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, agrees. "We believe that the proper relationship is one of functional interaction," he says. "As we see it, the divinely instituted missions of the church and state are converging in important areas of their activities."

Dr. Edgar S. Chandler, executive director of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago, argues that this kind of convergence is the product of a vast social change that has made old categories of thinking about church and state irrelevant. "With the development of education for all, of social services for people in need, it becomes increasingly impossible to maintain a real wall of separation," he says. "It is much more fruitful to show how the church can reach .further to fulfill its mission of serving people. You don't change the doctrine of separation, but you consider it in the context of the needs of present-day society."

How long will the current comradeship-in-alms last? The pragmatic need now, as the churches see it, is to join with the state to eradicate social evil; the pragmatic need tomorrow may well be for the church to stand in prophetic judgment against the state. But at the moment, the churches seem to share the undoctrinaire attitude of the South Side Chicago minister who announced that the church was starting a series of neighborhood welfare projects supported by federal money. "Some of you are probably wondering how we're going to square this with our theory of separation of church and state," said the minister cheerfully. "Well, we're simply going to have to find a way to square it--or change the theory."

* Named for Swiss Theologian Thomas Lueber (1524-83), known also as Erastus, who attacked the theocratic views of Calvinism.

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