Racial Justice Working Group
March 24, 2011

The ecumenical movement is a movement to make visible the church’s essential wholeness (unity) for the sake of its witness in the world.  Racism denies our given unity in Christ and radically distorts the church’s witness to Christ’s work of reconciliation.  An ecumenical movement that does not address racism/racial justice at the heart of its agenda is not ecumenical in any meaningful sense of the word. 

This understanding of ecumenism is now widely affirmed; but living it out has been a struggle marked by victories and setbacks.  In these brief remarks, I want to survey some of this history, focusing especially on ecumenical opposition to racism in the United States.  My prayer is that this will contribute to the efforts of this new working group – a group for which I am deeply thankful. 

The African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, and the National Baptist Convention were charter members of the Federal Council of Churches in 1908.  At its inaugural meeting, the Council affirmed that the churches stood for “equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life,” but offered no explicit consideration of race relations.   

World War I helped raise consciousness.  A 1919 Conference sponsored by the Federal Council issued an eight-point appeal for protection of African Americans from mob violence; equal opportunity in jobs; equal facilities in education, recreation, travel; and implementation of voting rights.  In 1921, the Council created a permanent Commission on Race Relations to promote this agenda, the first explicit commitment of the churches to a continuous effort on behalf of racial justice and to cooperation of black and white churches in undertaking it.  It was this commission which started Race Relations Sunday, which continued until the mid-1960s.  By the mid-1920s, the Federal Council also had a firm policy of not holding meetings in hotels that discriminated against racial minorities.  But the Council did not directly challenge the underlying pattern of segregation prior to WWII.   

A first sign that things were changing was the election of Benjamin Mays as vice president of the Council in 1940.  After the war, in 1946, the Federal Council issued a declaration denouncing segregation as “undesirable and a violation of the gospel”, calling on member communions to do the same.   According to the Council’s general secretary, Samuel Cavert, this marked the first time in U.S. history that a group of churches unequivocally opposed segregation on moral, theological grounds.  Several denominations - including Congregationalists, Methodists, Episcopalians, American Baptists, and Northern Presbyterians - quickly endorsed the declaration.  But, of course, the moral force of all this was undercut by the de facto segregation of local congregations.  An extensive survey following the Council’s declaration found that only 1/10 of 1% of black Protestants belonged to congregations of mixed racial membership. Far from helping overcome segregation, the churches were contributing to it. 

The Federal Council became the National Council of Churches in 1950, but ecumenical understanding of the issues didn’t change, again, until “the Freedom Movement,” following the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, encouraged a more activist stance.  Churches, always several years behind the curve, began to issue official statements in the early 1960s.  In 1963, clearly a watershed year, the Disciples pledged support for the idea of an integrated church and an integrated society, Southern Presbyterians declared that segregation is “out of harmony with Christian theology and ethics”, and the United Church of Christ issued a “call for racial justice now”. 

There is no doubt that the individual churches found language and courage to do this through ecumenical bodies.  In January of 1963, leaders of the NCC, the Synagogue Council of America, and the Catholic Inter-Racial Council met for the first inter-faith conference on religion and race; and in June, the General Board of the NCC authorized the Council’s president to immediately appoint a Commission on Religion and Race to promote action, not just education, in support of desegregation.  White leaders simply could not stand by while black counterparts were staging demonstrations and facing increased violence!  The General Board declared that “words are no longer useful in this struggle unless accompanied by sacrifice and commitment”, and its members pledged themselves to engage in demonstrations and other direct action to promote racial justice, especially through civil rights legislation.  In July, representatives of the new commission testified before the House Judiciary Commission on behalf of President Kennedy’s civil rights recommendations, and then, in August, cosponsored the March on Washington.  Among the speakers preceding Dr. King was the famous ecumenical leader, Eugene Carson Blake, who said that if the churches had put their own houses in order, there would be little need for a civil rights bill or a march on Washington. 

In 1964, an interfaith coalition organized a massive convocation in Washington during the filibuster against the Civil Rights bill.  In 1965 many ecumenical leaders were in Selma for the March to Montgomery.  Soon after, the NCC initiated the Delta Project to help buy land for cotton workers in Mississippi making under $500 a year.  And in 1968, the Commission on Religion and Race prepared study materials for congregations to promote the struggle, and helped establish the Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) which channeled resources to local black-led projects.   

As I look back on it, 1969 was a watershed year comparable to 1963.  The move toward black power, which seemed to magnify separation rather than desegregation (much to the consternation of the predominantly white churches), was clear by 1967; but the decisive step came in 1969 when James Forman presented the “Black Manifesto,” calling for reparations from the churches for injustice suffered during slavery, at a conference on black ecumenical development.  The Manifesto denounced “the racist white church with its hypocritical declarations and doctrines of brotherhood,” which hit like an earthquake in the mainline denominations.  The NCC General Board gave support to the conference and developed a policy on “socially responsibly investing,” but issued a rejection of “the ideology of the Manifesto.” 

The 1960s freedom struggle (civil rights movement) represents liberal Protestant activism at its peak.  Since that time, mainline churches have grown accustomed to saying that racism is a cancer in the body of Christ, have generally paid more attention to inclusivity in leadership, and express a desire to be more integrated in membership - but, as Bradford Vester, professor at Williams College, puts it, “the recent history of mainline activism for racial justice is a story of good intentions but discouraging results.” 

You can speculate later on the reasons for this, but let me name a few facts.  After a decade of aggressive evangelism, minority members of Evangelical Lutheran Church in America were still no more than 2.2% at the turn of the century, a confirmation of Verter’s claim that mainline churches are still among the most segregated institutions in the U.S.  The Presbyterian Church (USA) has issued numerous statements in favor of affirmative action, but a 1999 survey found that 75% of Presbyterians oppose it, an indication of the persistent gap between leaders and regular members and of the failure to teach about the churches’ social concerns.  Since the 1980s, black leadership in the Episcopal Church has declined rather substantially.  Financial support for such interdenominational groups as IMPACT (which aimed at achieving racial equality) has dried up.

The NCC issued a major policy statement on racial justice in 1984, a statement which defined racism as “racial prejudice plus power” and called on Christians to “strive together in the power of the Spirit to create institutional forms of the church in which racism is eliminated and cultural and ethnic richness are celebrated.”  But the statement has not been updated, and the Council’s efforts, in my judgment, have been diffuse, not sustained.  In the mid 1990s, for example, the NCC raised considerable money for the Burned Churches Project, but this whole effort lost steam once an independent study showed that racism was a factor in only a small percentage of the fires.  By the time I became chairperson of the Council’s newly-formed Justice and Advocacy Commission in 2004, the Racial Justice Working Group had been disbanded. 

Let me, briefly, pick up the story globally.  In 1925, J.H. Oldham, one of the patriarchs of modern ecumenism, published Christianity and the Race Problem which put racism squarely on the ecumenical agenda.  The early conferences of the Life and Work movement, as well as the WCC’s first assembly in 1948, explicitly condemned racism as contrary to the gospel and called on churches to oppose it; but much of the focus in the late 1940s and early 1950s was on anti-Semitism as the Holocaust was coming to light. 

Starting in the late 1960s, however, ecumenical thinking about racism underwent two major shifts. 1) Until the late 1960s, WCC statements (influenced by western Enlightenment culture) assumed that racism could be eliminated through education.  A new attitude was first articulated at a famous WCC conference in Notting Hill, England in 1969.  Willem Visser’t Hooft, the Council’s first general secretary, summarized the shift:  “We have believed too much in persuasion by declarations and have not been sufficiently aware of the irrational factors of the situation.  We have insisted too little on the very considerable sacrifices which have to be made if racial justice is to prevail.” 

The WCC’s response was the Program to Combat Racism (PCR) which, through its Special Fund, began to support groups engaged in fighting racism.  The program was tremendously controversial!  Grants were given for humanitarian purposes to groups such as the African National Congress which was engaged in armed struggle against the apartheid government in South Africa.  Just as it is not enough to aid the victims of economic oppression, said leaders in the WCC, so it is not enough to educate racial oppressors.  The church is called to acts of solidarity with those who struggle for justice.  Just as there must be a preferential option for the poor, so there must be a privileged listening to the racially oppressed.  When it comes to racism, said the WCC’s Central Commission in 1969, “Neutrality is not an option.”   

There was a related development in these years.  The WCC’s Central Committee, in setting up the PCR in 1969, declared that racism “is not an unalterable feature of human society.”  At first glance, this seems to run counter to the claims of how radical it is.  What they were doing, however, was defining racism as prejudice plus power.  The prejudice infects us all and probably will until the end of history, but the power arrangements can and must be challenged. 

The second shift in thinking also began in the late 1960s.  Racism had generally been seen within the ecumenical movement as a problem of mission (i.e., it undermines the church’s witness).  Now it began to be seen, as well, as an issue of ecclesiology (i.e., racial inclusiveness is a fundamental mark of the church and its unity).  This was explicitly stated at an international conference on combating racism, sponsored by the WCC in 1980.  Racism, said the delegates, is a bigger threat to unity than denominationalism.  It was this shift that led to denunciations of apartheid as a heresy.   For example, in 1982 the World Alliance of Reformed Churches suspended the membership of apartheid-supporting churches, contending that their theological apology for apartheid was a denial of the gospel that placed them outside the fellowship of churches. 

A rather hidden implication of this is that unity is eschatological, which means that we must be willing to disrupt our temporary, partial, flawed unities for the sake of the church’s wholeness that is our larger goal.  Oscar Lee, the last executive director of the Federal Council’s Department of Race Relations, put it this way:  “Now is the time for action, even costly action that may jeopardize the organizational goals and institutional structures of the church and may disrupt any fellowship that is less than obedient to the Lord of the church.” 

In this country, we can see this second shift very clearly in the history of the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) – the church union “consultation” that led to Churches Uniting in Christ (CUIC).  From the late 1960s on, it has included the AME, CME, and AME Zion, so racism was very much on its radar screen.  But until 1980, racism was dealt with in the appendix to the theological consensus statement hammered out by the churches as the theological basis of their union.  In the early 1980s, racism and sexism were finally incorporated into the statement itself as ecclesiological issues, issues of the church’s essential nature.  When a new document, Churches in Covenant Communion, was approved in 1988 as a basis for covenanting, the language was stronger:  “God abhors racism.  It is essential to Christian unity that there be a redress of racism and a commitment to racial inclusiveness, both in our churches and our society.  This is not alone a matter of mission.  This commitment is fundamental to Christian community itself.”  COCU, as you know, became CUIC in 2002, claiming as one of the marks of the new relationship, “Engagement together in mission to combat racism.”  The churches, according to the basic civic covenant, recognize “a particular and emphatic call to ‘erase racism’ by challenging the system of white privilege….” 

And so we come to the present.  Obviously, the U.S. is not where it was in the 1960s – but the economic numbers (if nothing else) show that deep-seated patterns of racial discrimination remain.  What, however, is the right current strategy for addressing this evil?  NaKeisha has focused on particular issues – cocaine sentencing, gun violence – that harm minority communities disproportionately.  I hope we endorse the importance of this.  But what else is needed?  A revision of the Policy Statement as a way of elevating the issue and reminding the churches that it hasn’t gone away?  What vision of the church do we lift up?  A fully inclusive church? Distinctive churches in equal relationship?  What vision do we hold for society? 

I am grateful for your commitment to this work.  Even more, I give thanks to God who has bound us to one another in Christ and called us to work for justice for all of our neighbors. 

Michael Kinnamon
General Secretary
National Council of Churches