Building a Culture of Peace

Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, the First Seventy Years

Paul R. Dekar

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781606082287
• eBook ISBN: 9781630877071
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Around the world, thousands of grassroots movements are confronting issues like destruction of the environment, economic depression, human rights violations, religious fundamentalism, and war. This book tells the courageous story of one such group. Organizing in 1939, Northern Baptists formed the Baptist Pacifist Fellowship as part of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Southern Baptists formed a parallel body. Like today, it was a time when sources of hope seemed hard to find. Discerning a need to support and connect Baptist conscientious objectors in the United States, members faced hostility in congregations and the nation. For the duration of the Second World War, the Korean War, war in Vietnam and elsewhere, Baptists sustained a witness for peace and justice. By 1984, threat of nuclear weapons led to formation of a wider circle of resistance to the culture of war. Subsequently, the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America has brought together Baptist peacemakers from around North America and the world. However small in numbers or reviled, members have been building a culture of peace through an interracial and international community. This book is an invaluable resource for those seeking a new world of forgiveness, respect for human rights, nonviolence, and peace.

1

The Baptist Pacifist Fellowship

Background

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress and called on the United States to enter what became known as the Great War. Christians generally supported his argument that the war would make the world safe for democracy. Most Christian pastors backed the war effort, as did the leaders of the recently formed Federal Council of Churches of Christ. Most denominations adopted resolutions embracing the war as a just cause. Older peace societies went into decline.

There were exceptions. These included the Historic Peace Churches (HPCs) and new pacifist organizations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). FOR began in Britain in 1914. The next year, on November 11, 1915, the North American FOR emerged during a conference in Garden City, New York. Sixty-eight participants included thirty-five women. The founders agreed to a statement of purpose according to which members rejected war unconditionally, proclaimed reliance on God, and expressed a determination to live according to God’s revolutionary principle of love.

For the duration of the Great War, FOR offered counseling and other assistance to conscientious objectors. Among their numbers, some Baptists did alternative service or went to jail. FOR also sought to strengthen the resolve of scattered members to resist patriotic war fever and to protest the militaristic attitude of churches.

Edwin Dahlberg delivering “The Churches and the National Conscience” address at Hartford CT in 1959. Photo from NCC, George Conklin.

Several prominent Baptists joined FOR including Walter Rauschen-busch (1861–1918), Dores Sharpe (1885–1981), Edwin Theodore Dahlberg (1893–1986), and Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969). Rauschenbusch was a pastor and leading theologian of social Christianity. At the end of his career, he taught at Rochester Theological Seminary. During the first world war, he formed a “peace group” because he believed the conflict was fueled primarily by the profit motive rather than by fundamental issues of justice. Discovering the newly-formed pacifist movement, he wrote Dores Sharpe that it was “an electric shock to get together with people more radical than I am, that take the Sermon on the Mount seriously.”1

Sharpe grew up on a farm near the St. John River in New Brunswick, Canada. During the war, Sharpe studied at Rochester Theological Seminary where he served as an assistant to Rauschenbusch. After graduation, Sharpe ministered with distinction in Canada and the United States and later wrote the first biography of Rauschenbusch. Theologian Bernie Loomer observed,

The range and depth of his passion for justice in the economic, political, and social dimensions of our common life, and the degree of his contribu­tions to the advance of the concerns of the kingdom constitute surely one of the finest exemplifications of the social Gospel in American Protesta­ntism during the present century. Walter Rauschenbusch sired a worthy disciple indeed.2

Dahlberg, onetime secretary to Walter Rauschenbusch and a Northern Baptist minister ordained in 1918, became a conscientious objector during the First World War. Though his pacifism during both world wars was controversial, Northern Baptists elected Dahlberg to head the denomination (1946–1947), and he later served as President of the National Council of Churches (1957–1960).

Many regarded Harry Emerson Fosdick as the greatest preacher of his generation. Some, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., considered him a prophet. Fosdick supported involvement by the United States in the Great War. However, at the end of the war he toured the trenches and turned to pacifism. Fosdick resolved, “I must never again put my Christian ministry at the nation’s disposal for the sanction and backing of war.”3 As a result, he became a member of FOR, explaining,

Having seen at first hand what war means in the first world conflict, my conscience could no longer dodge the issue: that war, in its cases, processes and results, is the complete denial of everything that Jesus Christ stands for. I welcomed then, as I do still, a fellowship which takes Christ’s ways of life seriously—not simply as an ideal dream for tomorrow but as a practical program today.4

An outcome of the Great War was a strengthened resolve by Baptist peacemakers and others to work for a world without war. Many recognized that the Great War and the terms of settlement by which the conflict formally ended set the stage for a second global war. In part, this was because the United States, a new superpower, refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. Despite the failure of the United States to join the League of Nations, FOR and other international organizations sought to eliminate war as a means of resolving disputes.

Animated by a vision of a world without war, peace advocates worked for disarmament and to eliminate the causes of war. Pacifism flourished. Speaking on December 14, 1930 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York City, Albert Einstein argued that there were two ways of resisting war. In countries where there was a draft, the pacifist could refuse military duty. “If only 2 percent of the men liable for war service were to refuse,” Einstein said, “there would not be enough jails in the world to take care of them.” The other option was for pacifists in countries such as the United States and England where no draft existed at the time to declare publicly that he would not, under any circumstances, bear arms. He and Mrs. Einstein got an ovation.5

On February 9, 1933, students at Oxford University in England debated the resolution, “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” It passed 275 to 153. In 1934 in the United States, the Northern Baptist Convention imbibed the spirit of the times and called on Baptists to agree to a non-aggression pledge, saying “I will cross no national boundary line to kill and to destroy, nor will I support my government in sending its army or navy to do so.”6 In Canada during the 1930s, pacifist sentiment was even greater than in the United States. FOR chapters sprang up in several regions of Canada.

Baptist pacifists understood that sin operates individually and collectively and that the reign of God would not come easily. Applying pacifist sentiments to concrete issues, such as war in Ethiopia or Spain, was left to individual believers. Yet Baptists, especially those influenced by Rauschenbusch, Fosdick, and other leading proponents of social Christianity, did not simply give voice to conscience. They actively undertook local initiatives for positive peace.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., formulated this concept during the 382-day Montgomery bus boycott (December 1, 1955–December 21, 1956). In a sermon preached at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on March 18, 1956, early during the Montgomery campaign, Dr. King contrasted “true” or positive peace with negative peace:

[Jesus says] I come to declare war over injustice. I come to declare war on evil. Peace is not merely the absence of some negative force—war, tension, confusion, but it is the presence of some positive force—justice, goodwill and the power of the kingdom of God. . . . Peace is not merely the absence of this tension [race relations], but the presence of justice. . . . If the Negro accepts his place, accepts exploitation and injustice, there will be peace. But it would be a peace boiled down to stagnant complacency, deadening passivity, and if peace means this, I don’t want peace. If peace means accepting second-class citizenship, I don’t want it. If peace means keeping my mouth shut in the midst of injustice and evil, I don’t want it. If peace means being complacently adjusted to a deadening status quo, I don’t want peace. If peace means a willingness to be exploited economically, dominated politically, humiliated and segregated, I don’t want peace. So in a passive, nonviolent manner, we must revolt against this peace.7

Dr. King returned to the theme when he went to Birmingham to participate in the civil rights movement there. In January 1963 a group of white clergy pleaded in an open letter to call off the demonstrations and to allow for the courts to achieve integration. Finding himself in jail, Dr. King responded on April 16 in the form of an open letter. He cited biblical examples of civil disobedience and turned to more recent examples of resistance to unjust laws. He recalled that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary in 1956 was illegal. Dr. King suggested that, had he lived in Germany or Hungary at the time, he would have advocated disobedience of the unjust laws. Dr. King continued,

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more dev...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Baptist Pacifist Fellowship
• Chapter 2: Living in the Shadow of Nuclear Annihilation
• Chapter 3: Creating a Network of Resistance, Affirmation, and Celebration
• Chapter 4: Building Blocks for a Culture of Peace
• Chapter 5: Building Blocks for a Global Network
• Chapter 6: Building Blocks for a More Inclusive Vision
• Chapter 7: Where Do We Go From Here?
• Appendix 1: Officers
• Appendix 2: Peace Camps
• Appendix 3: Friendship Tours
• Appendix 4: International Projects
• Appendix 5: Two Prayers
• Appendix 6: For Such a Time as This
• Appendix 7: Two Reflections on the School of the Americas
• Appendix 8: With Such a Cloud of Witnesses
• Appendix 9: Let us Seek Justice
• Appendix 10: Selections from Peace Soup—
Baptist Peacemaker 20 (Summer 2000) 13
• Appendix 11: Model Ministries for November 2008
• Appendix 12: “St. Peter and the Jerusalem Protocol” by Ken Sehested
• Appendix 13: Reflections on Lynchburg II
• Appendix 14: How Grace Gut-Punched Me in English Class
• Appendix 15: In the Valley of the Shadow
• Afterword
• Bibliography