From Archbishop Hallinan

Ecumenism in the New South
January 26, 1967
St. Bernard/Sacred Heart, Cullman,Alabama
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This address follows that one of the new South’s most sensitive spokesman - Father Bernard Law of the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson. Speaking of Interfaith Relations in the South, he made two major contributions to ecumenism: he explained the newly-developed Catholic approach to it by a fine analysis of the recent Vatican decree; and he surveyed what 12 southern Catholic dioceses were doing.

The idea of Father Law and I speaking on the same general subject requires a word of explanation, and I can only illustrate it by the small-town luncheon club which accepted for membership only one man from each profession or business. Then, suddenly a clergyman-member presented the name of his bishop who had moved into town. A sort of identity crisis was averted when the officers found a solution. When the directory appeared, it listed the minister, ‘Religion-Retail’ and the bishop, ‘Religion-Wholesale’!

That’s about how it is with Father Law and me. He spoke on ‘Ecumenism-Retail’; I will speak on ‘Ecumenism-Wholesale.’ My line of general development will be:

Denominational streams in the South
Ups and Downs of Unity Movement
General ‘religious profile’ of the Southerner
Recent ecumenical Developments (since 1910)
The Future - Wave or Ebb-Tide?

The subject is large, complicated and not well researched. It touches on the phenomenon of Revivalism, the tensions of slavery, secession, strife and segregation. At two extremes, both Baptists and Catholics have shown a hard intransigence hardly worthy of Christ’s followers. Yet the streams have run close together, as well as far apart, and in them all has walked the man we call the ‘Southerner’ with his own basic religious character. Does 1967 present the picture of a new wave as the streams converge, or a backing up of old water in the dark eddies of a thousand camp-meetings, a million broken dreams of glory and Armageddon, and a dour of Calvinist affirmation of a stratified status quo?

1. DENOMINATIONAL STREAMS

Many churches, both traditional and spontaneous, make up the church-going Southern Christian. But we must, in following the mainstream, put aside such Catholic landmarks as the Florida missions, the New Orleans’ French and Spanish settlements, and the thoroughly American instance of Bishop John England’s program of lay and democratic usage in Charleston (1820-1842). The Anglicans emanated from their establishment in Virginia; the Lutherans out of southern Pennsylvania; and other sects were born, or cross-fertilized, dissected or died in the land south of the Potomac, Delaware and the Ohio Rivers. But the three great currents were in this order: Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist. All came south in the latter part of the 18th century. There had been a Presbyterian church in western Virginia in 1738; John Wesley had been in Georgia in 1735 but this was before the founding of Methodism, and there was a Baptist church in Charleston in 1684. Not until the years 1755 to 1775, however, did the three great Evangelical churches organize with sufficient strength to cover the south. By that time they had become, in spite of their Anglican and Calvinist beginnings, authentically ‘American.’

The ‘South’ is really many Souths, geographically as well as culturally. There is Appalachia; - Tennessee and Kentucky, present West Virginia and the northern mountainous parts of North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. Here the religious mainstream was staunch Presbyterianism. There is the Deep South: - South Carolina, and most of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, the upper part of Louisiana. The three denominations, Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist predominate. Then there are such exotic ‘Souths’ as southern Florida, cosmopolitan New Orleans, and the technologically oriented settlements at Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Cape Kennedy, Florida. In these centers of transplanted Yankees, all faiths and forms can be found.

Despite generous exceptions, the religious current has been Calvinist, plus the Dissenters’ moral code of the seventeenth century. This enabled the fixed and static teachings of predestination to bear fruit in a stern way of life. It was ‘every-man-in-his-proper-place,’ a status quo of the social order. But the code of dissent put a high value on autonomy (as in the Presbyterian and even more, the Baptist tenets) and emotional individualism (as in the Methodist).

Compensating factors included a devotion of a very profound nature; emphasis on the Bible, the home and the local church. The awareness of God (true, it was the Jehovah of Sinai and the prophets) ran through the South in a degree equaled only by the New England faith of the Great Awakening in the 1740s. It was during the Second Awakening (the 1760s) that the three sects made their indelible imprint on Appalachia and the Deep South.

These are the primary streams. They affect the ‘leaders’, the ‘led’ and the ‘lost’. They lie deep in the narratives of such diverse southern writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Robert Warren Penn. They have inspired such great schools as Duke and Emory universities; they have been evoked in White Citizen Councils, lynchings, legislation to search Catholic convents, and the cross-burning of the Ku Klux Klan.

2. UPS AND DOWNS OF UNITY MOVEMENTS

When the gentle but powerful evangelist, John Wesley said to another Christian, ‘If thy heart be as my heart, then give my thy hand,’ he touched on one of faith’s most dynamic instincts, - the desire for unity with others in God. A Baptist historian, Dr. Theron D. Price, recently put it this way:

‘Our natures seem to require the displacement of chaos by the realization of unity and continuity in the orders of existence. In this sense, unity is primarily an instinct or drive. . . Apart from such instinct and struggle there would be, for us, no conquest of chaos, and therefore no cosmos and no culture.’
Christian Unity in North America (1958)
‘A Southern Baptist Views Christian Unity’
Theron D. Price pg. 81

How well has Wesley’s invitation, and this Baptist ‘instinct for unity’ worked out in southern churches? No ready answer in available. Nearly two centuries have been filled with what Dr. Walter B. Posey, church historian of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, has termed ‘Religious Strife on the Southern Frontier’ (1965). The very chapter-headings of his book are signs of controversy: Protestants against Protestants (that is, Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians); against a New Sect (the Disciples of Christ); against Catholics especially after Lyman Beecher’s Plea for the West in 1832, for an end to ‘a system of ignorance, priestcraft and superstition.’ This last movement might be called ‘selective ecumenism’, sects uniting to fight a common Christian enemy, or even, in the light of Our Lord’s counter-plea, ‘that they all may be one’, ecumenism in reverse.

Granted a certain instinct for unity, the American experience has been corroborated by foreign visitors, de Tocqueville in the 1840s and Philip Schaff in 1850:

‘All the sects are comprised within the great unity of Christianity, and Christian morality is everywhere the same.’ (de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 314) ‘We need no new sects; there are already too many. . . America, to fulfill her mission, has only to present in its unity and beauty the old and eternally young church of Christ. . . embodied in so many denominations sects, yet united in a common national life.’
(Schaff, America, pp. 203-204)

Toward the end of the century, James Bryce of England again oversimplified American ecumenism: ‘Proposals for union. . . witness to a growing good feeling among the clergy, and a growing indifference to minor points of doctrine and church government.’
(Bryce, The American Commonwealth, II, p. 580)

But religious unity was not as simple nor as near as these foreign prophets saw it. Cooperation between denominations was not widespread, but antagonism was. ‘They found strength,’ writes Dr. Posey, ‘in exclusiveness, individualism, and eventually divisiveness.’ (Posey, Religious Strife on Southern Frontiers, pg.18)

An old preacher summed it up:

‘What must they come amongst us for? If we allow them to come into our churches, the people will go to hear ‘em preach, and won’t go to hear us preach, and we shall all be put down.’

It is discouraging to the honest ecumenist to hear a high-placed prelate, Bishop James Camon, Jr. repeat almost the same thought in the 1930s when the ‘organic union’ of the Northern and Southern Methodist Episcopal churches was being discussed:

‘The Methodist Episcopal Church, South would not agree to the plan because it would be swallowed up, and be a minority of one-third.’
Cannon, The Present Status of Methodist Unification, p. 19

The Catholic position, although that of decided minority, rooted its exclusiveness in the doctrine of the true Church, and its historical continuity. Seen with the vision of faith, or even with the human eyes of history, it represented both a fidelity that America could well learn and an intransigence that our pluralistic society could well forego. Unwanted and uninvited to the shifting table of religion union, Catholics generally stayed close together, provided their own schools, societies and journals. When they discussed Protestantism, it was usually by way of reply to the ancient charges of ‘ignorance, priestcraft and superstition.’ Whatever the Catholic response to an invitation to union would have been, there are few instances of such a Protestant invitation ever being proffered.

In the South perhaps even more than the East or Midwest, the denominations ‘shoved and pushed, attracted and repelled each other like children.’ (Posey, p.23) The coming of foreign and home missionary societies, Sunday schools and tract-distributors led the Apple Creek Baptist Association to invent a new word, ‘unfellowship’, with all such foreign groups. One reason was their fear that these would insist on an educated clergy; equally strong was that the missioners were more concerned with new-fangled ideas that were broader in scope than the parochialism of the separate churches.

Roughly summarizing, it may safely be said that four factors brought the quarreling Protestant together: (1) The Revivalism of 1805-1806 when all forces joined in the truly phenomenal camp-meetings and wholesale conversions. This ended when time came to count the fish: strife, schism, and new sects resulted. (2) The anti-Catholic campaign starting in the 1850s with the heavy Irish and German immigration, and continuing well into the 20th century. In reality, this union against the common enemy never ceased; it just rose and fell. (3) The crisis of the War of 1861-1865 which brought Southern churches (except the Catholic and Episcopalian) together, and separated them from their Northern counter parts. (4) The union against science and the new philosophies, when Dr. J. H. Thornwell, soon to be the president of The College of South Carolina, accused his old teacher of ‘infidelity’. From southern pulpits, the word went out that this infidelity and a new paganism called ‘Science’ was sweeping the world. ‘Christianity and atheism are the combatants’ added Dr. Thornwell, ‘and the atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans and jacobins are all on one side.’ (W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, p. 92)

It is certainly true that in better men, the nobler instinct of a true religious harmony persisted. In 1855, a prominent Methodist preacher, Augustus Longstreet asked his colleagues to drop their anti-Catholicism and bind all the South; all foreigners, Catholics and Democrats against nativism, The Episcopal Bishop of Kentucky, about the same time accused the sects of wasting their time with ‘paltry distinctions, to the sad neglect of the weightier matters of our common Christianity.’ (Posey, p.13)

At the First Vatican Council, Bishop Augustin Verot of Savannah argued against the timing of the decrees on papal infallibility:

‘I live among Protestants, and I have a pretty good opportunity to see how they conduct themselves. . . It is not accurate to hold that among them, there is increasing hostility toward the Holy See. (If the exposition of certain points is softened and moderated by the council, as far as truth will bear) then at least the door will be opened.’
(Michael V.Gannon, Rebel Bishop, p.215)

Probably many clergymen of all faiths, and certainly their intelligent laymen looked forward to a day in which these sentiments could be realized. As the Presbyterian president of the Federal Council of churches in 1924, Dr. Robert E. Speer, said: ‘We are coming to a common recognition of the elemental unity of life and experience among Christians. There is no Presbyterian type of sin with which only the Presbyterian Church can deal’ (United in Service, report of Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 1920-1924, p.14)

But the 19th century American experience left us a sad heritage of discord and division. It still exists today. Since the humble beginnings of the World Council at Edinboro in 1910, the movement toward unity has gained momentum. Recent events, most especially the late, but highly significant Vatican Council (1962-1965) have increased this momentum. If it was true, as was stated in the 1930s that there was ‘much interest, less understanding’, today there is surely much more interest, and the beginnings of a sound understanding.

3. RECENT ECUMENICAL DEVELOPMENTS (SINCE 1910)

In our times, H. Richard Niebuhr has said: ‘Denominationalism represents the moral failure of Christianity’. (Social Sources of Denominationalism, p.25) The Vatican decree on Ecumenism, so ably analyzed by Father Law in his earlier lecture, contains this pregnant sentence: ‘In recent times more than ever before, the Lord of Ages, has been rousing divided Christians to remorse over their divisions, and to a longing for unity.’
(On Ecumenism, II)

Perhaps the two World Wars have forced our generation to reexamine the power of the old instinct for religious unity. Lives spent cheaply, nations crushed, supplies and money rising in clouds of waste, personal despair and group frustration - these are expensive ways of maintaining the peace. Technology without a conscience, security without cost, and pleasure without effort have added to the human condition. America is wealthy, weary and misunderstood. The South is wracked by the deathpains of an ancient slavery and contemporary injustice. Can the churches today offer us a unity that politics, economics and science have failed to provide?

A religious profile of the Southerner does not necessarily encourage our quest. In Appalachia and in the Deep South, the dogma of Calvin, the cult of violence and a faded individualism vie for mastery with brighter, more vital, more Christian qualities. Why is liturgical renewal so rare in the major evangelical churches of the mainstream? Why has the restless questing of the human intellect so seldom linked with God, why has an emotional storm more meaning than a true understanding? Why has the Social Gospel with its demands of economic justice of living wages, and racial quality of non-discrimination been so little recognized? The churches have been slow to help the worker and the Negro, but the body of the denominations have been more resistant. In 1955, Robert Crawford, a hard-shell segregationist, told a Virginia audience: ‘The worst obstacle we face in the fight to preserve segregated schools in the South is the white preacher. The patriots of Reconstruction had the preachers praying for them instead of working against them.’ (James McB. Dabbs, The Southern Heritage, p. 252-253)

All these factors - isolated worship of God, a suspicion of the human intellect, racial and economic sectarianism, - have worked against religious unity. They have been based, not on love, but on fear. In a survey made in 1934, the Southern Evangelical churches were shown to favor the present denominational system, and being thus conservative, disapproved any strong impetus toward genuine union. In the Quadrennial Meeting of the Federal Council (1924) one Methodist layman, Mr. M. M. Davies of Atlanta, said clearly: ‘I began to realize the narrowness, the bigotry of denominationalism, and the value of cooperation. . . The coming of the Kingdom is delayed because His followers are in so many different groups.’ (Op. Cit. pg 24)

The Catholic bishops of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida would agree with Mr. Davies: ‘History reveals a splintered Christianity; centuries have failed to heal it. But on this Pentecost (1965) our hopes are higher. In the presence of a growing dialogue and a hearty cooperation, one can hardly deny that the Holy Spirit, breathing over an anxious world, is inspiring men of all beliefs to meet together to talk and pray together.’

Emory University, Methodist-oriented, is growing into a truly ecumenical center in Atlanta. Last week, a significant unity service was held there with all the major faiths represented, and the university awarded honorary degrees to its own Bishop Frederick Pierce Corson, and the distinguished world religious leader, Leo Josef Cardinal Suenens.

Similar examples abound today. Catholics have come out of their non-ecumenical shells, and Protestants both leaders and led, are becoming much more aware of the great work of the Council of Churches. There is evidence of ferment at the pastoral, and especially the academic, level. There is even considerable leadership from many bishops and other officers and administrators. But perhaps it is the layman who is most interested, even though his understanding may not be too mature. After all, Baptists have worked and lived with, socialized and argued with, even married and bore children with Catholics, and vice versa. Why cannot both begin the simple steps up the ecumenical ladder together. Laymen, it might be said, can rush in where bishops and theologians fear to tread.

4. THE FUTURE - WAVE OR EBB-TIDE?

Among the wiser aphorisms of Karl Marx was his comment that history repeats itself: once as tragedy, then as farce. How neatly that Epigram fits the South! There was something of glory in the Rebel generals, perhaps even in the Confederate leaders. There is only a pale shadow (with a loud-speaker) in today’s southern governors, with their sheriff-bullies and ragged editors.

Can we fit the Church unity movement into this world of tragedy-farce? When one of three churches located side-by-side in a row refuses to share in an ‘exchange-collection’ to be given to the church next door to help its needy children, just where are we? When a bi-racial committee fails to get the largest church-body in the city to provide a single representative, where do we stand? We are very probably on time for the curtain to rise on the 20th century’s most ironic farce.

Ecumenism has received a bad press since the 16th century, and nowhere with less need than in the American South. With a common Bible and the Lord’s prayer to start with, an awareness of the presence of God in our lives, a moderate degree of commitment to and mission in the world - we should have been more prepared for the ecumenists than we were. Christians should not have shuddered, or worse, turned away when a Methodist, Rupert E. Davies said in 1962:

‘Denominational evangelism has ceased to be of any great value at all. There is no longer a receptive audience for those who teach as Methodists or Anglicans in isolation for their fellow- Christians. . .’
(Methodists and Unity, p. 98)

or when a Baptist, Dr. Theron D. Price wrote in 1958:

‘Our ecclesiastical divisions per se are less serious than lukewarm faith and feeble love. . . The Southern Baptists are in much greater danger, at present, of failing to make our witness to the Whole Church by isolation than of losing the distinctiveness of that witness by association.’
Theron D. Price, in Christian Unity in North America,
‘A Southern Baptist View’, p. 88

On the ecumenical roadway there are detours, road-blocks, ‘soft shoulders’ and pot-holes. But as in every human endeavor, God works in His own good time. We must trust that His Son’s prayer, ‘ that they all may be one’ will be realized either with, without or alongside our puny efforts. The ladder of religious unity has many steps, and there is no place to begin except at the bottom-rung.

In order, we might start with Preliminary Ecumenism: conversions and contacts, and always courtesy and kindness. This is what Catholics and Protestants should have been doing for the past four centuries. Our time-lag can be compensated only by the honesty and charity of our present approach.

Second, Praying Ecumenically: this stage engages us in public and private prayer for unity. Here we pray with our Lord.

Third, Acting Ecumenically: every mutual effort toward the common good, from a bowl of hot soup for a convalescent Baptist to an elaborate cooperative program of racial justice.

Fourthly, Understanding Ecumenically: now the work really starts. To learn about other churches, to hold them in reverence, to stress similarities and to examine and honestly explain the dissimilarities, Good will and trust, of course are necessary on both sides, but without the hard work of study, they will issue in nothing but superficiality.

Fifthly, Doctrinal Ecumenism: at highest levels, in the study and comparison of religious concepts, their history and their development, the finest minds must be linked to honesty, and the unity instinct must be rooted in charity. This is the work now going on between members of the Bishops’ Commission on Unity and their opposite members in the Council of Churches.

Finally, Full Ecumenism: actual sharing of beliefs and common participation in the liturgy. We must view this phase in the light of four centuries of strife, and countless sects, denominations and churches. But it is of far more importance to think of this achieved unity as God’s work needing man’s best efforts.

‘If I were mystic, I would attribute the change in the South’s situation to fate,’ the historian, Walter Prescott Webb, recently said, ‘if I were a minister, I would say that the Lord Himself, after permitting the people to suffer much, has finally come over on the side of the South.’ (Webb, in The Idea of the South, ‘The South’s Future Prospect’, pp. 71-72)

Perhaps, He has. If this is true, that He has spurred on our instinct for religious unity and corked the bottles of venom and violence distilled from our peculiar grapes of wrath, we can look upon a second springtime. We are located in time on the eve of a verdant April.

When Stephen Vincent Benet wrote John Brown’s Body, he envisioned the ‘little New Year, the weakling one blowing the fluff from a turkey-wing at skies already haunted with Spring.’

Our southern skies have been haunted all right. They lie heavy over our heads like the steamy night of a Georgia camp-meeting. We have walked along the three great streams of Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists. We have watched them sweat together on the ‘anxious seat’, then rise in anger against each other because of dissension. Then we saw them fight together a new claimant, the Disciples, or an old enemy, Romanism.

Secession from the Union brought them into a union.

The God of Calvin - stern, alone, forbidding, exclusive? Or the God of Jesus - father as well as judge, gentle as well as firm, all-embracing and all-forgiving? Which God will the South adore in our time? If we are content to float with the ebb-tide, we will lose our living faith in the backwash of history. But if we strike out together, then Christians will ride on the future’s wave. It is a wave of trust and hope and the unity of all God’s People in Christ Our Lord.