Churches: Politics in the Pulpit

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Once upon a time, most churchmen stayed discreetly on the sidelines dur ing a presidential campaign. No more. This year, as never before, religious journals, church groups and individual clergymen are deeply, openly involved in the election. The overwhelming majority are against Barry Goldwater and, though less fervently, for Lyndon Johnson. In marked contrast with 1960, when Protestant ministers soberly debated whether John F. Kennedy's Roman Catholicism might impair church-state separation — and mostly concluded that it would not — churchmen this year have generated more heat than light.

In large measure, Goldwater himself provoked clerical disapproval. By abandoning a campaign of reasoned conservatism for a confusing variety of unfocused stands and charges, he has left himself wide open to criticism —and churchmen have often responded with a rancor that is undisguisedly political rather than morally persuasive.

Break with Tradition. Sometimes soberly, sometimes shrilly, a number of church journals this year have broken with longstanding traditions of noncommitment. The nondenominational Christian Century, perhaps the most influential of Protestant weeklies (circ. 38,000), has not only come out for Lyndon Johnson, the first presidential candidate it has endorsed since Wendell Willkie; it has also published an anti-Goldwater editorial in almost every issue since the G.O.P. Convention last July, attacking Barry for "stridency and military recklessness," "obsessive nationalism," and "promoting racist exploitation." Christianity and Crisis, a small (12,000) but prestigious journal of Protestant opinion, broke a 25-year record of political neutrality to oppose Goldwater, devoted an entire twelve-page edition to a critical analysis of the G.O.P. candidate's views. The editorial board, whose chairmen are Reinhold Niebuhr and President John C. Bennett of Union Theological Seminary, found a conflict between Goldwater's "record and the judgment of the Christian churches on most of the major issues of social ethics in our time."

Similar objections were voiced by the lay-edited Catholic monthly Ramparts, the Episcopal journals the Witness and the Churchman, and the biweekly United Church Herald — although Dr. Ben Herbster, president of the United Church of Christ, later maintained that the magazine was not speaking for the denomination. Many other church journals seem to have lined up against Goldwater by implication. The Methodist student magazine Motive reprinted the entire Christianity and Crisis special issue dissecting Goldwater, while the Covenant Companion of the Evangelical Covenant Church published a story on the Century's stand; neither journal added comment or rebuttal. As the American Lutheran obliquely put it, some candidates "will make subtle appeals to man's innate prejudice—especially prejudice against the Negro. That is an issue no Christian can ignore." The Texas Methodist compared the parties' platforms with stands taken at the recent Methodist General Conference, made it clear that on every substantive issue, the Democratic view is closer to the church's teaching.