The Decline and Fall of the Southern Presbyterian Church, Part 3
On race (integration, civil rights, MLK), women's ordination, abortion, and evolution, and conservative backlash that led to RTS and the PCA's founding.
“The ministry of reconciliation” became the buzzword at the 1959 GA. Smith writes (Gold, p. 157) that this did not refer to “the ministry of the saving grace of Christ, whereby He reconciles men to God through His atoning work.” No, it meant racial reparations. The Assembly also, contrary to its own confessional standards, called for a “broad churchism as preferable to a narrow view that would maintain one theological emphasis is better than others.”
The Journal writers weren’t prepared to cut themselves off from either the institutions that the imperial government was integrating, beginning with the schools, or from ecclesiastic relations with those who supported the government. And while the government was busily erasing their constitutional rights, they tried to draw a new line in the sand, relying on the Southern people to make the right decisions, but at the same time, knowing that young people could not if they were forced into compromising relationships.
On April 17, 1963:
“[A]ll seminaries and the Presbyterian School of Christian Education are now integrated.”
On May 29, 1963:
“In an unprecedented action, the [UPCUSA, previously the PCUSA, GA] amended its docket to make way for a speech by Negro integration leader Martin Luther King.”
The 1963 PCUS GA resolved, against its own Constitution, that capital punishment “raises serious questions concerning the responsibilities of Christians.’’
The NCC was soon afterwards demanding “obedience” of its member churches in supporting the Civil Rights Bill of 1963. Its commission on Religion and Race helped organize the 1963 “March on Washington” that summer.
In 1964, at the PCUS GA, “every slight reference to race was long and bitterly contested.” The impression “was that only one matter preoccupies the Church: race.”
The GA ordered the remaining segregated presbyteries dissolved.
There was also a major liberal advance on the ordination of women. This had been shot down when proposed in 1957. The year 1962 was the first time that the PCUS GA positively recommended the ordination of women as deacons, ruling elders, and teaching elders (Ministers of Word and Sacrament).
The proposal was sent down to the PCUS churches in 1963 to be ratified, and in 1964 it was overwhelmingly approved. The first woman who was ordained under this change was Rachel Henderlite in 1965. The PCUSA/UPCUSA had already ordained women as deacons since 1922, as ruling elders since 1930, and as teaching elders since 1956. This “conservatism of expediency,” as R.L. Dabney put it, exhibited by the South had only the purpose of exercising radicalism by giving it something to whip.
President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law in July. The NCC then directed all of its efforts to get its member churches, including the PCUS, to adopt it.
Similar to his article that was published in the Journal on July 3, 1957, Morton Smith writes in the October 1964 issue of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s Presbyterian Guardian:
“Most Christians throughout the rest of the nation and world are shocked to hear that Negroes are turned away from white churches in the South. The ground for this is the assumption that the reason for the coming of the Negro to the church today is not to worship, but rather to integrate and prove a point. That this is the case is shown by the fact that when offered segregated seating in the church, the Negroes refuse it. They insist that they should be allowed to enter and sit where they please. If they were truly interested in worship, it would seem that they would be willing to sit in any section provided for them. It is hard to imagine Jesus exhibiting the spirit of the modern integrationist on this point. The fact is that Jesus taught a spirit of humility. He taught that one should take the lowest seat at a feast, and then if invited up to a higher, how much better than insisting on a higher and having to be sent to a lower place…
The reason that so many see a Communist influence in the present movement is that the goal seems to be the same as that of the Marxist philosophy, namely, the levelling of all to a common uniformity… The mass mixing of the races with the intent to erase racial boundaries [is] wrong… God has established and thus revealed his will for the human race now to be that of ethnic pluriformity, and thus any scheme of mass integration leading to mass mixing of the races is decidedly unscriptural…
It is striking to observe that the State of Mississippi, which is the most segregated state in the nation, has the lowest crime rate of all the states. On the other hand, other areas have suffered from an exploding crime rate, and the Negro race has played a leading part in this increase of crime…in the integrated society.”
In the same issue of The Guardian, OPC pastor R.J. Rushdoony responded negatively to an issue from a few months earlier which contained all the usual liberal bromides on race, and even approval of the French Revolution.
Rushdoony replied (p. 131) that Black advocacy was simply a stepping stone for liberal Presbyterians in seeking the “exaltation of humanity as a race and a demand that we identify ourselves with all men as one people.”
But Rushdoony was a libertarian, and so while he could see that racial integration followed from the Enlightenment, he believed segregation was the product of viewing “one race above others as inherently virtuous, divine, great, or the like.” This wasn’t true of Southerners or anyone else in the world who attempted to survive as a people. Sadly, Rushdoony believed that forced segregation was “racism,” just as forced integration was “racism,” because “[b]oth deny Christian liberty and the right of free association.” I’m sure he thought this sounded magnanimous at the time, but the sense in which he used the phrase was a delicate way of saying that all societal boundaries should be erased so that everyone could intermarry, regardless of the cost. This became a weapon in the hands of the very humanists he criticized, who were willing to go to any extreme to enforce their religion. And it didn’t fit with Rushdoony’s stated belief that 99 times out of 100, interracial marriage militates against the very purpose of marriage, which is for a wife to be a helpmeet to her husband.
A Journal article on April 14, 1965, states that at the PCUS GA that year, the Permanent Committee on Christian Relations brought a report on the civil rights movement that was “intended to be a definitive pronouncement by the Church.”
“The basic purpose of the civil rights movement is to obtain for the Negro — and of course for other minority groups — equal participation in the business of society. In our democratic world, their manhood requires this. The spirit of Jesus, who was of all men the most manly, requires that Christians support them in this demand.”
The GA approved of civil disobedience and “sit-ins” on this basis.
“If in a given instance this question seems immaterial to the Christian, the sit-in, as it has been generally used to extend human dignity and increase respect, should receive his support.’’
Carolyn DuPont writes of this action by the PCUS in her book, Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975, p. 215:
“Hostilities erupted over a 1965 invitation to Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak at the Southern Presbyterian Retreat Center in Montreat, North Carolina. Representatives of congregations in Benton, Ackerman, Laurel, Grenada, and Jackson vilified their leaders for allowing the ‘creator of strife and unrest,’ ‘a known communist,’ and the ‘sponsor of the recent sex orgy enacted in Selma,’ to ‘desecrate’ the place where so ‘many eloquent and consecrated’ ministers had spoken.”
A letter to the editor on June 30, 1965, notes that
“the Synod of Virginia…went out of its way to deplore ‘right wing extremism’ and to endorse race-mixing and other socialist boondoggles of the [Johnson] Administration. The leaders of our own Church seem to be as committed to the social gospel as is the Northern Church…”
On Sept. 1, 1965, MLK is quoted as saying that the “great task” of the Church today “is to lead people into proper attitudes on prejudice,” and that “there are about as many Communists in the civil rights movement as there are Eskimos in Florida.”
On June 9, 1965, it is written of the GA that year that the
“[m]ost important action of the court in the field of race was its approval of interracial marriages.”
One of the papers issued by the 1966 GA is “Questions and Answers of Capital Punishment.” Its response to the question “Does the Bible Advocate Capital Punishment?” is that five out of six professors from the four PCUS theological seminaries answered no.
On June 22, 1966:
“The race question has so intimidated people these days that no one feels there is any Christian thing to say, except, go, go, go!... But we reject out of hand and without embarrassment the implication which has just been made in the synods of Appalachia and Georgia that until a private family is racially mixed it isn’t a Christian family…
To say…that Jesus Christ wants the homes of His people to be integrated is to take liberties with deity that reflect on the speaker, not the synod. Christ said that His followers were to look upon all men as brothers. He did not say they were to look upon them all as potential husbands and wives.
We will review our estimate of the sincerity of some of these people after we notice that their families have become racially mixed.
The Presbyterian Church US supports ‘special’ [denominational children’s] homes here and there, such as one for retarded children in Louisiana. To be consistent, the brethren who deplore differences of every kind should campaign to have that home ‘equalized’ by bringing in a few brilliant children. The current crusade to ‘level out’ everything in the name of Christianity is just that misguided.”
Due to this escalating liberal agitation, Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) was founded in 1966 in Jackson, Mississippi, beginning with fourteen students and four faculty members. Officially, the motive was to preserve Reformed orthodoxy, especially the assaulted confessional standards, but the founding of RTS was inextricably tied to race, and resistance towards the PCUS’s support for school integration and the removal of necessary racial barriers in the churches, which caused church bodies to be open prey for Communist agitators. RTS revered men like James Henley Thornwell, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, and Robert Lewis Dabney as giants of the faith, and lauded them in seminary materials. Morton Smith was the first full-time faculty member at RTS, teaching systematics from 1967 to 1986. John Reed Miller, who was the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Jackson and an ardent segregationist, has a lecture series named after him at RTS.
“Dr. John Reed Miller relentlessly opposed every General Assembly initiative and every denominational agency that stood for racial equality. Members of the Citizens’ Councils occupied positions of leadership and responsibility in the congregation. Like other downtown Jackson churches, First Presbyterian refused to seat black worshippers during the church visit campaign of 1963-1964, though black activists regarded it as so impenetrable that they quickly stopped wasting their efforts on it.
In 1965, as school segregation in Mississippi faltered under the guidelines imposed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, First Presbyterian led the first wave of Mississippi churches to open private academies. As it had provided spiritual leadership for the enemies of integration, so First Presbyterian guided the flocks who forsook their old denomination to join the PCA.
—Mississippi Praying, p. 218
Until 1966, the editors of the Journal placed “civil rights” in quotation marks, similar to what race-mixing liberal clerics do with the word race today.
On Nov. 23, 1966, they printed the text of Billy Graham’s World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin, Germany, which had been held on November 4.
“We reject the notion that men are unequal because of distinction of race or color. In the name of Scripture and of Jesus Christ we condemn racialism wherever it appears.”
On Jan. 18, 1967, the Journal reported that at the 1967 UPCUSA GA, a new creed called the Confession of 1967 was adopted and included in the Book of Confessions, alongside the Westminster Confession of Faith. But whereas Westminster says that the Scriptures depend not “upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God,” and that it is “the word of God,” the Confession of 1967 calls the Scriptures merely “the words of men.”
Its main focus was the new “social gospel”:
“The Church is called to bring all men to receive and uphold one another as persons in all relationships of life: in employment, housing, education, leisure, marriage, family, church, and the exercise of political rights. Therefore, the church labors for the abolition of all racial discrimination. Congregations, individuals, or groups of Christians who exclude, dominate, or patronize their fellow men, however subtly, resist the Spirit of God and bring contempt on the faith which they possess…
The Church…is called to practice the forgiveness of enemies… This requires the pursuit of fresh and responsible relations across every line of conflict, even at risk to national security…”
The Journal called it “the most radical and revolutionary change in [the] entire history” of the PCUSA/UPCUSA.
On May 10, 1967, the PCUS’s Council on Church and Society was on the hunt for “racism,” publishing a paper entitled “Repenting of Racism in our Institutional Life.” It called for the receiving of Negro ministers in the presbyteries, and for churches, children’s homes, church camps, and conferences to racially integrate.
“The resolution also asks the Assembly to urge Presbyterians, when moving into a new community, intentionally to join a congregation of another race; to urge all church courts to establish the racial composition of their various boards on a ‘representative basis’; to urge all boards and agencies to invest their capital funds in such a way as to best achieve the goals established by the Assembly in matters of race.”
Morton Smith writes of this:
“The position of the Church on race was officially one of attempting to integrate. That is, it was not satisfied to have a freedom to integrate, or not, but was urging that members move their membership into congregations that were predominantly of a different race. Further, it urged ‘all church courts to examine the racial composition of their various boards and committees and to take steps to ensure that they have a representative character.’ Here we see that the matter of race had become a measure of whether a committee is properly constituted, and not a matter of spiritual qualifications of those on such a committee or board.”
—Gold, p. 169
On Aug. 9, 1967, Bell writes:
“Forced segregation was wrong. Forced integration is equally wrong… When the Supreme Court voided the Virginia law against interracial marriages, they based their decision on the inherent right of the individual to make his own choices. This was the only position they could rightly take… Once the right of personal choice is recognized — choice which involves responsibility — and the right of equal opportunity becomes a reality, the foundation of Christian race relations will have been laid.”
A Journal report from Oct. 18, 1967, reveals that NCC-sponsored meetings had Blacks calling for White churches to affirm the “legitimacy of the Black Power movement,” and Whites calling the “white church…a racist church.” White speakers added,
“The American black does not control the ghettos. They are controlled by immoral structures of white men. However, American blacks will transform the ghettos. Whites must seek a way to transform themselves or we will constitute an apartheid society… The body gathered in this caucus are determined to transform the white society. We are encouraged by the courage of the black American brother who has shown that he will create a new black society in America. Therefore, where it is possible, we will move together for the transformation of American society.”
On Nov. 8, 1967, T. Richard Snyder, the “director of church and community affairs” for the Presbytery of Philadelphia (UPCUSA), called for abolishing the economic system of the country and replacing it with “a more communal type of existence.” He said,
“the Church will have to ‘suffer’ more and understand the role of the ‘violated’ before it can decide to shoot… I am not saying the Church should take up bombs and grenades, but I don’t think we can preclude this in the future, if all non-violent means prove ineffectual.”
On Feb. 7, 1968, the Journal reports that a resolution affirming the “right of any man, regardless of race, religion, or national origin, to buy or rent any house or apartment” was adopted by the Mecklenburg Presbytery of the PCUS.
Hanover Presbytery in Virginia agreed.
On March 27, 1968:
“Power and how to transfer it from white people to Negroes was the subject of a race relations conference sponsored here by the National Presbyterian Center and the Washington Cathedral (Episcopal). A top spokesman for Negro militants, the Rev. Albert B. Cleage of Detroit, told conferees that the extent of violence next summer will depend on how fast and how far the white community will go in transferring political and economic power to the black leadership in major urban areas where the black community lives.
Violence in the cities will increase as long as the white man tries to keep the black community powerless so that he can exploit it, the pastor of Detroit’s Central United Church of Christ charged. His audience was made up of 26 Episcopal and 35 United Presbyterian pastors from Eastern metropolitan areas.…
Among the sponsors of the center are the United Presbyterian Church USA, the Presbyterian Church US, and the Reformed Church in America…
Mr. Cleage…describes himself as a black power advocate and a black nationalist. At the U.S. Conference on Church and Society last fall, he told delegates there are two Bibles — one for blacks and another for whites. The epistles of Paul are for whites and the Old Testament and Gospels for blacks, he claimed. He told Detroit conferees that black power was rooted in the Old Testament.”
Southern churches were under no obligation to allow these devils to cross the threshold, and that goes for anyone who supported them, which was almost all Blacks, with some notable exceptions, like Zora Neale Hurston.
On April 17, 1968, right after MLK was assassinated:
“Martin Luther King was not a man we admired… On the other hand, we do subscribe wholeheartedly to the basic principles of justice and equal opportunity for all men, regardless of race, color, or creed…
Someone, who is at this writing unknown, decided for reasons of his own to take the law into his own hands. He assumed the role of judge and executioner against the one Negro leader whose public image was one of moderation, if not strictly of non-violence.”
And then the Journal places its stamp of approval on the new religion of “social justice”: “Until law and order prevail, social justice will never be perfected.”
You can see a gradual leftward drift, but the Journal was the voice for the relatively conservative wing of the PCUS. The Presbyterian Survey, on the other hand, was the house organ of the PCUS and was growing more liberal by the day. It published a June 1968 cover with a photo of King’s casket and the words “LOVE SHALL OVERCOME.” It also printed King’s “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail.”
The Minutes (p. 99) of the 1968 PCUS GA show that a paper was adopted entitled “Toward an Understanding of Racial Disorders.” This sought to excuse the Negro riots of that year with this amazing sentence: “This age-long violation of the personhood of every Negro by the majority, whether intentional or unthinking, has laid the foundation for Negro violence against whatever might be in sight.” Another paper, “The Church and Its Use of Economic Power,” sought “economic justice to all people… We must be racially non-discriminatory in our employment of personnel.” Another paper, “Equal Opportunity in Housing,” has this incredible statement: “The 108th General Assembly affirms that segregation and discrimination in housing on the basis of race or religion, enforced by either law or custom, is a violation of Christian ethics.”
On June 12, 1968:
“Many so-called Christians have denied to others what they should have had. Negroes who worked hard all of their lives in the end had nothing. The white man underpaid him. The sons of these Negroes will not take it, and rebellion has happened.”
On June 19, 1968, a reader asks if the Journal has washed its hands on the matter of Christian race relations. Denial and clarification follow, but always from the principle that individual choice (free association, which the empire had already made illegal) should prevail.
On March 19, 1969, there’s an article on the Presbytery of New York City (UPCUSA) calling for the abolition of all abortion laws, making it
“a matter of individual conscience to be exercised within the context of one’s faith and with proper medical counsel.”
The left was beginning to effectively use political power to enforce abortion, as it had already used political power to crush segregation. Having advanced beyond the segregation fight, free choice on the matter was no longer allowed, from their perspective, while you can see in this language that “individual conscience” was the propaganda for political coercion on abortion. The right was not putting up an effective political fight on either matter, and their ethical arguments reduced to “individual conscience” as well. The left had the high ground for the battle.
Not until 1967 was there much mention in the Journal about abortion legislation in the U.S. In 1969, the PCUS GA ruled that it no longer considered abortion a crime and approved of “termination of pregnancies when the births would be “unwelcomed or resented.”
This was reaffirmed in 1970 when a conservative presbytery was unable to overturn the decision. The GA ruled that
“Induced abortion is the willful destruction of the fetus… Therefore, the decision to terminate a pregnancy should never be made lightly or in haste…[but] may on occasion be morally justifiable. Possible justifying circumstances would include medical indications of physical or mental deformities, conception as result of rape or incest, conditions under which the physical or mental health of either mother or child would be gravely threatened, or the socio-economic conditions of the family.”
That’s right, three years before the Supreme Court imagined the justification for legalizing abortion, the PCUS said that if the excuse exists that there isn’t enough money to raise a child, it’s fine to kill him.
This was a major factor that contributed to the formation of the PCA in 1973.
On May 7, 1969, the PCUS GA resolved that macroevolution is compatible (in a relationship of “non-contradiction”) with the Bible, the Westminster Confession, and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, reversing GA resolutions from 1886, 1888, 1889, and 1924, which were now called “in error and no longer represent[ative of] the mind of the church.”
This was yet another major factor that contributed to the formation of the PCA in 1973.
At the PCUS GA of 1969, several men who would go on to be founders of the PCA, possibly including Jack Williamson, filed a resolution that opposed MLK, and it was ordered expunged from the record.
