The National Council Of Churches
The beginning of true liberty is Jesus Christ. And therefore the first and last target of all subversion is biblical faith. Hence it is that the Church has been the first target of infiltration and subversion; and is the most subverted institution in the United States today.
— Dr. R. J. Rushdoon
David Emerson Gumaer spent two years within the youth apparatus of the Communist Party as an undercover operative for Chicago Police Intelligence. In December of 1967 he accepted the invitation of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to testify in executive session regarding his knowledge of the activities and personnel of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs and the Students for a Democratic Society. Mr. Gumaer is currently a Contributing Editor to The Review Of The News (an outstanding new national newsweekly) and has lectured widely.
Claiming to speak with authority for some 42 million American Christians, the National Council of the Churches of Christ (N.C.C.) includes thirty-three denominations representing most of the major Protestant and Orthodox Churches in the United States. In addition, more than a score of denominations not actually members of the N.C.C. have participated actively in its radical programs.
Headquartered at 475 Riverside Drive in New York City, the National Council functions through dozens of interlocking departments, grouped under four major divisions, overseeing the N.C.C.'s international operations. The program is of such magnitude that in 1968, alone, the National Council of Churches expended over $19 million on a worldwide network of Leftist projects. In that year, however, the N.C.C. collected $24,819,000 from gullible American Christians and tax-exempt Leftist foundations.
During the meeting of this group's General Assembly at San Diego in February of 1968, a presentation titled "NCC Ministries and the Communist World" revealed that in 1967 over $1,584,000 had been given to the Communist Government of Poland through an N.C.C. on-going ministry called Church World Service. Although the aid was received in the name of the Polish Ecumenical Council, it was administered by the Communists for their own purposes. During the period from 1952 until 1967, over $40 million worth of food, clothing, and other material was give by the N.C.C.'s Church World Service to the Communist Government of Yugoslavia. Even stranger was an admission in this N.C.C. report that the National Council was operating a "refugee program" which picked up the tab for relocating Brazilian Communists in Mexico.
To top it off, in 1968 the same U.S. Government which prohibits prayer in our schools donated $5 million to the National Council of Churches through something called "(Ocean Freight Refunds." In fact, in its 1960 triennial report, the N.C.C. lists "Ocean Freight Refunds" from the federal government totaling more than $23 million for the period 1957 to 1960.
The recipient of this federal largesse is the same National Council of Churches whose 1968 General Assembly at San Diego demanded that America:
"Stop the bombing of North Vietnam as a prelude to seeking a negotiated peace"; "Avoid provocative military actions against Communist China in the knowledge that it has a legitimate interest in Asia"; "Press for the admission of the Peking government to the United Nations"; "Create conditions for cooperation between the United States and the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and Cuba"; "Recognize the government of Cuba and acknowledge the existence of the East German Republic"; and, "Remove restrictions on imports from Communist countries and on cultural exchanges between the U.S. and the Soviet Union."
Other resolutions called for "increased support for poverty-rights action groups by Church Women United," and provided for financial backing of the subversive National Urban Coalition. The N.C.C. even directed its member churches "to provide funds for local black groups to strategize for the summer and to support inclusion of black power and black nationalist organizations in local task groups.... "In other words, the resolutions of the National Council exactly followed the current Communist Line.
The N.C.C. has consistently propagandized for every conceivable Leftist program, from federally forced integration to complete disarmament of the United States. From its office in Washington, D.C., the National Council's spokesmen regularly appear before Committees of Congress to lobby for the causes of the Far Left, though the National Council has never registered under the Lobbying Act of 1946. And, despite its having been repeatedly exposed as a fraud the N.C.C. has somehow continued to maintain not only its reputation for legitimacy, but its tax-exempt status as well. It is very well shielded indeed, and rooted in a conspiracy against Christianity in America which goes back more than eighty years.
A full decade before the turn of the century, the seeds of the Marxist "social gospel" were already being planted within our major seminaries and divinity schools by returning American theologians who had studied in England and Germany. There they had become infected with the virus of a Conspiracy which had already changed much of the spiritual and moral structure of Europe. After awhile, of course, America produced her own clergical conspirators. One of these was a man named Walter Rauschenbusch.
In 1885, Raushenbusch was graduated from the prestigious Rochester Theological Seminary, thoroughly indoctrinated in the Socialist tenets of "Ilumanism" — a philosophy calling itself a religion but substituting faith in man for faith in God. As the atheist Karl Marx noted: "Ilumanism is really nothing else but Marxism." Rauschenbusch was both a Ilumanist and a Marxist. Thus, in 1892 he and a group of Comrades organized "The Brotherhood of the Kingdom" to promote their radical beliefs along Fabian lines. Walter Ranschenbusch declared: "If ever Socialism is to succeed, it cannot succeed in an irreligious country. It must start in the churches."
And start in the churches it did.
In New York, the Reverend F.D. Huntington — another Marxist — was busy founding the American branch of the Christian Socialist Movement. It was to be a religious arm of the infamous Fabian Socialist Society which had been created some years earlier in London at the direction of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and a host of other prominent Marxists of the time. Indeed, the Webbs made a trip to the United States in 1898 to review the success of Fabian infiltration of religion. By the turn of the century, Marxist plans for the capture of our churches were proceeding apace.
In February of 1900 the first effort to create a National Federation of Churches resulted in a nationwide committee of twenty-five leading churchmen, many of whom were devoted Fabians. One of those young organizers was an English protégé of Walter Rauschenbusch named Harry F. Ward. Years later, in sworn testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, it would be revealed that Ward was not only a secret Communist, but "the Red Dean of the Communist Party in the religious field."
By February 1901, delegates from local church federations met at Philadelphia and formed the National Federation of Churches, forerunner of a larger, more powerful Fabian organization whose projects on behalf of the Communist apparatus would radically alter the course of American history. The next year at Chicago, during the national convention of the Socialist Party, a number of prominent N.F.C. clergymen participated actively.
There followed a Committee on Correspondence, made up of the more radical ministers and laymen of the day, which toured the nation's seminaries and church offices propagandizing for yet another Red project, an Inter-Church Conference on Federation. Deliberations at that important Conference, held in New York on November 15, 1905, would have a profound influence on the minds and actions of thousands of religious leaders for many years to come. It was at that historic gathering that the first formal proposal was made calling for the formation of the Federal Council of Churches, now the National Council of Churches.
In 1907 the Far Left created a supporting Front called the Methodist Federation for Social Service, a "religious" organization found by the House Committee on Un-American Activities to have been a key apparatus of the Communist Conspiracy since its very inception.1 In fact, when it was finally exposed years later, it was cited as "Among the more Conspicuous fronts for Communist activity . . . "And, as you might expect, one of the founding Methodist ministers was Harry F. Ward, the brilliant protégé of Walter Rauscbenbusch. For the next thirty-five years this Communist Front was directed by Comrade Ward, and staffed by numerous functionaries of the Communist Party.
By this time the groundwork had been laid and Dr. Rauschenbusch paid a return visit to Sidney and Beatrice Webb in England, fully committing himself to Fabian designs for subversion of the Christian church in America. The following year, on December 2, 1908, Waller Rauschenbusch and Harry Ward set up a nine-day conference at Philadelphia during which the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (F.C.C.) was officially formed by representatives of twenty-nine Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations. The F.C.C. then chose as its constitution the same plan of federation that had earlier been adopted by the Socialists attending the 1905 Inter-Church Conference on Federation. They also adopted "The Social Creed of the Churches" written by English Communist Harry F. Ward, who had earlier submitted his Plan to Nikolai Lenin for approval.
By 1914 the Federal Council of Churches had become one of the major outlets in America for Marxist propaganda. On February tenth of that year a group of conspirators met in the home of millionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie and laid plans for something called the Church Peace Union. In Pioneers For Peach Through Religion, Charles S. Macfarland (at the time General Secretary of the F.C.C.) reveals that this group included only those religious leaders who were in some way connected with the Federal Council of Churches. This newly formed organization was the brainchild of top conspirator Andrew Carnegie, who used it to capture for the Insiders the controlling clique of the Federal Council by subsidizing the Church Peace Union to the tune of $2 million.
Shortly after the meeting with Carnegie, two international church conferences were promoted by the F.C.C.'s Church Peace Union — one for Roman Catholics, to be held at Liegé, Belgium, and the other for Protestants at Constance, Germany. Both were scheduled to convene on August 1, 1914. Which, by an odd "coincidence," was the very day that war was declared between Germany and Russia.
Several months later, at Cambridge in England, the Fabian Socialists set up an International Fellowship of Reconciliation to protest the War while propagandizing for Socialism. This was followed a year later on November 11, 1915, by the formation of an American Branch of F.O.R., organized by such stalwarts of the Federal Council of Churches as Harry F. Ward and Walter Rauschenbush. They were aided in this project by leading Socialists Norman Thomas, Oswald Garrison Viliard, and Jane Addams (at whose home in Chicago the Webbs stayed during their visit to America). In April 1917, one month after the Czar had been forced to surrender control of his government to Socialist Alexander Kerensky, The United States was finally maneuvered into World War I, thus ending 141 years of neutrality. That fall, a relative handful of bolsheviks led by Nikolai Lenin captured the Government of Russia, thereby establishing a base for the Marxists' continuing world revolution.
By 1918, as its interlock with the Fellowship of Reconciliation became more pronounced, the Federal Council of Churches stepped up its agitation against the War and became the major propagandist in America for the Bolshevik Revolution. That year, too, with the passing of Walter Rauschenbush, the mantle of the Marxist movement within the church passed to Comrade Harry Ward, who had by then begun teaching the Red dialectic at Union Theological Seminary, where he was to remain for twenty-five years.
In early 1919 the Russian Communists issued a call for the founding of the Communist International, resulting that September first in the formation of the American Communist Party from the Left wing of the Socialist Party. Among the hundreds of delegates at the founding convention in Chicago were Comrades John Keracher and Dennis Batt, representing the Michigan State organization of the Socialist Party. They insisted "that the Communist Party should in its program adopt a plan calling for an all-out campaign against religion as its main and immediate objective." Years later a charter member of the Party revealed:
The policy in those days was framed in such a way that the members of the Communist Party could infiltrate church organizations for the purpose of conducting their propaganda among them, for enlisting their support for Soviet Russia, and for the various campaigns in which the Communists were interested.
In the early Twenties the Communist Party made considerable gains in its program to infiltrate the churches. This effort was led by such prominent "American" clergymen as Harry F. Ward, Jerome Davis, William B. Spofford, and Albert Rhys Williams. As former top Communist Benjamin Gitlow told the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953: "This group wielded tremendous influence in the religious field and did Trojan Horse work in advancing the Communist conspiracy in religion."
The most important Communist in the field of religion, said Gitlow, was Robert W. Dunn — who "served as the Communist Party's liaison between its political committee and secretariat and the clergymen operating under instructions of the Party." Comrade Dunn, an official with the American Civil Liberties Union, carried his orders to Harry Ward and the others, who in turn issued directives of their own. Comrades Ward, Spofford, Davis, and Williams were all leaders of the F.C.C. and all were members of the Communist Party. Williams even worked in the Soviet Union as an assistant in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.
In 1922 the American Communist Party, and all Communist Parties throughout the world, adopted the "United Front" strategy ordered by Nikolai Lenin and the Communist International. This enabled the Reds greatly to expand their infiltration of religion. As Ben Gitlow testified: "The number of clergymen who followed the Communist Party line grew by leaps and bounds."
In 1924 (and again in 1929) Federal Council chieftain Harry Ward traveled to Moscow to discuss with Stalin the use of the churches in furthering the goals of the International Communist Conspiracy. In early 1925, Ward was sent to China where he lectured widely among Christian clergymen. His lectures in China were discussed at length at the Comintern, and it was agreed that "the missions and church institutions in China could be used . . . to cover up Communist espionage activities. . . . "That was also the case in this country, where the Federal Council already had a budget of $350,000 and an office in Washington from which it promoted Communist interests.
In 1927 the F.C.C.'s lobbying for Communist causes became so flagrant that Congressman Arthur M. Free introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives describing the Federal Council as "a communist organization aimed at the establishment of a state-church .... "In that same year, a report issued by the Military Intelligence Association branded the F.C.C. as subversive. Another denunciation appeared in the Naval Institute Proceedings of 1928, which established that the Federal Council had been meddling in defense matters and was "probably the most powerful propaganda organization in the country."
Testifying before the Senate Lobbying Investigating Committee, Congressman George Tinkham revealed that he had received propaganda from the F.C.C. on fifteen different political issues. Tinkham later revealed that Insider John D. Rockefeller Jr. had from 1926 to 1929 contributed over $137,000 to the Federal Council of Churches — a sum equal to about ten percent of its total annual income from all sources.
During 1932 the Federal Council suffered a series of setbacks. Congressional Committee Report Number 2290 formally branded the F.C.C. as subversive. And the Sunday School Times of August 13, 1932, exposed an obscene F.C.C. sex manual entitled Young People's Relationships, described as "a crowning achievement of the Federal Council controlling group along the line of preparing the way for atheistic Communism." Also, Major Amos A. Fries produced documentation before a Hearing of the House Immigration Committee in January 1932, proving that "There has been an interlocking board of directorates all the way from the Federal Council of Churches to the most extreme Communists."
During this hectic period for the F.C.C., Harry Ward was graduating one of his more interesting proteges from Union Theological Seminary in New York — an eager young Marxist who promptly began working for the A.C.L.U. Ward's pupil was Arnold Johnson, now Public Relations Director for the Communist Party, U.S.A. The following year Comrade Johnson served as Field Secretary for the Communists National Religion and Labor Foundation, created in 1932 by Communist Sidney Hillman. Acting in the same capacity as Johnson in that effort was Willard E. Uphaus, a Federal Council official who has since affiliated himself with ten other officially cited Communist projects. Other F.C.C. officials listed on the letterhead of the Reds' National Religion and Labor Foundation include such members of its Executive Committee as Communists Jerome Davis, A.J. Muste, and Charles C. Webber.
By 1935 Communist infiltration of religion in the Untied States was in full swing, presaging orders of the Seventh World Conference of the Comintern at Moscow to maintain such subversion. On September 10, 1935, a Report on the F.C.C. from the Office of Naval Intelligence was read into the Congressional Record, establishing that the Federal Council was one of several organizations which "give aid and comfort to the Communist movement and Party." Its leadership, the Intelligence Report revealed, "consists of a small radical group which dictates its policy," and "it is always extremely active in any matter against national defense." In fact the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral William H. Standley, formally accused the F.C.C. of collaborating with the Communists.
How far the Federal Council of Churches was prepared to go in pushing the Communist Line was revealed in a special report issued by the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, at the 1942 convention of the F.C.C. It called for:
Ultimately, "a world government of delegated powers." Complete abandonment of U.S. isolationism. Strong immediate limitations on national sovereignty. International control of all armies and navies. A universal system of money.... Worldwide freedom of immigration. Progressive elimination of all tariff and quota restrictions on world trade .... A "democratically controlled" international bank ....
Chairman of the Commission which issued these proposals was John Foster Dulles, an Insider who was a leader of the Federal Council of Churches.
The F.C.C. conference concluded:
Many duties now performed by local and national governments "can now be effectively carried out only by international authority." Individual nations . . . must give up their armed forces "except for preservation of domestic order" and allow the world to be policed by an international army and navy . . . .
Three years later, in 1945, the Federal Council of Churches was one of only forty-two non-governmental organizations invited to send delegates to the international conference at San Francisco which founded the United Nations. Presiding over the U.N. conclave was Communist agent Alger Hiss, who like Dulles had earlier served as Chairman of an important committee of the Federal Council of Churches. The Federal Council even boasted that it had first conceived the idea of the United Nations, and noted that one of its prominent officials, John Foster Dulles, had been responsible for incorporating the Federal Council's "Six Pillars of Peace" into the U.N. Charter.
Nonetheless, the F.C.C. had taken quite a beating from Conservatives during the Forties. It was time for a change of image if it was to survive. On November 29, 1950, the Federal Council held a convention at Cleveland where it absorbed four additional agencies (the Church World Service, the Interseminary Committee, the Protestant Film Commission, and the Protestant Radio Commission), and formally changed its name to the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Leaders of the old Marxist organization became leaders in the new one. In fact, the F.C.C.'s Bulletin that December explained: "All the work of the Federal Council will continue under new auspices....other divisions of the National Council and the general administration of the Council will also draw upon the resources in both personnel and finances."
In checking the quick-change artistry of the Federal Council of Churches, Dr. J.B. Mathews, who compiled the voluminous Appendix IX of the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities, found:
In the formal constitution of the National Council of Churches in Cleveland, one representative from each of the participating denominations signed the official book which became the Document of Record. Eleven of these 29 signers of the official book have public records of affiliation with pro-Communist enterprises....
There were 358 clergymen who were voting delegates to the constituting convention.... Of these clergymen, 123 (or 34 per cent) have had affiliations with Communist projects and enterprises. That represents a high degree of Communist penetration.2
The overlap between the old Council and the new was almost complete. It included Edwin T. Dahlberg who had been Chairman of the Department of Evangelism in the F.C.C. and later became President of the "new" National Council of Churches. The public record shows that Dahlberg has affiliated himself with at least twenty-seven officially cited Communist projects. Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, who had been President of the F.C.C. in 1948, became a member of the powerful N.C.C. General Board. Oxnam has a record of affiliations with forty-one officially cited Communist Fronts and projects. Roswell P. Barnes, as Associate General Secretary of the F.C.C. in 1940, and editor of the F.C.C. Bulletin in later years, turned up as Executive Secretary of the N.C.C.'s Division of Christian Life and Work. Barnes has associated himself with nine officially cited Communist Fronts. And then there was Walter W. Van Kirk, who had held the identical title of Executive Director of both the F.C.C. and N.C.C. Department of International Justice and Goodwill. The list, as one might expect, could go on and on.
What is most interesting about control of the National Council of Churches is that its hierarchy consists of a General Assembly made up of 750 delegates who meet once every three years. From this group is chosen a General Board of 275 members who meet every four months. The rules provide that a quorum must be present to take any official action, and that a majority of those present must be in favor of said action for it to be official. The fantastic thing about this is that it only lakes 20 of the 275 to constitute a quorum — and a majority of that twenty is eleven. Therefore, the balance of power lies in the hands of just eleven men who can issue a declaration on any political subject and promulgate that declaration in the name of thirty-three denominations comprising over 42 million American Protestants. That, people, is just the way the Communists want it.
In 1951, opposition to the N.C.C. came from both the House Committee on Un-American Activities (see its investigation of the Communist Committee for Peaceful Alternatives to the Atlantic Pact), and from a newly formed Methodist organization based in Cincinnati, the anti-Communist "Circuit Riders."
The year 1952 began with the H.C.U.A. exposing the Communists' Methodist Federation for Social Action, which was found to be directly linked to both the F.C.C. and the successor N.C.C. The House Committee also heard testimony from former Communist leader Joseph Kornfeder, who said there were at that time somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 American clergymen who were members of the Communist Party. Kornfeder had trained at the Lenin School of Political Warfare in Moscow from 1927 to 1930, been a top aide of Josef Stalin, and spoke from experience.
When Dwight Eisenhower took office, Leftists in the National Council of Churches began to pop up in key posts in the Administration. There was John Foster Dulles, who became Secretary of State; Harold Stassen, who became Mutual Security Director (he had been Vice President of the N.C.C. and President of its International Council of Religious Education); and, Arthur S. Flemming, who became head of the manpower division of the Department of Defense and later Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.3 President Eisenhower personally added prestige to the N.C.C. by speaking at its functions.
During 1953 the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and the House Committee on Un-American Activities took thousands of pages of testimony on Communist penetration of all phases of American life. In July of that year, H.C.U.A. heard testimony from such former leaders of the Communist Party as Manning Johnson, Benjamin Gitlow, and Joseph Kornfeder, detailing Communist infiltration and manipulation of our nation's churches. Supporting evidence was likewise given in sworn testimony by such experts as former Communists Paul Crouch, Karl Prussion, and Albert Vassart. The latter testified that "In 1936, Moscow sent out an order to have sure and carefully selected Communist youth enter the seminaries and become priests." After all, Stalin had himself been a seminarian.
1953 was also the year of the famous G. Bromley Oxnam Hearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in which Oxnam admitted his participation in numerous Communist projects and implicated his N.C.C. Comrades. During that year the American Legion launched a drive to block the N.C.C. effort to bypass the McCarran Act in order to bring Communist clergymen to America from the Soviet Bloc. Meanwhile, the National Council was attacking the Bricker Amendment and the McCarren-Walter Internal Security Act of 1950.
The following year, while the National Council of Churches was pushing to abolish Bible reading in public schools, Walter Reuther presented a check to the N.C.C. for $200,000 — a grant from the C.I.O.'s Philip Murray Memorial Foundation. In the meantime, the Communist Daily Worker was devoting its space to reporting the National Council's attacks on Senator Joseph McCarthy and on all Congressional Committees investigating subversive activities.
In 1958 the National Council of Churches World Order Study Conference met at Cleveland, Ohio, from November eighteenth through the twenty-first. As the Communist Worker reported, the Cleveland delegates proposed:
Diplomatic recognition by the United States of Red China — and its admission to the United Nations; Co-existence with "the Communist nations"; Avoidance of "the posture of general hostility" to "the Communist nations"; Ratification of the genocide convention; Internationalism to supercede national patriotism; "Disarmament by multilateral agreement" for "universal disarmament"; "The creation of a permanent United Nations police force" and abolition of universal military training; "Abolition of the system of military conscription" and of the Selective Service System; Extension of trade and travel without restriction between the United States and Communist countries.
Of course, these N.C.C. proposals might just as well have come directly from Moscow. We are told, however, that they emanated from a "Message to the Churches," prepared by a committee of twenty-three N.C.C. laymen and clergy under the chairmanship of Dr. John C. Bennett, dean of the faculty at Union Theological Seminary. As one would assume, Bennett had already affiliated himself with at least twenty-seven officially cited Communist Fronts and projects.
What is most interesting about the Cleveland Conference is that, of the six hundred delegates, two-thirds were lay-men. The Circuit Riders note in Recognize Red China? that one-half of the registered clergymen at the conference, or 103, had public records of affiliation with Communist Fronts and causes.
The next major incident to jar the hierarchy of the National Council came on February 25, 1960, with the publication of Issues Presented By Air Reserve Center Training Manual, a Report of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As the H.C.U.A. Report revealed, the Air Force had issued a training manual for its officers which dealt at some length with Communist penetration of religion. Officials of the National Council of Churches, learning of this, immediately contacted Secretary of the Air Force Dudley C. Sharp, demanding that this "offensive" manual be removed and the chapter pertaining to subversion of religion be rewritten to exclude any mention of Communist penetration. On the same day that the N.C.C. message was received, February 11, 1960, General Lloyd P. Hopwood, Director of Personnel Procurement and Training of the U.S. Air Force, ordered the manual withdrawn.
Some time thereafter, Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates told the Press: "in response to the letter of the National Council of Churches...I have assured this fine organization of my very genuine regrets regarding the statement that appeared in [the] Air Force Reserve Manual .... "
Citing the "offensive" passage on page fifty-three of the Air Reserve Center Training Manual, H.C.U.A. staff director Richard Arens quoted it as follows:
A while back Americans were shocked to find that Communists had infiltrated our churches....
The Communist Party, U.S.A., has instructed many of its members to join churches and church groups, to lake control whenever possible, and to influence the thoughts and actions of as many church-goers as they can .... The party tries to get leading church men to support Communist policies disguised as welfare work for minorities. Earl Browder, former head of the American Communist party,, once admitted: "By going among the religious masses, we are for the first time able to bring our anti-religious ideas to them."
Are there Communist Ministers? Sure.
The manual then named two such identified Communist ministers — the Reverend Eliot While, and the Reverend Claude C. Williams. It was Williams who once boasted: "Denominationally I am a Presbyterian, religiously a Unitarian, and politically I am a Communist. I am not preaching to make people good or anything of the sort, I'm in the church because I can reach people easier that way and get them organized for Communism."
Defending the H.C.U.A. position favoring the unaltered Air Force Reserve Manual, staff director Arens declared:
...in view of the Secretary's repudiation of the information conveyed respecting the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, the chairman issued a statement to the effect that the leadership of the [N.C.C.] had hundreds or at least over a hundred affiliations with Communist fronts and causes. Since then we have made careful, but yet incomplete checks, and it is a complete understatement. Thus far of the leadership of the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, we have found over 100 persons leadership capacity with either Communist-front records or records of service to Communists causes. The aggregate affiliations of the leadership, instead of being in the hundreds as the [H.C.U.A.] chairman. first indicated, is now, according to our latest count, into the thousands, and we have yet to complete our check....
Another matter raised by the Air Reserve Center Training Manual was the fact that on September 30, 1952, the National Council of Churches had published a "Revised Standard Version" of the Bible in which many beloved passages were altered, and adulterated phrases substituted to fit the social gospel of the N.C.C. Of the ninety translators named in a brochure issued by the N.C.C. at least thirty have been affiliated with ninety major Communist Fronts or projects.
Several months later, on April 20, 1960, Congressman Donald Jackson read into the Congressional Record (Pages 7842-7846) a shocking exposé of the pamphlet The Negro American A Reading List, published in 1957 by the Department of Racial and Cultural Relations of the National Council of Churches. This pamphlet was a bibliography of 260 books on "Negro history," many of which had been written by identified Communists. The Foreword to that reading list, by Alfred S. Kramer, slated: "We of the National Council . . . consider ... these books ... safe to recommend for children." Among the Communist authors recommended were: Victor Perlo, former head of a Soviet espionage ring operating within the U.S. government; Herbert Aptheker, chief theoretician for the Communist Party, U.S.A.; W.E.B. DuBois, an admitted Communist in whose honor the Party later named its youth affiliate; Shirley Graham, DuBois' Communist wife (who was in charge of all radio and television propaganda in Ghana when it was controlled by the Communists); and, Langston Hughes, whose blasphemous poem, "Goodbye Christ," scrapes the bottom in Communist sacrilege (Hughes had nine books on that reading list). A committee of ten clergy and laymen, headed by Dr. J. Oscar Lee (an N.C.C. Executive Director), had approved this N.C.C. reading list.
Obviously we will not be able to go into many more of the hundreds of subversive operations of the National Council of Churches because of limitations on our space. But, ever so briefly, let us touch on a few additional items of major importance.
On June 7, 1963, the N.C.C. created an Emergency Commission on Religion and Race headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Walter Reuther, and Eugene Carson Blake. It was a Major coalition of Leftist forces run by Dr. Robert W. Spike, who after successfully leading the attack on the South during the N.C.C.'s Delta Project was murdered at Columbus, Ohio, in 1966 in circumstances which led police to believe that he had been a practicing pervert. Lewd pictures of homosexuals, names and addresses of known deviates, and addresses of homosexual hangouts in several cities were found in his possession.
Working with Spike in that N.C.C. Delta Project (which included the Reds' march on Selma, Alabama, in 1965) were Bayard Rustin, a convicted sexual deviate and former organizer for the Young Communist League; Myles Horton, Marxist director of the notorious Highlander Folk School; and, the Delta Ministry's associate director, the Reverend Warren McKenna. The Reverend McKenna was photographed in 1957, sitting during a visit to Red China with Communist Premier Chou En-lai, and has been referred to by Herbert Philbrick (in a government document called Communist Passport Frauds) as "one of the leading collaborators of, and apologists for, the Soviet Union."
In March and April of 1964 the Communist Worker announced an N.C.C. coalition to create a March on Washington — a march officially designated as a project of the Communists Party.
Then there is the Sixth Triennial Conference of the National Council of Churches held at Detroit during the first week in December 1969. On December fifth the Communist Daily World carried an article by Communist William Allen reporting that:
By unanimous vote, the 790 delegates at the convention here of the National Council of Churches condemned the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops.
On that same page, immediately following Comrade Allen's account, appeared a shorter item reporting yet another N.C.C. resolution which recommended "that U.S. churches raise 'substantial' funds to support 60,000 American military deserters and draft resisters who have taken refuge in Canada."
The Daily World report also named Dr. Cynthia Wedel, "an outspoken advocate of women's rights," as having just been elected the first woman President of the National Council of Churches. The New York Times noted on December fifth that the new N.C.C. President now occupies the "highest symbolic post in American Protestantism." Devoting a quarter of a page to the background of Mrs. Wedel, it revealed that she maintains the position of Associate Director of the wildly Leftist Center for Voluntarism in the Institute for Applied Behavioral Science in Washington, "the pioneering body in sensitivity training formerly known as the National Training Laboratory." In addition, she is a leading member of the "Jeanette Rankin Brigade" — a subversive group made up largely of the wives and daughters of Communists and fellow travelers.
After receiving her doctorate in psychology from George Washington University in 1935, we are told, Mrs. Wedel "took charge of youth work for the Episcopal Church in New York." There she met and married the Reverend Theodore O. Wedel. The Times somehow failed to mention that the Reverend Theodore Wedel is listed in Appendix IX of the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities as having begun his career of support for Communist causes as early as 1940 by sponsoring a "Conference On Civil Rights" held under the auspices of a Communist Front called the Washington Committee for Democratic Action. His wife, Cynthia, was listed in the Communist Worker of July 14, 1957, as a signer of a Communist petition to President Eisenhower calling for a ban on H-bomb testing.
What plans have Mrs. Wedel and the leaders of the National Council for rendering further aid to the Communists? For one thing, they called on member churches at their Detroit conference to "organize the collection of funds in the churches over the Christmas season for distribution among the Committee of Responsibility, the American Friends Service Committee, Vietnam Christian, Service and Caritas, for emergency medical relief to civilian Vietnamese casualties....To participate in the continuation of the March Against Death in communities around the country...." In short, the N.C.C. called for the collection of money for subversive agencies which have given material aid to the Communist Vietcong, and for the promotion of the Communists' continuing "Vietnam Moratorium" project.
During the course of the N.C.C.'s week-long conference, some three thousand "church leaders" were treated to the stirring words of Marxist James Forman, militant leader of the Black Nationalist movement in America. Referring to his "Black Manifesto," Forman called for "a transfer of power," asserting the hoary Communist canard about the "right of self-determination" for blacks in America.
Commenting on Forman, syndicated columnist Tom Anderson has noted:
On May 2, 1969, Marxist-anarchist James Forman presented a list of demands, called a Black Manifesto, to the General Board of the National Council of Churches. This manifesto demands that United States churches pay 500 million dollars as "reparations" to Negroes for past "exploitation." The money would be paid to Forman's National Black Economic Development Conference to help finance a nationwide guerrilla war. The Manifesto clearly, expressed N.B.E.D.C.'s intention to overthrow the U.S. government by force and violence.
And, believe it or not, the General Board of the N.C.C., after voting in favor of Foreman's plan, declared that it desired "to record its deepest appreciation to Mr. James Forman for the presentation of, and explanation concerning, the Black Manifesto...."
So you see, there is little wonder that in its issue of July 15, 1968, Approach magazine (a publication of the National Council of Churches) devoted considerable space to an exclusive interview with Gus Hall, General Secretary of the Communist Party, U.S.A. During that unprecedented interview, Comrade Hall declared that Communism and the church share so many goals that "they ought to exist for one another." Hall, said the N.C.C. article, "cited current red goals for America as being 'almost identical' to those espoused by the liberal church....
'We can — we should — work together for the same things,'' he said." You see. Communist leader Gus Hall concluded: "We can live together in a Socialist nation."
If the National Council of Churches has its way, that's just the way it will be!
Footnotes:
1 The Methodist Federation for Social Service, which later changed its name to become the Methodist Federation for Social Action, admitted its cooperation with the Communists in its Bulletin number eight for 1932. It was subsequently cited as a Communist Front by the 1948 Report of the California Committee on Un-American Activities. On February 17, 1952, the House Committee on Un-American Activities Issued an 87-page document detailing the Red activities of the M.F.S.A. and its Communist personnel. Among those in this Front cited as active Communists posing as church leaders was one Winifred Chappell, a Soviet agent who was assigned by Harry Ward to do "youth work" for the Methodist Church. As Secretary of M.F.S.S. for ten years, she counseled young draftees to commit wholesale sabotage and treason against the United States. Writing in the Methodist weekly, Epworth Herald, Comrade Winifred advised youth to: "Accept the draft, take the drill, go into the camps and onto the battlefield, or into the munitions factories and transportation work — but sabotage war preparations and war. Be agitators for sabotage. . . ."
Another Communist in this outfit was the Reverend Jack McMichael, the first clergyman ever subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He was Executive Secretary for the M.F.S.A. Then there was Dr. Charles C. Webber, M.F.S.S. Co-Secretary, who told an audience at Rochester Divinity School: "Capitalism is un-Christian and unethical, and must give way, to Socialism and Communism, and the missionaries of the future must be social revolutionists." There was also Jerome Davis, identified twice under oath as a Communist, with a record of Communist activities that takes eight full pages. The current Executive Secretary of the Methodist Federation for Social Action is Communist Lee H. Ball of Chicago.
Communist Party founder Benjamin Gitlow revealed during testimony given in 1953 that the objective of M.F.S.A. "was to transform the Methodist Church and Christianity into an instrument for the achievement of Socialism." The Communists in this organization, said Gitlow, "posed as religious reformers fighting orthodoxy and reaction in religion."
2 Approximately one-third of those elected to the General Board of the National Council of Churches have had similar Communist records. while at least seven hundred officers, denominational representatives, and other N.C.C. officials also have Communist Front records.
3 Dr. Arthur S. Flemming, currently President of the University of Oregon, served as N.C.C. President from 1966 to 1969. He was a U.S. Civil Service Commissioner in Washington during the Administration of President Franklin Roosevelt. In that strategic position, Flemming had ruled that Soviet agent Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, head of a Communist spy ring operating within our Government, was "eligible" to retain his key post. Dr. Flemming ruled favorably in behalf of a number of such Communist agents.
