Jack Bauman 11-13-09
The Boothbay Congregation Church and Politics:
Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick
Unlike the 18th century colonial church that Chip has addressed, the 19th century Protestant church, both urban and rural, mainly abjured controversial political issues. Southern ministers preached slavery, while northern clergy intoned an anti-slavery message. Most agreed that women belonged in the home obeying their husbands. On workingmen’s rights, the church viewed the world as a vale of tears; a poor worker’s reward came in heaven not on earth. Wages were governed by iron laws and only the fittest survived. But, as the 19th century wore on, American optimism yielded a new strain of Postmillennial theology preached in the 1840s and 1850s by clergymen such as Charles Grandisson Finney and Horace Bushnell. For these men of the cloth the Second Coming had already occurred. God was immanent in the World; society, especially in blessed America, marched inexorably toward perfection and the Kingdom of God. Emboldened after the Civil War by Darwinian evolutionary thought, advanced by the new biological and social sciences, a group of urban clergy, Henry Ward Beecher, Lyman Abbott, and Edward Everett Hale, all from Boston, George Hodges from Pittsburgh, Washington Gladden from First Congregational Church of Columbus, Ohio, and Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch of New York, unveiled the new Social Gospel. Rauschenbusch, the leader, emphasized the organic nature of society, and the realization of the Kingdom of God through the Brotherhood of Man. Sin, such as greed, oppression, graft, corruption, taught Rauschenbusch, was social, and the Social Gospel brought men to repentance for their collective, not individual, sins.
There is little or no evidence that this Social Gospel reached the peaceful, cottage-lined shores of Boothbay Harbor between 1881 and 1918. However, it did arrive in that stormy year 1919. That year the 41-year old pastor of New York City’s First Presbyterian Church purchased Mouse Island. A graduate of Colgate College and Union Theological Seminary, where he was deeply influenced by Rauschenbusch and William James, the author of philosophical pragmatism, Harry Emerson Fosdick also held a Master Degree in Sociology from Columbia University (his thesis was “Trade Unionism in A suburban Town [Montclair, N.J.]).”
Raised and ordained as a Baptist, Fosdick in 1919 had already established himself as one of America’s premier, albeit controversial, preachers, in addition to being a prolific writer, composer of hymns, and a thorn in the side of Christian Fundamentalism. Between his arrival on Mouse Island in 1919 and his death in 1969, Fosdick occupied this pulpit many times. His sermons rarely lacked political content.
Fosdick entitled one of his most irenic sermons preached in 1922, not here, but at his own church in New York City, First Presbyterian, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win.” In this sermon he charged that Fundamentalists intended to “drive out of the evangelical churches men and women of liberal opinions . . . [that] the Fundamentalist program [was] essential illiberal and intolerant... If they had their way within the church they would set up in Protestantism a doctrinal tribunal more rigid than the pope’s.” In the same sermon that he also shockingly questioned whether faith in the virgin birth “as an historic fact” was essential for church membership.
New York’s John D. Rockefeller, a Baptist, loved Fosdick’s sermon. The Presbyterian hierarchy hated it. Pressed to conform to Presbyterian orthodoxy, Fosdick resigned the First Presbyterian pulpit in 1924. His reward was the pulpit in 1926 of Rockefeller’s Park Street Baptist Church and a promise that Park Street would soon build for him a larger, interdenominational, open membership cathedral. Five years later, in 1931, Fosdick preached the dedication sermon for Riverside Church, the magnificent, 4000 plus-seat Gothic Cathedral (modeled on Chartres) which adorned a knoll in Morningside Heights in the shadow of Columbia and Union Theological Seminary. A check from Rockefeller for over $10,500,000 helped construct the edifice as did the over $20,000,000 in subsequent sustaining dollars. How’s that for pledging?
Fosdick’s outspoken political views hardly ended with his modernist assault on Fundamentalism. And, neither Rockefeller, nor his Riverside flock restrained his homiletic tone or content. When, with Fosdick’s permission, the somewhat radical League for Industrial Democracy held a meeting at Riverside and invited as the speaker the Socialist Norman Thomas, some irate parishioners complained to Rockefeller who promptly scribbled a note to the minister. Fosdick, vilified as a “Sobbing Socialist,” responded that it was “none of [Rockefeller’s] business. . . I regard him [Thomas] as one of the best citizens of the community.” On another occasion Rockefeller questioned Fosdick’s use of an anti-capitalist “Litany of the Nations,” but added the Standard Oil tycoon, “please do not think to reply to his note which I hope finds you having a wonderful rest in Maine.”
Throughout his career Fosdick was an eloquent, prophetic voice for social justice. “I plead,” he preached, “for a church that shall be the fountainhead of a better social order. Any church that pretends to care for the souls of people, but is not interested in slums that dam them . . . is worthless. Fosdick, an admirer of Freud, and a founder of psychological pastoral counseling, saw the Christian gospel reaching out to “souls crushed . . . by a maladjusted and cruel society.”
In his writings, his sermons, hymns, Fosdick ranged over a host of contemporary, often politically contentious issues, including gender, sex, the rights of labor, and the abuse of wealth. He gloried in what he viewed as the successful struggle of women for legal, educational, political, and occupational freedom. His daughter Elinor (now Elinor Downs), today a summer resident of Southport Island, graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School, was a medical officer in World War II, served in the World Health Organization, on the faculty of Columbia University and with the New York City School System. Her daughter, Patti, likewise became a doctor.
Riverside Church sat only a block from Harlem and had and has many black members. Rockefeller and Fosdick supported numerous African-American causes, and the latter outspokenly advocated black civil rights. Martin Luther King preached several times in the Riverside pulpit, where he told Fosdick that “If I were called upon to select the greatest preacher of the century, I would choose your name.” In the 1920s and 1930s, Fosdick championed another controversial cause, birth control. He strongly believed that “the population problem is the basic problem of the world, and if it is not well handled no other social problems can at all be solved.” He praised the work of Margaret Sanger from his pulpit, belonged to the American Birth Control League and Planned Parenthood, and wrote for the Birth Control Review.
Branded “modernist slime,” an atheist, pro-Soviet apologist and outspoken communist, among other things, Fosdick essentially believed in the reasonableness of faith and that in a modern, secular age, the truth of the Gospel could be made intelligible, vital, useful, and compelling for modern audiences. The church, that is, could bring hearers of the word in a closer, practical relationship with God, and thus make religion an active force for social good. To do this he never shied away from politics at First Presbyterian or at Riverside. I find it difficult to believe that our Congregational Church was the exception!!! His biographer, Robert Moats Miller called Fosdick “Protean,” contending that in the 20th century “no American Protestant minister exceeded the prominence of Harry Emerson Fosdick. “This,” asserted Miller “is simply an historic fact. [He] was not only vastly influential, but also, a great human being.” Our church was surely fortunate to have had this powerful, albeit often controversial voice for social justice in our pulpit, if only in the good old summertime.