Consensus

Is U.S. Protestantism being dominated and led around by leftists and fellow travelers? Such charges have recently been made, notably by Roosevelt-hating pamphleteer John T. Flynn, whose book, The Road Ahead, brought the Federal Council of Churches out fighting with a special pamphlet to refute its numerous misstatements. Last week, in his biweekly journal, Christianity and Crisis, anti-Communist Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr swun, some haymakers at right-wing critics on Protestant social thinking.

Niebuhr notes that the Detroit Conference in the Church & Economic Life (TIME, Feb. 27), which came out in favor of a middle way between socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, confirmed a consensus already established by Protestantism in its conferences at Stockholm (1922), Oxford (1937) and Amsterdam (1948). "This consensus of Protestant thought is the more remarkable," writes Niebuhr, "in that it closely approaches the main emphases in the social teachings of the Catholic encyclicals since Rerum Novarum . Whatever may be the differences in Catholic and Protestant social policy . . . the similarities are more striking than the differences . . .

"This does not mean that either Catholic or Protestant theory is committed to socialism. It certainly does mean that it rejects the theory that every form of socialism is but a halfway house to Communism, and that every form of social control upon economic process is inherently wrong."

Protestants, says Niebuhr, should beware of denying authority to such a consensus of church thinking. "Protestantism is inclined to vaunt itself because of its liberty, as distinguished from Rome's authoritarianism. We fear that Roman Catholicism deifies the church. [But] does not Protestantism deify the individual conscience to an extent which gives men a sense of security about the 'dictates' of their conscience and no sense of repentance about the mixture of interest and self-seeking in the ideals of conscience?

"Some of the reactions to the Flynn criticisms of the church might well prompt us as Protestants to be less concerned with the characteristic weaknesses of Rome, and a little more anxious about the vast morasses of sentimentality and human pride in which parts of the Protestant Church are sinking."

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