Crisis Continues

In early 1941, when Hitler's troops stood poised across the English Channel from Britain, American churchmen had mixed feelings about U.S. entry into the war. One of the most outspoken advocates of the Allied cause was Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a onetime pacifist who had come to see that stance as "utopianism" in the face of Nazism's threat to Western civilization. With a group of like-minded thinkers, Niebuhr founded a biweekly journal of Christian opinion to oppose the prevailing pacifism of church leaders and to relate the Gospel message to problems of war and peace.

The particular danger posed by Hitler was banished to the history books, but Niebuhr's Christianity and Crisis found enough troubling issues to keep right on publishing. This week the magazine celebrates its 25th anniversary by sponsoring a colloquium on mankind's present crisis and a banquet at which the main speaker will be Longtime Reader Hubert Humphrey.

$5,000 from Lippmann. The magazine has only 17,500 subscribers, but its influence is well out of proportion to its size. Readers range all the way from Martin Luther King to Boston's Richard Cardinal Gushing to Walter Lippmann, who recently paid tribute to C & C in the form of a $5,000 gift. Over the years, its contributors have included Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain, Adlai Stevenson and John Foster Dulles.

Niebuhr, 73, and in poor health, has taken a less active role in the magazine in recent years, eventually will step down. Since 1953 he has shared the title of editor with President John C. Bennett of Union Theological Seminary, while day-to-day operations are handled by Managing Editor Wayne Cowan, 38, a former Methodist missionary in Japan.

Unbound by church control, the magazine takes its stand with considerable passion, and almost always on the liberal and ecumenical side. At a time when most other Protestant magazines suspiciously viewed Roman Catholicism as a formidable monolith, C & C was inviting Catholic contributors to explain the church's views on issues that caused interfaith tensions. One article two years ago by Harvey Cox of the Harvard Divinity School suggested that it was time for Protestants to re-examine their attitude of total opposition to premarital sex. Another, by Pastor Howard Moody of Manhattan's Judson Memorial Church, proposed a redefinition of obscenity: the really filthy word, he suggested, was not a four-letter Saxonism for sex but the word "nigger" shouted by an Alabama cop.

Christian Realism. Ironically, the journal that once condemned Hitler now criticizes the U.S. in its confrontation with Asian Communism. Niebuhr and Bennett say that a nation at times has a "moral obligation" to check power with power, but they advocate a negotiated end to the fighting in Viet Nam, a position that some critics feel is surprisingly akin to the antiwar view the magazine opposed in 1941. "We hope we are still Christian realists," Bennett writes in the anniversary issue, "and that we are as 'realistic' in emphasizing the limited relevance of American military power today as we were in calling for its use to defeat Hitler in 1941."

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