Brown Sees 'Protestant Deformation'

"You're talking to Harvard and Radcliffe students. If you want them to listen you can't talk about God," the Rev. Harold O. J. Brown '53 said, quoting a Harvard minister in the recent issue of the National Review on "The Protestant Deformation."

In his article, Brown, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School '59 and a minister of students at the Park St. Church in Boston, insists that the Protestant Church of today, having abandoned Biblica lauthority, is now deformed by secular sanctions. He continues the argument saying that since the Scripture is the formal basis of Protestantism, without it "Protestantism collapses like a punctured dirigible."

As an example of this deformation, Brown cites a meting of the United Harvard Ministry which was devoted to publishing an advertisement endorsing the civil rights movement. He criticizes the Ministry's use of a quotation from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, rather than a Biblical quotation as the cornerstone of the Ministry's argument.

Furthermore, Brown objects that the "flocking of clergy to the integrationists' banners today is nothing more than their participation, boosted by a few religious slogans, in a movement dictated by the mood of secular society."

Brown recounts that a Catholic priest at the meeting of the United Ministry objected because Baldwin had said "absolutely everything is in our hands." The priest felt that this eliminated the possibility of the existence of God.

Out of Context

The Rev. Richard E. Mumma, a member of the United Ministry at Harvard, said last night that Brown's quote had been "wrenched out of context." Commenting on Brown's attack on the reasons Harvard ministers endorsed the civil rights movement, Mumma said that many of them were acting out of a profound religious conviction and not simply secular reasoning.

Mumma added that as he remembers it, the "recent meeting of campus chaplain's at Harvard," to which Brown refers, took place over a year ago. The civil rights movement, according to Mumma, ran in the CRIMSON.