Law and the Kingdom Church and State-Rush to Judgment

( This is the second of three parts. )

THE SPIRITUAL order remembering and reclaiming. From political activism to political office to-ecclesiastical bodies assuming jurisdiction over and deciding civil disputes.

On May 8, 1968, the representative of the Mindick Family Real Estate Interests in Boston's South End, and the representatives of the South End Tenants Council asked the Masachusetts Rabbinical Court of Justice, the Bet Din (House of Judgment) to adjudicate their disagreements, thinking this would be faster than civil litigation. The Ret Din agreed. The Jewish Advocate reported in its August 8, 1968 issue the August 5 signing of the final settlement: "It is the first time in U. S. history that a Rabbinical Court, normally concerned with interpretation of Jewish law, divorce cases, disputes between synagogues, religious functionaries, family counseling, has undertaken to deal with such a profound social issue."

Another recent, unprecedented example of civil mediation by an official ecclesiastical body occurred earlier this year in the work done by the U. S. Catholic Bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on the Farm Labor Dispute between California grape growers and workers. The committee of five bishops brought some growers and union representatives together for the first time and effected the first break in the long deadlock through several contractual agreements.

Rev. Daniel Lyons, editor of the anti-left Catholic weekly, Twin Circle, frowned upon these doings: "That the name of the U. S. Bishops is being used in the campaign to organize the table grape industry is unprecedented. We have also found it bitterly resented."

Nevertheless, political activism to political office to jurisdiction over civil disputes to-large-scale corporate consolidation.

Two momentous church mergers are in the works. One would merge the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., the United Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the AME Zion Church, the Presbyterian Church in the U. S., and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church into a 25-million member Church of Christ Uniting. The other would merge the Episcopal Church with the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, the Episcopal Church stands as the pivot for the possible creation of a single church within Christendom of mind-boggling size and implications.

Plans for the Church of Christ Uniting are being developed by the Consultation on Church Union which dates back to 1962 and is an acrostical COCU just like the subject of its endeavors. The Boston Herald Traveler reported last February 22 that, "The CCCU plan makes very clear that the new 'Church of Christ Uniting' will be socially concerned... It makes equally clear that social action cannot be divorced from 'religious' concerns... Immediately following the plan's assertion that 'mission in the world shall be the primary characteristic of the Church's life at every level,' it is stated: 'Celebration of God's grace shall' (the planners did not say 'should') 'mark every endeavor of this united church.'"

Repairing the damage done by Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn has been the subject of five years of discussions by the Joint Commission on Roman Catholic-Anglican Relations in the United States. On the international level, comparable deliberations are going on between the Vatican and the Anglican Commission. "Full communion and organic union" are the goals declared in a document released by the Episcopal Church Center in New York City last May 4, and Most Rev. Charles H. Helmsing, Catholic bishop of Kansas City St. Joseph, Mo., states emphatically: "We must bring about the union of the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches as quickly as we can."

In October 1969, James F. Cunningham, Paulist priest of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, announced that careless driving is a "serious sin against society, fellow man and God" and that "traffic safety is a religious and moral problem as well as a physical and educational one." Last April 15 in the Herald Traveler, Rabbi Judea B. Miller of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis, objected to that paper's picturing grapes as part of Passover Feasts. He said the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis was supporting the California grape boycott, had determined it to be a religious and moral issue, and, basing its decision on "the spirit and letter of Jewish law," had declared California table grapes unfit for use in synagogues and religious Jewish homes.

Catholic theologian Rev. Hans Kung reports that a secret Vatican document recently circulated among selected bishops would use Vatican II "letter" to revert to Vatican I "spirit," leave only the Pope with real power, make "legalisms of dogma and dogmatize law" -this last, the kind of fusion Father Cunningham and Rabbi Miller seem to be approaching with their sinful driving and tref table grapes.

Ecclesiastical powers are reacting to the churches' secularizing trends of recent history not by withdrawing from secular concerns but by expanding those concerns while infusing into them the traditional theology supposedly eschewed or modified through secularization. Secularized spirituality becomes materialized theology. Reclaiming the civil order while going back to that old-time religion.

II

As THE church breaches that hallowed barrier between the forces of salvation and the forces of law and order, hammer blows are heard from the other side. Over there, things are getting very difficult, and it is well-settled that the priest is sometimes more effective than the soldier in holding the fort. And now we have those two new soul brothers, President Richard Nixon and Reverend Billy Graham.

Last summer, Richard Nixon and Billy Graham appeared together at the University of Tennessee, marking the first time a President of the United States had addressed a revival meeting. Last July 4 was transmogrified into Honor America Day with Billy Graham leading the celebration. On New Year's Day, Graham will be the first clergyman to be grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses parade.

Meanwhile, back at the fort proper, Nixon last January unveiled the White House police in Student Prince-like uniforms allegedly inspired by his impressions of European palace guards. He modified those uniforms but launched the President's Trumpeteers to beef up the introductory ceremonies featuring "Hail to the Chief." Last June he shook up the Cabinet, causing columnist William S. White to say: "... the President is... openly reducing the institutional prestige and status of the Cabinet and drawing into the White House proper... the largest palace guard in history." Time's cover story last June 8, "Nixon's Palace Guard," noted that the key figures around Nixon-Staff Chief Bob Haldeman, Domestic Affairs Aide John Ehrlichman, and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger -had variously acquired the nicknames: "the Berlin Wall," "all the King's Krauts," "the throne nursers," "the Praetorian Gaurd," and "the Germans."

Nixon sent Henry Cabot Lodge to renew semi-official contacts with the Vatican then visited the Vatican himself, eliciting the Associated Press statement: "Pope Paul VI and President Nixon apparently are forming strong working links between the Vatican and the White House. Their personal friendship also appears to be growing." In the October 6 New York Times, an article entitled, "The Pope and the President" is critical of both but, of greater interest, the official seals of both are prominently displayed side-by-side above the title.

There is talk of doing a television special Christmas Day linking Washington and Westminster Abbey with President Nixon and Queen Elizabeth taking part in a religious program. Press Secretary for President Johnson, George Reedy, has written a book, The Twilight of the Presidency, suggesting that we may need a King to relieve the burdens of the Presidency.

Who can say certainly that the soul of Western man is dead to government in the grand manner of Pope and King? Are the above-mentioned events "merely coincidental"? Or do we have here a natural and historic joining of the instinct for self-preservation with the urge toward that grand manner?

A UNION of church and state is prone to becoming a union of church and state with race. Religious belief draws biological lines more sharply than does the secular state. In America, the crises in church-and-state and black-and-white may each come to a head through coming together. "Nation-building" is the new and culminating black concept and commitment. Various roads are converging on the South as a black secessionist Afro-Islamic nation wrenched from a white Christian America.

The Black Muslims await Allah's destruction of the white devil but the Republic of New Africa and others are plunging into the revolutionary struggle. The first shoots of Afro-Islamic law are appearing in drafts of Black Laws and in emerging bleak courts. I have observed some of these beginnings from the inside and I estimate the potential to be comparable to the dreams of the early Zionists.

The Jews were to await the Messiah -but, without him, they seized their opportunity. I think that, as their revolutionary brothers succeed, the Muslims will seize theirs. It is only human.

If the Messiah is not with Israel, Israel is still something of a miracle. It is, for all of us, a fatefully substantial if not complete example of the union of church and state. In Israel and elsewhere, Jews are moving into deep trouble because of their special genius at being both particular and universal.

In America, insofar as student and black rebellions grow, Jews are in danger. Embattled America will probe sources. Marx, Franz Boas- Jewish prophet of egalitarian cultural anthropology (universalism kills anti-Semitism), Hoffman, Rubin, Dohrn, Rudd, Chomsky. Recent outcry against Brandeis University as radical nest. Jewish Defense League. Young Jews rediscovering Judaism and Jewishness. Racial inequality doctrine returning via Lorenz, Ardrey, others. Carleton Putnam thoughtfully exploring such matters in Race and Reason and Race and Reality.

In those books at least. I find Putnam neither anti-black nor anti-Semitic. He is concerned with preserving Anglo-American spirit and values: with self-preservation. If one concedes another the right to-self-preservation, I find it difficult not to concede to the other the right to define it. Non-interference with the rights of others is a vague, dreamy doctrine which is always breaking down and is, perhaps, unwise. Genocide upon the Indians may have been good and necessary for the blooming of a world-improving, necessary good in white America. Elijah Muhammad, Golda Meir, and Carleton Putnam may be "racists" yet rightly and justifiably so. It may be a failure of our spirit that we do not see as just all that necessarily accompanies evolving good. Bio-religious and religio-patriotic fervor are probably more life-giving than life-destroying, and leveling always produces new eminences.

Such thriving movements as Avn Rand's Objectivism or L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology impart a messianic spirit to the new Euro-and Anglo-American militancy. Reports of the death of the West may be premature. Read the book, Imperium, by Francis Parker Yockey and wonder if the greatest Western Empire is yet to come. In the grand manner. At any event, it certainly seems that the easeful, gentlemanly days of church-state separation are over.

(James T. Anderson is a composer specializing in the music of India.)

Copyright October 31, 1970