“If it were not for the churches of this country (…) there would probably not be a United Nations today”1. So spoke John Foster Dulles, former American Secretary of State, diplomat, international lawyer, ecumenist and leader of the American Federal Council of Churches’ Commission on a Just and Durable Peace in 1947. Dulles exaggerated but both the publicity generated by the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), a body which included many of the Christian denominations of the United States at the time, and the concrete actions taken by that body were substantive. They were both invaluable tools in educating the public and the elites about “…the political framework for a world community that was based on consensus and voluntary membership rather than imperial coercion”2. It was the organizational effort of the churches that prepared the way in the US for a new world order. “The various FCC conferences, books, sermons, and pamphlets had spread the message to an audience wider than any other. Church and missionary links between the United States and the rest of the world ensured a symmetry of views that transcended national borders. Most important was the effect on the American people, whose support was crucial and who had absorbed the message of ecumenical internationalism. A 1941 Gallup poll listed “International federation” and “reform based on toleration and Christian principles” as the two most popular solutions to the problem of war. Thanks in large part to the FCC, by April 1945 some polls recorded 90% approval ratings for the establishment of a permanent United Nations”3. The FCC used one very concrete strategy in particular. It published a book entitled Six Pillars of Peace and offered it for sale to the general public. More influentially though, it donated several hundreds of thousands of copies to churches nationwide and instructed its member clergy to use it as the basis of their sermons on the Second World War. The Six Pillars of Peace laid “out the essential principles that would need to form the core elements of any postwar system. The first pillar, international organization, was the most important because all the others would emanate from it and be managed by it. The second was more complicated: providing for economic justice by limiting the ability of states to pass domestic laws that would have global ramifications; (…) The third pillar called for political reform of the world system by making treaties more flexible to reflect changing circumstances. The fourth, fifth and sixth pillars upheld more familiar goals of liberal Protestants: decolonization, disarmament, and the protection of individual freedoms, especially religious, and intellectual liberty”4.
Six Pillars of Peace sold more than eighteen thousand copies and its plan for post-war peace was featured in more than one hundred regional newspapers. Perhaps most startling to Western Europeans and North Americans, used to considering the reality of secular states and systems and public conversations about the decline of religion in certain sectors of society, this post-war peace plan of the churches which included the necessity of international organizations received considerable attention because it was one of the only substantive plans for US post-war planning at the time5. It was completely logical that the churches of the US would have such a thoughtful and prominent post-war peace plan. Not only did the FCC represent approximately 25 million Americans and so have a vested interest in a stable and ongoing peace for the sake of American society, but its churches all took seriously the Biblical imperative to love one’s neighbour as one’s self. This was manifesting in initiatives towards racial tolerance even in the American south, which were intertwined with a condemnation of previous tendencies to isolationism. As the Southern Baptists stated at their annual convention in 1944, “Believing in the worth of every individual, we deplore race prejudices and hatreds as undermining the respect to which every individual is entitled, and as destroying the spirit of good will, which must be the foundation of enduring peace. This is true whether we consider racial tensions in our nation or in international relationships”6. It would be an exaggeration worthy of Dulles to say that the American churches at this time were completely federalist in orientation, but in a framework of subsidiarity they were seeing the necessary connections between such vital human issues as anti-racism and peace in international relations. “As the war drew to a close, and as the Allies planned to meet in San Francisco to transform the UN from a wartime alliance to an organization for the maintenance of post-war peace (…)”7, the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace of the FCC played a key role. The great powers had made the decision to admit non-governmental organizations to the meeting to provide expert testimony and advice, and while numerous NGOs attended in that capacity, it was the FCC that represented the greatest number of people and spoke with the greatest expertise. It was through another FCC-related body, the Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, that the push was made for the inclusion of explicit human rights provisions, specifically that of religious liberty, in the UN Charter. Religious liberty was seen as the source of conscience which affects all other human rights by declaring that there is no real human freedom unless people can move, speak and act according to their conscience, limited only, and it is a substantial limitation, by the imperative to care for them neighbour8.
Although the vast majority of Christians in the US at the time were all in agreement with the strategies and articulations of the Protestant FCC, as were, not incidentally, most Catholics and Jews, some “fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals could not bring themselves to support the construction of a regulatory global state that would herald the birth of a new world order”9. It is instructive to look at why that was the case, and what can be learned about the current needs in articulation of World Federalist principles and strategies. The reason that some fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals believed that planning for post-war international organizations was futile, was because they believed, in a certain way of biblical interpretation, that the end times were approaching. And in that interpretative method, anything that seemed like a form of world government would make it possible for the world dictator, a kind of anti-Christ, to take control and hasten the terrible end times that must usher in the hoped and longed for Second coming of Christ. The logical flaw in this belief did not register with the minority holding it. If the Second coming of Christ was to be longed for and something like a form of world government would make possible the steps which would lead to it, surely that would be something to support. That was not the belief though10. More logical in the thinking of the minority of American Protestant Christians who opposed such post-war international organizations as the United Nations, was their traditional, small-‘c’ conservatism. If regulation and government interference in matters that should belong to family and church were to be feared and opposed on a national level, they should also be feared and opposed on an international level. Tied in with that way of thinking was a fear of and resistance to anything that might be entitled ‘foreign’ interfering in the American way of life11. While there are, of course, people of every nation who will, for a variety of reasons, never be convinced about the benefits of and imperative for world federalism, it behooves us as a movement to make fewer assumptions about the general understanding and perception of federalism, and to make a more detailed and concrete case for its benefits at every level of what we call subsidiarity. It behooves us to listen more closely and carefully to opposition to federalism and to structure our apologetic accordingly. The world famous theologian H. Richard Niebuhr had a more thoughtful and reflective critique of international institutions that actually spoke then and speaks now to the need for world federalism. “His belief in original sin and humanity’s innate capacity for evil made him skeptical that a world state was the best thing for peace”12. As world federalists in our current context, we would not claim the UN as a ‘world state’, nor would most of us advocate for such a reality, preferring and seeing the wisdom and effectiveness of our current trajectory of incremental federalism. But Niebuhr’s position is instructive. He warned, in a way of total resonance with our federalist campaigns of UN reform, that one must never assume that any international body would be responsible for and limit itself to those issues and actions completely within its purview. “Niebuhr agreed upon the need for the UN, but one that was constrained by its members, just as the US government was kept in check by its reliance upon the consent of the governed”13. Niebuhr was a realist about the human condition. He believed that the contemporary international system was anarchic, but he could see dangers in new international systems as well. He warned against the American “tendency to oscillate between utopianism and disillusionment” that would result from a demand for “a world state or nothing”. While an international organization might be necessary, its powers would have to be limited to account, to some extent, for national priorities and the inevitability of power politics”14. He linked internationalism with the realities of power. He brought together Christian unity around international organizations with a framework of collective security. Whether Niebuhr was a ‘card-carrying’ world federalist or not, we should claim him. He believed, in his own words, in a “global civilization [requiring] a collective and mutual defense”15. He sounds like an advocate, a thoughtful, critical advocate, for the ICC and RtoP.
Niebuhr’s enormous contribution to the acceptance of international organizations amongst the majority of American Christians, lay in his prominence. He was a public intellectual of international scope, who was widely published not only in religious periodicals, which he used as a platform for the promotion of international organization, but also in the national, secular press. His religious editors proclaimed that they were “committed to the realization of a community of nations founded in justice”16. As noted above, it was not just American Protestants who were committed to post-war international organizations, leading to the UN. American Catholics were also strong proponents of the UN. Pope Pius XII issued “Six Conditions of a Just Peace”, a document which was in accord with the FCC “Six Pillars”. The Catholic priority for social justice moved the Church towards a “pursuit of a more equitable and peaceful international order [as] an integral part of improving American society at home, especially on industrial and racial questions”17. The Catholics brought to the discussions of international organizations and law a helpful and healthy balancing, which might be labelled ‘subsidiarity’ in a federalist perspective, amongst individual political rights and group social and economic rights. The American Jewish community had a tendency to progressivism and internationalism, and as such recent victims of Russian and German aggression, were natural supporters of organizations that would curtail sovereignty and tyrannical power. For the Jewish community, Zionism was a complicating factor, however. Some perceived the desire to build a Jewish homeland as a kind of nationalism that was in tension with the internationalist visions of those who supported the creation of the UN. At that time, Jews who opposed Zionism were impassioned supporters of the creation of the United Nations. As Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, articulated the issue, “The creation of an enduring peace presupposes an active cooperative relationship among nations and peoples, which makes the question of statehood less and less relevant”18. Jews, including Zionists, overwhelmingly supported the creation of a permanent UN, but that support was nuanced and made complicated by the creation of the state of Israel and the current and on-going question of statehood for Palestine. The desire for an international peace that would be facilitated and managed through the UN was therefore not just something believed in by the majority of America’s Christians, but also by the majority of those people of faith whose traditions were strongly present in the country at the time. It was not just a theoretical desire, but one that was actively promoted and collaborated on. “…The war marked a coming of age for American civil religion, and nearly everyone espoused the same message of global tolerance and pluralistic harmony”19. It was obvious, it was logical. Because religion protected the freedom of conscience, the unchallenged thinking of the time was that religion was then a source of democracy. In the decades since the founding of the UN, the question of the relationship of religion to democracy and to international institutions has become a more complicated and nuanced one. In the days in which this article has been written, it has become an even more complicated and nuanced question as the world has watched and experienced the terrorism in Paris, which was said to be provoked by a particular kind of satire of religion. A minority aberration of religion, however abhorrent, does not change the central tenants of religion which can be expressed in one iteration by the prophetic words, “…what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). The churches and faith communities of the US around the time of World War II believed that such an imperative was best achieved for their society and their world through the creation of international organizations, specifically, the UN.
1 Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy, New York, Anchor Books, 2012, p. 408
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 394
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., pp. 400-401
7 Ibid., p. 405
8 Ibid., p. 406
9 Ibid., p. 402
10 Ibid., pp. 402-403
11 Ibid., p. 403
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p. 405
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., pp. 405-406
17 Ibid., p. 401
18 Ibid., pp. 401-402
19 Ibid., p. 402
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