When Not to Speak Truth to Power: Thoughts on the Historiography of the Social Gospel

Today's guest post comes courtesy of Guy Aiken.  Guy graduated in May with a PhD in Religious Studies (American Religions) from the University of Virginia. His dissertation was on the American Friends Service Committee in Germany and Appalachia between the world wars. He is an Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University. You can read his previous guest posts here and here.

Guy Aiken

“Speak truth to power.” Everyone knows the phrase—John Fea recently used it at the end of his article in the Washington Post on Trump and white evangelicals—but almost nobody knows where it comes from: the title of a 1955 pamphlet on international relations issued by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization headquartered in Philadelphia.[1] Those who do know this immediate provenance of the phrase often assume that it originates ultimately with an eighteenth-century Quaker, or even with the founder of Quakerism himself, the British shoemaker’s apprentice George Fox. Not so.

The first person to use the phrase, it seems, was the African-American Quaker civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who wrote in 1942 that the role of a religious group was to “speak truth to power.” Rustin himself attributed the phrase to a speech he had heard by Patrick Malin, a professor of economics at Swarthmore College who was to head the ACLU from 1950 to 1962—but it appears that Malin never used the exact phrase.[2] A little over a decade later, Rustin helped write the pamphlet Speak Truth to Power. Rustin and his co-authors expunged Rustin’s name from the pamphlet because of his arrest on charges of committing a homosexual act in 1953. Another co-author claimed the phrase occurred to him spontaneously.[3]

Speaking truth to power comes with a price. The apparent ease with which the phrase is often uttered today can conceal the cost of putting it into practice, not to mention what it cost the AFSC to be able to utter it in the first place. 

Between its founding in 1917 and its co-acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 on behalf of Quakers worldwide, the AFSC learned well that the less powerful often need the help or permission of the more powerful to serve the needs of the powerless. To have spoken truth to power would have cost the AFSC its claim to neutrality and thereby its access to people in dire need of food, clothing, and comfort.

Between its feeding of over five million German children after World War I and its refugee work before and during World War II, the AFSC relieved those they saw as victims of another kind of war—one being waged right on its doorstep. Industrial warfare was starving the innocent women and children of striking miners and mill workers in southern Appalachia just as the Allied naval blockade during and after the Great War had starved innocent women and children in Germany. AFSC leaders drew precisely this parallel to justify their intervention in domestic labor battles between 1922 and 1936, and deployed many of the same personnel and foodstuffs in Appalachia as they had in Germany. In the 1920s AFSC workers in Appalachia discovered and agonized over the outright conflict between social justice and humanitarianism. In the 1930s the Quakers of the AFSC came to shed enough of their voluntarist scruples to actively seek massive government intervention in the economy. Talk of “justice” began complementing talk of “love” within the AFSC. Relief without “rehabilitation” was no longer enough. Laws and institutions had to be changed along with hearts.

The AFSC in the 1920s and 1930s thought of itself as an agency for the Christianization of the international and social order—that is, as a vehicle of the Social Gospel. It was, after all, a service committee. As Donald Meyer argues in The Protestant Search for Political Realism, Protestant churches in general, or at least their ministers and lay elite, saw the church as a neutral mediator between warring social factions, especially capital and labor.[4] Before the 1930s, these social Christians feared taking sides in social conflicts lest they become complicit in either side’s sins.

In the abstract, this neutrality looks like craven captivity to capitalism, and many historians have taken social Christians to task for catering to wealthy congregants and failing to stand with workers and unions in their fight for economic justice and political recognition. While there is much truth to this criticism, the early history of the AFSC offers another, perhaps fresh, way of looking at social Christians’ reluctance to take sides: it is one thing to denounce a social order and seek to change it by converting hearts, minds, and laws, and quite another thing to seek to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and give shelter to the poor in those places where the social order has broken down and where the springs of human decency, let alone justice, are choked with fear, hatred, and violence. In such places what is necessary is not prophetic indictment but concrete acts of mercy. And often the gatekeepers to these nether regions of suffering are the very powers—whether capitalists at home or dictators abroad—to whom to speak truth, or to have spoken truth, would mean refusal of entrance.

From this angle neutrality can look like courage and compassion rather than cowardice and indifference. So maybe there are times and places when it is the role of a religious group not to “speak truth to power.”

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[1] Stephen G. Cary, A. J. Muste, Clarence E. Pickett, Bayard Rustin, et al, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence. A Study of International Conflict Prepared for the American Friends Service Committee ([no publisher information], 1955).

[2] Bayard Rustin to New York Monthly Meeting, August 15, 1942, in Bayard Rustin, I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters, ed. Michael G. Long (New York: City Lights Publishers, 2012), 2.

[3] See https://www.afsc.org/sites/afsc.civicactions.net/files/documents/Speak_Truth_to_ Power.pdf  for the “Historical Note about Bayard Rustin” the AFSC appended to Speak Truth to Power in 2012. For the story about the title occurring to one of the other authors, see Paul Lacey, Quakers and the Use of Power, Pendle Hill Pamphlets, Vol. 241 (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1982).

[4] Donald Meyer, The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919-1941, 2^nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988 [1960]), 104, 109-110.

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Fun with Polygamy, or, "A House Full of Females" & the Benefits of Teaching Mormon History

Andrea L. Turpin

I love Mormon history. I have found a way to work it into literally all the courses I have ever taught. I am neither a Mormon nor a historian of Mormonism, but I've discovered that teaching the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints brings to life so many aspects of nineteenth-century American history in a way that students always find gripping. Specifically, recounting the development of the LDS church during this era provides a fresh way to present topics as diverse as racial prejudice, Western expansion, revivalism and the larger significance of Protestant theological debates, changing gender roles, anti-Catholic prejudice, the utopian impulse, the expansion and contraction of the franchise, and debates over religious freedom, among others.

I teach in a history department, so an additional asset of Mormon history for me is that the church's formative years run from the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830 through the renouncing of polygamy by LDS church president Wilford Woodruff in 1890. In other words, early Mormon history can be used in both halves of the US Survey course, whether you divide it at the end of the Civil War in 1865 or the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

I also teach at an institution (Baylor) where many students identify as Christians, so discussing Mormon history allows for class reflection about how historians treat faiths that believe that God has broken into human history in miraculous ways. Many students affirm that God raised Jesus from the dead on a specific date in history but dismiss Joseph Smith's assertion that the Book of Mormon is the result of digging up and translating golden plates whose location was revealed to him by the angel Moroni. Teasing out the similarities and differences between these historical claims makes for fruitful discussion.

Of course, a big part of why my classes are so interested in nineteenth-century Mormons is their practice of polygamy, or "plural marriage" as it was known. When I first started teaching in 2009 and asked undergraduates for their associations with Mormonism, the number one answer was Big Love--now it's Sister Wives. (Honorable mention in different years has gone to Mitt Romney, the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, and "those guys in black suits.") Students' association of Mormons with polygamy makes LDS history especially useful for teaching women's history.


It is a truism in American women's  history that Quakers (the Society of Friends) led in the fight for women's rights in the nineteenth century, owing in large part to the peculiarities of their theology. They believed God had placed in all people an "Inward Light" that testified to the truth, so women and men were equally qualified to preach. Quaker women thus developed both the skills and the convictions to work for women's equality. As an intellectual historian, I love such a clear-cut case where beliefs affected practice! It makes sense to students too. But because Mormon theology taught plural marriage, it causes undergraduates cognitive dissonance when they learn that Mormons also led in some feminist reforms. In 1870, Utah became the second territory to grant women the vote (and the third state in 1896), and Mormon women embraced the national women's rights movement long before it gained wider popularity in the early twentieth century.

This cognitive dissonance can be productive. It makes students work harder to understand and develop empathy for people who are different from them, which is one of my chief goals for all my history courses. Another benefit is that students tend to think that their constellations of beliefs make inherent sense together, and the surprise of Mormon feminism helps them think more precisely about what their own ideas do and don't imply. Finally, their cognitive dissonance allows us to discuss how there are both objective and subjective components to what constitutes oppression--which sheds light on students' own experiences in contemporary religious traditions that place restrictions on women's roles.

Another thing that I have managed to work into (almost) all of my classes is the work of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. I love everything that Ulrich has ever written, so sight unseen I put her new book, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 (New York: Knopf, 2017), on the syllabus for my graduate course this semester on Women, Gender, and Sex in American Religious History. It did not disappoint. With her characteristic human sympathy, Ulrich argues--or, more accurately, demonstrates in narrative form--that the communal impulse, both theological and practical, within the early LDS church served to build the habit of collective self-assertion among Mormon women. The book's title is a quotation referring not to a polygamous household, but rather to a gathering of the Women's Relief Society in the Fourteenth Ward Meeting House in Salt Lake City. This voluntary association of Mormon women, many in plural marriages, literally embodies the communal sensibilities that led them to join together in defense of their understanding of women's interests.

My graduate students really liked the book, by which they meant that they actually enjoyed reading it. Considering the book's length and their reading loads, this is no faint praise. They liked it because one of Ulrich's great skills as a historian is using sources creatively to tease out the fullness of what life was like for women in the past whose lives are less documented than those of many men. Thus, readers get a sense of walking with multiple individual frontier Mormon women through the specific ups and downs of their lives and end up forming a very real sense of human connection with them. In this case, Ulrich relied on the diaries, letters, poems, albums, society minutes--and, yes, quilts--of over twenty women and men in plural marriages to excavate their own thoughts about and experiences with the practice, and thus to make sense of how women could and did simultaneously advocate for plural marriage and women's rights.

Students noted that the drawback to Ulrich's inclination to let Mormon women and men speak for themselves is that she sometimes downplays the problems and contradictions that plague every individual and belief system. Some wished for greater treatment of Mormon racism and the problems of neglect and abuse that could arise in Mormon households. Still, Ulrich admirably highlights the emotional tensions experienced by both women and men in plural marriages, and she follows those who spoke out against it as well as those who defended it. The struggle all historians share between assessing our subjects and listening to them on their own terms made for productive class conversation.

So consider this post a plug for reading A House Full of Females and for mining the riches of Mormon history--both for its own significance and for the ways it can challenge students from other traditions toward greater empathy and toward greater reflection on their own heritage and beliefs. For my part, I will now be adding to my undergraduate lectures some of the women's stories that Ulrich has so painstakingly unearthed and so beautifully retold.

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