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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No Depression in Heaven: Greater at Length

Elesha Coffman

I have a confession to make. I have been promoting Alison Greene's No Depression in Heaven for months, whenever conversation turned to Christians' distrust of "big government," or why the Social Gospel faded, or whether churches could make up the difference for proposed federal budget cuts. (Gee, I dunno--does your church have an extra $714,000 lying around at the end of every year?) I was confident that Greene's book spoke powerfully to these discussions--but I hadn't actually read a page of it.

Now, I had read Greene's essay in the edited collection Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in Modern America, so I knew both the crux of her argument and her skill as a writer. And I had heard lots of good things about her and her work the way one hears things in our field--at conferences, on blogs, on Facebook, etc. I say this for the benefit of any grad students suffering from imposter syndrome, or professors still suffering from imposter syndrome, especially while teaching four new preps at Podunk University, 100 miles from the nearest research library or in-field colleague. We're all magpies, picking up bits of what we need for teaching and writing and just trying to understand the world. I think it's better to be a somewhat knowledgeable participant in an important conversation than to sit it out for a lack of deep expertise.

Fortunately, Janine Giordano Drake invited me to comment on the book for this blog, making it easy to convince myself that I really should sit down and read it. The argument I had previously encountered was there: That church leaders in the Delta region, utterly unable to provide for the material needs of their communities during the Depression, eagerly sought federal assistance--until they began to feel that the government was usurping their moral authority, at which point they turned against the hand feeding them and denied that they had ever needed help anyway. This is such a potent and timely argument that, if it were all the book offered, it would be enough ... but you could get it from an essay-length piece instead. The whole book, I now know, has even more to commend it, including:

Astonishingly good writing. I exhort my students to write with clarity and charity, and Greene excels at both. Clarity: "The Great Depression gave lie to the toxic notion that responsibility for poverty lies with the poor rather than with systems of oppression that make a mockery of the American dream." Charity: "When starving white farmers marched into an Arkansas town to demand food for their dying children, when priests turned away hungry widows and orphans because they were no needier than anyone else, and when visitors claimed that moonshiners did as much as churches to feed the hungry, southern clergy of both races spoke with almost one voice to say that they had done all they could" (both quotes, p. 2). Page after page, it is that good.

Deft use of sources. The letters from clergy to FDR that anchored Greene's essay in Faithful Republic are treasures, but so are the WPA documents and images, the blues lyrics, and the newspaper accounts of Fighting Joe Jeffers, vaudevillian turned revivalist. And while intimate knowledge of the rhythms of agricultural life isn't exactly a source, Greene has that, too. Certain months were better for revivals or worse for changes in banking policy. This book takes it all into account.

Exploration of the Delta region. Memphis and the farmlands tied to it culturally and economically were a blank, green spot on my mental map of the U.S. prior to reading this book. The political dynamics in a city where the long-ruling boss paid poll taxes for white and black voters; the version of plantation society that grew here mostly after the Civil War; and the religious mix (I had no idea that COGIC is one of the largest denominations in America) are all really interesting.

New questions. Clergy pushback against the emerging welfare state was clearly a product of this historical moment, but Greene cites early on a historical reference to "the un-American system of the dole." So which is the more surprising development, the antipathy toward federal aid, or the aid itself? Also, when it came to perspective on welfare, most (poor) Southern parishioners were in favor, while many of their (comparatively well-off) pastors complained. On this issue in the 1930s, laypeople were more "progressive" than clergy, with clergy conceptions of their own moral authority very much bound up with maintenance of the Jim Crow order. But in her epilogue, Greene asserts that Southern clergy were (tepidly, to be sure) more welcoming of Brown v. Board and desegregation than were laypeople. Is this the switch that it appears to be, and, if so, what explains it?

In sum, this is a great book, and I should have read it earlier. I can at least hope that some of the people I commended it to got there way ahead of me.

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Theology and Historical Amnesia: Remembering the Great Depression

Janine Giordano Drake

[Today's post is the first of several reflections on Allison Collis Greene's No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression of Religion in the Delta. Look for another post tomorrow and yet another on Sept 9. ]

Why did Southern whites applaud Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency and the coming of the New Deal? Why did many of these same Southern whites later distance themselves from the same policies? To what extent have southern whites' attitudes toward charity, the government "dole," and the system of capitalism changed over the twentieth century?

Alison Collis Greene's heartwrenching and pathbreaking book answers all of these questions as it teaches us to parse the differences between history and memory. While many white Southerners remember government social programs as antithetical to the Christian ethics of hard work and personal responsibility, they forget that many of their own religious institutions embraced the New Deal with open arms in the depths of the Great Depression. Why did so churches do so, and why have so many of their members forgotten this embrace?

Greene's book examines the relationship between charitable institutions and the poor in the Misssippi Delta from the early twentieth century through the start of World War II. It shows that elite Southern women effected a Southern Social Gospel in the early twentieth century, particularly with regards to medical care, medical education, and aide to women and orphans. As spouses and children of prominent business owners, they always stood somewhat at odds with church teachings on the dangers of dependence upon charity and the virtues of personal responsibility. However, their work created the (albeit minimalist) infrastructure of charity that addressed the widespread onset of poverty starting in the 1920s.

This charity, as Greene teaches us with stunning detail, was never enough to actually address the depths of poverty in Memphis and the surrouding Misssippi Delta. By the time FDR took office, churches and charities throughout the South were going (or had already gone) bankrupt. Many had to spend more time attending to their creditors than to their members, not to mention to the poor outside of their churches. While Catholic and Jewish charities were able to raise a bit more money to support their communities than Protestant charities, the poor in the Missssippi Delta overall only received a small fraction of the public aide that poor people received on the average. Many Protestants realized that they relied upon voluntary donations. Without the intervention of the federal government, the future of their charities--and even their churches themselves--were not at all secure.

Greene teaches us that FDR and his programs for aide to the poor were widely welcomed by white and black Southerners as an answer to prayer. Poor, black and white Southerners shaped New Deal policy through their ready embrace of government "handouts" and programs like Social Security. However, the New Deal in the South, like in every region of the country, was largely administered by local white elites. Many administered programs to benefit white elite businesses and provide enough of a social safety net to recreate a white middling class. In short, Southern Democrats used the New Deal--and, indeed, widespread religious support for the New Deal--to preserve white supremacy. As this white middling class revived, conservative elites began rewriting the history of the Great Depression. They revived early twentieth century narratives about the problems of charity and the dangers of a powerful state. They quickly enforced a collective amnesia about the ways that their own churches had nearly faced financial and social ruin in the face of the Depression.

Why does it matter that Southern churches were "saved" by the New Deal? Why does it matter that Southern attitudes toward public aide have shifted more than most care to admit throughout the twentieth century? Historians of the New Deal, of Southern History, of American Christianity, of the Welfare State, and of African American History might each answer this question slightly differently.

I'll highlight here just one reason this study matters: Greene's work teaches us that we cannot understand shifts in religious convictions outside of the context of social history. Beliefs are powerful explanations for historical realities, but they are also quick to shift with changing circumstances. Beliefs are also as easy to forget as they are to remember. Despite how tempting it may seem to study the history of ideas--of theology--in a vacuum, Greene's work reminds me that this approach blinds us to the many forces of historical causality. We simply cannot explain shifts in religious belief without understanding the social, political and economic circumstances that supported them.

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