“Dr Harry F Ward, for many years, has been the chief architect for Communist infiltration and subversion in the religious field.” (Former communist Manning Johnson, 1953, Testimony before House Un-American Activities Committee).
In a year that marks both the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, and 100 years of Communism, we will examine a nexus between these two mighty movements. In the early 1900s, a large number of clergy had Marxist leanings and were easy targets for manipulation by communists, despite the atheism of the latter. Dr. Paul Kengor, author of Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is quoted as saying:
When I started researching this book, I asked Herb Romerstein, the veteran investigator of the communist movement, and himself a former communist, which group of Americans were most manipulated. He unhesitatingly answered “liberal Protestant pastors.” He called them “the biggest suckers of them all.”
Harry F Ward
One of the more prominent of these early communist sympathizers was the Methodist Harry F. Ward. He trained at Northwestern University (BA 1897) and Harvard (MS Philosophy 1898). Returning to the Midwest he became a pastor of a Methodist church in the slums of Chicago, where contact with stockyard workers increasingly radicalized him. He joined a fledgling labor union in solidarity with his parishioners. He began preaching sermons that emphasized political and economic themes. In 1905 he took a sabbatical during which time he read the works of Karl Marx. The following year he founded the Methodist Federation for Social Service, joining with like-minded Methodist pastors to promote social change. He taught at Boston University in 1916, and later became a professor of ethics at New York’s Union Theological Seminary (from 1918 to 1941), where he was instrumental in distributing communist literature, according to Comintern archives. He influenced a generation of pastors.
Of Ward’s Union years, an interesting glimpse is provided in a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous theologian and martyr under the Nazi regime, who had trained at Union. Ward was depicted as “decidedly more ideological than any of his Union colleagues”:
Ward and Niebuhr would take dramatically different turns in the decade ahead: Niebuhr abandoning pacifism for Christian realism, and eventually becoming a Cold War anticommunist Democrat; Ward, meanwhile, hunkering down, as he saw things, in the trenches with Jesus and Marx, a defender of the “Soviet spirit” against all its enemies. . . . In the classroom, Bonhoeffer listened closely as Ward enunciated his singular version of Pascal’s wager: Christians had the world to gain from living “as if” there existed an ethical God weighing every human action in the balance. This meant, at least for Ward, a socialist revolution. (Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Vintage, 2015, p 124)
From 1920 to 1940 he was the national chairman of the ACLU, the role for which he is best remembered today. He is also one of the fathers of the ecumenical movement. Along with prominent socialist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, Ward was instrumental in founding the Federal Council of Churches in 1908, which was a precursor to the current National Council of Churches.
Kengor, who based his work on declassified communist archives, writes of Ward in the Catholic World Report:
One of the more eye-opening early documents now declassified from the Comintern Archives on Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a four-page December 1920 letter that lists liberal college professors targeted by the Soviet Comintern and American Communist Party. On the list is not only Ward, listed with Union Theological Seminary, but other professors from seminaries or religious colleges, from Mount Holyoke to Trinity College. The liberals are listed by Comintern officials as sources to get their materials on the shelves at seminary and college libraries.
Ward made several pilgrimages to the USSR, where he was given the full Potemkin-village treatment. The progressive pastor was smitten, returning to write more than one book on the marvels of the Motherland. In 1935, he published The Soviet Spirit, a valentine to Lenin and Stalin, which the “Daily Worker” and “New Masses” promoted loudly. The “Daily Worker” did a full-page profile of Ward’s book, along with a glowing feature on the good reverend. The hardcore atheists were enamored of the Methodist minister. As for New Masses, it offered a free give-away of The Soviet Spirit as a complimentary gift for buying a one-year subscription.
In the 1950’s Ward’s name came up in connection with the infamous McCarthy hearings. Former American Communist leader turned defector, Manning Johnson, gave the testimony noted above. He was asked if Ward was a communist. Johnson answered in the affirmative.
“I would say that he is the Red dean of the Communist Party in the religious field.”
Johnson named an organization headed by Ward as a Communist front, namely the “American League Against War and Fascism”. This organization was created by the Communist Party central committee and per Johnson was involved in activities including sabotage, fomenting resentment against law enforcement, conducting espionage for the Soviet Union, and infiltrating and subverting churches, seminaries, and youth organizations. All sensitive information conveyed to this and other front organizations were reported to the Communists in Russia. The end goal of using front organizations was to attempt to radicalize millions of people in support of Communist ends.
Harry F. Ward was selected to head the American League Against War and Fascism. The party conclusion was that because he was a minister, he would be able to draw in churches, and secondly, that he would be able to draw in labor because of his imposing record as a clergyman of some standing and note.
In other words, they considered him the ideal head for the organization. It was proven a good decision because the American League Against War and Fascism was able, through exploiting the antiwar and anti-Fascist sentiments among the clergymen and among church people generally to involve millions of people in supporting the program of the American League Against War and Fascism.
… The majority of the ministers in the American League Against War and Fascism were involved by Harry F. Ward, and the organization which he was connected with, known as the Methodist Federation for Social Action; also the People’s Institute of Applied Religion, and other Communist-front organizations operating in the religious world. The Methodist Federation for Social Service later became the Methodist Federation for Social Action.
The Methodist Federation for Social Change
The secretary of the Methodist Federation, Ms. Winnifred Chappell, was also named as a Communist, and wrote an article in June 1934, that called for workers to refuse to make goods for their governments, and to join in “a joyful international Soviet to supply their own and each other’s needs.” Another prominent member of the Methodist Federation was Jack McMichael, former head of a major Communist front organization known as The American Youth Congress. He was himself later called before the HUAC committee where he vehemently denied being a Communist.
Johnson’s testimony about the Methodist Federation continued:
The Methodist Federation for Social Service or the Methodist Federation for Social Action, headed by Rev. Harry F. Ward, whom I have already identified as a party member, was invaluable to the Communist Party in its united-front organizations and campaigns. It was invaluable because through it the party was able to get contact with thousands of ministers all over the country.
… They had the contact, a wealth of
contact, established and built up over the years with ministers in every section of the country who were easily and quickly involved in various united-front activities, consequently giving these Communist-front movements an aura of respectability the like of which they could not get except for the tremendous amount of faith people have in religion and the church.
Mr. Manning’s full testimony is available at the Internet Archive.
The influence of The Methodist Federation for Social Change is well attested: MFSA attained the height of its growth just following World War II under the leadership of Jack McMichael. By 1950, the MFSA was highly influential in the Methodist Church. While the MFSA had only 5,800 members compared to 9 million in the entire Methodist Church, this membership included half of the church’s 16 bishops, as well as having representatives in all the major seminaries at the time.(Wikipedia). The Methodist Church would be scandalized enough by the MFSA to formally cut ties, though it has persisted as an independent organization and remains a force within Methodism, proclaiming today its mission: “to mobilize, lead and sustain a progressive United Methodist movement, energizing people to be agents of God’s justice, peace, and reconciliation” (MFSA website, accessed 2/28/2018).
Testifying about the MFSA in 1953, Communist Party founder Benjamin Gitlow revealed that its objective “was to transform the Methodist Church and Christianity into an instrument for the achievement of Socialism.” (HUAC transcript is available at Archive.org).
The National and World Council of Churches
As noted earlier, Harry Ward was instrumental in founding the Federal Council of Churches, a precursor to the National Council of Churches, and by extension the World Council of Churches. For decades, the latter organizations were led by Ward’s pupil and fellow member of the MFSS, Bishop Bromley Oxnam (1891-1963).
Oxnam studied under Ward at Boston University (also assisting him in grading papers, and babysitting his children). Oxnam became a socialist–though apparently never a Communist–calling the industrialized capitalistic world “unchristian, unethical, and anti-social”. (As an aside, he apparently also was not one for theological disputes, hilariously referring to them as “one monkey with a mirror flashing it in the eyes of another”). (See Brookhiser, “The Earnest Methodist” in First Things, 1992). Oxnam became president of DePauw University in 1928. Oxnard rose rapidly through Methodist ranks, eventually becoming Bishop of Washington, DC.
The National Council of Churches became the subject of scrutiny in the 1950s. The Air Force Reserve had raised concern, and Secretary of the Air Force Dudley C. Sharp defended his allegations:
…in view of the Secretary’s repudiation of the information conveyed respecting the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, the chairman issued a statement to the effect that the leadership of the [N.C.C.] had hundreds or at least over a hundred affiliations with Communist fronts and causes. Since then we have made careful, but yet incomplete checks, and it is a complete understatement. Thus far of the leadership of the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, we have found over 100 persons leadership capacity with either Communist-front records or records of service to Communists causes. The aggregate affiliations of the leadership, instead of being in the hundreds as the [H.C.U.A.] chairman first indicated, is now, according to our latest count, into the thousands, and we have yet to complete our check.
As an aside, I can remember growing up in small town America and hearing people grumble about the NCC’s left wing agenda. I know of people who left their churches because they “didn’t want to send any tithes to the National Council of Churches.”
In 1990, after the Romanian Communist regime fell, the World Council of Churches issued a tepid apology for its silence on the human rights abuses suffered by Christians under Communist regimes. Rev. Emilio Castro, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, said: “I think we didn’t speak strongly enough, that is clear. That is the price we thought we needed to pay in order to help the human rights situation inside Romania.” (L.A. Times).
Conclusion
As early as the turn of the 20th century, Harry Ward and other zealots for the “Social Gospel” articulated by theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch were turning their attentions toward the abolishment of capitalism and eventual establishment of a world socialist government. They were easy marks for Communists who used them to infiltrate and subvert Protestant Christianity. Their efforts had enormous impact upon the “mainline denominations” such as the Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. These groups have continued to drift leftward ever since, and have paid a price, losing as much as 50% of their membership (see this piece from The Gospel Coalition).
In fairness, I must state that not all socialists were Communists, and not all persons identified as Communists, even under oath, necessarily were such. Ward wrote once, “As for myself, I belong to no social or economic faction. In answer to that question I usually say, I am neither Communist, nor Socialist; I am something worse than that–I am a Christian.”
Some leftists, while sympathetic to socialism and progressive political positions, nonetheless opposed Communists within their organizations. Many people who were Communists in the 1920s later changed their minds.
Probably most of the “red churchmen” listed above were merely “fellow travelers” with communism. They were sympathizers, rather than card carrying members of the party of Lenin. Many ministers were largely unaware of the extent to which sinister and calculating Communist agents were using and manipulating them behind the scenes.