Today I will keep this short as it is finals time and I have papers to grade. However, I wanted to briefly follow up on my post last week regarding the Anglican Communion during the interwar period, the time between the First and Second World War.
One of the issues impacting the Anglican Communion, German Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church was the rise of the post-Darwinian pseudo-scientific racism or eugenics. The issue was that Christianity has principles that exist whether or not a particular group Christians pays more than lip service to them. The old worn out saying “hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue” is true in so far as the vice recognizes that there is a virtue that it is violating. Ironically hypocrisy is sustainable so long as 1) the forms of adherence to the principle are partially observed, 2) those who practice the hypocrisy are in a hegemonic position of authority in the concerned institution, and 3) any victims of the hypocrisy are not in a position to get a hearing regarding their grievances.
Historic Christianity makes particular claims which can be believed or disbelieved. However, the fact that the claims exist is the critical point. You can judge the religion, or any belief system against its claims. This works for academia where we test and challenge definitions, categories and parameters all the time to see what survives a thorough shaking. But it also works for everyone else who can call out hypocrisy when they see it. Put another way, just because you are comfortable with your hypocrisy does not mean that anyone outside your club has to put up with it. They do not. And, if your institution depends on outsiders’ sufferance or approval to maintain something of importance, like its place in society, then you are vulnerable if your hypocrisy becomes annoying.
But there is another concern, if the desire to maintain the thing that makes you a hypocrite becomes stronger than the desire to outwardly conform, then the organization my morph into something very different from what it was, something potentially hostile to its original ethos and reason for existing.
And yet another concern is that those who prefer the forbidden thing will leave the institution altogether and become fierce and vindictive opponents. The Western Churches faced both scenarios regarding fascism, Nazism, and eugenics, and to a lesser extent Marxism only because Stalinism was less subtle in its attack on Christianity. The time of hypocrisy was running out and the time repudiation was approaching.
This was a major problem for the Anglicans and the groups descended from them like the Methodists, because the Anglican Communion through the British Empire and the American elite was the religious face of classical liberalism. Essentially Nazism was an especially dangerous civilizational opponent that could not coexist with the claims of Christianity even if many of the powerful Western Christians — in the British Empire or the USA — were hypocrites. In the January 1939 State of the Union Address, before the war broke out in Europe in September with Germany’s invasion of Poland, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began his address to Congress by denouncing the “new philosophies” in Europe as a threat to American religion:
“Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate and the Congress:
In Reporting on the state of the nation, I have felt it necessary on previous occasions to advise the Congress of disturbance abroad and of the need of putting our own house in order in the face of storm signals from across the seas. As this Seventy-sixth Congress opens there is need for further warning.
A war which threatened to envelop the world in flames has been averted; but it has become increasingly clear that world peace is not assured.
All about us rage undeclared wars—military and economic. All about us grow more deadly armaments—military and economic. All about us are threats of new aggression military and economic.
Storms from abroad directly challenge three institutions indispensable to Americans, now as always. The first is religion. It is the source of the other two—democracy and international good faith.
Religion, by teaching man his relationship to God, gives the individual a sense of his own dignity and teaches him to respect himself by respecting his neighbors.
Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows.
International good faith, a sister of democracy, springs from the will of civilized nations of men to respect the rights and liberties of other nations of men.
In a modern civilization, all three—religion, democracy and international good faith- complement and support each other.
Where freedom of religion has been attacked, the attack has come from sources opposed to democracy. Where democracy has been overthrown, the spirit of free worship has disappeared. And where religion and democracy have vanished, good faith and reason in international affairs have given way to strident ambition and brute force.
An ordering of society which relegates religion, democracy and good faith among nations to the background can find no place within it for the ideals of the Prince of Peace. The United States rejects such an ordering, and retains its ancient faith.
There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded. The defense of religion, of democracy and of good faith among nations is all the same fight. To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.
We know what might happen to us of the United States if the new philosophies of force were to encompass the other continents and invade our own. We, no more than other nations, can afford to be surrounded by the enemies of our faith and our humanity…”
Yet, as FDR denounced the new foreign ideologies that violated the principles of respecting your neighbor he was the leader of the Democratic Party, that was then and had been since the end of Reconstruction, the party of Southern white supremacy in the Jim Crow states. Hypocritical? Sure. And still he was sincere, and the more he did this, denounced Nazism in civilizational terms, the more Western hypocrisy on racial equality and colonial exploitation was exposed and undermined from within. The World Wars would shakeup the hypocrisy of the Churches and force them to choose to either reform or repudiate their mission.