VIETNAM

Declining Concern?

As 1970 began, public concern about the long American involvement in the Vietnam War seemed to decline as the Nixon administration withdrew ground troops, announced future troop reductions, and escalated the air war, with a resulting decline in American casualties. This had not been true the previous autumn when religious leaders, mostly Roman Catholic and Mainline Protestant, were prominent in the great, peaceful demonstrations in October and November 1969 called the Vietnam Moratorium. Crowds, large and small, clerical and lay, met in cities and communities around the country in the most extensive protest in the nation's history to express their disappointment with the new administration's failure to end the war more quickly. At this time Middle America seemed to be speaking about what liberals considered a moral and political issue.

Nixon's Response

In response to the moratorium President Nixon appealed to another part of the middle class, what he called the "silent majority," the great mass of Americans who did their work, worshipped their God, and supported their nation. He effectively contrasted these people with the war's opponents by suggesting that those who did not support his efforts to end the war aligned themselves with the radical young whose violent and vocal protests offended people more than did the war itself.

Support and Opposition

The Reverend Carl McIntire, who had based his life on opposing the Mainline Protestant denominations in the National and World Councils of Churches, attempted to tie himself to Nixon's appeal to Middle America when he led an estimated ten thousand to fifteen thousand prowar demonstrators in a march in Washington just before Easter 1970. Mclntire insisted there were at least fifty thousand people at the demonstration. The marchers carried flags both American and Confederate, Bibles, and signs supporting the war and demanding prayer in public schools. McIntire's histrionics drew more press coverage that the seventy-day protest led by Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam that also ended that Easter.

Cambodia and Kent State

In May 1970 the American military incursion into Cambodia and the Ohio National Guard's killing of four students at Kent State University brought a dramatic series of protests as many colleges and universities, religious as well as secular, were closed by outraged students. Once again Washington became a center of protest, but this time not from radical youth, but middle-aged, middle-class people, including clergy from around the nation, who lobbied and petitioned their representatives to reduce the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Response of the Churches

Revulsion against the war was strong in the Mainline Protestant denominations. The Executive Council of the Episcopal church called for the total withdrawal from Vietnam and an end of the war. Later that year, however, the House of Deputies at the denomination's convention refused to endorse that extreme position. The lay delegates to the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian church removed a strong condemnation of the Cambodian incursion from a resolution regarding the war but did call for an American withdrawal. The clergy seemed far ahead of their parishioners on the war issue.

WAR IN VIETNAM

In February 1972 the Ecumenical Witness of Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Jews in Kansas City, Kansas, called for an immediate end to the war, arguing that the Nixon administration's policy of turning the war over to the South Vietnamese was immoral. They declared that the policy of Vietnamization is "fundamentally immoral because it forces Asian people to be our [American] proxy army, dying in our places for our supposed interests. … The present Administration's Vietnamization policy looks toward not a negotiated political settlement but an eventual military victory. We will continue to provide the weaponry and air power, the massive technological support, the advisers and the money. Asians will provide the casualties."

Source:

"Ecumenical Witness: Withdraw Now!," Christian Century, 89 (22 February 1972): 81.

Pastoral Issued

As the American involvement in the war tapered off, with a resulting decline in American casualties, protests against the war also declined. But concern remained in religious circles. In May 1972 Cardinal Terranee Cooke, archbishop of New York and military vicar of the armed forces, issued a pastoral calling for a "speedy end" to the war by greater use of the United Nations. While there was an upsurge of revulsion in liberal religious circles about the massive bombing of North Vietnam in December 1972, and while some religious leaders bitterly condemned Nixon's policy of mass destruction, the peace accords of January 1973 brought an end to the American participation in the conflict and offered an opportunity for ending some of the divisions at home.

War over Meaning

That hope was an illusion. The fight among Americans about the war and its meaning continued long after the prisoners of war and the troops returned home, however. Debate over the implications of the long struggle paralleled debates over the question of amnesty for those who opposed or dodged the draft or deserted from the military. As those debates went on they affected the religious and political landscapes. Political conservatives found themselves aligned with religious conservatives in criticizing the liberal leaders and bureaucrats of the Mainline denominations. The decade's divisions over foreign and domestic politics and moral and cultural issues split Protestants, Catholics, and Jews into liberal and conservative camps and fueled the political divisions of the last part of the century

Source:

Mitchell K. Hall, Because of Their Faith: CALCAV and Religious Opposition to the Vietnam War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).