The only clashing noise in what was otherwise a symphony of effortless gliding
on the part of the varied forces working in behalf of Stalinist Russia in
the fall of 1941 across the United States grew out of the August 1941 Atlantic
Charter and the consequences of Roosevelt adding the "point" dealing
with freedom of religion. One of the first to capitalize on this was Soviet
radio, commending this strategy, and joining to it the urging of the overthrow
of the Germans at the earliest opportunity because Hitler was "menacing
the very existence of Christianity." This even cooled off ardently
pro-Russian Time, which did not think it appropriate for the Marxist regime
to be hailing a force which they systematically attacked on the domestic
Russian scene.(106) Even if one wished to insist that Bolshevism
was a form of religion itself,(107) the Russian people as a whole
hardly had abandoned their old ways, no matter what the Soviet government's
League of the Militant Godless maintained. Almost twenty years after the
Leninist revolution had taken over, about one half of the total population
was still of the Russian Orthodox faith.(108) The dramatic decline
was in the number of churches, estimated in August 1941 to be down to 8,338
from 70,000 in 1917.
Not much had been said at the time the so-called "Four Freedoms"
had been launched from the deck of the British battle- ship Prince of Wales
off Argentia, Newfoundland, which included the religious freedom concept.
Even the noted Protestant layman John Foster Dulles, not a part of the Roosevelt
regime, and mainly involved in labors in behalf of a group of prominent
churchmen and laymen called the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just
and Durable Peace, had nothing to say about it in particular when he drafted
his famous negative dissection of the celebrated Eight Points of Churchill
and Roosevelt. Dulles, a party to the American presence at Versailles in
1919, condemned the Churchill- Roosevelt vision of the postwar world as
following "too closely the pattern of Versailles" and saw their
August 1941 product as mainly a prop for a self-satisfied pro-status quo
crowd, and a prelude to a new war when the one going on was over, not an
outline for "the development of some international mechanism for effecting
peaceful change," which recalled the book he had published two years
before, War, Peace and Change (Harper).(109) The mobilization
of religion in the impending worldwide martial cataclysm was inevitable,
but the maneuvering had been going on for years prior to 1941. Americans,
with their separation-of- church-and-state tradition, knew nothing of the
realities of the religious scene in Europe, and the propagandistic forces
seeking to enroll their sentiments and sensibilities preferred to keep them
that way. Few knew of the state relationships of the Russian Orthodox Catholic
clergy, nor that the German congregations, roughly half Roman Catholic and
half Lutheran, were the recipients of sizable subventions from the Hitler
government, as they had been recipients from previous German regimes. For
that matter, probably no more than a platoon of Americans realized that
the clergy of the official state-supported church in northern Europe were
actually public functionaries drawing the equivalent of civil service salaries,
in American parlance. The emphasis in the propaganda war in the U.S. was
entirely away from these facts and entirely upon emotional and denominational
loyalties, with such overtones of general substance as were unavoidable,
given the general knowledge of world affairs prevailing. One aspect of the
latter involved the universal conviction in the U.S. that all organized
religion was in a bad way in Soviet Russia, a regime with a formal policy
of hostility to this and a corresponding policy of encouraging organized
disbelief, in harmony with Marxist materialism, the Soviet state's religion.
In the word war waged against Hitler and Mussolini, American liberals especially
esteemed the descriptive epithet "clerico- fascist," finding it
useful also to apply to Franco Spain and to the breakaway Slovakian state
headed by Monsignor Josef Tiso. This stands in strange contradiction to
the simultaneous charge by the same propaganda voices that these hated dictators
were trying to abolish religion. Though it was known that the Russian Orthodox
Church leaders were fully behind Stalin, it struck them as painfully distasteful
to have to apply the same criteria to their warmly esteemed Stalin, so one
heard nothing about "clerico-fascist Russia."
The relative detachment or apathy of most clergy in Europe was not a subject
for much commentary after Russia joined the European war. The self-righteous
militarism of the clergy everywhere in World War I was not repeated, most
of such figures being found associating mainly with leftists in Europe and
America, in the latter their numbers being also swelled by German and British
expatriates. The likes of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich(110) and William
Temple, Archbishop of York and Canterbury, typified the former, and the
one-time Marxist enthusiast Reinhold Niebuhr standing out among church notables
flourishing their verbal armament in the U.S.,(111) though the American
warrior clergy in general were far more identified with secular ideological
politics than with the pulpit.(112) It became obvious to the clerical
friends of Stalin, however, that the most profitable tactics consisted of
negative material, which was the very largest part of "anti-fascism"
at all times, even at the peak period of ardent admiration of Communist
Russia, in 1943. It was easier to crow and gloat over failure among the
Soviet's enemies than it was to attempt to sell the view that there were
positive and affirmative things happening in the Workers' Fatherland, and
which under the renewed patriotic pressure of the Stalinist machine, desperate
for public support, was even becoming spoken of occasionally once more as
"Mother Russia." Such an occasion was the exultation, even in
Time, when it was claimed that the new premier of Norway under the German
occupation, Vidkun Quisling, was able to get only 27 of Norway's 700 Lutheran
pastors to support Germany's "crusade against Russia.''(113) A
few days later, Roosevelt himself tossed a grenade into the middle of this
essentially successful anti-Hitler and pro- Soviet campaign on the religious
front by his casual remark during a press conference in the second week
of October 1941 alleging the existence of religious freedom in Stalinist
Russia.
Few remarks by Roosevelt before or after, during the war era, drew as much
comment, including analyses, guesses and glosses as to its real intent,
attacks, excuses and a rare defense. Walter Lippmann, one of FDR's strongest
journalistic supporters, delivered a harsh scolding, and Lippmann's paper,
the New York Herald Tribune, called it "whitewashing the Kremlin."
Time's lead story was devoted to deep analysis of the act, ascribing political
objectives to it all. Roosevelt was thought to have advanced this trial
balloon, seeking to get the Russians to "guarantee religious liberty"
in case they were not doing it in exchange for gaining a spot on the American
Lend-Lease bandwagon. This in turn he was thought to exchange for the support
of Pope Pius XII, thinking such a Russian concession might gain his endorsement
of the "democracies" and Russian cause as "just," soften
up Eire to allow British and U.S. bases on its territory, create discomfiture
among the Catholic populations of Italy and Germany, and get the support
of U.S. Catholics behind the administration's pro-Russian course. Thus,
his motivation in their view had really nothing to do with religion at all.(114)
U.S. News gave lengthy attention to the brawl stirred up by the President,
originally trying to make FDR look as good as possible and his critics as
evil as possible,(115) but in its summary a week later, it was conceded
that a presidential gaffe of substantial proportions had occurred. After
a broad sampling of the nation's press, David Lawrence's weekly organ conceded
that a consensus indicated Roosevelt "showed poor judgment in making
his in cautious remark about the Russian constitution and religious liberty."
The Protestant Christian Century scalded Roosevelt for his soothing pronouncement
on religious freedom in Russia, and recalled his words before a Christian
youth assembly in 1939 when he declared, how much he detested "the
banishment of religion" from Russia. The editors also divined the intent
of the statement as one of trying to woo Catholics in the U.S. to support
his aid to Russia program, but insisted that "Instead of winning the
Catholics, the President's careless words have made them more than ever
critical of his Russia policy." Furthermore, the editors considered
the presidential remark an adverse reflection upon his widely hailed "freedoms"
in the Atlantic Charter: "The President gave the nation an opportunity
to test his conception of one of these essential freedoms, and the test
gave forth a hollow, empty sound.''
There was no doubt that the national mood, despite the stunning attack upon
their sensibilities by a rising din of pro-war propaganda, was still quite
alien to receptivity to puffs about another non-existent beauty supposedly
existing in Soviet Russia. In this moment of disaster only the New Masses
came up with a supporting strike, a long three-column editorial in which
Roosevelt's prominent Catholic critics, such as Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen and
Rev. Edmund A. Walsh, vice president of Georgetown University, were subjected
to personal abuse. The Communist editors cited in warm approval the vociferous
criticism of veteran pro-Soviet divines such as Paul Tillich, Kenneth Leslie,
Pierre van Paassen and James Luther Adams, deploring "the attempt to
create a religious issue regarding the USSR." The editors concluded
by returning to the offense, emphasizing their charge that Hitler Germany
was attacking religion, and that any suppression of clergy or religious
persecution in the Soviet Union were just "police measures taken by
the government against reactionary clerics who secretly conspired against
the Soviet regime."
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