The NCC enjoyed better relations with the Clinton administration. It was able to muster some opposition to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but it has never been able to organize a ground game approaching that of the religious right.

A review of Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left, by Jill K. Gill: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011

In her remarkable account of the declining influence of mainline Protestantism and, especially, the National Council of Churches during the 1960s and 1970s, historian Jill Gill refuses to advance a singular cause, but no argument is more persuasive than a couple of lines she drops quietly on page 322: “One might assume that church leaders would have adopted a moral approach from the beginning,” she writes. “But they did not.” That strategic failure may have been responsible more than anything else for the rupture between the leaders of mainline Protestantism and the people in the pews.

The larger narrative of Gill’s Embattled Ecumenism, rendered in excruciating detail, begins with the Federal Council of Churches and intensifies after World War II with the formation of the National Council of Churches during a snowstorm in Cleveland in 1950. After an initial false step—she traces the liberal-evangelical divide in American Protestantism to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s rather than to divergent responses to social changes late in the 19th century—Gill quickly regains her footing.

She writes about John Foster Dulles, the future secretary of state, who chaired the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace for the Federal Council of Churches in 1940, but whose capitulation to the containment ideology of the cold war put him increasingly at odds with Protestant ecumenists—a foreshadowing of larger divisions to come.

Mainline Protestant sympathy for the civil rights movement emerged fairly quickly, Gill writes, but the assumption on the part of ecumenists that they could segue easily into opposition to the Vietnam War proved chimerical. Charges that the NCC was soft on communism dated to the aftermath of the Chinese Revolution of 1949, and critics found it easy to apply that rhetoric to antiwar protesters.

The NCC enjoyed access to the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, but Lyndon Johnson, whom the ecumenists overwhelmingly supported over Barry Goldwater in 1964, began to tire of the antiwar rhetoric emanating from the Interchurch Center. The NCC’s first open denunciation of the war came in 1965, and although Gill characterizes it as tepid, “it was one of the first such statements by a large, national, mainstream American institution against the war.”

Gill’s recounting of the Vietnam War, laced with ecclesiastical intrigue, is superb. She sorts out the various internal agencies as well as the fraught relationship between the NCC and Church World Service. Robert Bilheimer and Gerhard Elston emerged as the most diligent NCC operatives against the war, while the organization Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam became the most prominent and effective religious antiwar group. It was under the aegis of CALCAV that Martin Luther King Jr. came out against the war at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, thereby fracturing his working relationship with Johnson. The NCC pursued direct contacts with North Vietnam, tried to ease the plight of conscientious objectors and continued its political agitation in opposition to the war.

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