When Not to Speak Truth to Power: Thoughts on the Historiography of the Social Gospel
Today's guest post comes courtesy of Guy Aiken. Guy graduated in May with a PhD in Religious Studies (American Religions)
from the University of Virginia. His dissertation was on the American Friends
Service Committee in Germany and Appalachia between the world wars. He is an
Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University. You can read his
previous guest posts here and here.
Guy Aiken
“Speak
truth to power.” Everyone knows the phrase—John Fea recently used it at the end
of his article in the Washington Post on Trump and white
evangelicals—but almost nobody knows where it comes from: the title of a 1955 pamphlet
on international relations issued by the American Friends Service Committee
(AFSC), a Quaker organization headquartered in Philadelphia.[1] Those
who do know this immediate provenance of the phrase often assume that it
originates ultimately with an eighteenth-century Quaker, or even with the
founder of Quakerism himself, the British shoemaker’s apprentice George Fox.
Not so.
The
first person to use the phrase, it seems, was the African-American Quaker civil
rights activist Bayard Rustin, who wrote in 1942 that the role of a religious
group was to “speak truth to power.” Rustin himself attributed the phrase to a
speech he had heard by Patrick Malin, a professor of economics at Swarthmore
College who was to head the ACLU from 1950 to 1962—but it appears that Malin
never used the exact phrase.[2] A little
over a decade later, Rustin helped write the pamphlet Speak Truth to Power. Rustin and his co-authors
expunged Rustin’s name from the pamphlet because of his arrest on charges of
committing a homosexual act in 1953. Another co-author claimed the phrase
occurred to him spontaneously.[3]
Speaking
truth to power comes with a price. The apparent ease with which the phrase is
often uttered today can conceal the cost of putting it into practice, not to
mention what it cost the AFSC to be able to utter it in the first place.
Between its founding in 1917 and its co-acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in
1947 on behalf of Quakers worldwide, the AFSC learned well that the less
powerful often need the help or permission of the more powerful to serve the
needs of the powerless. To have spoken truth to power would have cost the AFSC
its claim to neutrality and thereby its access to people in dire need of food,
clothing, and comfort.
Between
its feeding of over five million German children after World War I and its
refugee work before and during World War II, the AFSC relieved those they saw
as victims of another kind of war—one being waged right on its doorstep.
Industrial warfare was starving the innocent women and children of striking
miners and mill workers in southern Appalachia just as the Allied naval
blockade during and after the Great War had starved innocent women and children
in Germany. AFSC leaders drew precisely this parallel to justify their
intervention in domestic labor battles between 1922 and 1936, and deployed many
of the same personnel and foodstuffs in Appalachia as they had in Germany. In
the 1920s AFSC workers in Appalachia discovered and agonized over the outright
conflict between social justice and humanitarianism. In the 1930s the Quakers
of the AFSC came to shed enough of their voluntarist scruples to actively seek
massive government intervention in the economy. Talk of “justice” began
complementing talk of “love” within the AFSC. Relief without “rehabilitation”
was no longer enough. Laws and institutions had to be changed along with
hearts.
The AFSC in the 1920s and 1930s thought
of itself as an agency for the Christianization of the international and social
order—that is, as a vehicle of the Social Gospel. It was, after all, a service
committee. As
Donald Meyer argues in The Protestant
Search for Political Realism, Protestant churches in general, or at least
their ministers and lay elite, saw the church as a neutral mediator between
warring social factions, especially capital and labor.[4] Before the 1930s, these social Christians feared taking
sides in social conflicts lest they become complicit in either side’s sins.
In the abstract,
this neutrality looks like craven captivity to capitalism, and many historians
have taken social Christians to task for catering to wealthy congregants and
failing to stand with workers and unions in their fight for economic justice
and political recognition. While there is much truth to this criticism, the
early history of the AFSC offers another, perhaps fresh, way of looking at
social Christians’ reluctance to take sides: it is one thing to denounce a
social order and seek to change it by converting hearts, minds, and laws, and
quite another thing to seek to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and give
shelter to the poor in those places where the social order has broken down and
where the springs of human decency, let alone justice, are choked with fear,
hatred, and violence. In such places what is necessary is not prophetic
indictment but concrete acts of mercy. And often the gatekeepers to these
nether regions of suffering are the very powers—whether capitalists at home or
dictators abroad—to whom to speak truth, or to have spoken truth, would mean
refusal of entrance.
From this angle
neutrality can look like courage and compassion rather than cowardice and
indifference. So maybe there are times and places when it is the role of a
religious group not to “speak truth
to power.”
[1] Stephen G.
Cary, A. J. Muste, Clarence E. Pickett, Bayard Rustin, et al, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an
Alternative to Violence. A Study of International Conflict Prepared for the
American Friends Service Committee ([no publisher information], 1955).
[2] Bayard Rustin
to New York Monthly Meeting, August 15, 1942, in Bayard Rustin, I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in
Letters, ed. Michael G. Long (New York: City Lights Publishers, 2012), 2.
[3] See https://www.afsc.org/sites/afsc.civicactions.net/files/documents/Speak_Truth_to_
Power.pdf for the “Historical Note
about Bayard Rustin” the AFSC appended to Speak
Truth to Power in 2012. For the story about the title occurring to one of
the other authors, see Paul Lacey, Quakers
and the Use of Power, Pendle Hill Pamphlets, Vol. 241 (Wallingford, PA:
Pendle Hill Publications, 1982).
[4] Donald Meyer, The Protestant Search for Political Realism,
1919-1941, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1988 [1960]), 104, 109-110.
Comments