How Silent Were the Churches?

Alan Davies, Marilyn F. Nefsky

Description

Winner of the 1997 Jewish Book Committee award for scholarship on a Canadian Jewish subject.

Ever since Abella and Troper (None Is too Many, 1982) exposed the anti-Semitism behind Canada’s refusal to allow Jewish escapees from the Third Reich to immigrate, the Canadian churches have been under a shadow. Were the churches silent or largely silent, as alleged, or did they speak?

In How Silent Were the Churches? a Jew and a Christian examine the Protestant record. Old letters, sermons and other church documents yield a profile of contemporary Protestant attitudes. Countless questions are raised — How much anti-Semitism lurked in Canadian Protestantism? How much pro-German feeling? How accurately did the churches of Canada read the signs of the times? Or did they bury their heads in the sand? Davies and Nefsky discover some surprising answers.

The theologies and the historical and ethnic configurations of Protestant Canada, encompassing religious communities from the United Church to the Quakers, are brought into relief against the background of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Europe and the resurgence of nativism in Canadian society.

The authors conclude their study with an evaluation of the limits to Protestant influence in Canada and the dilemmas faced by religious communities and persons of conscience when confronted by the realities of power.

Sujets

• Religión
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 30 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781554586660
• Langue: English

Extrait

How Silent Were the Churches? Canadian Protestantism and the Jewish Plight during the Nazi Era
How Silent Were the Churches? Canadian Protestantism and the Jewish Plight during the Nazi Era
Alan Davies and Marilyn F. Nefsky
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Davies, Alan T. How silent were the churches? : Canadian protestantism and the Jewish plight during the Nazi era
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88920-288-5 (bound)
I. Christianity and antisemitism. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945). 3. Protestant churches - Canada - History - 20 th century. 4. Antisemitism - Canada. I. Nefsky, Marilyn Flecher, 1948-II. Title
BM535.D38 1997 261.8 34892404 C97-932330-4
Copyright 1997 WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5
Cover design by Leslie Macredie, using an illustration by Sandra Woolfrey

Printed in Canada
All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means-graphic, electronic, or mechanical-without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6.
To Ernest Edwin Best 1919 - 1994 Teacher, ethicist, friend, in affectionate memory
I send a message of good cheer to the Jewish people in this and other lands. None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew of the unspeakable evils wrought on bodies and spirits of men by Hitler and his vile regime. The Jew bore the brunt of the Nazis first onslaught upon the citadels of freedom and human dignity. He has borne and continues to bear a burden that might have seemed beyond endurance. He has not allowed it to break his spirit. He has never lost the will to resist. Assuredly, in the day of victory, the Jew s suffering and his part in the present struggle will not be forgotten. Once again, at an appointed time, he will see vindicated those principles of righteousness which it was the glory of his fathers to proclaim to the world. Once again it will be shown that though the mills of God grind slowly, they grind exceedingly well.
Winston S. Churchill, as reported in the Montreal Daily Herald, January 7, 1942
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter I: The Setting
Antisemitism in Canada
Antisemitism in Europe
Chapter II: The Churches
The United Church
The Church of England in Canada
The Presbyterian Church
Baptists and Evangelicals
Lutherans, Mennonites and Quakers
Chapter III: The United Church
The fascist temptation
Persecution in Germany
The refugee crisis
Claris E. Silcox
The Holocaust
Chapter IV: The Church of England in Canada
Headlam and Inge
Liberty-loving Anglo Saxons
That ancient race
Every last refugee?
W.W. Judd
The Holocaust
Chapter V: The Presbyterian Church
Morris Zeidman
Persecuted Christians
The rabbit and the snake
W.L. Mackenzie King
The Holocaust
Chapter VI: Baptists and Evangelicals
T.T. Shields
Watson Kirkconnell
A new Gethsemane
Gardens of the damned
The Holocaust
Chapter VII: Lutherans, Mennonites and Quakers
Lutherans
Luther s land
And the Jews?
Mennonites
The German connection
The Jewish question
Jews or Germans?
The refugee crisis
Quakers
The Jewish plight
Raymond Booth
Starving children, dying Jews
Chapter VIII: Conclusion
Appendix A
Appendix B
Notes
Index
Introduction
I N THEIR EXPOSÉ OF THE NATIVISM and antisemitism that lurked behind the refusal of the King cabinet and its bureaucratic servants to open the gates of Canada to Hitler s Jewish victims, Irving Abella and Harold Troper accuse the Canadian churches of silence. Although some organizations and high-placed members of religious groups, such as the Anglican and United Churches, actively campaigned on behalf of Jewish refugees, most Canadians seemed indifferent to the suffering of German Jews and hostile to their admission to Canada. 1 This judgment from None Is Too Many is later amplified: As long as the churches remained silent-which they did-the government could dismiss the [Canadian National Committee on Refugees and Victims of Political Persecution] members as well meaning but impractical idealists to be patronized but not taken seriously. 2 Are Abella and Troper correct, or does their observation require modification, even serious modification? Were the churches really silent? Or did they address the afflictions of the Jews of Europe? The matter is important, not only for the sake of the historical record, but also as a test of the integrity of Christian Canada and its social conscience. In this study, a work of collaboration on the part of a Jew and a Christian, the Protestant churches of Canada are probed. Outside of Roman Catholic Quebec, Protestantism was the dominant force in shaping the moral ethos of the nation. For this reason, it stands on trial. Roman Catholicism in Canada also stands on trial, but someone else must examine its annals.
Any trial demands a careful investigation of the relevant evidence. Consequently, we have delved into as many extant sources as we could locate, including official documents, sermons (insofar as they survive)-the pulpit has always been an important focal point in Protestant Christianity-and, most of all, church journals, since the voice of the churches found collective expression through their official and semi-official public organs. At once, certain difficulties present themselves. For one thing, official documents, particularly diocesan letters and synodical, presbyterial and conference resolutions, although obviously central to our study, are not easy to weigh; should they be accepted at face value, or should they be dismissed, as William E. Nawyn has said, as gratuitous and emotional protests of a kind that churches love to engage in when their sensibilities are aroused? 3 Making the right noises is a good device for doing nothing because words are cheap and actions are expensive. Whether the spoken and written statements of the mainstream Protestant churches of Canada deserve such a negative appraisal is a matter of opinion; our view emerges in the text.
For another thing, church journals do not always speak unequivocally for the churches, even when they are denominational. Editors are editors and cherish their independence; rarely are they slavish agents of their employers, who may or may not wish to keep them on a short leash. In some churches, notably the United Church, a deliberate hands-off policy was adopted toward The New Outlook and its successor The United Church Observer, allowing its editorial staff a large measure of freedom. In other churches, notably the Jarvis Street Baptist Church, which had become a de facto denomination of its own, the matter was different. The Gospel Witness was the virtual mouthpiece of its central figure, T.T. Shields. Moreover, church journals vary greatly in character. The Mennonite press, especially Die Mennonitische Rundschau and Der Bote, allowed a wide range of discourse into its pages, including some quite extreme claims, but their authors spoke more for themselves than for anyone else, at least in a communal sense. Sometimes also, incidental factors played a role. In the case of The Canadian Churchman, the main publication of the Church of England in Canada, staff infighting during the Nazi era interfered with its reportage on various matters, raising doubts about the degree to which it should be regarded as a reliable reflection of its sponsoring communion. 4 Hence, facile equations between the churches and their newspapers must be avoided; nevertheless, the latter were unique forums for debate and Christian opinion, and their editorials, articles, columns, letters and book reviews cast indispensable light on the mood of Protestant society in Canada in the thirties and forties. Without such a rich vein to mine, this book could not have been written.
Simply assembling an assortment of contemporary utterances on the Jews and their plight, however, would be little more than an exercise in what R.G. Collingwood described as scissors and paste history, 5 or history that is not really history at all but only a juggling of texts and testimonies, without some attempt to place what the churches said (and did not say) in a larger frame. True history, according to Collingwood, concerns itself with the inside as well as the outside of events. In this book, we are very much concerned with the inside of events, which means the Canadian Protestant mentality in the thirties and forties. Protestant Christianity is highly varied, and its diversity cannot be ignored when assessing the responses of the Canadian denominations to a crisis of this nature. For the sake of convenience, the Church of England in Canada has been included on the Protestant roster, although many Anglicans do not regard themselves as Protestants, and would not accept such a classification. Quite apart from the peculiarities of Anglicanism, enough distinctiveness is found among the major Protestant churches to warrant their separate and special treatment. Only in the case of the smaller evangelical and fundamentalist groups has this rule been forsaken, since their theolog