My perspective on the states that were once the Northwest Territories has changed since moving to Michigan and discovering the university town of Ann Arbor to be an urban oasis. So I don’t want to sound snotty about Cleveland. But a recent story (thanks) about the National Council of Churches closing its New York City facilities reminded me of the schadenfreude I experienced upon the news that the United Churches of Christ was moving its national offices from New York City to Cleveland. Now comes word of a similar downsizing. The once celebrated outcome of postbellum Protestant ecumenism, the Federal Council of Churches, founded in 1908, and morphed in 1951 into the National Council of Churches, is shuttering its New York offices and relocating to the basement of a Methodist congregation in Washington, D.C. (Okay, it is not the basement of a church but a national office building for the Methodists. Still, the idea that one of the denominations belonging to the NCC could house all of the NCC’s staff would have in 1960 been incredible.)
In addition to the difficulties of teaching millennials that anti-Catholicism used to exist, I also have trouble convincing college students that mainline Protestants were once formidable. The NCC’s offices were even called the “Protestant Vatican on the Hudson.” But with the rise of the religious right (evangelicals and Roman Catholics together), no one has the slightest idea that mainline Protestants have a central agency.
Such demise for the NCC could not have been foreseen in 1960 when the Interchurch Center, once called the “Protestant Vatican on the Hudson,” first opened on the upper west side of Manhattan next to Grant’s Tomb and Columbia University. More specifically the “God Box,” which originally housed dozens of denominational offices, is next door to architecturally magnificent Riverside Church, also built by the Rockefellers, and Union Seminary, collectively representing the once formidable but now faded power of Mainline Protestantism.
At the Interchurch Center’s 1960 dedication, a German Lutheran bishop presciently warned against the “institutionalization” of churches, noting that a beautiful building and organization were of “no avail without true faith.” Initially the NCC occupied four floors of the 19 story, $21 million imposing midrise that overlooks the Hudson River. The Methodists, Presbyterians, American Baptists, and Reformed Church in America, among others, also based their offices there.
His father having recently died, John D. Rockefeller III was present at the dedication to honor the Interchurch Center as the fulfillment of his father’s dream of a new Christianity without denominational distinctions. Although he didn’t then specify it, the Rockefellers also dreamed of a uniformly liberal Protestantism devoted to good works instead of doctrine. The elder Rockefeller donated the land for the Interchurch Center plus over $2.6 million for costs.
Ironically, nearly all the Mainline denominations housed there would begin their nearly 50-year membership decline just a few years later. A sanitized Protestantism without doctrine or distinctions simply became too boring to sustain. In the early 1960s, about one of every six Americans belonged to the seven largest Mainline denominations. Today, it’s one out of every 15.
Likely unable to conceive of such a dramatic spiral, the NCC’s chief pronounced at the Interfaith Center’s 1960 dedication: “It is the prayer of all who worked toward its creation that this will become more than a symbol of the growing spiritual unity of Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Churches in America.” Those days were heady times for the Mainline denominations, who were flush with members, money and influence. Church offices in the God Box then claimed to represent 40 million church members.About 30,000 attended the Interchurch Center’s cornerstone ceremony in 1958 with President Eisenhower. He marched with 300 religious leaders under banners representing 37 participating denominations. David Rockefeller was present. So too was Charles Malik, the Lebanese Christian president of the United Nations. And Harry Emerson Fosdick, the dean of liberal Protestantism who built Riverside Church, was there also. In his brief speech, Ike condemned the recent bombing of a synagogue in Atlanta. Quoting George Washington, he hailed religious liberty and the importance of religion in sustaining morality.
Influence fades.
Old Life 