The Brooklyn Church and Mission Federation today intensified its campaign against the Christian Front by naming the Front’s eight constituent organizations and calling upon all Protestants to repudiate them as “un-Christian.”
A meeting of the federation’s commission on public welfare, headed by the Rev. Ben F. Wyland, voted to send to all Protestant ministers and others in Brooklyn and elsewhere a resolution condemning the Christian Front, which was adopted on Nov. 14, together with an appeal to preach that true Americanism creates unity, not “racial and religious hatred.”
The components of the Front named in today’s resolution are: the Social Justice Distributors’ Clubs, the Crusaders for Americanism, the American Nationalists, the American Patriots, the Citizens’ Protective League, the Christian Mobilizers, the German-American Business League and the German-American Bund.
This development came after Postmaster General James A. Farley, in an address Wednesday night to 500 persons attending a dinner of the Washington Heights and In-wood Coordinating Committee in Behalf of Persecuted Minorities, had denounced the Christian Front and Mobilizers.
“How my blood boils,” Farley declared, “when I hear the adjective ‘Christian’ used by these organizations, the Christian Front and Christian Mobilizers, which thus insult the gentle Jesus who preached love for all mankind. Their members haven’t been here long or they would have heard of the know Nothings.”
Today’s resolution of the Brooklyn Protestant federation declared that the twofold object of the Christian Front “is the extermination of the Jews and the establishment of a Fascist government. The first is a sacrilegious attack upon the spirit of Christianity and the second an assault upon our American democracy.”
It called on all Protestants “to do all in your power to make plain to your people that true Americanism is a creator, not of disunity and racial or religious hatred, but a creator of a perfect union, one and inseparable, established upon the four great liberties: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of press and freedom of assembly.”
“We furthermore call upon you,” the statement concluded, “to teach that true Christianity is the spirit of the neighbor who knows neither Jew nor Greek, bond or free,’ and derives its character from the Prince of Peace, who said the two great laws of religion were love of God and love of man. As our American democracy is the protector of all kinds and conditions of man, so is Christianity truest and purest in its expression of a universal love above all distinction or race or class or creed.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
