8 - Breaking Silence: Churches and Opposition to the Vietnam

Summary

When Norman Morrison set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon in November 1965, Americans reacted with horror and incomprehension. Morrison, a member of the Society of Friends, was despondent over the American escalation of the Vietnam War. A week later, Roger LaPorte, a member of the pacifist organization Catholic Worker, immolated himself at United Nations headquarters. Unlike Morrison, he lived long enough to explain that this was his religious protest against war.

Such actions departed from traditional practices of the historic peace churches (Society of Friends, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mennonites, and Church of the Brethren) and religious pacifist organizations such as the Catholic Worker and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), namely, refusal to pay taxes to support the military or accepting conscientious objector (CO) status during wartime. Mainstream Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant denominations, by comparison, had historically supported American entry into wars. What made religious opposition to the Vietnam War different was that the historic peace churches and pacifist organizations were joined by prominent religious leaders such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel; the Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr.; his fellow Presbyterian minister Robert McAfee Brown; the Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan; and, most famously, Martin Luther King, Jr., Baptist pastor and civil rights leader. Civil rights was their entrance into social protest.