Copyright (c) 2013 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill Recent documents in Jill K. Gill en-us Thu, 04 Apr 2013 08:35:32 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/17 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/17 Tue, 04 Sep 2012 08:35:21 PDT Idaho was among the nation's last states to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his human rights work with a paid state holiday. Given Idaho's media-made reputation as a haven for white supremacists, this delay likely surprises few readers. Ironically, however, those supremacists induced the holiday's adoption in 1990.

]]> Jill Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/16 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/16 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:56 PDT Traditional Christian ecumenists such as Robert Sperry Bilheimer, educated in the ways of the World Council of Churches, grappled with activist "new-breed" church leaders over how to protest against the Vietnam War. During 1966-74, Bilheimer headed the International Affairs Commission of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC) and sought to unite the member churches in an ecumenical effort. Activists in the NCC, spearheaded by "new-breed" spokesmen, focused on protest, however, and church leaders, who were often more liberal than those in the pews, failed to develop consensus within their denominations. Consequently, Bilheimer's efforts at cross-denominational dialogue and consensus were in vain.

]]> Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/15 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/15 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:54 PDT The National Council of Churches (NCC) felt called by church bureaucrats to take a prophetic leadership role on the Vietnam War. Therefore it moved beyond the sentiments of its denominations’ parishioners to articulate antiwar positions on this controversial issue. Council leaders met several times with Dean Rusk to persuade him to change the presuppositions undergirding America’s Vietnam policy, while Rusk tried to sway the Council into accepting the necessity of the government’s actions. The Council’s staff failed to realize that government weighed the NCC’s clout not by the quality of its information, staff, or moral vision, but rather by the number of constituents it represented or influenced. When the NCC took what some perceived as elitist stands more representative of liberal church bureaucrats than millions of voting, church-going Americans, the White House shunned it as politically useless. The NCC has yet to recover from its loss of status suffered during this period.

]]> Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/14 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/14 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:52 PDT In 1973, when armed members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota, military and law enforcement agencies of the United States arrived to quell the civil disturbance. The National Council of Churches sent a delegation consisting of Methodists - Bishop James Armstrong and pastors Wesley Hunter, Homer Noley, and John Adams - to serve as intermediaries. The members earned the trust of AIM and government authorities but were ousted from the reservation at the behest of Oglala Sioux Tribal Council chairman Dick Wilson, who believed the delegation to be pro-AIM. Although the role of the intermediaries diminished, they had successfully brokered cease-fires and convinced both sides that negotiations offered the best means of reaching their objectives.

]]> Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/13 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/13 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:50 PDT Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/12 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/12 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:47 PDT The fifty-year marriage between Church World Service (CWS) and the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCC) did not survive. In 2000, when they divorced to create separate 501(c)(3) organizations, CWS pleaded irreconcilable differences. The fact that two of America’s most prominent mainline ecumenical organizations, committed to Christian unity, were unable to maintain a healthy organizational marriage bears examination. Many people became aware of their troubles in the late 1990s when their financial arguments caught the attention of religious news services and periodicals such as The Christian Century. Few are aware, however, that the issues that caused their separation can be traced back nearly forty years when fault lines appeared amid their approaches to the Vietnam War. This essay will examine those fault lines and trace how their politicization transformed them into insurmountable rifts. The story reveals how profoundly American political culture affects religious life and work.

]]> Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/10 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/10 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:44 PDT Executives within many mainline denominations, such as the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, were frustrated by their inability to inspire widespread debate and action at the congregational level about the Vietnam War Using the UPCUSA as a case study, this article argues that parish clergy functioned as the primary bottlenecks between the denominations and the congregations, constricting the flow of information largely because of their uncomfortable, precarious, middle position between liberal leadership and more conservative laity. By ming clergy journals and citing pastors in their own words, this essay illustrates the ambivalence local ministers felt toward both laity and church executives, as well as their concerns and confusion, as they struggled to navigate the clergy-laity divide during a highly polarized time.

]]> Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/8 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/8 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:40 PDT Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/7 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/7 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:38 PDT Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/6 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/6 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:36 PDT Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/5 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/5 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:34 PDT Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/4 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/4 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:33 PDT Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/3 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/3 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:30 PDT Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/2 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/2 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:29 PDT The Vietnam War and its polarizing era challenged, splintered, and changed The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCC), which was motivated by its ecumenical Christian vision to oppose that war and unify people. The NCC’s efforts on the war exposed its strengths and imploded its weaknesses in ways instructive for religious institutions that bring their faith into politics. Embattled Ecumenism explores the ecumenical vision, anti- Vietnam War efforts, and legacy of the NCC. Gill’s monumental study serves as a window into the mainline Protestant manner of engaging political issues at a unique time of national crisis and religious transformation. In vibrant prose, Gill illuminates an ecumenical institution, vision, and movement that has been largely misrepresented by the religious right, dismissed by the secular left, misunderstood by laity, and ignored by scholars outside of ecumenical circles. At a time when the majority of scholarly work is committed to looking at the religious right, Gill’s groundbreaking study of the Protestant Left is a welcome addition. Embattled Ecumenism will appeal to scholars of U.S. religion, politics, and culture, as well as historians of evangelicalism and general readers interested in U.S. history and religion.

]]> Jill K. Gill http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/1 http://works.bepress.com/jill_gill/1 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:57:27 PDT This dissertation examines responses of the National Council of Churches to moral, religious, political and socio-cultural issues surrounding American involvement in Vietnam 1965-1972. It does so by focusing upon NCC views of peace and justice as they were first developed within a process of cultural communication among ecumenical leaders in the NCC and constituent denominations; it then examines how these were aimed at persuading its denominational membership, grassroots Christians, and the government to a view of justice that the NCC believed would ensure domestic and international peace. Historical and ethnographic methods were used to research communication within the NCC, and then between the NCC, the general public and the government. They were also employed to investigate how the NCC functioned as an institutional expression of Protestant denominational pluralism regarding this war and probe why the government ignored views expressed by NCC and denominational leaders who were, in many respects, peers to the politicians and military personnel perpetuating it. The NCC felt compelled to address ethical issues raised by the war and tried to be a central prophetic voice in the debate over American policy and values throughout its duration. American ecumenical leaders often held enlightened, fact-based opinions on U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Staffmembers in the NCC's Department of International Affairs had hoped to spark a transformation in the popularly held, government-reflected worldview and its correlating presuppositions relative to national security, justice and peace which they felt precipitated America's skewed Vietnam policies. But, because of the unpopularity of NCC socio-political stands at government and pew levels, as well as its leaders' sometimes elitist, ideologically exclusive attitudes, bureaucratic style, naive political strategies, and inattentiveness to the spiritual needs and opinions of grassroots Christians, the Council became alienated from parishioners and lost clout with the White House. In the NCC's response to the Vietnam War, one finds illustrated several precipitating causes of the mainline Protestantism' s "decline" of the 1970s.

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