The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck

Ralph Lord Roy seems cast in the role of apologist for the National Council of Churches. Formerly, a boy prodigy, he wrote a preposterous book, Apostles of Discord. There his thesis was that liberal socialism is the norm of religious health, the orthodoxy of right-thinking minds, the beneficent ecclesiastical conformity. So anything to the right of Niebuhr is heresy; anyone who favors free enterprise is a cantankerous rebel, an apostle of discord.

In Communism and the Churches (Harcourt, $7.50), Roy is more glib and sophisticated, but he remains preposterous. He is still the boy who stands on the burning deck whence all but he had fled from the synthetic flames of “McCarthyism.” He rushes in where even Niebuhr fears to tread, urging the flat impossible thesis that all Protestant churchmen have never sinned but are dreadfully sinned against; not that the Air Force Manual was sometimes inept, but that it was wholly false; that the Council of Churches is never socialistic, but only “social”; that “the Communists —in a curious de facto alliance with extremist elements of the Right Wing —have dealt a severe blow to legitimate social concern and protest in the United States.”

ER

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E. Merrill Root

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Ralph Lord Roy seems cast in the role of apologist for the National Council of Churches. Formerly, a boy prodigy, he wrote a preposterous book, Apostles of Discord. There his thesis was that liberal socialism is the norm of religious health, the orthodoxy of right-thinking minds, the beneficent ecclesiastical conformity. So anything to the right of Niebuhr is heresy; anyone who favors free enterprise is a cantankerous rebel, an apostle of discord.

In Communism and the Churches (Harcourt, $7.50), Roy is more glib and sophisticated, but he remains preposterous. He is still the boy who stands on the burning deck whence all but he had fled from the synthetic flames of “McCarthyism.” He rushes in where even Niebuhr fears to tread, urging the flat impossible thesis that all Protestant churchmen have never sinned but are dreadfully sinned against; not that the Air Force Manual was sometimes inept, but that it was wholly false; that the Council of Churches is never socialistic, but only “social”; that “the Communists —in a curious de facto alliance with extremist elements of the Right Wing —have dealt a severe blow to legitimate social concern and protest in the United States.”