Joan Brown Campbell, the National Council of Churches & Chautauqua

The Westminster Chimes of the Bell Tower on Lake Chautauqua in New York began playing old hymns early this morning. Very nice, but not entirely welcome, as I had only arrived at 4:30am a few hours before. But they did rouse me in time for the morning worship in the Amphitheater of the Chautauqua Institute, where former National Council of Churches chief Joan Brown Campbell, a frequent target of IRD criticism in the 1990’s, is the daily preacher this week.

Chautauqua is a beautiful lake side village co-founded by a Methodist minister in the 1870s as a Sunday School Assembly for teachers. It evolved ecumenically into a Summer camp for preaching, lectures, musical entertainment, cultural and literary refinement. Chautauqua spawned a national movement of the same name, with traveling tent Chautauquas, and more permanent camps and villages, hosting the best known preachers, orators and entertainers. William Jennings Bryan was one regular speaker who fit all three categories. A few of these Chautauqua camps still exist, some of them now fashionable vacation spots.

The original Chautauqua in far western New York is very popular, picturesque, well organized, and still often attracts famous personalities as speakers. PBS film producer Ken Burns is featured next Summer. Some but not all of the original religious emphasis has faded, and most of the speakers, religious or not, have been liberal in recent years. Joan Campbell, when she left the National Council of Churches in 2000, became Chautauqua’s director of religious events. At age 81 she is retiring this year.

Back in the 1990’s, IRD critiqued Campbell and the NCC for siding with President Clinton against the Republican Congress during a federal budget confrontation, for hosting Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in New York, for helping to return little Elian Gonzalez to Cuba after his mother died during their escape, and for exploiting the black church burning saga late in the decade. The NCC raised millions of dollars for its Burned Churches Fund, which was oddly managed by a former apparatchik of the Marxist regime in Grenada that exploded in 1983. Those dollars helped to stave off the NCC’s financial woes but not for long, with Campbell leaving the NCC near financial collapse. Her successor, former Democratic Congressman Bob Edgar, helped financially revive the NCC with secular foundation funding, but only for a time. Recently the NCC closed its historic New York office and is now down to a handful of staffers.

Campbell seems to have been more successful at Chautauqua, and her sermon today was non-political, focusing on the Virgin Mary. She recalled that Protestants often have been uncomfortable talking too much about Mary in reaction against a historic Catholic emphasis on her. “Today Mary takes her rightful place among the saints,” Campbell noted, calling her, “This woman who finally said yes to God.”

Referring to Mary’s “mystical” role, Campbell sadly felt obliged to dismiss the importance of arguments about whether Mary’s virginity was “literally true,” noting virgin in the Bible could simply refer to a young woman. Campbell said it’s “like arguing whether Jesus walked on water. It is to miss the point. The miracle that was Mary.”

Of course, Mary’s virginity is central to Christian belief in the Incarnation of God in Christ. For that matter, Jesus’ walking on water is an important demonstration of His deity and power. These Christian teachings can’t be dismissed for some ostensibly “larger” point, because they are themselves central to the point.

Campbell did not specifically reject Mary’s virginity, and later in her sermon referred to it straightforwardly. She emphasized that Jesus’ mother was “no weak helpless woman” but a strong “carrier of the life of the world.” Campbell said Mary could have said no to God’s vocation for her but instead was faithful. “Even though Mary was chosen she was not without choice.” Calling Mary a “prophet,” Campbell said, “It’s sorrowful that Protestants haven’t really come to know the Mary who could have said no but said yes.”

Now in her ninth decade, Campbell spoke robustly, recalling my own memories of her lively time on the national stage 15 and 20 years ago, when the National Council of Churches was still a somewhat significant presence. Her sermon today echoed a fading form of liberal Protestantism that no longer fills churches but still perpetuates some grand institutions like Chautauqua that recall an earlier glory.