Between Dialogue and Denunciation: The World Council of Churches, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights during the Cold War

Abstract

While the historiography on the religious Cold War has tended to focus on Christian anticommunism, the World Council of Churches (WCC) sought to transcend the Cold War while simultaneously advancing religious freedom in the Soviet Union. This article connects the WCC's ecclesiastical diplomacy to the wider story of human rights, from which religion has too often been excluded. The WCC's quest for Christian fellowship led it to integrate the Russian Orthodox Church into its membership, but this commitment generated tensions with the rise of Soviet dissidence. Moreover, the WCC's turn towards the left and the Third World contrasted with newly ascendant voices for human rights in the 1970s: Amnesty International's depoliticised liberalism, evangelical anticommunism, and the Vatican under John Paul II. Thus, the WCC, an early and prominent transnational voice for human rights, ran afoul of shifts in both the Cold War and the politics of protest.