This article and editorial were first published in the February 16, 1924, issue of The Living Church.
The unusual spectacle of the trial of a bishop for holding and teaching false doctrine is about to be witnessed. The Rt. Rev. William Montgomery Brown, D.D., sometime Bishop of Arkansas, now retired, has been presented to the Presiding Bishop [the Most Rev. Alexander Charles Garrett] for trial, by the Bishop of Vermont [the Rt. Rev. Arthur C.A. Hall], the Bishop of Indianapolis [the Rt. Rev. Joseph Marshall Francis], and the Bishop of West Virginia [the Rt. Rev. William Loyall Gravatt], acting as presenters. The Church Advocate, who is the equivalent of the district attorney in civil proceedings, is Charles L. Dibble, D.C.L., of Kalamazoo, Mich.
The charges are based entirely upon an alleged repudiation of the Christian faith, expressed in many paragraphs of a volume entitled Communism and Christianism, written by Bishop Brown, of which the first edition was printed in October, 1920, and of which more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand copies in the English language are said to have been put into circulation in addition to translations in Italian, Bohemian, Swedish, Hungarian, Greek, and Finnish, while the book is also said to have had a large influence in Russia in promoting Soviet repudiation of the Christian religion.
While the book appears to repudiate practically the entire content of the Christian faith, yet the charges made in this Presentment are limited to such statements as deny the deity and, even, the historical existence of our Lord, and those that deny theism of any sort.
The Presentment cities twenty-three quotations from the book, typical instances of which are the following:
- On page 22: “Within the Social realm, humanity is my new divinity, and your [meaning thereby members of said Protestant Episcopal Church] divinity (my old one) is a symbol of it, or else, as I think, he is at best a fiction and at worst a superstition.”
- On page 51: “Orthodox Christians say that Jesus founded their sectarian churches, though each sect insists that he had to do with only one church, theirs. I doubt that he lived.
- On page 61: “Do you not now see with me that the Christ of the world is not a conscious, personal god, but an unconscious, impersonal machine? It is to the machine of man, not a lamb of god, to which we may hopefully look for the taking away of the sins of the world.”
- On page 78: ‘The world’s saviour-god is knowledge. There is no other Christ on earth or in any heaven above it, and this one lives, moves, and has his being in the fear of ignorance.”
- On page 82: “So far I have not found it necessary to renounce the Christian God or any of the things which go with him, and I have no idea of doing this any more than I have of renouncing the American Uncle Sam and the things which go with him, but I place the Brother Jesus of the Christian religion and the Uncle Sam of the American politics on the same footing with each other and with others of their kind as subjective realities. I could be a Jew and an Englishman as conscientiously as a Christian and an American.”
- On page 90: “The one God of the Jews and the triune god of the Christians; if taken seriously, are superstitions.”
- On page 91: “ ‘The Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world’ is the sign of the zodiac, Aries (sheep, ram) through which the sun passes toward the end of March, when all the saviour-gods annually died and rose again.”
- On page 91: “Jehovah is the sun-myth rewritten to fit in with the ideals and hopes of the owning, master class of the Jews. Jesus is the sun-myth rewritten to fit in with the ideals and hopes of the owning, master class of the Christians.”
- On page 106: “There is no rational doubt about the fictitious character of the divine Jesus.”
- On page 106: “The gods of all the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion are so many creations of the dominant or master class, and their revelations were put into their mouths by their makers for the purpose of keeping the slave class ignorant and contented.”
- On page 114: “My god. Nature, is a triune divinity — matter being the father, force the son, and law the spirit On page 155: “However, though I love my Brother Jesus and Uncle Sam all the time, as a child does Santa Claus at Christmas time, I am no longer childish enough at any time to look to either of them to do anything for me, because I know that what is done for me must be done either by myself or by men, women, and children, and that as objective, conscious personalities, my Brother Jesus and Uncle Sam have had no more to do with my life than the man-in-the-moon.”
The Presentment is made to the Presiding Bishop under the terms of Canon 30, paragraph 1, and is by him transmitted to the president of the Trial Court, who is the Bishop of Maryland [the Rt. Rev. John Gardner Murray]. The trial will be governed by the terms of Canon 31. The trial must be held in not less than two, nor more than six, calendar months from the day of mailing the notice.
The Rt. Rev. William Montgomery Brown, D.D., was consecrated Bishop of Arkansas on June 24, 1898. He began his episcopal administration with real missionary zeal, and during the first years of his episcopate was able to accomplish much of real service for the Church. Later his episcopate became somewhat stormy and his health became badly broken. He asked for the election of a coadjutor in 1911 on the ground of ill health, giving the entire jurisdiction within the diocese into his hands. Dr. [James Ridout] Winchester, the present Bishop of Arkansas, was thereupon chosen and was consecrated to be Bishop Coadjutor of Arkansas
In April 1912, he asked the House of Bishops to accept his resignation entirely, “it being understood that I retain my seat in the House of Bishops.” At a special meeting of the House of Bishops in the same month his resignation was accepted on the ground of ill health, which, according to the canons, allows the Bishop to retain his seat and vote in the House, and his name has been upon the roll of that House to the present time. He has not since that time attended a session of the House.
The Presentation of Bishop Brown
By F.C. Morehouse
That it would become necessary to present Bishop William Montgomery Brown for trial has long been anticipated. His book, Communism and Christianism, first published in 1920, can bear no interpretation other than that of a complete repudiation of the Christian religion in whole and in every part. The extracts from the presentment that are quoted on another page seem conclusive as to this, but the whole book has a similar import, and one could make quotations indefinitely.
The copy of the book now before the present writer is of the one hundred and twenty-fifth thousand in English. It has also been translated into many foreign languages and is reported to have been a considerable factor in Russia in promoting anti-Christian bolshevism. Indeed the frontispiece, showing the author in episcopal robes, describes him as “now Episcopus in partibus Bolshevikium et Infidelium.”
In 1922 the diocesan Council of Arkansas, of which diocese Dr. Brown was formerly bishop, memorialized the House of Bishops to take same action toward removing the scandal of the condition, which was especially acute in that diocese.
The Bishops appointed a committee of five of their number to visit Bishop Brown and seek to obtain from him an act of voluntary relinquishment of the ministry. He replied by a defiant and insulting letter addressed to the House of Bishops, which now appears on an inside cover of his book, while a cartoon showing five yelping dogs surrounding a porcupine with quills extended, which he interprets as depicting himself and the inquiring bishops, appears upon the other inside cover.
His propaganda of anti-Christianity is being actively waged in this country as well as in eastern Europe. Only a few days ago a Columbus (Ohio) paper reported a street orator discussing “the doctrine of Bishop William Montgomery Brown of the Protestant Episcopal Church.” “Bishop Brown lives in Galion, O., and has proclaimed his belief that there is no personal God,” continues the paragraph.
Bishop Brown must have a fair trial. If there were any conceivable explanation of his writings other than that which appears on the surface, we should all wish to be silent until the court had adjudged the case. In any event, there has been the utmost leniency throughout the Church in bearing with him, and we have no knowledge of a single personal enemy to him in the episcopate or out of it.
The Rt. Rev. William Montgomery Brown (1855-1937), also known as “Bad Bishop Brown,” would be tried for heresy by the House of Bishops, and eventually deposed and excommunicated in 1925, the only Episcopal bishop to ever be so condemned for heresy. He subsequently became a bishop in the Old Catholic Church, which had separated from the Roman Catholic Church decades earlier.
Brown’s trial and condemnation reflected widespread concern about the anti-Christian goals of the Soviet Communists, who had won the Russian Civil War and taken full control of the world’s largest country just two years earlier. Brown’s presenters were among the Episcopal Church’s senior bishops, and leaders of Catholic and evangelical factions. They united in condemning “Modernists,” who approached the Bible with skepticism derived from historical criticism and openly criticized credal orthodoxy. The trial of retired Bishop Brown was partly intended as a warning to still-active liberal clergy to be wary of pressing too firmly against the boundaries of teaching and practice.
