“Whispers” of Black Exclusion In the ACPE Pacific Region GTU Archives

27 min readNov 4, 2017

We were Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. Our Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian forbears believed that only the elect merited a public call. Our Lutheran, Baptist, and Congregationalist parents were more inclined to accept the personal call as the sine qua non.[1]

In the beginning of the public call to professional chaplaincy training and credentialing four groups existed. These groups were the Council for Clinical Training of Theological Students (1930), Institute for Pastoral Care (1944), Lutheran Advisory Council (1945) and Southern Baptist Association of Clinical Pastoral Education (1957) who were all attempting to institutionalize clinical training and certify public ministry of the Chaplain Supervisor. The Association of Clinical Pastoral Education incorporated in 1967 as an effort to unify all of these white mainline Protestant Christian groups under one credentialing body. Unfortunately, for many years the academic standards established by ACPE by intent and practice precluded Black Americans from membership and training. Evidence of this sustained exclusion was found from the inception of ACPE in the Pacific Region Graduate Theological Union’s archival material. Black American ministers found themselves steadily disenfranchised. Black American pastors’ path to professional chaplaincy was thwarted through admissions standards, certification requirements and credentialing practices like graduate school barriers, ecclesiastical tests, and all-white review boards. While researching the Pacific Region’s ACPE GTU historical archive I look instinctively for what W.E.B. Du Bois described as “snatches of pain and discomfort.”[2] Historian Du Bois wrote candidly on his 90th birthday about what frankly he believed to be a “whisper” of the archival voice from the lungs of his social justice work. Du Bois said, “And then reaching back in my archives, I whisper to the great Majority.”[3] Therefore in my reaching back, I was very attentive to the whisper of the excluded in the GTU archive.

Similarly, I could hear this internal whisper of questions stirring within me in my research of the “great Majority” of the ACPE. I too felt “snatches of pain and discomfort” while reaching back in these historical archives, asking why. Why, if 1954 Brown vs. The Board of Education was the case that began Black Americans’ dreams of meaningful and equal educational access, why is this not evident in this archive? It was a painful and discomforting inquiry into why white Christians in the ACPE delayed admissions for nearly a century in decisions that disenfranchised blacks. Instead I found the creation of rigid standards that signaled the continuation of similar ideological old slavery and Jim Crow forms of racial control, and the rise of more hostile forms of racist thought among professional white Americans. How ironic that in 1969 ACPE was the only federally recognized credentialing body of clinical pastoral education which professionally certified that chaplains have advanced practical skills in listening with presence to all those who suffer.[4] At the same time that we have federal laws that began simultaneously to enforce equal access to education, ACPE resisted embracing Civil Rights legislation in letter and spirit.

In the beginnings of the organization paths of access for blacks immediately surface as gentle sounds and polite whispers about racial inclusion in membership and training in ACPE. At the same time, the polite whispers grow to a roar seeing how the very lack of action taken is made so marginal by the sustained silence in the Standards Commission which suggest that in effect inclusion of blacks was off the radar. Three commissions were established from the outset and formation of ACPE, that as, Stoler says “produce assemblages of control”, “specific methods of domination” and “arrested histories:”[5] the Accreditation, Certification, and Standards Commissions of the ACPE.[6] This research will trace these assemblages and methods in both the spoken and unspoken ways of the commission on standards, and particularly, those found in the Pacific Region’s ACPE GTU archives in the leadership and life legacy of J.L. Cederleaf. Given that the mission of the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education has always been to train all chaplains and ministers in pastoral education, why did privileged white mainline Christians ACPE leaders not more effectively and swiftly champion the least restrictive academic standards so economically and racially disadvantaged ministers could gain admission?

W.E.B. Du Bois is the racial historian in and of the time of the formation of ACPE and his thought offers great insights about the possible reasoning behind the exclusion of blacks from clinical pastoral education. The white Christian founders of ACPE represented the “great Majority” spoken of in his writings, and he explains the real meaning of the mysteriously inclusive sounding word ‘all’ in the archives of his lifetime. Du Bois’ archival hermeneutics are differentiated in the archives of his time between “the ignorant and poor that lynch and discriminate”[7] from the “educated and distinguished leaders”[8] who in his opinion, are far worse morally. The distinction between the ignorant poor white as opposed to the educated and professional great white majority was very important in highlighting the significance of privilege. Thus, in my seeking to understand the reason for the exclusion of blacks from professional development in chaplaincy, Du Bois’ thought assisted me in being able to better listen contextually to the whispers within the archive.

Du Bois comments about the educated and distinguished leaders of white civilization will set the framework of this paper. He describes his contemporaries who are educated and distinguished leaders as being “determined to keep black folks from developing talent and sharing in civilization.”[9] Du Bois is very fair-minded: he credits them with being “ashamed”[10] of both their actions and words, so this shame causes them to leave archives that “cover their tracks.”[11] I found it to be true also in the GTU archives — the way he describes it being difficult to trace and uncover their tracks. My research will show just how I uncovered the “desperately … ineffectual excuses and surprises and alibis”[12] that institutionally “gently and politely”[13] in the silences of “strict secrecy”[14] continued to exclude blacks or as Du Bois calls it, “push it forward.”[15]

What gave rise to this paradox of tempered shame and evil[16] determination within white Christian ACPE leaders who maintained this exclusionary attitude whether intentionally or unwittingly? American Religion historian Jon Butler looks at the roots of this attitude in the Christian theological questions of eighteenth-century Anglican missionaries. He traces the roots of where I believe these shameful attitudes and racial anxieties link back to struggle over how to offer salvation to slaves but keep them enslaved in the South, and to offer them salvation — but in separate relegated spaces in the churches in the North that fostered a peculiar theology that brought relief and comfort to White Christian leaders. Butler writes that they “participated in the creation of a racially based worldview by assuring slave-owners that, contrary to popular belief, Christians could enslave other Christians and that baptism liberated the soul but not the body.”[17] So the healing or liberation of black souls remained in the hands of White Christian ministers while black bodies, lives, and minds remained in pain and discomfort through the denial of equal access. This was a mainline Protestant church white liberation theology that psychologically marked the American Christian notions of religious boundaries and disciplines concerning organizational governance. The prevailing position was that only the educated elite or the “elect” should lead and be in positions of influence over American chaplaincy.

Clinical pastoral education emerged from these Christian sentiments despite the fact that they were about the healing of the mind in the disputed boundaries between the field of religion and psychological studies. This field of study was conceived between the 1920s and 1940s and was born institutionally between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s in traditional university-related divinity schools.[18] Graduate theological studies according to Don Browning is where

these programs were struggling to sort out the relative truth, cultural meaningfulness, and social usefulness of classic …Christian interpretations…in relation to claims advanced by the newer social science disciplines — especially twentieth century psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and various psychotherapies.[19]

He goes on to say these claims from psychotherapies “were concerned with healing the psyche and therefore overlapped with endeavors once performed almost exclusively by religion.”[20] Some of the names most influential in this wrestling and reformation between psychology and religion can be found in the list of founders of the ACPE.[21]

In the GTU archive of the ACPE, J.L. Cedarleaf one of its most eminent leaders and a top institutional missionary of the clinical pastoral education movement gave this insight later in his life just before he died about ACPE: “To understand ACPE’s call to leaders, it is useful to sample the persons and traditions that inform that call. In the beginning we were essentially a community of Reformed Anglo-Saxon males.”[22] In a brief history on the fiftieth anniversary of CPE it states, “In the beginning, and for at least 50 years, the Certified Supervisors were all male, mostly Protestant Christian, and almost all white.”[23] All of the reformed Anglo-Saxon males Cedarleaf mentioned were indeed persons connected to university-related divinity schools or working with students or professors in one of these institutions. One founding leader of this reformation movement was Seward Hiltner whom Don Browning describes as having written a dissertation that tried to reconcile positivistic psychology, social science and Marxism with religion by excluding painful and discomforting areas of human experience.[24] These clinical pastoral education Christian missionaries were split on their epistemology, methodology and pedagogy but in 1967 four separate clinical pastoral education groups united under one banner of ACPE.[25] Their common white male privileges of graduate school were superior to any religious, theological, psychological differences and collectively they remained educated and distinguished leaders of white civilization.

These were the type of reformed Christian chaplains that forestalled the acceptance of Blacks into the training of the Association Clinical Pastoral Education. Jeremy Carrette, Professor of Religion and Culture at the University of Kent, wrote an article on the problems of the foundations of religion and psychological studies. I suspect that these CPE reform Anglo-Saxons were still operating from a racist theology but also their positivistic psychology ironically had to be employed negatively in order to ignore the moral imperatives of racial and social justice of the time. Carrette points out, utilizing an argument from Foucault, that I believe was operative: he called it “disciplinary amnesia.”[26] Essentially Foucault argued that psychology was a discipline that excluded painful and discomforting areas of human experience and this provided the reformed Anglo-Saxons of the ACPE a consciousness with the “ability to forget.”[27] Du Bois calls it “desperate and ineffectual excuses and alibis.” Butler calls it rationalization of salvation based on race or a “divinely ordained” hierarchy of biologically distinguishable human groupings.[28] Nonetheless, I argue this archive shows how the educated and distinguished leaders of ACPE created training that effectively championed the credentialing and professionalization of chaplaincy in the United States, but for whites only. However, this white Christian male leadership of ACPE did not intend to include blacks, and so they employed “gentle” and “polite” and “strict secrecy” diplomatic power to “push it forward.”

The Archives

There was discussion of a problem that our current standards may be excluding the possibilities of some ministers of some economic and ethnic groups participating in training. For instance, it was noted that some of the most effective Negro ministers in the ghettos may not have high school and college education as included in our requirements for admission in training.[29]

Presiding chair of the Standards Commission, J.L. Cedarleaf notes 19 of 20 CPE Supervisors were present during this discussion. What happened? How did it happen? And who initiated the “discussion” and why? The archive reads more like a protest, a silent witness to an execution or perhaps what one might imagine as a silent prayer vigil. However, this event is not purposed as a silent vigil — or is it? It is rather what Du Bois pointed out about the educated and distinguished white Christians “gently” and “politely” pushing forward a determination to exclude black Christians. This is one example of how that “whisper” sounds or where to pause to listen for the whisper of “arrested histories”[30] in the minutes, commission reports, and notes from the Standards Commission, dated January 30, 1968. No comments were recorded, no motion forwarded, no further discussion; just that there was a discussion with no referral to a lower committee and no further action needed to be taken.[31] The whisper came from someone of the 19 present concerning the unacknowledged native expertise of the “most effective Negro ministers” and questioned the academic barrier in the standards. It is only a whisper because it is audible yet faintly so and a communication but the meaning of whisper is unclear and very difficult to detect.

Seminary representatives that were sworn into the “strict secrecy”[32] standards meeting that were present was noted on this page of the archive: Claremont, School of Theology; Pasadena, Fuller Theological Seminary; Berkeley, Pacific Lutheran Theological School; and Berkeley, Church of Divinity School of the Pacific. Somebody cared, someone noticed and someone advocated for consideration of the ethnic and economic social, political realities of minorities in this nascent association barely a year old. The strict secrecy as Du Bois mentioned in his archival research, I too found in my own research. No one knows who dared to speak and all we know for sure is who attended, how many were present and what occurred: a whisper of a discussion about racial barriers in the standards was recorded. In contrast, when you compare the next discussion in the same minutes about program formation in this formative period of ACPE, you can not only feel the energy of the discussion but you know who is responsible, how it will be followed up on, and what to expect as an outcome going forward. Not so with this discussion about access of membership and training to develop “effective Negro ministers in the ghettos.” That is the “strict secrecy” in the archive: that in fewer written words the second discussion conveys more positive intent and action than the former but not with regard to increasing black access to the profession; rather for creating more jobs and position for themselves in the continuation of the mission civilisatrice of white Christianity. That is, that white Christianity would continue to lead the civilizing mission in the prisons, communities and places where the oppressed lived and continue to suffer.

Compare the first discussion found to the very next discussion mentioned in the archive from January 30,1968. The following is from a Finance Committee report:

There was discussion regarding funds for developing new or experimental programs. The matter was referred to the Education and Research Committee. There is a possibility of funds being allocated to that committee for the purpose of encouraging different types of programs.[33]

This archival note on this discussion can be fully heard without the need to have been present at this meeting. In comparison, this inquiry into funds for the development of new or experimental programs has a clear path of hope ahead. It was referred to an appropriate committee for further discussion and a commitment of possibility after due process for fund allocation to the Education and Research Committee. Moreover, this idea was given incentives for the stated purpose of encouraging diverse types of programs. The difference in the discussion is that this proposal pushes forward the idea of an expansive mission of an all white male Christian mostly- Protestant attachment to privilege and domination. On the other hand, the previous discussion is about sharing access to salvation or professionalization to black ministers. Where white Protestant Christianity stops and capitalism begins[34] in this discussion is unclear but the energy and life of this discussion is clear. Historian Jonathan Dewald explores this question about discerning when tradition ceases and the rationality of the market effaces and replaces it based on various attachments.[35]

In my research I was able to see the growth and how successful the new affiliated and experimental programs of ACPE developed, expanding into more and more governmental positions and community programs in prisons, youth detention facilities, and recovery community centers serving primarily poor minority populations. In these archives of J.L. Cedarleaf’s letters, he emerges as a true missionary of opening many new opportunities to governmental agencies. Oddly though, in the next minutes and reports after this discussion on racial exclusion in the Standards Commission there is this extraordinary announcement: “J.L. Cedarleaf’s resignation as chairman of the Regional Standards Committee.”[36] Again, there is no explanation of why or of what had happened, just as there was nothing else reported about the conversation about current standards excluding talented Black ministers who may be economically disadvantaged. No word, only a resignation immediately after that silent vigil of a discussion about racial inclusion. The one fact universally true about a whisper is the ambiguity causes a disturbing suspicion and desire to know the source, at least to know who is whispering and why.

In March of 1968, we see that Berkeley Baptist Divinity School joins the Seminary participants of ACPE along with the Franciscan Theological Seminary, Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, Graduate Theological Union, Pacific School of Religion, St. John’s Seminary and College, St. Patrick Seminary, San Francisco Theological Seminary, California Baptist and Starr King.[37] Immediately Roman Catholic outreach increases for intentional inclusion and expansion of the ACPE accredited centers and affiliated seminaries. However, historic black seminaries and divinity schools were not pursued in a similar outreach and it does stir within one a whisper that begs to know why.

In July of 1968 another gentle and polite mention about the only other discussion about blacks in the Pacific Regions files surfaces in the archive. It is as isolated as the last discussion but it offers much more when taken in the context of the whole archive. It contextualizes the type of whisper and an unspoken possible meaningful source or what Dewald calls the “attachment of habit and fear”.[38] This shows up not in the minutes and reports, but is mentioned in the ACPE Pacific Newsletter. It reads: “The special program was a panel entitled “Black Power Confronts the Seminary Student.” Four members of the black community in San Diego made up this panel.”[39] White seminarians are confronted with Black Power. This indicates something more about the sentiments of the times and explains the silent vigil first discussion of racial exclusion. Although isolated and still devoid of details about how or why or what, it is a hint of the feelings being expressed and perhaps the lessons to be learned; we at least know that now a confrontational atmosphere exists. This conjures images of anxieties of the slave revolt, the emancipated black person, and now the habituated attachment to fear of the confrontational black students of this time on seminary campuses. This could be a reason for the silent resistance to change on behalf of the White Power establishment of the ACPE.

After the mention of this Black Power talk in seminaries, the Pacific Region archive goes completely silent about race. Meanwhile monthly new pilot and experimental programs are mentioned as a testament to ACPE’s success. CPE addiction centers in urban centers are experimentally opened all over and opportunities are explored in Veterans Administration hospitals for creating new ACPE centers. In the archive in the fall of 1969, it is announced to expect radical changes and revisions over the next 3 years to the Standards Committee.[40] This archival announcement is another whisper in carefully placed wording about the first discussion about black inclusion without mentioning race. This for the archivist is still much more encouraging and hopeful but it is still a faint whisper. Perhaps the academic standards used as new forms of racial barriers that inhibited possibilities of admissions will be radically removed? This causes me to believe and imagine the ACPE white Christian professionals who were apart of the original discussion of racial exclusion remained and fought. Now a curious suspicion grows around J.L. Cedarleaf’s resignation. Anne Stoler again is helpful in attempting to understand what is going on with this commission at this point. In several passages her words seem to fit perfectly what I have observed in the GTU archives of the western region ACPE. She writes,

At one level, the social semantics of these commissions would seem to offer few surprises. Their scripts are honed, as are the stereotypes to which they subscribed. They mirror even as they produce the prevailing idioms of colonial common sense. The phrases are stock and formulaic — faithful to the truth-claims of racialized rule.[41]

Her description applies to the wording of the statements of the western ACPE discussed above. The fact that they “mirror even as they produce” racial attitudes and assumptions that, regardless of intent, did prevent access of blacks to professional chaplaincy for a generation, at least until federal legislation that afforded more access to higher education for blacks and its ripple effects finally catalyzed change in the ACPE in the 1980s.

There is no doubt that the same imperial, racist structures of mind that persisted in the U.S. long after the abolition of slavery, were based in the imperial, colonizing, and dehumanizing venture of slavery upon which the U.S. economy was based and upon which American capitalism developed.[42] Though the white Protestant establishment that created the ACPE surely viewed itself as an organization with high-minded goals and intents, it was socially, culturally, and politically rooted in institutional racism from which it did not emerge until change was forced from the outside — from legislation, from the black power movement, and from all the liberation movements converging to demand change and growth. While there were visions enunciated about how to include those “effective Negro ministers in the ghetto,” inherited structures of thought and action posed a high wall that prevented movement, until no other choice was left.[43] Stoler writes:

Such a focus presents an analytic and methodological quandary: how much historical weight should be assigned to such a set of improbable visions that were, for the most part, never implemented? How should we treat the history of what was deemed possible but remained unrealized? What can we learn about colonial cultures and the states they sustained from their aborted projects, from proposals whose circulation was interrupted, from (blue)prints that were ultimately scrapped? [44]

One way the “old boys” answer these questions Stoler offers is that this nascent white Christian ACPE leadership had no other choice and they did the best they could while answering the public call for the greater good. For example, after WWII, the government mandated credentialed chaplains, insisted on ecclesiastic endorsement and graduate level education for employment. So, Negro ministers despite how effective in the ghetto they were, were without a proper government -sanctioned education — and so were unemployable to minister as a paid chaplain.[45] Therefore, no gifted intuition and charisma will be employable and admissible in training or membership in ACPE. The Baptist, Lutherans and Congregationalist among us disagreed in spirit with such rigid standards but were sworn to “strict secrecy” and just “pushed it forward.” We are commissioned to create and establish this clinical training program, and blacks are welcome to start a separate CPE program and ask for equal recognition under the law. Despite the1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson explanation of separate but equal, these answers were not civilly right under the law in 1968 and thus equal access for blacks and women had to be opened up.

The early women pioneers of clinical pastoral training had a softer approach to lowering the barriers to their entrance to ACPE. They formed a Collegiality Task Force and created a board game created to “gently” and “politely” educate the white male dominant group. It worked quite well as white women know white male psychology quite well. Women ascended up the ranks slowly and steadily as they assuaged the “old boys” attachment to fear and control. In contrast, Black Power and Black Theology was neither gentle nor polite to the white consciousness. I found archival evidence that proved my suspicion right.[46] Black liberation theology really kept the walls of resistance to change high for the “old boy” great Majority in ACPE leadership. What can we learn about the times and system that sustained aborted projects of inclusion, from the first discussion and request left separate and ignored from equal access pathways that lie buried in the unrecorded words of the un-archived and unrecognizable?[47]

The radical changes projected in three years in 1969 were not that radical after all but instead they were pragmatic and strategic. These changes opened up a few delegate seats in the by-laws and constitution in 1972 and changed how leadership was elected, changed membership but racial access remained the same due to poor seminary outreach.[48] However in 1978 the Standards Committee got an “equivalency clause” approved.[49] It would be 1985 when this clause would be put into language that removed racial and economic barriers to membership and training access.[50] Radical change began to happen in 1984, when the very last founding members of the “old boys club” moved out of leadership, retired, or were just outnumbered.[51] Every president from 1967 to 1984 was from one of the four founding organizations that came together to form ACPE.[52] In 1984 an intentional move to Atlanta, Georgia from New York was made for the central office of the ACPE. Conversations in the archives about this turn in history begin in September 1982 about the future site as a relocation and spatial turn for the ACPE.

This move was away from the historic placing of American mainline White Christian interest over an American all-inclusive and welcoming ACPE. The annual convention was held in Atlanta to welcome in a new era with a very diverse panel of presenters from intentionally historically black seminaries. The Racial and Economic Minority Task Force (REM) began in 1981 and soon became a network along with the Collegiality Task Force for women’s inclusion. New programs and initiatives were now holding programs in Switzerland and Germany in 1983. That second discussion in the Finance Committee was clearly successful with support from local experiments to global experiments. In 1986 a new pilot program was supported by ACPE that introduced CPE to Black ministers in Atlanta, Georgia by a black CPE supervisor.[53] REM attempted for seven years to host panels to encourage more regional and national inclusion and changes gradually in each region but very little change was welcomed. In fact, REM decided to finally hold a separate annual meeting of ACPE members. This was first hosted in Washington, D.C. at Howard Divinity School and it continues to meet yearly with great success with 300 and more attendees. Two Black Americans eventually ascended to the top of ACPE: Urias Beverly became president of the ACPE in 1994 to 1995 and 1999 Teresa Snorton became Executive Director of the ACPE.

In this GTU Pacific Region ACPE archive search, it was helpful to have Du Bois as a guide through “snatches of pain and discomfort” when learning how to discern archival “whispers.” I learned why “educated and distinguished whites were determined to keep blacks unskilled and not civilization building.” Jon Butler and Jeremy Carrette offer reasons based in the fields of religion and psychology. The most important lesson of my archival research was not written nor was it in any hermeneutic tools but rather it was learning the process itself. Finding an intentionally obscure note, a point in recorded history that seems odd and felt discomforting, and learning the process of staying present with it to trace the arch of the archive. This discussion about black exclusion from ACPE membership and training along with the finance committee advocacy and support of new programs and experimental projects bothered me. However, it was supposed to bother me and inspire me at the same time. And it did.

[1] See J.L. Cedarleaf letter to ACPE leadership in 1989 written to remind them of the original founding aim and purpose of the ACPE. How, as he called them “old boys club”, lead the organization and choose its leadership. GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[2] The words are key terms “snatches of pain and discomfort” and “whisper” found in the “Postlude” chapter of The Autobiography of W.E. B. Du Bois. I found both the meaning and contextual framework to be a great guide for the purpose of this historical essay. Du Bois at the end of his life speaks about the idea of expected pain and discomfort while reaching back and then listening to whispers in his archive. This was found in the footnotes in W E B. Du Bois, Writings, The Library of America (New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States :, ©1986), 1330.

[3] Ibid.

[4] J.L. Cedarleaf is noted by Hospital Chaplaincy author Chris Swift for tracing the emphasis on listening to two of the founders of the CPE movement Dr. Richard Cabot of Harvard Medical School and Chaplain Russell Dicks early work called The Art of Ministering to the Sick (1936). The irony is how a profession that certifies the mastery of listening skills to minister to the suffering, how could at the time of the Civil Rights outcry of suffering of blacks these chaplains could be so tone deaf. Cedarleaf’s life and legacy I will listen to very closely as a possible whisper as to why this happened with in the GTU archives. See the chapter called Ministry of Presence fn 36 in: Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 185.

[5] See Ann Stoler fn 39 in her chapter on The Pulse of the Archive where she talks about “arrested histories” in archives where she says “As some of the best of this work now recognizes, filing systems and disciplined writing produce assemblages of control and specific methods of domination.” Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ©2009), 33.

[6] A historian CPE supervisor wrote: “These positions involved a lot of work and responsibility but also power in terms of the future of the organization. At one point, there was a deliberate choice to nominate and elect more active supervisors to balance some supervisors who were perceived as more passive and less likely to challenge applicants.” See John Rea Thomas, A ‘snap Shot’ History, 1975–2000, of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, Inc.: A Celebration of the 75th Anniversary of CPE ([Madison, WI]: J. Thomas, ©2000), 23.

[7] In the chapter, Techniques of Race Prejudice, historian Du Bois writes: “The ignorant and poor may lynch and discriminate but the real deep and basic race hatred in the United States is a matter of the educated and the distinguished leaders of white civilization. They are the ones who are determined to keep black folk from developing talent and sharing in civilization. The only thing to their credit is that they are ashamed of what they do and say and cover their tracks desperately even if ineffectually with excuses and surprises and alibis. But the discrimination goes even gently and politely but in strict secrecy put their shoulders to the wheel and push it forward.” W E B. Du Bois, Writings, The Library of America (New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States :, ©1986), 1207.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” comes to mind here. Her point that horrific evil comes about as a result of good people not intending monstrous forms of evil such as that unlashed by the Nazis, but who also do not do anything about it and allowing it seems to apply to many of the “great Majority” and explains how well-intentioned religious leaders would tolerate and, by inaction, further the evil of racial exclusionary practices. See Hannah Arendt, Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963, 2006).

[18] See Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women Into the Professions, 1890–1940, The Douglass Series On Women’s Lives and the Meaning of Gender (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, ©1987), 165–173. This can be found also in Diane E. Jonte-Pace and William B. Parsons, eds., Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain (London: Routledge, 2001), 165–168.

[19] See Don Browning article where he talks about Seward Hiltner early works in this field as founder of the movement in Diane E. Jonte-Pace and William B. Parsons, eds., Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain (London: Routledge, 2001), 165.

[20] Ibid.

[21] J.L. Cederleaf said the following: To understand ACPE’s call to leaders it is useful to sample the persons and traditions that inform that call. In the beginning we were essentially a community of Reformed Anglo-Saxon males: Anton Boisen, Russell Dicks, Carroll Wise, Rollin Fairbanks, Fred Kuether, Ernest Bruder, Phil Guiles, Seward Hiltner, Richard Cabot, William Keller. GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[22] GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[24] Diane E. Jonte-Pace and William B. Parsons, eds., Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain (London: Routledge, 2001), 166.

[25] J.L. Cedarleaf states, “These divergent groups melded their leadership perspectives into an ecumenical entity known as the ‘old boys club.’ I remember Ernie Bruder, who at times assumed he was our holy father, proposing a category of FELLOWS to serve as our high priests. Ernie vigorously objected to our public call to masters and mentors who, in his view, possessed nothing more than a personal call to be grateful sheep. Our self perpetuating nominating committee accepted and functioned by unwritten ordered rules.”

[26] See Jeremy R. Carrette, Post-structuralism and the psychology of religion: The challenge of critical psychology. Fn 1 My idea of “disciplinary amnesia” is developed from Foucault’s argument that positivistic psychology, in founding a discipline that excluded the difficult and problematic areas of human experience, fatally provided Western consciousness with the “ability to forget” (Foucault 1962: 87) I use the phrase “disciplinary amnesia” to refer to the procedure through which a discourse is able to function by suppressing issues and problems that undermine its coherence (see Foucault 1970 for a discussion of the rules of exclusion within a discourse). 124. Diane E. Jonte-Pace and William B. Parsons, eds., Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain (London: Routledge, 2001), 124.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Tweed cites Jon Butler: As long as persons were enslaved because they were heathens, they could be freed through conversion. Once their enslavement was rationalized on the basis of race — on the basis of a “divinely ordained” hierarchy of biological distinguishable human groupings — then salvation and enslavement could coexist. Thomas A. Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, ©1997), 38.

[29] GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[30] On the critical elements of identifying in archives “arrested histories” Stoler says : “They prime us to look for arrogant assertions of know-how couched in unacknowledged native expertise.” Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ©2009), p. 34.

[31] “If every document comes layered with the received account of earlier events and the cultural semantics of a political moment, the issue of official “bias” opens to a different challenge: to identify the conditions of possibility that shaped what warranted repetitions, what competencies were rewarded in archival writing, what stories could not be told and what could be said.” Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ©2009), 34.

[32] A historian of the Standards in CPE Dan DeArment a CPE Supervisor Practitioner affirmed this idea about the strict archival secrecy when doing his own research years later after he lived and experienced these very discussions. He wrote: “In reviewing these documents, I have been aware of the people who created this written record. I remember well the impact of these words of authority on my work as a certified supervisor (1968). I remember also, usually with fondness, the names of the many who wrestled and tugged with me over how to interpret these words. But the advantage of looking at the documents, quoting the documents, and making judgments about changes in the documents, is that the written record contains no footnotes, or by-line attributing any wisdom or folly to anyone. There is something of value in this kind of memory, and something of loss. What is of value is that the written record reflects a system of ideas, not devoid of human touch, but as devoid of that touch as the written word can ever be. Part of what is lost, perhaps lost forever, are those connections between who said what and where, and what were the issues on both side of the debate that led to the final product. But there is potentially a greater loss. The literal words of the Standards usually led us to move ahead with creative CPE programs. But will generations which follow be able to identify what CPE really is and was quite beyond the prosaic and sometimes dull words?” See John Rea Thomas, A ‘snap Shot’ History, 1975–2000, of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, Inc.: A Celebration of the 75th Anniversary of CPE ([Madison, WI]: J. Thomas, ©2000), 20–21.

[33] GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[34] For a full articulation of the connection between Protestant Christianity and capitalism see the famous thesis by Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (New York, New York: Routledge, 2001).

[35] Jonathan Dewald points out: “There are also attachments of privilege and greed, which encourage (for instance) aristocracies to use their political power and social status to obtain economic advantages. And there are ethical attachments, which discourage rich and poor alike from the calculating selfishness that market economics may demand. See Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber, eds., The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, pbk. ed., Murphy Institute Studies in Political Economy (Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press, ©1996), 43.

[36] GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[37] GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[38] Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber, eds., The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, pbk. ed., Murphy Institute Studies in Political Economy (Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press, ©1996), 43.

[39] GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[40] GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[41] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ©2009), 42. This point can not be lost at this point from Stoler: “If every document comes layered with the received account of earlier events and the cultural semantics of a political moment, the issue of official “bias” opens to a different challenge: to identify the conditions of possibility that shaped what warranted repetitions, what competencies were rewarded in archival writing, what stories could not be told and what could be said.” 35

[42] GarikIa Chengu, “How Slaves Built American Capitalism,” Counter Punch, December 18, 2015, http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/18/how-slaves-built-american-capitalism/.

[43] Frederick Douglass, “If there is no Struggle, there is no progress,” 1857, West Indian Emancipation, a speech at Canandaigua, New York, in which he says “This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue until they are resisted with words, or blows, or with blows.” (emphasis added)

[45] In the same Pacific Region Newsletter where the Black Power Confronts Seminary students is mentioned so is this job announcement. Again, this is July, 1968: “Word is out that Terminal Island, a Federal correctional institution for men and women at San Pedro (near Long Beach) has a chaplaincy opening. Salary range from somewhere around $9,000 to $13,000. Six months clinical training is one of the requirements.” GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[46] In 1989 J.L. Cedarleaf near the end of his life wrote a one page critique against the Executive Director, Duane Parker’s plea for CPE Supervisor to be open to learning about Black Liberation Theology for their students. Cedarleaf rebuked the notion. GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[48] GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

[49] Ibid

[50] Ibid

[51] See John Rea Thomas, A ‘snap Shot’ History, 1975–2000, of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, Inc.: A Celebration of the 75th Anniversary of CPE ([Madison, WI]: J. Thomas, ©2000), 24.

[52] Ibid, 116.

[53] GTU Archive, MSS Collection, GTU 89–5–06. Association For Clinical Pastoral Education. Pacific Region, 1967–98. Box 1. Location: 2/A/2

Final Paper Submitted for HS 5057 American Religious History through the GTU Archives Fall Semester 2015

By Bilal Ansari for Instructor: Randi Walker, PSR

“Whispers” of Black Exclusion In the ACPE Pacific Region GTU Archives

Written by Bilal Ansari