Walter W. Van Kirk

Nationality

U.S.A.

Date of Birth

1891

Date of Death

1956

Political
Preference

Walter William Van Kirk was the secretary of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America’s Department of International Justice and Goodwill. This department was responsible for the creation of the Commission for a Just and Durable Peace in December 1940, of which Van Kirk took up the secretariat. At this point in time, the intervention of the US in the Second World War was still very uncertain. Van Kirk himself, together with Harry Emerson Fosdick and others, belonged to the non-interventionist and pacifist faction, who held that all war was evil and against Christian principles. The opposing group of the interventionists was led by Reinhold Niebuhr and Henry P. Van Dusen of Union Theological Seminary in New York. John Foster Dulles did not side with either faction and was therefore approached by Van Kirk to lead the CJDP. Together with Dulles, Van Kirk visited Britain in 1942 and met the Peace Aims Group there, a group with a similar purpose to the CJDP. The work PAG and CJDP did during wartime continued post-war with the CCIA. Van Kirk was the main organiser of its founding conference.