Commission on a Just and Durable Peace (CJDP)

Date of Founding

1940

Date of Abolition

1947

Location

In October 1940, John Foster Dulles proposed to the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), an ecumenical association of Christian denominations in the United States, the establishment of an commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, which was created in January 1941 with Dulles as its chairman. The main aim of the Commission was to mobilise “Christian forces” in the shaping of post-war global order. 19 representatives of the member churches of the FCC were nominated to serve as commissioners, most of them were pastors, academic theologians, and professors of social sciences. The Commission spoke on behalf of the American Protestants churches on international affairs.

The Commission appeared to be highly effective and powerful in influencing public opinion in the U.S. In the early years of the war. Under the influence of what later became known as the ‘Christian realist’ school of political thought, associated with thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr and Henry Van Dusen, the CJDP supported US involvement in the Second World War at a time when most liberal theologians had pacifist sympathies. Later, in 1943, it pleaded for the creation a new international organisation to replace the League of Nations through an action programme called Six Pillars of Peace. This statement was distributed to churches and politicians throughout the U.S. and abroad and strengthened collaboration with its British counterpart, the Peace Aims Group.

Dulles and other CJDP members were also active in the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences of 1944 and 1945, where the Allied nations agreed to set up the United Nations as an organisation to protect and uphold a new global order. When Dulles rose to a more prominent political role in the US, the Commission proceeded without him for two more years. Eventually, it was superseded by the creation of the Commission of the Churches for International Affairs in 1946 and dissolved in 1947.