The Coalescence of Religious and Secular Radicalism: The Ecumenical Fellowship and the War on Poverty in Houston, 1964–69

Historians of twentieth-century American politics have begun to reevaluate the War on Poverty of the 1960s by investigating how its programs operated at the grassroots. Much of this recent scholarship asks important questions about how these programs interacted with local struggles for racial and economic justice. An interesting strain of this historiographical trend recognizes that in many communities the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) played a critical role in the War on Poverty. This much needed corrective suggests that in many instances VISTA and local volunteer sponsoring organizations, rather than community action agencies, carried the potential to bring about community empowerment and to challenge the status quo. This paper will attempt to answer the question of why the VISTA program possessed most of the potential for bringing about radical social change in the city of Houston. I will probe deeply the ideologies of the VISTA sponsoring organizations and the volunteers themselves in order to illustrate the coalescence of prophetic religion and radical politics that fueled their efforts. Inspired by the writings of theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Harvey Cox, as well as radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, these grassroots antipoverty activists employed the VISTA volunteers to empower the city’s poor residents through radical community organizing. As these Protestant religious activists carried out programs in Houston’s poorest neighborhoods, they frequently clashed with members of the city’s designated community action agency who administered the mainstream liberal antipoverty effort. These ideological conflicts reveal the significant limitations of the liberal antipoverty effort as well as the possibilities that existed for grassroots activists to bring about lasting social change through the War on Poverty. Most importantly, the competing philosophies of the VISTA sponsoring organizations and the city’s official community action agency challenge the standard liberal-conservative binary that permeates the traditional War on Poverty literature.