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For a Methodist prelate, Oxnam has two unusual hobbies; the theater and art. He and his wife go to every play they can and have a good collection of paintings (mostly of the Barbizon school), including a Sargent and a Sir Joshua Reynolds: Girl with a Bird. When the mayor of Omaha tried to censor some profanity from the Lunt-Fontanne production of Idiot's Delight, Oxnam got him to drop the attempt, declaring: "Censorship is more dangerous than an occasional realistic line. If the mayor decides to remain in politics, may I suggest a theme song for his coming campaign: 'Every little Damma must be taken from our drama.' Censorship is, in fact, 'Idiot's Delight.' "
From 1939 to 1944, Oxnam was bishop of the Boston area. There he had one notable success — persuading Cardinal O'Connell to sign a joint statement with him condemning the 1942-43 wave of anti-Semitism in Boston—and one small failure, in his drive for ever-increasing personal efficiency. The latter was his scheme for hooking a dictation machine, to his car battery, so that he could park at spare moments and dash off a few letters. After finding himself marooned a few times with a dead battery, he abandoned the experiment. But he was the first bishop in the area's history to visit all 800 of its Methodist churches.
"Wesley Organized . . ." In 1944, Oxnam was U.S. Protestantism's man of the year. He was elected president of the Federal Council of Churches and also became bishop of the New York area, Methodism's most important diocese, where he succeeded Bishop Francis J. McConnell, another famed liberal. He has carried on McConnell's work. At the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, for example, he found no racial discrimination against patients but a rule excluding colored candidates from nursing school. After months of firm pressure from Oxnam, the hospital board repealed the rule.
Oxnam attended both the Oxford and Edinburgh conferences of 1937 and has been active on the provisional committee for the World Council. Says he:
"Before Amsterdam, cooperating between the churches was occasional. From Amsterdam onwards, it will be continuous. The difference is that between the traveling lecturer who may inspire and the school which educates. Whitfield preached and passed; Wesley organized and abides."
How long will the World Council abide? Will it ever turn the churches into The Church? Can it meet the challenge of a secular century?
On these questions Amsterdam met an even stiffer stalemate than on its attempt to define the word "church." There is a great gulf between U.S. activism and continental Europe's apparently passivist theology. Most U.S. Christians, as shown by Bromley Oxnam's tireless example, believe in muscular, active Christianity—serving their faith by works. To U.S. liberal Protestantism, most European Christians have a let-George-do-it reliance on God.