wfn.org | Dean Kelley, NCCCUSA Religious Liberty, Dies

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National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.
Contact: Carol J. Fouke, NCC, 212-870-2252
Internet: carol_fouke.parti@ecunet.org
Contact: Carol J. Fouke, NCC, 212-870-2252

NCC5/12/97       FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

REV. DEAN M. KELLEY, PRE-EMINENT RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 
EXPERT, DIES

 NEW YORK, May 12 ---- The Rev. Dean M. Kelley, 
70, widely recognized for his pre-eminence as a 
religious liberty expert, died early Sunday (May 11) 
at his West Swanzey, N.H., home following a 15-month 
battle against cancer.

 From his position as Executive for Religious 
Liberty on the staff of the National Council of 
Churches (1960-1990), and thereafter, in semi-
retirement, as NCC Counselor on Religious Liberty 
until he died, Mr. Kelley defended the religious 
freedom of groups, no matter how mainline or 
controversial, and vehemently opposed 
"deprogramming."

He held the conviction that the threat to the 
religious freedom of anyone was a threat to all.  
This led Mr. Kelley, a United Methodist minister 
clearly committed to his own Christian faith, to go 
to bat for the First Amendment rights of groups as 
diverse as the Unification Church, Taos Pueblo 
Indians, Church of Scientology, Old Order Amish, 
Christian Scientists, Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims 
and mainline Protestants.

 He wrote and filed scores of amicus curiae 
briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts, 
offered testimony to Congressional bodies, wrote 
dozens of articles and several books, gave hundreds 
of interviews and spoke widely on church-state 
issues across North America and Europe.  He also 
wrote hymns and poetry.

 Mr. Kelley also regularly convened religious 
liberty specialists "from left to right" at national 
conferences and in working committees, including the 
NCC's Committee on Religious Liberty.  Those 
assembled often held diametrically opposed positions 
on how best to assure religious liberty, but Mr. 
Kelley kept them talking, sharing information and 
clarifying issues, commented Mitchell A. Tyner, 
Associate General Counsel for the Seventh-day 
Adventist Church, Silver Spring, Md.

 Mr. Kelley's 1977 book, Why Churches Should Not 
Pay Taxes, continues to serve as the "textbook" on 
that issue, said the Rev. Oliver Thomas, Maryville, 
Tenn., now the NCC's Counsel for Religious Liberty.  
"Dean, more than any one person in the United 
States, is responsible for religious organizations 
retaining their tax-exempt status," he said.

 When he died, Mr. Kelley was nearing completion 
of the final edit of a five-volume treatise, The Law 
of Church and State in America, forthcoming from 
Greenwood Press.  Religious liberty colleagues have 
pledged to complete the work, which Mr. Kelley began 
more than 20 years ago.

 Recently, Mr. Kelley has been concerned about 
persecution of new religious movements, and has 
written two articles criticizing the U.S. 
government's role in the deaths of more than 90 
members of an Adventist sect near Waco, Texas.  He 
conducted face-to-face interviews with survivors of 
that assault.

 "The only time I saw Dean cry was when he was 
reporting to us about those interviews," said the 
Rev. N.J. L'Heureux, Jr., Executive Director of the 
Queens (N.Y.) Federation of Churches and Vice 
Chairperson of the NCC's Committee on Religious 
Liberty.  "He concluded that a strong sense of faith 
bound those people together, and grieved the Federal 
Government's cavalier, vicious treatment of them."

 Mr. Kelley organized successful opposition to 
seven successive efforts to amend the First 
Amendment to permit prayer in public schools and was 
a key force in the passage of the Equal Access Act, 
which protects the rights of students in public 
schools to form religious clubs.

He was instrumental in shaping church-state 
safeguards in the Elementary and Secondary Education 
Act of 1965.  He was co-director, with Charles 
Whelan, S.J., of a three-year Project on Church, 
State and Taxation funded by the Lilly Endowment, 
and edited the November 1979 issue of the Annals of 
the American Academy of Political and Social Science 
on "The Uneasy Boundary: Church and State.

 The Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, NCC General 
Secretary, paid tribute to Mr. Kelley's "outstanding 
leadership in the area of church-state relations.  
His scholarship and diligence on behalf of the 
unique American treasure of free exercise of 
religion rendered a distinguished career in service 
to the church."

 She commented that Mr. Kelley's "love for the 
church" also "led him to ponder the loss of 
membership in mainline churches."  His 1972 volume, 
Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, "remains a 
classic in the field," she said.  

"At the Council," Dr. Campbell said,  Dean was 
a dedicated ecumenist, a mentor to younger staff, an 
advisor to several general secretaries and a 
faithful proponent of the need and urgency for 
social justice within our land," including racial 
justice and justice for women.  He will be deeply 
missed and mourned by so many within the NCC and 
across the nation, she said.

 Dean M. Kelley was born June 1, 1926, in 
Cheyenne, Wyo.  He graduated from Denver University 
(A.B., 1946) and the Iliff School of Theology 
(Master of Theology, 1949).  He received the 
Elizabeth Iliff Warren Fellowship in 1949 for 
graduate study in sociology at Columbia University.

 Following ordination, he served local churches 
in Oak Creek, Colo., and in East Meadow, West 
Hampton Beach, Queens and The Bronx, N.Y., for 13 
years.  While pastor of the Crawford Memorial United 
Methodist Church in The Bronx, he organized a three-
year study of church and state for the denomination, 
which led to his joining the NCC's staff in 1960.

 He organized a National Study Conference on 
Church and State for the NCC in 1964, a consultation 
on Churches and Tax Law in 1975, and two conferences 
on Government Intervention in Religious Affairs in 
1981 and 1984.  In 1991 he organized a Bicentennial 
Conference on the Religion Clauses at the University 
of Pennsylvania Law School.  He has been listed in 
Who's Who in America since 1968 (until he retired 
from full-time service in 1990).

 Mr. Kelley served on local and national boards 
of the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1960s, 
and until just last week was on the boards of the 
American Conference on Religious Movements and 
International Academy for Freedom of Religion and 
Belief.  He was a member of the New York Annual 
Conference of the United Methodist Church, and 
attended the Community Church of West Swanzey. 

 Mr. Kelley and Maryon Hoyle were married June 
8, 1946, in Denver, Colo.  He is survived by his 
wife; their daughter Lenore Wadsworth and son-in-law 
Stephen of West Swanzey, N.H., and one grandchild, 
Mark Kelley Wadsworth.

 A graveside service will be held Wednesday, May 
14, at West Swanzey Cemetery.  The Fletcher Funeral 
Home in Keene, N.H., is handling arrangements.  
Memorial services are planned for Sept. 15 in 
Washington, D.C., and at a date yet to be set in New 
York City.  

The family requests that in lieu of flowers, 
memorial contributions be made to the National 
Council of Churches and designated for the NCC's 
Committee on Religious Liberty.  (Attn. NCC General 
Secretary, Room 880, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, 
NY 10115).

 ADDITIONAL TRIBUTES TO DEAN M. KELLEY:

 JAMES DUNN, Executive Director, Baptist Joint 
Committee on Public Affairs, Washington, D.C.: Dean 
Kelley was a towering figure in American religion.  
He was passionately committed to real religious 
freedom for everyone.  As a good Methodist he knew 
that religion of the heart was all that counted with 
God and he fought and thought with all his might to 
guarantee that every individual had freedom of 
conscience.

 FOREST MONTGOMERY, Counsel, Office for 
Governmental Affairs, National Association of 
Evangelicals, Washington, D.C.: Dean Kelley, a man 
of tremendous talent, was totally committed to 
religious liberty.  He was equally at home with 
liberals and conservatives, whether theological or 
political.  He was a Christian with a gentle spirit, 
a willingness to listen and ready to act.  He had an 
ability to seek consensus without sacrificing 
principle, a talent exceeded only by his gift of 
total recall.  He will be sorely missed.

 STEVEN T. MCFARLAND, Director, Christian Legal 
Society's Center for Law and Religious Freedom, 
Annandale, Va.: The nation has lost one of its pre-
eminent experts on the relationship between religion 
and government.  Religious freedom was not just an 
intellectual exercise for Rev. Kelley, it was his 
passion and professional focus.  Anyone, regardless 
of faith background, who defended religious liberty 
found a friend in the Rev. Dean Kelley; anyone who 
suppressed it or was denominationally selective in 
upholding it met an imposing foe.  While the church 
was mute about the Waco disaster, Dean's exhaustive 
investigation pricked our conscience.  When many 
fretted over the prospect of student religious 
meetings before class at public high schools, Dean 
called for equal access, confident in the benign 
effects of free religious speech.

 MARK CHOPKO, General Counsel, United States 
Catholic Conference, Washington, D.C.: Dean Kelley 
will be missed by everyone who had the honor and 
pleasure of his company.  He was a champion of 
religious rights.  He was a scholar.  He was a 
joyful gentle man who brightened what he touched.  I 
learned much from him about the craft of 
constitutional law.

 MARC STERN, Lawyer, American Jewish Congress, 
New York City: Dean and I worked together on a lot 
of religious liberty litigation and legislation.  I 
was the outside reader of his upcoming treatise.  It 
was easy to forget it wasn't done by a lawyer, but 
by someone whose degree was in theology..When the 
U.S. Supreme Court was hearing arguments on the 
Equal Access Case in January 1990, I was one of the 
attorneys for the school board that was challenging 
the act, which held that students could organize 
their own religious clubs if the school wasn't 
involved.  Dean was there arguing in favor of kids 
having their own religious clubs.  It was only then 
that I learned he was not a member of the bar.  Dean 
had strongly held positions and still retained 
everyone's affection.  He held on to his beliefs 
even when they weren't popular.  

 EARL TRENT, House Counsel for National 
Ministries, American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A., 
Valley Forge, Pa.: I met Dean when I came to NM in 
1974.  No one had a greater influence on me in terms 
of the importance of religious liberty.  This 
probably was the primary reason I decided to focus a 
good deal of my energy on issues of church and state 
and religious liberty and continue to be involved in 
those issues today.  I found him to be scholarly, 
prophetic and honest..he had an appreciation of how 
restrictions on unconventional religious groups 
would affect all of us.  He was a principled person.

 MITCHELL A. TYNER, Associate General Counsel, 
Seventh-day Adventist Church, Silver Spring, Md.: 
Dean was a scholar and a gentleman.  He was a very 
calm man who worked in an area that generates strong 
passions and very divisive opinions.  There are 
those whose greatest fear is that government will 
cease to be neutral and will sponsor religion.  
Others fear government will be so neutral that the 
government will become hostile to religion.  There 
is tension between the "Free Exercise" and "Non-
Establishment" clauses and within the religious 
community and Dean modulated those tensions.  He 
would bring to the NCC Committee on Religious 
Liberty a spectrum of opinions on church-state 
matters and keep us all talking with each other.

 THE REV. N.J. L'HEUREUX, JR., Vice Chair, NCC 
Committee on Religious Liberty, and Executive 
Director, The Queens Federation of Churches, 
Richmond Hill, N.Y.: Dean spoke up for people, 
including those in some of the newer religious 
movements, whose religious freedom would have 
otherwise been thrown away by an uncaring majority.  
This wasn't merely an academic exercise but a strong 
commitment that religious people should be respected 
in their style of piety and worship.  Dean was a 
good friend and a wise counsel.  I spoke with him at 
about 4 p.m. Friday (May 9) and he was still working 
on completing his five-volume treatise.  He was 
still regularly doing two hours of work in the 
morning and two later in the day.

 THE REV. OLIVER THOMAS, NCC Counsel for 
Religious Liberty, Maryville, Tenn.: Dean was 
responsible for mentoring more religious liberty 
advocates than anyone else in the United States.  No 
one worked longer in the field or mentored so many 
of us over his four decades of work.  We can take 
comfort in the fact that Dean Kelley's vision of 
full religious liberty for all is finally taking 
hold.  We are a genuinely pluralistic society in 
which we try to respect others' viewpoints.  He was 
a man of principle who understood that each of us 
has a stake in each other's religious liberty.  What 
applies to you will eventually apply to me.

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