Remembering Another John Paul Jones

It recently came to my attention that a lot of quotation websites list the following under the name of John Paul Jones of the Continental Navy:

If fear is cultivated it will become stronger. If faith is cultivated it will achieve the mastery. We have a right to believe that faith is the stronger emotion because it is positive whereas fear is negative.

Jones might indeed have spoken about fear, I thought, but where would he have recorded his ideas about faith? Why would he express himself in such short, twentieth-century sentences? And what eighteenth-century thinker would refer to faith as an emotion?

Some tactical Googling revealed the answer. These words appeared in Forbes Magazine in 1952, attributed to “John Paul Jones, D.D.”—no doubt the longtime minister at the Union Church at Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

The Rev. Dr. Jones previously made Time magazine with a dramatic anti-Nazi sermon in 1939. In the year after the quotation’s appearance in Forbes, Jones had prompted a controversy over “the social gospel” by preaching on “Religion, Patriotism, and Communism.”

That prompted some grumbling in the congregation, and in June 1954 Jones suddenly announced his resignation. At first he told the New York Times in June that the kerfuffle over his sermon had nothing to do with his decision, but the next month the newspaper reported the minister had rescinded his resignation after the congregation “cleared up” just that situation by a vote and letter in his favor.

As Jones then described it, the controversy was whether Union Church “should be a ‘liberal’ church, whose minister and program represent a social as well as a personal gospel, seeking to interpret spiritual principles and obligations in relationship to the economic, political and human relations problems in a controversial age and society; or should ‘stick to the Bible’ and avoid controversial matters such as, to quote one letter, ‘your racial equality.’”

The Union Church at Bay Ridge now remembers Jones this way:

Dr. John Paul Jones (1931) was a man ahead of his time, who often spoke on labor and other seminal issues that defined the first part of the century. He sometimes exchanged pulpits with a minister from Bedford-Stuyvesant and with a rabbi. He was a dramatic, gripping preacher and one of the first civil rights activists.

Jones finally left the pulpit in 1956 after a quarter-century.

Just to confuse matters, Bay Ridge has a John Paul Jones Park, but that’s named after the Continental Navy commander. It includes a 1916 monument to “the first resistance made to British arms in New York state” in August 1776 and a 1980 flagpole honoring Capt. Jones.