Chapter III: Part 3

The middle classes are in fact quite incapable of any high degree of social imagination. Their experience is too limited to give them a clear picture of the real issues in modern industrial life. Non-union mines may organize in West Virginia and reduce miners to a starvation wage without challenging the conscience of a great middle class nation. If the children of strikers are starving it is more difficult to find support for them than to win contributors for the missions of the church. America may arouse the resentment of the world by its greed and all the good people of the American prairie will feel nothing but injured innocence from these European and Asiatic reactions to our greed.

Men are clearly not very lovely in the mass. One can maintain confidence in them only by viewing them at close range. Then one may see the moral nobility of unselfish parenthood, the pathetic eagerness of father and mother to give their children more of life than they enjoyed; the faithfulness of wives to their erring husbands; the grateful respect of mature children for their old parents; the effort of this and that courageous soul to maintain personal integrity in a world which continually tempts to dishonesty, and the noble aspirations of hearts that must seem quite unheroic to the unheeding world.

The same middle classes which seem so blind to the larger moral problems of society have, after all, the most wholesome family life of any group in society.

_1926_

Here is a preacher whom I have suspected of cowardice for years because he never deviated by a hair’s breadth from the economic prejudices of his wealthy congregation. I thought he knew better but was simply afraid to speak out and seek to qualify the arch-conservatism of his complacent crowd with a little Christian idealism. But I was mistaken. I have just heard that he recently included in his sermon a tirade against women who smoke cigarettes and lost almost a hundred of his fashionable parishioners. He is evidently not lacking courage in matters upon which he has deep convictions. Nobody, for that matter, lacks courage when convictions are strong. Courage is simply the rigorous devotion to one set of values against other values and interests.

Protestantism’s present impotence in qualifying the economic and social life of the nation is due not so much to the pusillanimity of the clerical leaders as to its individualistic traditions. The church honestly regards it of greater moment to prevent women from smoking cigarettes than to establish more Christian standards in industrial enterprise. A minister who tries to prevent fashionable women from smoking cigarettes is simply trying to enforce a code of personal habit established in the middle classes of the nineteenth century upon the plutocratic classes of the twentieth century. The effort is not only vain but has little to do with essential Christianity.

I would not deny that some real values may be at stake in such questions of personal habits. But they affect the dominant motives which determine the spirituality or sensuality of character but slightly. The church does not seem to realize how unethical a conventionally respectable life may be.

_1926_

Some of these young business men in the congregation would compare favorably with any leaders who grace the pulpits of our churches. Their family relations seem to be almost ideal. They are trying honestly to live a Christian life in their business relations. Lack of power sometimes means that they cannot go as far in experimenting with Christian values as they would like. But they are not complacent. They are eager to learn, and are fair and careful in their judgments. Their virtues are acquired with less self-conscious effort than those of more studious people. They think and plan, but they do not stop the adventure of life to meditate upon its difficulties and inadequacies.

Extravert people are on the whole happier and more wholesome than the introverts. If they do not act too unreflectively, they are able to define their goals fairly accurately and they certainly pursue them with more robust energy than do the moody intellectuals.

It is surprising, too, how considerate and generous they are in their relations with one another and with me. They take my impetuosities for granted and exhibit little pettiness in their dealings with one another. The women do not get along quite so well together. They are too new at playing the game of life with others. But I will not belabor that point. I may be exhibiting bachelor prejudices in making it. At any rate I am willing to compare this group of young men who bear the burdens of our church with any faculty group in the country. They can teach you nothing about philosophy, but they do teach you much about life and they reënforce your confidence in human nature.

_1926_

After Attending a Jewish-Christian Conference

Fellowship with peoples of other religious groups always results in the grateful experience of discovering unsuspected treasuries of common sentiment and conviction. More contact between enlightened Jews and Christians would change the emphasis in many a Christian homily. This conference was rewarding in many ways. But at one point I fail absolutely to understand my Jewish friends. All of them, high and low, intelligent and those who are less so, insist that the story of the crucifixion is the real root of all or of most antisemitism, and they seem to have some vain hope that broadminded Christians will be able and willing to erase the story of the cross from the gospel record. The least they expect is that the odium of the cross be placed upon the Romans rather than the Jews.

I can see that there would be some advantage in ascribing a historic sin to a people who live only in history and who can therefore not be victimized by belated vindictive prejudices. But would that be history? The record is pretty plain and the fact that the Jewish elders rather than Roman soldiers were the real crucifiers is supported not only by evidence but by logic. The prophets of religion are always martyred by the religious rather than by the irreligious. The Romans, being irreligious, were not sufficiently fanatical to initiate the crucifixion.

It must be admitted that the phraseology of the Fourth Gospel may easily incite the prejudices of the ignorant. But the enlightened will find a better method to allay any antisemitic feeling which may result from the record than to ascribe the crucifixion to the Romans. They need only ascribe it to the general limitations of human nature and society. Jews are not the only people who martyr and who have martyred their prophets. The history of every nation and every people makes the crucifixion a perennial and a universal historical fact.

That is the very reason why Christians can no more afford to eliminate the cross than they can ascribe it to the fortunately extinct Romans. Anyone who incarnates the strategy of love as Jesus did meets the resistance and incites the passions of human society. The respectabilities of any human society are based upon moral compromises and every community is as anxious to defend these compromises against the prophet who presents some higher moral logic as against the criminal who imperils the structure from below.

The cross is central in the Christian religion, moreover, because it symbolizes a cosmic as well as an historic truth. Love conquers the world, but its victory is not an easy one. The price of all creativity and redemption is pain. Most modern religionists who understand the God of creation and not the God of redemption fail in understanding the latter precisely because they do not see how closely related creation and redemption are. Which simply means that they don’t understand that creation is a painful process in which the old does not give way to the new without trying to overcome it.

The cross of Jesus is truly the most adequate symbol of both the strategy and the destiny of love not only in history but in the universe. We may grant our Jewish brethren that it is not the only possible symbol of eternal verities, but it is a true one, and it cannot therefore be sacrificed.

Incidentally, I believe that Jewish people have a tendency to overestimate the religious bases of antisemitism. Racial rather than religious prejudice is the dominant factor in this social disease. All ignorant people hate or fear those who deviate from their type. Religious divergences may be as important as cultural and physical differences, but they are not dominant. The Jews could accept our religion and if they maintained their racial integrity they would still suffer from various types of social ostracism. After all the Negroes are Christian, but that hasn’t helped them much. Some Jews dislike this comparison very much. They do not like to be put upon the same basis with the Negroes. But that reveals unrealistic social analysis. The majority group is intolerant of minorities whether their culture is inferior, superior or equal.

_1926_

One is hardly tempted to lose confidence in the future after listening to a group of young people discussing the important problems of life. Of course the number who approach the future reflectively and with real appreciation for the issues involved in the readjustment of traditions to new situations is not large. There are not many such groups and even in these the number who really take part in the discussion is small.

Nevertheless their wholesomeness is impressive. I can’t always withhold a sense of pity for them. With traditions crumbling and accepted standards inundated by a sea of moral relativity, they have a desperate task on their hands to construct new standards adequate for their happiness. There is always the temptation to be too rebellious or too traditional, to be scornful of the old standard even when it preserves obvious virtues, or to flee to it for fear of being lost in the confusion of new standards. Yet the best way of avoiding these dangers is to subject them to the scrutiny of a thoughtful group which knows how to discern the limitations of any position, old or new.

On the whole the discussions of our young people at the church seem to be more wholesome than those in which I participate in the colleges. Most of these young folks have assumed responsibilities and are therefore not as inclined to be morbidly critical and sceptical as the college group. The cases cited from their own experience help to give vitality to their discussion, and they are not enervated by that extreme sophistication which imperils the college youth and tempts him to end every discussion and discount every discovery with the reflection, “This also is vanity.”

I really wonder how we are going to build a civilization sufficiently intelligent to overcome dangerous prejudices and to emancipate itself from the inadequacies of conventional morality without creating the kind of sophistication which destroys all values by its scepticism and dampens every enthusiasm by its cynicism. In America that possibility is particularly dangerous because our intellectualism is of the sophomoric type. There is no generation, or only one generation, between the pioneers who conquered the prairies and these youngsters who are trying to absorb the whole of modern culture in four years. The traditions against which they react are less adequate, less modified by experience and culture, than those which inform the peoples of Europe.

And the teachers who guide them into the world of new knowledge are frequently themselves so recently emancipated that they try to obscure their cultural, religious and moral heritages by extreme iconoclasm. It is difficult to be patient with one of these smart aleck Ph.D.s on a western campus who imagines that he can impress the world with his learning by being scornful of everything that was thought or done before this century.

_1926_

A letter from Hyde brings the sad news that C---- has lost his pastorate. I am not surprised. He is courageous but tactless. Undoubtedly he will regard himself as one of the Lord’s martyrs. Perhaps he is. Perhaps loyalty to principle will always appear as tactlessness from the perspective of those who don’t agree with you. But I agree with C---- and still think him wanting in common sense. At least he is pedagogically very awkward.

You can’t rush into a congregation which has been fed from its very infancy on the individualistic ethic of Protestantism and which is immersed in a civilization where ethical individualism runs riot, and expect to develop a social conscience among the people in two weeks. Nor have you a right to insinuate that they are all hypocrites just because they don’t see what you see.

Of course it is not easy to speak the truth in love without losing a part of the truth, and therefore one ought not be too critical of those who put their emphasis on the truth rather than on love. But if a man is not willing to try, at least, to be pedagogical, and if in addition he suffers from a martyr complex, he has no place in the ministry. Undoubtedly there are more ministers who violate their conscience than such as suffer for conscience sake. But that is no reason why those who have a robust conscience should not try to master the pedagogical art. Perhaps if they would learn nothing else but to be less emotional and challenging in the pulpit and more informative and educational not only in the pulpit but in their work with smaller groups, they could really begin to change the viewpoints and perspectives of their people.

_1926_

Spoke tonight to the Churchmen’s Club of ----. The good Bishop who introduced me was careful to disavow all my opinions before I uttered them. He assured the brethren, however, that I would make them think. I am getting tired of these introductions which are intended to impress the speaker with the Christian virtue of the audience and its willingness to listen to other then conventional opinions. The chairman declares in effect, “Here is a hairbrained fellow who talks nonsense. But we are Christian gentlemen who can listen with patience and sympathy to even the most impossible opinions.” It is just a device to destroy the force of a message and to protect the sensitive souls who might be rudely shocked by a religious message which came in conflict with their interests and prejudices.

There is something pathetic about the timidity of the religious leader who is always afraid of what an honest message on controversial issues might do to his organization. I often wonder when I read the eleventh chapter of Hebrews in which faith and courage are practically identified whether it is psychologically correct to assume that the one flows from the other. Courage is a rare human achievement. If it seems to me that preachers are more cowardly than other groups; that may be because I know myself. But I must confess that I haven’t discovered much courage in the ministry. The average parson is characterized by suavity and circumspection rather than by any robust fortitude. I do not intend to be mean in my criticism because I am a coward myself and find it tremendously difficult to run counter to general opinion. Yet religion has always produced some martyrs and heroes.

I suppose religion in its most vital form does make men indifferent to popular approval. The apostle Paul averred that it was a small thing to be judged of men because he was seeking the approval of God. In a genuinely religious soul faith does seem to operate in that way. Issues are regarded _sub specie aeternitatis_ and the judgment of contemporaries becomes insignificant. But the average man fashions his standards in the light of prevailing customs and opinions. It could hardly be expected that every religious leader would be filled with prophetic ardor and heedless courage. Many good men are naturally cautious. But it does seem that the unique resource of religion ought to give at least a touch of daring to the religious community and the religious leader.

_1926_

The excitement about the Federation of Labor convention in Detroit has subsided, but there are echoes of the event in various magazines. Several ministers have been commended for “courage” because they permitted labor leaders to speak in their churches who represented pretty much their own convictions and said pretty much what they had been saying for years.

It does seem pretty bad to have the churches lined up so solidly against labor and for the open shop policy of the town. The ministers are hardly to blame, except if they are to be condemned for not bringing out the meaning of Christianity for industrial relations more clearly in their ministry previous to the moment of crisis. As it was, few of the churches were sufficiently liberal to be able to risk an heretical voice in their pulpits. The idea that these A. F. of L. leaders are dangerous heretics is itself a rather illuminating clue to the mind of Detroit. I attended several sessions of the convention and the men impressed me as having about the same amount of daring and imagination as a group of village bankers.

The ministers of the country are by various methods dissociating themselves from the Detroit churches and are implying that they would have acted more generously in a like situation. Perhaps so. There are few cities in which wealth, suddenly acquired and proud of the mechanical efficiency which produced it, is so little mellowed by social intelligence. Detroit produces automobiles and is not yet willing to admit that the poor automata who are geared in on the production lines have any human problems.

Yet we differ only in degree from the rest of the country. The churches of America are on the whole thoroughly committed to the interests and prejudices of the middle classes. I think it is a bit of unwarranted optimism to expect them to make any serious contribution to the reorganization of society. I still have hopes that they will become sufficiently intelligent and heroic to develop some qualifying considerations in the great industrial struggle, but I can no longer envisage them as really determining factors in the struggle. Neither am I able for this reason to regard them as totally useless, as some of the critics do.

The ethical reconstruction of modern industrial society is, to be sure, a very important problem, but it is not the only concern of mankind. The spiritual amenities and moral decencies which the churches help to develop and preserve in the private lives of individuals are worth something for their own sake. Yet it must be obvious that if anyone is chosen by talent and destiny to put his life into the industrial struggle, the church is hardly his best vehicle.

The church is like the Red Cross service in war time. It keeps life from degenerating into a consistent inhumanity, but it does not materially alter the fact of the struggle itself. The Red Cross neither wins the war nor abolishes it. Since the struggle between those who have and those who have not is a never-ending one, society will always be, in a sense, a battleground. It is therefore of some importance that human loveliness be preserved outside of the battle lines. But those who are engaged in this task ought to realize that the brutalities of the conflict may easily negate the most painstaking humanizing efforts behind the lines, and that these efforts may become a method for evading the dangers and risks of the battlefield.

If religion is to contribute anything to the solution of the industrial problem, a more heroic type of religion than flourishes in the average church must be set to the task. I don’t believe that the men who are driven by that kind of religion need to dissociate themselves from the churches, but they must bind themselves together in more effective association than they now possess.

_1926_

After preaching at ---- University this morning I stopped off at ---- and dropped in at the Presbyterian church for the evening service. The service was well attended and the music was very good. The minister had a sermon which might best be described as a fulsome eulogy of Jesus Christ. I wonder whether sermons like that mean anything. He just piled up adjectives. Every hero of ancient and modern times was briefly described in order that he might be made to bow before the superior virtue of the Lord. But the whole thing left me completely cold. The superiority of Jesus was simply dogmatically asserted and never adequately analyzed. There was not a thing in the sermon that would give the people a clue to the distinctive genius of Jesus or that would help them to use the resources of his life for the solution of their own problems.

Through the whole discourse there ran the erroneous assumption that Christians are real followers of Jesus and no effort was made to describe the wide chasm which yawns between the uncompromising idealism of the Galilean and the current morality. I wonder how many sermons of that type are still being preached. If that sermon is typical it would explain much of the conventional tameness of the church.

How much easier it is to adore an ideal character than to emulate it.

_1926_

That resolution we passed in our pastors’ meeting, calling upon the police to be more rigorous in the enforcement of law, is a nice admission of defeat upon the part of the church. Every one of our cities has a crime problem, not so much because the police are not vigilant as because great masses of men in an urban community are undisciplined and chaotic souls, emancipated from the traditions which guided their fathers and incapable of forming new and equally potent cultural and moral restraints. The children of the puritans are in this respect no better than the children of the immigrants. Both have reacted against traditions which do not fit their new circumstances and both are unable to escape license by new and better standards.

Perhaps the real reason that we live such chaotic lives in urban communities is because a city is not a society at all, and moral standards are formed only in societies and through the sense of mutual obligation which neighbors feel for one another. A big city is not a society held together by human bonds. It is a mass of individuals, held together by a productive process. Its people are spiritually isolated even though they are mechanically dependent upon one another. In such a situation it is difficult to create and preserve the moral and cultural traditions which each individual needs to save his life from anarchy.

All of us do not live in moral chaos. But in so far as we escape it, it is due to our loyalty to religious, moral and cultural traditions which have come out of other ages and other circumstances. That is why churches, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish, however irrelevant their ethical idealism may be to the main facts of an industrial civilization, are nevertheless indispensable. It is enough that our society should be morally chaotic without also losing the kind of moral restraint which still determines the life of many individuals.

There is something very pathetic about the efforts of almost every one of our large cities to restore by police coercion what has been lost by the decay of moral and cultural traditions. But of course we do have to save ourselves from anarchy, even if it must be done by force. Only I think the church would do well to leave the police problem alone. If violence must be used temporarily, let the state do so without undue encouragement from the church. The church must work in another field and if it has failed in that field, it cannot recoup its failures by giving advice to the police department. The priest as a sublimated policeman is a sorry spectacle.

_1926_

We were discussing the first commandment in the preparatory class today. The boys were trying to see whether “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me” meant anything in modern life. It is a constant source of surprise and delight to see with what profundity these boys and girls deal with the problems of life. They decided that anything that we loved more than God was in effect another god. But how do we love God, I asked. There were the usual answers which show how some children still identify religion with religious practices and customs, particularly Sunday observance. But one of the boys came through with this answer, “We love God by loving the best we know.” That seemed to me not bad at all.

Now we put on the blackboard all those interests which threatened to become gods to us: money, clothes (volunteered by a girl, of course), automobiles, eating, playing. We took up each one of these interests and tried to determine when they were in danger of becoming too central in life. On automobiles the boys didn’t have much conscience except that they thought one ought not to clean them on Sunday. They take the cult of the automobile for granted as everyone else. The girls had quite a time defining the place where clothes cease to be a legitimate interest and become an obsession. I was probably a poor one to lead them in that discussion.

On the matter of eating there was considerable difficulty. “We have to eat to grow,” said one of the boys. Correct answer. When then, is eating a form of idolatry? “When we eat all the time,” suggested another boy. That left Junior in a corner. “I like to eat most all the time,” he confessed ruefully. How can a hungry boy be anything but a sceptic about a philosophy of values which does not have eating at the center of it? Thus do the necessities of a robust organism defy the value schemes prompted by tradition or arrived at by reflection.

Junior just about stopped our discussion of comparative values by that confession, “I like to eat most all the time,” and I couldn’t help but think that my pedagogical impotence before this demand of natural life was closely akin to the impotence of the church before a youthful and vigorous national life, immersed in physical values and intent upon physical satisfactions. Our youthful nation is also declaring, “I love to eat most all the time”; and the error in its judgment is not easily overcome by preachment and precept until time and experience will show it the limits of animal satisfactions and teach it that man does not live by bread alone.

_1926_

I had a letter from a young preacher today who told me how he was suffering for truth’s sake. He had merely been telling his congregation that Jesus was a great spiritual teacher, as was Confucius and Laotsze, and that the Christ idea was the product of Greek legend and ancient mythology. His good people were so ignorant, he thought, that they failed to show proper appreciation of his learning and resented his iconoclasm.

I find myself reacting violently to the sophomoric cocksureness of this young fellow. I suppose I am getting old and have made those compromises with the devil of superstition against which the editor of the Christian Register warns so hysterically. But for the life of me I can no more reduce Jesus to the status of a mere Galilean dreamer and teacher than I can accept the orthodox Christologies. The person who can make no distinction between a necessary symbolism and mythology seems to me no better than the wooden-headed conservative who insists that every bit of religious symbolism and poetry must be accepted literally and metaphysically.

It is not easy to define the God idea. Scientifically I suppose God is “the element of spirituality which is integral to reality,” but for all practical and religious purposes I find it both helpful and justified to define him by saying that “God is like Jesus.” The ultimate nature of reality cannot be grasped by science alone; poetic imagination is as necessary as scientific precision. Some of the supposedly ignorant peasants against whom my youthful friend is drawing his heroic sword may have more truth on their side than any fresh young theologue could possibly realize.

_1926_

In the young men’s class this morning we continued our discussion of the Sermon on the Mount. The boys have been making some interesting contributions. On the whole they are sceptical of the practicability of the demands which Jesus makes in the matter of trust and love and forgiveness. It is rather interesting to have this revelation of the basic cynicism of even the adolescent mind. They think that to follow Jesus “would put a business man out of business in no time,” as one expressed it today. Of course, it is better to see the difficulties than to engage in some kind of sentimental avowal of Christian faith without realizing how stubbornly life resists the ideal.

After all, those boys are up against what St. Anthony saw when he was tempted by the vision of the young woman and the old woman. The one meant life but also lust, and the other meant faith but also death. At least that is the way Flaubert has it. It is certainly not easy to separate life from lust without destroying life. Yet Jesus came to give us a more abundant life.

“Maybe it would work if we tried it hard enough,” thought one of the boys today when we discussed the practicability of trusting people. That may be the answer to the whole question.

_1926_

Bishop ---- and I shared the platform tonight. Fortunately, I spoke first so that I did not have to compete with his powerful eloquence. His sermon warmed the heart, but it was based upon the uncritical assumption that modern Christianity is an exact replica of primitive Christianity and is characterized by the same qualities of heroism and faith. There was a disquieting tendency to patronize in the good man’s demeanor. I should think it would be a very difficult achievement for a bishop to be a real Christian. The position is bound to aggravate the inclination to pride which all of us possess. I do not know many bishops intimately. The few that I have known well have been singularly free of arrogance; but they were unusual, for they were saved by a sense of humor which is not frequently found in the pulpit and certainly hardly ever in the episcopacy.

“Be not ye called rabbi,” said Jesus, “and call no man father upon earth, for one is your father which is in heaven.” I am not interested in applying the words of Jesus literally, but it seems to me that the principle involved in these words would wipe out the episcopacy. It wouldn’t leave much justification either for “The Reverend Doctor.” Of course the Christian community cannot do without leaders. But it might learn to save them from pride and arrogance.

The highest type of leadership maintains itself by its intrinsic worth, sans panoply, pomp and power. Of course, there are never enough real leaders to go around. Wherefore it becomes necessary to dress some men up and by other artificial means to give them a prestige and a power which they could not win by their own resources. But it would be well if the church realized how dangerous power and prestige are, and how easily they corrupt a man’s spiritual integrity.

It is certainly not to the credit of the church that it is less eager than the democratic state to circumscribe the authority and socialize the power of the leader. The Methodists try to preserve the proper spirit of humility among the bishops by relegating them to parliamentary impotence once every four years. But who wouldn’t be willing to suffer for that brief period for the sake of the power and authority which the bishop exercises for the rest of the quadrennium?

Somewhere I read the observation of an anthropologist that naked savages could never have evolved a priesthood or an hereditary monarchy. No one is so much superior to his fellows that he deserves the positions of authority which a complex society finally evolves. That is why the leader must be put over with the proper clothes and paraphernalia. The throne and the crown make the king. Even the President of the United States has impressive naval and military aids to offset the unimposing frock which the democratic tradition prescribes. As for the bishop, who could be more awe-inspiring than a hierarch sitting upon his “throne” in his full regalia? That does not apply to Methodist bishops. But they have so much power that they don’t need the panoply.

Think how insufferable bishops might be if they had to be both worshiped and feared. I am afraid that is true of Catholic bishops. Perhaps that is why the Catholic saints are not frequently found in the hierarchy.

_1927_

An impertinent youngster at the forum (midwestern college) accused me today of being an authoritarian because I quoted several modern philosophers and scientists in my address in support of my theistic belief. I made a deep bow before him and congratulated him upon being so proficient in laboratory experiments in every science and so profound in his philosophical meditations that he could arrive at his conclusions without the help of anyone else, scientist or philosopher.

His question did set me thinking on the problem of freedom. Why do we believe what we believe, and why do we do what we do? If the religion of my home had been harsh and unlovely I would probably be today where that young man is, in a position of rebellion against all religion. If I had not had the aid of this helpful professor and that illuminating book when my religious convictions were undergoing adjustment I might not have made the necessary adjustments but would have thrown religious convictions into the discard.

If I were not in a position where human nature reveals itself in its more lovely characteristics would I be able to maintain confidence in the integrity of man, upon which so much of the confidence in God depends? Has the class-conscious worker not a right to dismiss both my political and my religious convictions as bourgeois prejudices? And could I not with equal justice condemn his as myopic views which his resentments against society explain but do not prove true?

What we know as truth is determined by peculiar and individual perspectives. Pressures of environment, influences of heredity, and excellencies and deficiencies of teachers help to determine our life philosophies. We ought therefore to hold them with decent humility and a measure of scepticism. But if we permit ourselves to be tempted into a complete subjectivism and scepticism by these facts, we put an end to all philosophy and ultimately to civilization itself. For civilization depends upon the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who are intelligent enough to know that their values are qualified by their interests and corrupted by their prejudices.

_1927_

Perhaps there is no better illustration of the ethical impotence of the modern church than its failure to deal with the evils and the ethical problems of stock manipulation. Millions in property values are created by pure legerdemain. Stock dividends, watered stock and excessive rise in stock values, due to the productivity of the modern machine, are accepted by the church without a murmur if only a slight return is made by the beneficiaries through church philanthropies.

Here is C---- recapitalizing his business and adding six million dollars in stock. At least five of these millions will not be invested in physical expansion but pocketed by the owner. They simply represent capitalization of expected profits. Once this added burden has been placed upon the industry any demands of the workers for a larger share in the profits will be met by conclusive proof that the stock is earning only a small dividend and that further increase in wages would be “suicidal” to the business.

Meanwhile C---- has become quite philanthropic. He gives fifty thousand dollars here and a hundred thousand there. Since the good man is a “Christian,” religious organizations profit most by his benefactions. Every new donation is received with paeans of praise from church and press.

What I wonder is whether the gentleman is deceiving himself and really imagines himself a Christian or whether he is really quite hard-boiled and harbors a secret contempt for the little men who buzz about his throne, singing their hallelujahs. One can never be sure how much we mortals are fooled by our own inadequate virtues and sanctified vices and how much we accept the world’s convenient tribute without being convinced by it. Nor do I know which interpretation of the facts is to be preferred, not as a matter of truth, but as a matter of charity. What is worse--to be honest with yourself while you are dishonest with the world, or to be dishonest with the world because you have deceived yourself?

_1927_

Dropped in on the First ---- Church of ---- on my way back from ---- University. Went into the young people’s meeting before the evening service and found a typical Endeavor meeting in progress. Some ninety wholesome youngsters were in attendance. All the various tricks of a good Endeavor meeting were used. Several little poems clipped from the Endeavor World were recited at the appropriate time and some of the members contributed quotations from Scripture and from well-known authors. The leader gave a good but platitudinous talk. There was no discussion. My impression was that this type of meeting, if still held, would be very poorly attended. But here the facts belied my theories. So much the worse for the young people of the church. Only a very inert type of youngster could be satisfied with such a meeting, and only a very uncritical mind would accept the pious platitudes which filled it, without uttering a protest or challenging a dozen assumptions.

However much such meetings may cultivate habits of loyalty to the church among young people and preserve among them the traditional religious attitudes and customs, they do nothing to fit young people to live a Christian life amid the complexities of the modern world or to hold to the Christian faith in the perplexities of a scientific world view. What worries me particularly in regard to these meetings is the assumption which underlies them that nothing but moral good will is necessary to solve the problems of life. Almost every other meeting is a consecration meeting. No one seems to introduce the young people to the idea that an ethical life requires honest and searching intelligence. Nothing is done to discover to their eyes the tremendous chasm between the ideals of their faith and the social realities in which they live.

Under such circumstances we can expect no new vitality in the Christian life as the new generation takes hold. Old virtues and respectabilities will be maintained, but the areas of life which are still unchristian will remain as they are. I see the danger in our own discussion groups that the young people may satisfy all their idealism in incessant talk. But the talk has at least the merit of exploring all sides of a problem and of revealing the limitations of traditional attitudes and the need of new ventures in faith.

_1927_

Whenever I exchange thoughts with H----, as I do with greater frequency and with increasing profit to myself, I have the uneasy feeling that I belong to the forces which are destroying religion in the effort to refine it. He is as critical as I am--well, perhaps not quite so critical; but in all his critical evaluations of religious forms he preserves a robust religious vitality which I seem to lack. His scholarship is of course much more extensive than mine, but it has not robbed him of religious naïveté, to use Schweitzer’s phrase. He has preserved a confidence in the goodness of men and the ultimate triumph of righteousness which I do not lack, but to which I do not hold so unwaveringly. While we understand each other, we really belong to different schools of thought.

I have been profoundly impressed by the Spenglerian thesis that culture is destroyed by the spirit of sophistication and I am beginning to suspect that I belong to the forces of decadence in which this sophistication is at work. I have my eye too much upon the limitations of contemporary religious life and institutions; I always see the absurdities and irrationalities in which narrow types of religion issue. That wouldn’t be so bad if I did not use the instruments of intellectualism rather than those of a higher spirituality for the critical task.

Nevertheless I hate a thoroughgoing cynic. I don’t want anyone to be more cynical than I am. If I am saved from cynicism at all it is by some sense of personal loyalty to the spirit and the genius of Jesus; that and physical health. If I were physically anaemic I never would be able to escape pessimism. This very type of morbid introspection is one of the symptoms of the disease. I can’t justify myself in my perilous position except by the observation that the business of being sophisticated and naïve, critical and religious, at one and the same time is as difficult as it is necessary, and only a few are able to achieve the balance. H---- says I lack a proper appreciation of the mystical values in religion. That is probably the root of the matter. Yet I can’t resist another word in self-defense. The modern world is so full of bunkum that it is difficult to attempt honesty in it without an undue emphasis upon the critical faculty.

If in this civilization we cannot enter the kingdom of God because we cannot be as little children, the fault, dear Brutus, is in our stars and not in ourselves.

_1927_

I fell in with a gentleman on the Pullman smoker today (Pullman smokers are perfect institutes for plumbing the depths and shallows of the American mind) who had made a killing on the stock exchange. His luck appeared like success from his perspective, and he was full of the confidence with which success endows mortals. He spoke oracularly on any and all subjects. He knew why the farmers were not making any money and why the Europeans were not as prosperous as we. Isn’t it strange how gambler’s luck gives men the assurance of wisdom for which philosophers search in vain? I pity this man’s wife. But she probably regards a new fur coat as adequate compensation for the task of appearing convinced by his obiter dicta.

_1927_

Seven clergymen sat down today with the national defense committee of the board of commerce. They invited us to talk over our stand against compulsory military education in the schools. It was an interesting experience, particularly as it came but shortly after our conflict with the same group on the matter of labor speakers in our pulpits. The contrast in the attitude of the business men in these two controversies is very illuminating.

In the labor controversy they were hard-boiled realists who simply wanted to prevent labor from getting its side before the public. At that time they did not invite us to a round table discussion. They had nothing to discuss. They simply used their power in the city to prevent any discussion of the character of their power and the method of its preservation. In this case they were aggrieved and bewildered romanticists and idealists. They want military training in the schools because they have been told by the army officers that such training makes for patriotism. And patriotism is the only religion they know.

They invited us to a luncheon precisely because they felt themselves in a morally, not to say spiritually, impregnable position. I think they were quite sure that a little argument would convince us of the error of our ways. Our resistance was obviously very disconcerting to them. Perhaps they had a right to be disconcerted; for it is only a little while since there was a perfect alliance between the religion of patriotism and organized Christianity. Since most of the men do not attend church they had not heard of the qualms of conscience in the pulpit that had, at least for the time being, dissolved that alliance. We stood our ground and the meeting dissolved without any results.

I wonder if it isn’t a little bit wicked to challenge the validity of the only kind of altruism which men know. But no--narrow loyalties may become more dangerous than selfishness.

_1927_

I wonder why it is that so many of the churches which go in for vaudeville programs and the hip-hip-hooray type of religious services should belong to the Methodist and Baptist denominations. The vulgarities of the stunt preacher are hardly compatible with either the robust spiritual vitality or the puritan traditions of the more evangelistic churches. Perhaps the phenomenon of which I speak is due merely to the size of the two denominations. They may have more showmen simply because they are big enough to have more leaders of all varieties. Certainly no church surpasses the Methodist in the number of men who possess real social passion and imagination. Nor are the old emotionally warm and naïvely orthodox preachers wanting in either church.

Nevertheless there is a growing tendency toward stunt services in both denominations. Perhaps it represents the strategy of denominational and congregational organisms which are too much alive to accept the fate of innocuous desuetude, which has befallen some other churches. Finding the masses, which they once attracted by genuine religious emotion, less inclined to seek satisfaction in religion, they maintain themselves by offering such goods in entertainment and social life as the people seem to desire.

When the naïve enthusiasms of those generations, among whom religion is an emotional experience and not a social tradition, begin to cool, the churches which serve the new generations must either express religious feeling through devotion to moral and aesthetic values or they must substitute a baser emotionalism for the lost religious feeling. Perhaps the prevalence of cheap theatricality among the churches of our great democracy is a sign of the fact that the masses in America have lost the capacity for unreflective and exuberant religious feeling before they could acquire the kind of religion which is closely integrated with the values of culture and art.

There is something pathetic about the effort of the churches to capture these spiritually vacuous multitudes by resort to any device which may intrigue their vagrant fancies. But it may not represent a total loss. The entertainment they offer may be vulgar, but it is not vicious, and without them the people might find satisfaction in something even cheaper.

_1927_

At the Lenten service today the dynamic speaker dilated upon the heroic character of the Christian faith. “Someone said to me recently,” he reported, “‘Do you realize that it is dangerous to be a Christian?’ ‘Certainly,’ I answered, ‘It always has been and always will be.’”

Isn’t it strange how we preachers insist on emphasizing the heroic aspect of the Christian faith? That pose today was exactly like the one struck by the minister in ---- who loved to say dramatically, “The church needs a new casualty list,” while it was generally known that he carefully evaded every issue which might create dissension or contention.

I think we ministers strike these heroic poses because we are dimly aware of the fact that the gospel commits us to positions which require heroic devotion before they will ever be realized in life. But we are astute rather than heroic and cautious rather than courageous. Thus we are in the dangerous position of being committed to the cross in principle but escaping it in practice. We are honest enough to be uneasy about that fact, but insincere enough to quiet our uneasiness by heroic poses.

Let any group of ministers gather and you will find someone declaring fervently, “No one ever tells me what to say. My congregation gives me perfect liberty.” That is just another way of quieting an uneasy conscience; for we all know that if we explore the full meaning of a gospel of love its principles will be found to run counter to cherished prejudices. It is of course not impossible to retain freedom of the pulpit, but if anyone is doing so without the peril of defections from his ranks and opposition to his message, he is deceiving himself about the quality of his message. Either his message is too innocuous to deserve opposition or too conventional to arouse it.

An astute pedagogy and a desire to speak the truth in love may greatly decrease opposition to a minister’s message and persuade a difficult minority to entertain at least, and perhaps to profit by, his message; but if a gospel is preached without opposition it is simply not the gospel which resulted in the cross. It is not, in short, the gospel of love.

_1927_

Talked today at the open forum which meets every Sunday afternoon in the high school. The “lunatic fringe” of the city congregates there, in addition to many sensible people. The question period in such meetings is unfortunately monopolized to a great extent by the foolish ones, though not always. Today one old gentleman wanted to know when I thought the Lord would come again, while a young fellow spoke volubly on communism and ended by challenging me to admit that all religion is fantasy. Between those two you have the story of the tragic state of religion in modern life. One half of the world seems to believe that every poetic symbol with which religion must deal is an exact definition of a concrete or an historical fact; the other half, having learned that this is not the case, can come to no other conclusion but that all religion is based upon fantasy.

Fundamentalists have at least one characteristic in common with most scientists. Neither can understand that poetic and religious imagination has a way of arriving at truth by giving a clue to the total meaning of things without being in any sense an analytic description of detailed facts. The fundamentalists insist that religion is science, and thus they prompt those who know that this is not true to declare that all religious truth is contrary to scientific fact.

How can an age which is so devoid of poetic imagination as ours be truly religious?

_1927_

Our city race commission has finally made its report after months of investigation and further months of deliberation on our findings. It has been a rare experience to meet with these white and colored leaders and talk over our race problems. The situation which the colored people of the city face is really a desperate one, and no one who does not spend real time in gathering the facts can have any idea of the misery and pain which exists among these people, recently migrated from the south and unadjusted to our industrial civilization. Hampered both by their own inadequacies and the hostility of a white world they have a desperate fight to keep body and soul together, to say nothing of developing those amenities which raise life above the brute level.

I wish that some of our romanticists and sentimentalists could sit through a series of meetings where the real social problems of a city are discussed. They would be cured of their optimism. A city which is built around a productive process and which gives only casual thought and incidental attention to its human problems is really a kind of hell. Thousands in this town are really living in torment while the rest of us eat, drink and make merry. What a civilization!

Incidentally I wish the good church people who hate our mayor so much because he doesn’t conform to their rules and standards could appreciate how superior his attitudes and viewpoints on race relations are to those held by most church people. It seems to me rather unfortunate that we must depend upon the “publicans” for our social conscience to so great a degree while the “saints” develop their private virtues and let the city as such fry in its iniquities.

_1927_

I think I have solved the Sunday night service problem for good. I give a short address or sermon upon a more or less controversial moral issue, or upon a perplexing religious question, and after closing the service we have a half-hour to forty-five minutes of discussion. The group attracted by this kind of program is not large. It is not the usual forum crowd. But it is a group of unusually thoughtful people, and the way they explore the fundamental themes and problems of life is worth more than many sermons.