CHURCH AND STATE

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 112, 7 November 1935, Page 16

CHURCH AND STATE

ORDERING OF LIFE

CHALLENGE OF COMMUNISM

(From "The Post's" Representative.)

LONDON, October 12.

The modern State, Communism, and Dictatorship were subjects discussed at the Church Congress at Bournemouth. An appeal to Christianity to combat the "idolatrous" conception of the totalitarian State was made by the Bishop of Chichester. "The totalitarian view that the supreme sanction is the interest of the. State, leads, in relation to other States, to a cynical defiance of pledges arid covenants, and so in the last'resort to war,'' he said. "The totalitarian State tends to produce a mechanical order of human beings—macadamised' souls, very completely polished may be, admirably drilled perhaps, excellently trained and schooled," a most efficient battalion of robots. But' Christianity, ■■ with its doctrine of the supremacy of the individual human soul, must oppose itself to any j such mechanical ordering *asthat in which beauty goes, art goes; and all those rare creative things which make human life worth while. "The doctrine of the totalitarian State at bottom—that is, if followed to obtain the fulfilment, in action, which its logic requires—involves the adoration of civilisation for its own sake, that is, the worship of man. Nothing uncontrolled by the State means nothing above the State, and that involves the complete secularisation of human life. And this-is < the Very height of idolatry. "The' relationship of religion, to the rhoderrTSfatewasldiscussed ■ by'•Canon1 F. R. Barry, who said the modern State was avowedly lay and secular. "The State, in our own country ;as elsewhere, will become increasingly totalitarian. Whether it becomes the Great Leviathan, or something more like a Christian Commonwealth, depends upon the vitality of religion. The first necessity for. the modern State is a renaissance of the Christian Church." WAGES AND PROFITS. : In a discussion on the Communist challenge to Christianity, Dr. Ernest Barker said that there was no, system of social economics ordained in the Bible. "In the age in which we live, the development which we need is a modification of private property to accord with the Christian conception of general human liberty and a modification of the method of fixing wages and profits and of the general organisation of the whole method of production to accord with that conception. The Christian Churches will testify to the State the modifications which are needed in order that the State may be persuaded to accept and enforce them. The democratic State', which by its nature listens to testimonies, will afford the churches the opportunity of such testimony." Christian economics, he added, were not the economics of a separate and gathered society distinct from the world with its own different standard of life. Today, Christian economics could not be but the economics of a whole society and of all its members permeated already by Christian civilisation and to be brought more and more into fuller accordance, with Christian principles. INTERNATIONAL SERVICE. Marxian' Communism as a rival to Christianity was discussed by Mr. J. G. Lockhart, who observed:— "Bolshevism is Marxism plus a new ingredient. The conviction of a destiny, of international service is not dead in Russia. The true Bolshevik is a missionary and a crusader. Some of the technique of the Messianic quality in Bolshevism has been borrowed from the Church and the attitude towards doctrine is, moreover, religious. "We must face this opposition—on the one side, a belief in spiritual values and God; on the other, militant materialism, and in place of God, the social coHectivity. In the present and the immediate future there is much to disquiet us ?.nd move us to action. It is my belief, however, that when put to the test Christianity will reveal unsuspected powers of resistance." Mr. Maurice B. Reckitt said that if organised religion had clearly and consistently resolved that the spiritual and physical needs and hungers of mankind should be met in the right way, Communism would not now be at hand to meet them in the wrong way. "The simplest, the most obvious, the most immediate challenge of Cummunism to Christianity is the challenge of urgency," he said. "What the Church has been neglecting in these latter days is not her blessed and perennial mission of rescue and charity, but her prophetic office. She has failed to speak with a clear voice as to the ends of human order, to elucidate the purposas for which industry and all other of man's organised activities exist, and to appraise secular policies in the light thereof.