APATHY OF YOUTH

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23085, 9 July 1938, Page 17

APATHY OF YOUTH

INTEREST IN RELIGION AN AMERICAN VIEWPOINT UNION OF CHURCHES MOVE The groat majority of American youth.was comparatively indifferent to religion, as it always had been, but in other sections there was a quickened interest, according to Professor H. P Van Dusen, professor at the Union Theological Seminary, New York, who arrived from America by the Monterey yesterday. Professor Van Dusen said that among the various groups interested in religion there had been a noticeable improvement in activity within the past few years. He attributed that mainly to a number of factors. One was the depression, although it was not, perhaps, the main one. Another was that youth had its day for roughly a decade immediately after the Great War, when it threw off most of the restraints, traditions, morality and religion, and "went pretty well to the limit."

"They then came to appreciate the liollowness and unreality of that kind of life," the professor continued, "and a return to a more serious, but not more solemn, attitude toward life and toward better intellectual work in their studies, began among students as far back as 1928." There was a steadily deepening interest in religion, but an equally steadily decreasing interest in the Church as an organisation in America, ho said. Tho general impression was that the Church was slowly, not radically, losing ground, although belief had not diminished, and that seemed to bo proved by the grave difficulties faced by many churches, upon which fewer gifts and much less financial support was bestowed than in former years.

Dr. "W. Horton, professor of theology in the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology, United States, who also arrived by the Monterey, said that at a time when countries seemed "to be drawing further apart the international religious forces were coming closer together. The younger Christian churches, which were known as "mission fields," were in a majority compared with the mother churches, and their voice would be a powerful factor in the interpretation of Christianity. The Episcopal (Anglican) Church in the United States had voted to bring about union with the Presbyterian Church, he said, a remarkable commentary upon the growth of a movement toward unity among Protestant Churches. In 1925 the Canadian churches, with th« exception of a group of Presbyterians and Anglicans, had combined in the United Church of Canada. In the United States the Congregational Church had united with the Christian Church, and the Evangelical Church with the Reform Church, and the Lutheran Churches, with their 26 branches, were moving toward unity. There were so many racial difficulties in the United States, Dr. Horton concluded, that few people anticipated a united church, as in Canada. The ultimate goal was four or five major churches.