LIGHT MAT MAS FAILED

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21158, 6 July 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

LIGHT MAT MAS FAILED

THE CHURCH INDICTED :: LACK OF LEADERSHIP

(Condensed from an Editorial in Fortune)

is too easily assumed to be a pattern of government based upon special political bodies and offices. Actually democracy is a spirit, not a form of government. It consists largely in assumptions, one man about another, one nation about another. And in our civilisation these assumptions are Christian assumptions.

As the leading democracy of the world, the United States is perforce the leading practical exponent of Christianity. The United States is not Christian in any formal religious sense; its churches are not full on Sundays and its citizens transgress the precepts freely. But it is Christian in the sense that the basic teachings of Christianity are in its blood stream. The central doctrine of its political system the inviolability of the individual—is inherited from 1900 years of Christian insistence upon the immortality of the soul. Christian idealism is manifest in the arguments that politicians use to gain their ends; in the popular ideas of good taste, in the laws and manners of our people. These applications of Christianity are humanitarian rather than terroristic, kind rather than cynical, generous rather than selfish. The American has always been, and still is, at home among ideals. The American owes all this to the Fight that the Church Put Up during long, dark centuries in Europe; and lie owes it to the leadership that the Church provided in the founding and political integration of his incredibly bounteous land. But it cannot be said that, for the past 100 years or so, the profound original debt America owes the Church has been much increased. It cannot be said that this period, characterised by the greatest material progress that man has ever made, is characterised by an equivalent spiritual progress. It cannot be said that the Church has faced with any conspicuous success the new material conditions brought about by the industrial revolution. Indeed just the opposite can be said: that the Church has been unable to interpret and teach its doctrine effectively under these conditions; and that as a result there has been a declining emphasis on spiritual values and a rising emphasis on materialism as a doctrine of life.

We have, therefore, the peculiar spectacle of a nation which, to some imperfect but nevertheless considerable extent, practises Christianity without actively believing in Christianity. It practises Christianity because the teachings of the Church have been absorbed into its culture; but it fails to believe because it is no longer being effectively taught. The Christian leadership in America has passed from the Church to the active and practical laity—the statesmen and educators, the columnists, the scientists and great men of action. And this is another way of saying that there is no true Christian leadership at all. Hence the future of Christianity, and of its derivative political and social doctrines, has become imperilled. Fortune comes to this subject as a layman. We cannot presume to know what the Church’s solution is. But we can record our certainty that in order for humanity to progress it must believe; it must have faith in certain absolute spiritual values, or at least have faith that absolute spiritual values exist. The Church, as teacher and interpreter of those values, is the guardian of our faith. And as laymen we do not feel that that faith is being guarded. In support of this criticism there is considerable historical evidence, such as, for example, the Church’s stand toward slavery for decades prior to the Civil War. Neither in the North nor in the South did the Church embrace the doctrine, inherited from its own teachings, that all men are free, whether black or white. Instead, it rationalised slavery and did not change its position Until the People Forced It To. It did not, that is to say, preach absolute values, but relative values. It failed to provide spiritual leadership. An even more trenchant example of the Church’s failure is to be found in our own time, in its attitude toward war. In 1914 the U.S. Church was solidly opposed to war, which it characterised as un-Christian. But in 1917, on the grounds that certain Christian values were at stake, the pastors mounted their pulpits to declaim against the Huns and bless the Allied cause. Such hatred for the enemy as there was in the front lines produced no oratory to compare with the invectives hurled against Germany by the men of Christ, are not, and never have been, in the flesh.

If these matters are left in the hands of the laity, to be solved on materialistic grounds, civilisation, instead of going forward, will recede. Without effective spiritual leadership the maladjustments of our politico-economic

But the reaction from that war to end war was as extreme as the invectives that had urged it on. Nowhere could men see any good in the war; nowhere would men give any credit to the peace. The boys had died in vain. And as for the Church, it, too, retracted; it was ashamed of having called down the fire; a number of its members turned to extreme pacifism; and when the war of 1939 broke out it was again opposed to participation almost to a man. The values used by the Church in reaching its decisions could not have been absolute spiritual values, because by no spiritual logic is it possible to get from one of these positions to the other. The threat to Christianity in 1917 was far less than the threat from Hitler today. The Kaiser’s regime, despite its militarism, embodied a culture from which neither religion r.oi certain political rights were excluded. The regime of Hitler is Godless, deriving its strength from the denial of all values except personal power. Yet the men who urged United States soldiers in 1917 to face death against an ordinary emperor, whose chief sin was worldly ambition, now conclude that it would be wrong to fight a virtual Antichrist whose doctrines strike at the base of the civilisation which the Church has done so much to build.

How soon could the Church again reverse its views on war ? The answer would seem to be clear; the pastors wall go over to the other side when, as, and if the people go over to the other side. Their agruments today are the same arguments used by industrialists who urge us to stay out. In dealing with both wars industry has provided a leadership at least as effective as that of the Church. Industry wanted to save democracy in 1917 by fighting; it now wants to save democracy by not fighting. If this point of view is more materialistic than that of the Church, its goal is identical. Thus the Flock is Leading the Shepherd. And this circumstance, if not corrected, will carve itself deeply in human history. The first result of lack of spiritual leadership for a people is a rise in materialism. No matter how well intentioned our lay leaders may be, this can scarcely be avoided. Industrialists are not spiritual leaders. The best they can do is to adapt such spiritual truths as they have been taught to the requirements of the arena of action. Their progress is inevitably slow.’. But it will vanish entirely unless the initial teaching is effective. It is all-important to observe that the solutions to material problems are not to be found within materialism. By no conceivable set of circumstances could materialism have produced the great “solution” of the 18th century that we have come to know as the American system. The American system has its origin, on the one hand, in passionate religious sects who believed in the spiritual absolutes that today are lacking; and on the other hand in those rationalists of the Golden Age of the American colonies, for whom Reason was not merely mechanistic £ut divine. Similarly, by no conceivable set of circumstances will it be possible to solve by materialism the titanic problems, domestic and international, which which humanity is faced today. The ultimate answers to the questions that humanity raises system must inevitably increase; unemployment, lack of opportunity, mal-distribution of wealth, and lack ot confidence will symptomise a long retreat; collectivism will grow; and what remains to us of the Golden Age, when we were able to believe, will be consumed in revolutions and wars. So long as the Church pretends to preach absolute spiritual values, but actually preaches relative secondary values, it will merely hasten this process of disintegration. We are asked to turn to the Church for our enlightenment, but when we do so we find that the Voice of the Church is Not Inspired. The voice of the Church today, we find, is the echo of our own voices. And the result of this experience, already manifest, is deep spiritual disillusionment. The effect of this experience upon the present generation is that of a vicious spiral, like the spiral that economists talk about that leads into depressions. And in this spiral there is at stake, not merely prosperity, but civilisation.

There is only one way out: the sound of a voice, coming from something not ourselves, in the existence of which we cannot disbelieve. It is the earthly task of the pastors to hear this voice, to relate it convincingly to the contemporary scene, and to tell us what it says. If they cannot hear it, or if they fail to tell us, we, as laymen, are utterly lost. Without it we are no more capable of saving the world than we were capable of creating it in the first place.