A reproduction of ch.1 of Marley Cole's Book
Has Christianity Failed?
ON A SPRING DAY in 1956 the world was suffering
from a bad case of jitters. It was one of those times
when it seemed as if the news were all black. People in half
the world shook their heads over bleak headlines. The
American dollar nose-dived on the Paris stock exchange.
The peace of mind and the fortune of millions hung in
the balance. All this because
a lump of muscle the size of
your fist got fouled up inside one man’s chest. It made sense:
the muscle happened to be the heart of the President of the
United States.
This was the second time within nine months that the
President had gone to the hospital. Happily after
11 3 suspenseful
minutes of surgery the world could be assured.
This time it was not a heart attack. Just an intestinal
obstruction.
The President soon was able to grin ruefully,
“What a bellyache!”
Presidential elections were in the offing. The future
looked befogged. Would Mr. Eisenhower be able to run
for
a second term? His personal popularity was tremendous; it
cut across party lines.
If there was such a thing as the indispensable
man, a lot of people felt, Mr. Eisenhower was
it.
Aggravating the international picture, Egypt and Israel
were on the verge of a war that threatened to embroil the
world. Communist satellites Poland and Hungary growled
with revolt. In America, Catholic Action was lauding Cardinal
Mindzsenty as the symbol of the struggle for freedom in
Hungary. They hoped to see him head a new liberated
Hungarian government. Other Americans, while wishing
Hungary all the freedom in the world, looked upon
the
Cardinal
as the symbol of a thousand-year-old clerical totalita
rianism from which Communism had “liberated” Hungary
in 1949. Why, many asked, did either evil have to
exist? Why totalitarianism in any form-in the name
of
God, or in defiance of God?
It was a period when the ecclesiastical heavens were undergoing
a
soul searching and a shaking. An American
church worker returned from Europe to announce that in
West Germany only about five per cent of the people were
going to church.
A conclave of East and West German
Protestants was preparing to meet. Soon the world would
overhear one churchman telling the conclave that Communism
was the child, not of Pagandom, but
of Christendom.
The masses were following Karl Marx in “throwing
off enslavement” from age-old Christendom’s false, fraudulent
religion of exploitation. (Her doctrine of the “divine
right
of kings” now discredited, what was Christendom to
do
with her vestigial teaching that God ordains worldly governments-
did Germans have God to thank for the fantastic
Has
Christianity Failed?
13
twice in this generation?).
If this were not enough, a smalltown
pastor would bring
up the question whether Christians
should submit to or resist Communist judicial injustice.
Evangelical official Dr. Guenther Jacob replied that,
according to diehard church doctrine, civil authority-
Communist included-“is established to carry out God’s
will,” and that there was nothing to do but submit.
World Communism,
as usual, lay at the root of everyone’s
headaches. Twenty years earlier it had been Nazism. Former
United States President Herbert Hoover was still contending
that America should have stayed out of World War
I1
and let Hitler and Stalin knock each other out.
As it was, he
maintained, the world could thank America for rescuing
World Communism. The 175 million people living under
Communist rule at the end of World War
I1 had more than
quadrupled to 800 million during the next ten years. One
out of every three persons, one out of every five acres of land,
had been claimed by Communism. From 1945 to 1955 Communism
gained domination over half
a billion people-as
many people as Christendom claimed after almost two thousand
years. What was this frightful plague welling within
the bosom of Christendom? Americans were spending
35
billion dollars a year for defense against-exactly what?
People ran to their churches frantically, demanding a faith
to live by, a faith strong enough to repel the Red Religion
engulfing Christendom and the world.
Where was the needed faith? Was
it Orthodox Catholicism?
If
so, why had Communism sprung into power in
Russia, the heart of Orthodoxy? Why had the Orthodox
Church become the servile lackey
of Communism?
Was the needed invincible faith Roman Catholicism?
If
so, why had Communism succeeded in carving out a satellite
governments that had ruined her and the rest of the world
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empire from the predominantly Roman Catholic countries
of Europe? Worse still, why had Communism found its second
happiest hunting ground in Italy, the heart of Catholicism’s
domain?
If an Italian Pope and an Italian hierarchy
could not wield the Church’s most formidable weapon, excommunication,
to keep one out of three Italian Catholics
from voting Communist, what power could they wield
against worldwide Communism? Take from Communism
her Orthodox and Roman Catholic heartland and what
would she have left?
So people wondered.
If not openly, still they wondered.
Many wondered if the faith to conquer all things was to be
found in Protestantism.
If so, which among the hundreds of
Protestant schismatic sects was the right one? People who
scratched a little beneath the surface had been dismayed
ever since 1949 when American Methodist emissary Dr. Garland
E. Hopkins reported on his tour of Communist satellites
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Austria,
and East Germany. “The fact
so frequently overlooked in
Western countries is that Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran,
and Reformed churches as well as Jewish synagogues
are each still supported by the state in one or more of the
Communist countries,” reported Dr. Hopkins, uneasily.
“There is no real separation of church and state in most
of
the European countries. Rather, the churches have been, or
are in process of being, integrated into the program of the
state.” Church people in America, to whom the news struck
home, looked at each other in horror. “What is
our church
doing in the
pay of Communism?” they demanded. Joseph
C. Harsch in
The Christian Science Monitor intimated that
the European churches thought more of their belly than
they did of their God. “None of the big church institutions
Has
Christianity Failed?
15
could maintain itself in the style to which it has been accustomed
if it had to depend on private contributions. The big
churches do not support themselves. Their cathedrals are
maintained by the state. In varying degrees and by varying
sys tems their schools, hospitals, and educational systems are
all state subsidized.” Did it not amount to spiritual prostitution
with God’s avowed enemy, Communism?
“Of
course,” Mr. Harsch added, “it does mean ultimate compromise,
for no state ever subsidizes an unfriendly organization
indefinitely.” In short, Communism would use the
churches, any churches, as long as they gratified its purposes;
but at any time their usefulness was over, Communism
would cast them off like worn-out harlots. Americans who
saw the significance of it asked each other: “If the European
example is anything to go by, how can we expect our
churches to provide us with the faith we need to combat
Communism?”
Good news? By the middle of June, 1956, Americans were
trying to cheer themselves with the National Council
of
Churches’ announcement that finally one hundred million
Americans were church members. In Colonial days (that
produced Washingtons, Jeff ersons, and the men who formulated
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
of the United States) only five per cent of the population belonged
to churches. In 1890 the percentage was
22.5; in 1944
it
was 52.5, and now it has become a big, fat 60 per cent.
But while the news was still warm in their mouths it
curdled sourly when the killjoys pointed out that the more
people went to church, the higher the crime rate mountedevery
time church membership rose eight per cent, crime
rose 62 per cent. Prisons reported that the percentage of
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criminal inmates who professed some religion was higher
than the percentage of people outside who professed some
religion.
In a series on “youth crimes,” the New York Times
came out with the shocking news that while on week days
youth-gang members woke up about noon, on Sundays
it
was different. “They rise much earlier than usual on Sundays,
for the 10 a.m. mass.”
F.B.I. Director
J. Edgar Hoover warned that the United
States was invaded internally by an army of five million
criminals. Crime was costing 400 times as much as education.
As far back as
1954, said Director of Federal Prisons
James
C. Bennett, federal penitentiaries were crowded 25
per cent beyond normal capacity. In the face
of all this,
Scripps-Howard newspaper columnist
Mrs. Walter Ferguson
threw
up her hands.
“I
am in a state of confusion,” she sighed. “First off,
I
read that the greatest religious revival ever seen is
now on in the
U.S. Religion is becoming a part of everyday
life, they say, and is no longer a cloistered mystery.
“We believe it when we look at all the new churches
being built. The air is clamorous with the voices of
evangelists exhorting the world to turn from its evil
ways and be saved. Newspapers carry many columns
written by ministers and priests.
Few things these days
are more popular than the opinions of those who deal
with religious subjects. The country has turned to serious
thoughts. And what is more serious than the soul’s
welfare?
“Just
as I fall into this placid ‘All’s-well-with-theworld’
mood, here comes
J. Edgar Hoover saying our
crime rate is a national disgrace. And this isn’t the
Has
Christianity Failed?
17
American people, are not concerned with these facts.
They fail to stir us. We seem to have lost our desire to
battle with crime. Why bother when your car and
TV
set are working all right? The confusing thing is that
in
the same year, in the same country, church interest and
crime statistics should both be at an all-time high.
“When religion has truly become
a part of everyday
life, we can expect its influence to wipe out our ‘national
disgrace.’
”
An army of Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as swarms of small
fundamentalist sects, were warning that the moral breakdown
was positive indication that the world had reached its
foretold “last days.” “But know this,” quoted the Witnesses
on millions of doorsteps, “that in the last days critical
times hard to deal with will be here. For men will be lovers
. . . of money, self-assuming, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient
to parents, without gratitude, with no loving-kindness,
having no natural affection,
not open to any agreement,
slanderers, without self-control, fierce, without love
of goodness, betrayers, headstrong, puffed up with selfesteem,
lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God, having
a form of godly devotion but proving false to its power
. . .
always learning and yet never able to come to an accurate
knowledge of truth”
(2 Timothy 3: 1-7 NW).
Staid old cults and denominations cupped a hand over
their brow and peered at a murky tomorrow but could discern
no Bible Armageddon impending. In our day to take
the Bible too literally is unsophisticated. Church is
a place
where people come to be lulled, not alarmed. Nevertheless
it was high time the “established” creeds rediscovered
a
“Bible theology” and acknowledged that what they were
founded upon was not “early Christian church teachingworst. The most terrifying implication is that we, the
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but “ecclesiastical traditions,” warned Episcopalian theologian
Walter C. Klein. “If we reject ecclesiastical tradition
we shall have to fall back upon learning, intelligence, intuition,
conscience and the like.”
Baptist John
S. Wimbish reasoned that the Communist
Manifesto was proving a more powerful doctrine in the lives
of men than the Bible because the church had coiled itself
about the Bible and died there, submerging its meaning out
of sight. “The church has become so precise
it is prissy; so
nice it is nauseating. If we are to snatch the banner from the
hands of the Communists, we must be willing to soil our
hands with noble toil. This
is an excellent time to shake the
dust of lethargy from our feet and emulate Jesus by manifesting
a genuine interest in our fellow man.” But how was
the church to shed its “dead orthodoxy”? About all that Dr.
Wimbish could say on that was that “Methodism needs
another John Wesley; Congregationalism needs another
Dwight Moody; Presbyterianism needs another John Knox,
and we Baptists need another Roger Williams!”
When
it came to extricating the churches from their dilemma
over the Negro, an even greater prophet was needed.
During the Civil War, American Protestantism split right
down the Mason and Dixon line. Southerners had called
God down on their side in support of the myth of the black
curse-the fable that God consigned black people to a position
of subhumanity and perpetual slavery, never
fit to belong
in the same lily-white society with Caucasians. In 1956,
after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation, the race
problem became the most explosive domestic issue in the
land. Historically the churches had followed their political
sides into splitting. Now they must follow the judicial order
to integrate-for conscience’s sake at least. It was humiliat
ing. Many churches were found to be following old unworkable
systems. “It is with deep humility that we face the
situation existing today and confess that as Christian leaders
we have not done what we should have in preparing our
people for this hour,” Presbyterian moderator Dr. L. Mc-
Dowel1 Richards lamented. Southern Protestantism, he declared,
was up against its “most difficult” crisis since the
“dark days” of the Civil War.
This was only local, national gloom. The world gloom
was darker. The tragedy of the world was that “worldwide
Christianity has failed to win the working classes,” as a
Methodist leader moaned. “There is no more serious development
in worldwide Christianity than its failure to win
the working-class masses,” said Dr. Alan Walker.
But was it Christianity that had failed? Or was
it the failure
of its
custodians? Had the clergy failed to preserve it
and instill its principles and hopes in the breasts of the.
derelict masses? Who was to blame?
Some clergymen blamed the people. By the middle of
June,
1956, people were still rushing to book counters to
buy
T h e Power of Positive Thinking. They devoured paragraphs
and pages seeking some “peace-of-mind” formula
that would really work. The clergy scolded them for trying
to use God as “one of a number of resources to enable us to
get what we want and enjoy life as we would.” Some people,
declared Episcopalian Dean James
A. Pike, were trying to
use God
“to help them sleep better, to calm their anxieties,
and
to make them more attractive and successful.” National
Council of Churches president Dr. Eugene C. Blake said it
was becoming fashionable to “make an instrument of God”
by using religion for selfish ends such as job security, health,
and peace of mind. “Everybody seems to be interested in
religion. But many people with new religious interest are
attempting to turn that interest into magic-to use God for
their own purposes rather than
to serve God and find His
purposes.”
We have
a world full of atrophied morals and hungerbitten
religion, declared Lutheran Glen
A. Pierson, because
the rank-and-file believers do not hold their faith seriously
enough to preach it, much less to live it seven days a week.
“Our conception of the priesthood
is that every man is a
priest with the privilege of direct access to God. That also
means he has the responsibility to propagate the faith. But
we Protestants today are prone to say
‘Get a preacher. Let
him do the work.’
’’
If
Protestants were falling down on the job, Catholics
were even more sluggish. People were still talking about the
Catholic Digest
survey that showed that 59 per cent of all
Protestants tried to win converts, and
43 per cent were succeeding.
But only
28 out of 100 Catholics tried, and only 17
succeeded.
