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We Are What We Read

The most popular novel of the past few years had nothing to do with violence or sex; it was a religious parable about a celibate bird. And the best-selling nonfiction book had nothing to do with he latest recipe or the newest diet; it was (and is) a recent version of the oldest book of all: the Bible. Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Living Bible -- someone said you could fly a kite to the moon with the miles of thread that bind together the pages of the 25 million copies of those books now in print.

At the same time, a major new study by Daniel Yankelovich shows that only 28 per cent of American college youth consider religion important, compared with 38 per cent in 1969; and that among working youth, the number considering religion an important value dropped from 64 to 42 per cent. Nor is it a secret that church attendance among all age groups has been dropping for a decade and that membership plummets each month. We could easily use these and other statistics to argue that religion is losing its impact on American society.

Meanwhile, 50,900 adults make the pilgrimage to Notre Dame for a Pentecostal rally, a teen-age guru turns on young people from coast to coast, and demand rises for books that run the gamut from thin prayer guides to thick encyclopedias of theology. Last year’s 12 campus best sellers included seven that treated religious themes, ranging from the inner journeys of Carlos Castaneda to the far-out fantasies of Erich von Däniken.

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Hence the question: Are Americans really losing interest in religion, or are they looking for it in different ways? If there is truth to the saying "We are what we read," a look at the numbers and kinds of religious books that Americans are reading may prove more revealing than a poll on church membership. The fact is: while church membership is dropping, the demand for books that appeal to religious needs is soaring.

"Religious interest is growing in this country," affirms Word Books publisher Jarrell McCracken, "but probably away from the established church and denominations. We may find a smaller percentage of total commitment to church membership or identification, but a greater intensity of interest among those involved. If there is a trend, it is toward books which help people in the gut-level experiences of life, but which do have some content and help people feel they are growing."

A look at the current scene gives us a clue. The credibility of all institutions, including the church, is under attack. As a result, the moral teaching of the church is challenged, its doctrinal foundation questioned, and its worship neglected. But at the same time, moral issues of major proportions are the daily bill of fare in newspapers and on television, and our nation seems infected with social problems that have a deep religious dimension: poverty, pollution, discrimination, runaway technology, to name a few. To fill the gap left by a weakened church, people are not only experimenting with both new and ancient forms of the spiritual and psychic life; they are searching for religious books that deal with the complex problems of society in personal, direct and simple ways.

"After all," says Barbara Rogasky, an editor of religious paperbacks for Pyramid Publications, "while institutions as such are all in disarray, that doesn’t change people’s need for definition, direction and guidance. In fact, it intensifies it and throws the burden of fulfilling that need almost entirely on the individual. Thus, institutional religion losing its influence while religious books grow is no real contradiction."

Gerald Battle, marketing manager for the Cokesbury bookstores, reports that the demand for religious books "has never been larger. Here at Cokesbury we are selling more religious books of every kind than at any time in our history -- and we have been booksellers to America since 1789."

Nationally, religious book sales increased by $9 million from 1971 to 1972, and by a further $7 million in 1973, according to annual reports issued by the Association of American Publishers. Milt Steinford, a religious books salesman for 25 years, echoes the opinion of his colleagues when he predicts that "this trend probably won’t crest for several years to come."

In the decade from 1963 to 1973, sales climbed from $73 million to almost $125 million, despite a celebrated late-‘60s slump. Despite today’s inflation, many publishers are expanding their religious programs. Seabury Press, for instance, published 13 new religious books in 1972, 85 in 1973, and 50 so far in 1974. Specialized religious houses (such as the Anointed Music & Publishing Company of Meriden, Connecticut) are springing up all over America,

These figures and projections do not include religious paperbacks, which are now sold at supermarkets, airports, drugstores and newsstands. And, as Jean-Louis Brindamour, who developed Pyramid Publications’ religious program, points out, "The phenomenal growth of sales so far tells us that time and a determined public will eventually force even greater space for such books where they do not yet appear." Pyramid editor Leslie Schwartz indicates one reason for the vast volume of religious paperback sales: "Rather than [in] a specifically religious bookstore, these books are sold in very open, public places. [They are] so accessible, it becomes easy to ‘pick up religion with your groceries,’ as it were. This may sound commercial, but it’s also putting, religion into the marketplace, where it also belongs."

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In both cloth and paper, religious books ranging from heavy theology to lighthearted verse are generally gaining in sales. The most dramatic increase, however, is in sales of Bibles and simple books of personal religion related to everyday needs. "When the world shakes," suggests Zondervan’s corporate executive Gary Wharton, "those in it grab onto something of substance and durability. The Bible and books that build on it are such stabilizers."

The phenomenal sales of Bibles over the past few years might even suggest that the Parousia is around the corner. John Delaney, editor of Catholic books for Doubleday, has figured out that so many Americans have bought Bibles during the past ten years that one out of every three of them (excluding children who can’t read) should he able to quote chapter and verse in unison. A new translation or paraphrase seems to come out every six months, but readers still hunger for more.

Cokesbury’s Gerald Battle reports: "Periodically we hear, through such ‘religious market experts’ as the Wall Street Journal, that Bible sales are declining. Bah and humbug! Doubleday, a house dominantly oriented to trade sales, and Ken Taylor’s Tyndale House have sold more than 18 million copies of The Living Bible to the trade in just three short years. Oxford and Cambridge have sold The New English Bible very well in many editions. Such Bible exotics as The Jerusalem Bible have had healthy sales. Zondervan has sold its Berkeley Bible, Amplified Bible, and Layman’s Parallel Bible in substantial quantities. The RSV in its myriad editions sells and sells, and the King James Version is with us always in a significant sales-producing role -- paying the rent for many a shop, large and small alike. Cokesbury alone sells more than 100,000 Bibles annually."

In addition, durable theological reference books, particularly those related to the Bible, are being sought out by old and young. Patricia Schreck, manager of the Episcopal Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia, is one of many who report "an increasing number of young people and those in the 25-35 year range getting into intense Bible study. Suddenly Barclay’s commentaries are becoming a fast-moving item!"

Strong’s Concordance, which has sold steadily for 50 years, is now out in a new edition and also going stronger than ever. Abingdon’s Interpreter’s Bible series, begun in 1952, has earned $22 million in sales to date and is still doing well. Eerdmans plans to run another 50,000 copies of its Handbook to the Bible and "launch the most extensive advertising campaign we have ever mounted." Westminster’s Historical Bible Atlas continues to be a standard, along with the Oxford Bible Atlas. Harper’s new edition of Harper’s Bible Dictionary went into its second printing within just a few months. Seabury’s scholarly Dictionary of Biblical Theology is being bought in large numbers by Catholics and Protestants alike. And Zondervan has a whole series of Bible reference books designed for the nonscholar that are enjoying good sales.

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The increased interest in Bible study could well be interpreted as marking an intellectual swing back to the center, but the huge demand for simple books of personal religion suggests an emotional retrenchment somewhere to the right of center. "The books that seem to sell most today," says Alex Liepa, editorial director of religious books at Doubleday, are those quite evidently written for people who are looking for a very personal, inward inspiration or enlightenment. We seem to be going through a period of aversion against religion or theology that seems to influence or change society or the world, and from my desk I can see no sign that the tide will be turning."

Many of these books convey messages of hope or courage in terms of story or autobiography (e.g., The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom). And while despite their often staggering sales, most best-seller lists don’t even recognize their existence, the National Religious Bestsellers newsletter, which does, spells out what it means: "A few years ago, a religious best seller enjoyed an annual sale of ten thousand copies. Now even the number ten title on the cloth list sells better than 75,000 copies." It is considered an achievement when the tenth title on a general best-seller list hits that figure.

Using these sale figures as a starting point, one could easily argue that Anita Bryant has more followers than Germaine Greer, that Pat Boone speaks to more important needs than David Reuben, and that Marjorie Holmes will be savored long after Xaviera Hollander is remaindered. Apples and oranges? Maybe. Tongue in cheek? Not really. Something to think about? Surely.

But not in the context of that mythical prairie called Middle America. It’s no accident that Norman Lear placed Archie Bunker in Queens. Large numbers of New Yorkers relish Two from Galilee just as large numbers of Iowans enjoy The Love Machine. It’s not so much a question of regional taste as of a growing, nationwide hunger for a personal, satisfying spiritual way of life.

"These readers are searching," says Doubleday’s Liepa, "for inspiration and assurance in their individual, personal, everyday lives" According to Patricia Schreck, they are seeking books of a "comforting or supporting nature, no doubt because of the times" East and west of the Hudson, books of this kind are enjoying vast sales.

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Those of us who read The Christian Century and consider ourselves at least semitheologians should not shrug this development off with a casual distinction between "educated" and "noneducated" readers. That distinction is a half-truth at best, and it misses two important points: the widespread reading of such books not only tells us something important about the overall religious temper of our times; it may also give us a clue to one possible theological expression of the future.

Martin Marty, in a prophetic Christian Century article (February 27, 1974), wondered where the bright new religious thinkers were hiding, and suggested that we won’t find them until we are ready to accept a form of expression quite different from that of the theological thoroughbreds we justly revere:

It may be that the seekers and spotters cannot see a new generation right under their nose because they use the definition and expectations of an earlier time. Certainly any new generation will seek fresh expression. Maybe Frederick Buechner and Keith Mano have the right idea: speak through the novel. Watch for poets and pamphleteers. Psychology, the social sciences, imaginative literature, will all go into the making of a new language. Any new survey will include people who are writing what two generations ago might not even have called theology.

In other words, a new generation of creative religious writers may not sound like theologians, though they may have something important and substantial to communicate. Given all the varieties of new journalism now known, and some not yet discovered, it is not unlikely that they will tend to express themselves in a genre resembling that of the religious best sellers of today -- a genre personal, concrete, narrational and, in application, universal.

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Traditional theological studies will and must continue to be published, of course, but only the most rigorously scientific and groundbreaking of them may find adequate support. Meanwhile, we might also hope for a new generation of writers who, like Buechner, will make life imitate art in awakening the reader to possibilities and not just to categories -- writers who will practice what many excellent traditional theologians are now preaching: story theology.

And we might expect certain writers who have already won their credentials to lead the way. "Story theology" is hardly new to such diverse theologians as Langdon Gilkey (Shantung Compound), Sam Keen (To a Dancing God), and Harvey Cox (Seduction of the Spirit). Eugene Kennedy’s recent book Believing introduces an interesting variation on this form by getting into the hearts and heads of public figures ranging from Eugene McCarthy to B.F. Skinner. And for many young people, Martin Bell’s book and record The Way of the Wolf hold the same basic appeal that Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey holds.

Conrad Hyers’s witty parable, The Chickadees, went into two fast printings this year, and perhaps the most controversial religious book of the year is Thomas Klise’s apocryphal novel The Last Western. Next year will see at least two major theological novels: Exit 36, by Robert Capon, and Protocol for a Damnation, by Peter Berger; the Capon chronicle has already been bought as a mass-market paperback for five figures.

In addition to the substance lacking in so many books of an evangelical nature, these writers have brought to their works the voice so often lacking in traditional religious books. Readers are aware that someone is speaking directly to them, almost as if over a coffee table. Reading, after all, is a uniquely solitary experience and even a theologian should strive to create the mood of a one-to-one relationship. There is no reason why theology and story cannot mix to form a potent tonic for individual growth and change, both intellectually and emotionally.

If this trace of a trend among solid thinkers develops further, the books that result may also be a leaven for those who seek a meaningful spiritual way of life but often have to settle for something that is less than substantial. A midwest book salesman, who probably reads as many religious books as most theologians, makes a comment on evangelical churches that applies to many evangelical best sellers: "They show a steady growth, but I fear it is immature. In the long run, it does not meet the needs of the rational thinker, and its overemotional status is bound to wither in various directions eventually. The brainwashed in this category will always remain, but the thoughtful, seeking kind of individual will continue to seek a spiritual way that is more substantial and rational."

Werner Mark Linz, president of Seabury Press, identifies the challenge: "The center of serious religious thought seemed to collapse during the past decade, and nothing may be more important in the long run than rebuilding it. Since the church’s critical, prophetic mission is best received by basically secure persons, a supportive publishing program providing substantive religious information and values for personal growth should be well received. There is a vast-scale ferment and the publisher that can make a deep-rooted impact on these readers will be both doing a service and selling his books."

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At the same time, while a more personal approach to religion is desperately needed and certainly worthwhile, religious publishers generally agree that to make a lasting impact the books they put out must also focus on the social dimension of religion and the moral crises of our day: poverty, the crumbling of values, pressures on the family, the plight of the aged and other minorities, problems in ecology, the life sciences and public affairs.

And perhaps it is in these vital areas that it will be most difficult to find new writers to communicate the issues from a religious point of view. John Shea, a young theologian and author of three books, says that many fine thinkers of his generation prefer to "act out what they believe in social or political programs, or talk out their ideas in conferences and workshops, rather than write them out." Whether or not these thinkers create via the typewriter no doubt depends on many factors; but certainly it depends in part on the encouragement that established religious media are willing to give them -- e.g., the invitation offered by Martin Marty in the article referred to above. If a new generation is convinced that the publisher of religious books or journals expects them to hold to the style of their predecessors, they may be even more prone to resist the troubling urge to write.

Today, both those who have not yet written and those who have been writing for years are perhaps more needed than ever. Author John Charles Cooper, dean of academic affairs at Winebrenner Theological Seminary, sums up the situation: "People do feel that religion is losing its influence on society, and they may be right -- but the majority of people do not wish this to be true, and so it is an important time to be publishing good religious books. Religious interest, in this sense, is growing, but it is not on the whole being fed solid food through the books that are published. Even in the face of cultural chaos and color TV, there is a great need and demand for materials that are both interesting and mature.

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The institutional church has gone through many hard times. It will surely survive the present storms of cultural and social change, though it is difficult to say just when things will look better instead of worse. But that the interest in religious books will continue to grow is a very safe guess, at least for the near future. "The greater the world pressures," says Zondervan’s Gary Wharton, "the greater the need for an answer, and the greater the future of religious books that provide answers. Sometimes I am much more optimistic about religious publishing than I am about the world tomorrow."

"How should the religious book not have a future?" asks Karl Rahner, one of the most important theologians of any time. "It will be transformed, but it will endure. It will achieve this even if it takes the form of an unending variation upon a single basic theme: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Even then it will endure and will lead us to that point in our human existence at which this existence is thrown headlong into the redeeming mystery."

The Future Came Yesterday

One thing is certain. Change. But too much change, coming too fast and too soon, can shake and shatter our lives, leaving many of us confused and unable to cope. "Nobody," argued Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, "can be pushed above his adaptive range without suffering disturbance and disorientation." And it’s clear that "disturbance and disorientation" are happening now. The future came yesterday, and most of us are unprepared to deal with it. Many, in fact, would like to go backwards.

Even churchgoers. Last summer, the First Presbyterian Church of Augusta, Georgia -- "mother church" of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern) -- announced its withdrawal from the million -- member denomination. It was one of a growing number of conservative congregations to cut off ties with the parent body because of disenchantment with "rising liberal trends."

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But can there really be a retreat to the past? Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson is one of many who point out that, "in our society at present, the ‘natural course of events’ is precisely that the rate of change should continue to accelerate up to the as-yet-unreached limits of human and institutional adaptability." And Professor Toffler warns: "During the next thirty or forty years we must anticipate not a single wave of change, but a series of terrible heaves and shudders."

The Roman Catholic Church, for instance, has seen more changes in the decade since Vatican II than it saw in the previous century. It’s no extravagance to expect even deeper changes in all Christian communions in the next 20 years than all those made since Paul left Tarsus 20 centuries ago. We are entering a whole new world where the surreal is becoming the real -- a world of urban communes and floating parishes, teen-age gurus and tentmaker priests, Jesus freaks and Jesus-freak deprogrammers.

More than ever, churchgoers must have help to understand the bursting energies that are shaping society and church, to rediscover the God who acts in history, to join him in the arena of his work. To this end a major effort in Christian education seems desperately needed. A new approach must be found to reconcile those who like to ride the crest of change with those who seek the safety of the harbor -- an approach that is faithful both to the push of the gospel and to the pull of a radically changing world. Otherwise, the church could eventually face what Alvin Toffler called "future shock" -- a massive adaptational breakdown.

Oscar Hussel, director of educational systems development for Joint Educational Development, emphasizes the urgency of the church’s present situation: "As Americans move out of their age of innocence and the culture is increasingly secularized, it becomes doubly crucial for the church to be able to tell its members what it is, where it came from, where it is meant to go, and what it should be about. Education is essential to these purposes. At least, until the church knows its own nature and purpose, it will never have much to say to American society or be a major force shaping American culture"

Grass-roots opinion reinforces the sense of urgency. In the fall of 1972 teams of fact finders from the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church visited 91 of the 92 dioceses of that 3-million-member church. Their purpose was to find out what the church at large thought should be the program priorities for 1974-76. Two-thirds of the reporting dioceses listed education as the highest priority. In effect they agreed that there is no clearer mandate than the demand for a new and innovative program of Christian education.

But there’s a dilemma. The pessimism prevailing in the country has blunted the spirit of generosity, and in consequence most voluntary institutions are hard pressed for funds. Certainly the national denominations are feeling a financial pinch that severely limits the educational services they can provide to judicatories and parishes calling for them. The Episcopal Church did without an education officer for more than a year. The Southern Presbyterian Church had some 80 people involved nationally in educational services a decade ago; today no more than 6 are projected for the near future.

So there is, on the one hand, a need and a demand for better programs of Christian education, and on the other, an apparent crisis of commitment to support them.

Take the question of resources. In the late 1950s, when people seemed to flock to the churches, the national denominations produced a plethora of creative curricula for their church schools. Some, like the Christian Faith and Action curriculum of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and the Seabury Series of the Episcopal Church, were even considered ahead of their time. But these materials age, despite updating, and soon the publishers will have to scrounge for subsidies to replace them. And, in a culture that prizes novelty, more and more parishes are simply "doing their own thing," passing by what is good and useful in their own denominational curricula and either making up their own or buying from independent publishers.

the situation reminds one of what Kurt Vonnegut says about The Brothers Karamozov: "That book tells you all you need to know about life. But today it isn’t enough." Most educators think that church education isn’t enough anymore either. As someone wisely said: ‘‘Christ taught adults and played with the children, while we in our churches have been teaching children and playing with adults." As a result, some of the best recent efforts in Christian education have been in adult education -- programs that enrich adult communities in which there are children, not communities of children in which there happen to be a few adults.

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This is obviously a positive trend. But it would be very dangerous if it diminished the church’s concern for better models of church school education. Data compiled by the United Methodist Church strongly indicate that the old dictum still holds: "As the church school goes, so goes the church." During the past decade, United Methodist church school enrollment plummeted by 1,649,264 (23.8 per cent). Between 1968 and 1971, church school enrollment of four other mainline denominations -- the United Church of Christ, the Christian Church, and the two Presbyterian churches -- dropped by 19.3 per cent. And since changes in church school enrollment usually precede changes in church membership by three to five years, these churches face severe attrition in both the quantity and the quality of their constituency in the years ahead, if present trends continue.

The Methodist survey makes it clear that "trends in the educational ministry, especially as they are reflected in the growth and decline of the church school, are followed by growth and decline elsewhere in the church."

So it is also clear that adult education is not the ‘‘be all and end all’’ as concerns the church. Effective programs for church schools are equally important. Are there any positive trends in church school education that hold hope for the future?

Enough of them. The trend among parishes is not only to "do their own thing" but to do it together. Ecumenism may be weak as an attempt to unite all Christians organizationally, but the trend toward interchurch cooperation on matters of education is strong. In fact, variations among congregations within the same denomination are often greater and more significant than any identifiable differences among the denominations themselves. Educational needs often cross denominational lines, and are influenced more by size, leadership, and economic and social environment than by denominational loyalties. And many parishes, like many national and regional agencies, are finding that it makes dollars and sense to meet their educational needs through the sharing of resources, both human and material.

Peter Day, ecumenical officer for the Episcopal Church, put the case succinctly: "We had assumed that the ecumenical issue was one of church government, whereas it’s an issue of church life. We face the fact that things are happening locally that in some ways are ahead of what was proposed nationally."

Four churches in Rockport, Massachusetts, for instance -- Baptist, Episcopal, Methodist and Congregational -- have combined their church schools and use one curriculum. The primary children meet at the Congregational church, lower juniors at the Methodist church, and juniors at the Baptist church. The Episcopal church offers Wednesday afternoon classes for those who prefer that time. Says teacher Nancy Bonne: "The system makes efficient use of space and resources, and it has solved the shortage of teaching staff, since formerly each church had to recruit teachers for every grade level, even with only three or four in a group. It has given the children a real sense of comradeship since they are with the same children they see in school every day."

Often churches form a covenant relationship to meet a specific educational need. In Macon, Georgia, an interdenominational class for retarded children includes Jews, Roman Catholics and Baptists. In North Dakota a tri-county coalition of churches from eight denominations is sharing facilities, equipment, filmstrips and other resources to provide each of the church schools involved with the best available methods in Christian education. Coalitions. are also being set up at the judicatory level, where dioceses, presbyteries, conferences and synods are pooling resources not only for church school education but for leadership development and youth work also. In the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi, the Christian education staffs of five denominations serve one another’s constituency on a sorting-of-skills basis.

Of course any coalition, local or regional, has problems as well as opportunities. Some coalitions have a fitful history of starting and stopping as educational goals are redefined or new ones merge. There is a temptation to abandon one coalition and join another when programs are less successful than expected. But, generally speaking, most people involved in educational consortia are reporting renewed enthusiasm for their work, as well as a feeling of wider comradeship and a redefined sense of purpose in their educational vocations.

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Perhaps the most intriguing work of this kind is that being carried on at the national level by JED. That sounds like the name of a member of TV’s Walton family, but actually JED is a family of its own, made up of members of the educational staffs of six denominations: the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., the Reformed Church in America, the United Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples), the Episcopal Church, and the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., which last acts as a representative of five additional denominations. Since 1968, the six have been engaged in a program of Joint Educational Development, whence the acronym JED.

JED has been described as "an ecumenical sharing of abilities and expertise" and a partnership which makes "good, economic sense in these days of decreasing financial resources for the work of the church." On the one hand, the JED denominations believe that they have a major responsibility in helping their congregations to choose the best educational programs for the specific goals each affirms; on the other hand, declining income, reduced staffs and denominational restructurings make it almost impossible for each denomination to do it effectively alone. So they have covenanted to work together, rather than having each denomination develop and market its own church school curricula, as in the past.

Because they recognize that life styles and viewpoints differ not only from one congregation to another but also within each congregation, the "JEDucators" believe that several educational systems are necessary to meet as many educational needs as do in fact exist. Therefore they have projected a four-faceted curriculum plan that they hope will meet the needs of at least 80 per cent of their 11-million combined membership. The plan calls for four separate and complete educational systems, ranging from a more traditional system designed to serve churches dissatisfied with the national emphases on social action to a forward-looking system meant for churches wishing to be involved in social change. Broken down, the systems will look something like this:

System I: A strongly biblical, well-structured, simple, dated curriculum, similar to the Uniform Series.

System 2: Undated curriculum of in-depth biblical studies that emphasize a contemporary and scholarly interpretation of Scripture. The present resources most nearly resembling this system are the Christian Faith and Action series.

System 3: An experience-oriented curriculum suitable for creative teaching and learning activity. The most similar present resources are the United Church, Covenant Life, and Christian Life series.

System 4: A curriculum to equip people for mission and to explore the issues that confront Christians in a changing world, such as the newly emerging Shalom resources developed by the United Church of Christ.

It is unlikely that either churches that are very conservative and thoroughly displeased with the directions their denominations are taking, or churches that are radical "do-it-ourselvers" and think the national bodies are still in the Middle Ages, will want to buy into the systems, though they could use much of what will be developed. However, most congregations are expected to find that at least one system does meet their needs; and the systems will be so interrelated that a congregation can intermix more than one with its program to meet the divergent needs of its own constituency. Betty Currie, JED planning coordinator, stresses that the systems will be heavily backed with teaching and learning plans, leadership support, and a variety of resources for different settings to make such an integrated approach possible.

The JED consortium is also working on several smaller projects, such as Share, a monthly newspaper which serves as a forum and resource tool for parish educators. But the multifaceted curriculum proposal, to be ready in 1975 and completed by 1978, is perhaps the first unified attempt at a massive redesigning of total church school education. If it works, richer resources at lower cost should be available to a wider constituency than ever before.

But while several denominations not now members of JED -- the United Methodist Church, the Church of the Brethren, and the Moravian Church in America -- are interested in participating in the design of the systems, the major issue at the moment, according to Dr. Hussel, "is to get the JED denominations at the national level to see that this is one of their top priorities and to speak boldly for it, giving us staff time to achieve quality, and applying precious dollars to this venture." For, he contends, "without this kind of approach, education in the parish will diminish in effectiveness, in numbers of persons reached, and in the realization of the increasing importance of education in the church in a period of national values crisis."

The educational systems approach, of course, does not guarantee anything. What happens with it may be exactly what would happen without it in many congregations. And it may not be necessary for every denomination at the national level to give it full support -- as the Episcopal Church recently decided. What is significant, in an educational sense, is that this is the first time congregations are recognized by the national agencies as the locale in which curriculum choice must be and in fact is made. The essential part of the educational systems is denominational assistance to congregations in choosing the curriculum which meets their needs. At worst, this approach will encourage and force congregations to determine exactly why they are involved in church school education. At best, it can help them to do a more effective and efficient job for greater numbers of their members.

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These trends in church school and other Christian education -- locally, regionally and nationally -- are not yet as widespread as one could wish. But they are growing enough to indicate an inevitable future when issues like papacy, episcopacy and presbyterianism will not raise Christian hackles as they now do. There is no reason why several ecclesiastical structures cannot coexist in an increasingly pluralistic society.

Meanwhile, education in the churches will probably evolve slowly in these directions, with only a few dramatic, and perhaps traumatic, experiences. It is not unreasonable to expect that, five years hence, the forms and support of education will not be radically different in a majority of congregations, and that church school enrollment will continue to decline.

After all, the churches have always had more resources for Christian education, both human and financial, than they have effectively used. The ultimate answer is one not so much of addition as of division and multiplication -- to tap and share and make available what is already there. But that loosing of resources will happen only when committed individuals, alone and together, decide to make it happen.

Keith Miller put it well in A Second Touch: "Paradoxically, it is together that we are each going to find his destiny. The Christian pilgrimage is a joint adventure; but to last, in my opinion, it must always remain an individual one for each of us." Keith Miller may not be taken seriously by some educators because of his evangelical directness. But the man is right on target. Even today, where this kind of spirit is alive in a congregation, chances are the church school is thriving. And where it is weak, as in many mainline Protestant churches, the church school situation is about as bright as a blackboard. An evangelical spirit, together with an ecumenical openness, could get lost in piety and obscurity; but properly witnessed it is not only compatible with denominational identity: it is perhaps the best way to motivate people to make their faith a part of their lives.

Some educators think it is too late, that the church school is dead, that the church itself may be dying. Others are convinced that the positive signs point to a future of enormous potential. In a time when anything can happen -- and usually does -- the question is not which point of view is true, but which one we should accept, and then, with God’s help, try to make come true.

The future came yesterday, but it’s not too late to shape it in the image of Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.

The Bible’s Place in the Public School

No doubt about it, religion is "in" today. Millions of bumper stickers exhort drivers to read their Bibles or to honk if they know Jesus. Students flaunt Jesus buttons and Jesus T-shirts. Televised specials and magazine photo-articles feature "Jesus freaks" and Pentecostal groups. Young people meet to discuss the Bible in homes, church basements, classrooms, back yards and public parks. Yet at least one student, in every Bible-as-literature course I have taught in a public high school, looks around conspiratorily the first day and asks in a stage whisper, Can we get away with this?"

I

Just where does the public school figure in this "Back to the Bible" boom? Contrary to general opinion, the public school may indeed teach the Bible -- or for that matter, the Koran or the Book of Mormon or the I Ching. A careful reading of relevant court decisions shows that absolutely nothing in them bans the objective study of the Bible and religions. In fact, the Supreme Court has made it plain that certain "religious" activities are not only permissible in the public schools, but desirable. The justices strongly encourage instruction in the Bible as a literary and historical document, use of the Bible as a reference book, and study of the role religions have played in the development of civilization.

What has been banned -- in such cases as Engel v. Vitale, Murray v. Curlett, the landmark Schempp case of 1962 -- worship services mandated by the school authorities. In other words, any school requiring students to listen to daily Bible readings or to recite the Lord’s Prayer or other officially endorsed prayers is in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution and the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment. A film, The Schempp Cases Bible Reading in Public Schools (Britannica, 1970: 45 mm., color), clearly brings out these points.

This film was shown in the Bible classes in the school where I teach -- Encina High, Sacramento -- when, in 1973, we introduced a Bible course there as a junior-senior nine-week literature elective. However, many of our students elected the course not out of interest in literature or history, but out of direct or indirect religious motivation. Of the approximately 120 Encina students who took the course in the 1973-74 school year, the vast majority gave as their reason simply to "learn more about the Bible," though some added, "to make me a better Christian." One or two students in each of the four nine-week classes chose the course because they wanted to understand the allusions to the Bible made by their parents or other adults they respected. And several in each group agreed with the boy who wrote, "I liked the idea of reading the Bible without religious prejudice."

II

Whatever the students’ initial reasons for electing the course, the film and the teacher’s introductory remarks made it clear that the main course goals would be to familiarize them with the Bible’s general contents and to give them a broad awareness of its influence on Western art and literature. A pretest asking students to identify various biblical books and the people and places mentioned therein, and to complete a few well-known quotations, showed how very little biblical knowledge most teenagers possess -- even those who have attended church schools for years. Moreover, many had no idea that the Bible consists of an entire library of books written by many authors over many centuries. They were confused too over the number of versions of the Bible, and wanted to know which one was the "real" Bible. Several were not at all sure what those "funny little numbers" along the sides of the pages were for.

So the nine-week courses we offered -- one in the Old Testament, one in the New -- could be only an introduction to biblical study. The Old Testament course began with information on how the Bible developed, on the difficulties of translation and on how the various versions came to be made. Next there were exercises on how to locate particular passages and how to use such standard reference books as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations or a concordance to complete a quotation or to find its source. We then read and discussed the great narratives from Genesis the stories of Abraham and Moses and of various judges and kings (Deborah, Gideon, Samson; Saul, David, Solomon). Finally we dealt with the books of poetry, wisdom, and prophecy (Psalms, Song of Songs, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.). In the New Testament course we read and discussed the Gospels of Luke and John (citing parallel passages it, Mark and Matthew), the Acts of the Apostles, and selections from the epistles and Revelation.

Of necessity, these courses covered only a sampling of what the Bible actually contains. The emphasis was on getting students to read, often for the first time, stories they thought they knew without ever having read them. (It’s a source of constant amazement to students to discover that no apple is mentioned in the Adam and Eve narrative.) Reading, and clarification of what the words literally say, was our main class activity. Since that first year we were not sure how well the class would go, we did not invest in books for the course. The Gideons kindly donated a number of King James Bibles for use in class, and most students had a Bible available at home. But the King James Version proved nearly unreadable for many students, so I often read aloud in class from The New English Bible (Oxford University Press, 1970), stopping frequently for questions. This translation in itself cleared up many of the students’ reading problems. For our second year, we are buying a modern translation of the Bible in paperback -- both the students and I agreed on the need.

III

The showing of supplementary films and slides helped vary classroom procedures and clarify the cultural, geographic and historical background of biblical times. I found in our district audio-visual department (a department that is certainly not geared to teaching the Bible) two films which were especially helpful from the point of view of history and geography: Ancient Palestine (Coronet Films, 1968; 14 min., color) and Israel: The Land and the People (Coronet, 1970; 14 min., color). A third film, The Law and the Prophets (McGraw-Hill Text Films, 1970; 51 min., 2 reels, color), not only offers a good summary of the Old Testament but also demonstrates the influence of the Bible on Western art, for, it shows great works of painting and sculpture inspired by the Bible.

I was fortunate to have in each quarter’s class at least one student who had visited Israel and could show his slides to the class. Our photography teacher made two sets of supplementary slides for me, one from a book on Marc Chagall’s Jerusalem Windows (based on the 12 tribes of Israel), and one from various books on biblical scenes and landscapes. I made use also of records -- Negro spirituals, Bill Cosby’s "Apple" and "Noah" (The Best of Bill Cosby, Warner Brothers Seven Arts Records), Jesus Christ. Superstar (Decca Records), etc., as well as of Peanuts cartoons and political cartoons, newspaper satire, and, occasionally, of short pieces of fiction and poetry on biblical themes. Such devices made the class livelier, evidenced the continuing influence of the Bible on our art and culture, and deepened the students’ understanding of the universality of biblical themes. One happy coincidence was the performance at a nearby university of Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., a modern interpretation of the story of Job. Several students saw the play and compared it with the biblical Book of Job for the benefit of the class.

As I said above our greatest need proved to be a modern translation of the Bible for each student. I also feel strongly that either the Old Testament course or teacher approval should he a prerequisite for enrollment in the New Testament course. On the whole our Bible course met with student enthusiasm, though it was by no means a "snap." In addition to extensive reading it required numerous papers and a good deal of old-fashioned memorizing. An adult with years of church attendance behind him cannot begin to fathom how new all those characters’ names are to a teen-ager.

IV

An interesting side effect of the course was that many students talked about it with their parents. No parents complained about the course; indeed many told me or my principal that they would like to see us set up such a course for adults. Nor did the plurality of religious backgrounds -- Jews, Mormons, Catholics, members of numerous Protestant sects -- pose any problems. Both students and parents respected my efforts to maintain objectivity in class, and when I asked the students what qualifications teachers of the course should have, none mentioned church affiliation as necessary, though they did observe that teaching a Bible course would probably be easier for a person with a strong Christian background (I agree). Many said that the teacher should have, a broad acquaintance with the Bible and with literature in general, and with parallel stories from other ancient cultures. And some students thought it would be good (though not essential) for the teacher to have some grounding in the sacred books, myths and legends of such other major religions as Hinduism and Islam.

Whatever the reasons, "The Bible as Literature" is a course which has evidently found its time. For years anthologies of English literature have included in the Elizabethan section several short selections from the King James Bible -- selections often hurried over. And as early as 1964 the English Journal, a national magazine for high school English teachers, was carrying articles on the teaching of Bible in the traditional English class. But the ‘60s were not years of great student interest in religion. The ‘70s have seen a change. Now that religion is "in" once more, it is once more possible to teach the most influential book in all of Western literature -- and to teach it without coercion or apology.

The Neglected Phenomenon of Female Homosexuality

Whenever the word "homosexuality" is mentioned, more than 90 per cent of the listeners or readers will assume that the reference is to males. In the first report by Alfred C. Kinsey and his colleagues on male sexual behavior in the U.S., one of the items that provided maximum shock value was the "cumulative incidence" figure of 37 per cent for homosexual acts. That meant that 37 per cent of the men interviewed reported having, at some age and on at least one occasion, a homosexual experience.

At that time Kinsey estimated that the percentage of more-or-less exclusively homosexual males in our white population was about 4 per cent. But the report made a most useful contribution: a scale of points from zero to six, with the zero representing those males demonstrating no homosexual interest or activity whatever, and the six representing those of exclusively homosexual orientation. Later students of the subject, including Kinsey’s successors, are now inclined to include most of the men ranked at five and some of those at four in the blanket category "homosexual," which of course considerably raises the predominantly homosexual proportion of the male population.

Some excellent studies of male homosexuality have been done since Kinsey. Judd Marmor and others have used both clinical and other data to show that male homosexuals as a group are no less mentally healthy, by the usual criteria, than heterosexuals -- except insofar as blanket discriminatory social attitudes render them so. Evelyn Hooker has pioneered in studies of the social patterns and relationships of male homosexuals. The differentiation of homosexual orientation from gender identity (for females as well as males) has been increasingly recognized, and a highly competent summing up is available in Man and Woman: Boy and Girl, by John Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).

As to the causes of homosexuality in males, there is so far no conclusive evidence that, physiological or biochemical factors are involved (but it may eventually be found that some such factors are contributory), and there is general agreement that homosexual patterns are "learned." But the complexities of that "learning" are very poorly understood. Otherwise competent journalistic reports on research findings about male homosexuality, such as Peter and Barbara Wyden’s Growing Up Straight (Stein & Day, 1968), confound the picture for the public by appealing to the fears of middle-class parents; further, they profess (without foundation) to show that parents can educate their children away from the possibility of becoming homosexual.

Along with the centering of the research and writing (and propaganda) almost entirely on male homosexuality, there have been some tacit assumptions about female homosexuality: that it is infrequent (Kinsey put the figure at half that for men); that its causes will automatically be made clear if those for males are disclosed; and that most female homosexuals are unattractive or dominating women who could not get a man. In addition to these fallacious assumptions, and perhaps even overshadowing them, is the fact that, contrasted with the antagonistic attitude, in general toward male homosexuals, society is not really much concerned about those few "inadequate" females who fall into homosexual patterns. Partly because of all that, and because money for research on homosexuality is virtually nonexistent (the present federal administration has cut back sharply even the small previous allocation, and private foundations seem frightened of the subject), nearly all studies have continued to be of male homosexuals.

A genuine advance toward the understanding of homosexuality in females has been made in the publication of Lesbianism, by David H. Rosen (Charles C Thomas, 1974), a psychiatrist at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco and a member of the University of California’s department of psychiatry. The book’s excellent foreword is by Evelyn Hooker, who chaired the HEW study commission on homosexuality in 1967-68 (its findings were released only in 1972). She commends the work, and rightly so, primarily for its "comprehensive critical review of the literature" (there have been about 15 studies of female homosexuals who were not patients) and for its 26 summarized case studies. Averaging about one page each, the case studies were collected by the author outside his clinical practice and with the cooperation of the Daughters of Bilitis, an organization of female homosexual persons. Quite properly, the author has done the statistical work that his small sample warrants, but the case studies tell more than the statistics. All the participants cooperated voluntarily.

Although Rosen did not use a control group in relation to his 26 nonpatient subjects, and although some of them had problems, he succeeds in considerable measure in demonstrating his principal thesis that "female homosexuality is not an illness but ‘a way of life.’ " His respondents varied as to their position on the Kinsey scale, some maintaining sexual relations with both males and females, while others had never had sexual relations with a male. They also showed wide variation in the duration of commitment to a single partner. One of Rosen’s most significant findings (supporting a suggestion by Kinsey) was that the later pattern these women followed had been greatly influenced by their first sexual experience. If that experience was a satisfactory one with another woman or girl, the chances of moving toward homosexuality were increased. They were also increased if the first experience had been an unsatisfactory one with a man or boy.

As one woman cited in the book explained her early experience: "I met a boy and ‘went steady’ with him for nine months. We were very much interested in each other -- sex would have developed later. My parents were afraid of my interest in him, so they put a sudden stop to our romance. I did not want to date another boy." I can recall a young woman with whom I counseled years ago about her homosexual relationship with a teacher. She told me: "My parents warned me against boys. But they never said anything about girls, and I never thought there was anything wrong with my relationship to the teacher -- until later."

Just last month the American Psychiatric Association, voting on a recommendation from its board of trustees, dropped homosexuality as such from its list of mental disorders. The vote was about 60 per cent to 40 per cent. Still retained in the mental illness category is "sexual orientation disturbance," which might involve homosexuals who are disturbed by their condition or who want to change it. While psychiatrists will, of course, be available to help people with a homosexual orientation if they want such help, the APA’s decision is a clear disclaimer of responsibility for changing homosexual persons who are not troubled by their orientation and whose behavior is not socially irresponsible.

For many human predicaments, classification as "illness" has been a gesture of hope and acceptance. "Alienists" became psychiatrists when "insanity" gave way to mental illness. In the sense that an illness is something that runs a course and is fatal if there is no recovery, homosexuality is no illness. By that same standard, a host of personality problems are not illnesses. In the sense that an illness is something the person had no part in initiating, it is probable that homosexual persons are less ill than people who get colds, ulcers, lung cancer and housemaid’s knee.

But when "illness" is used for name-calling purposes, to rule out such use is plainly a move in the right direction. On Christian ethical grounds, I would recommend that all laws making criminal offenses of acts between consenting homosexual adults be repealed and that there be no blanket job discrimination against homosexual persons of either sex; further, I contend that exclusion of homosexual persons from churches (unless they are pushed out for a reason that would apply to heterosexuals in identical fashion) is untenable. But I would not be prepared to say, as the increasing quantities of homosexual propaganda want us to, that the one problem about homosexuals is their civil rights in the larger sense.

The constructive suggestions in Rosen’s book are confined to the no-illness point of view, along with a plea for more research, which, of course, is needed. But there are other phenomena that have come to attention in recent years about homosexual behavior among women -- phenomena which, even though lacking careful study, are suggestive enough to warrant, preliminary comment.

The respected Masters and Johnson studies have made crystal clear that most women (unless impeded by specific disease or restrained by social standards) have the capacity for far more orgasms than even the prize male stud can claim. Some interesting findings have been brought out by the two or three competent studies of so-called "group sex," in which the participants are mainly married couples. It seems that a couple usually enters into such activity on the urging of the husband; however, if the pattern lasts as long as a few months, most of the wives discover that they enjoy sexual relations with women as well as with men. A typical group-sex evening seems to find the men racing at the start, then dropping out one by one, but enjoying watching the women continue until it is time to go home. (Such groups forbid both feelings and expressions of affection.) So far as is known, most of these women, after group sex is left behind, seldom if ever again engage in homosexual activity. They never think of themselves as "homosexual." Also of interest concerning the married groups studied is the fact that male homosexuality has been completely absent,

I have been trying to imagine what a "pansexualist" utopia would be like if absolutely all taboos on sexual activity were removed except those involving injury, exploitation, coercion, and the like. If females -- perhaps even girls before puberty -- had the psychic inclination to realize their full orgasmic potentialities, then there would have to be sexual acts between females, and these would far outnumber all heterosexual acts and all male homosexual acts combined! For any woman psychically tuned up to use all her capabilities for orgasm all the time, sexual relations with males would become, comparatively speaking, "breaks" in the "normative" female-to-female pattern.

Before dismissing the above fantasy too quickly, let the reader think about why it is that our society seems so little concerned over female homosexuality, has regarded it so lightly, and has no idea of the amount of female sexual activity engaged in by women who are not admitted homosexuals. A woman bent on such full sexuality would have little or no time left over for babies and housekeeping, not to mention a job. In this instance, even nonbelievers in "natural law" might argue that nature, or perhaps evolution, has triumphed over unbridled instinct; otherwise the race would have perished on Lesbos. And maybe some of that is true. But is it not likely that our male-dominated society "represses," in Freud’s sense, the realization that women guided by instinct and pleasure alone could cause far more havoc than men motivated by the same factors? Is not our apparent tolerance and indifference probably a means of protection for the male ego?

More and more church groups seem to be feeling a bit guilt-stricken about blanket condemnation of homosexuality and especially of homosexual persons. Thinking perhaps of how they once condemned alcoholics instead of trying to accept and help them, they have become open to discussions and not infrequently have invited homosexual persons to speak. The trouble is that such encounters pit an indefensible and outmoded legalism against a propaganda line that says, basically, that there is no problem about homosexuals except that of civil rights. That is a bit like the John Birch Society’s getting qualms of conscience, inviting Brezhnev in for a discussion, and then wrestling over whether to retreat to its previous position or to advance all the way to the Kremlin.

It is proper and timely that our interest be awakened in the personhood of homosexual individuals who have no wish to change their sexual orientation -- and let us not forget the women. But there is a need to be thoughtful about the overall issues involved.

The Outlook for Mental Health Services

News being what it is, even a conscientious reader of the New York Times can get only scraps of information about the state of mental health services today. Such a reader would know, for instance, that already there have been some judicial decisions requiring mental hospitals to give treatment, and not just custodial care, to all patients -- and that others are likely to follow. While seeing the potential value in such decisions, the reader would not have to be a cynic -- realism would suffice -- to wonder whether the results might be a mere shuffling of labels; unless sufficient additional personnel and funds were made available, "treatment" would be no more than a euphemism. One who reads fine print would have learned that various levels of government have cut training funds for mental health workers. But all the news stories together would not go far in illuminating the situation.

In attempting here a broad-scale analysis, I am assuming that mental health services are a concern of the churches and churchpeople, over and above any special interest we may have in religious ministry to patients or clients.

Voices of Conscience

It was not until the 1920s and ‘30s that mental hospitals in the U.S., even expensive private ones, offered differential diagnosis and treatment based, at least in part, on scientific understandings. Until this century most such institutions were called insane asylums. As Albert Deutsch showed in his monumental history of care of the mentally ill, some 19th century institutions did provide humane care, as well as general medical and surgical treatment for patients who needed it. Dorothea Dix was the "voice of conscience" of that century. By influencing state legislatures and citizens alike, she did much to advance the humane quality of care. But, as Deutsch notes, the figures she gave as to the number of people who got well were thoroughly overstated, not through bad intent but as a consequence of that period’s poor statistical methods. Diagnoses were made on the basis of symptoms, and persons with a certain cluster of symptoms were given a label in the conviction that a particular cause might be found for that "disease."

Such diagnostic thinking was spurred, early in this century, when paresis (or general paralysis, as it was called) was found to be a late-flowering -- usually after ten years or so -- result of syphilitic infection. Until Paul Ehrlich’s discoveries, however, syphilis could not be treated effectively; indeed, not until the development of penicillin could such treatment be carried out easily and safely. There is little paresis today because its syphilitic origin is usually treated successfully in early stages. So the discovery of the bacteriological cause of paresis brought few cures; more often it only reinforced the hope that specific cures (or diagnoses inviting means for cure) could be found for the other "diseases." Today only a few psychiatrists believe that most mental illnesses are disease entities in the sense that pneumonia, scarlet fever or even cancer is.

After Dorothea Dix, the next "voice of conscience" was Clifford Beers. Following a spontaneous recovery from a severe illness for which he had been hospitalized, he founded the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene in 1907, and a year later, with the help of psychiatrists and others, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. Like Dix, his concern was to ameliorate the conditions of the hospitalized mentally ill, but he also wanted to foster prevention of and education about mental illness. His organizational legacy is the National Association for Mental Health and many state and local associations. These groups were very much under psychiatrists’ thumbs until after World War II. Since then they have become lay movements, with the professional concerns left to psychiatrists and their colleagues.

From World War II until the late 1960s, no voice raised on behalf of mental patients was more audible and respected than that of William C. Menninger, who talked to at least as many state legislatures as did Dorothea Dix in the previous century. As a result of his efforts, along with those of the mental health societies (the change from "hygiene" to ‘health" came in the 1940s) and many other groups, including the professionals, it is safe to say that most mental hospitals are better now than they were a generation ago.

Yet we must be cautious. Every step forward has usually been followed, sooner rather than later, by at least a half-step backward. Some of the reasons for the retrogressions are obvious. For instance, state mental hospitals improved greatly in Illinois when Adlai Stevenson was governor. However, his successor’s policies in regard to state hospitals prompted many of the best hospital personnel to leave the state as though it were plague-infested. Illinois eventually made a comeback, but it took years.

About 1950, the state of Kansas asked the Menninger Foundation to help improve its hospitals. William and Karl Menninger had more than knowledge alone; they had enthusiasm and leadership, and they attracted able young professionals for training. Seemingly miraculous recoveries were brought about. Some persons who for many years had been in back wards, out of contact with people, responded to the treatment and got well enough to live outside.

At the Topeka State Hospital alone, the number of resident patients in their 60s was reduced from about 600 to less than 50 in only 20 years. The total population was cut in half (possibly more), a phenomenon that has occurred in many good hospitals. But legislators and sometimes governors were accustomed to give money according to the number of resident patients per day. As resident populations declined, these officials thought hospital budgets could be cut (and they often have been). This attitude, of course, overlooks the fact that the improvement and the higher discharge rates have been possible only by means of more and better personnel and equipment, with the result that the cost per patient per day inevitably increased. This basic misunderstanding still plagues every tax-supported hospital in some fashion.

Especially vulnerable to cutting are funds for training and education. The reasoning here is particularly strange when applied to psychiatric residents, for they, like interns and resident physicians in general hospitals, contribute important service while advancing their education. Yet state legislatures seesaw as to whether these residents are liabilities or assets, as they do in regard to allocating training funds for psychologists, social workers and others, including clergy trainees. Equally threatening to good hospital care and treatment is a similar attitude about the importance of training nonprofessional or paramedical personnel.

In mental hospitals as in general hospitals, intelligent treatment of patients is always better where education and research are going on. Funds for research ride the same roller coaster as do those for training. For some years federal funds were on the rise, but they have been declining over the past five or six years.

Another anomaly appeared in mental hospitals with the advent of drugs, especially the types that reduce anxieties and make patients more manageable. Wisely and sparingly used, such drugs can open patients to various forms of therapy. With wholesale usage, they may extinguish that spark of suffering or uneasiness without which a patient will not seek change. Used by themselves alone, with no supporting therapies, they simply ease the burden for personnel by making patients more tractable. There is aggressive cruelty only on occasion in modern mental hospitals, but relatively indiscriminate drugging is a passive concentration-camp approach of a sort, in fact if not in intention. This condition is all the more tragic because professional personnel, who know better and would like to do more, are likely to be without enough time and assistance to undertake positive therapies.

Community Centers: Creative Adjuncts

During John F. Kennedy’s administration, and with his strong sponsorship, a bill was passed to make possible the creation of community mental health centers. Had the original plans been followed, there would have been about 1,500 such centers by 1970. The actual number by that date was probably not much more than a third of that total; furthermore, despite the good that existing centers have done and are doing, the plan’s most imaginative features -- those that would bring such centers into close contact with schools, churches, the police, and other responsible community organizations -- are the ones that have been least realized.

The centers were designed for several purposes: to admit emergency patients and help them for a brief period, discharging them if improved and sending them to hospitals if extended care was called for; to provide out-patient treatment to individuals and families; to serve as a coordinating or focal channel for many kinds of problems, referring clients to other agencies when indicated; and above all to take mental health services into the community more and more.

These centers were to be encouraged in connection with any kind of reputable auspices: a general hospital or medical center, a private hospital, a clinic, a social-work agency and the like. They could also arise indigenously under their own auspices if stability of the founding group could be established. In practice, well-established institutions have generally been the sponsors. Ghetto groups have almost never been able to demonstrate enough stability to be granted funds. Although ghetto and other poor people are being served by many centers (one condition is that they must give help to anyone within a certain geographic area), minority groups in particular have often viewed such services as being offered by an alien "university whitey" who, in their opinion, fails to consult them about the kinds of services they need.

Even in the centers that have given valuable service, and often in ways the mental hospitals have rarely tried, there has been a two-step temptation, yielded to at times: first toward disillusionment when the early vision of doing so well that mental hospitals would no longer be needed has had to be qualified by the complex and sometimes stubborn resistance of mental illness; then, after disillusionment, sometimes a reversion to old patterns. Church history is of course full of just such idealistic new starts and, not infrequently, some degree of disillusionment followed by routine performance without much zest or imagination.

What has suffered most is the opportunity to bring mental health services into the community. Whatever the provocation, it becomes a tragedy when the very institutions designed to rectify the errors of the mental hospital system move into the kind of business-as-usual attitude originally thought to be the worst aspect of mental hospitals. By no means is it true that all -- or even most -- centers have gone in this direction; but all have been tempted, and some have fallen.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that some people who went into the community mental health centers had a kind of elitist motivation; that is, the conviction that theirs would have "open" organization over against the "closed" organization of the hospitals, and hence that they would ride mental health’s "white horses," dealing with the "interesting" people at early stages while Dr. Whocares could work in hospitals with the derelicts who had not been fortunate enough to find a center early in their illness. Of course, the fact is that, in mental health as in religion and other areas of institutional life, no horse stays white very long.

The Lure of Private Practice

In my opinion, a mental hospital, if it has good leadership and morale and a reasonable assurance of its economic base, is capable not only of providing excellent diagnosis and treatment for its resident patients but also of performing a variety of services that bring it close to its community. And a community mental health center, given the same conditions, is capable of performing valuable functions largely for a different segment of the population and probably at less cost. The two types of institutions, with relatively ideal conditions, should complement each other and not be competitive.

But how can the conditions of leadership, high morale and a reasonable economic base be secured? On that score the image of the roller coaster is scarcely an exaggeration in describing what every such hospital or center has to confront these days. Good administrators and professional people can be driven out not solely because their salaries are lower than they can command elsewhere but also because they may be deprived of the challenge of teaching students and/or doing some research. Nonprofessional personnel may either leave or perform perfunctorily on the job if their leadership seems to have lost hope and zest or if in-service training programs are not available to increase their understanding and convince them that they genuinely are partners with professional persons committed to using every available resource.

For psychiatrists who are competent (or who can convince potential patients of their competence), private practice has been a more lucrative alternative to hospital or center work ever since the public accepted psychiatrists as experts on the problems of living rather than merely on psychoses. Since World War II clinical psychologists increasingly have had a similar option. Still more recently, social workers and marriage and family counselors have sometimes developed private practices. Until very recently, competent people found that entering private practice was not difficult except during the early period in which they are developing a reputation. The kinds of people served by such private practitioners are, rather clearly, those above the midsection of the economic middle. All such reputable helpers I know -- especially the psychiatrists -- do give service to people at lower rates, in many instances working part-time in a clinic or hospital for less than they would receive in private practice.

These professional persons who earn their living in private practice for the most part do not charge improper fees -- even if a 50-minute hour costs $40. It should be remembered that a good surgeon may earn $200, or even $500, in an hour, and physicians in some specialties may see as many as four to six patients in the space of an hour. Moreover, conducting a competent private practice is not easy; increasingly, there seems to be the possibility of malpractice suits for which even physicians have a hard time making provision. For the other helping professions, such protection is even more difficult to obtain.

The obvious lure that takes competent mental health professionals away from hospitals and centers is money; and if the professional can tolerate the process of finding an accountant, a receptionist, nurses, and dealing with other necessary details, the money can be made. But if they had their choice, the best professionals would prefer working on teams. They know that they continue to learn more in that way, that their idiosyncrasies are checked by colleagues, and that they can spend less time and energy worrying about the accountant and the billing.

Money is by no means the sole incentive for entering private practice. Such practice carries a kind of mystique about it. Compare the statement, "Did you hear that Jones has set up shop in the Crystal Towers?" with this one: "I heard Jones has decided to hang on with his schizzies." I gravely doubt that Dr. Jones and his professional colleagues can be held wholly accountable for that evaluation system. It is public opinion, at least indirectly, that feeds the mystique to the professionals. And it is the same public opinion, often expressed through complaints about taxes, that makes it impossible -- or at least very difficult -- for a Dr. Jones to continue in a hospital or a center.

By an ironic twist, private practice may become less attractive, at least financially, if current economic trends continue. Salaries for full-time professional workers in hospitals and centers have gone up, and they are not likely to decline much. True, the number of people a hospital or center can employ may be reduced, but some competent people are now finding difficulty of a new order in making a living from private practice. If the public had the imagination to see the opportunity, and knew that the best professionals want to work on teams and not in isolation, this would be an ideal time to bring some of them back to hospitals and centers.

More Ups Than Downs?

I have focused on the mentally ill who need hospital or clinic-type care and treatment. Quantitatively, they are the largest group, provided alcoholics are left out of consideration -- which is just about what is actually happening today. The most conservative estimates put the number of serious problem drinkers at not less than 7 or 8 million, and no one knows better than Alcoholics Anonymous that there are many alcoholics they cannot reach. Also omitted are the mentally retarded, even though John F. Kennedy made it clear that community mental health centers were to be as much concerned for them as for any other group with mental or emotional problems. Care, treatment, rehabilitation and education for them has improved, but here too the roller-coaster tendency is operating.

If the future of mental health services is considered to depend on complete elimination of the roller coaster, then I should be pessimistic indeed. No matter how hard we try, there are going to be ups and downs in financing, training and research, in idealism, disillusionment and mystiques -- in fact, in all the topics discussed above. I am sanguine enough to believe that the dips on the roller coaster can be leveled out somewhat if the public understands just a little better that doing so will ease more human suffering even than finding a single cure for cancer (which is not to denigrate the importance of that).

The future also depends on what professional people do and how they reflect upon their situation. It is, so to speak, society’s responsibility to see that there is not too large a discrepancy in income between hospital and center work and private practice. If the sacrifice were not extremely large, then the professional people would have a viable choice. In that case, many of them would, I believe, be willing to risk a moderate roller-coaster effect in return for the benefits of genuine interprofessional team practice.

Mental health, of course, consists of more than helping those with mental or emotional problems. But excessive emphasis on positive mental health can turn into a sneaky way of avoiding social responsibility for persons now suffering. Also, too much focus on positive mental health, to the neglect of the negative, can easily become a secular religion of sorts. At any rate, we first need to consider mental health services for the sufferers who need them -- the earlier the better, but certainly at all stages where help is needed.

Religious Freedom or ‘Catch-22’? The Private School Aid Issue

It is my contention that the U.S. Constitution ought to be amended by the addition of these words: "Nothing in the First Amendment shall be construed to prohibit government from defraying the costs of secular education in nonpublic schools." Such an amendment would return to the political process a prerogative that the U.S. Supreme Court has in recent years pre-empted: the right of the people and their elected representatives to determine, and to take practical steps to foster, those kinds of education that seem beneficial to the general welfare. In most other democracies that power has not been lost, as it has in this country, to a runaway doctrine of judicial review. The experience of France after World War II, and especially from 1959 to the present, is particularly instructive. Let us begin, however, with the problem posed by recent rulings of the Supreme Court.

The Court’s Curious Reasoning

Almost unanimously in 1971, and with a solid majority in 1973, the high court struck down a number of programs enacted by state legislatures to provide aid for nonpublic schools, teachers, and students or parents of students. The measures invalidated included supplements for teachers’ salaries; reimbursements to schools for textbooks and instructional materials; grants for maintenance of facilities and equipment to ensure student health, welfare and safety; tuition reimbursement to parents; tax relief for parents who did not qualify for tuition reimbursement; and reimbursement to schools for the expenses of state-required services of examination, inspection, record-keeping and reporting.

Each of the measures fell afoul of one of two court-applied tests of constitutionality. The state programs reviewed by the court in 1971 contained provisions intended to guarantee that funds going directly to schools or teachers would be used to defray the costs of instruction or services that were in no sense religious but rather "secular, neutral or nonideological." Those acts were held to "foster an excessive governmental entanglement with religion." In 1973, however, the court invalidated programs carefully designed to avoid the defect of excessive entanglement; although these plans reflected a secular educational purpose, said the court, their primary effect was to advance religion.

Even within the court itself these decisions did not go unchallenged. In 1971 Justice Byron R. White rejoined that in prior cases the court had recognized that in American society parochial schools perform both religious and secular functions. Those earlier rulings also recognized that a measure extending governmental assistance to sectarian schools in the performance of secular functions does not constitute a "law respecting an establishment of religion" merely because the secular program may incidentally benefit a church in fulfilling its religious mission.

To White the reasoning employed by the court to invalidate a program in Rhode Island was a "curious and mystifying blend" in which the critical factor appeared to be an unwillingness to accept the district court’s express findings that, on the evidence before it, none of the teachers involved had mixed religious and secular instruction. The Supreme Court interposed unsupported conclusions about the teachers in elementary and secondary parochial schools and concluded that the difficulties involved in avoiding the teaching of religion along with secular subjects would pose intolerable risks. Nor were the teachers to be given adequate opportunity to prove otherwise. To the court, that route would have entailed an unacceptable enforcement regime. As White expressed it, the potential for impermissible fostering of religion in secular classrooms -- an untested, assumption of the court, so far as he was concerned -- paradoxically rendered unacceptable the state’s efforts to ensure that secular teachers under religious discipline would successfully avoid conflicts between the religious mission of the school and the secular purpose of the state’s education program.

White found a twofold difficulty with this interpretation. In the first place, it was contrary to the evidence and to the district court’s findings. He saw nothing in the record indicating that any participating teacher had injected religion into his secular teaching or had had any difficulty in refraining from doing so. In fact the testimony of the teachers was quite the contrary. Rather, the court had struck down the Rhode Island statute primarily because of its own model of church-state separation and its own unsupported views of what was likely to happen in Rhode Island parochial school classrooms -- although the record gave no indication that entanglement difficulties would accompany the salary-supplement program.

White summed up the problem in these words:

The Court thus creates an insoluble paradox for the State and the parochial schools. The State cannot finance secular instruction if it permits religion to be taught in the same classroom; but if it exacts a promise that religion not be so taught -- a promise the school and its teachers are quite willing and on this record able to give -- and enforces it, it is then entangled in the ‘no entanglement’ aspect of the Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence [Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 666, 668].

What Justice White dignified with the term "insoluble paradox" could also be termed a "Catch-22." It is one more version of a game called "Heads, I win; tails, you lose." Children play it for kicks and confidence men for a living, but Supreme Court justices do not engage in such antics consciously or deliberately. They are lured into this dilemma by their untested assumptions, by consequences they fear to be inevitable and intolerable. Here, for instance, is the reasoning of Justice William O. Douglas:

If the government closed its eyes to the manner in which these grants are actually used it would be allowing public funds to promote sectarian education. If it did not close its eyes but undertook the surveillance needed, it would, I fear, intermeddle in parochial affairs in a way that would breed only rancor and dissension [ibid., 640 (emphasis added)].

Writing the opinion of the court in Lemon v. Kurtzman, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger sounded the same fearful note:

The history of government grants of a continuing cash subsidy indicates that such programs have almost always been accompanied by varying measures of control and surveillance. The government cash grants before us now provide no basis for predicting that comprehensive measures of surveillance and controls will not follow [ibid., 621-6221.

Political Division on Religious Lines

In addition to the danger of surveillance, however, Burger fears something even more sinister: "the divisive political potential of these state programs." He contends that in a community where large numbers of pupils are served by church-related schools, it can be assumed that state assistance would entail considerable political activity. Partisans of parochial schools, understandably concerned with rising costs and sincerely dedicated to both the religious and secular educational missions of their schools, would inevitably champion aid to nonpublic schools and promote political action to achieve their goals. Those who oppose state aid -- whether for constitutional, religious or fiscal reasons -- would be equally active in their opposition to the plan. Candidates would be forced to declare and voters to choose. To Burger, it is unrealistic to ignore the likelihood that many people confronted with these issues would find their votes aligned with their faith.

Burger further maintains that although vigorous and partisan political debate is usually a normal and healthy manifestation of our democratic system of government, political division along religious lines is one of the principal evils against which the First Amendment was intended to protect. The potential divisiveness of such conflict is a threat to the normal political process. To have states or communities divided over the issues presented by state aid to parochial schools would tend to confuse and obscure other issues of great urgency. Says the chief justice: "It conflicts with our whole history and tradition to permit questions of the Religion Clauses to assume such importance in our legislatures and in our elections that they could divert attention from the myriad issues and problems which confront every level of government" (ibid., 622). Burger’s statement can only mean that the court sees itself empowered by our history and tradition to forbid the people and their elected representatives from discussing, for any practical purpose, issues that might raise questions about the meaning and intention of the religion clause of the First Amendment. The court alone may do that.

Furthermore, the chief justice believes that the court, in imposing paternalistic limitations upon the process of full American political discussion, is justified by the evidence to be found in the experiences of other nations: "The history of many countries attests to the hazards of religion intruding into the political arena or of political power intruding into the legitimate and free exercise of religious belief." That remark demands a response, because the recent history of many countries attests to no such thing. In other recognizably democratic nations besides our own there exist systems of aid for religious day schools, their faculties and pupils -- systems that have not resulted in the consequences the court fears and presumes to be inescapable.

France’s Private School Aid Experiment

The example of France is particularly instructive. The French history of church-state relations contains bitter episodes of an intensity unmatched in the American tradition. The acrimony that characterized church-state relations in France at the beginning of the 20th century should have led to those very hazards feared by our court when the Fifth Republic instituted a serious discussion of government aid to nonpublic schools. It did not. Rather, at the very time that our Supreme Court effectively suppressed discussion of political questions it believed to be unhealthy and unacceptably divisive, France’s citizens discussed the same questions in depth with strikingly positive practical consequences. France inaugurated a program making aid available to all private schools within its borders, implemented that program (the Debré law regime) for a full 2 years, evaluated the consequences, and observed that the program not only improved the quality of all French education but actually mitigated the divisiveness of the particular church-state question to which it was addressed.

As early as World War II, the political leaders of the Free French forces had known that France would have to face up to the question of whether it was going to allow the decline of a system of schools preferred by the parents of one-sixth of all French pupils, or whether it was going to accept the hazards of open political discussion aimed at developing a new and creative solution. The latter alternative faced a major hurdle: France’s tradition of rigorously anticlerical separation of church and state was based on the assumption that Catholicism and democratic republicanism were fundamentally opposed. This assumption had been reinforced by Vichy’s program, which simultaneously assisted church schools and restricted public education.

Nevertheless, beginning in 1942 the Free French set up a series of commissions to study the problem. In 1951 the nation’s scholarship program was opened up to qualifying students who wanted to attend private secondary schools; the government also began providing for children attending all elementary schools a minimal supplementary aid in a form similar to the tuition voucher plans presently under discussion in several American states. These measures, though somewhat helpful, failed to arrest the decline of the schools; nor did they enable teachers to upgrade their professional qualifications and to attain a minimum standard of living. The issue smoldered on through the demise of the Fourth Republic.

In 1959 the Fifth Republic decided to meet the problem head on. It began by empanelling a commission of persons of high integrity and unquestionable reputation who were not actively engaged in education. The commission’s final report guided the legislature and administration in establishing the relationship that exists to this day between the French state and nonpublic schools in need of financial assistance. The new arrangement was designed as an experimental trial run whose consequences were to be evaluated after no fewer than nine and no more than 12 years, at which point the legislature had to decide whether to continue, alter or abolish the program. Undergirding the experiment was the conviction that the right to freedom of education (like the right of the accused to legal counsel in our own country) did not really exist unless its exercise was supported and guaranteed by concrete government action.

The program worked to harmonize several basic values: freedom of education, freedom of conscience, cooperation between public and private education, educational and fiscal responsibility in nonpublic schools, and preservation of the distinctive character of those private schools that accepted state aid and supervision. The government’s method was to offer private schools four options: (1) continued independence with no aid, (2) integration into the public school system, (3) a permanent "contract of partnership" in which the classes under contract would be taught according to public school schedules by teachers under contract to the state, and (4) a "simple contract" of limited duration in which the designated classes would be taught by teachers hired by the school but certified by the state. One striking feature was the provision of committees of conciliation for every locality -- purely advisory bodies that were to hear any question raised by the application of the Debra law, especially issues involving freedom of conscience, to promote a preliminary exchange of views with the aim of effecting a reconciliation without going to court.

The Achievements of the Debré Law

The Debré law has now been in effect for 14 years. During the 11th year the government reconsidered the experiment. Initially the implementation of the law had run into difficulties. Resistance and opposition had been called for by zealous advocates of both private and public schools. The state had had to expand its administrative machinery to discharge a gigantic new responsibility involving contractual relationships with over 11,000 schools and 50,000 teachers. These problems were generally solved, however, with the passage of time. The law operated smoothly and efficiently after the 1964-1965 academic year. This achievement was due in part to the determination with which the French government addressed itself to a major, almost revolutionary, task. Equally important, however, was the spirit of flexibility and fairness which served to reassure numerous supporters of both public and private schools, enabling the French populace to turn from this to other, more pressing political questions.

The French consider the Debré law a success. In 1971 public opinion polls indicated that a great majority of French citizens favored its continuation. The final report to the French senate suns directly contrary to Chief Justice Burger’s gloomy predictions and his reading of history. It held that freedom of education had been definitively installed in French custom by 11 years of the Debré regime. Far from provoking division among the French, the law and its implementation had brought about the disappearance of the old quarrel over aid to nonpublic schools.

The Debré law has measurably improved the quality of French education. Nonpublic school teachers now have both the resources and the motivation to bring their qualifications up to standard. The attitude of public and nonpublic school personnel to each other has become one of cooperation rather than hostility. The law has also preserved the right of families to choose the kind of education they desire for their children. The mild competition it has stimulated between the two types of education has not proved to be a danger to public education; private education is practically stabilized while the number of public school pupils continues to grow -- partly because the improvement of education in private schools has made it easier for pupils to transfer to public schools of high quality. Meanwhile, Debré law aid has enabled private schools to develop democratic enrollments and to avoid being limited to accepting pupils from the upper classes. Neither the schools nor the teachers have felt unfairly pressured to give up distinctive values or pedagogical methods in order to receive state assistance.

Saving Nonpublic Education in America

Under present conditions the possibility of establishing a similar arrangement in the United States is virtually nonexistent. No seriously creative legislation can be passed without being subjected immediately to judicial challenge, and the Supreme Court appears to have narrowed its own options too tightly to allow for genuine experimentation by our government at any level. Fears that history does not necessarily justify have led the court’s majority, into Catch-22 reasoning.

Even if the justices were able to see on the basis of the French achievement that the political divisions they fear from religious controversy are not inescapable in today’s democratic society, their own need for consistency as they fashion the developing common law would still prevent them from reversing themselves soon enough to enable the American people to take effective official action to save nonpublic education. For that reason, I propose that we return this question to the political process as quickly as possible by amending the Constitution as I suggested at the beginning of this article. Such an amendment might enable Americans to share in the kind of religious freedom that the French have been able to achieve.

The Ministerial Mystique

Graduates of theological seminaries usually become ordained and are called to pastorates. The terms of the call typically include words like the following:

And that you may be free from worldly care and avocations. we . . . promise and oblige ourselves to pay you the sum of . . . yearly . . . during the time of your being and continuing the regular pastor . . . of this church, together with free use of the manse and . . . vacation each year United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Constitution, Part II].

Comforting words, these. But beware! They may be bait on a trap.

Already in the mid-1950s awareness was growing that many ministers were either leaving their profession or leading lives of unquiet desperation. Sociologist Sam Blizzard was making his studies and publishing his reports. Popular magazines published any number of articles on "Why I Left the Ministry." Joseph Sittler visited some of his former students in their pastorates and coined a phrase to express his horror at what he saw: "the maceration of the minister." Statistics bore out such personal impressions: many were leaving the ministry, and among those who remained discontent and frustration were rife.

Valiant efforts were made to meet this crisis. Denominations, individuals and independent groups initiated ambitious and expensive programs of counseling and therapy. Seminaries repeatedly revised their curricula in an endless quest for "relevant" content and "relevant" methodology. Continuing education became the new frontier. Further studies were made of the occupant of pulpit and manse. Such intense concern and unstinting commitment of resources should have brought about improvement. They did not. Many ministers are still throwing up their hands and running for haven in some other line of work. (See, e.g., Allix Bledsoe James: "Theological Education 1972," Theological Education, Autumn 1972.) Others stay put rather than risk starving their wives and families. Both kinds keep the growing numbers of denominational career-guidance agencies very busy indeed.

There is something very strange about this problem: we have been dealing with it for almost 20 years, without having formulated any theory about its cause that is acceptable to its victims and persuasive to all who seek a solution. In this respect it differs from a host of other social problems that surfaced in America during the same period. For instance, in our society blacks have a problem that will not be solved easily. Nevertheless, every black except the most naïve has now taken one essential preliminary step to finding a workable solution: he has refused once and for all to accept a white man’s explanation of why the problem exists. The black has decided to examine and explain his condition for himself, and on the basis of his own explanation has begun to take militant action. American Indians, Chicanos and other minority groups have learned to do the same. For each of these a contest has been joined whose outcome is in doubt. Differences of opinion regarding strategy, timing, and so on may exist among the members, but each minority is in basic agreement about the nature of the wrong it intends to correct. The same is true of our last great social minority: women. The leaders of today’s movement for woman’s liberation have clearly articulated the nature of the problem they face. By seriously studying what they say, the macerated minister may learn a great deal about his own problem.

I

An excellent place to start learning certain essential ABC’s is Betty Friedan’s best-selling The Feminine Mystique, first published about ten years ago. Let me sum up her message. She insists that what she calls "the problem that has no name" -- that is, the fact that American women are denied full development as persons -- is far more threatening to this country’s physical and mental health than any known disease. Its solution requires "a drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity that will permit women to reach maturity, identity, completeness of self, without conflict with sexual fulfillment" (op. cit., copyright 1963 by Betty Friedan; references are to Dell paperback edition, 1971).

But, according to Friedan, that reshaping will make demands on women themselves. As she sees it, the growing success of the feminist movement combined with emancipation from domestic labor via technology to create a crisis for American society just after World War II, when millions of returning servicemen were flooding the job market. In that Situation the presence of millions of women competing on a basis of genuine equality throughout American secular society was too much for most men -- and most women -- to face. The women copped out, and to justify their cop-out they availed themselves of the "feminine mystique," which is nothing more than a cultural rationalization for a social failure of nerve. That mystique has been unremittingly purveyed ever since by our communications media, commercial propaganda and educational institutions, by anthropologists, psycho-analysts and sociologists, and not least by the pulpiteers, educators and counselors in most American Christian churches.

II

The mystique operates simultaneously in two directions to blur our perception of an important aspect of reality: it diminishes the general opinion of woman as a person while glorifying those few activities to which society seems determined to commit her. According to the mystique, her sex makes woman biologically different" from man (and "different" here means "inferior"). Women naturally do not have the vision, the intellect, the courage, the determination, the practicality and all the other great qualities that supposedly equip men (thanks simply to their maleness) to govern families from which they can sally forth to explore, build, conquer and otherwise to battle in the outside world. Woman’s natural endowments (meaning her biological deficiencies) destine her rather to find fulfillment in marriage as her husband’s full-time helpmate, mother of his (preferably numerous) children, keeper of his household, and vicarious participant in his victories. This secondary, auxiliary existence to which a woman’s presumed limitations condemn her is touted as far more important and challenging than anything her hubby might be up to "out there." She is seriously told that the so-called "profession of homemaker" requires more creativity, ability, intellect, acumen and competence than do the professions of engineer, physician, teacher, banker, business executive, etc., etc., rolled into one.

From World War II on, millions of women allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by this claptrap, only to find themselves forced to learn the hard way that the truth is quite otherwise. It turns out that on the terms offered by the mystique the home is really a prison for women, trapping them in housework and child care, frustrating and distorting their need for fulfillment as persons. Friedan cites voluminous evidence supporting her contention that this state of affairs was a consequence not of some personal or natural deficiency in the women but of the role assigned them by the mystique.

III

Friedan’s conclusion is dramatically confirmed in a recent article titled "Confessions of a Househusband" (Ms., November 1972). Its author, Joel Roache, teaches English at the University of Maryland and has published a book and a number of scholarly articles. He has been married for over eight years and is the father of three children aged one, four and six. As he tells it, Professor Roache agreed "in a moment of weakness" to share the housekeeping with his wife, Jan, so that she could do some of the other work she needed to do in order to achieve some measure of personal identity. He discovered by experience that housekeeping was a literally unending chore that sapped his physical and intellectual energy and killed his creativity. Worse, frustrated by the constant demands and interruptions of his three children, he came to hate them, to hate himself for hating them, and to hate his wife for getting him into such a mess. He soon concluded that if he hoped to maintain his sanity he would have to give up everything else and devote himself solely to care of the house and the children. Though he kept up with academic routine, in any real sense his career as teacher and scholar came to a standstill.

Meanwhile, as his wife’s work became more important his own share of the housework grew larger, until he was keeping house as she had used to, from eight to 16 hours a day. Then, when Jan and the group she had organized "out there" scored a major success, he woke up to the fact that he had no achievement of his own. He was getting his sense of fulfillment, of self-esteem, through her, while she was getting it through her work. (Except for the reversal of sexual roles, this was -- according to the feminine mystique -- a classic example of the ideal relationship.) And when, late one afternoon, Jan came home and tried to tell him about her day’s activity, he snapped at her viciously, just like a nagging housewife. "It had happened. I was a full- fledged househusband."

At this point a great deal became painfully clear to Roache. When he found himself "muttering and bitching, refusing to listen" to Jan, he realized that her nagging and complaining "had not been neurotic symptoms but expressions of resistance to his own privilege and to the power over her life that it conferred," He writes:

Jan’s failure to force a real change in our life together for so long is a grim tribute to the power of socialization, and to my ability to exploit that power in order to protect myself from reality. When Jan realized how really minimal were the satisfactions of housework, there was also a voice within her (as well as mine without) suggesting that perhaps she was just lazy . . . . that she was basically a hateful person and thus a poor mother . . . And when she became sullen and resentful toward me the voices were always there to obscure her perception that I had it coming. They even encouraged her to feel guilty, finally, when she did not feel my success as her reward, the payoff for all her drudgery.

Having described the power and effectiveness of the mystique, Roache speaks of its cost:

. . . when someone has concrete power over your life, you are going to keep a part of yourself hidden and therefore undeveloped . . .Your identity becomes bound up in other people’s expectation of you -- and that is the definition of alienation. It did not take long for me to make connections between the alienating ways in which Jan had to deal with me . . . and the way that I was dealing with my "senior colleagues," the men and women who had power to fire me and did.

Our experience also helped me to understand the distortions of perception and personality that result from being the ‘superior" in a hierarchical structure. . . . the alienation which results from privilege pervades all our experience in a society which values human beings on the basis of sex, race, and class and which structures those standards into all its institutions. Housework is only a tip of that iceberg.

IV

But before we sentimentalize about women and their plight, let us take note of one point about which Friedan minces no words: the women had it coming; they were not innocent victims, they were suckers. As every confidence man knows, a sucker by definition is a person who wants something for nothing. The con man achieves his end by exploiting the streak of dishonest greed that is present in most human beings. "You can’t cheat an honest man!" The "mark" is never innocent, only stupid. At any point in the game, the mark can turn the tables if he is ready to pay the price.

Thus, as Friedan explains, the ceaseless indoctrination of the feminine mystique itself does not account entirely for its victims. In some fundamental way each victim has become one by choice. At some time she has chosen not to be a complete person, not to be adult, not to take responsibility for making her own decisions. In exchange for the promise of lifelong acceptance and security in the home, she has opted to arrest her development, to remain infantile. She has accepted the offer to be literally "free from worldly care and avocations" in return for "free use of the manse" Like Esau, on a full stomach she laments the loss of her birthright.

Friedan shows how that choice blights the life of the housewife, her husband, her children and all society. But she also shows that the problem is not insoluble. Victims can devictimize themselves. They can see the mystique for what it really is, and refuse any longer to accept its delusions. Without abandoning their family responsibilities, they can reorder their priorities to provide for their own development into full persons. They can refuse henceforth to be "passive," "dependent" and, in Friedan’s sense of the word, "feminine"!

V

I submit that the feminine mystique is paralleled by a ministerial mystique, a cultural image of the minister and the church which serves to blur our perception of reality and to rationalize individual and social failure of nerve. I believe that this mystique accounts in large part both for the misery and frustration that afflict countless clergymen and for the dreary dullness that, according to large numbers of church members, characterizes Sunday services. Like the feminine mystique, the ministerial mystique has been widely and unremittingly touted in all our communications media; and whether the source of the message is secular or ecclesiastical, the mystique is the same.

I venture to say that the social failure of nerve set in just after the Civil War. Before that, the revivalistic evangelism of Lyman Beecher and C. G. Finney aimed to Christianize the nation through militant social reform. However, the striking accomplishments of their movement -- particularly its ending of the institution of slavery -- brought on even thornier problems in human relationships, and that at a time when most Americans wanted to get back to their personal agenda. It was easy to tell oneself that a Christian culture had been pretty largely achieved. The later evangelical revivals in the style of Moody, Sunday and Graham have generally assumed that American society is basically Christian, and therefore have been pretty much a call to preserve that culture through respectable behavior and church membership. Meanwhile, most of our church leadership has failed to respond clearly to the challenges of new scientific theories, technological change, world leadership and increasing racial, ethnic and religious heterogeneity. Consequently people have come to think that intellectuals can have no use for piety while pious pastors are necessarily deficient in intellect.

Thus the stage was set for the development of another mystique to blur our perceptions of reality by diminishing the general opinion of the minister while glorifying a limited number of non-threatening activities to which society seems determined to commit him. (Incidentally, English pronouns may make me seem concerned only with the pastor as a man. Nevertheless I do want to point out on behalf of the ordained woman that she gets it with both barrels: the ministerial mystique from one side, the feminine mystique from the other.)

The ministerial mystique is squarely based on a theologically inadequate concept of humanity. Instead of seeing man as created in the image of God but fallen and sinful, it assumes that human beings are of two types: the good on the one hand, the worldly on the other. Presumably, a person can be one or the other, but never both simultaneously. Hence the pastor, by virtue of his calling, is different from all other men: he is good and he sees good in everyone. It follows that he does not have the realism, the wit, the drive, the courage, the aggressiveness and, especially, the practicality that are characteristic of normal males who get their hands dirty doing men’s work in a rough and tumble world. The pastor is above all that. Exempted from grubbing for cash to sustain himself and his family, he can devote himself wholly to serving the only institution that upholds heavenly ideals in a naughty world. He reforms the naughty wherever possible, and nurses the wounded through their traumas. This kind of work, he is told, calls for a professional, a general practitioner. In fact he is the last of the great G.P.s. As such he will derive greater rewards and satisfactions from his unique social contribution than his more specialized co-professionals in medicine, law, and so on can attain, despite the lucrative fees they command.

VI

Numerous pastors have discovered the hard way that the truth can be dismayingly different. On the mystique’s terms the pastorate too can be a trap frustrating the minister’s need for fulfillment as a person, a prison in which all his work, even the care of those who present themselves as the wounded of the world, may be no more than institutionally self-serving trivia. Unlike Jan Roache, the pastor is not likely to find a layperson to share the pastorate with him. To be sure, laypeople may count the offering or do some calling from time to time (just as masculine husbands carry out the garbage and fix the leaky faucets); but how often will they share genuinely in the overall responsibility of the pastorate? And why should they? They have other matters to take care of. Anyway, that’s what the congregation hires the pastor to do. So he does it. He spends eight to 16 hours a day on a job that usually cannot accomplish its purposes. He finds himself on a treadmill of routine that saps his intellectual energy and kills his creativity, and he is frustrated by constant demands and interruptions of his parishioners. Eventually he begins to hate them, to hate himself for hating them, and finally to look for someone to hate in particular (whom? his wife? his former pastor? his seminary professor?) for getting him into such a mess.

Meanwhile, as he discovers what it is like to have to take pride in his contribution, his sacrifice, while worldly men take pride in their earnings, resentment builds up in him. The mystique helps blur his perception that his bitterness may be a normal expression of resistance to the layperson’s privilege and to the power over the pastor’s life such privilege confers. The pastor’s inability to force any real change in the situation is a grim tribute to the power of socialization and to the laity’s ability to exploit that power. When the minister realizes how minimal the satisfactions of a pastorate may be voices within and without will suggest that perhaps he is lazy and selfish and lacking in dedication. If his mind becomes sluggish, if he abandons serious reading, if his sermons become catchall collections of retreaded or half-baked ideas, he may rightly blame it all on his being awash in a sea of trivia, but those voices will whisper that he is inadequate intellectually, psychologically or spiritually. When he becomes sullen or resentful toward members of his congregation, the voices will be there to obscure his perception that they have it coming because they never quit twisting his arm. The voices will encourage him to feel guilty about resenting their material gains rather than taking satisfaction in the contribution his service has made to their success, guilty for envying their substantial incomes and burnished life styles, for resenting their wives’ new furs while his wife gets first crack at church rummage, for eating his heart out over their kids’ going to prestigious Ivy League universities while his go to local fresh-water colleges.

Those voices, within and without, keep reminding him that his real destiny is to provide a place where every member of the congregation can feel accepted without any sense of threat from spouse or children or pastor. Those voices will keep telling him that joy in the success of others is the payoff for all his drudgery. They will keep him from realizing not only that the payoff is at best the pittance for exploitation but that behind the payoff is a terrible double cost. One aspect of the cost is the minister’s loss of anything that could be called a genuine independent selfhood. Neither his home nor his wife nor his children nor his politics nor a host of other matters that all other mature adults handle for themselves without interference are to be his own. Piously heady with the power of the mystique, the congregation will not permit him to be a person like other persons. This in turn exacts a corrupting cost from the pastorate itself. Ever on the defensive, the minister cannot avoid substituting subservience and manipulation for service and love. Remember Professor Roache’s observation that "when someone has concrete power over your life . . . your identity becomes bound up in other people’s expectation of you -- and that is the definition of alienation."

VII

Roache points also to "the distortions of perception and personality that result from being the ‘superior’ in a hierarchical structure." And all too often the pastorate is just such a hierarchical structure, a pecking order; and therefore it is unable to show the love and joy it proclaims. Try as a superior to serve another person and you will do no more than meddle in his or her life. Come as a subordinate to the same attempt and you will be subservient and manipulative. If you would love and serve human beings you must meet them as equals -- that is, in a relationship the purveyors of the ministerial mystique are determined to prevent.

Again, let us not sentimentalize about the victims of that mystique. In some fundamental way each victim has become an Esau by choice. Deliberately or inadvertently the victim has traded in his person-hood, his true freedom, in order to be "free from worldly care and avocations." Dependency is relying on somebody else to take care of your needs, usually at the price of not having anything to say in the matter. But if dependency is really intolerable it can be cured. Victims who are willing to pay the price can achieve emancipation. The minister or anyone who wants to be a whole person must undertake a journey into the unknown. But the minister who goes on that journey must be not only as gentle as a dove but as wily and tenacious as that snake Jacob. He need not abandon the pastorate, but he will have to tell his congregation in plain terms: "There is a portion of my life that is my own. It does not belong to you. My spouse does not belong to you. Our children do not belong to you. You have no more claim over me and mine than I have over you and yours. I will serve you faithfully as your pastor, but I insist on being myself even to the extent of picking up a suitable worldly care or avocation."

Perhaps few people will mind the words, but many will emit cries of dismay as the minister turns those words into action by picking up a lucrative part-time job, for instance, or disappearing two days a week to continue a honeymoon with his spouse, or getting into politics because he finds it refreshing, or buying a lot in the woods and building his own house. Some of his harried fellow ministers will accuse him of betraying his profession, and some of his parishioners will accuse him of neglecting his pastorate (particularly if he is involved in social action or civic reform). But he will know by his inner sense of wholeness that such charges are simply untrue. If any insist on their unsupported nonsense, he can tell them this little anecdote:

A teacher came to a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her house. She had a sister named Mary who seated herself at His feet and drank in what He had to say. Martha meanwhile was busy and distracted in attending to her guest, and finally she went to Him and said: "Professor J., don’t you care that my sister is leaving me to do all the serving by myself? You tell her to help me!" But the teacher said, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about all those details. Only one is really necessary. Mary has picked the good portion for herself, and that is not going to be taken away from her!"

Ecumenicity: Rx for Urban Health

Cities are a vehicle through which large numbers of people come together to solve problems and create the good things of life. This coming together has a multiplier effect on human productivity. Great libraries, symphony orchestras, universities, factories, hospitals, even wonderful things like professional football teams, require an urban base. And given the urban base, such good things are likely to develop. But it is essential in the city that communication be maximized and human interaction facilitated.

The view that cities are, par excellence, a means of human communication and cooperation is be-clouded, of course, by the fact of urban conflict and division. Some might conclude that cities are more often an arena for confrontation and vicious competition than a vehicle of cooperation. Certainly the conflict is there; but is it not evident that whatever productivity cities have achieved and they have achieved enormously -- has occurred where people have come together in orderly, cooperative, sustained relationships? The very survival of cities depends upon nurturing such relationships.

I

At issue in this question are very practical matters. The front page of the November 2, 1973, issue of the Wall Street Journal carried the headline, "Detroit Mayoral Race Pits Two in a Contest Many Tried to Avert -- Some See City as the Loser in Black-vs.-White Election"; and the accompanying story quoted a plain-spoken top city official as saying: "If Nichols wins, the blacks will take every opportunity to trip him up. If Young wins, a lot of whites will just move out . . . In both cases, business may be afraid to invest here."

Of course, business is not the only kind of activity that is blighted by urban conflict. Everything else suffers too -- including schools and churches -- when people lean away from rather than toward each other. And while race conflict may be the most conspicuous and poisonous form of urban antagonism, it is not the only one. It follows that whatever can be done to establish orderly communications and harmonious working relations in the city will help the city, and will enhance productivity and the quality of life.

There is a question for the churches here. To what extent have they worked to achieve higher levels of organized unity? It would be foolish to claim that strong ecumenism among the churches could solve all the city’s problems. At the same time, the churches’ failure to organize for unity could well be a real source of ill health in the city and in the churches themselves.

Not so long ago it was thought that the second half of this century was going to be a golden age of ecumenism. In the ‘50s, those of us who worked for ecumenical organizations felt we were riding the wave of the future. The church seemed generally to be prospering. Morale was strong and the outlook was bright. As the ‘60s approached, the warm spirit of Pope John was quickening Protestant-Catholic relationships, Protestants were talking church union, the American conciliar movement was vigorous and growing. The prospects for real breakthroughs in religious unity seemed excellent at the very time that America was becoming a predominantly urban nation.

Who could have guessed that by the end of the ‘60s the spirit of Vatican II would have waned, denominational merger talks would be petering out with little accomplished, much of the machinery of the conciliar movement would be dismantled and forgotten, and the income of local congregations would be declining? Meanwhile, the cities had become battlegrounds and the country was torn by conflict.

Many writers undertook to reveal the source of the church’s difficulty. Harvey Cox urged that the church has not understood the city. Gibson Winter noted that the churches most able to lead and unite all the people were identified with the middle class. Stephen Rose called attention to the church’s neglect of opportunities for service. These and other analysts and critics were illuminating and helpful. But none of them gave enough attention to a matter I think should have been emphasized; namely, the need for wholeness expressed in united, cooperative effort. For instance, Gibson Winter called on the church to "affirm community by forming a ministry to the whole metropolis" (The Suburban Captivity of the Churches [Macmillan, 1962], p. 201), yet the terms "ecumenical" and "council of churches" do not appear in the book’s index. Perhaps these commentators of the ‘60s did not sense the need for greater cooperative effort because at that time everyone thought that the ecumenical and conciliar movements were thriving -- as indeed they were, in some ways and by some standards. But the fundamental strategy of the Protestant churches in America has been one of competitive separatism, not of cooperative mission.

II

Cooperation and consolidation are the two broad types of organization for unity among the churches. By cooperation I mean simply joint effort through some formal or informal organization by otherwise separate churches or denominations. (The council of churches is an example of this.) By consolidation I mean the merging of two or more organizational structures into one. Both approaches should have been used more extensively in the past few years.

Consider, first, consolidation. In my years as a church planner, in Massachusetts in the 1950s and in the St. Louis area in the 1960s, nothing seemed plainer than the unwisdom of maintaining large numbers of small congregations. It has often been said -- but apparently it needs to be said over and over again -- that American Protestantism has proliferated congregations beyond all reason. Actually, the problem of the small church was recognized early in this century, even in rural areas (the rural "larger parishes" were an attempt to deal with it). But we still have churches in plenty. The 1970 Yearbook of American Churches reported a total of 318,866 churches and synagogues (p. 93) in the country. Leave aside the Roman Catholic and Jewish congregations, and there are nearly 300,000 Protestant churches for about 150 million non-Catholic, non-Jewish Americans, or one for every 500 people. Hence the larger number of very small congregations.

Now, virtually no one thinks small churches are a good thing (though of course they are necessary in sparsely populated areas). Indeed, nearly all small congregations wish they had more members. They want to grow, to "succeed." So they compete, often fruitlessly. In the relatively small city of Akron, Ohio (population 275,000), the churches spend nearly $100,000 per year on competitive -- and probably useless -- newspaper advertising (upwards of two full pages each Saturday at $6.09 per column inch). The same amount of money spent on cooperative effort could accomplish enormous good.

Few Protestants seem to realize how very many small churches exist, and what a drain they are on the resources of the larger congregations. In almost any denomination, in any part of the country, one finds a similar pattern: a few large churches with strength and resources to spare, and a big number of extremely small, weak churches.

III

One way to see this picture in its stark reality is to select -- by geography or by denomination, or even at random -- any group of churches and note how many of the smallest in the group it takes to equal the membership of the largest. For example, one administrative unit in the "heartland of Methodism" -- the Cleveland (Ohio) District of the United Methodist Church -- has 54 congregations. In 1970 the largest of these had more members than the 21 smallest together (3,449 as against a total of 3,389). Some might say that the largest is too big, but who would advocate breaking it up into 21 congregations? (To be sure, within that large congregation there are probably 21 small groups that give people the advantages of smallness and informality.)

I once advised a denominational planning committee in New York state to close some 100 of the approximately 300 churches in its jurisdiction. I argued that the closing would affect only about 10 per cent of the total membership, many of whom could find other and more conveniently located churches to attend; and that in any case the net membership loss would be negligible while the increase in effectiveness and fiscal health would be great. But the committee did not like my advice. So the maintenance of these 100 "loss operations" continues in one way or another to absorb the financial surplus of the solvent churches. There just is no way that American Protestantism can support thousands of unnecessary local churches and have many resources left for special mission and service tasks.

The past 50 years or so have seen a trend toward consolidation and centralization in practically every sector of American life. This is called the trend to "bigness," and is sometimes lamented. But there is a reason for it. Improvements in communications make consolidation possible; this in turn makes possible great cost reductions and large increases in productivity. Thus the corner grocery yields to the supermarket and the supermarket to the chain. The phenomenon is seen not only in business but also in education, medicine, social services, government, etc. The churches, however, have resisted the tendency in certain important respects.

Through the years a principal argument for denominational mergers has been the need to eliminate "overchurching." But local congregations do not necessarily merge just because their denominations have merged. In fact, there are cases where two churches of the same denomination are located across the street from each other years after their parent bodies merged. The resistance to local mergers is very strong. Church people, like everyone else in America, have grown up on an ideology of competitive individualism coupled with a sense of loyalty, and the local congregation has been the focal point, of effort.

The result is disastrous for churching the city, in two ways especially. First, the dollars that ought to be spent for "helping’’ ministries of various kinds are spent instead in maintaining competitive, unnecessary churches. Second, the larger congregations which are required to create and sustain the form and substance of community in urban neighborhoods often do not exist (except, of course, in Roman Catholicism).

IV

Consider now the other approach to organization for unity: cooperation. This has a long history in America. One of its important creations is the metropolitan council of churches. Though the pattern varied, most of our large cities, especially in the north, developed councils of churches as instruments of cooperative ministry, and these were ready for use when the final phases of the urbanization of America began. Typical church-council undertakings were hospital and campus chaplaincies, teacher training, women’s activities, social services planning, radio and television production, and research and planning. Each council had its own special interest and thrusts. The base membership was usually the individual congregation, and the main workers and supporters were laypeople and parish clergy.

As an instrument for service to the metropolis, the council of churches had some unique advantages. First, it was the only piece of ecclesiastical machinery whose service boundaries corresponded with the metropolis itself. As has often been pointed out, when the metropolis became the significant unit of life, America was caught with organizational structures -- governmental, religious, etc. -- that did not fit the metropolitan pattern. But the urban council of churches did not have this problem.

Second, unlike many ecclesiastical structures, the council had no large investments in real estate or apparatus of one kind and another to absorb its resources and so constrict its activities. Of course, it did have some personnel and some long-established patterns and programs, which some might regard as vested interests. But these were minimal compared with those of most ecclesiastical structures.

Third, the council’s organizational style was simple and democratic -- the only style which could make it possible for churches with widely varying polities to participate. There was no need of arguments over presbyters, bishops and presiding elders, as there must be when denominations talk merger.

Fourth, though not perfect, the pattern of participation was broadly inclusive in representing varied ethnic, social, economic and racial groups (not to mention varied denominations). No other ecclesiastical entity in American Protestantism has ever come close to the representativeness achieved by urban councils of churches. As a means of communication, therefore, the councils were unique. On the negative side, it should be recognized that the strongest supporters of this conciliar movement over the years were the ‘free" church people, especially Baptists, Congregationalists and Methodists (though more recently Presbyterians and Lutherans have also been in the forefront). Most of the council executives were Baptists or Methodists.

Still, the plain fact is that the councils had a "style" which was not congenial to some. The manners and mores of the evangelical were manifest in both ways of doing things and selection of tasks. Moreover, the councils were always on somewhat precarious ground financially -- though this was no obstacle to anyone’s efforts to expand the base of support or the range of undertakings.

V

On balance, it would seem that the councils of churches were strategically situated to be of important service as an instrument of the churches in the city as America entered the urban era. Unfortunately, instead of being a period of growth, the 1960s turned out to be a period of decline for the conciliar movement. By the end of the decade some major metropolitan councils of churches were all but dismantled.

The problem presented itself, of course, mainly in the form of financial distress. In the later ‘60s those of us who had final administrative responsibility in ecumenical organizations lived from payday to payday. We were in constant fear of not being able to meet the next semimonthly payroll. We were caught in a squeeze between inflation-caused cost increases and eroding financial support from constituents.

Now, the first, and sometimes overlooked, fact about declining support of the councils of churches is that the constituency itself fell on hard times in the ‘60s. Many a local church found itself with a static income while costs increased. Something had to be cut. Given the natural priorities of the local congregation (local program first, denominational program second, cooperative program third), it was certain that some congregations would reduce their support of ecumenical enterprises. A good many did, and the number reducing exceeded the number increasing. But though I dealt with a constituency of several hundred churches, I do not remember a single congregation’s cutting its support of my council of churches while it was itself solvent and growing. I know of a few congregations that explained their reductions on the ground that the council had been maladroit or misanthropic, but in every such case the congregation was itself short of resources. In brief, the decline in support of councils cannot believably be explained as due to genuine disenchantment with their performance.

Yet the polemicists of the right have been having a field day. The allegation has been made that the councils’ propensities for radical social action displeased the public, which consequently withdrew support both of them and of the churches generally. Certainly the charge that the churches were run by communists found ready ears. I remember that on several occasions my talk to a local church group was repeatedly interrupted by tirades about Red China and Angela Davis. This sort of thing was indeed disturbing and did influence some individuals to discontinue their contributions. But to say that councils dug their own grave by their excessive social activism certainly is an oversimplification. The real problem is the people who think that any expression of social concern beyond zero is radicalism. Most metropolitan councils in fact have been essentially conservative, white-dominated, establishment-run organizations that engaged in nothing more radical than sponsorship of the training of clergy in hospital visitation or publication of a hesitant statement on some controversial issue.

VI

In 1967 and 1968 a movement to "restructure" metropolitan councils gained considerable momentum. Among the fundamental changes proposed, one -- a change in the basis of membership -- was critical. Most metropolitan councils were organized on the basis of membership by local congregations. The new approach called for membership by "judicatories" -- the districts, presbyteries, associations, dioceses and other such denominational units. The assumption was that this approach would remove control of the ecumenical machinery from the hands of laity and parish clergy and place it in the hands of denominational officials. A number of councils have for years operated with this style of membership -- notably some state councils, but even some city councils, such as Detroit’s. The other critical proposal called for a change of name. "Council of churches" was out, and "metropolitan interchurch commission" or some variation thereof was in.

The arguments for "restructuring" were several. The denominational membership base would make the ecumenical effort more "official," more "legal," more "authoritative." Instead of centering on a voluntary association of interested individuals, ecumenism would be officially structured into church life. In turn, financial support would be more secure, with funding from denominational treasuries. The change of name would help because "councils of churches" has a bad image. Both changes, it was said, would facilitate participation by Roman Catholics, since they operate hierarchically. Furthermore, Roman Catholics, while hesitant to join councils as Johnny-come-latelies, would participate in forming a new structure which they could share in from the beginning. Finally, such a strengthened ecumenical effort would be much more effective and relevant in dealing with the crucial issues of the day -- poverty, race, urban decay, etc. The councils were too "tradition-bound," too absorbed with such out-of-date activities as training clergy and church school teachers, providing hospital chaplains, organizing women volunteers, and televising religious services. The church, it was said, needed to be truly ecumenical and "out where the action is." (This was an interesting period for the council administrator, who was told by some that his organization was too tradition-bound and conservative and by others that it was too radical.)

Incidentally, it seemed at the time (1) that the pressure for "restructuring" was coming almost exclusively from the officialdom of two denominations; and (2) that what was going on was to some extent a power struggle between denominational officials and conciliar officials. In the past, councils had been more or less respected but hardly prestigious. But the 1960s were a time of great ecumenical fervor, and ecumenically the council of churches had the only game in town. Furthermore, the cooperative way is a less expensive way to get things done, and this was a time of financial strain. Denominational officials too were being urged to develop "inner-city missions and service programs." Both financially and politically there were advantages in doing this cooperatively, if the denominational authorities could be sure of retaining control.

Anyway, some of the city church councils were restructured, with very mixed results. Some -- Cleveland’s, for example -- found to their dismay that it is much easier to turn off an old source of income than to turn on a new one. An "interchurch agency" in New York state was being cut off financially by some of its founding denominations less than two years after it was formed.

VII

Ecumenical fervor or no, in the ‘60s denominations were in no position financially to plunge into a major new venture. The fervor was not that strong. Besides, the organizational logic of the change in style is dubious at best. To abandon an organization whose geographic boundaries are coterminous with the metropolis in favor of an amalgam of organizations whose boundaries run haphazardly hither and yon is less than brilliant. Anyway, the wave of restructuring does not appear to have ushered in a new era of ecumenical accomplishment.

In sum, the ecumenical movement has faltered at precisely the time when it is most needed. An urbanized, highly technological, conflict-ridden society requires orderly, well-organized, effective institutions. The church simply cannot do its job in the city if its members are divided among hundreds of little congregations, each absorbed in itself and its problems. The church must become a vehicle of communication in the metropolis, a means of achieving wholeness, an instrument for creating community. The obvious route to that end is the ecumenical route, traveled in dead earnest, directed, wherever possible, toward merging of church structures, but, short of that, toward cooperation among all.

Eating and Drinking with Jesus

If there is anywhere a separation between the kingdoms of the sacred and the secular, it is in the doctrine and practice of the Lord’s Supper. That so-called sacrament as it is celebrated in our churches has little or no relevance for modern man, precisely because it has little or nothing to do with eating and drinking outside church walls. It has little or nothing to do with the problems of poverty and hunger which oppress all people in their daily lives. The Lord’s Supper has no relation to their work, their economics and their politics.

Today there is an urgent need to give clear expression to the gospel in the language of the world; that is, in relation to what people experience and suffer. Therefore we begin not with the Lord’s Supper but with the meaning of eating and drinking in general. We ask three questions: Why, and what, and how may and must we eat and drink?

I

The usual answer to the question, Why must we eat and drink? is: in order to live and because we derive pleasure from eating and drinking. But according to the biblical witness, man does not exist under a cruel law of self-preservation, nor is pleasure the goal of his life. We are not to eat and drink in order to satisfy our appetites. "For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own belly" (Rom. 16:18) ; "their god is their belly" (Phil. 3: 19). No, man may and must eat in obedience to God’s commandment. The commandment frees him to eat and drink and gives him joy in doing it.

With the possible exception of Genesis, there is no book in the Bible that so expressly stresses a joyful freedom to eat and drink as Ecclesiastes. "Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart" (9:7) , not merely because "bread is made for laughter, and wine gladdens life" (10:19) , but because "God has already approved what you do." It is a theme that runs through the whole book. "It is God’s gift to man that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil" (3:15). That scholars have equated this divine permission and commandment with Epicureanism is incomprehensible, for in his second chapter the Preacher rejects all crude and refined forms of Epicureanism as vanity. He teaches that joy in eating and drinking cannot be sought; it can only be found. It is "a gift of God," it comes "from the hand of God" (2:24-26). Without God’s gracious authorization and justification man cannot find enjoyment in eating and drinking.

The commandment rests upon God’s gracious permission. He provides us with food and drink. "He satisfies him who is thirsty, and the hungry he fills with good things" (Ps. 107:9). The manna in the wilderness and the water from the rock were extraordinary signs that God is the Giver of all nourishment (Exod. 16-17). In the New Testament the commandment is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. On the one hand, he is revealed as the Giver of food and drink and as the One who commands us to eat and drink. (Recall the Feedings of the Multitudes and the Wedding Feast at Cana.) On the other hand, he is depicted as a hungry and thirsty man who eats and drinks in trust in his heavenly Father. He is at once the commanding God and the obedient man who eats and drinks in gratitude. Moreover, Jesus himself becomes the bread of life and the giver of the water of life solely because he dies of hunger and thirst. On the cross he cried: "I thirst." He is the justification and sanctification of all eating and drinking, and not merely of an eating and drinking at the Lord’s Supper. He -- he alone -- is the answer to the question why we may and must joyfully eat and drink.

II

What may and must we eat and drink? Paul’s general answer is: "Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving" (I Tim. 4:4). Yet the Apostle did not regard this as an eternally valid principle. There are special times and circumstances in which the commandment is limited and conditioned.

It is by no means obvious that we may eat meat. It was not the case at the beginning and it will not be the case at the end of the world. According to the first two chapters of the Bible and the 11th chapter of Isaiah, a vegetarian diet was ordained. It was only after the Fall and the flood that man was permitted to eat meat. The time of natural history -- that is, the time between the creation and the consummation -- is the time in which peace between God and man, between man and his fellow man, and among animals, has been shattered. During this time man may be carnivorous -- but only as he appeals’ to the reconciling grace of God. Wellhausen, Kraus, Rowley and other Old Testament scholars have shown that the flesh of animals was not intended to be eaten, but to be, first, a sacrifice to God. Karl Barth explains the matter thus:

A meal which includes meat is a sacrificial meal. It signifies a participation in the reconciling effect of the animal sacrifice commanded and accepted by God as a sign. It presupposes, therefore, that God demands and will accept the surrender of the life of the animal for that of man as a substitutionary sign, and mans participation in the reconciliation [namely, reconciliation through the death of God’s Son as a lamb slain] thereby signified [Church Dogmatics III, 1, p. 210].

If this explanation is correct, then all eating of meat is a sign and a proclamation that we live only from the death of the Lamb of God, and thus the Lord’s Supper is not to be regarded as the only sign.

Nor is it by any means obvious that man may eat all things. Leviticus and Deuteronomy distinguish between clean animals, which may be eaten, and unclean animals, which are forbidden. The distinction is abolished in Acts (10-11, 15) on the ground that what God has cleansed in Jesus Christ is no longer impure. Through his blood Christ has broken down the wall of separation between Jews and gentiles and has made possible a table fellowship between them and among all races and peoples. When, therefore, Paul asserts that nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, he does not mean a thanksgiving for food, but a thanksgiving for Christ, in whom we may eat all things.

That does not imply, of course, that one may eat and drink as much as one desires. Gluttony and drunkenness are strictly forbidden throughout Scripture. The commandment requires moderation and self-control. Nevertheless, the Nazarites and the Rechabites in the Old Testament were a witness that there is also a freedom to be abstinent. In all ages of the church there have been ascetic and monastic movements whose members have voluntarily taken vows of abstinence, celibacy, chastity, poverty and anonymity. These movements have often been, rightly, accused of quietism, otherworldliness, legalism and work-righteousness. Yet their special witness in the face of the world and a worldly church is salutary and frequently necessary.

The presence of such groups in the New Testament congregations was an occasion for conflict between the "strong" and the "weak." According to Paul, the freedom of the "strong" to eat and drink all things is limited by love. This could become a burning issue today if the "strong" were to maintain that all kinds of food and drink may be eaten and drunk at the Lord’s Supper while the "weak" declared that only a little consecrated bread and wine may be taken. Possibly the "weak" would not go so far as to assert that elements consecrated by an ordained priest or minister are necessary for salvation. But they would probably believe that these are a means of grace, that they possess a sacramental efficacy, and that they are at least an aid, a support and a prop for faith. Then the "strong" would indeed be obliged to bear the infirmities of the "weak." But that does not mean that the "strong" would have to compromise their freedom. Paul abides by his conviction: "I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself" (Rom. 14:14).

III

Nevertheless, there is one thing that is strictly forbidden in both the Testaments: "... you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood" (Gen. 9:4; cf. Acts 15:29). Yet according to John’s Gospel, Jesus said: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life" (6:53 f.). His blood is his life, and it becomes our eternal life when it is drunk. But how? Most commentaries (not all) speak of a sacramental eating and drinking of the body and blood of Christ. Since the time of Ignatius and Justin Martyr there has persisted a belief in the mysterion or sacramentum of Christ’s body and blood. Although there have been various views as to how Christ’s body and blood are eaten and drunk, almost all churches agree that Christ is present in the Lord’s Supper and is somehow eaten. Outstanding exceptions among theologians have been Ulrich Zwingli and Karl Barth, both of whom rejected the notion that the Lord’s Supper is a sacrament and a means of grace.

We cannot here deal with the theory, first advanced by Hans Lietzmann and then by Oscar Cullmann, of two types of Eucharist in the New Testament: a joyful meal with the risen Christ, and a sorrowful meal in which the crucified Christ is eaten. Nor can we go into the historical problem of the rise of sacramentalism under the influence of the Hellenistic mystery religions. Let me say only that in my opinion John 6 is to be understood purely christologically. Jesus is speaking of the death which he must suffer and about the effect of his dying. Man will live only from the once-and-for-all shed blood of Christ, not from his blood in a sacrament. The offense of the gospel is not merely an offense to reason over the "mystery" of the presence of flesh and blood in or with bread and wine; no, it is the scandal of the cross. "We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles" (I Cor. 1:23). Through the sacrifice of his flesh Christ has become the bread of life, not merely for the elect or for believers or for those who partake of the Lord’s Supper, but for the world (John 6:51). He is the one sacrament, the only means of grace. From now on all eating and drinking are a witness, a parable, and a proclamation of the death of Jesus. Jesus called the feeding of the 5,000 a sign, but he gave no intimation that in, with and under the bread and the fishes his flesh was eaten.

IV

How may and must we eat and drink? Paul’s general answer is: "Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God" (I Cor. 10:31). Not simply the Lord’s Supper but all eating and drinking is to be to the glory of God. And that means to the honor of the Creator, Preserver, Reconciler and Redeemer of all men. Elsewhere Paul explains that we eat and drink to the glory of God when we do so in remembrance of Jesus and when we proclaim the Lord’s death. In remembrance of Jesus? We have clearly to understand that the omnipresence and contemporaneity of Jesus are the presupposition of all eating and drinking with him. Because Jesus is the Lord of space and time, there are no times and no places outside his time and space. "For in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). Therefore, whether they believe and know it or not, all men eat with Jesus, and thus may render an ignorant and unconscious testimony to Jesus. But Jesus will be specially present to his congregation through his Word and Spirit. The faith and the confession of Christians, their suffering, their prayers, their works, baptism and the Lord’s Supper can and should attest his preserving and saving presence. But only attest it (Barth) ; they cannot represent, realize, repeat or actualize his presence. Jesus does not become present through our recollection and remembrance. On the contrary, because he is present, we may eat in remembrance of him, Although the anamnesis (recollection) occurs in relation to God’s activity, it is altogether a human action. By God’s work in Christ through the Holy Spirit we are made free for a human, ethical decision and act. We are free to eat and drink in remembrance of Jesus without claiming that in, with and under our work of believing, loving and hoping we also have to do God’s work.

How, then, may and must we eat and drink with Jesus? I shall try to give a threefold answer. Eating and drinking become a human, ethical act in remembrance of Jesus when they are an act of faith, love and hope. Such an act is at once a Eucharist, an Agape-feast and a Marriage Supper.

(1) Eating and drinking in remembrance of Jesus are an act of faith. Only with the greatest reserve may we say that faith is a spiritual eating and drinking of the body and blood of Jesus. For faith is not the repetition or realization of the death of Jesus at the hands of men. On the contrary, faith is man’s recognition and acknowledgment that because of man’s sins Christ has offered up his flesh once-and-for-all. Still less will faith regard eating and drinking as a means whereby faith is created and strengthened. Eating and drinking are predominantly and always an act of thanksgiving for what God has done in Christ through the Spirit.

The church has always acknowledged that the Lord’s Supper is an act of gratitude, the "Eucharist." Though in the New Testament the noun eucharistia is never applied either to the Lord’s Supper or to eating and drinking in general, it came into common usage in the postapostolic period. It has its origin in Jesus’ prayers of thanksgiving at the Last Supper and at the Feedings of the Multitudes, but its meaning was soon changed. Whereas in the Didache the Eucharist was a thankoffering for the blessings of creation and redemption, Justin Martyr thought that the bread and wine were consecrated through the repetition of Jesus’ words and thereby became the body and blood of Christ. Perhaps that is why the Lord’s Supper ceased to be a joyous meal. At any rate, in our churches the Lord’s Supper is a somber affair. It evokes sad, mournful, even morbid thoughts of death. More like a fast than a feast, it bears little resemblance to the meal which the father prepared for the lost son. It seems that we are no longer able to partake of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God, as the first Christians did (Acts 2:47).

V

(2) Much could be said about the restoration of a genuine Eucharist in our congregations. One thing is certain: there can be no genuine Eucharist that is not at the same time an Agape-meal. If it is an act of faith, it is an act of love. The two are inseparable. Without love there is no genuine thanksgiving and no true proclamation of the death of Jesus. Paul told the congregation at Corinth: "When you meet together, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat"; or, as the NEB has it, "it is impossible for you to eat the Lord’s Supper." Why? "... in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal, and one is hungry and another is drunk." One eats and drinks "in an unworthy manner," not because he does not discern the body and the blood in the elements, but because he despises the church of God and humiliates those who have nothing. For that reason he is "guilty of profaning the body and the blood of the Lord" (I Cor. 11:20-22, 27). Here we are bound to raise the most serious questions concerning the doctrine and practice of the Lord’s Supper whereby very early the Agape and the Eucharist were sundered,

The togetherness of Agape and Eucharist rests upon the unity of faith and love in Paul and upon the unity of faith and works in James. What avails in Christ Jesus is "faith working through love" (Gal. 5:6).

Corresponding to God’s love, human love is self-giving love. Eating and drinking become an act of love when there is a common participation in the gifts of the Lord, when they are a matter of mutual giving and receiving. Hence the Lord’s Supper cannot be a love-feast unless it is a diakonia; that is, a service to fellow Christians, to fellow men, and especially to the poor. The root meaning of the Greek diakonein is "to wait on tables." In the New Testament and in the early church diakonia was inseparable from the service of worship. Following the worship service the diakonoi, the "waiters," visited and succored the poor, the widows and those in prison. Later, the Agape and the church’s welfare work were separated from the service of worship. Thereby both suffered: the service of worship became otherworldly and welfare work became worldly.

Much could be said also about a restoration of the Agape-meal in our congregations. I want simply to emphasize that the Agape-meal, far from being an end in itself, is the springboard for the church’s mission and service in the world. The church is to serve all people with its words and deeds of love. The Lord’s Supper would not be an act of faith or of love if it did not have this outreach.

When the church goes out into the world with its deeds of love and mercy, it does not cease to eat and drink with Jesus. For Christ is not only present in the church where the Word is truly preached and the sacraments are rightly administered, as the Reformers, taught. Jesus is first and above all outside us and around us, so that when we come out of church we stumble over him. The God who is known and confessed in the church is none other than Jesus, who is secretly but no less really present in the least of his brethren. God in Christ -- the suffering, weeping, oppressed, hungry, lonely God -- is all around us and cries out to us. This is another reason why no absolute distinction can be made between the Lord’s Supper and the eating and drinking of the children of this world.

Moreover, Christians have no monopoly on love and diakonia. We dare not forget that it was a godless Samaritan (read "communist") who was neighbor to the man who had fallen among thieves and been left half-dead, whereas a priest and a Levite (Christians) passed by on the other side. The Samaritan "brought him to an inn, and took care of him." Shall we deny that the Lord’s Supper was secretly held in that inn? Did it not occur in remembrance of Jesus? Was it not an unconscious recollection of the neighbor, of the mercy of God?

VI

(3) No answer to the question about how we may eat and drink with Jesus would be complete which did not speak about hope. Today we hear a good deal about a theology of hope. Through the work of New Testament scholars and systematic theologians. eschatology has become the fashion in our century. But there has not yet been anything like a satisfactory attempt to relate this newly discovered eschatology in a systematic way with a theology of the Eucharist. Theologians are still almost exclusively concerned with the presence of Christ in or with bread and wine; that is, with a realized eschatology in the Lord’s Supper.

I can only indicate how eating and drinking are an act of hope. The hope of the world is Jesus Christ himself. "Surely I am coming soon" (Rev. 22:20; 3:11) ; "The Lord is at hand" (Phil. 4:5). Jesus comes again in the threefold form of his Parousia: in the resurrection from the dead, in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and in the consummation. The coming Jesus is the one who has already come. The Lord’s Supper is not only a Eucharist that celebrates the kingdom that has come; it is a messianic meal which is an antepast, a foretaste of the coming kingdom. According to the Book of Revelation and the Banquet parables of Luke 14 and Matthew 22 and 25, the Lord’s Supper is the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. It celebrates the wedding of the Lamb with his bride.

Jesus is our hope -- the hope that he will come with food and drink for the morrow, and that at the last day he will come to raise the dead. But to hope is a human, ethical endeavor. The congregation cannot hope without believing and loving; and it cannot believe and love without hoping. Faith, love and hope are the three forms or ways of the one act of the remembrance of Jesus, "who is and who was and who is to come (Rev. 1:4) , "the same yesterday and today and forever" (Heb. 13:8).

Because the congregation hopes in Jesus, it is not deceived or disappointed. It is not anxious or worried about tomorrow. It does not ask: "What shall we eat? Or what shall we drink? Or what shall we wear?" It does not need to lay up treasures on earth. It will not hoard its daily bread or squander it in gluttony. Still less will it resort to violence to protect or increase its goods, because it thinks: - ‘My Master is delayed" (Matt. 24:48 f; Luke 12:45) -- what foolish theologians have called the "delay of the Parousia." No. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me" (Rev. 3:20). In reality eating and drinking are an act of hope when they are a prayer to "give us this day our daily bread" and a prayer that Jesus will one day come so that we can see what now we can only believe; namely, that he is the bread of eternal life. For all our ultimate and penultimate hopes are enclosed in a hope in Jesus. This is the witness which the congregation owes to the world.

Why, what and how may we eat and drink with Jesus? Let me sum up. Because Jesus Christ is present with all people as the Giver of food and drink and as the Bread of life, and because his presence is revealed to his congregation by the Holy Spirit, and because he permits and commands us to eat and, drink, therefore we may and must eat and drink all things with Jesus in faith, love and hope.

Berrigan, Buber, and the ‘Settler State’

Daniel Berrigan’s address on the Arab-Israeli conflict, delivered to the Association of Arab University Graduates last October, was vintage Berrigan. It displayed paradigmatically his superb virtues and his glaring defects: the absolute moral stance, the calling of men and institutions to account before the divine imperatives, the insistence on concrete witness to good and active resistance to evil; but also, alas, the violent rhetoric, the cartoon distortions of concrete human reality, the lurid accusatory statements about those he condemns as sinners. It is nevertheless, with all its faults, an impressive performance, well deserving of serious consideration at this hour. For the situation it deals with still confronts us, and so do the moral and spiritual issues it raises.

I

Berrigan’s complaint, in short, is that the reestablishment of a Jewish state (a justifiable goal) has come at a tremendous cost in human suffering, armed violence and moral decay; that the course of the new state has been a betrayal of everything the term "Israel" has stood for -- justice, compassion, succoring the humiliated and injured; that a "settler state" was established through the expropriation of the people of the land, followed by an imperialist venture, based on the subjugation and exploitation of the conquered; and that, to add moral insult to physical and spiritual injury, the spokesmen of and for the state claim for it a special virtue and glorious achievement which may not be criticized. Although he also excoriates the Arab states, peoples and leaders in bitter, wounding terms, the whole structure of Berrigan’s presentation is such that Israel (or Zionism) alone is blamed for what has occurred, and the implication is that all that has happened is attributable to an intentional Zionist/Israeli plan, with malice and domination aforethought.

I share Father Berrigan’s repugnance toward those in high intellectual and religious places who apologize for or ignore gross historical evil, and I have insisted that Auschwitz bears a commandment to Jews also not to destroy their fellow human beings, that the necessity for Jewish survival, illuminated and commanded by the Holocaust, cannot justify the principle that it is better to do than to suffer injustice -- that this goes completely counter to the spirit and teaching of the Jewish religio-ethical tradition. On these important matters Father Berrigan and I agree. As to what happened and how it came to happen, and as to what kind of society Israel has been, we disagree.

It should also be noted that much of the worst that Berrigan said against Israeli policies toward the Arabs has already been said, and most eloquently, by prominent Zionists, as prophetic warning or as condemnation after the fact: by Ahad Ha-Am, Moshe Smilansky, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, Ernst Simon, etc., etc. Some of Berrigan’s statements could have been lifted from their words -- for example, from Buber’s somber and anguished 80th birthday address, in 1958, to the American Friends of Ihud (a Palestinian Zionist organization devoted to Jewish-Arab rapprochement). In it he told how the hopes of his youth for a renewed Jewish community in Palestine, living in justice and peace with its Arab neighbors, had been frustrated by the situation caused by the mass immigration of refugees from Nazi Germany, and how his own and Magnes’s reconciling message vis-à-vis the Arabs went unheard. ". . . the majority of the Jewish people preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us. Hitler showed them that history does not go the way of the spirit but the way of power, and if a people is powerful enough, it can kill with impunity as many millions of another people as it wants to kill. This was the situation that we had to fight."

It would be wrong, however, to leap from a reading of these words to the conclusion that Buber, like Toynbee explicitly and Berrigan implicitly, held that the Jews emulated the Nazis, harboring and executing a plan for the extermination of a people. Buber pointed to an essential tendency, a spiritual stance, developed by the experience of being treated, in fact and not metaphorically, as "human waste" by superior force exercised by malevolent men who intended the Jews’ destruction. And he faced up to the new task created by the necessity to succor and shelter and heal the horribly bruised remnant of European Jewry -- a task that in the historical circumstances could be done only by the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine). After all, Buber too, came to Palestine "from Hitler" as well as "from conviction."

II

The message of Buber and Magnes and others of their school was that the partition of Palestine (that is, of the portion of it under the British Mandate) and the establishment of a Jewish state against the will of the Arab peoples -- inside and outside Palestine -- could not be achieved except through armed conflict, and that to maintain a state thus engendered would require endless violence and, warfare.

Magnes (an American-born rabbi who was a prime founder and first president of Hebrew University in Jerusalem) sought for a solution in a bi-national state, with parity for both the Jewish and Arab communities, and preferably linked in a federation with other states in the region. This concept was supported vigorously by important labor and left-wing Zionist groups, including the radical Marxist Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair kibbutz movement, the Ahdut Ha-Avodah socialist party, the Poale Zion Smol (Left Workers of Zion) party, and the Mapam party (which at one time embraced the other groups); and by such significant political figures as Haim Margalit-Kalvarisky (a member of the Zionist Executive), Bert Katznelson (a founder of Ahdut Ha-Avodah and of the Histradut federation of labor), and Henrietta Szold (the first woman member of the Zionist Executive and founder of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America). Even David Ben-Gurion entertained the bi-nationalist solution for a time, and the same may be said of Chaim Weizmann, the foremost leader of the Zionist movement during the Mandate period. In short, the original and most zealous supporters of bi-nationalism were dedicated Zionist leaders and organization, as much as half a century before it became cant in certain Palestinian Arab liberation groups and among their New Left supporters in this country.

In the end this solution failed of adoption, and partition and the establishment of a Jewish national state followed. The failure has been ascribed variously to the shortsightedness and inflexibility of official Zionist leaders, the social backwardness and xenophobic chauvinism of the Arabs, the deliberate sabotage by the British of all efforts toward Arab- Jewish rapprochement and mutual action, or simply the alleged fact’ that the aims of the two national liberation movements were essentially irreconcilable.

Zionists of the bi-nationalist school generally accepted the fact of the new state and went on from there to work for justice to the Arab minority, a decent solution of the Arab refugee problem, and peaceful relations with the surrounding Arab states. Buber -- who was, in an elevated sense, a pragmatic realist -- worked continually for these aims and insisted that the new "political enterprise" (the State of Israel) was normatively subordinate to the "religious idea" (Zion), and "that as long as such a reality [i.e., the idea of Zion] lives, history should be responsible to it rather than that it should be responsible to history" (preface to Israel and Palestine: The History of an Idea). "I am now no less a Zionist, in this sense of Zion, than I was [at age 20]," he said in his 80th-birthday address. He remained hopeful to the end: "The ways of history are ways of disappointment and bitterness -- ways of the spirit’s being vanquished again and again, yet ending with its victory."

III

The extreme opposites of the bi-nationalist school, the hard-line protagonists of violence and armed power as the only way to establish and maintain a Zionist settlement in Palestine (or over all of it), held that the Arabs were intransigently opposed to this venture and regarded the immigrating European Jews as racial outsiders, as intruders in their own ancestral living-space, and would harass and murder them and strangle their venture unless they were beaten back by superior fire-power. The protagonist of this view was Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the splinter Revisionist group which he himself called "the most extreme of Zionist parties." That group was vehemently opposed to the moderate, mainline Zionism led by Chaim Weizmann. A brilliant writer and orator, Jabotinsky argued impressively that Palestine on both sides of the Jordan should be made the place of salvation for the wretched Jews of eastern Europe rather than the Jewish "spiritual center" or "model community"’ proclaimed by Ha-Am and Buber. With acute foresight, he told the British Royal Commission on Palestine in 1937: "We are facing an elemental calamity, a kind of social earthquake. . . . We have got to save millions, many millions." He asked for the right to form Jewish self-defense forces against the indigenous inhabitants, claiming this as a "holy duty." He appealed to the British colonial experience, mentioning specifically the Settlers Defense Force in Kenya.

Certainly, this man and the movement he headed would seem to fit Berrigan’s stereotype of the "settler ethos," on the model of the Boer-Bantu or British-Kikuyu stance. To be sure, he was speaking for a people on the eve of extermination and was pointing to a place to which they were connected by millennia-old tradition. Yet he went far beyond other Zionists inspired by the same motives, to a brutally colonialist attitude toward the Palestinian Arabs. The hard fact is that the preponderant majority of Zionist parties and spokesmen abhorred his views and rejected them decisively. He was a heretic, "excommunicated" and "pilloried," in Magnes’s words, by the Zionist establishment -- a consideration which should make him a sympathetic figure for Father Berrigan. Critical Zionist thinkers, however, have maintained that the official Zionist movement in effect adopted Jabotinsky’s views when it decided in 1942 to go all out for a Jewish national state to be established and maintained against all opponents by whatever means were necessary. "He was the prophet of the Jewish state," Magnes declared. "He saw that the only way to get a state was through force." A prophet and realist in his own right, Magnes recognized in Jabotinsky a prophet and realist of the counter spirit.

IV

But there are settlers and settlers, Zionists and Zionists: and there is more than one kind of "settler ethos." All the persons mentioned above as friends of the Arabs and fighters for Arab rights were Zionist settlers, some early, some late, from Smilansky in 1890 to Buber in 1938. Berrigan and his ideological confreres can hardly have such persons in mind when they speak of the "settler ethos"; nor can they mean people like Aaron David Gordon, "the Jewish Tolstoy," for whom settlement and Zionism meant working the land with one’s own hard physical labor, usually with fellow pioneers in a kibbutz. I suppose the key term is "settler state, connoting a political entity established by a non-indigenous group to rule over an indigenous people whom it exploits and oppresses. South Africa is the model. But is this a good likeness for the Zionist venture in Palestine? Is "return" merely a synthetic ideological myth, without rootage in the Jewish religious tradition and historical experience? And what nation, including the Arab nations, is not a settler nation? Berrigan himself cannily distinguishes between the "settler state" and the "long-settled state" -- a distinction that would make the peculiar evil of this settlement lie in its comparative recency.

The famous letter of Buber to Mahatma Gandhi in 1939 gives us some instruction on this cardinal issue -- and some rather plain speaking. Replying to Gandhi’s assertion that "Palestine belongs to the Arabs" and the Jews have no right to settle there, Buber, while granting and upholding the claim of the Arabs, staunchly upholds the prior and also vital claim of the Jews, which goes back some 3,000 years and is based on what they experienced as a divine mission to hallow a particular land and build a good society there. To fulfill that mission and to be an authentic people, they require a "home center’ in the land -- in the actual Concrete soil, not a mere symbol in the heart. Says Buber: "That which is merely an idea and nothing more cannot become holy, but a piece of earth can become holy." For Berrigan, this is idolatry; for Buber, sacramental existence.

Further, Buber asks the sensible question, "By what means did the Arabs attain to the right of ownership in Palestine?" and answers, equally sensibly, "Surely by conquest and, in fact, a conquest followed by settlement. . . . Settlement by force of conquest justifies for you a right of ownership of Palestine; whereas a settlement such as the Jewish one [at the time of writing, by peaceful means] . . . does not justify, in your opinion, any participation in this right of possession." Such logic necessarily justifies possession based on conquest-settlement after a number of generations, and we are reminded that the Jews’ ancestors originally took the land by conquest and settlement too; also that they were forcibly expelled from it.

Palestine became "Arab" during the world-shaking Islamic conquests of the seventh century. Not only did the Arabian Muslims settle and rule the conquered land; they also Arabized and, in many cases, Islamized the indigenous population, both Jewish and Christian. Thus some of the Palestinian Arabs presumably derive from ancient Jewish stock (the late Ben-Gurion sought among them an authentic image of the ancestral Jew).

V

Of course, Palestine in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries was situated in a socio-historical and ideological context much different from that of the 13th century B.C.E. or the seventh century C.E. The Zionist settlement began at the last possible moment when Europeans, whatever their lineage, could still settle safely in lands not governed by the indigenous inhabitants. And it soon ran into the buzz saw of an emerging and insuppressible Arab nationalism- It is a truism to say that the two movements of national liberation met and clashed in the same land at the same time. Moreover, the Zionist settlement contributed greatly to exacerbating Palestinian Arab nationalism; and dialectically -- through its development of the country and raising of hygienic, economic and cultural levels -- it provided the sinews for a strong indigenous nationalist movement. During the Mandate period the Arabs in the area of Zionist settlement experienced a phenomenal population rise (of births over deaths), and Mandatory Palestine attracted some 100,000 Arab immigrants from adjacent lands.

With some notable exceptions, the Zionist leaders did not take Arab nationalism seriously enough. Relations with Turkey, Britain and, later, the United States seemed most important to them. (Similarly, Israeli leaders today prefer to deal with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan rather than with an independent Palestinian Arab state.) The Zionist leadership did not take the necessary steps in deeds to satisfy the Arabs’ urgent need for national pride and self-government. For them to assume that mere economic and social advance would serve as an adequate surrogate was gross philistinism, unworthy of heirs of the Jewish spirit. And for them to suggest (as some did) that Arab national needs could be taken care of in other lands, in the vast territories held by kindred peoples, was unfeeling as well as presumptuous. The Ihud group understood that the Palestinian Arabs were deeply attached to their land and that they became even more so when they fled from or were pushed out of it.

Buber and Magnes were convinced that, given goodwill, concentrated effort and practical concrete deeds, a just and viable arrangement could be made in which the two national movements would share the same country. My skepticism as to whether there was any real willingness on the Arab side to reach such a modus vivendi has been considerably mitigated by Aharon Cohen’s Israel and the Arab World (1970), which demonstrates that on several occasions, down to World War II, Arab representatives made significant approaches to cooperation. Bi-nationalism was evidently a real possibility. Whether it would have worked reasonably well, whether it would have been marred by bitter conflict or ended in the domination of one people by the other, we cannot know, because it was never tried. The majority of the Zionist leaders did not want to take the chance -- did not want to risk jeopardizing the attainment, at long last, of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It could have happened. It did not happen. We cannot go back. Bi-nationalism is a lost opportunity.

Instead, the Jewish state came into being. It claims the right to exist and survive. In that respect it is like any other state: it plays the usual game of power and diplomacy, using armed violence in a brutal and effective way, telling lies or half-truths and engaging in espionage. But it has also been a model of social progress and political liberty in a region not noted for either (witness the startling novelty of a free Arab press on the West Bank), and has tried to share some of its innovative social institutions with developing countries in Africa and Asia. Where else in the Middle East are even spies, murderers and "traitors" spared capital punishment, public or not? For "fascism" and the other barbarities of which Father Berrigan accuses Israel, one had best look to certain other countries in the region.

Moreover, while it is a state with all the defects, and vices of a nation engaged in a struggle for power and/or survival, Israel has in large part fulfilled the dream of the "spiritual" Zionists and has become a creative and inspiriting center for Jewish culture. In the world of learning, "Israel" signifies Hebrew University. The new nation of Israel has become treasured and treasurable, among Jews and others, for something far beyond national sovereignty, flag, army, propaganda bureau, and all the rest of that claptrap. It has become a world cultural center. And, finally, a Jewish homeland has been built in Palestine, and it is the only one that Jews as a people have.

VI

But what of the price in human suffering -- all the mutual murder, mayhem and destruction? It has been a terrible price, and here I think Magnes was eternally right: in the particular circumstances, the decision to establish a Jewish state was bound to bring armed conflict in a continuing spiral. So the triumph and achievements of the new state are flawed by a primary injustice to the people of the land, willed or not -- an injustice compounded by subsequent military victories. The Jewish people have eaten of the apple, the price of state power, and not for the first time in their long history.

When their consciences are alive (a not unusual state), Israelis may acknowledge that they have a large share of guilt to bear. But others involved in these tragic events share in the burden: the Palestinian Arab elite who, when they did not forsake their people, led them into ruin; the Arab rulers and governments who, counting on an easy victory, ordered their armies into Palestine in 1948; leaders like Nasser, who triggered the disastrous 1967 war (deliberately, it seems now from recently revealed Arab documents), and Sadat, who unleashed the Yom Kippur War (another scheduled quick victory that came a cropper); and, of course, the liberationist warriors who murder unarmed innocents in cold blood and are hailed as heroes in Arab circles. It has been observed that the Jewish treatment of the Palestinian Arab refugees at Gaza and elsewhere has been far more humane and constructive than that given them by Egypt and Jordan. After all, it was King Hussein, not Golda Meir or any other Israeli leader, who ordered the butchery of the Palestinians in Black September.

For the future, I would place my hopes in the return of Israel to something like its pre-1967 borders, the establishment of an independent Palestinian Arab state on the West Bank, some practicable and equitable solution of the original Palestinian refugee problem, close economic and other relations between Israel and Egypt (leading perhaps to people-to-people and cultural exchanges between Israel and the Arab countries), and a strong -- and this time legally foolproof -- guarantee by the UN. of the peace agreements enforced by an adequately armed international police force, with superpower backing, if not participation.

I also hope that there will be a return by Israeli leaders to the old humanistic Zionist ideas and ideals, and away from the hard-line, quasi-colonialist orientations that seem to have shaped Israeli policy in the years between the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars. And I hope that Arab leaders will turn to the tremendous task of social and economic development in their countries, and away from the radical rhetoric with which they seem to have intoxicated both themselves and their peoples.

Force is not the way, either ethically or pragmatically. The whole course of Jewish-Arab relations during the past half-century demonstrates as much. Let us hope and pray that the spirit of Buber and Magnes will finally prevail over reliance on the right of the stronger.