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Dorothy L. Sayers: A Christian Humanist for Today

During her lifetime, Dorothy L. Sayers was known to many readers as the creator of that debonair, aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, who solved the mysteries in Murder Must Advertise, Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors. To others, she was the dramatist whose radio serial, The Man Born to Be King, brought the words of Christ into their living rooms. To countless students, she was the scholar and translator who made Dante’s Divine Comedy not only readable but enjoyable, and surprisingly relevant to their own era. At the time of her death in 1957, Sayers’s writings, aside from her best novels and short stories, were not well known outside England, but in the past ten years, particularly in the United States, her reputation as a Christian humanist has grown steadily.

Making Christian Dogma Meaningful

Born in 1893, Dorothy L. Sayers was the only child of Henry Sayers, headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School, Oxford, and Helen Leigh Sayers, great-niece of Percival Leigh, “the Professor” of Punch. Dorothy’s childhood was spent in East Anglia, the fen country described in The Nine Tailors. She won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she attained first honors in medieval literature. While employed at Blackwell’s, Oxford, she published two small volumes of verse, Op. I and Catholic Tales. Settling in London, she secured work as a copywriter in an advertising firm, and in her free time finished her first novel, Whose Body? After 12 novels and several collections of short stories, she announced that she intended to stop writing fiction and to turn to more serious subjects.

A devout Anglican, Sayers viewed all life in terms of the incarnation. She lectured and wrote on the imperative need to make Christian dogma meaningful in ordinary life. In Begin Here, a wartime essay on aspects of peace, she defines freedom as it was understood in medieval England: “Freedom . . . not in the sense we are inclined to give the word today -- that is, exemption from all external restrictions -- but in a more philosophical sense: the freedom to be true to man’s real nature, that is, to stand in the right relationship to God.” This relationship, she insists, can be achieved only when one in daily life manifests Christlike love for others, a way of life based not on sentimental chatter about brotherly, sisterly love, but on a disciplined integrity toward oneself and others. In the essay “Creed or Chaos,” she stresses that it is fatal to allow people to “suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling . . . [it is] hopeless to offer Christianity as a vague, idealistic aspiration: it is a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine steeped in drastic and uncompromising realism.”

Right Relationships

Only in recent years have Sayers’s readers become aware that many of the Christian truths and ideals expressed forthrightly in her essays are subtly woven into most of her writings: poetry, drama, Dantean studies and even fiction. The idea of maintaining right relationships with God, one’s neighbor and oneself is an important theme, for instance, in her third novel, Unnatural Death (1927). Miss Climpson, the lovable, eccentric spinster who assists Lord Peter in his sleuthing, expresses her concern that young Vera Findlater is so infatuated with an older woman that she becomes her veritable slave. She urges Vera not to spend all her time with this friend; “I’ve known so many happy friendships spoilt by people seeing too much of each other.” Vera insists that friendships such as theirs make great demands: “It’s got to be everything to one. It’s wonderful the way it seems to colour one’s thoughts. Instead of being centred in one’s self, one’s centred in the other person. That’s what Christian love means -- one’s ready to die for the other person.”

When Miss Climpson is disturbed, her inner turmoil is suggested by the way that she emphasizes every important word: “Well, I don’t know. . . . I once heard a sermon about that from a most splendid priest -- and he said that that kind of love might become idolatry if one wasn’t careful. He said that Milton’s remark about Eve, you know -- ‘he for God only, she for God in him’ -- was not congruous with Catholic doctrine. One must get the proportions right, and it was out of proportion to see everything through the eyes of another fellow-creature.” When Vera argues that she and her friend put God first, of course, but that a mutual love and friendship simply must be good, Miss Climpson answers firmly: Love is always good, when it is the right kind, but I don’t think it ought to be possessive.”

By the end of the novel. Vera Findlater has violated her integrity in an attempt to shield her friend. The pun on the name is obvious: Vera, truth, finds out too late that her relationship was out of proportion.

This theme of integrity in personal relationships is important in the novels that develop the romance between Lord Peter and Harriet Vane. Strong Poison (1930) opens with Harriet on trial for the murder of her former lover. When circumstantial evidence fails to convince one jury member of Harriet’s guilt, the trial ends with a hung jury; a new trial is scheduled. Having fallen in love with Harriet, Lord Peter is determined to prove her innocence; he clears her name but fails to win her love.

Aware that Harriet is suffering from feelings of rejection and betrayal, and that she resents being under obligation to him for saving her life, Lord Peter decides that the only way to win her is to submerge his own feelings, giving her time to regain her self-confidence and personal esteem. Here Sayers reveals her own philosophy of integrity in human relationships: education, wealth and social position are not the factors that establish equality and mutuality. Harriet must recognize her merits and failings, accept them, and respect her own uniqueness; only then can she achieve a satisfying relationship with another.

In the essay “Gaudy Night” (not to be confused with the novel of that name) Sayers tells how her ideas of integrity influenced her writing: “Let me confess that when I wrote Strong Poison, it was with the infanticidal intention of doing away with Peter; that is, of marrying him off and getting rid of him.” But: “I could find no form of words in which she could accept him without loss of self-respect. . . . She must come to him as a free agent, if she came at all, and must realize that she was independent of him before she could bring her dependence.”

Valuing Integrity

In the novel Gaudy Night (1935) the theme of integrity is doubly significant, affecting the Wimsey-Vane romance and the plot. An alumna of Shrewsbury, a women’s college at Oxford University, Harriet is invited by the dean to help discover the identity of an intruder who is disturbing the scholastic calm; after much wanton destruction, Lord Peter’s help is enlisted. In the senior common room one evening, when the topic of intellectual honesty comes up, a don recounts how a graduate student from another university deliberately suppressed evidence because it would invalidate his research and destroy the main argument of his dissertation. Someone suggests that perhaps the student felt he had to sacrifice his professional integrity so that he could secure his degree, desperately needed if he were to support a wife and family. Another don questions: If a wife knew that her home and financial security were purchased at the cost of her husband’s integrity, would her reaction be one of dismay and guilt? Over the dean’s protests that most wives would not give a pin about the loss of their husband’s professional honor, Miss Chilperic shyly suggests that if a wife did accept such dishonesty, it would be tantamount to living on immoral earnings. This comment delights Lord Peter, who declares that if people ever come around to accepting this standard of honesty -- that is, if they ever learn to value the integrity of the mind equally with that of the body -- a social revolution will take place.

Asked to give a toast at her own alma mater, Somerville College, Oxford, Sayers pondered much about why one should be grateful for a university education, and came to the conclusion that such an education gives “that habit of intellectual integrity which is at once the foundation and the result of scholarship.” Later, this idea offered a way to place Harriet in a position where she could accept Wimsey’s love:

On the intellectual platform . . . Harriet could stand free and equal with Peter, since in that sphere she had never been false to her own standards. By choosing a plot that should exhibit intellectual integrity as the one great permanent value in an emotionally unstable world I should be saying the thing that, in a confused way, I had been wanting to say all my life, Finally, I should have found a universal theme which could be made integral both to the detective plot and to the “love-interest” which I had, somehow or other, to unite with it.

The Ethics of Advertising

The integrity of work is a prominent theme in many of Sayers’s writings. In the essay “Why Work?” she speaks out against wastefulness and against “advertisements imploring and exhorting and cajoling and menacing and bullying us to glut ourselves with things we do not want, in the name of snobbery and idleness and sex-appeal.” Again she stresses the need of proportion and right relationships. Work, she says, is not what one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. “It is, or should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.” She continues:

We should ask of an enterprise, not “will it pay?” but “is it good?”; of a man, not “what does he make?’ but “what is his work worth?”; of goods, not “can we induce people to buy them?” but “are they useful things well made?”; of employment, not “how much a week?” but “will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?”

In the novel Murder Must Advertise (1933), set in an advertising agency where reams of copy are written daily to lure customers to buy shoddy goods -- or worse, written to create false needs, convincing the public that it must purchase certain commodities or be hopelessly out of fashion -- Sayers highlights ethical problems involved in the production, promotion and consumption of manufactured goods. She understood the advertising milieu well, for in the ‘20s and ‘30s, while writing her novels, she had been employed as a copywriter in just such an advertising agency, Benson’s in London. In this novel, Lord Peter dashes off clever copy that delights his colleagues at Pym’s advertising agency without letting his unsuspecting associates know that he is actually hired to discover who is carrying on some nefarious scheme under cover of the agency.

After writing advertisements for just one week, Lord Peter voices his concern about the ethics, or lack of them, in this business. Is it ethical, he ponders, to concoct enticing copy that will lure some poorly paid typist to spend her pennies on Muggins’ Magnolia Cream in the hopes that her complexion will capture the attention of some Prince Charming? Sayers’s attitude is evident in the copywriter’s response to Lord Peter’s queries:

How should anything be sacred to an advertiser? We spend our whole time asking intimate questions of perfect strangers: “Mother, Has Your Child Learnt Regular Habits?”; “Are You Troubled with Fulness After Eating?”; “Do You Suffer from Superfluous Hair?” . . . Upon my soul, I sometimes wonder why the long-suffering public doesn’t rise up and slay us.

Sayers criticizes advertisers who tempt the gullible and invade areas that should be private, but she also censures consumers who, indifferent to blatantly offensive advertisements and shoddy, unnecessary products that flood the market, nevertheless continue to spend foolishly. She also concedes that advertisers know how to use the English language, choosing the right, the “telling” word, a trait infrequently practiced by many who carelessly misuse “the richest, noblest, most flexible and sensitive language ever written or spoken.”

The Dantean Studies

That integrity in communication was a vital concern to Sayers is evident in her essays “Plain English,” “The English Language” and “How Free Is the Press?” -- all published in Unpopular Opinions (1947), a collection of 21 lectures and essays. Even in her Dantean studies, she brings out the need for honesty in all forms of communication. She asserts that in Dante’s description of the Eighth Circle of Hell, he shows not only the punishments suffered by those who on earth committed malicious fraud, but also that their place of punishment is an image “of the City in corruptions” where every social relationship, personal and public, has disintegrated. In this Circle of Fraud, flatterers who on earth abused and corrupted the language now wallow in the filth which they once spewed out upon the world. “Dante,” she says, “did not live to see the full development of political propaganda, commercial advertisement, and sensational journalism, but he has a place prepared for them.”

Also punished in the Circle of Fraud are panderers and seducers; Sayers reminds readers that although the image is a sexual one, allegorically one may interpret these offenders as including all who are guilty of stimulating and exploiting any kind of passion, such as rage and greed, thereby making tools of other people.

Throughout her commentaries on the Divine Comedy, Sayers stresses that the subject of the poem is not the story of a journey through hell, purgatory and paradise, but is one concerning the relationship between humanity and God. Dante insisted that although the poem is literally concerned with souls after death, it is allegorically concerned with the behavior of humankind in this life, for it is by one’s freely willed actions on earth that one becomes liable to “punishing or rewarding justice.” One must, she says, accept Dante’s idea that heaven, hell and purgatory are within the soul. But if one prefers, she adds, one may think of the corruption not as sins of individuals but as the evils which undermine nations, cities and communities today. This idea, borrowed from the writings of her friend Charles Williams, appeals to many readers who admit that Dante’s underworld makes more sense to them when they think of it as a portrayal of a modern city plagued by every type of moral corruption,

In Canto XIX of the Inferno, Dante describes the punishment of those guilty of simony; in a note, she reminds readers that the buying and selling of holy things is not confined to medieval folk: “A mercenary marriage, for example, is also the sale of a sacrament.” She asserts that gluttony is not always the sin of overeating or overdrinking; it can be over fastidiousness in matters of food, or too great a concern to secure a higher standard of living. Sloth in its modern form is not necessarily idleness of mind and laziness of body; under the guise of tolerance, it is often passive acquiescence to evil or error, or “escapism,” withdrawal from situations which are difficult.

The Church’s Failures

Each of the essays in Creed or Chaos (1949) suggests the need for integrity in the living of Christian ideals in all facets of life. Even the church, Sayers suggests, has failed in this aim at times. In “The Other Six Deadly Sins,” she declares that though the church officially recognizes seven capital sins, nevertheless it has seemed more concerned in the past to condemn lust than it has the other capital offenses; quicker to condemn sexual immorality than financial chicanery; more vigilant to condemn sexually suggestive books or dramas than to suppress works suggesting that wealth and position are the worthwhile goals of life; more harsh on excessive drinkers than on those who charge excessive rates of interest Commenting that in these matters the church’s record is not as perfect as it should be, she adds that by the church she does not mean Rome, Westminster, or bishops, vicars or church wardens: “The Church is you and I. And are you and I in the least sincere in our pretense that we disapprove of Covetousness?”

Sayers does blame the church of the past several centuries for attempting to uphold a particular standard of ethical values which derive from Christian dogma while gradually dispensing with the very dogmas which are the sole rational foundation for these values. The root cause of the Christian church’s failure to influence the lives of many today is, she insists, not that too much stress has been placed on dogma but that it has been neglected or watered down. Scorning a Christianity that fosters a mild “gentle Jesus sentimentality” with vaguely humanistic ethics, she asserts boldly: “We cannot blink the fact that gentle Jesus, meek and mild, was so stiff in His opinions and so inflammatory in His language, that He was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbetted as a firebrand and a public danger.” Later generations muffled up that challenging personality: “We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah,” turning Jesus “into a household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”

The Sin of Pride

The root of every sin against integrity -- that is, every sin against humanity, against nature and against God -- is pride, the destroyer of right, balanced relationships. Sayers’s first drama, The Zeal of Thy House, written for the Canterbury Festival, 1937, is an exploration of the theme of pride. In the two previous years, the festival plays had concerned well-known figures: Thomas à Becket in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and Thomas Cranmer in Charles Williams’s Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury. But Sayers chose the obscure French architect William of Sens, commissioned in 1147 to rebuild the burnt-out choir of the cathedral. He is so proud of this honor and so confident of his artistry that he asserts: “This Church is mine, And none but I, not even God, can build it.” Later he boasts:

We are the master craftsmen, God and I  --

We understand each other. . . .  

He knows that I am indispensable

To His work here; and for the work’s sake, He,

Cherishing, as good masons do, His tools,

Will keep me safer

 

But just as William places the keystone of the great arch in its place, he slips from the high scaffold and, like Ibsen’s master builder, plummets to earth.

During months of painful recuperation, William attempts to continue overseeing the building operations, enduring physical pain with equanimity but complaining vehemently when his orders are imperfectly executed or changed by subordinates. He vows that he will never give up his creation for others to finish, until in a dream, Michael the Archangel convinces him that his sufferings and those of Christ are similar; Christ made the supreme sacrifice: he left his work for others to finish. In his final submission, William acknowledges:

O, I have sinned. The eldest sin of all,

Pride, that struck down the morning star from Heaven

Hath struck down me from where I sat and shone

Smiling on my new world.

 

He begs that his work remain unspoiled:

But let my work, all that was good in me,

All that was God, stand up and live and grow.

The work is sound, Lord God, no rottenness there –

Only in me.

 

The final speech in The Zeal of Thy House states a fundamental belief frequently found in Sayers’s writings: human handiwork reflects the creativity of the Holy Trinity. Michael the Archangel addresses the audience:

Children of men, lift up your hearts. . . .

Praise Him that He hath made man in His own image,

               a maker

And craftsman like Himself, a little mirror of His

               Triune Majesty.

For every work of creation is threefold, an earthly

           Trinity

to match the heavenly.

The Playwright as Theologian

Although Sayers played a significant role in the Christian drama movement that flourished in England in the ‘30s, she scorned plays written to edify or to evangelize. In “Playwrights Are Not Evangelists,” she warns the writer: “If he writes with his eye on the spiritual box-office, he will at once cease to be a dramatist, and decline into a manufacturer of propagandist tracts. . . . He will lose his professional integrity, and with it all his power, including his power to preach the Gospel.” In the introduction to The Man Born to Be King, she states: “A loose and sentimental theology begets loose and sentimental art-forms; an illogical theology lands one in illogical situations; an ill-balanced theology issues in false emphasis and absurdity. Conversely: there is no more searching test of a theology than to submit it to dramatic handling.”

This radio serial was also to be a test of her own integrity. Aiming to present the life of Christ as an actual historical event in first century Palestine, she portrayed him as a human being who spoke in the vernacular, as did the other biblical figures. If he did not use colloquial language, he would be “a stained-glass, unreal figure.” A storm of controversy and censure broke. Vehement protests were directed against the use of the vernacular and the representation of the voice of Christ. At that time and up to 1968, the stage impersonation of any divine person was legally forbidden in England except in the case of dramas presented in church. Although the prohibition did not apply to radio presentations, some church groups took full-page ads in newspapers to register their protests. One such protest read:

A sinful man presuming to impersonate the Sinless One! It detracts from the honour due to the Divine Majesty. In the present instance the man chosen to impersonate the Eternal Son of God -- attributing to Him some words our Divine Saviour never uttered  -- is a professional actor. Could anything be more distressful to reverent-minded Christians?

Criticism was so virulent and widespread that questions concerning the propriety of continuing the broadcasts were brought before the House of Commons; but the BBC, supported by leading clergy of various denominations, reaffirmed its decision to broadcast the remaining 11 plays. Sayers continued to write in the style in which she had begun, taking the liberties which she deemed necessary to make the plays dramatically effective.

Frequent transmissions. of The Man Born to Be King attest to the worth of the work. Broadcasts during the ‘40s were so popular that in 1947 the entire series was redone with a new cast. This version was heard frequently until 1975, when a new production, in stereophonic sound with a score for full orchestra, was broadcast as a weekly Sunday feature.

A New Audience

In England, Dorothy L. Sayers, along with the other members of a group termed the “Oxford Christians”  -- notably C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams and J. R. R. Tolkien -- has had a steady following; but in the United States her works today are attracting a wider audience than those of some of her male colleagues, despite the fact that her fiction, unlike theirs, is not in any explicit sense religious. Lord Peter Wimsey is not a Christian, yet within the structure of the detective novel, Sayers has found many opportunities to suggest Christian values. Undoubtedly the BBC television productions of her major novels introduced her sophisticated sleuth to a younger audience; the availability of all her novels in inexpensive editions and the recent volume containing all the Wimsey short stories have stimulated interest in her fiction. Janet Hitchman’s Such a Strange Lady, the first Sayers biography, has piqued interest in her private life, in which there are mysteries greater than any found in her novels.

Most likely the factor most responsible for the renewed interest in Sayers’s writings is that her best nonfiction prose and her verse dramas are now available in numerous editions, many of which focus on particular themes -- a notable improvement over the haphazard grouping that marred the two collections of essays published in her lifetime.

Christian Letters in a Post-Christian World (1969), edited by Roderick Jellema, contains four essays from Unpopular Opinions, her first anthology of lectures. “What Do We Believe?,” “Towards a Christian Aesthetic,” “Creative Mind” and “Christian Morality” stress her conviction that Christian truths must be stated dramatically and lived courageously. From her second collection -- Creed or Chaos? -- Jellema selected the essay of the same name, as well as “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” “Strong. Meat,” “The Dogma Is the Drama,” and “The Other Six Deadly Sins.” These suggest ways in which Christianity has failed to appeal to postwar generations and offer some bold remedies to change the situation. Are Women Human? (1971), a slim work containing the essay of that name and “The Human-Not-Quite Human,” introduces Sayers’s views on the subject of women’s rights and women’s role in a male-oriented society.

A Matter of Eternity (1973), edited by Rosemary Kent Sprague, has only two full-length essays, “Christian Morality” and “The Lost Tools of Learning,” in which Sayers states boldly that the great defect in modern teaching is this: “Though we have succeeded in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything except the art of learning.” The remainder of A Matter of Eternity is a collection of provocative passages, ranging from pithy sentences, such as “To pray when one ought to be working is as much a sin as to work when one ought to be praying,” and “Evil can never be undone, but only purged and redeemed,” to longer quotations running a full page, grouped under such headings as “Time and History,” “Evil,” “Sin,” “Forgiveness” and “Work.”

Throughout these new editions, there emerges an astonishing thematic consistency: the importance of the incarnation, the need for the church to enunciate forthrightly the dogmas of the Christian religion and for believers to live as witnesses to these truths, and the necessity of maintaining integrity in one’s relationships with God, one’s neighbor, and oneself. These and other truths run like a Pentecostal flame through her writings. Neither a mystic nor a saint, Dorothy L. Sayers was an original craftswoman, a gifted scholar and translator, and an outspoken Christian humanist. Her works merit the esteem and close reading accorded to them, for they speak to the troubled times of today.

Public Versus Private Schools: A Divisive Issue for the 1980s

One of the major developments of the 1960s was the formation of scores of informal, ecumenical, social action coalitions organized around issues such as race, poverty, the draft, Vietnam and foreign policy. The 1970s saw the emergence of legalized abortion as an issue that shattered many of these coalitions. A statistical index of the rapid rise of legalized abortion as an issue can be found in the fact that in 1970 only 3.4 per cent of all pregnancies were terminated by a legally induced abortion. (Another 21.6 per cent of all pregnancies resulted in spontaneous abortion or stillbirth.) In numerical terms, the number of legal abortions rose from 193,000 in 1970 to 1,034,000 in 1975, while the number of illegal abortions dropped from 530,000 to approximately 10,000. The net result was that 300,000 babies were not born in 1975 that otherwise would have been. Another estimated half-million babies were not born in 1975 because of the increased use of birth-control measures. In other words, the number of babies born in 1975 was down by approximately three-quarters of a million from what might have been the total had it not been for the wider use of birth-control measures and the legalization of abortion.

These figures are more than an interesting footnote to the fight over the legalization of abortion. They also form part of the context for looking at what may turn out to be the most divisive social-action struggle of the 1980s: the issue of public schools versus private schools. Just as the abortion issue formed a divisive wedge not only between Protestants and Roman Catholics but also within several Protestant denominations, the public-school-versus-private-school struggle will split long-established liberal Protestant alliances and will be another blow to Protestant-Catholic cooperation on issue-centered ministries.

Three Statistical Factors

Three sets of statistics provide background for this discussion. The first is that 1979 marked the end of a six-year period during which an unprecedented number of Americans celebrated their 18th birthday. The only time in American history when the annual total of live births exceeded 4.2 million was the period from 1956 through 1961; this birthrate determined that in 1979 an unprecedented number of persons would belong in the 18-23 age bracket. For the next dozen years in the future, that 18-23 cohort will drop from slightly over 25 million in 1979 to slightly over 19 million in 1994, and then it will slowly increase to approximately 22 million in the year 2000. When viewed in terms of higher education, these figures will mean a shortage of undergraduates for the nation’s 3,000 colleges and universities.

The second relevant statistic is that during the past two decades, 200 private colleges and universities have closed their, doors. Many of these were church-related institutions.

The third piece of background information is that in recent years between 700 and 800 new private Christian elementary or high schools have been launched each year and every month the number of new Christian schools increases. This burgeoning coincides with diminished enrollment in public schools as a result of the low number of births in the 1973-76 period, during which the total never reached 32 million births. (The figure of 3,137,000 live births in 1973 was the lowest number since 1945. Between 1946 and 1971 the total never dropped below 3.4 million.) The obvious consequence for the years 1979-82 will be an increased number of schools competing for a remarkably small number of kindergarten and first-grade pupils. Currently there are approximately 5.6 million students enrolled in private elementary and high schools -- with two-thirds of them in Christian schools.

The wave of new Christian schools is largely unrelated to the issue of racial segregation, which prompted the opening of many Christian schools in the south between 1967 and 1976. The present wave is a unique phenomenon, highly visible in the north and west and especially pronounced in such states as New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Oregon, Kansas and California. One of the basic differences between this new movement and the segregationist academies of a few years ago is that the all-white schools were especially concerned to avoid racial integration at the junior high and senior high levels. The current boom in Christian day schools is concentrated more heavily on the young child, and many of these new schools operate on the assumption that the children will transfer to public schools after completing third or fourth grade.

Another factor is that many of the most determined advocates of this new wave of Christian day schools are upwardly mobile black parents who are willing to make major sacrifices in order to enroll their children. Some of the fathers are ministers, and many of these parents are employed in the public schools.

Why the New Interest?

There are many reasons for the increase in the number of these day schools. A basic list includes growing dissatisfaction with the quality of education provided by the public schools; a renewed emphasis on the ‘basics” of reading, writing and arithmetic, motivated by response to the decline in the scores achieved by public school pupils on standardized tests; a desire for children to be taught “the fourth R” -- religion -- in school; a wish by parents to have their children instructed by teachers who often appear to be more accessible to parents and who have chosen to be teachers out of a sense of Christian vocation; and the desire by parents that their children be educated in a setting marked by explicit Christian values. Also operant are a negative attitude toward busing young children great distances; the fear of disorder and violence and the opposition by parents to what they perceive as an excessively “liberal” or “permissive” climate in public schools; the reaction to the widespread availability of drugs in the public schools; the desire by many parents to have their children enrolled with highly motivated students; a strong shift in public sentiment, backed by considerable academic research, that small schools are superior to the very large schools produced by the public school consolidation movement of the post-World War II era in educational “reform”; the general swing away from the melting-pot interpretation of American history as a value to be perpetuated; and the general wish by parents to have a more influential voice in the policy formation of the school in which their children are enrolled.

Another factor -- one which is seldom mentioned -- is that the cost of operating a private school, once far above the per-pupil cost of public education, is now competitive. In Massachusetts, for example, which has some of the finest private schools in the nation, the annual average per-pupil cost in the public schools is $1,000 a year above the average for private schools. In other words, the cost of sending a child to a private school is now within the financial capability of many more families.

The Policy Issues

There is every reason to believe that the current increase in private elementary and high schools will continue, at the same time that so many private colleges and universities find themselves squeezed between declining enrollments and rising costs. These two trends raise a series of very important policy questions for those Christians concerned with issue-centered ministries and public-policy formation.

What is the appropriate position for a Christian to take on the use of public funds for scholarships awarded to students attending private, church-related colleges and universities? Without this form of indirect financial support from government sources, scores of private colleges and universities simply will not be able to compete for students with the tax-supported colleges and universities. During the years when there was a shortage of public school facilities, the argument could be made that it was more economical for the state to provide these scholarships than to build and staff new facilities. During the 1980s, however, there will be a surplus of facilities and faculty, but a shortage of students. In addition, the faculty and administrators in many states are now organized to exert considerable political pressure on the state legislatures to allocate these scarce funds to the public colleges and universities rather than to share them with private church-related schools. In simple political terms, whose jobs will be eliminated? Teachers and administrators in the publicly supported colleges and universities? Or teachers and administrators in the private church-related institutions?

Should Christians support state university systems and accept as an inevitable consequence the closing of many private colleges? Or should they insist on the continuation of a wider range of choices for students through state tuition scholarships for those who prefer to attend a church-related school?

A second policy question grows out of the current wave of new Christian day schools. Many denominations have had a strong pro-public-school orientation in their social-action statements. These include the Methodists, Baptists and the United Church of Christ. Others, such as the Episcopalians and Presbyterians, have had a strong pro-public-school position but have also affirmed the value of private schools for the elite 2 per cent of the population who can afford them. A third position is represented by those denominations with a strong tradition of private Christian schools; these include Roman Catholics, Christian Reformed, Lutherans and Seventh-day Adventists. Each of these denominational families has a tradition that enables it to affirm the value of a private Christian alternative to the public school system. Will Methodist, Baptist and United Church of Christ leaders affirm this new development, or will they view it as a threat to the public schools? Will this be a new wedge in liberal social-action coalitions?

Perhaps the most influential policy question in denominational circles concerns how the general issue will be phrased. Is it public schools versus private schools? Is it the use of vouchers to subsidize students attending private religious schools versus the maintenance of the public school system? Is it a single system versus pluralistic alternatives? Is it individual choice versus the melting-pot theory? Is it quality education versus the maintenance of an expanding and increasingly costly public school system? Or will it be church-related schools versus private nonsectarian schools, with the latter deemed eligible for publicly financed assistance, but not the former? The way the issue is articulated will influence the response of many people.

A fourth issue -- and from a public-policy perspective the most important one -- is how to reform large, unwieldy and long-established institutions. From within? By turning control over to those who operate them? By legislation? By individual protests directed at specific school systems? By litigation? Or by the pressures of a competing alternative system? There is a growing body of opinion suggesting that the survival of the public schools as healthy institutions is dependent on the emergence of a strong alternative system.

Difficult Decisions

Perhaps the most perplexing problem is posed for the person who always seeks to support the poor, the oppressed and the exploited members of society. Is the appropriate stance for such a person to support a virtual monopoly by the public schools, which clearly are of little help to most of the poor, the oppressed, the blacks, the Hispanics and children who come from a poor home environment? Or to support a voucher system which would enable many of these children to attend private schools? Or should the availability of private schools continue to be reserved largely for the children of wealthy parents?

A somewhat related issue concerns the churches’ relationship with organized labor. The rapid increase in the unionization of teachers probably means that organized labor will oppose state tuition scholarships to students attending private colleges as well as a voucher system to enable more parents to send their children to private schools. Will the churches endorse what many will view as an anti-labor position?

The unions are concerned, and quite properly so, with protecting the interests of their members; but there is absolutely no evidence to support the contention that what is good for the teachers is also good for the students. The shift toward smaller classes, shorter workdays, a lighter workload, higher salaries and in-service training experiences for teachers has coincided with a decline in performance by students on every available test used to measure learning.

Overlapping several of these questions is a sixth issue. Should the churches be consistent? Can they support state tuition scholarships -- which now go largely to middle- and upper-middle-income white families -- for church-related colleges and oppose a voucher system that would enable blacks, Hispanics and others to send their children to private elementary and high schools?

A seventh policy question for mainline denominational leaders, especially for those groups that emphasize their pluralistic nature, concerns the alternatives offered members and potential new members. With comparatively few exceptions these denominations are saying to the young Anglo-American parents, to the Asian-Americans, to the upwardly mobile black parents with strong hopes for their children, and to others dissatisfied with the public schools: “If you’re looking for a private Christian day school for your child, don’t come to us. Go to the Catholics or the Episcopalians or the Quakers or the Lutherans or the Christian Reformed Church or the Seventh-day Adventists or to evangelical or fundamentalist churches. They may offer that alternative, but we don’t!”

This is not a serious problem for those denominations that have a tradition of opposing private church-related educational institutions or those that, because of theological, biblical or public-policy reasons, have developed a pro-public-school and anti-private-school philosophy. It is obviously better for them to adhere to their principles than to sacrifice basic beliefs in order to reach these young families. Most Protestant denominations, however, have a long history of establishing, supporting and encouraging church-related schools. For these denominations there are at least a half-dozen factors that should be considered when responding to this policy question.

1. The “American tradition” is one of three centuries of support for church-related Christian day schools. The tax-supported public school is a comparatively new phenomenon dating back to the early part of the 19th century; for most of its history it has had a very strong Protestant Christian orientation. In historical terms the Christian day school cannot be identified as “un-American”!

2. Unfortunately, the issue is not simply “Do you favor free public education for everyone? If you do, you must oppose the spread of private schools, for if they continue to increase they will wipe out the public schools.” That is a simplistic either/or choice that distorts the issue. The vast majority of public school districts are not threatened by the increase in numbers of private schools. They are threatened by the combination of parental discontent and the taxpayer revolt that mounts as per-pupil costs rise at a rate far in excess of inflation, at the same time that student performance appears to be declining. If one seeks a simplistic either/or statement of the issue, it is: “Will private schools continue to be an alternative open to only a tiny fraction of children, or will that option be extended to larger numbers?”

3. The preponderance of research suggests that if a denomination is interested in influencing the development of future adults, the best investment of scarce financial resources is in nursery schools, kindergartens, elementary and high schools -- rather than in colleges or universities.

4. For denominations interested in reaching the young parents born after 1950 -- regardless of race, nationality or ethnic background -- the closest to a guaranteed evangelistic thrust is the Christian day school.

5. Most of the high-quality Christian day schools are able to cover all out-of-pocket operating costs from tuition charges. These tuition payments, incidentally, cannot be taken as tax deductions when the parents calculate their federal income tax. (By contrast, parochial schools are largely supported from the parish budget.)

6. Church-related colleges are graduating substantial numbers of young adults who see teaching in a church-related school as a Christian vocation and feel a call to that vocation. Committed, trained and experienced teachers are available.

Will the Methodist, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Christian (Disciples of Christ), Episcopal, Brethren, Southern Baptist, Nazarene, American Baptist, Moravian and Mennonite denominational leaders come out in support of Christian day schools in their denominations, or will they leave that alternative to a relatively small number of denominations representing the more conservative end of the theological spectrum?

About the only safe prediction is that the various denominations will not agree on the response to what may be the most divisive social-action issue of the coming decade.

Changes in the Small-Town Church

Text:

Be we High or Low

The status is Quo.

 --  Old Episcopal saying.

 

10 Church Street

Small Town, U.S.A.

Dear Pastor:

It was only after much hesitation that I decided to write you this letter. Last Thursday’s meeting between you and the Women’s Guild does call for a few observations! In the course of my 70 years, I have seen many clashes between parishes and clergy, and they do upset me. For as long as I can remember, I have loved this little parish and the clergy who have served it as pastors, and it has always seemed to me that many difficulties between them could have been avoided if both sides could have recognized the basic values of the other. Many times laypeople expect clergy to respond to subtle cues and chance remarks, while clergy, seeking to maintain their ministerial image, fail to express their true feelings. Consequently, both parties frequently become involved in what the lawyers call an “adversary position.” Too often the victim in all this is the parish. To illustrate what I mean, let us go back to the Guild meeting of last Thursday.

I

You began by remarking on our low Sunday attendance. Then you reviewed the budget, especially the many bills. The main explosion was provoked by your innocent comment -- or was it that innocent? -- on the old furnishings of the sanctuary. “All that old stuff,” you said, “is so dreadful that it looks as though it had been handmade by the monkeys in Noah’s ark!” As a matter of interest, you were closer to the truth than you realized.

The women’s reactions were even more revealing. Joy Matthews spent loving moments on the state of the washrooms and simply refused to listen to our problems about obtaining a janitor. Josephine’s observations about your not joining Rotary did appear to be a little off the subject, but given her set of values, they were not surprising. You did not like it when the conversation turned to Jim Clancy’s matrimonial adventures. Anne had come to that meeting armed with this information, and she simply had to tell it before too many of the women left!

I suppose that if we are ever going to explain ourselves to each other, we had better state some basic facts. First of all, this is a small parish in a small town. Probably neither the parish nor the town can be expected to change much. This fact is the clue for understanding the entire situation. Small churches are not smaller editions of large churches, any more than my Volkswagen Beetle is a small Cadillac. Historically, small churches are on the fringe of denominational attention and thus are less influenced by central decisions than are larger parishes.

People, however, cannot live in a vacuum, and so we have built up our traditions, some of which have nothing to do with the policies or influences of the larger church. With this process has come a certain way of looking at things. Unfortunately this “way” is often hidden and difficult to grasp, and laypersons will sometimes go to great length to make sure the pastor does not understand them. Many of your people’s ideas are quite opposite to yours and to the hopes of the national church.

In a sense -- and I know this may be difficult to grasp -- you as the pastor are a threat to a small church. This sort of thing goes back at least to the time of St. Paul -- who, I understand, had a difficult time with his parishes in Corinth and Galatia. The chief problem with St. Paul was that he wanted his entire parish to go straight to heaven at the precise moment he converted them, while his parishioners kept saying, “We’ll be glad to go, Paul, but we have a few other interests we would like to deal with first.” All of us are interested in salvation, but all of us have interests in the church that frequently lie outside the church’s chief purpose. May I be a bit presumptuous and begin with you?

II

As I see you (and most clergy), you are always looking forward to the future. Pastors want more and more worshipers on Sunday, more and more programs during the week. It is always a source of satisfaction when a pastor can report more baptisms and more children and teachers in the church school than in previous years. Growth means that more bills can be paid. Advancement in your profession is often measured in terms of a larger membership, whether you had anything to do with the growth or not. The system forces you to be forward-looking.

Second, clergy live with statistics, but statistics tend to make parishioners abstract. There is no way of reporting to headquarters that Mrs. Jones came back to church after a year’s absence because she was worried about her sick son, or that Bob Thomson suddenly upped his pledge because he was thankful for the success of his surgery. Your parishioners, in other words, are human and have human responses, but there is no way of getting such facts on a computer printout.

Third, clergy have a tendency to seek their satisfactions outside the small church. They look outward, toward headquarters or toward meetings or toward books, for their inspirations and new ideas. It is hard for parishioners to appreciate this attitude, despite the fact that they may be well educated.

People in small towns value pastors in terms of their ability to be known and liked. A sense of humor, an ability to read social cues, a willingness to become “one of the boys or girls” (provided you know where to stop) -- these are what small communities value in their pastors. If questioned on such matters, most search committees would deny that these are the qualities they want in a pastor. But do not let such denials fool you!

Against your points of view are the traditions your church people believe in. I think of them in terms of three loves -- first, love of the past, then love of order, and finally love toward each other. We will take each of these in order.

Opposite to your tendency to look to the future, a small congregation is much more likely to look toward the past. A recent visitor from headquarters called us “backward-looking,” and although his opinion needs to be modified, there is much truth in the remark. The need for modification lies in the fact that if our values are to survive, we must pass them on to future generations. We do this all the time. When Mrs. Slatterly warned the younger girls last Easter to be careful with the altar cross because it was a memorial to Jim Hope, who had been killed in World War II, she was educating them about their heritage. It is your task to teach newcomers about Christian doctrine and Christian behavior and that sort of thing; it is our task to make sure that newcomers know about local traditions. You might sum us up by making a comparison with Henry Ford, for it was he, I believe, who said that “history is more or less bunk.” If, by some great stretch of the imagination, Henry had become our pastor, he would not have lasted a week!

III

All of this is leading up to your attempt to replace that sanctuary furniture. In case you did not know it, that set was given many years ago by the family who founded this church. Oh, we all know their bodies are out in the cemetery, but as long as we have that altar and all that goes with it, these people in a very real, spiritual sense are still with us. Every time we recite the creed that says, “I believe in the communion of saints,” I think of my great-aunt who once sat where I now sit.

And please do not accuse us of worshiping the building! It is not the building we worship; it is the roots the building represents. All around us are change and decay. The house where I was born is now the site of a filling station; the school where I was educated will educate no one else, for it has been replaced by a parking lot. Yet the small church remains, and as long as it does, it is our psychological link with the past, showing us Sunday by Sunday that we are not adrift. And that sense of not drifting is also shown in our love of order.

Allow me to describe that love with an analogy. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ garment is described as a seamless robe. To weave it, its maker had to put every thread in a certain place. Think of people as threads, and you will have the picture of what I mean. If you still do not understand, let me take you back to our now-famous women’s meeting. I will pick it up where you were exhorting us to help with the bills.

Susan: Old Jim Clancy might help.

Anne: I would not call him old. He is getting ready to marry for      the third time.

Everybody: He is?

Susan: Where are his children? He had a big family.

Anne: The oldest girl got married last year and now has a young      boy of her own. Young Jim is after a master’s degree in      engineering, and his wife is working in a library. Larry, the      third boy, is in the army. And Amy, the youngest girl . . .

Pastor: For heaven’s sake, what has all this to do with the budget!

 

That conversation, Reverend, was not for heaven’s sake, but for ours. If we have a deep regard for the past, we also have a certain way of looking at the present -- a certain social way. We like to know things about our fellow parishioners. Do not put that habit down to idle curiosity. In our scheme of things, everybody has a place and nobody is really happy unless he or she knows that place. You can see this truth in many different ways. Why do we always choose the same pew? Why do we take communion, Sunday after Sunday, in almost the same order? Why do we re-elect people to the same offices year after year? It is because of our basic need for social order. You see, we had to discuss Jim Clancy’s matrimonial adventures because we had to fit him into our church life. We fitted him in because we love him.

IV

Once, long ago, I was a church school teacher, and the course I taught was called “Our Family the Church.” That title captures the essence of my last point. Remember how puzzled you were when we took up a collection to help Pat Jones pay his lawyers? Of course he was guilty -- we all knew that -- but he was “our guilty parishioner.” Pat had grown up in this parish, attended its church school and sung in its choir. He belonged! Once you belong, we do not desert you. In small churches, bonds of affection run deep. In a small church like ours, unlike in a large church, nobody is anonymous. A funeral, a baptism, a wedding are church events that bring all of us to the service, because these concern members of our church family. There is no better way to describe us than that verse from Romans which says. “None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself.”

Obviously my “three loves” stand in contrast to the way pastors think. Our love of the past conflicts often with your plans for the future; our love of order does not show up on abstract statistics; our tendency to look to each other for affection and support stands against a minister’s wish to obtain emotional support away from the small church. The clergy never really belong to a small church, and because of that, we have a hard time trusting them.

But more than that, we are reluctant to change to your standards. Certainly we want new families, if these new people will really understand us. Can we be sure they will learn and appreciate our long past? Will they realize that we cannot fit them into our structure until we know a good deal about them? Above everything else, will they be willing to be adopted into our parish family and in the process to grasp that we are a family, with all that that word implies in terms of loyalty, care and love?

The demands a small church places on its membership are high indeed, and may seem at first glance to have little to do with Christian love and discipline. Yet, on the other hand, did not Christ form a family that we know as his disciples? Is not religion constantly emphasizing tradition? Is not love considered one of the highest of Christian virtues? If we were not the way we are, those Christian attributes would and could not exist.

The greatest poem in the English language was written, so Milton said, in order to explain the ways of God to man. This letter hardly meets the standards of Paradise Lost, but it is my sincere hope that it may explain the pastor to the small church and the small church to the pastor.

Your loving friend,

Mary Walsh.

Unrecognized Internal Threats to Liberal Churches

So-called “mainline” or “liberal” denominations have recently been taking a public-relations beating for lack of growth and for neglect of mission. Many possible causes have been suggested, among them a general conservative trend of our times, greater faithfulness by liberals to the radical demands of the gospel, and greater expression by conservatives of warmth, zeal or certainty. Some of these explanations have merit; others are misleading. One cause of weakness, however, has been much neglected. This unrecognized threat is the widespread blindness of liberal churches to the nature and needs of their unique constituency. So long as this malady continues, there is little likelihood of either long-run statistical recovery or resurgence of faithfulness to God-given mission.

Projecting an Unambiguous Image

I would define liberal denominations as those whose theological positions are comparatively receptive to the conclusions of the physical and human sciences, and whose social witness is relatively thoroughgoing and comprehensive and includes some basic criticism of major social systems. In both theological position and social witness a gradual continuum of differences exists between and within denominations, making it difficult to draw precise lines. Yet there is evidence for including among liberal churches the United Methodist, United Church of Christ, United Presbyterian and a few others. These bodies differ significantly from more conservative denominations. At the same time liberal churches are appreciative of major elements in tradition as still valid, and they stress the importance of emotionally vital, personal religious experience. They aim to join the warm heart to the clear head and busy hands. In their comparative emphasis on Christian tradition and religious experience, liberal churches tend to differ from more radical religious groups (e.g., the Unitarian Universalists).

Liberal churches are threatened by a debilitating misunderstanding of their mission. Particularly dangerous are the actions of two groups within liberal denominations: (1) militant conservatives who are trying to win entire denominations to their own to compromise with such protest movements to the extent of blunting the distinctive emphasis of the denomination.

Basic to an understanding of the seriousness of these threats is a recognition of the wide-ranging pluralism of modern American society. To be sure, all humanity shares some common, basic regularities and needs. But there are also important sub-publics in any free society -- differing in background, personality and immediate interests. To meet their basic needs, varying approaches become necessary. For the most effective communication with the total population we need a variety of conservative and liberal churches, showing appreciation of each other at the same time that each group assumes responsibility for reaching its own unique constituency.

It becomes the mission of the liberal church to present the claims of the Christian faith to those who have been most impressed by the empirical approach of the sciences or by those critical social needs which call for rapid and thoroughgoing change. This constituency includes persons now repelled by organized religion because they cannot accept certain positions (such as opposition to evolutionary theory or to birth-control practice) which they have been exposed to in some churches and which they assume characterize all churches. Research also shows that those who are alienated include many humanitarians seriously hoping for basic improvement in our social situation and convinced that churches in general are either benighted or inactive concerning such matters.

To be seriously listened to by these subgroups, any denomination must prominently exhibit sufficient integrity to promise a  continuously helpful message and consistent opportunities for action. The liberal church must project an unambiguous and highly visible image of this sort. There must be enough consistency in both the local congregation and the national denomination to stimulate the growth of membership and to allow effective expression in compatible action projects.

Large numbers of those alienated from the churches of their youth (or offended by the TV presentations of conservative evangelists will not be attracted by the prospect of continuously compromised national curricula or social witness. They are understandably reluctant to invest in intra-church conflict the time and energy that should go into mission to the world. In a time of desperate individual need and social crisis, authentic stewardship suggests more urgent uses for resources than battling internally for denominational control, or formulating inadequate positions moderated to appease reactionary groups, or resurrecting past debates which contribute nothing to the future.

Any healthy church (or society) requires the stimulus of disagreement; the emergence of new ideas to contend with the old is a prerequisite for improvement. A considerable range of pluralism is indeed desirable within both a denomination and a political unit, but when that range becomes too broad, common purposes are often obstructed. As governments can be torn apart by extremist polarization, so churches can be immobilized by indecision. If any denomination tries to serve everyone equally well, it will serve no one sufficiently. Unity which incorporates a broader range of pluralism depends not on individual denominations but on the wider ecumenical movement.

The Dynamic Factor in Culture

It is these realities that make militant conservative groups within liberal churches so dangerous to evangelism and mission. These groups unwittingly weaken the impact of the Christian message either as they try to alter the distinctive character of entire denominations, attempting to turn liberal churches into conservative churches, or as they undermine the consistency of image projected by liberal churches in areas important to their particular constituency. There are only a few liberal denominations with the potential to communicate persuasively with the growing subgroups at the liberal end of the social spectrum, and liberal churches which turn in a more conservative direction become disqualified for their indispensable and unique task. A similar thesis applies, of course, to conservative churches. On comparatively incidental matters they should not become so radical as to lose touch with the more conservative constituency in society for which they have a particular responsibility.

Both conservative and liberal churches need to be continually reminded of the thoroughgoing demands of the gospel, lest they settle too easily for some version of psychologism or culture religion. Within liberal churches we need movements stressing a more vital personal religious experience -- so long as that experience is enriched by all the knowledge about nature, persons and society which God has more recently revealed through responsible science. We need also to call attention to that reinforced by the continuing experience of the race. This kind of forward-looking conservatism is an essential ingredient of any authentic liberalism.

The danger of liberals becoming faithless and ineffectual witnesses becomes even more evident when we consider the dynamic factor in culture. Since technological and ecological changes are always taking place, any society in order to stay afloat must adopt novel ways of dealing with new circumstances. Major progressive modifications may then become long-term trends. While there still are important differences between subgroups in any society, all these groups share in varying degree these common continuing trends. In a dynamic society conservatives tend to adopt part of the liberalism of the past, while liberals accept some formerly radical positions. For example, social security programs once advocated only by radical groups have become the conservatism of subsequent generations. Similarly, severe racial discrimination was once the position of the conservative majority, but today it is coming to be seen as a reactionary stance. Because the nature and needs of their constituencies change, both conservative and liberal churches now require programs different from those they presented in the past.

Reality-Based Religion

In relation to theological and social emphases on which conservative and liberal churches differ, research indicates long-run social trends toward (1) wider acceptance of the conclusions of valid empirical research, and (2) greater reluctance to accept the imperfections of existing social structures. With respect to the first of these, our population increasingly demands that all truth claims be based on the best available data. There have been important recent criticisms of the excesses of scientism, but even these grow out of an acceptance of the general scientific method of drawing coherent conclusions from observation and experience. For increasing numbers of persons, acceptable religion must be reality-based. A growing section of the population considers historical emphases on unsupported revelation or the mere word of traditional authorities as insufficient evidence for religious belief.

In a society that has moved from horse and buggy to space flight in a single life-span, more and more people regard as archaic any church which seems to locate the golden age or complete revelation somewhere in the past. More nearly adequate is a view of the Holy Spirit which emphasizes continuing discovery of larger truth and a recognition of the transcendent quality of God, calling us forward to degrees of perfection never before imagined.

The trend toward more serious desire for social change may seem to be contradicted by the highly publicized conservative political expression of the past few years. The long-term trend, however, has not been significantly altered. Election returns and public-opinion studies indicate discontent with some serious imperfections in recent liberal political policies and programs; studies also show that the general population does not want to give up the values of such programs and still wants additional selected government services. There is much current disillusionment over the ineffectuality of existing social institutions, but also great readiness to follow leadership that seems capable of helping realize more extensive human hopes.

Liberation movements of some sort now seem imperative to more national, economic and ethnic groups. Activists in liberation have tended to become less involved in churches. Any church that does not increase the scope of its demand for social justice can in the long run expect to attract fewer adherents. All subgroups in American society have to some extent been affected by the trend toward greater attention to personal fulfillment. Their expectations have been enhanced by unprecedented medical, psychological and social resources. Those nourished in such a climate can be expected increasingly to cease participation in any churches that seem to degrade human potentialities, neglect personal needs or stifle human vitalities.

When personal and humanitarian hopes collide with the complex and confining social crises of our time, the prevailing mood is increasingly one of perplexity, anxiety, frustration and resentment. Recognizing the inadequacy of the church’s traditional emphasis on simplistic comfort, we are troubled not only by the same ultimate questions and existential anxieties which plagued previous generations. We also chafe under a convergence of unprecedented military and ecological threats to the continued existence of life on this globe. Such dilemma-ridden persons are less likely to support any church that remains silent on such matters, speaks only in generalities or does little to implement its convictions.

The Necessity for Swifter Change

Continuing cultural trends toward demanding more satisfactory evidence for belief and greater help on human problems have consequences for both conservative and liberal churches. The necessity for swifter change is underscored in several recent studies. Andrew Greeley, in a survey of Roman Catholic parochial education, has raised the question of the relationship between Vatican II and the decline in support for the Catholic Church in the United States. His data show that this decline was due not to changes made by Vatican II but to the fact that these changes did not go far enough, especially in the area of sexual ethics (Catholic Schools in a Declining Church [Sheed & Ward, 1976], pp. 110 ff.) And Dean Hoge has observed that “in general, the number of people who have left because of changes in the church is not as large as the number who have left because of lack of changes.”

The problem which conservative churches face is obvious. At the moment, there is in our population a sizable enough conservative subgroup, theologically and sociologically, to provide the basis for considerable growth by these churches. This is also the group least alienated from organized religion, the one that habitually tends to support churches. At the same time, general cultural trends are moving away from the conservative religion of the immediate past; eventually, conservative churches will face slowly diminishing constituencies. Such churches are simply postponing the crisis of support which has already been felt by liberal churches -- unless conservatives modify their traditional emphases. Fortunately they are beginning to make such changes, finding them to be an inherent part of a more adequate biblical understanding. Modern evangelicals are no longer the fundamentalists of the past, and increasing numbers among them are arguing for the addition of a “social gospel” to their previous individualistic emphasis. Should there be greater movement toward such neoevangelicalism, conservative churches can continue to grow by serving those near the conservative end of a moving cultural spectrum.

Liberal churches, on the other hand, may be in a more precarious position. Their constituency is moving in the direction of even more rigorous reality-based tests for truth, and of more extensive expressions of social discontent. Since there is solid biblical and theological grounding for these same general interests, liberal religion should be able to relate to such constituencies as it has done in the past. But there is little evidence that liberal churches are looking forward or offering specific programs appropriate for present and future generations. It is questionable whether liberal churches can change rapidly enough to continue to serve the subgroups in the cultural spectrum for which they have primary evangelistic responsibility. If they do not do so, large sections of the population will be left without any acceptable organized expression for their religious interest. Greater change within conservative churches than within liberal churches could also mean increased competition for much the same constituency, with catastrophic results for the strength of the total church and for the character of society.

A Crisis of Plausibility

At the moment liberal churches seem substantially to be yielding to the temptation to do what is easiest in the short run, even though this will finally prove disastrous. The strongest support in attendance and financial contributions now comes from those with a more traditional orientation, and it is easier to continue old habits and to sustain religious organizations by appealing to this group. On the other hand, empirical activists outside the church are not attracted .by the ambiguity and compromise which such pseudo-liberalism represents. Thus liberal churches are counting on the subgroups in society that are declining in numbers and social influence, while they neglect the subgroups that in the end will grow in numbers and influence. As Wade Clark Roof points out in a recent study, this neglect will lead to “a crisis of plausibility” resulting in alienation of growing numbers of persons and finally in the church’s representing a very small minority (Community and Commitment: Religious Plausibility in a Liberal Protestant Church [Elsevier, 1978], pp. 6-9).

This analysis of cultural trends further underscores the seriousness of the threat inherent in organized groups within liberal churches which aim to transform their denominations into more conservative churches, or at least to blunt their liberal witness. But this analysis also points to a second internal threat: the undermining of the function of such churches which is unwittingly perpetrated by those friendly, mildly liberal folk who are hesitant or apathetic about truly thoroughgoing changes. We show little interest in stemming the exodus from our churches when, in the language of our creeds, the topics of our sermons, and the content of our programs, we remain ambiguous about relating theology to well-researched world views now widely held by thoughtful persons. We deny the evangelistic mission of our churches when we perpetuate reluctance to become more actively and comprehensively involved in personal growth and social improvement. When it is not only a question of the direction in which we move but also the speed of our movement, we can no longer defend our tardiness in more drastic renovations of worship, education, caring and outreach ministries. Our distinctive liberal contribution is denied when we become simply custodial liberals, caretakers doing minor janitorial maintenance or cosmetic repairs on what we have inherited.

Sexual Taboos and Moral Restraints

What is the role of religion in restraining a man who is tempted to commit an illegal sex offense of which society highly disapproves? Religious institutions have placed a great emphasis on sexual morality, seeking to enforce their standards through law, cult, custom, public opinion -- indeed, via every means available. The offender is rigorously condemned, but he is rarely studied to discover why the moral order failed to restrain him. The Christian faith in particular is intended not to police people but to empower them. Thus persons who consider themselves to be Christians but who lapse into sex offenses may be sinners and personal failures; yet in some sense they represent failures of the Christian community as well, in that it fails to enable people to live up to the high standards it proclaims.

We are living in a time when sexual morality is in a state of fundamental disarray, and in part this state has come about because of a decline in the authority of the religious institution and its tradition. For example, many people who consider themselves good Catholics practice birth control in ways the church explicitly forbids. Less noticed is the fact that those who do accept the church’s authority on such moral questions frequently find themselves involved in a moral struggle and may well feel that they are fighting a losing battle.

I

Does religion affect morals anymore? This question can be interpreted and answered in several ways. I am not asking whether the church can regain political authority to enforce morality by law, but rather whether religious faith can empower individuals -- especially those who have a vision of a "more excellent way" -- to win the battles they fight within themselves. Discussions of such considerations are usually academic and theoretical, despite the fact that the case-study approach insists that moral theology should be concrete and realistic. Robert C. Sorensen’s survey of adolescent sexuality estimates that 37 per cent of America’s young people are quitting the churches because of disagreement on sexual-morality issues, and 40 per cent who consider themselves to be "very religious" concede that they sometimes take part in sexual activities which are not consistent with what they believe.

In part, the erosion of morality results from confusion over what the religious position really is. According to Sorensen’s study, 49 per cent of the adolescents believe that the churches’ teaching is that all sexual pleasure is sinful. But one wonders how many of the others feel that their religious faith, in its institutional or community forms, strengthens them for their struggles with themselves and against a world which seeks to corrupt them. To many of them, the feeling is not like that of the banker who successfully resists the temptation to embezzlement, but is more akin to that of the starving child who is tempted to steal bread when no one is looking.

Some children in that position would steal the bread without the least twinge of conscience, believing that God in fact had placed it there to satisfy their hunger. Others, acting in a blind moment of hunger, would steal the bread and then would suffer greatly over feelings of doing wrong. Those who condemn themselves as thieves might find it easier to steal another time. Some might walk past the bread each day for 100 days before losing the inner struggle, and when arrested would ask: "Do I get no credit for winning the battle with temptation 99 times out of 100?"

II

According to the research findings of psychologist Karl Freund, one out of eight adult males in the United States on occasion is erotically aroused by a young adolescent of his own sex. We are not speaking of homosexuality in the usual sense, but of pederasty: the involvement of heterosexual men and boys in sex play which can be very pleasurable, especially for those men who, in fantasy or fact, found great enjoyment in early adolescent homosexual activity.

Although some of these men face a struggle as difficult as that of the alcoholic or drug addict, nine out of ten pederasts lapse into an illegal offense only once or twice in a lifetime usually when young and unmarried, or when apart from their wives (e.g., while in the army or on an extended business trip). Of the men tempted to engage in sex play with young adolescents, a majority successfully exercise restraint unless coincidentally and compromisingly confronted with a sexually sophisticated and seductive youngster. Today there are at least 100,000 young boy prostitutes soliciting men on American streets. Senator Birch Bayh has written the preface to Robin Lloyd’s For Money or Love, a just-published book by an NBC newsman who documents that disturbing fact.

Attention is usually focused on the particular sexual incident of which society disapproves, with no notice given to the inner struggle of the pederast, who asks himself: "Do I get no credit for winning the battle with temptation 99 times out of 100?" What is religion’s responsibility in reinforcing such restraint? How can the potential sex offender be restrained that 100th time?

III

A study of 1,000 pederasts -- many of them professional men, good citizens who are respected in their communities, with no record of arrest -- has disclosed that the person tempted to such a sex offense is rarely restrained by fear of police action, as is true for most other illegal sexual behavior. Effective restraint in sexual matters ultimately depends on conscience, self-discipline, the power an individual can muster in his personal struggle with himself, rather than on external controls. Pederasts who refrain from illegal acts generally give credit to the respect they have for law and the structures of society, even though, in fact, laws that people disagree with have less and less impact today, and most institutions seem to be losing their credibility and authority. A study of a group of Dutch pederasts indicated that even if laws against man-boy sexual activity were repealed, most of the men would still have a troubled conscience over such behavior; the pederast who loved and respected the boy would be worried about the boy’s sexual future, whereas the man who did not love and respect the boy would feel cheap about being sexually involved with him.

Most pederasts, like other human beings, are caught up in a moral struggle, since being human involves visions of a better life. When groups of pederasts meet, sooner or later they nearly always talk about ethics, condemning men who abuse boys and girls. In their personal struggle with what they consider to be wrong, the pull of conscience is less effective among those offenders and potential offenders who do not have good jobs to lose, whose lives have already been wrecked by arrest and newspaper publicity, or who consider themselves to be failures in life. The strongest restraining factor against illegal sexual activity seems to be a respect for the sensitivity of friends and family -- a desire not to hurt them. Another important factor is the desire to avoid irreparably damaging one’s own life, especially if professional goals are being attained. At the same time, however, the financially successful man frequently feels that some sex play, especially when he is away from home, is one of the rewards to which his success entitles him. At a moment when opportunity and temptation coincide, the pro and con factors seem to balance out, With no sense of moral empowerment strong enough to counterbalance the desire for sexual pleasure.

IV

When asked about the impact of religious faith and involvement on this struggle, pederasts respond with widely varying answers; however, they also give evidence of neglected aspects in the realm of moral empowerment. Explained a pederast priest: "My religious faith, and nothing else, has kept me from the sexual encounters with boys which I have so desired. I have taken shelter in the church to escape from the promiscuous existence which might otherwise have been mine." Said a layman: "Until he died my pastor was the one who kept me out of trouble, because when I told him about my temptations, he admitted to me that he, too, faced the same temptation. With his encouragement and help I was very careful, but now I do not seem to find anyone who can help me as much." And another:

I find liberal, well-educated clergy to be of the least help. They get embarrassed when one talks about something like pederasty. I therefore dropped out of the church I grew up in and have joined a small evangelical fellowship -- whose members know about my pederast temptations and where I get lots of encouragement and support to toe the narrow line. They keep an eye on me, and keep me busy and happy. Most of all, they trust me to work with kids, which is what I enjoy more than anything. I wouldn’t let them down for anything.

In contrast, pederasts with more conventional church involvements reported over and over that their moral struggle has never been taken seriously, and that they do not "give much thought to conflicts that might exist between church membership and sexual activities." Commented one: "My pastor is heavy into group encounters and sleeps around some himself."

These few but representative quotations suggest that it might be helpful to study more carefully the responses and experiences of many more such offenders and potential offenders, in an effort to discover the factors that do or do not provide them with empowerment in their moral struggles. On the basis of the data available, however, it would appear that beliefs alone do not empower. Indeed, in other areas of life besides the sexual, most people need strength and support in order to live up to what they believe, to reach the higher standards they aspire to. In the lives of pederasts, one repeatedly finds evidence that beliefs and high standards -- when not accompanied by power to accomplish them -- frequently lead simply to a sort of self-condemnation that enfeebles the struggler, in the manner of one who says: "I guess I’m a thief, so I might as well steal."

What one finds is that religion no longer has much impact on the moral struggle, with one important exception: when religious faith and moral standards are experienced as commitments to valued and supportive persons and are embodied in relationships with those persons. They may be relatives, friends, or members of a church which one experiences as a family. Unless a pederast is an active participant in an enfolding, supportive religious community which knows about his sexual desires and temptations, he rarely finds in religion any power to restrain him from indulging in forbidden sexual pleasures when special opportunity arises. Restraint comes not through the authority of institutions or the power of ideas, but through the personal influence of people he loves and trusts.

It has been noted that race prejudice seems to exist among church members in the same proportion as among non-church members, except for highly committed and involved church people. In the struggle against sexual temptation, more than religious commitment is needed. The highly committed and involved member may be restrained 99 days out of 100, but the hungers of the flesh are such that additional strength to get through the 100th day is generally available only when one is a member of a face-to-face redemptive community. There, where one’s temptation is known, where one can say: "Will you hold my hand because I’m facing my 100th day," where the potential offender’s relationships are such that he cannot possibly let down his family, and wherein he has the feeling of worth and success in life -- there he can be enabled, despite occasional failures, to come back and wage the battle again. Many families provide this sort of community, but today most Christians lose the moral struggle -- in many areas other than sex -- because they lack this experience of empowering fellowship. Perhaps the saints need more ethical teaching, more moral theology, more preaching of "oughts" and "shoulds," but the sinners Christ died to save seem to need not abstract authoritarian teaching, but more support in the form of loving communities, of more empowering human relationships.

Tackling the World’s Unsolvable Problems

"Of course there is nothing I can do about war," the pastor of a small church declared. "Clergy do not have enough political clout to tackle the major unsolvable problems of the world; hunger, disease, pollution, overpopulation, crime, injustice, war"

He may be wrong. It may well be that, where enabling leadership is concerned. American clergy are in a unique, advantageous position, with an opportunity which few other people in the world have.

For example, anyone who reads the final report of the United Nations special session on disarmament will see that the delegates agreed unanimously on a surprisingly encouraging document. The words of hope written there may never become incarnate in the deeds of politicians, especially in the United States, which must lead the way to disarmament. But the stage is set for the final end to war, for the definitive outlawing of violence in the settling of disputes between nations -- and the opportunity for American pastors to tip the scales of history is tremendous.

We in the U.S. have become more and more conscious of the problems involved in mounting effective political opposition to the "military-industrial complex," which increasingly dominates our economic and political life. Even more difficult, on a world scale what forces can be built up to counterbalance the power of totalitarian states? World government could easily become a threat to freedom and justice if power were concentrated in the hands of oppressive leadership.

I

At the special U.N. disarmament session, confusion and sadness could be sensed in both Christian and Marxist groupings. Ideally both groups are committed to peace and disarmament, but some Christians find it difficult to take a pacifist, nonviolent line because they are compassionately involved with liberation movements seeking to overthrow dictatorial governments. On the Marxist side, some delegates were blunt in stating that, while the major powers must disarm, guns must be provided for people fighting for their freedom from "colonialism, racism and oppression." American gun-lobby supporters are unintentional allies of those who smuggle guns into South Africa, Katanga, Rhodesia, Northern Ireland, and to the PLO.

Reflecting at the end of the United Nations special session, Homer Jack of the World Conference on Religion and Peace urged careful study of the two significant social movements in the United States which have had success in achieving major change in recent years: the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam-war movement. He says that no one is really sure how such a movement is put together, what the role of individuals is, and what forces can be brought into play to bring forth the leadership of a Martin Luther King.

Dr. King began his civil rights crusade as pastor of a local church, and some of the key people in Clergy and Laity Concerned have been local pastors. We have been blinded by the possibility of spectacular legislation and leadership on the part of the federal government, and we therefore sometimes forget that not much happens in Washington until great pressure is exerted. There is evidence that President Carter and key legislators would like to move faster and further in the direction of disarmament, but they can find no organized public support. On the other hand, organized opposition is strong -- particularly in veterans organizations and Pentagon support groups.

We tend to forget that movements start locally, as small groups in many communities begin to create communications networks to exchange ideas and to support one another. Nothing much happens in a local community, however. unless there is an enabler: someone with time and opportunity to move around town and talk to numbers of persons; someone with a pulpit from which questions can be raised; someone with a constituency, such as a congregation, in which concerned people can be found.

Pastors may be the only people in a position to open communications networks -- by corresponding with other clergy all over the world to discuss how an international antiviolence movement can be created at the grass roots. As Dr. Jack has pointed out, the American government did not prepare well enough or participate adequately in the U.N. special session on disarmament because "there is no broad-based disarmament constituency" in this country. Although there is a great deal of local activity on disarmament in various parts of the world, there is no movement yet -- except perhaps in Japan, which sent 20 million signatures on petitions to the U.N. special session?

So American pastors have a special opportunity. Those who, like Homer Jack, have been studying and observing the stirrings of American concern in local communities suggest that "a movement does not take shape in a democracy simply because it is needed. Also, individuals cannot volunteer for leadership; leaders are made by circumstances which cannot easily be contrived." Leadership is discovered, not only when a church is bombed in Montgomery, or a woman refuses to go to the back of a bus, but when large numbers of persons are moving to communicate with one another and to find expression for their concerns. It may well be that if a charismatic leader emerges at the head of a world crusade against violence, that person will be another Gandhi, a black layperson, someone who is not a member of a Christian church.

II

The evils of the Hitler era are not over; torture, political lies, political imprisonment, military dictatorship, the exploitation and persecution of minorities -- all of these flourish. The U.S. government, with its huge, sophisticated military system, can do little in these areas, while Amnesty International and NGO groups (nongovernmental organizations) are discovering ways to build counterbalancing forces for world public opinion and citizen action. The decline of the church as a major world force is one factor which allowed the rise of Hitler and totalitarian governments. Hitler tried to use churches for his own purposes, and because religion in its institutional forms can be so vulnerable to state pressures, the religious involvement in providing a counterbalancing force to political structures and armies may take entirely new forms in the future.

For several decades I have been paying close attention to undergrounds, which, of course, provided the only effective internal resistance to Hitler. The Soviet Union today is honeycombed with small underground groups -- which help to explain why "civil rights", issues are so threatening to the government there. In Russia and in other totalitarian states, both left and right, the most fearless advocates of human rights are usually nurtured in minority religious communities which on the surface have no power at all.

From such seemingly inauspicious beginnings a worldwide movement to outlaw war can be built. Perhaps the most effective mobilization of church power for social change in recent decades has been on the part of black churches in the south in support of the civil rights movement. Small, poor, "otherworldly" congregations were able to motivate people even in the face of armed police and angry mobs. Many of us assume, looking back at what history tells us, that when the institutional church grows weak and ineffective the churches themselves have no power as a counterbalancing force. Today, however, as the world grows smaller, as communications become swifter and more sophisticated, networks of support and interrelationships emerge which are not centered in the institution or controlled by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. It will remain difficult to project the future of any changes in church-state relationships until a new shape for religious institutions comes into clearer focus. It is possible that a hurricane of change awaits both church and state in the next half-century, for observers who are cynical about the institutional church often fail to take note of the equal cynicism about the state in communist countries.

Counterforce networks -- often made up of faithful individuals in opposition to institutions, systems and oppressive governments -- may have much more influence on the future than we can foresee at present. Nor can we safely predict the amount of institutional power which NGOs, including churches, will have. One must be wary when politicians embrace religious institutions -- even when UN. politicians embrace NGOs. If the day of the formally established church ever ends once and for all, then transnational religious movements may be increasingly valued and supported and perhaps can be more effective as peace agents if they remain institutionally poor and weak.

The national states, of both East and West, seem inclined to keep close rein on all other possible international counterforces; e.g.. education and science are government-financed. But the churches keep bubbling up, thriving on persecution, and their vitality seeps across boundaries to plague the states that oppress human beings and utilize violence. I find it amusing that the Soviet government this past Easter had to schedule rock concerts and American movies at the hour of Easter church services. It has frequently been noted that Stalin turned to the churches when he wanted help in getting the Russian people to rise up and fight Hitler, but it has less often been noted that the Soviet government also turns to church leadership -- both Orthodox and Protestant -- when it wants to take initiatives toward peace and arms reductions.

III

On a trip to Poland my wife and I found that many church officials were cautious and fearful of losing institutional privileges and prerogatives. In contrast, young Pentecostals, converted to Christianity within a communist society, were displaying some of the same audacity so evident among southern black Pentecostals in the 1960s during the civil rights demonstrations. East European Pentecostals have no wealth, institutional power or privilege to lose; so when need arises, they go to prison and turn their prisons into "Bible schools" to convert their jailers, as St. Paul did, They spread faith and hope to fellow prisoners as Black Muslims have done in some American prisons. Powerless, they bring a new type of creative tension into the conflicts between people and government.

And that tension may be crucial for preserving the human spirit and human freedom, so that honest politicians who sincerely desire to transform the war system into global structures for peace and development will heed a new movement. They can begin to welcome -- gingerly perhaps -- the churches and other NGOs as consultants and partners in the process of formulating ideas and programs, and in mobilizing public opinion in support of proposals that may make it possible for humanity to survive and thrive on this planet in a nuclear space age.

Now it is up to the clergy, who more and more can begin to act on the convictions expressed by the U.N. report, which opens with the words "Alarmed by the threat to the very survival of mankind," and proceeds: ". . . the accumulation of weapons, particularly nuclear weapons, today constitutes much more a threat than a protection for the future of mankind. The time has therefore come to put an end to this situation, to abandon the use of force in international relations and to seek security in disarmament." Special measures were called for to "mobilize world public opinion on behalf of disarmament."

This call goes directly to the churches and their pastors. Perhaps the enabling leadership of a movement for disarmament and against war and violence will be discovered among the increasing numbers of women clergy. Maybe it will come from the retired clergy, who feel less vulnerable to community pressures. But to the pastor who said, "Of course there is nothing I can do about war; clergy do not have enough politica1 clout to tackle the major unsolvable problems of the world," I would reply that the local pastor in the United States today has an opportunity unparalleled in history to make possible the emergence of a movement that can turn the world around.

This is a crucial time of decision, with the future of humanity at stake. The nations of the world need not follow the path to annihilation. Science and research, and the vast financial resources of the major countries, can be turned from the arms race to solving basic human problems. Never before has there been such a moment of opportunity for Americans to take the initiative for the achievement of world justice, peace and prosperity for all peoples. And it may well be that, more than anyone else, the local pastor and a few key laypeople in the local church are the ones who can do it.

The Church and the Coming Electronic Revolution: An interview with

Television’s revolutionary impact on culture is scarcely understood yet, and in any case it is only the precursor of the greater electronic-media revolution to come. One phase of that revolution with dramatic implications for Christian faith and institutions is perhaps months away: commercial production of the laser video-disc.

To assess some of the potential impact I interviewed Burton Everist, video media specialist. A Lutheran pastor who also serves as director of the Visual Education Service at Yale Divinity School, where he has taught courses on media and ministry, Everist has served as editor of Please Copy, has written a soon-to-he published book on Creative Uses of Media by the Church, and has created a four volume review publication, Educaid. as well as videotape productions such as “Philippian Profiles” (a flashback news show), “Yesterday,” and a consultation documentary for the Lutheran Council in the USA. He has also conducted workshops on the media and continuing education conferences on theology and imagination. He presently serves as a consultant for churches in regard to the effects of the media upon the shape and theology of the church.

Rossman: The impact of TV on the church is yet to be fully assessed. I am told that an exciting lay renewal movement in the church of Cyprus nearly collapsed with the arrival on that island of television. What is going to be the impact of the video-disc, which can be rented or purchased like a phonograph record to be played on any TV set?

Everist: Did it take a century for the impact of the printing press on the church to be assessed? Film companies are being lined up to give permission for their blockbusters to be put on discs which can be purchased for as little as $25 -- and the pornographic industry is waiting in the wings. What the long-play record did for sound, the video-disc will do for sound and sight. Discs will store encyclopedic information for instant retrieval; as competing types of discs are standardized, industry, schools and churches will begin to use them extensively.

In addition, cable TV -- though developing more slowly than anticipated -- will increase home use of television, especially when the new glass cables replace copper cable, for they will carry more information in less space, will cost less to produce and maintain, and will bring down cable access cost.

Soon millions of families will have video recorders with which they can record while they are away from home TV programs for later viewing, or can record one program while watching another. The immediate effect may be to intensify the stay-at-home habit which hit the Cyprus population. To meet this possibility, one Christian film production company has produced pilot films that include a discussion leader (one of the actors) for home teaching. Such an approach seems paternalistic and a poor use of the medium. If a discussion leader is needed, it would be better to use a member of the family. But this experiment is only the beginning of extensive efforts to use video-discs.

Rossman: So you would encourage churches to begin planning for video-disc programming?

Everist: Yes, as a resource, but never as a substitute for human interaction. Print has already gone too far in dehumanizing the church. We must take care to avoid efforts to use TV in place of people-to-people relationships. For example, a Lutheran clergyman in Denmark proposed celebrating communion over the radio, the people placing bread and wine beside their radios to be blessed over the air by the media celebrant.

As I see it, both the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Fourth Gospel (not to mention I Corinthians) provide evidence of the early church’s insistence on human communion, even in the face of persecution and death. Print tended to separate the Bible from the human community -- the church. Children who cannot yet read are taught to sing: “Jesus loves me! this I know, For the Bible tells me so.” Actually it was God’s people, perhaps a parent or teacher, who not only told them so but showed them so. If cable TV and the rich variety of fare available through video-discs cause people to stay home more, and sit more in front of their TV screens, the church will find it necessary to do more than review and interpret media experience. The church must also make new efforts to focus its energies upon personal human contact and group work.

Rossman: You have suggested that Richard Niebuhr is as helpful as Marshall McLuhan in understanding the church’s relationship to the media.

Everist: As one observes the approaches to the media taken by various Christian groups, Niebuhr’s five types of relationship between church and society in Christ and Culture seem to describe the various alternatives. Billy Graham represents a “Christ over culture” position. Extreme fundamentalists who forbid members to watch TV, who sometimes even burn TV sets, illustrate a Christ against culture view. Everett Parker and the United Church of Christ have demonstrated a highly creative “Christ as the transformer of culture” position, acting as “watchdogs” to protect minority rights and to seek justice in the use of media. Perhaps such efforts as Jesus Christ Superstar represent the “Christ of culture” tradition. My own basic position is “Christ and culture in paradox.” I see the various media, Including TV, as gifts of God, with their present content as mixed blessings and -- well, cursings.

Of course, the church does not need to create all of its own programming for cable or disc. Christians can use the wealth of excellent specials and documentaries, the mixed hag of situation comedies and even evening news as discussion materials with parishioners.

Rossman: How can you use scheduled programming when you do not know what the content of a show will be?

Everist: All people now live in that media world, so we must help church people reflect about each TV experience, as we help them interpret other life events, both good and bad. Unless we help church people see what the media do to them, unless we help them form discriminating tastes (as we hope that they do in choosing books to read), their actions will more and more be molded by the media rather than by their Christian values. An ecumenical group, Media Action Research Center (MARC), has set up programs in Television Awareness Training (TAT) to help people become more alert to the effects of that medium. Research shows, for example, that people become more tolerant of violence as a result of so much violence in TV programming.

As I see it, the visual environment, the background and the action -- more than the verbal line -- impress and mold people’s thought and action. For instance, in the TV version of Roots I can never forget the scene of Kunta’s “massa” studiously reading the Bible -- with a magnifying glass! -- while refusing pleas to halt Kunta’s whipping. Later there was a sequence of black-white dialogue which sought to soften the reaction of blacks to American racism. It failed because it was “preachy!’ in contrast to the vivid message of the drama.

The quality of a program carries a message itself, and that is why the churches should proceed with thorough preparation in their use of video-discs and cable TV, as with filmmaking. In a shoddy production the medium gets in the way of the message. On the other hand, a high-quality production such as the “New Media Bible,” which is filming the Scriptures chapter by chapter -- with accompanying filmstrips, magazines and discussion guides -- illustrates an excellence which the video-disc can bring into homes with great impact.

Rossman: An electronic curriculum?

Everist: Yes, not to replace human interaction, but as a powerful tool to support pastors, teachers and Bible students. People today, and especially youth, are increasingly visually oriented because of the dominance of TV. Excellent films therefore have an impact that can compel people to question, to discuss and to read -- for books will not be replaced. TV shows and films are stimulating people to buy books and to read them. At the same time video can return the emphasis of theology to story, although we really have no idea yet how this universal electronic-image medium is going to shape theology and culture. A young, growing organization, the Association for Media Educators in Religion, has been established to study this influence on the one hand and to encourage appropriate use of the media on the other.

Rossman: Hasn’t TV tended to stifle creativity and imagination?

Everist: It has made us too passive, with our imagining done for us by camera, writers and actors. Once the video-media are freed from the monopolistic and exclusive control of sponsors and commercializers -- as could be done by cable and video-disc -- there can be a rapid change, with new types of programming that directly involve the child or adult in a creative process. Instead of polluting the environment, TV can then enrich it. Theologically. I believe that human beings, especially Christians who have the vision to do so, are called to be creative and to enable creativity.

Nicholas Berdyaev suggested that Jesus called his followers not merely to be good but to be creative, that love is the content of creativity and that love can transform evil into good. This transformation requires boldness to use the media to face such problems as war, poverty and crime, rather than to escape into the unreality of “Happy Days.” Christ’s resurrection victory over death can enable Christians to employ the media to get people out of their comfortable armchairs and into the human realities of life.

Rossman: What can you suggest to local congregations?

Everist: A congregation in Mason City, Iowa, planning for its own religious radio station, decided upon a less passive format than the usual schedule of gospel music and preaching. After consultation with the Media Services of the American Lutheran Church, it was decided that the church would offer service agencies in the community a platform for addressing local needs. I am recommending the same approach to a congregation In Rantoul, Illinois, which has been preparing for cablecasting from its church building. Another local congregation is presently acting as catalyst for a community services workshop to assist churches and public-service groups in planning how to use electronic media, especially the “public access” channel of the newly formed cable system in the area.

The church can present models to show what can be done, as the church pioneered in creating schools, hospitals and tile vision of cradle-to-grave learning. When printing was invented, many in the church were fearful and suspicious, and it took time and experimentation to discover how books could be used in Christ’s service.

We approach the coming electronic revolution with faith. We must seek to use these new media for the good of all, to extend faith, hope and love throughout the world. At a time when the church seems powerless, we are facing new possibilities for influence as yet unconceived and undeveloped. Of course the commercial producers of entertainment will profit -- as they have with films, books, records and TV. But church people need no longer be help-less pawns of television. The TV monopoly is broken with the arrival of many-channel cable TV and the video-disc. People who have felt powerless will have another chance to involve themselves in influencing and directing change.

Preaching as One-Way Communication: An Interview with Gabe Campbell

In preparation for a lecture on “Electronic Communications in the Parish: Year 2000” at an Ohio University conference on technological communication and the churches, Parker Rossman sought out Gabe Campbell, pastor of First Congregational Church in Stamford, Connecticut, as one involved in the use of new technology. The New York Times and New Catholic World have previously reported on some of Campbell’s work. He will become pastor of First Congregational Church in Akron, Ohio, on January 1, 1979.

Rossman: The April 1979 Futurist surveyed radical changes that are coming as a result of the “microelectronic revolution” -- such innovations as home computer centers, “intelligent” telephones, and learning centers. That magazine quotes you as saying that the computer-consensor has helped you “to recognize and address issues and concerns that have special meaning” for your members, and that this opinion-surveying gadget enables your people express themselves on matters of faith and action when many of them would otherwise have remained silent. How did you come to feel that this consensor and other electronic communications devices may play an important role in the future of religion?

Campbell: The Stamford church, founded in 1635 was slipping when I came -- as are many downtown churches -- and it became clear to me that communication, especially two-way feedback, was required to turn the congregation around. I first looked to TV and radio, wondering why the mainline denominations had allowed the fundamentalists to dominate such communications. In The Electric Church Ben Armstrong reports that 130 million Americans listen to fundamentalist broadcasts each Sunday -- more than attend all churches in the country on a given Sunday.

I began a 15-minute radio program each Sunday noon in an effort to reach people who never come to church. I had to buy time at first, pledging the funds I would receive for weddings, funerals and counseling. Now I have three broadcasts a week, one with the largest audience of any program on the station. This broadcasting success has had an impact on church attendance because we invited the radio audience to share “who they are” with us instead of insisting that they “be like us.” Our telephone call-in show gets feedback and would be even more significant if we could broadcast at a time when we would reach more young people.

I

Rossman: Say more about your conviction that church and society need more such two-way communication.

Campbell: It has seemed that the fundamentalists were going to dominate the electronic age in religion. Their style of mass evangelism and one-way confrontation has been most adaptable to TV and radio. It has almost seemed as though they were thus the “modernists” and the mainline churches were the “new fundamentalists,” insisting on old-fashioned reliance on print.

Now I think the mainline churches are going to have their turn on the electronic stage as two-way communication becomes increasingly possible on radio and TV, and as cable TV and videotape enable ordinary people to make more use of, and to regain some control over, electronic communications. The church has extensively utilized the telephone, for example, because that has always been two-way, a means for obtaining feedback. Soon our TV cables will be two-way also, with audiences pushing buttons to respond to TV programs. The center of power in religious TV will shift away from national studios as parishes begin to employ two-way communications. It worries me, however, that more parishes aren’t experimenting already, at least with more telephone call-in shows.

Rossman: Why aren’t they?

Campbell: Perhaps pastors and laity are so conditioned to one-way media that we are not yet well enough prepared for two-way communication. Most preaching is still one-way, despite all the talk about dialogue sermons; yet Protestantism becomes feeble whenever its laity become passive merely listening and watching instead of praying and doing. Christian communication must always be two-way. That is why much use of radio and TV has limitations.

William Simmons of Applied Futures, Inc., of Greenwich, Connecticut, has developed the consensor -- an electronic device that facilitates discussion in meetings by helping a group arrive at quantified representative conclusions or decisions. After seeing how business used this consensor, I became interested in its potential for feedback in church after a sermon or business meeting. The consensor is a small computer with a terminal on which an individual can register an opinion by turning a knob to any one of 11 selections (0 to 10). The results are visible on a TV-type monitor so that everyone present can see where people stand. Many people seem much more willing to express opinions when they can do so anonymously, and they are more willing to speak when they see evidence on the screen that they are not alone in their views.

Rossman: There are cable TV experiments in which the audience, by pushing buttons, can change the outcome of the program. Can your congregation do that during a sermon?

Campbell: No, we do not have enough terminals for the congregation to react to a sermon while it is being preached. Those who wish to react must go to the terminals in groups of 16 after the service. But I have found it stimulating to use the consensor as I speak elsewhere, learning from the screen whether the audience is with me or has questions. One does not have to speak so long, since there is no need to belabor a point once everyone registers agreement on the consensor. The device also draws out controversy, clarifying actual points of disagreement. With the consensor, everyone in a business meeting can immediately react to a statement. If there is broad disagreement, then the group can quickly proceed to isolate and discuss the real issues.

Rossman: You found that church people became more involved and excited about theological and biblical discussions.

Campbell: Yes, the level of involvement began to increase dramatically with the use of the consensor. Most pleasant for me was the intense interest in the sermon and the suggestions that were made for the next sermon. Members could dialogue through the consensor, as a third party, without confronting anyone or feeling that they were criticizing their pastor. We were in this evaluation together, and all sessions included good humor and quick comments. People then talked about the sermon and their responses during the week.

One member, for example, who had been reluctant to express his theological opinions because he thought no one would agree with him began to talk theology a lot when he learned that others shared his interests. Another man, who had taken pride in being “way out” in his views, found that his “way out” ideas were majority opinion in the congregation. He had to move further to the left to keep his radical reputation.

More important, as I have written, “In trying to reach a consensus of the faithful, the key to bringing persons together is in sharing opinions, ideas, dreams, hopes, doubts, feelings of despair or joy, and those normal human expressions that make us who we are.” Somehow the consensor seems to help with the search for better ways to create and to nurture the sense of community.

When the New York Times interviewed members about this process, the person who had been the only one to register a No on the question “Do you believe God has a mission for you?” said: “I was startled to be the only one. We all like to think that we are original thinkers, but when we find out we really are, that’s a shock.” And he added a comment to summarize what many in this congregation thought about the use of the consensor: “It’s a marvelous vehicle for starting conversation.” Another member told the Times reporter that the consensor was the first step toward breaking down the walls that prevented closer ties and trust among church members: “The thing most people care about is being involved with others,” One man told the Times that he had his first theological discussion with his father after the consensor showed that members held widely varying views on hell. Another member said she was helped to discover that other members also had feelings of anxiety about their children.

II

Rossman: And you have experimented at Stamford with another type of electronic feedback.

Campbell: Several members of our congregation became interested in holistic health -- the scientific medical examination of the relationship between body, mind and spirit in healing. We opened a biofeedback training center in the church. I paid for the initial equipment, about $2,600, myself. Our center has worked with the Menninger Foundation, New York University, and the Gladman Center for Psychosomatic Medicine in exploring new relationships between science, religion and medicine.

“Biofeedback” is a term that describes the use of electronic instruments to monitor biological and physiological responses to emotional stress. This feedback enables people to learn to control their physiological reactions to mental stimulation -- which, as Jodi Lawrence says in her book Alpha Brain Waves, provides “you with instant information concerning your inner state, a kind of electronic mirror to see into your mind.” Basically it is a way to learn relaxation techniques, which in religious language are often called meditation and prayer. Scientists who have experimented with biofeedback have become interested in Christian mystics such as Ignatius Loyola. We use the electromyrograph (EMG) to measure muscle tension and the galvanic skin response indicator (GSR) -- almost a sort of lie detector -- to chart emotional swings, and other instruments to measure brain waves (electroencephalograph -- EEC) and body temperature.

Rossman: For spiritual purposes?

Campbell: To open people for counseling, for example. A woman comes for help because she has had tension headaches. She watches the meter as she talks, and her muscle tensions tell her what thoughts heighten her tension or relax it -- for example, an antagonism toward her mother that she has never before been willing to admit to herself. It is ironic that many Americans are more receptive to what they see on the screen than to verbal efforts to bring out their problems, perhaps because they are used to electronic equipment in hospitals. The machine does not replace counseling, but it opens people to personal spiritual ministry previously rejected.

Rossman: And in parish education?

Campbell: I have just finished a dissertation on the work of Roy Burkhart of First Community Church in Columbus, Ohio. When I was his associate, I became most interested in his efforts to diagnose the unique needs of each person in the parish, as reported in the December 20, 1950, Christian Century. He used psychological tests to help persons deal with religious awareness.

Rossman: Why have so few pastors given attention to testing young persons’ spiritual potential as a basis for a tailor-made curriculum of experiences to develop that potential?

Campbell: Partly because we’ve lacked the tools, and also because in our time the church has been hung up on the left hemisphere of the brain, the intellectual side of religion. We have sometimes tested youngsters for what they know about the Bible and Christian history. But they can make an A on such an exam and still not be committed or growing in the spirit.

You should see how excited some of our young people become when they are turned loose in our church’s biofeedback center. People are hungry, I think, for a chance to know more about themselves spiritually -- for diagnosis, if you will. We have experimented with the use of EEG in prayer (watching the brain waves to discern a rise in spiritual consciousness), the use of the consensor with prayer groups, and the impact of certain kinds of music as observable with biofeedback machines.

One of the needs of this parish has been to build or renew the sense of mutual trust. Prayer groups have accomplished that, but the consensor has at times helped people break through their first lack of confidence, revealing their worries about being honest and open in prayer. It perhaps seems odd to say it, but we begin to see how to use electronic communications to repersonalize instead of depersonalize, to reindividualize and counteract the mass approaches and passivity that result from one-way TV viewing.

III

Rossman: But what do your critics say? Isn’t all this electronic equipment terribly expensive --  another way of building luxurious cathedrals instead of feeding the poor?

Campbell: Costs will come down as more people make use of the equipment. There will soon be $400 home computers available. The consensor equipment now costs $16,000, so our congregation just borrows it; but state associations or clusters of churches could buy or rent this equipment to take to many parishes for demonstration. I wish a foundation would finance a demonstration for all denominational offices to show how much energy, time and money they could save in all their meetings. I’m sure the first printing presses were too expensive also; let’s not forget where our children are. The computer is going to be as central to their lives as the pen and pencil have been to ours. Video cameras are going to be essential for church work with children and youth. You should have seen our five-year-old students in Greenwich carrying around their cassette tape recorders to keep a record of their thoughts. They couldn’t write yet, but they could create plays and carry home reports to their parents and communicate with youngsters in other classes today -- and in other countries tomorrow.

Rossman: Biofeedback must have a tremendous potential for misuse and abuse.

Campbell: Charlatans are always attracted to a new fad -- for example, some sex therapists are now charging large sums to increase their clients’ sexual potency through biofeedback. People who use the technology must not only be carefully trained -- and untrained counselors don’t need machines in order to harm people -- but they also should consider the view of Arthur Gladman, a psychiatrist who says that anyone who uses biofeedback must be aware of its tremendous spiritual potential for self-transformation. There is the danger that some people may become dependent on the machine, but it is the purpose of biofeedback to help people learn how to exercise self-control, how to gain insight and free themselves.

Rossman: Jacques Ellul points to the demonic in all technology.

Campbell: We human beings have the capacity to abuse or misuse anything, but we cannot escape the major revolution that is coming in culture, in our churches. It is not merely a question of whether we will use TV, satellite communications, cable and computer, or biofeedback machines -- and whatever technology comes tomorrow. It is not only in medicine, in the elaborate diagnostic equipment in the hospitals, that modern technology is going to teach us a great deal about ourselves, but also in the development of our spiritual potential, in consciousness-raising, in transforming and uplifting human values, morals and character.

We have too often sought God logically in the “left brain” rather than expanding our use of the right hemisphere of the brain where intuitive, prayerful, loving, visual thinking occurs -- where we pray, believe, love and develop a consciousness of the total mind-body-spirit relationship. Through biofeedback we can see our brain waves as we welcome new wholeness into our lives, bringing the two hemispheres of the brain together as religious mystics have taught us to do in prayer. We don’t have to have the biofeedback machine any more than we have to have the airplane to go to the church assembly. We can walk. But I think that feedback is going to help us fly spiritually in the parish in the next generation.

Fractures in the Future

The dream of uniting the U.S. Protestant religious community has hit a snag. Splintering rather than unity appears to be the theme of the 70s and may be this decade’s legacy for the ‘80s. The fragility of denominational unity is evident as some bodies are unable to overcome internal divisiveness. The cracks in the church’s foundations resulted from pressures that built to the breaking point because of neglect, and the effects of social activism in the ‘60s and early ‘70s.

I

The Presbyterian Church in the United States was one of the first casualties. In 1973 this largely southern denomination suffered an exodus of slightly more than 40,000 members in more than 260 churches. The new denomination -- the Presbyterian Church in America -- continues to add congregations and members.

The Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod was next. Disrupted by factions for some years, it split in 1974; a new denomination, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, was formed in 1976.

Likewise a faction in the Episcopal Church that had difficulty in relating to women clerics and changes in liturgy has broken off to form the Anglican Catholic Church. Other dissidents, despite their unhappiness over prayer-book reforms and women’s ordination, have stayed. Two other major denominations are having internal troubles. The United Methodist Church and the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. have for several years suffered internal challenges to procedures and programs of their national boards.

Dissenters in these last three denominations are aligned under banners that emphasize evangelical principles and the upholding of traditional religious practices. They define themselves by identifying what they oppose almost as often as they proclaim their platforms in positive terms.

The roots of dissent are in the foundations of Protestant theology and polity. The current situation owes much to the strong concentration on social action by national boards and agencies of denominations in the late ‘60s. The period from 1968 through 1971 was one of internal turmoil and increasingly open criticism. The black-power-inspired James Forman episode of 1969 and the protests against the war in Indochina were major divisive forces in some denominations. Other disruptions were generated by a morality related to liberalized sexual practices and abortion. Each of these became issues around which the dissenters could rally.

The unity movement, a vocally accepted way of life in the 1950s, reached its high point in the early 1960s, at a time when society had a sense of working together. Suburbs burgeoned; churches grew; the economy came alive. It was a religiously homogeneous time, a period when commentators like Will Herberg could describe American religion as being constituted by three easily identifiable faiths: Protestant, Catholic and Jewish.

During the late 1950s enthusiasm was high for an organization devoted to unity among denominations. An Episcopal bishop, James Pike, and a United Presbyterian executive, Eugene Carson Blake, drew up a proposal for a body that would work to achieve unity within a decade. The Blake-Pike proposal caught the imagination of many denominational leaders. The visible and continuing result of that call to union is the Consultation on Church Union.

The Second Vatican Council of the early ‘60s had a significant impact on Protestants. Roman Catholic priests and parishes worked hard at discovering and cooperating with the Protestant and Jewish groups in their communities. Catholics sometimes seemed more ecumenically minded than their Protestant counterparts.

The promise of a future is always subject to being broken. In the case of Protestant communions, the optimism of unity discussions in the early ‘60s was overshadowed by civil rights activities in the mid-‘60s. Ministers marched in the streets protesting injustices in housing, inadequacy of education, and then the immorality of the Vietnam war.

Immediate opposition to such social action on the part of clergy and church leaders was expressed by many congregations. A flurry of excitement was generated during the late ‘60s when word spread that church members were withholding money to protest social involvement. While income did decrease, little firm evidence exists to confirm withholding as a major or long-term tactic of church members.

By the late ‘60s some national agencies in several denominations were controlled by social activists. Through personal action and public pronouncements, these agency people led the church into the forefront of the fight against social injustice. Internal opposition took form quickly, beginning as theological discussions on the nature of the church. Disagreement focused on the desirability of church involvement in protests against injustice, and debates centered on the degree to which the church ought to allow its leaders to take time for protests and nonchurch meetings. One argument was that such activities cut into the minister’s time for serving the church members.

Some clergy, especially younger ones, began to view their role as that of crusaders. Laity, except for a small minority, understood the task of clergy to be providing counsel and stability in a world of uncertainty and change. A difference of opinion based on strong convictions created a clergy-laity gap. In the intervening years, these differences have been examined but not discussed in depth, and the conflict has not yet been resolved.

II

In the ‘70s, battles ceased to be theological and became psychological. By the mid-’70s the dissenters were promoting a psychology of growth and winning. Their arguments were bolstered by the declining church-membership statistics for their denominations as compared with the growth figures of more evangelical groups. Dean Kelley’s 1972 book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing contributed to the debate by providing other data for the dissenters. In addition, the mood of society by the mid-‘70s, with the emphasis on personal fulfillment, swelled the ranks of the dissenters.

The dissenters stress the individual’s religious life, not one’s involvement in social action. This emphasis, having a long history within Protestantism, asserts that personal piety is the key to the Christian life and that social action is an individual issue that should not necessarily involve the full resources of the church.

In contrast, denominational leaders often advocate full understanding of and involvement in the struggles of people seeking equality and justice. They call for societal as well as individual piety, applauding social action and protest. At times such support is viewed by them as a necessary stance. Leaders sometimes fail to keep lines of communication open with dissenters and appear to demean opposing points of view. The impression is sometimes given that there is only one side to an issue. This attitude tends to broaden the gap and to increase the potential for conflict.

The dissenters entered the ‘70s as a silent majority. Having little recourse to the normal channels of denominational power and expression, they felt left out and unheard. They began to promote their point of view through private newsletters and conferences of “interested persons.” By 1972, most denominations had ad hoc organizations whose communiqués emphasized the “forgotten” side of religion, especially evangelism and missions. Criticism of bureaucrats who seemed to be swayed by every protest group that surfaced was one of their tactics.

During the past few years the dissenters have become increasingly effective. The nostalgic mood of the nation has helped them to identify values “lost” by the church during its social-action involvement -- personal religion, conversion of non-believers, and Christlike charisma.

Around these “lost” values, the dissenters have built rationales and organizations. Within such denominations as the United Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church there exist important and influential groups going counter to denominational leadership. They regularly attack national church activities and continue to build their coffers and secure recruits and staff.

Given the history of the past two decades, the future appears likely to be one of fractures. The optimism of the early ‘60s is a faded dream. The current interest in smallness, the emphasis on self-fulfillment, and the desire by grass-roots people to control organizations to which they belong are forces that will further the splintering. A sense of the importance of the individual has been instrumental in creating this new mood.

The fracture of denominations may be constructive over the long term. The vitality of Protestantism does not reside in the maintenance of large denominations. After all, religious commitment involves personal understanding, interpretation and heritage. It is as these are combined with common understanding and symbols that creeds and organizations are built.

An argument often heard is that when denominations grow large, they cannot help people feel that they are significant in their religious life. The message is diluted. They therefore need to be dissolved or broken up.

The Protestant community at the conclusion of the ‘70s is broken into more pieces than existed at the beginning of the decade. But perhaps these fractured communions can discover a new life and purpose in the world of the ‘80s.

Prayer, Metaphysics and an Eskimo Named Nuckkerweener

Oddly enough, it was an Eskimo Indian named Nuckkerweener who set me to thinking about metaphysics and prayer. A Wall Street Journal story told of his plight in the Canadian jails. Failing in his attempt to join the white man’s world, Nuckkerweener had turned to crime. Jailed, he was cut off from his roots. No one in the vicinity could even speak his language, and he has not spoken for 23 years. He cannot plead his own case, and he has no known relatives, no privilege of rank or class. He languishes in confinement month after month, a cipher among the nonpersons of our fallen world, seemingly beyond the reach of either justice or demonstrated love.

How could I help Nuckkerweener? I am unable to hire mercenaries to storm the prison, and at any rate I am not convinced of the righteousness of violence. Since I am not a Canadian citizen, a letter-writing campaign is not likely to impress the authorities. The agendas of international councils are clogged with more colorful cases, and besides, their machinery moves too slowly to help. None of these “social action” remedies seemed open to me. I decided that, as embarrassing as it might be to my more liberal friends, I could only pray for him, bombarding heaven with appeals against the injustice of it all.

Only pray for him? Sermons on the power of prayer insist that this avenue of aid is the most potent of all. But being a child of the age, I find myself asking questions. Can such meditative missiles glance off the pearly gates and land on the locks of Nuckkerweener’s jail door, setting him free like Paul and Silas? Or dare I hope that the shock waves from my prayers will penetrate the Eskimo’s skull at the point where the brain’s chemistry triggers warm, secure feelings, so he will know that someone cares? We are familiar with radio and television waves, and we are learning the physics of penetrating light, as in laser beams. But how does prayer work? To ask such a question is to plunge us into the murky waters not of physics but of metaphysics. And no one has bothered much with that topic for years.

Whatever Happened to Metaphysics?

We hear the term “metaphysical” now mainly in reference to modern mystery cults like spiritism. I use it here in the older sense: to denote that which is beyond the physical, but not so esoteric or spooky that one has to be a mystic or a medium to deal with it. In fact, metaphysics was long the province of philosophers, who sought to explain how mind is related to matter, how bodies act on each other, and how to extend these laws of the physical universe into the realm of theology. Just as the empirical world operated on such principles as cause and effect, so the spiritual world was supposed to be the effect of God, as First Cause. Metaphysics was therefore studied as a science, on a basis similar to mathematics or physics.

The conventional recitations usually include the assertion that David Hume refuted cause-effect relationships, and plunged the world into doubt. Actually, Hume believed that the world was attributable to God, but that the old metaphysics hardly proved it. The development of science since Hume has followed the premise that cause and effect still work as reliably as ever. But the precise mechanism remains obscure. Hume merely pointed out that there is nothing external to two bodies which demonstrates a causal relationship. Applied to theology, God and answered prayer were, for Hume, undemonstrable.

Immanuel Kant’s contribution at this point was crucial. Of course metaphysics does not rely on external deductions based on the behavior of bodies. Physics relies on empirical knowledge; metaphysics must be truly beyond physics. Its concepts must be intuitive, self-evident from the start, like the universal moral law. The bottom line to Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics was that the truths of metaphysics must be couched in “analytical” statements. That is, the predicate, when analyzed, must have already been implied or intuited in the subject.

It appears therefore that metaphysics is required to bow to the limitations of natural theology. On the one hand, answering Hume’s question, it borders on scientism in its attempt to “prove” the spiritual cause of empirical events. On the other hand, rising to Kant’s challenge leaves it exposed to the charge of circular reasoning. G. W. Hegel’s dialectic was successful, for some, in showing that the spiritual world penetrates the physical, but it did not explain how. And at any rate, the familiar history of the dialectic raises more questions than it answers. On Hegel’s terms, Spirit could be so thoroughly imbedded in the state that Nazism could be identified with the will of God, and American expansionism with our manifest destiny.

On the same terms, it is easy to see why Karl Barth and others revolted against natural theology. Neo-orthodoxy’s rejection of metaphysics, however, allied with atheistic existentialism to close the first half of our century with the rather negative question: Who needs metaphysics?

Only Scientists and Charismatics

After philosophers and theologians tired of metaphysics, the strangest bedfellows took up the enterprise. Take clinical psychologists, for example. Recently I allowed a psychologist friend to attach me to a biofeedback machine. By imagining that my hands were immersed in hot water, I was able to increase my body temperature by four degrees. On every hand such evidence abounds, showing as never before that spirit, or mind, penetrates matter, by whatever means. Editor Norman Cousins, struck down by a mysterious arthritic ailment no one could cure, had jokebooks brought into the hospital and good-humored himself well. Others are “thinking” their blood pressure down, “supposing” pain away by substituting hypnosis for anesthesia, and, in a unique counseling program in Fort Worth, Texas, “imaging” cancer cells to death. The bio feedback era has brought us to one of two conclusions: either there is a dimension of reality beyond the physical which can indeed relate to the physical, or the mind is only rarefied matter and what we have is merely one kind of body acting on another. And even if the latter hypothesis is correct, the connecting force between the two is a metaphysical action.

But I spoke of strange bedfellows, and this brings us back to prayer. I sat recently in an Episcopal charismatic service which relied on metaphysics more strongly than any prescientific philosopher could have. We assembled amid severe weather warnings that included the threat of tornadoes. “Lord!” cried a young lay leader in prayer. “In the name of Jesus we bind Satan this moment and forbid him to control the weather tonight. We deliver it instead into your hands and claim the promise that you will care for your own and not allow this storm to damage the person or property of a single one of us gathered here tonight!”

Sure enough, the storm hurt no one. We cannot prove a metaphysical connection, just as the thousands of reported miracle healings or other presumed answers to prayer cannot be proved to the satisfaction of the Humes and the Kants of the world. (Far less, of course, can we explain the fact that similar prayers did not stay the tornadoes that killed 50 people in Wichita Falls, Texas, a few months later -- but that is a different problem.) But it somehow seems odd that those who believe in this kind of answered prayer are rarely interested in Spirit, at least to the eye of faith. The scientists actually seem more interested in the relationship between mind and matter.

But if the simple believer joined the discussion, what might be said?

Toward an Arguable Metaphysics

1. Jesus is alive. The believer must first realize that he or she is to stick to the simple proclamation of the Good News as the first utterance, instead of allowing Hume or Kant or Heidegger to set the agenda unilaterally. It was natural theology’s mistake to begin with nature apart from its relationship to the empty tomb. The classical “proofs” may illustrate the God-world relationship, but they do not prove it, and the Barthians were right to criticize them on this ground.

But against the Barthians, the gospel does interlock with metaphysics. Jesus was designated the Son of God (a metaphysical claim) by the resurrection (a physical-metaphysical event) (Rom. 1:4). This event is at the boundary between this world and the world of Spirit -- the Greek word translated “designated” in this passage also gives us our word “horizon.” Despite the existential element in the proclamation, it is the historical testimony of those earliest this-worldly witnesses, and not their subjective faith, that distinguishes Christianity from many other faiths.

But if Jesus is risen from the dead, where is he? For the original witnesses, it would never have been enough to say with old-line liberals that Jesus is alive in my thoughts, or embodied in my Christlike acts, or symbolized in the Lord’s Supper. If Jesus is really risen, he has a metaphysical existence, one that allows him to be both with me and with the prisoner Nuckkerweener. He may enjoy what Paul called a “spiritual body” (I Cor. 15:42 ff.). I do not know what that means, and am glad to admit to a metaphysics de fidei. But I contend that the historical nature of the resurrection accounts indicates that this assertion has content.

Is the statement “Jesus is alive” an “analytical” judgment, as Kant required? Yes, to the believer; and it is fully open to the nonbeliever who is willing to accept the idea that a resurrection is at least possible. For the predicate “is alive” is necessarily implied in the subject, Jesus, who is the living Word.

If Jesus is alive and well today, but in a superphysical state, then he can make his home both in my heart and in the heart of Nuckkerweener. The same metaphysical power that opens tombs and creates worlds has been unleashed among us. Can it not also re-create hearts? The Mind that is the ground of cellular matter surely has no trouble entering the cells of the brain and effecting a change there. The Force that formed the earth and primeval seas, the Word that stilled the storm on Galilee, could easily snuff out the tornadoes threatening the Episcopalians. I have not set out to prove how this happens, nor to show why such miracles do not occur according to my own standards of justice or consistency. We are looking here for reasonable ways in which the world might be affected by Mind; and I contend that the resurrection of Jesus holds a clue to that possibility, if not its mechanism.

Mind and Body

2. Bodies are affected by something other than themselves. We have pointed out that whatever mind is, the biofeedback age indicates that it exercises control over matter called flesh. I have admitted that this may only show that mind is different from flesh in degree, rather than in kind. Yet the effects of the mind acting on the body appear to be metaphysical. That is the conclusion of my psychologist friend, who had been on the verge of rejecting faith. Recent work with placebos and psychosomatic medicine strengthens this conclusion. A placebo was formerly thought to effect healing only if the illness was “merely psychosomatic” or “not organic” It is now more fully recognized that actual chemical or organic changes can occur under the influence of a sugar pill.

This realization will not, I hope, plunge metaphysics back into such dead-ended explorations as the attempt to locate the soul, or the mind. Lucretius thought that the soul nestled in the human breast; Descartes located it in the pineal gland; and process theologian John Cobb, following Alfred North Whitehead, hopes to find mind wandering as a thread through the “interstices of the brain,” But if we are truly dealing with metaphysics, then the mind and the soul, like the risen Christ, will not be anywhere, but holistically related to the body. Gilbert Ryle was right to scoff at the idea of a ghost in a machine. Biblical metaphysics deals with persons, that peculiar mix of body and mind and soul that relates so intriguingly both to matter and to Spirit.

Alvin Plantinga (God and Other Minds) has argued that since we accept the reality of other human minds while seeing not the mind itself but good evidence that it is there, so we can reasonably accept the reality of a supreme Mind. Similarly, if we can see evidence on a biofeedback thermometer that something other than the physical is affecting body temperature, the metaphysical possibility of prayer’s efficacy may be close at hand. The evidence is analogical, but nudges us toward accepting the fact that the Supreme Mind can affect the lives of those for whom we pray.

A Realm Beyond the Physical

3. The hills are alive. One eddy alongside the mainstream of Roth century philosophy has dared to continue to speak of metaphysics: the process thinkers, who view the basic building blocks of matter as open to outside -- and at least in that sense, metaphysical -- influence. Not all of these philosophers are traditional theists; some simply hold, with atomic theory, that reality consists of relationships (as protons with electrons) instead of “hard matter.” Charles Hartshorne’s term for all this is panpsychism: even the hills are at least metaphorically “alive” to the extent that they can act on and react to events about them. Purged of sheer animism, this sort of language is open to the Christian. Whether we are speaking of the matter of the hills or the mind of humankind, the creation is open to the mighty acts of the Creator. It is in such terms that we can talk about a creation that “groans in travail” while awaiting its redemption (Rom. 8:21-22).

Further, process is the philosophy of organism -- matter and mind are related holistically. Each affects the other because they exist in dynamic relationship. For Whitehead, all “actual entities” have both physical and mental poles. In this set of terms, is it too difficult to believe that the entity called the human brain is susceptible to its Creator’s mental nudges?

None of this is offered as self-evident proof of a realm beyond the physical. It does, however, constitute a basis for continued conversation with those who ask about the ability of God to work in the world. With Kant, as well as with Scripture, we must warn ourselves not to presume to prove too much -- God is still in heaven, we are on earth, and our words can well be few. But as for me, whether or not I can fully explain how God works in the world, I cannot avoid such matters. And whether or not I can prove prayer’s effects, I said a prayer for Nuckkerweener anyway.