Plans for a study were outlined in New York this week by the Rev. Marvin Halverson, an executive of the National Council of Churches. It will attempt to determine the what’s and the why’s of popular arts in contemporary American religious life. For example, they will try to ascertain why people wait in seemingly endless lines to see motion pictures such as “The Ten Commandments” and “A Man Called Peter.” They will also try to find out why songs like “Somebody Up There Likes Me” and “I Believe” make the top 10 on the nation’s juke boxes. In short, they will try to learn whether religion is box-office, and if so, why. The study will include opera, radio, and television. A tangent of the survey will be the effort to see to what extent our 29th century popular arts are genuine American art forms and what makes them popular. As the Rev. Mr. Halverson observed: “People usually think of the Negro spiritual as our only real folk art with religious inspiration. It is important to know what the religious values of people are today, and if the current popular songs debase them.”
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Contributions to churches in the United States have passed the $2 billion mark for the first time in history. The total reported by 52 Protestant and Eastern Orthodox church bodies was $2,041,908,161. Better than 81 percent was for local congregational expenses. Contributions for benevolent purposes, including overseas relief and foreign and home missions amounted to nearly $387 million, or about 19 percent.
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It is always gratifying to discover that your point of view is shared by others. Last Sunday I commented upon the fact that the U.S. Bureau of the Census is considering including in its questions for the 1960 census some dealing with religious beliefs and affiliations. This week the Associated Press carried an item of some length, the gist of which is as follows: “On the grounds that it would violate the principle of separation of church and state, the General Council of the American Baptist Church has announced its opposition to including any kind of religious question in the 1960 census. The council’s attitude was announced by a spokesman who said the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, with headquarters in Washington, reported the government was thinking about including this question: “What is your religion?” The General Council is the governing body of the American Baptist Church between conventions. It represents 1.5 million members in 6,000 churches in 36 states.
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At the age of 67, Neill Robertson of Parkman, in northern Maine, has written finis to nearly a half century as a railroad telegrapher to become a country parson. Robertson became a station agent telegrapher for the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad when he was 25. As a sideline he filled in frequently for ministers unexpectedly called from their pulpits. He memorized sermons that could be delivered anywhere, anytime, and was always ready to help. Twice he was offered pastorates but turned them down because of his wife and seven children and because he felt that his grammar school education was insufficient. But he resolved that upon retirement he would try to find a church unable to afford a full-time pastor. Last June, Robertson found his spot: the United Baptist Church in Parkman. Only 32 persons were in that church the first Sunday. Now there are 72 parishioners. A modest man, Robertson says he has only one strong point as a preacher. He puts it simply: “I am done in 20 minutes. It makes no difference what I may have prepared; when that 20 minutes is up, I’m done.”
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As suggested here more than once, religion is native, natural, intrinsic, unavoidable, a primary part of man. And Christianity is only one of the many interpretations of that phenomenon. From the standpoint of sociology, the persistence of super-naturalism as an explanation of this natural phenomenon of religion is striking. Perhaps it is a commentary on the lack of integration of knowledge, but it could be due to the lack of a carryover in education. To illustrate, a careful ands competent teacher who lectures on the evolution of the beetle on the days of the week, goes to church on Sunday. He parks his brains with his umbrella and enters into a new and strange supernatural world where all sorts of wonders happens: axes float on water, the dead come to life, men become gods and vice versa. The man in the laboratory or the classroom demands step-by-step evidence, but in the field of religion he is likely to transform into a sentimentalist.
Not only did the early Christian religion claim more and better miracles than were previously available, but Christians condemned non-Christian miracles. In fact, some of the writers achieved more consistency, but at the same time more bigotry, by condemning all mystery religions but their own. According to the book of Acts, the disciples in Samaria put a professional miracle worker named Simon wholly out of business. Paul was so angry at the miracles of a magician named Elymas that he struck the poor devil blind. The whole history of heresy has in it a great deal of jealousy in respect to who had supernatural power. Catholics have discounted and denounced Protestant miracles and Protestants have made fun of the great miracle healing resorts of the Catholics. Even the state has forbidden the handling of poison snakes and has taken children from homes where miracles were relied upon instead of biotics.
In much the same manner, Christians have denied that there was any revelation except Christian revelation, and if you look at all the different sects you see the Christians cannot agree on what it was that God said. Revelation by definition is the importation of knowledge to a human or humans by supernatural means. But we are not consistent about this. We accept easily that a supernatural power delivered stone tablets to Moses, but we refuse to believe that golden plates were delivered to Joe Smith, who founded the Mormon Church. There is about as much evidence for one as the other, if we are honest with ourselves and look at the evidence and draw our conclusions from it.
Not only have Christians denied other than Christian miracles, and on occasion condemned to death witches and people possessed of a devil and dealers in magical power, but they have turned upon their neighbors and slaughtered fellow humans who claimed a revelation other than the Christian revelation. Thus Catholics have tortured, burned, and hanged Protestants and heretical Catholics. Protestants have amply repaid the compliment to their Catholic colleagues.
The ancients explained phenomena in terms of super-naturalism because they had no other explanations. The tragedy is that today, after the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the tremendous advances in all fields of knowledge, on Sunday people, otherwise normal, accept super-naturalism as a respectable and satisfying interpretation of religion. The ancients had no telescope on Mt. Palomar through which they could read secrets of many worlds. They had no compound microscope by which they could lay bare the mysteries of nature’s vital processes. The only way the ancients had of establishing truth was to have it supernaturally guaranteed.
And thus it is that even where wild super-naturalism has been greatly modified or rejected by scholarship, the masses today as they always have, love, enjoy, defend, and will pay for the preaching of super-naturalism as a worthy interpretation of religion. Yet, in actuality, sociologically, if not theologically, religion is man’s response to the totality of his environment. Theologies are merely interpretations of something that is native and natural. To take this point of view is in no sense to tear down or disparage religion, for it is intrinsic and unavoidable, indestructible. But we should examine interpretations of it. To show the error of an interpretation of religion is not attacking religion; it is protecting it. It is not meritorious or spiritual, or even pious, to believe something that is in an ancient book, or because a lot of people have believed it, or to hold, as Tertullian did before he backslid, that it is true because it is unbelievable. For many, a technique of religion is to believe something that is difficult to believe. Perhaps the most backward of our social institutions today is the church itself. It could do much for the happiness of the race, for righteousness, brotherhood and love, if it would abandon much of its pretense of super-naturalism and demand the same kind of careful investigation and evidence that is demanded in other areas. We have the known conclusions of all the fields that known scholarship has revealed. The function of the church should be to take these conclusions, weigh them, and build a philosophy of religion that is valid, historically proportionate, and emotionally satisfying. Such a synthesis of knowledge in the light of moral values would, or could, make an unlimited contribution to the happiness of mankind. Such an interpretation of religion would always be subject to revision, open to change, as our methods of achieving truth improve and as the sum total of truth increases.
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There came to my attention this week a list of books, some of them exceptionally good, but which are banned by the Catholic Church. It would appear that that church is in favor of lots of children but is not in favor of sex. Wonder if they do not subscribe to the recently popular song that went something like this: “Love and marriage, like a horse and carriage, go together; you can’t have one without the other.”
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From a pastor comes this bit of wisdom that seems worth passing on to you. He says, “I am tired of hearing that old chestnut, ‘you cannot legislate morality.’ It is usually used as an alibi for not rectifying an evil condition…. Of course, we do not legislate morality. Who said we did? But immorality can be outlawed and punished.”
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One reassuring note in the news this week is that, though we do not have a Sputnik, the Defense Department announces that we have stockpiled enough H-Bombs to blow up the earth three times. One can be pardoned for wondering why three times. After a third were used, there would be nothing to use the other two thirds on.
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It is reported that the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, Auburn, Alabama, fired a professor because he advised obedience to the Supreme Court in the matter of desegregation of schools. It seems that the trustees of a state institution of higher learning should not be subversive of law and order. Simply because tensions and emotions run high is no reason for an academic institution to suppress an honest minority opinion. The interference of the board of trustees with the matter of faculty personnel was, of course, outrageous, and would be in any college or university. What is the school trying to do, educate or brainwash? That is a technique of dictatorships.
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In the Johnson City Press Chronicle for November 1, appeared under the heading “A Farce, A Fiasco,” the following editorial, in part: “Of the Jenkins murder trial, perhaps the least said the better. It was a farce, a fiasco. It will not be written into the records that way, but that is what it was. The jury returned the proper verdict: acquittal. On the basis of the evidence, any other verdict would have been simply a travesty. The state simply had no case…. Why such a state of affairs? Go back to the beginning. Recall the jealousies, the bickering, the intrigues among rival investigating officers. Remember the false starts and strange finishes…. Can there be any wonder that nothing meaty and substantial came out of such a welter of confusion?”
There is more, but this much is sufficient. The simple fact is that Everett Jenkins was murdered six months ago. The people of Washington County have a right to look to their elected sheriff and attorney general to bring the perpetrators of this murder to justice. They have not done so. There is wonderment in the minds of many as to whether they have exhausted the resources of their offices in trying to do so. Until something more tangible is produced, that wonderment will continue. What about it, gentlemen?