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Maryland State Archives Jeffersonian, Towson, Maryland mdsa_sc3410_1_81-0926 Enlarge and print image (3M) |
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Maryland State Archives Jeffersonian, Towson, Maryland mdsa_sc3410_1_81-0926 Enlarge and print image (3M) |
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SEPARATING PIETY AND POLITICS.
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Solid religion, unadulterated with legalism, is what a Detroit layman wants from the pulpit, and failing to get it, he asserts, he has resigned from the Methodist Church, of which he had been an active member for forty-five years, 'this decision on the part of Horatio S. Earle, former State Senator, one-time State Highway Commissioner, and once a candidate for Governor of Michigan, has created a discussion that is echoed from Massachusetts to Oregon. The question, whether the pulpit should engage in discussing politics, economics, and sociological subjects, is recurrent. In Detroit, according to press reports, the majority of the clergy differ strongly frbm Mr. Earle, though he asserts that "one hundred good Christian gentlemen would be glad to contribute $1,000 each toward a church for the preaching of the Gospel and the exclusion of politics." The church Mr. Earle has in mind "would be a church in which you would be scolded every Sunday for being bad,-and praised for being good, and in which no propaganda of the Anti-Saloon League or any other organization would be disseminated. There would be no P. T. Bar-num stuff, no preaching to the newspapers, such as is indulged in by certain of the clergymen of the City." Jn his letter of resignation to his pastor, Mr. Earle writes, as we quote it from press accounts, that "we need a great countrywide revival, with the pastors of all Christian churches in the pews, and the lay members who believe in the doctrine of Jesus Christ ' in the pulpits, preaching repentance, forgiveness, brotherly love, and so forth. Instead of driving the people away with politics and subscription blanks for the Anti-Saloon League, give them the Gospel, as did the business man—St. Paul." An Episcopalian minister is said to have offered to preach in a church of the sort outlined, and Mr. Earle, we are told, has received letters from various cities advocating a general' movement to forward the "Church-free-from-State" idea.
The Church is not a political forum, says the Rev. Charles R. Scafe, a Detroit Presbyterian pastor in sympathy with Mr. Earle's views. In a statement to the Detroit News he says that "the world is disappointed, and has a right to be, when the pulpit departs from the preaching of the Bible as the Word of God and Jesus Christ as the needed and all-sufficient Savior of mankind. Politics will never regenerate a soul." The Church's business, says the Rev. E. C. Fack-ler, an Evangelical Lutheran pastor of Detroit, is evangelization. "It is refreshing to see that some people are getting the vision of the real function of the Church." However, tne majority of clerical opinion in Detroit is said to agree with the opposing view, as set fortn by Dr. M. C. Pearson, executive secretary of the Detroit Council of Churches, and Dean Warren L. Rogers, of St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral and president of the Detroit Council of Churches. Dr. Pearson asserts , that the Church is not fulfilling its mission if it lets up one whit in its attack on men and policies inimical to the coming of Christ's kingdom on earth. "It is just as much the Church's business to destroy the liquor evil as to preach the Gospel." After all, says Dean Rogers, "the Gospel has to do with the living of folks, and can not be narrowed to a round of piety." But it is clear that no one denomination possesses. exclusively divine guidance, and the difference of opinion among pastors themselves on purely legislative issues is convincing proof that men are left to solve their immediate problems by use of their own intelligence and conception of what is right.
The point where Mr. Earle diverges from his church is the point where the church leaves the field of good citienship in its fundamentals and enters the very dangerous one of particularizing on personal con-
duct in specific issues. There is a wide and legitimate difference of opinion on whether the National Prohibition Law, as it stands, is a good law or a bad law. It is clearly no more treasonable to seek to amend an amendment to the Constitution than it was to seek to amend the Constitution Itself. In so far as objections to the Eighteenth or any other Amendment are based on honest conviction airu sincere belief, any man is not only justified in proclaiming that conviction, but would be a hypocrite if he pretended otherwise. It is unthinkable that any church prefers or advocates hypocrisy at the expense of honesty.
"No church would undertake, with any sane hope of success, to order men to chango their minds, since there exists no identifiable court of appeal which can state with any certainty which of two opinions concerning human progress is the right and which the wrong.
"The safety of the nation lies not in overbearing the intelligence of honest men, but in teaching them all to be honest. Between two honest convictions, the nation eventually will travel the right road. The first duty of the churches is to inculcate a common energy for public service. As to the course that citizenship, being hon'est, shall pursue, why not leave that to the Divine Providence, the eyes of'Whom, says St. Peter in his first epistle, 'are upon the righteous, and His ears open to their supplications'?"
As an organized and active body, the Church has a right to concern itself in moral issues, "but it was not established to become a political factor." The Nazarene distinguished between the "proprieties of religion and of politics" when He advised his questioners to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. He never! mussed up in the political feuds of His time, except when a moral issue was at stake. Then He literally threw His fists right and left. In a day when moral issues confront church members, they have a right to be vigorously active, but not blindly political."
But, turning the pages, we find secular papers strongly affirming that the Church must concern itself with whatever concerns man. If Mr. Earle maintains that the clergy should not urge enforcement of, and obedience to, the Eighteenth
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Amendment, then logically he must protest against recital or exposition of the extremeTy legalistic. Ten Commandments in the churches. It is unfortunate that there are sensationalists in the pulpit, but it would be an almost infinitely more unfortunate thing if priests and ministers as a whole were to go to the other extreme, shirk all discussion of moral and civic matters, and maintain that they have no responsibility for the sort of laws that are passed or the manner in which law is administered. But, if it wants to be in the company of great spiritual movements, the Church must aim very high and be steadfast in its purpose. When it is so, it can effectively touch on public questions, can make powerful protest against modern evils, can tell men and women to account for the way in which they spend their lives. To many thinking people, solid religion certainly would have to take account of the world we live in, its great efforts at reform, such as Prohibition, the outsome of elections and the conduct of the Government. To some others it appears to mean that type of faith and worship that interferes less with the actual conduct of every-day life. In the opinion of some, Christian ethics would have less value than they have if they were' not made applicable to everyday life.
The movement to interest the Church in the multifarious enterprises of men, from which so-called politics is inseparable, is in definite answer to widespread demand that it enlarge the area of its usefulness. Those who find fault with the Church for engaging in extra-theological activities are vastly outnumbered by the army who complain that it does not sufficiently concern itself with applied religion, the need of which in and out of politics seems to be pretty generally understood.
The Church is interested in roads. Whether roads lead people toward or away from their temples of worship, undoubtedly they are a factor to be reckoned with. The Church is concerned with the punishment and reformation of crim- ¦ inals, with community co-operation in the cure of poverty and the improvement of physical health, with housing conditions, and with transportation facilities, which are interwoven with other problems. It is interested in them because religion and ethics and right-living are inseparable and because sane thinking is promoted by sound living, a principle recognized by missionaries to backward peoples who know that the physician, the economist and the sanitary engineer are efficient allies of the preacher of the Gospel. It is concerned with education as a prerequisite to the dissemination ol religion—and education as a public function is a political matter in the modern understanding of the term.
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