that the Master in his words to Simon Peter, "Thou art Peter, and upon
this rock I will build my church," clearly recognized that Peter was a
shuffler and a weakling and a coward and it was upon just such common
material that the church was founded. It was not to be an aristocratic
organization. Its foundations were not laid upon skill and genius in
human character, but upon the weaker and commonplace traits, which
universal mankind possesses.
So definite was the appeal of Jesus to the marginal people of his time,
that he has been twice criticized unjustly; once in his own time by the
Pharisees, and again in our time by the Socialists. The latter have
claimed that Jesus was "class conscious," that he was a partisan of the
poor, a proletarian radical. The unscientific character of Socialism is
displayed in this comment upon Jesus. His appeal was to the whole
community, as through Christian history his message has come uniformly
to men of all degrees, rich and poor, ignorant and learned, bad and
good. The religious genius of Jesus is shown in the fact that he
recognized what the Socialist does not, that to appeal to the whole
community a prophet must address his plea to the people on the margin of
the community. His measure of value must be final utility.
One may go at large into this tempting field in illustrations. The
artistic experience of mankind is abundant in illustration of it. There
is no beauty of the ocean save in its shores--the margin of the
boundless expanse. Literary descriptions of the experiences of human
love are made up of descriptions of the margins of love. Married life is
depicted in courtship, and the sentiments of affection are described in
scenes of parting and meeting, which are the margins of companionship.
This principle should be fundamental in all policies of reconstruction
of religious and ethical institutions. In the training of men for
religious service and for ethical leadership they should be accustomed
to think in terms of communal wholes, and this thinking will use as its
units of measure the characteristics of the marginal life. It is for
this reason that temperance reform in America has been so influential
within the past two decades. It is a communal form of ethics. It demands
that the community should act together in safeguarding the weaker
members of the community, the young men, and the working people. The old
temperance propaganda was individualistist. It recorded its results in
the number of persons who signed the pledge. Its results were almost as
gratifying if the pledges were signed by well-doing and orderly people
as if they were signed by drunkards. The modern temperance movement
draws its influence from its proposed effect upon the agricultural
laborer.
The theological seminary of the past has been a literary institution.
During the period of its development the typical Christian was the
bright and aspiring young man in a community of boundless resources. To
such a man books are the interpreters of life. But in the modern period
with the congested population and close social organization, human
fellowship is an experience of greater value to most men than books.
Since the time of the invention of printing successive quantities of
literature have been given to the world, and under the law of
diminishing returns literature has come to have for many very small
returns. At the time of the Protestant Reformation the value of books in
the hands of the common people was infinite. For several generations
along with the extension of universal education this infinite value of
books continued for the people on the margin of the educated world. But
nowadays everybody in American progressive communities can read and
write: and in a universally educated population we arrive at the final
utility of books in human use. Great masses of poor people and also many
people of means use books within narrow limits only. They do not buy
them, they do not read them, they do not think in literary terms. Yet
they have access to books and they turn from them with a clear sense of
intelligent preference for other human values. Books are to them but an
alphabet and social life is the story.
My own impression is that the life of the marginal man is social rather
than literary. His religion will be a social religion rather than a
biblical religion. The weakness of Protestantism is that it stubbornly
insists upon literary interpretation of God and upon a biblical
ministry, while the population around these Protestant churches
exemplifies the diminished value of literature for spiritual uses.
The religious and ethical service of the days to come must interpret
the social life of the people. The great mass of the people care as
little for wealth as they do for books. The same argument as to the
diminished returns of literature may be repeated to describe the
diminished returns of private property. The economic revolution since
feudal days has exhausted the values of private property in satisfying
human need. The time was when property had an infinite value for
expressing personality. In days to come private property will still have
this value for many individuals. But among common folks generally
private property does not seem to have boundless value for human
satisfaction. Working men as I have known them do not take pains to get
rich. They know the way to wealth by economy and accumulation, but they
do not take it. They have a vast preference for the social intercourse,
friendly interchanges and mutual dependence by which their life is
refreshed, strengthened and sustained. Ethical policies of the future
while using literature and private property as efficient implements must
interpret social life itself as a flowing spring of religion and
morality.
The training of religious and ethical leaders should be undertaken in
the theological seminary and in the university in such manner as to
standardize the influence of these institutions, by the life not of the
exceptional man, but of the common man. The influence of educated men
must be used to reconstruct churches and societies upon the standards
not of the wealthy, the learned, the genius and the well-to-do, but by
the experiences of the poor, the workingman and the immigrant. The
standard in all religious and ethical institutions which profess to
represent the community is today graded up to the professional and
exceptional. The reconstruction necessary is to grade down so that the
appeal shall be to the poor and struggling man whose condition is in
jeopardy, and whose status in the community is as yet undetermined.
Institutions which appeal to the community as a whole must standardize
their policy to the level of the margin of the community.
The reconstruction of the theological seminaries is necessary, if they
are to fit men for service in communities. They render now a service
which is so valuable that one cannot pass over them lightly. They train
the candidate for the ministry by a process which develops and engages
his piety. Other university courses either ignore his religious feeling,
or if they develop it, do not harness it to the task of social
improvement. The theological seminary lays the yoke of service upon the
neck of prayer. This alone justifies its existence as a servant of the
church in the community. However, the instruction in the seminary is
rigidly grouped around courses in dead languages; which are jealous of
instruction in a living tongue. The history of discarded doctrines and
of discredited teachers is minutely taught through months, to the
exclusion of courses upon modern, living people, whose religious
experience is rich and striking. The purpose of seminary instruction is
personal culture instead of efficiency. It is the theory of the teachers
wherein they disagree with all other professional teachers, that "We do
not make preachers: the Lord makes them." They try therefore to impart
culture and personal distinction.
The seminaries need first of all flexibility of courses. The whole
traditional schedule should be made elective. The demands of the time
would then have free course in the seminary, and would rearrange the
instruction according to actual present need. The cultivation of
practical piety should receive more attention. The social life of the
students, in close association with their professors and under religious
stimuli, should be made a more powerful force than it usually is, in
creating a common ideal of service to which the seminary should commit
itself. Above all, the seminary of theology should teach sociology and
economics, as a religious interpretation. Students should after a year's
class-room work be made to investigate and report upon actual
conditions, should be delegated to study social movements, report upon
them, and to lead in discussing them. They should be trained in the use
of statistics, in graphic display of conditions, and in the use of
public reports. In the senior year they should be employed definitely in
practical work for populations, under instructors. After graduation the
young minister should, more generally than now, be employed as an
assistant to an older minister, in a large organization.
The influence of such social training would itself reform seminary
instruction. Thrust into a present-day curriculum, social science is a
foreign and alien intruder; but its value would soon be demonstrated and
other courses would be made over in new harmony with it. If some courses
be dropped, even if whole chairs be abandoned, it is better than that
the whole theological seminary be abandoned by students--which is the
apparent fate hanging over certain seminaries! What has here been said
is true of the schools of theology in all denominations, and applies
alike to both the conservative and the liberal.
In conclusion, the writer believes that the church's future is with the
self-respecting poor. Jesus and nearly every leader of a great religious
movement was of the poor and labored with the poor. The sources of
religion are those named in the Beatitudes: poverty, meekness, sorrow,
hunger, ostracism; and those are all social experiences. The service of
the church should be to these; and in serving the marginal people, whose
life is composed of the Beatitudes, the church will serve all men.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 29: "The Distribution of Wealth," by John Bates Clark.]
[Footnote 30: Luke, 6:20 ff; 15:1 ff.]
IX
NEWCOMERS IN THE COMMUNITY
One general cause is bringing new people into the average country
community. The exploitation of land expresses the transition from the
period of the land farmer to that of the scientific farmer or
husbandman. The signs of this exploitation are the retirement of farmers
from the land, the incoming of new owners in some numbers and of tenant
farmers in a large degree, into the country community. The influence of
the absentee landlord begins to be felt in communities in which the
landowner was until 1890 the only type. In most of the older states
immigration from foreign lands has not greatly affected the country
community. In Wisconsin, Minnesota and other states of the Northwest
substantial sections of the community are invaded by people of sturdy
Germanic and Norse extraction. In New England the Poles, French,
Portuguese and some Jews are settling in the country. But throughout the
states of the Union as a whole the population, both the newcomers and
older stock, are American.
The dates of this exploitation of land are, generally, from 1890 onward.
Reference is made elsewhere to the description of this process in the
Middle West.[31]
Independent of these causes the same process has appeared in the South,
in Georgia, Mississippi and in West Tennessee, as well as other states.
In sections in which the values of land have not been doubled, as in
Illinois and in Indiana they have, the same exodus from the farm and
invasion of the country community by new people has taken place.
One cause of this exploitation of land is the shrinkage in size of the
older families. Everywhere the exploitation of land is the greatest
where the soil is the richest and the farmers the most prosperous. Even
in the exceptional populations such as the Scotch Presbyterians and
Pennsylvania Germans, this effect of agricultural prosperity is slowly
at work.
In Chester County, Pennsylvania, and in Washington County, where the
most substantial farmers in the country are found, the families in the
present generation are small. Many of the older stock have no children.
Families which have retained the title of their land for eight
generations are losing their hold upon the soil, by the fact that they
have none to inherit after them.
Another cause of this exploitation of land is the increasing number of
small farms in certain regions. This means that in certain sections the
farming population has a new element, for the holders of these small
farms are many of them new to the community.
The process, which is made clear by the census of 1910, is this. The
earlier retirement from the farms was by sale, the farmer taking money
instead of land. The second stage of retirement from the farm was
through absentee landlordism and the placing of tenants on the farm.
This process has come to an end in many sections of the Middle West,
with the return of the sons of the landlord to the family acres in the
country, so that there is a sort of rhythm in the flow of population
from the country into the town and backward to the land. In this process
there is no invasion by new people, except the temporary residence of
the tenant farmer in the country, and some of these have in the process
gained a footing by ownership of land. But this ebb and flow of
population out of the country community and back again has weakened and
strained the country church and school and has not yet begun to
strengthen them. There is every evidence that with a pleasant and
agreeable country life the country community can retain the best
elements of this population, which comes and goes. The country church
and school ought to take measures to retain the best of the country
population through these changes.
Through all these causes the presence of a large proportion of aliens in
the community who are American born, but locally unattached by birth or
ownership, has effected great changes in the country church, and other
community institutions. The State of Illinois, which has a tenant farmer
population of more than 50 per cent in its richest sections, has
suffered severely through the loss of many country churches. There is no
precise measure of this loss, but a sociological survey recently made in
Illinois indicates that in the past twenty years more than fifteen
hundred country churches have been abandoned in the State. This
statement must be accepted as approximate, but the number is likely to
be greater rather than less. This abandonment of country churches has
come in the same period in which the proportion of tenant farmers has
greatly increased. Reference is made elsewhere to a similar condition in
the State of Delaware, in which the churches of the old land-owners have
been abandoned and replaced at heavy expense with poorer churches built
by the incoming tenant farmers.
Everywhere in the United States this process has in some measure
affected the country. It does not much matter whether the proportion of
tenants is increasing or decreasing, the present effect is one of
instability. In New England where in the past ten years tenantry has
been diminished ten per cent, the country churches are weakened as
elsewhere. The churches have not yet had time to recover while the
population is in a state of change.
The old order in the country is crumbling. The church is an expression
of stability. The people on whom the church always depends for its
audiences, its enthusiasm and its largest accessions, are marginal
people, working men, adolescent youths and those who are coming to a
position in the community. The exodus of these from the country
community, or the incoming of persons in these classes into the country
community, has been unfavorable to the country church at the present
time.
It may be said at this point that a state of transition is for the time
being unfavorable to ethical and moral growth. Moral conditions are
sustained by custom, and where customs are in change, moral standards
must themselves be in transition. The country community is moral so far
as adhering to the standards of the past is concerned. But the
population themselves who have to do with the country are undergoing
extraordinary moral change, with incidental loss, and many of the
problems of the United States as a whole are made more acute by the
waste of the country community. Among these should be cited the
amusement question in the small town, the decadence of the theatre in
the cheaper vaudeville, the white slave traffic and the social disorders
peculiar to unskilled laborers, many of whom come from country
communities of the United States and Europe.
It must be remembered, too, that the rural free delivery and the
telephone have entered the country community in the past twenty years
and their effect has not yet been recorded. It has probably been in the
direction of chilling instead of warming the social life of the
country. The old acquaintance and the intimate social relations of the
country community have not been helped by the telephone: and along with
the presence of aliens in the community, one-fourth or one-half or
three-fourths of the population, the telephone has had the effect of
lowering the standards of intimacy and separating the households in the
country one from another. The rural free delivery has put country people
into the general world economy and for the time being has loosened the
bonds of community life.
In those states in which the trolley system has been extended into the
country, for instance Ohio and Indiana, the process of weakening the
country population has been hastened. Sunday becomes for country people
a day of visiting the town and in great numbers they gather at the
inter-urban stations. The city and town on Sunday is filled with
careless, hurrying groups of visitors, sight-seers and callers, who have
no such fixed interest as that to be expressed in church-going or in
substantial social processes. For the time being inter-urban trolley
lines have dissipated the life of the country communities.
The duty of the church in the country under these conditions can be
accomplished only under a widened horizon. The minister and the leaders
of the church must lift up their eyes. They need not be discouraged if
for the time being they accomplish little, for the period of
exploitation must come to an end normally with the exhaustion of its
forces, before the better day can come. But this period is one of
enlargement. The units of social life will be spaced farther apart. The
country community will advance as soldiers say, "in open order." This is
true for the family life, in which the father, the mother and the
children have greater freedom from one another; as well as in the
community, in which neighbors become less intimately dependent on one
another. The church must therefore preach the world idea. At this time
of transition the country church should undertake its foreign missionary
service. The great causes of the Kingdom which are world-wide should be
presented to country people when they are lifting up their eyes from
local confines to look at the world and the city and the nation. As the
daily paper comes into the farmer's household the farmer's church should
interpret the history of the time in missionary terms. The literature of
the great missionary agencies should be distributed in the farm
household. Wherever the catalogue of the big store in Chicago or New
York is found on the center table, beside it should be placed a modern
book expressive of missionary evangelism. As the mind of the countryman
develops to comprehend the world in his daily thought under the impetus
of a daily newspaper, his conscience and his religious experience should
be expanded correspondingly.
In a time of exploitation of land the country church should regenerate
its financial system. The system of barter passes away in the day of
speculation in farm land; and the country church which can find means to
endure the period of exploitation must put its financial system on a new
basis. The tenant farmer is crudely striving through problems of
scientific agriculture. He may, indeed, be a soil robber, but by his
waste of economic values he and other men are learning to conserve. The
financial system of the church should be placed at this time on a basis
of weekly contribution, for with the tenant farmer comes system, cash
payments, regular commercial processes. The business administration of
the church must be made to correspond.
The country minister and schoolteacher must therefore become prophets of
the intellect and of the spirit, in the new order. If they cannot
minister to the new intelligence of the farmer and his children, their
institutions will necessarily decay. The farmer who succeeds in the new
social economy of the country will not endure old sermons which were
appropriate in his father's time. The emphasis must not be placed on
tradition, but upon inductive study. The preacher must not feed the
people on special instances, but upon representative cases. The
intelligence of the new type of farmer will not be satisfied with
sensations and with the unusual; but he demands to be trained in
standards of the new day, when science, system, organization and world
economy are making their demands on him and his very soul is concerned
in his response to those demands.
The task of dealing with newcomers in the country community is
educational, financial and recreative. One should add that it is also
evangelistic, but I have in mind the possibility that these newcomers
may be Catholics with whom Protestant evangelism will not be successful.
It is possible also that they will be of another Protestant sect from
that of the reader of this chapter, so that to evangelize them would
mean proselyting. The writer believes very heartily in rural evangelism.
It is an essential process in building the country church. These
chapters are devoted primarily to the building of the country community
and in that process the securing of members for the country church is
preliminary only. Leaving, therefore, the question of rural evangelism
for treatment in another place, let us take up the educational treatment
of the newcomer in the country community.
The proper machinery for this education is the common school and the
Sunday school. As the common school is treated elsewhere, the use of the
Sunday school in organizing the rural population belongs here. Few
churches realize the power and value of Sunday-school training. I am
insisting that the life of country people is religious. The use of the
Sunday school is to train the young of the community in religion. All
country people accept the Bible as a holy book. They all believe in the
education of their children and in much greater numbers than they will
respond for a church service their children will respond to the work of
religious culture on Sunday at the church. The Sunday-school
organization is interdenominational. Its lessons and its methods are a
common heritage of the churches at the present time. The machinery is
perfect, but the Sunday-school leaders lack vision and they lack the
progressive spirit. If only the teachers and ministers realized the
value of the Sunday school and its acceptance with the people, there
would be needed no other machinery for building the country community.