Out here on the Pacific coast, particularly in Los Angeles, one is
forcibly impressed with the influence of environment upon religion.
Every kind of cult seems to flourish in Los Angeles, and most of them
are pantheistic. Every sorry oriental religious nostrum is borrowed
in the vain effort to give meaning to pointless lives and to impart a
thrill to vacuous existences. The pantheism is partly due, no doubt,
to the salubrious nature of the southern California climate. Wherever
nature is unusually benignant, men tend to identify God and the natural
world and to lose all moral vigor in the process.
But that is hardly the whole explanation. There are too many retired
people in Los Angeles. They left the communities where their
personalities had some social significance in order to vegetate on
these pleasant shores. In this sorry and monotonous existence they try
to save their self-respect by grasping for some religious faith which
will not disturb their ease by any too rigorous ethical demands. Of
course Aimee Semple McPherson is more successful than the pantheistic
cults. She fights the devil and gives the people a good show. She
storms against the vices which flourish in this paradise without
touching their roots. Furthermore she has the art of casting the glow
of religious imagination over sensuality without changing its essential
nature. In that art she seems to be typical rather than unique for this
whole civilization. If she is unique it is only in her success.
They are always telling me that Detroit is the most typically American
of our cities. Perhaps Detroit is typical of the America which works
feverishly to get what it wants, while Los Angeles is typical of
the America which has secured what it wants. On the whole I prefer
the former to the latter. An honest enthusiasm even for inadequate
ends is better than a vacuous existence from which even the charm
of an imperfect ambition has departed. Of course the paganism of
power is more dangerous than the paganism of pleasure, but from the
perspective of a mere observer it is more interesting. Who would not
prefer Napoleon to his imbecile brothers who merely luxuriated in the
prosperity created by his ambition?
Only in the case of complete innocency, as that of a child’s, is life
more beautiful in repose than in activity. Character is created by
a balance of tensions, and is more lovely even when the balance is
imperfect than in a state of complete relaxation.
Of course Los Angeles has more culture than our midwestern cities.
Culture flourishes in leisure and sometimes redeems it. But it will
be a long time before this kind of leisure will produce more than
dilettantism.
_1925_
We had a communion service tonight (Good Friday) and I preached on the
text “We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and
to the Gentiles foolishness, but to them that are called the power of
God and the wisdom of God.” I don’t think I ever felt greater joy in
preaching a sermon. How experience and life change our perspectives! It
was only a few years ago that I did not know what to make of the cross;
at least I made no more of it than to recognize it as a historic fact
which proved the necessity of paying a high price for our ideals. Now I
see it as a symbol of ultimate reality.
It seems pathetic to me that liberalism has too little appreciation of
the tragedy of life to understand the cross and orthodoxy insists too
much upon the absolute uniqueness of the sacrifice of Christ to make
the preaching of the cross effective. How can anything be uniquely
potent if it is absolutely unique? It is because the cross of Christ
symbolizes something in the very heart of reality, something in
universal experience that it has its central place in history. Life
is tragic and the most perfect type of moral beauty inevitably has at
least a touch of the tragic in it. Why? That is not so easy to explain.
But love pays such a high price for its objectives and sets its
objectives so high that they can never be attained. There is therefore
always a foolish and a futile aspect to love’s quest which give it the
note of tragedy.
What makes this tragedy redemptive is that the foolishness of love is
revealed as wisdom in the end and its futility becomes the occasion for
new moral striving. About heroes, saints, and saviors it must always
remain true “that they, without us should not be made perfect.”
_1925_
I wonder if the strong sense of frustration which comes over me so
frequently on Sunday evening and to which many other parsons have
confessed, is merely due to physical lassitude or whether it arises
from the fact that every preacher is trying to do a bigger thing
than he is equal to--and fails. I have an uneasy feeling that it may
be native honesty of the soul asserting itself. Aren’t we preachers
talking altogether too much about what can be proved and justified only
in experience?
_1925_
Mr. ---- spoke at a luncheon meeting today. He made everyone writhe as
he pictured the injustices and immoralities of our present industrial
system. The tremendous effect of his powerful address was partially
offset by the bitterness with which he spoke and by the ill-concealed
assumption that his hearers would not care enough about what he said to
change their attitudes. I suppose it is difficult to escape bitterness
when you have the eyes to see and the heart to feel what others are too
blind and too callous to notice. The mordant note in the discourse of
the prophet may not only be inevitable but pedagogically effective.
Perhaps there is no other way to arouse a people who are so oblivious
to the real issues of modern civilization. Yet I am compelled to doubt
the pedagogical benefits of this approach. While I use it myself,
sometimes I don’t like to have it used on me. It freezes my soul. And
there is usually some injustice, some insupportable generalization,
involved in this method which obsesses my mind and makes it difficult
for me to see the general truth with which the speaker wants to impress
me.
If I had to choose between this bitterness and the blandness of many
pulpiteers I would, of course, choose the former. Better a warrior’s
grimness than the childish sentimentalities of people who are too
ignorant or too selfish to bear the burdens of the world. There are too
many men in the pulpit who look and act for all the world like cute
little altar boys who have no idea that the mass in which they are
participating is a dramatization of tragedy.
Yet there seems to be no reason why a warrior ought not maintain his
effectiveness and yet overcome his bitterness, particularly if he is
a warrior who is fighting “not against flesh and blood but against
spiritual wickedness in high places.” The one certain cure for a bitter
spirit seems to me a realization that the critic is himself involved in
the sins which he castigates. Man is imperialistic and even parasitic
in his nature. He lives his life at the expense of other lives. By both
outer compulsion and inner restraint, his expansive desires are brought
under sufficient discipline to make social life possible.
But there is no social life, not even in the family, which does
not illustrate this native imperialism in life. Look at all these
professional people, preachers, professors and doctors! Even in the
moment in which they declare their superiority over the commercial
world, where life is more frankly selfish and more obviously brutal,
they illustrate the common human frailty by some petty jockeying for
position, or some jealous depreciation of the success of others, or
some childish ego-assertion.
The pessimist might draw the conclusion from this fact that we can make
progress only by a reorganization of society and never by a reformation
of human nature. But that conclusion does not seem to me to follow from
the facts. We do need a constant reorganization of social processes and
systems, so that society will not aggravate but mitigate the native
imperialistic impulses of man. The greed of modern civilization is
partly an expression of a universal human tendency and partly a vice
peculiar to a civilization with our kind of productive process.
But meanwhile we can not afford to leave the capacities of man out of
the picture. There seems to me no reason why we can not cure people of
greed by making them conscious of both the nature and the consequences
of their expansive tendencies. Only we ought to realize, while we are
doing it, that our own life reveals some refined form of the sin which
we abhor. That will make it possible to undertake the task of world
regeneration with a spirit of patience and humility.
The modern pulpit does not face this problem because it is not really
preaching repentance. Its estimate of human nature is too romantic
to give people any appreciation of the brutalities of life which are
frequently most real where they are most covert--in the lives of the
respectable classes. But whenever a prophet is born, either inside or
outside of the church, he does face the problem of preaching repentance
without bitterness and of criticising without spiritual pride.
It is a real problem. Mr. ---- is effective, after a fashion, because
he is an itinerant. We only have to hear him once in so many years.
But think of sitting Sunday after Sunday under some professional holy
man who is constantly asserting his egotism by criticising yours. I
would rebel if I were a layman. A spiritual leader who has too many
illusions is useless. One who has lost his illusions about mankind and
retains his illusions about himself is insufferable. Let the process of
disillusionment continue until the self is included. At that point, of
course, only religion can save from the enervation of despair. But it
is at that point that true religion is born.
_1926_
Preachers who are in danger of degenerating into common scolds might
learn a great deal from H----’s preaching style. I am not thinking
now of the wealth of scholarship which enriches his utterances but
of his technique in uniting religious emotion with aspiration rather
than with duty. If he wants to convict Detroit of her sins he preaches
a sermon on “the City of God,” and lets all the limitations of this
get-rich-quick metropolis emerge by implication. If he wants to flay
the denominationalism of the churches he speaks on some topic which
gives him the chance to delineate the ideal and inclusive church.
On the whole, people do not achieve great moral heights out of a sense
of duty. You may be able to compel them to maintain certain minimum
standards by stressing duty, but the highest moral and spiritual
achievements depend not upon a push but upon a pull. People must be
charmed into righteousness. The language of aspiration rather than that
of criticism and command is the proper pulpit language. Of course it
has its limitations. In every congregation there are a few perverse
sinners who can go into emotional ecstasies about the “City of God” and
yet not see how they are helping to make their city a hell-hole.
It is not a good thing to convict sin only by implication. Sometimes
the cruel word of censure must be uttered. “Woe unto you Scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites” was spoken by one who incarnated tenderness. The
language of aspiration is always in danger of becoming soft; but it is
possible to avoid that pitfall and yet not sink into a habit of cheap
scolding. I like the way H---- does it.
_1926_
Cynics sometimes insinuate that you can love people only if you don’t
know them too well; that a too intimate contact with the foibles and
idiosyncrasies of men will tempt one to be a misanthrope. I have not
found it so. I save myself from cynicism by knowing individuals, and
knowing them intimately. If I viewed humanity only from some distant
and high perspective I could not save myself from misanthropy. I think
the reason is simply that people are not as decent in their larger
relationship as in their more intimate contacts.
Look at the industrial enterprise anywhere and you find criminal
indifference on the part of the strong to the fate of the weak.
The lust for power and the greed for gain are the dominant note in
business. An industrial overlord will not share his power with his
workers until he is forced to do so by tremendous pressure. The middle
classes, with the exception of a small minority of intelligentsia, do
not aid the worker in exerting this pressure. He must fight alone.
The middle classes are in fact quite incapable of any high degree of
social imagination. Their experience is too limited to give them a
clear picture of the real issues in modern industrial life. Non-union
mines may organize in West Virginia and reduce miners to a starvation
wage without challenging the conscience of a great middle class nation.
If the children of strikers are starving it is more difficult to find
support for them than to win contributors for the missions of the
church. America may arouse the resentment of the world by its greed
and all the good people of the American prairie will feel nothing but
injured innocence from these European and Asiatic reactions to our
greed.
Men are clearly not very lovely in the mass. One can maintain
confidence in them only by viewing them at close range. Then one may
see the moral nobility of unselfish parenthood, the pathetic eagerness
of father and mother to give their children more of life than they
enjoyed; the faithfulness of wives to their erring husbands; the
grateful respect of mature children for their old parents; the effort
of this and that courageous soul to maintain personal integrity in a
world which continually tempts to dishonesty, and the noble aspirations
of hearts that must seem quite unheroic to the unheeding world.
The same middle classes which seem so blind to the larger moral
problems of society have, after all, the most wholesome family life of
any group in society.
_1926_
Here is a preacher whom I have suspected of cowardice for years because
he never deviated by a hair’s breadth from the economic prejudices
of his wealthy congregation. I thought he knew better but was simply
afraid to speak out and seek to qualify the arch-conservatism of
his complacent crowd with a little Christian idealism. But I was
mistaken. I have just heard that he recently included in his sermon a
tirade against women who smoke cigarettes and lost almost a hundred
of his fashionable parishioners. He is evidently not lacking courage
in matters upon which he has deep convictions. Nobody, for that
matter, lacks courage when convictions are strong. Courage is simply
the rigorous devotion to one set of values against other values and
interests.
Protestantism’s present impotence in qualifying the economic and
social life of the nation is due not so much to the pusillanimity of
the clerical leaders as to its individualistic traditions. The church
honestly regards it of greater moment to prevent women from smoking
cigarettes than to establish more Christian standards in industrial
enterprise. A minister who tries to prevent fashionable women from
smoking cigarettes is simply trying to enforce a code of personal habit
established in the middle classes of the nineteenth century upon the
plutocratic classes of the twentieth century. The effort is not only
vain but has little to do with essential Christianity.
I would not deny that some real values may be at stake in such
questions of personal habits. But they affect the dominant motives
which determine the spirituality or sensuality of character but
slightly. The church does not seem to realize how unethical a
conventionally respectable life may be.
_1926_
Some of these young business men in the congregation would compare
favorably with any leaders who grace the pulpits of our churches. Their
family relations seem to be almost ideal. They are trying honestly
to live a Christian life in their business relations. Lack of power
sometimes means that they cannot go as far in experimenting with
Christian values as they would like. But they are not complacent. They
are eager to learn, and are fair and careful in their judgments. Their
virtues are acquired with less self-conscious effort than those of
more studious people. They think and plan, but they do not stop the
adventure of life to meditate upon its difficulties and inadequacies.
Extravert people are on the whole happier and more wholesome than the
introverts. If they do not act too unreflectively, they are able to
define their goals fairly accurately and they certainly pursue them
with more robust energy than do the moody intellectuals.
It is surprising, too, how considerate and generous they are in their
relations with one another and with me. They take my impetuosities
for granted and exhibit little pettiness in their dealings with one
another. The women do not get along quite so well together. They are
too new at playing the game of life with others. But I will not
belabor that point. I may be exhibiting bachelor prejudices in making
it. At any rate I am willing to compare this group of young men who
bear the burdens of our church with any faculty group in the country.
They can teach you nothing about philosophy, but they do teach you much
about life and they reënforce your confidence in human nature.
_1926_