It is not accidental that the greatest breakdown of marriage — morals occurs at the moment of America's most pronounced religious Liberalism, after a half century of increasingly heavy poundings against the bulwarks of conservative Christianity. In Israel harlotry nourished when priests and people turned their backs upon the worship of Jehovah; and in all ages since, wherever infidelity has usurped control of high places in the churches' administration, a moral drop has quickly followed. The triumph of rationalism in Germany during the eighteenth century "Enlightenment" corresponded to a collapse of chastity. During this period, when skepticism sat on exalted thrones, the six newspapers of Hamburg constantly lampooned piety, championed paganism, glorified suicide, and stuffed their columns with ribald humor and indecent narrative. A German commentator reviewing that age of unbelief summarizes: "Perhaps never since there was an evangelical Church was the ... moral life so low. Never such looseness in morals, never so widely current a spirit of despair."
This connection between Modernism and morals is a truism of history and is conceded even by the Liberals themselves. Glenn Frank points out that the consequences of religious Liberalism are felt most strongly a generation or two after the first nourish of infidelity. In a syndicated article entitled "Theology and Morals" he writes these pointed sentences: "I want to indicate the way in which what the theologians did a half century ago is today affecting the morals and manners of the current generation. There took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century a fairly general emancipation from the traditional orthodoxy,... but for the generation which effected this emancipation it remained an intellectual ' emancipation only. ... If those pioneers in theological reconstruction could return to watch their descendants, ... they might be surprised, if not shocked, by the harvest that has sprung from the seeds of nineteenth-century dissent. ... In fields as intimately related as religion and morals it is impossible to release the forces of free and independent judgment in one and isolate the other from their impact."
If, as this analysis intimates, the last generation ate the grapes that have set modern teeth on edge, what devastation awaits us tomorrow, when present-day unbelief gathers its full momentum?
The unbelief of the hour, parading under the cloak of "modern Christianity," constitutes the most widespread anti-Scriptural movement in which American Protestantism has ever participated. Pirate pulpiteers have boarded the ship of the Church and attempted to throw overboard the doctrines through which the Church has hitherto pointed to the happiness of a God-pleasing marriage.
No corsairs of the Barbary Coast have ever sailed the seas more confidently than our clerical Captain Kidds. Modernism has undisputed sway over Protestant radio interests. National broadcasting systems generously allocate time for several weekly programs to liberal Protestantism but refuse to permit a preacher of the full Gospel to broadcast the message of Christ over their facilities even though he pay the full charges. Beer and cigarette advertisements, lip-rouge merchants, loan companies, all have been welcomed to the ether; but through modernist influence the conservative forces of Christianity are often ruled off the air or obliged to content themselves with paying a high price.
Liberalism has gained a parallel influence over the press. The statements of an unswerving preacher of the Gospel usually bring little that our newspapers are eager to print, while Liberalises, entirely destitute of any compulsion to preach the Law and Gospel, may indulge in ear-tickling sensations or sophisticated wise cracks and usurp the lion's share of the newspapers' columns. In this way the unthinking masses are led to regard the' voice of Liberalism as the utterance of the Christian Church.
Christian institutions founded for the perpetuation of the Savior's doctrines have been seized by the machinations of Modernism. In 1885 Daniel Sharpe Ford, Boston publisher, left more than one third of a million dollars for the erection of an institution which was to help men "to accept Christ and Christ's teachings as the guides of their life." This fund was devoted to the establishment of the well known Ford Hall Forum. But the men who are featured on its program, far from promoting the interests of Christ's kingdom, have sometimes shown notoriously atheistic tendencies. The speaker who has been heard most frequently in this forum wrote among other things: "I do not know when my redeemer will live or whose redeemer I may be, except in the sense that every man is his own redeemer." The second most popular speaker in the Ford Hall Forum characteristically attacks Christianity in statements like these: "The doctrines ... which make up the content of Christian tradition are simply not true. They have been refuted a thousand times. They are ignored in our schools and colleges and laughed at in our newspapers.... The Church is disloyal to truth; she is engaged in the business of falsehood and deceit." (From Ernest Gordon: The Leaven of the Sadducees, p. 259.)
The complete triumph of Modernism in our country, however, has been its usurpation of control over the large Protestant churches, particularly through the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. Theoretically dedicated to the spreading of the Savior's Gospel, the policies and pronouncements of this organization, which claims to be the voice of Protestant Christianity in our country, have steadily assumed a negative attitude, with increasing concessions to Modernism. Representing a membership of 22,000,000 Protestants, although large churches like the Synodical Conference of the Lutheran Church refusing participation, this federation has passed under liberal control. Its revolt against Scriptural standards, as will be shown, is conspicuous in its attitude on marriage.
It must be said to the shame of our day, just as in classical antiquity pagan priests were leaders in the violation of family ethics, so today some of the most obnoxious protests against the divinely sanctified order emanate from liberal preachers.
A pastor of a Brooklyn, New York, Unitarian church told his congregation: "From my experience as a minister I know that marriage is not feasible for the average person today. The basic possibility ... of a man or woman living together over any considerable period of time and retaining their respect for each other is at best precarious." He added that both he and his wife had retained their independence and continued their pre-marriage friendships with members of the opposite sex.
A preacher of a Madison, Wisconsin, students' chapel asserted: "There is a double standard. Freedom for unmarried men is accepted. ... Sex morals are changing and will change.... Divorce is a bit of the new morality sanctioned by religion. So is birth control a bit of the new morality. I have heard no Protestant Church say anything against this practice. Having a large family used to be considered a virtue; now it is regarded with suspicion."
A New York Episcopal rector declared to a newspaper reporter: "Orthodox theology means nothing to civilized people. Sociology is more important than religious doctrine. I base my religion on these statements: For example, before I marry a couple, I give them advice on birth control, compatibility in the sexual relationship, and the family budget. Then I talk to them about religion. Then I marry them."
The rector of a Protestant Episcopal church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, told a San Francisco church congress: "Even with those who do not go so far" (i. e., as endorsing promiscuity) "the idea that many of us had that such things as petting or over-familiarity with the opposite sex should be saved at least until the time of engagement, if not until marriage, on the basis that married life would be happier, has disappeared."
The director of religion at a well-known California university championed laxity in this newspaper statement: "Our keen and racy college girls may shock you with breezy talks about birth control, boasts of practicing man's vices, laugh at coarse jokes, flirt with sex risks, and bid for astounding frankness; but when they settle down to honest-to-goodness living, most of them drop as by magic most of this high-powered slang talk, this free-and-easy love line, and this posed college chatter that shocks their sedate elders into scolding fits about 'the sins of this lawless generation.'"
The president of an Episcopal seminary asked a convocation of the Congregational Church whether the commandments and prohibitions of religious ethics were really anything more than ecstatic utterances of highly emotional men and women. Then he descended to these depths: "Nature stands above all creeds and dogmas, all codes and regulations. It is science, not religion, that tells us about nature. Of course, nature will triumph in the end. All things, all gods, all human society, will ultimately yield to the program of nature. Much of Christian ethics seems little more than whims and vagaries of Mrs. Grundy. The noble experiment of Prohibition or the equally unnatural present-day marriage legislation are both unscientific."
This trend is also noticeable in the utterances of a Committee on Marriage and Home of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ. One of the brochures published by this committee has been described in this thought provoking review: "Had this pamphlet come out of Russia direct as one of their means of breaking down all morality, the family, and the home, as the final step toward Communism, we would have felt it well qualified to carry out the intent of its authors."
A Baptist group, meeting in New York City on October 2, 1934, passed this resolution: "We, the Interstate Evangelistic Association, in session at Calvary Baptist Church, with delegates and representatives from thirteen States, ... denounce ... the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America and urge that all conservative Christian churches immediately withdraw and disassociate themselves from said council. In this connection we denounce especially the countenance and support which said council is giving to the spread of indecent literature, designed, under false colors, to poison the minds of our youth. What has been done in this direction is so filthy as to pass belief. It constitutes a scandal and a shame to all decent people, Christian or non-Christian."
Significant side-lights on the widely heralded Reconciliation Trips advocated by the Federal Council of Churches, are furnished in three typical programs:
"Trip on Changes in Sex Attitude vs. Monogamy, Birth Control, Companionate Marriage, especially arranged by Prof. Leroy E. Bowman for his class at Columbia University."
"Margaret Sanger will direct inspection of Birth Control Clinic. Mrs. F. Robinson Jones, president. Board of Directors, American Birth Control League, on Birth Control. Frank Olmstead, friend of Judge Ben Lindsey, on Companionate Marriage, also speaker on Sex Attitudes vs. Monogamy."
"Dr. Eugene L. Swan on Love Art. Dr. Eliot White on Companionate Marriage. Love Art, which depicts the art of love where goodness and beauty meet in uplifting ecstasy, under the leadership of Dr. Eliot White, formerly of Grace Episcopal Church."
In the push for easier, cheaper, and quicker divorce some of the most enthusiastic advocates of this moral let down. have been the Unitarian-minded preachers and the radical teachers of heavily endowed but poorly attended divinity schools. How else can we interpret the practical endorsement of divorce furnished by the example of modern ministers or this assault on the sanctity of marriage by Anna Garland Spencer, a clergyman, who asks (The Family and Its Members, p. 244 ff.): "Now that the moral sense of most people allows another trial on Love's Rialto, there are many individuals who can leave 'that dead thing' to find its own grave and in the light of some new and dearer affection go on to a renewed promise of joy and life. Can we think that wrong?" What other interpretation can we place on the words of the Rev. John Thompson, Methodist minister in Chicago: "If Christ were on earth today, He would approve divorce in many instances of matrimonial unhappiness. He did not prohibit divorce as we know it. If He were in this country today, where we have kind, wise, and discriminating judges deciding on domestic infelicities, He might recognize more than one ground for divorce. Should two persons be compelled to live together when all affection which constitutes real marriage is dead? I am not alarmed at the increase in divorces"?
Modernism in the United States today stands committed to support the theory of the artificial limitation of the family. In 1931 the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America placed its sanction on birth control, following in this the liberal attitude of the Lambeth Conference in England. These American church-bodies are listed as supporters: Special Commission of the Presbyterian Church in America; Legislative Committee of the Ethical Culture Society; New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church; Conference of Congregational Churches of Connecticut; Central Conference of American Rabbis; American Unitarian Association; Universalist General Convention; Southern California Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church; Board of Managers of Five Point Mission, Community Church of New York.
A magazine writer calls attention to the fact that many leaders of the clergy, far from frowning upon birth control, are recognizing it as "essential to the welfare of society." Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick is cited as one of its staunchest defenders, and his emphatic words are recorded: "The day will come when the old haphazard ^ spawning of many children, with popular laudation as a reward and perhaps a letter of appreciation from the White House, will be looked upon as utter barbarism. . . . You cannot trust God to bring everything out all right if you let the earth's population double every sixty years."
A symposium of clerical statements by New York preachers would reveal an outspoken endorsement of birth restriction that ranges from the pointed opinion of Dr. Karl Reiland, liberal Protestant Episcopalian ("The Church's attitude on birth control must change. It must support this method of raising the level of existence. Objections on religious grounds are all irrelevant"), to the repeated applause which metropolitan preachers have lent the Federal Council of Churches pronouncements.
Altogether, then, modernistic Protestantism as champion of the Christian home presents a sorry spectacle. Sophisticated preachers smile indulgently at marital standards. Divorce has too often lost its clerical stigma. The list of divorced doctors of divinity grows. Pulpit exponents of barnyard morality become louder. Zealous clerics make bids for cheap publicity by inviting the divorced son of an American President to church services. And all the while bewildered Christians ask: "If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (Ps. 11:3.)
We need not search far a field for the basic factor in the relation of unbelief and immorality. As soon as the philosophy of Havelock Ellis, Schmalhausen, Harry Elmer Barnes, enters the pulpit and permeates pastoral practices, we have an explanation for the sophisticated air that surrounds liberalistic preachers, and we understand tjie motivation of the new clergyman, so well described in this telltale sketch from Harper's (October, 1931): "He defends modern youth.... He boasts of actors and actresses among his buddies, going backstage when opportunity allows. He visits artists in their studios and rushes into the pulpit to tell the world that these people, once looked upon as lechers and outcasts, are fundamentally good and essentially religious. He denies that the world is irreligious by denying irreligion."
The current trend of liberal Protestantism is directed toward the ignoring of sin. Dr. Don O. Shelton, president of the National Bible Institute of New York City, presents statistical evidence of the pulpit's silence on sin: "Sin has largely dropped out of the vocabulary of the modern church. Four New York morning papers, the Times, the Herald-Tribune, the World, and the American, last Monday generously gave space to summaries of forty-one sermons with an aggregate of more than 16,000 words. In these 'sin' was not used nor even remotely referred to, except in one brief summary of 106 words of a discourse given at St. Patrick's Cathedral. The omission of 'sin' from the Christian preachers' messages is astounding in view of the fact that 'sin' is a central word in the vocabulary of the Bible, in which it appears 416 times."
In the Living Church the new rector of a city parish receives this advice from one of his vestry: "Don't preach about sin; for none of the worshipers at the Church of the Holy Innocents is a sinner, at least none of the regular pew holders."
With modem theology tacitly but determinately ruling out sin and substituting "complexes," "self-expression," "new freedom," "superiority to inhibitions," for the ugly, three-lettered word; with liberal church-leaders endorsing the "Follow your impulse" philosophy of atheist teachers, the spread of animalism receives powerful impetus. This indifference toward right and wrong helps produce the attitude which a feature-writer of the New York. American scores in this sarcastic vein: "This is going to be a pretty good world in the very near future. Because sin is losing all its popularity and becoming as prosaic and innocuous as breakfast foods. Once sin was rare and exceptional. It was either black or purple or red. Now it is just a dull, faded mauve and as prevalent as hay-fever. 'Beautiful Sinners and Savage Sins' announces the advertisement of a new motion picture. Ho hum. Well, sin has got to be awfully savage these days to keep us from yawning. 'Temptation' used to be something that a woman was taught to resist and a man was looking for. Now, every girl tries to look like a 'temptation.'"
A strange attitude toward sin is featured by the Oxford Group, popularly known as Buchmanism. Into this religious movement, which seeks to save the nation and civilization through Moral Rearmament, radical Modernists and conservative Fundamentalists are all welcomed, with no discrimination. One of its leaders wrote: "Some of us are Modernists, and some are Fundamentalists; but we do not quarrel. These difficulties simply do not count." One of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Oxford Group in the United States is the Christian Register (Unitarian), an avowed enemy of Christ's deity.
A characteristic teaching of this group, which has enlisted the support of thousands in upper-class society in America and abroad, is the practice of "sharing." Buchmanism requires that those who would enter into the fullness of its blessings learn openly to confess their sins and all that separates them from God. The initiate into Buchmanism is told to choose a sharing partner, to whom he reveals his secret sins. The very act of confessing becomes a virtue in itself.
After these sins have thus been shared, they are confessed to God, and the lives are "surrendered" to Him. This "surrender" is not to be confused with the spiritual conversion, the work of the Holy Spirit through the Word of God; for the Oxford "surrender" is first of all a resolve for a social, outward change. It resembles more the Mohammedan resignation to Allah.
The "sharing" and "surrender" usually occur at a house party. A particularly well-known house party — besides the annual meetings at Oxford — was the fashionable lodge at Briar Cliff Manor (Westchester County, New York) a few years ago, to which guests had come from various parts of the country and even from Europe. Here a former Glasgow Communist as well as several former football stars, a sprinkling of university professors, and a group of brokers gave their testimony. All of the 500 who attended the session, which lasted for ten days, were invited to share with one another. At the Monterey, California, 1939 house party, much the same procedure was followed.
"Sharing," the open avowal of sins, may become very dangerous. Experience has shown that very often these confessions deal with matters of sex. It was this emphasis, so we have been told, that provoked the ban of Buchmanism from Princeton. In the excerpt from a private letter written by a Princeton student in the Lutheran Herald of April 11, 1933, we read this revelation: "It is an undeniable fact that this 'sharing' of experiences almost always had the effect of placing a premium on past sins. I have been told by students who attended these house meetings that the one who made the greatest contribution to the meeting had the greatest sins to confess. As a matter of fact, however, I am sure that the Christianity of this group was not so perverse." This aspect of Buchmanism discloses another ugly characteristic. The confession dwelling largely on sex made these meetings little more than a realistic version of "True Confessions." Now, however, we are told that sex confessions are discouraged.
The Rev. Harold T. Commons, who was actively associated with the movement for three years and who attended many house parties, wrote, after severing his connections with the group, that the "method of open and public confession of sins is a very questionable procedure. It produces the desired psychological effect in the meeting, but it incites undue emotionalism and also tends to lower the standards and to produce, on the basis of sin, a sort of fellowship that seems to me very undesirable. Specific sins, after continued confession, seem not quite so terrible as they were at first. I well remember a statement by one of the leaders that 'the fellowship of sinners is more real than the fellowship of saints.'" Dr. G. H. Stevenson, Canadian physician, lists as one of the six points on which he indicts Buchmanism the "emotional orgies dealing with sex, which might become almost a verbal form of sex perversion by 'sharing' them with others."
The cry of this hour for all Christians in all churches must be: Back to the moral standards of Jesus Christ! Back to the sacred-ness and indissolubility of marriage! Back to the glory of parenthood and the blessedness of childhood! Back to the rigid requirements of purity and the stern disavowal of any compromise with shady immorality! Back to Christ for pardon and peace!
If this cry means that Christian churches banish from their pulpits and their theological institutions those who refuse to accept Christ's code of marital and domestic ethics; if it means that young people in Protestant denominations who know that the call to follow Christ is stronger than the call to follow applauded preachers rise up in pointed protest against every modernistic betrayal of Christian virtues, even if it means that congregations may be split into liberal and conservative elements, homes divided against themselves, ties of kinship and friendship may be torn, we still cry: Back to the moral standards of Jesus Christ.