The Supreme Court is hearing arguments this week on the issue of Bible reading and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the public schools.
That public schools do not exist for the conduct of religious exercises is becoming increasingly clear. We do not, therefore, think that a Supreme Court decision along the lines of the earlier New York Regents prayer ruling—which prohibited government-approved or government-sponsored religious exercises—will stir as wide a demand for a Christian Amendment as happened a year ago. We cannot complain at one moment, with an eye on the proper use of public funds, that sectarian schools obviously create a worship atmosphere not possible in public schools, and contend at another moment, with an eye on spiritual imperatives, that public and parochial schools must preserve an identical atmosphere.
The public schoolroom in a republic dedicated to separation of church and state should be used for evangelistic purposes by neither Protestant, Catholic, nor Jew; by neither atheist nor theist; nor by the die-hard humanists who still propagate John Dewey’s outmoded philosophy.
But the public schools, if they take their academic mission seriously, do exist for the pursuit of the whole truth. And that pursuit includes an understanding both of the distinctive convictions that historically underlie Western culture and of the vision of life held by the colonists and the founding fathers. (See the editorial feature, “Bible Reading in the Public Schools,” pp. 31, 32, this issue, for a background report.)
Those who fear a trend toward secularism in our public institutions have every cause for alarm. If the Supreme Court rules against Bible reading under all circumstances in the public schools, or if it acts against Christian practices in a manner that again leaves in doubt the propriety of a narrow or broad interpretation of its own ruling, then we may well expect to see a great wave of public indignation. Citizens know that the American wall of separation between church and state is serpentine, but they recognize the hard reality and desirability of the wall. Therefore they look—and rightly so—to the Supreme Court not simply for a series of pragmatic adjustments to the changing temper of our times but for a clarification of controlling principles. In this respect the Supreme Court is very much on trial.
The Bible belongs in the public schools as well as in private schools as a sourcebook in the academic process—not indeed as the only required book, but surely as one of the great books.
Even corporate or cultic expressions that reflect convictions the founding fathers insisted upon in drafting the nation’s political document—such as affirmation of the divine Creator as the source of man’s inalienable rights—need not be challenged by the exclusion of religious acts of worship.
Where the Bible is removed from the classroom as an instrument of learning and the nation’s distinctive political philosophy is obscured and compromised, the citizenry may well ask whether atheistic and naturalistic forces may not be seeking to foist their partisan prejudices upon our national institutions. The course of recent modern history makes plain that where public institutions are not inspired by a confidence in transcendent justice and objective morality, such institutions do not long vacillate in the gray twilight zone where nothing is any longer clearly white or black; instead, public institutions detached from an anchor to the supernatural world glide quickly into the service of anti-Christ and promote widespread skepticism about everything sacred and holy.
What is really on trial in this hour is the spiritual conscience and commitment of every individual citizen. In the last analysis, no nation can thrive spiritually and morally nor long retain its feeling for social justice in the absence of voluntary personal dedication to holy priorities. Where such uncoerced dedication is lacking, particularly in the home, it is easy for parents troubled over the erosion of inherited values to seek an. institutionalizing of these values in order to protect and preserve them. But faith in the living God cannot be coerced by legislative action or by public education, and, moreover, ought not to be. The classroom dedicated to the whole truth has no right to suppress the teachings of Moses and Jesus, of Isaiah and Paul, in order to give one-sided advantage to the teachings of Darwin and Dewey. What the Supreme Court debate really constitutes, however, is a call to every American family to determine what convictions are of utmost priority, and to establish these in the life of the home. A spiritual witness that radiates to the community and to the nation from this intimate center will have greater transforming power—even in our public institutions—than any alternative devoid of this voluntary dedication.
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Spain, Soviet Russia, And Religious Freedom
In discussions of religious freedom, Spain and Russia figure prominently. In such context they are not set forth as champions, to say the least. Nonetheless, in the last few days both Moscow and Madrid have made news on a subject which is a sort of shadowland for both nations.
From Moscow: Izvestia (official government newspaper) carried an article written by Petr Kolonytsky, chief editor of the country’s main atheistic publication, a magazine called Science and Religion. Marking the forty-fifth anniversary of the decree on separation of church and state signed by Lenin, the article claimed that “real freedom of conscience” exists in Russia. As “proof” that no religious persecution is to be found in his country, Kolonytsky highlighted the fact that “no form in Russia asks about religious beliefs, and no one is obliged to report about going to church.” He charged that in “capitalistic countries” there is “no freedom to be an atheist,” but he offered no examples to support his thesis.
As if to punctuate the editor’s remarks, word came of the release of Ukrainian Archbishop Josyf Slipyi, Roman Catholic prelate who had been imprisoned by the Soviet Union for eighteen years.
From Madrid: Time reports that at a secret meeting in the Spanish capital, the nation’s Metropolitan Council—composed of fifteen ranking prelates, including four cardinals—approved in principle a “statute for non-Catholic religions” proposed by Spain’s Foreign Minister Fernando María Castiella y Maíz. Time describes it:
While still denying non-Catholics the right to proselytize, the proposed law will grant major Protestant churches juridical recognition as religious groups, allow them to run their own schools and seminaries, print and distribute their own translations of the Bible, operate hospitals and cemeteries. The proposed law even affirms the right of all Spaniards to hold every civic office but that of chief of state, who must be a Catholic.…
The bill is virtually certain to pass, a cheering development for Spain’s tiny Protestant minority (30,000). For as Time points out, while Spanish laws theoretically grant Protestants the right to the unhampered private exercise of their faith, their churches have no legal standing but “must operate as ‘foreign commercial firms.’ Missionaries have been fined and jailed for distributing the Bible, their churches shut for violations of obscure civil laws.” And the forthcoming law “may be nullified in practice by individual Catholic politicians.”
It is such treatment which can make a United States Protestant wonder at times whether he would be more at home in Roman Catholic Spain or in Communist Russia. The latter nation affords him more co-religionists. There are more than 550,000 Russian Baptists alone, and their churches are said to exert an influence over approximately four million people. (There are presumed to be some forty million Russian Orthodox Church members.) Not too long ago the Communist press printed 15,000 hymnbooks for Baptists, along with a few Bibles. It has printed Bibles for domestic use and for export.
Christian baptisms of adults and children in Russia are holding their own, if not increasing. But in contrast to the hopeful development in Spain, American churchmen who have visited Russia have reported a building up of pressure on the churches there, even though the results have seemingly been the reverse of those intended. Construction of new churches is almost never allowed. Publication of only a very small amount of religious materials is possible.
No formal religious training is permitted until the age of eighteen, and the number of seminaries is restricted. Nor may the church do any benevolence work.
But even if Protestants conclude they are better off in Catholic Spain than they are in Communist Russia, there is something terribly, terribly wrong with the fact that even a basis for comparison exists.
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Good Beginning For Fitness: Hike To A Church Service
Tongue in full cheek, Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s chubby White House news secretary, called off his promised fifty-mile hike under the President’s fitness program. Leaning heavily on the advice of many doctors, he confessed “My shape is not good,” and added, “I may be plucky, but I am not stupid.” Besides, he said, the long trek was superfluous since Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s fifty-mile hike had “amply demonstrated” the fitness of the entire Administration.
One could wish that the Administration would make the streets of Washington a fit place to walk. Not everyone can be accompanied by secret-service personnel. In recent months, neither congressmen, personnel of foreign embassies, nor their wives have found walking in the District of Columbia a safe exercise. In spite of mounting concern and more police surveillance, the rate of criminal assault on District streets was 17.4 per cent higher in January than for the same month last year. Why walk fifty miles to kill yourself when you can do half as well walking a few blocks around the White House or Capitol Hill at night?
The President’s stimulation of the finer arts has also reached far. The Commission on Religion and Arts of the American Unitarian Universalist Association recently urged that the dance, properly used, be accepted as a medium of religious expression. For this there is biblical support. But the physical, moral, and religious level of the average American being what it is, perhaps we had best begin at the bottom—like a good walk to church on Sunday. For, as Salinger suggested, exercise should be adjusted to fit the shape one is in.
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The Cuban Crisis And Pacifist Reaction
The Cuban crisis ushered in a new departure in the peace-war issue which must now be confronted by pacifist dialectic. So believes renowned pacifist A. J. Muste, who presents his response to the recent crisis in a paper, “Relation of Love and Power in the Contemporary Setting,” prepared for a Church Peace Mission seminar. For Muste, the “colossal Fact” of the crisis was that “the decision to use nuclear weapons, risk nuclear war, was taken.” He declares: “The phrase that we have to learn to ‘live with’ the cold war is often used. What we now have to ‘live with’ is the decision to use the nuclear arsenal in a concrete situation, for a certain political objective. Politically and morally this was done, though we were spared the physical execution of the decision.”
Numerous “Christian teachers,” says Muste, “who have presumably been able to maintain a foothold on the narrow and shaky ground that having an arsenal of nuclear weapons for deterrence is not the same as being committed to their use are now confronted with a new situation. We did commit ourselves, or the President committed us, to their use. At the very least, it seems to me, this now has to be said in clear and unequivocal terms and this policy has to be repudiated by all committed to non-use of nuclear weapons or another retreat of Christian forces will have taken place.”
So runs Muste’s “post-Cuban” challenge to those teachers whom he names “nuclear pacifists,” as distinguished from pacifists of the more conventional sort. “It is one thing,” he continues, “to possess nuclear weapons as part of a general pattern of international relations inherited from the past, these weapons presumably fulfilling the function of maintaining a balance of power or ‘terror’ which may forestall such crises as occurred over Soviet missiles in Cuba and facilitate negotiation about disarmament. Politically, it is quite a different matter for an Administration to map out a concrete policy in a specific situation which outlines a number of steps, specifically including resort to nuclear retaliation, and which makes the disposition of weapons and men (maximum alert) to carry out such a policy if the conflict takes a certain course. Obliteration bombing of cities is no longer in the realm of a general deterrent when armies are equipped to do so and set to drop the bombs on a given city if the weather is right and if by a certain date the city has not surrendered. Unless this distinction is recognized, nothing but the actual outbreak of nuclear war will lead churchmen and others to drop the argument that nuclear weapons serve a deterrent purpose, they exist to make sure they will not be used.”
In summing up his case, Muste urges restudy of a passage in Paul Tillich’s Interpretation of History, written in the aftermath of World War I. Said Tillich: “In every power there is an element of renunciation of power, and the power lives on this element.” Says Muste: “This is a truly astounding statement. The ancient prophetic and New Testament law of survival by self-sacrifice is here stated in philosophical terms as relevant for political science.”
Tillich cited the Church as obviously and supremely subject to this law, but then looked to the nation: “We must ask whether a people or a group which originally is not the church could renounce power and thus become the church.” His answer: “This possibility is not to be rejected fundamentally.”
Muste points out the relationship of this line of thought to Tillich’s concept of kairos—the time when the unexpected comes to fulfillment, when discontinuity prevails and history somehow transcends the already given. How could renunciation of power be achieved? Not with the help of state power, said Tillich. “A people can become the church only if in an unexpected historical moment, it is seized as a whole by the transcendental idea and for its sake renounces power.” He concludes: “Such an event would be one of the great turning points of history, it would perhaps create ‘mankind.’ ”
Muste hails this last as “one of the most profound statements about the meaning of history and the destiny of man to be found anywhere in literature.” He believes that “the churches, in so far as they are not utterly apostate, have no other dominant vocation today except to wait for ‘the coming of the Lord,’ i.e. to pray and study and work for that ‘historical moment’ in which a people is ‘seized as a whole by the transcendental idea and for its sake renounces power.’ Instead, this whole range of ideas,” complains Muste, “has virtually no place at all, as far as I can see, in the studies of Christian leaders and the teaching of the churches today. Perhaps we shall not be able to free ourselves from involvement in peripheral or trivial activities while pre-occupied with the death of mankind in a nuclear holocaust, until we dare face the necessity and possibility of creating mankind.”
Muste did not point out differences between his view of kairos and Tillich’s. For Tillich, kairos was always a particular moment in history. He had discerned one in the twenties in Germany, but it had passed and no longer existed in the forties. Muste’s view has been inclined more toward a perpetual possibility of entrance into the ideal future, into the new world. In 1939, 1941, and 1942 he proposed to the United States the purportedly saving, sacrificial act of unilateral disarmament. He saw a shrinking of the masses from war. His 1941 warning had a current ring: “Christian realism would lead us to renounce war preparation and war as obviously suicidal.…”
Muste’s vital concern for the future of the race is moving. And arguments of 1941 are now buttressed by the horror of nuclear weapons. For some who were not pacifists then, the quantitative growth in the destruction potential of current weaponry is so great as to create a qualitative difference which necessitates a switch to pacifism. Muste seeks still more converts by dramatizing what he apparently feels was a large step toward nuclear war in the United States’ handling of the Cuban crisis.
One may not discount the agony of personal decision, pacifist or non-pacifist, to be made in a nuclear age. Muste obviously is not optimistic concerning chances for unilateral disarmament by the United States. Cuba has not put to flight those who yet see the necessity of the deterrence afforded by atomic arms. To deny the necessity, they say, is to fly in the face of history. And in this, we think they are right; our arena of discourse and action is a sinful world. We say this even while realizing that we risk a Hiroshima as we turn away from the abject servitude of Buchenwald or Siberia.
The difficulty, the complexity of the dilemma is reflected in The Christian Century’s supporting the United States’ naval embargo against Cuba (Oct. 31, pp. 1311 f.) after having previously advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United States (Aug. 3, 1960, pp. 891 f.). It is true that many pacifists retain a second policy, knowing their ideal is not to be acted upon anyway, although an “ethic of the second best” hardly rises to biblical heights or soars to Pauline nobility.
If we cannot identify Muste’s pacifist views with Christian realism, we certainly are unable to identify his eschatological hopes with biblical theology. We feel under no biblical compulsion to identify “the coming of the Lord” with “that ‘historical moment’ in which a people is ‘seized as a whole by the transcendental idea and for its sake renounces power.’ ” The expectation of a people or nation becoming a church through such a process would seem to find its roots more in elements of Gnosticism and Pelagianism than in the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. This supposed means of “creating mankind” appears to overlook the basic necessity for individual regeneration by the Holy Spirit.
From here it looks like a fanciful hope for Utopia which spells bad politics and bad theology.
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A Definition In Flux, A Concept Yet Needed
The Congressional Record has recorded remarks on “The Return of the Square” from a speech by Charles H. Brower, president of the advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne, Inc. The evolution of the word “square” merits consideration. Some years ago, observes Mr. Brower, the word was one of the finest in the language. A square deal and a square meal were to be sought after. Once out of debt, you were square with the world and could look your fellowman square in the eye. To be admired was the man who stood foursquare for the right, as he saw the right.
Then the word was subjected to the Twist. Convicts contorted it first, to describe an inmate who would not conform to the convict code. From prisons, says Brower, it hit the marijuana circuit of the bopsters and hipsters:
Now everyone knows what a square is. He is the man who never learned to get away with wrongdoing. A Joe who volunteers when he doesn’t have to. A guy who gets his kicks from trying to do something better than anyone else can. A boob who gets so lost in his work that he has to be reminded to go home. A fellow who laughs with his belly instead of his upper lip. A slob who still gets choked up when the band plays “America the Beautiful.”
His tribe isn’t thriving too well in the current climate. He doesn’t fit too neatly into the current group of angle players, corner cutters, sharpshooters and goof-offs.… He’s burdened down with old-fashioned ideas of honesty, loyalty, courage and thrift. And he may already be on his way to extinction.
Brower reviews the squarish character of the exploits of such patriots as Nathan Hale, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. Though he sees a swing back to old beliefs in ideals, devotion, and hard work, he yet recalls Arnold Toynbee’s somber observation that of twenty-one notable civilizations, nineteen perished not from external conquest but rather from the evaporation of belief within themselves.
This points us to the religious sphere. Discouraging it is to witness the popularity of the offbeat and the cynical pursuit of the exotic, extending from Zen Buddhism to the beat of pagan drums in nightclubs across the land. And the despair which so inevitably ensues.…
The old virtues are rooted in the love and righteousness manifested in Jesus Christ. Those who seek a way contrary to the way of love and righteousness seek not His way. Their future hope lies not in him but rather in selfish dreams. Nor can they exult with the Apostle John over his vision of “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven.” For indeed, “the city lieth foursquare.”
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