“What Sort Of People …?”
The ability to see ourselves as others see us was one of the less sagacious yens of the poet Burns. Happily for the sensitive among us, geographical location and linguistic sloth combine to protect Americans from the candid criticisms of foreigners and foreign journals. (The domestic “death-wish psychosis” so percipiently discussed in this journal two issues ago is, of course, a quite different matter.) A few of such alien strictures have come my way recently, and I’m still trying to figure out what they do to the American mystique.
One foreign friend shook me to the core by uttering some appalling generalities about Americans. So outrageous were they that I sought his permission to publicize them. At that point he rocked me still further by stipulating that I must not reveal his name as he still has relatives in these United States.
The burden of his song is that all Americans abroad, whether from Barre, Vermont, or Steamboat Springs, Colorado (honest, he mentioned those two), feel themselves called to spread one message—not that America is good or bad, but that America is unique. He claims to have perfected a formula guaranteed to stop Uncle Sam’s nieces and nephews in full flight. When they become more than usually bouncy and insufferable, he makes a remark that links Americans with nationals of another country. “Spaniards and Americans,” he will say casually, “do not know the first thing about making tea.” Then, for an encore, “Americans and Persians are never good listeners.” The response, he assures me, is most gratifying—only a little less, in fact, than when he points out that “God Save America” is a Russian hymn.
Then there is one E. S. Turner, evidently domiciled in England. “It’s a fallacy,” announces this scribe, “that an ever-widening indulgence in pot-plus-promiscuity will some day stop the war in Vietnam.” And again, “It’s a fallacy that youth matches its shining idealism, its impatience with shams, its lust for a better world, with a talent for administration.”
Perhaps the most incisive word could apply equally well to those American delegates at Uppsala who delighted the Russian boys by a sickening denigration of their own country’s policies (which, inter alia, permit them to travel abroad and criticize it). The word is from Stephen Spender, who spent some time at American universities gathering material for his book The Year of the Young Rebels. He tells of the question he asked some campus tearaways: “Why are the students in Prague so eager to achieve what you are so eager to abandon?” Answer came there none.
Heart Provoking
Even if your editorial, “The Death-Wish Psychosis of the New Left” (May 9), is correct, the question is begged, for we must ask why the death wish is expressing itself in such virulent form at the present time. It is true that members of the New Left are beneficiaries of the order and have enjoyed the freedom it afforded. Is it not also possible that the freedom of the order helped develop their sensitivity to the plight of others less fortunate?…
Of course, members of the New Left are provoking. They often seem inclined only to destroy without suggesting alternatives. With the strong conscience of the Puritan, they seem sure they are right and are willing to forego orderly, democratic procedure. But how many prophets have ever been willing merely to sit down and talk things over in a “reasonable” way? What is important is that they speak to hearts …, at least to the hearts of some of us.
Can the order we enjoyed in spite of the devastating consequences to the less fortunate survive? Can it be changed sufficiently to be worth surviving? The future is in the hands of those who take human values seriously, and we can hope that the number includes not a few committed Christians. If our consciences have been awakened, the New Left has served a valuable purpose.
Chairman
Dept. of Religious Education
New York University
New York, N. Y.
Springtime On The Brain
Fair Harvard was rather unfairly dissected by your recent editorial (May 9). In your zeal to score the nasty left, you neglected to point out that the faculty of arts and sciences as well as a substantial body of the students voted to censure the administration for its handling of the immoral and undemocratic actions of the SDS.…
The “expected rantings” about police brutality were in the main justified. There was little in the situation that justified the use of indiscriminate force by the police when they could have arrested students without cracking heads …
The poverty of your own suggestions for solutions to campus unrest (meet force with counter-force; expel!; take their scholarships away!?) is only another demonstration of the poverty of an uncreative conservative political line which CHRISTIANITY TODAY has over the years advocated. I for one as a theological conservative have appreciated your presentation of the Gospel; as a sociologist I find myself groaning at times for something other than the old pablum of obscurantistic rantings against social liberals and radical movements that is supposed to pass an informed Christian approach to society.…
Fair Harvard is surviving both the assault of the SDS and the storm-troopers from the local police departments. It would seem that your editorial only buries those facts to resurrect a preconceived conclusion. Perhaps springtime does do things to the blood—and maybe the brain, too. It is unfortunate it affects editorial writers as well as SDS radicals.
Teaching Fellow in Social Relations
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.
In Miniskirt And Jail
Ten of our American presidents could trace their ancestry to Northern Ireland and, thank God, only one’s ancestors came from southern Ireland. If ever there was a super-race, it is the Scotch-Irish. The devil knows this and so is trying to destroy their autonomous government and beset them on every hand. How sad and sickening to hear of the Roman Catholic Bernadette Devlin parading about in the House of Parliament in London in her miniskirt while Ian Paisley languishes in jail (“Ulster: ‘The Gospel as a Club
Raised,’ ” May 9).…
It is getting so bad in this country that no one can speak out against the evils of Romanism without being attacked even by Protestants. Now that patriotic Protestants have been softened up and squelched in America, there are those who seek to attack Protestants in Northern Ireland, one of the last bastions of true Christanity in the world.
Trinity Methodist Church
Ashland, Ky.
Of Meetings And Morals
May I first send you thanks and praise for your magazine.… However, one rarely writes only to compliment.…
I found James Adams’s report on the NAE convention (“NAE Hits Hard at Pornography,” May 9) rather over-critical. Has he ever been to a convention that was not a “multitude of commission meetings, public meetings, private meetings, and dinner meetings”?
As for the agenda lacking on “racism in the Church, poverty, or alienation of youth,” surely most serious Christians agree that the core of all these problems is found in the convention’s main theme, “The Moral Crisis in America.” Isn’t it the lack of morals and the disobeying of God’s laws which promote the development of all our problems in society?
Concord, Mass.
Fighting Foolishness
Once again we are indebted to Dr. L. Nelson Bell (“Sparring with God,” April 25) for succinctly analyzing a basic problem of our day, and answering it in terms of the Word of God.
Recently the national press reported the jury verdict of “guilty” for the case cited by Dr. Bell, and the same papers carried statements by another of our notorious Californians who seems to be “sparring with God” by encouraging others to leave the Church for which Christ died, even as he has only recently done.
Surely we are understanding anew what the Apostle Paul taught us: “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.”
Calvary Baptist Church
Bishop, Calif.
The Word For Chaplains
Congratulations on your editorial to keep God on the lips of chaplains in the armed services (“Discharging God from the Army,” April 25). Your refutation of the ACLU position was as skillful as it was thorough.
MORTON A. HILL, S.J.
New York, N.Y.
Sold-Out Souls
I can hardly believe your news report, “Freedom Overpriced” (April 25), where you said “The [Soviet] Baptist Union worshipers feel the same way toward atheistic pressures.… But with them it is more a matter of reason, of co-existence.” Whenever anyone sells his witness for Christ for a “conditional freedom” he has as much as sold his soul and betrayed his Lord. Thank God the young believers of Russia are following Christ and not their elders who have sold out.
I pray you will study this further, and read some of the Rev. Richard Wurmbrand’s writings—then see what you think of the underground church.
Iowa City, Iowa
Missions Here And There
I read with great interest the editorial “Missions and Missionaries 1969” and the related statistics (April 25). The worldwide missionary enterprise of the Church has had my intense concern and support for the past fifteen years. However, I am more and more of the opinion that an uncritical support of overseas missionary activity may not be what is needed.…
Since the turn of the century, the Presbyterian Church has sent too many of its most able and dedicated men overseas. The consequence has been that the ability and dedication at the home base has been gradually diluted and diminished. It is true that theological liberalism has contributed to the present perplexities of our denomination. But why has theological liberalism grown within the United Presbyterian Church? Is it not, in part, that the best of those whom the church has nurtured have gone off to minister to someone else? Too frequently evangelical Presbyterians have been interested in missions overseas at the expense of attending to the necessary day-to-day details of the church at home.… As a consequence, many of the overseas churches are sounder and healthier than the parent church.
Immanuel United
Presbyterian Church
San Jose, Calif.
I felt the recent editorial on missions was not entirely fair. It is much easier to ignore the home problems and run away to some foreign field. Many of those churches in the NCC have turned their attention to problems at home. If the facts on home missions were added, it might have been more fair. It is one thing to try to win the black man in Africa to Christ, but quite another to help the white churchman win his black neighbor to Christ and give him a welcome in church on Sunday.
Wabash United Methodist Church
Vincennes, Ind.
I very much appreciated your editorial … I … call to your attention that the Christian churches are supporting 590 foreign missionaries.… Prior to 1919 there were no foreign missionaries supported by these churches. Therefore, you can see the great increase in number of missionaries since that time.
Jewell Christian Church
Jewell, Kan.
Facile And Fluid
I must say that your facility and fluidity of expression in the editorials are certainly pleasing and promising. They bespeak both liberal and conservative tendencies which every man must be at once, conserving good values handed down and adding liberally of his own. Please keep up the good work and may the Lord sustain your strength.
Elm Grove, Wisc.
After much deliberation, I have decided to renew again in order to know the conservative views in religion, something that is sadly lacking in so many publications. My hesitancy to renew is because of much writing (usually in your main articles) which is so lost in philosophy, theory, ideology, theology, etc., etc. that the real meaning of Christianity is forgotten as in so many publications and debates. Thank God for Dr. Bell and his kind.
Marshville, N. C.
