What Has Happened to Religion?

ACCORDING to both the Christian Herald and Reader’s Digest, our “most important shortage” is “too little . . . belief in Almighty God”. Is this view shared by others? Yes. “Anemic religion” and the “decline of the churches” have been decried by the Episcopal Churchnews and the Manchester Guardian. An article in Woman’s Day was up in arms over children’s saying they never talk about Jesus in Sunday school, and “Christian” youth has been “found guilty at ‘trial’ of Bible ignorance”, according to the Baltimore Sun.

The Milwaukee Journal reported on a most unusual request by labor union leaders for a study of the sort of religious faith needed to meet the conditions and problems of contemporary life. It said few leaders in government, business, journalism, education, the arts, farm and labor organizations between thirty and fifty years of age have more than a nominal connection with a church or synagogue.

An article in Collier’s quoted an old farmer as avowing, “Only God can save the world now.” God? Yes! But does that mean today’s religions? No! Actually it is today’s religion that is responsible for the shortage of belief in Almighty God, because it has accepted responsibility for teaching that belief. The “Rev.” David Glyn Evans of the Basingstoke, England, Congregational Church said on August 19, 1951, “If lots were cast tomorrow, it is the sleeping church that would be thrown overboard”; and he pointed to the fact that during the past thirty years Congregational churches alone in England lost more than 100,000 members.

The failure of today’s religion was shown by a Christian Century article February 27, 1952, which said: “There is an impression abroad that religion first and last is a comforting and comfortable affair. Twentieth century Christianity has lost the stringent note. For most of us there is no cross in it, no abstinence, no subjugation of the flesh in the interests of the spirit. People are not made to feel when they look at the church and its program that Christianity is a creed for heroes or that to embrace it means ‘living dangerously’. It is overanxious to placate and accommodate the state and the world at large. . . . The man on the street has little reason to think that Christians are a company of people committed to the turning of the world upside down with a view to setting it right side up. But that was the general impression of Christians in the first century. It meant something then to be a Christian, and it cost something. No one from A. D. 30 to A. D. 313 thought of Christianity as a comfortable religion. It was a creed for heroes.”

Just as in politics there is much talk of peace, so in religion there is much talk of the church’s becoming militant again, but this goal succeeds no more than do the peacemakers’ dreams. Rather, the churches prefer to please the men who provide the money, honor, political recognition and “respectability” which early Christians never had nor sought, having a far more valuable thing in its stead.

Further illustrating this very failure of even the church members to show sufficient concern over their religion to actually get out and work for it, The Churchman for June commented: “Though Christianity was founded by a layman it has taken us many years to realize that we have deprived the layman of the position of high dignity that he held in the early church, when all Christians were a royal priesthood.” But that magazine’s discussion of a few being granted licenses as lay readers is a proposal that still falls short of providing for “a company of people committed to the turning of the world upside down with a view to setting it right side up”.

Religious leaders would like to shift the blame to the people or to communism for the moral decay, as Cardinal Spellman did at the Eucharist Congress in Spain last year. They cannot! The people are responsible for many things, communism is responsible for many others, but the religious leaders are the ones who are responsible for today’s religious deterioration. They have watered down pure worship, exalted their own prestige, fraternized with corrupt politics and government. They have taught their theories and traditions, instead of God’s Word, and as a result their religions have become anemic.