The essential fact in this situation may be stated thus: In a community where there is known to be a mass of persons (in commercial parlance, “volume of business”) sufficient to build and maintain only from one to five churches, there are actually found to be from two to ten; and the excess of churches over and above the number which the volume of business justifies is the direct result of the injection of home-mission money into the community.
Veiled Hate
It does not require a clever mind to know what will happen. When from two to ten kernels of corn are planted in a piece of soil which has nutritive elements sufficient to bring only from one to five stalks to maturity, we know that a struggle for life is on which may doom one stalk, several stalks, or even all stalks. It is so with the competitive churches; but the corn simile fails to illustrate the case at the really tragic point. The subsidized churches, which make up the redundance, create in the community what is known by everybody there to be a case of veiled malignancy. Self-respecting persons either hold themselves aloof from formal religion there, or, conscience-stricken, stand helplessly bewildered, or in plain disgust they pick up and leave. And the community turns sour. The salt has lost its savor.
If you would sense the disaster of this competition, please read between the lines of the following resolution, passed within the last year, by a minister’s association in a small rural community where six Protestant churches are breathing the air that is hardly enough for three!
“Whereas we are joined together as Christian ministers in the association of brotherly fellowship and helpful co-working, we hereby agree that the following principles shall guide and control us individually, and, so far as our proper influence can go, our several congregations in our mutual relationships....
I. That we decline and discourage proselytizing in any form.
II. While we recognize that every man is free to worship where and as he wills, yet we realize that shifting from one denomination to another save from absolute religious conviction is not edifying, but harmful. Wherefore, we will not encourage those who from pique or temporary dissatisfaction with ministers or people of their own local congregations wish to unite with ours.
III. That we will not, save in exceptional cases, receive into our Sunday-schools as regular members thereof, children of families who are affiliated with other congregations of the town.
IV. That whenever we come across new-comers to the town who are affiliated with, or declare preference for, some Christian body other than our own we will not (if the church of their choice be represented by a congregation here) ask them to unite with our congregation or send their children to our Sunday-school until we have given to the minister or church officials of the church of their preference the name and address of such persons, and allowed reasonable opportunity for them to claim their own.”
It is clear on the face of it that the recognized principles of Christianity have failed to keep these churches sweet to one another; and resort is, therefore, had to a contract—a perfectly human document of agreement, such as governs sinners in mundane business—in hope that an-out-and-out bargain may accomplish what Christian love can not.