Crimes of Preachers in the United States and Canada

by M. E. Billings

CRIMES OF PREACHERS.

In the year 1906 the Young Men’s Christian Association of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, rejected the application of an actor for membership on the ground that one of his profession could not be a moral person. Viewing the action as a slur cast on the whole theatrical profession, Mr. Henry E. Dixey, the well-known actor, offered to give one thousand dollars to charity if it could be shown that actors, man for man, were not as good as ministers of the gospel. No champion of the cloth appearing to claim Mr. Dixey’s money on that proposition, he went further and offered another thousand dollars if there could not be found a minister in jail for every state in the Union. This second challenge was likewise ignored by the clergy and the association which had provoked it, but Mr. Dixey made a few inquiries as to the proportion of ministers to actors among convicts. His research, which was far short of being thorough, discovered 43 ministers and 19 actors in jail. The investigation, so far as the ministers were concerned, could have touched only the fringe of the matter, for in eight months of the year 1914 the publishers of this work counted more than seventy reported offenses of preachers for which they were or deserved to be imprisoned, and of course the count included only those cases reported in newspapers that reached the office through an agency which scans only the more important ones. There had been nothing like a systematic reading of the press of the country for these cases. Judged by 1914, the clerical convicts in 1906 must have far exceeded the number developed by Mr. Dixey’s census.

The foregoing incident is introduced here to explain the nature of this work, “Crimes of Preachers,” which, like Mr. Dixey’s challenge to the clergy in behalf of his profession, is the reply we have to make to the preachers in behalf of the unbelievers in their religion.

The clergy assume to be the teachers and guardians of morality, and assert not only that belief in their astonishing creeds is necessary to an upright life, but, by implication, that a profession of faith is in a sense a guarantee of morality. It has become traditionary with them to assume that the non-Christian man is an immoral man; that the sincere believer is the exemplar of the higher life, while the “Infidel,” the unbeliever, illustrates the opposite; and that whatever of morality the civilized world enjoys today it owes to the profession and practice of Christianity.

Now, it is wholly legitimate that systems should be judged by the correspondence between the claims made for them and their actual performances. When Mrs. Eddy, for an instance, rose up and asserted that Christian Science was the key to health, investigation into the health of persons professing and practicing Christian Science became at once a proper inquiry. And so, when ministers exalt the belief and practice of Christianity as the one highway to the moral life of individuals and nations, it is equally germane to observe with some care whether or not the clergy make good their claims in their own persons. The inquiry would be of great interest and permissible even were Christianity offered only for our free acceptance or rejection; but the investigation assumes the binding nature of a civic duty when, on the strength of these clerical pretensions, the preachers of Christianity claim and are allowed to enjoy privileges and immunities from the state that are not granted to other citizens. There are many “benefits of the clergy” besides those bestowed on them personally in the shape of half-fares, freedom from civic and military duties, and the license under the papal decree which forbids that any priest shall be brought into a civil or criminal court without the approval of his ecclesiastical superior. In the United States church property valued at a billion and a half dollars escapes taxation on the plea that it is devoted to improving the morals of the community, and the ministers have a virtual monopoly of the first day of the week, commonly called Sunday, on the strength of the same unproved theory. The plea is questioned and denied by the publishers of this book, who quote the evidences in disproof, among these being the fact of the immorality of the clergy themselves. If the religion they spend their lives in expounding does not keep the ministers straight, it is almost useless to ask how much restraining influence that religion has on the laity who only listen once a week.

It is admitted that just as the upright life of a professed Christian is no evidence whatever of the truth of Christian doctrine and history, so the moral delinquency of a believer is no disproof of those things which it is necessary to accept in order to be orthodox. The creation story, the flood story, the story of Jonah and the whale, the virgin birth and the other miracles of the Old and New Testaments are not affected by anything a believer in them may do, either good or bad. Therefore we have been asked of what value a list of the crimes of preachers can be to the cause of Freethought and mental liberty. The reply, couched in the language of an editorial article in “The Truth Seeker,” is as follows:

“Christianity, as interpreted by its preachers, affirms a fundamental relation between belief and morals. It claims that its system of morals is revealed and perfect; and not only this, but also that good morals are out of the question unless we believe in the Christian religion.

“There are Christian ministers, and they are of the class who have the widest hearing, because they are ‘sensational’ ones, who will tell you that unbelief is synonymous with immorality; that men are wicked because they are Infidels, and are Infidels because they are wicked. They argue that as religion cannot countenance anything that is wrong, the wrongdoer must justify his course by denying the authority of religion, and hence becomes an unbeliever in order that his creed may not conflict with his conduct. Who has not heard that Infidels deny the existence of hell to relieve their minds of the uncertainty of going there when they die; that they put the Bible aside because it will not permit their indulgences in sin, and that a reform in conduct will be accompanied by a renunciation of their Infidelity and a reacceptance of religion and the Bible?

“The preachers who promulgate these principles often proceed from the general to the particular. Having asserted the correlation of unbelief with moral turpitude, they give pretended illustrative instances, and they do not seem to understand that the force of their argument is lessened by the fact that they are obliged to invent cases and to deal with imaginary characters. Some, of course, prefer to libel known and representative Freethinkers instead of exercising the faculty of invention and defaming unbelievers who are pure myths.

“A list of ministers, guilty of crimes and immoralities, though of unimpeached orthodoxy, is the answer to this class of falsifying preachers, which any court must accept as historical and lawful evidence against the pretense that good conduct grows out of belief in Christianity. It shows that the very apostles of that religion go wrong, that its ministers are profligate, and that in these the theory is condemned before we come to its mere lay exponents who less perfectly understand it.

“People have been taught so long that piety and morality are interchangeable terms, that they believe it without regard to the facts which demonstrate the contrary to be true. When an individual of reputed orthodoxy violates the moral law they accuse him of being a hypocrite and set his religious professions down as mere outward pretense. But here their mental narrowness is shown, for the immoral person may be thoroughly sincere. The more firmly he believes, the stronger may be his confidence that no mere human weakness on his part can deprive him of the benefits of his religion. For according to the code we are all sinners, and the function of religion is not so much to keep us from personal sin as to save us from its natural consequences. One has fallen already in Adam and is therefore totally depraved, which is the limit of depravity. How, then, can his own sins count against him, when he cannot be depraved beyond ‘totally’? His concern is to escape the consequences of the fall, which is accomplished by accepting the Christian scheme of salvation. His own transgressions can be adjusted by prayer and repentance. He conceives of divine mercy as infinite—there is no reaching the end of it; hence with unlimited credit he may draw on his account whenever he feels sinfully disposed.”

It is unlikely, however, that the believer performs this mental operation before reaching a determination to do that which is wrong. Were he capable of analyzing the plan of salvation in that manner he might doubt it. But he is like other men in the same environment, and, like them, when inclination prompts, he falls. Conduct, in the last analysis, is a matter of common sense, in which the minister and the believer are likely to be at a disadvantage as compared with the Rationalist. In our own minds we are pretty well convinced of the reason why ministers go wrong—they have more opportunities and, among the faithful, are under less suspicion and observation than the laity. Nevertheless we are not averse to hearing other explanations of their tendency to fall.

A few years ago the Rev. Dr. Madison C. Peters, a New York clergyman, offered a theory and remedy.