With Our Soldiers in France

by Sherwood Eddy

1. Indifference to the Church. As one typical young sergeant, a member of the student movement, puts it: "The men simply have no time for it. They do not care for the Church because it did not care for them." There is a general feeling that the churches do not understand them or sympathize with the social and industrial disabilities of the men. They feel that the ideals of life for which the Church stands are dull, dim, and altogether unnatural; its standard of comfort and complacent respectability makes no appeal to them and they have no part or lot in it. They feel that this respectability of the Church is quite in keeping with flagrant selfishness in social and industrial relationships, that the Church is largely in the possession of the privileged classes, who monopolize it, and who have neither sought nor welcomed them within its doors.

As one representative chaplain in a most influential position in France says: "There is the plain fact that the great mass of men are out with the Christian Church, and do not look to it as being in any vital relation to life as they know it, either in peace or war. There is the deeper and sadder fact that to a very large proportion of them God Himself means little or nothing, or means something that is very unchristian. Where there is a living presentation of religion men are responsive—extraordinarily so. Put it how you will, men must be summoned to a new thought, a new outlook on life, a new attitude towards the unseen and eternal."

2. An attitude of separation and alienation from the Church. For the most part the men are largely ignorant of what the Church really is, and for this the churches are largely responsible. They believe that its message and presentation of truth are often too feminine and impractical and that its fellowship is too cold and exclusive. They do not understand the vocabulary and tone adopted frequently by preachers in speaking of religious things, and they feel that the churches are almost complete strangers to the real facts of life with which they have to deal.

It is true that the practical work of the churches in their helpful ministry through the various organizations working in the camps has brought many of the men into vital contact with religion for the first time. But the war has revealed the lack of the churches' hold upon the men in pre-war times.

3. Criticism of its worldliness. The men have an unuttered belief in God, and they reverence Jesus Christ as the friend and brother and comrade of man, as the embodiment of the highest ideal they can conceive. But they feel that somehow the churches do not adequately represent Christ, that they have become merely the adjunct of the State to second its schemes and aims. Many feel that the Church has lowered its colors in the present war, that in some countries it has been little more than a recruiting station for enlistment and that its message cannot be reconciled with the Sermon on the Mount.

One sergeant thus states his convictions: "Perhaps it would be well if we out here could get up a committee of inquiry on 'Civilians and Religion' and arrive at some decision as to what is the matter with you at home. Are we to return home where the spiritual fires have been kept burning brightly, or to the blackened ashes of those great ideals of the early days of August, 1914, which have burned themselves out? Are we to return to a country in which, in spite of all the community of suffering and sorrow, the Christian churches have still their differences simmering instead of being regiments in one common Army?"

Another soldier writes: "What could not the churches do for the world if they could only connect the symbols Christ gave us with the knowledge that is within the hearts of men? There must be more known about suffering and sacrifice now in the hearts of men than at any past time. I thought once, on the Somme, that the two races facing each other in such agony were as the two thieves on their crosses reviling each other, and that somewhere between us, if we could but see Him, was Christ on His Cross."

4. The men are bewildered and repelled by the Church's divisions. There is a widespread feeling among them that there is something wrong here, that instead of representing Christ or losing themselves in the wide interests of His Kingdom, instead of concern for the winning of the world and humanity as a whole, the aims of many of the churches are petty, narrow, exclusive, and sectarian. There is a feeling among the men that far too many Christians are working for themselves or for their own particular branch of the Church, or are, as one of them puts it, "out for their own show."

In the last hospital we visited, the young American Episcopal chaplain working with one of our own units asked the writer to accompany him one morning to help him in cheering up the patients, giving them Testaments, meeting their needs, and answering their doubts and difficulties. While we were proceeding through one of the wards, the Nonconformist chaplain came by. The writer was speaking to a poor boy who was dying. The chaplain seemed shocked and surprised that we were speaking to one of his patients without his permission. The young Episcopal chaplain explained that he felt sure that the chaplain would not mind if we tried to help the men. Although he followed him out of the ward and tried his best to make his peace with him, the chaplain reported the matter, and we were prevented from doing personal Christian work in neighboring hospitals.

The Roman Catholic chaplain in the next hospital, a most consecrated and earnest man, has managed to get a military rule passed that no services can be held in any ward of the hospital unless every Roman Catholic patient is bodily carried out. This has successfully prevented the holding of any Christian services whatsoever, Catholic or Protestant. Throughout the entire war we have never known of a single instance of any man trying to proselytize or to divert a soldier from allegiance to his own church. We have known of men leaving the churches altogether during the war, but not one instance of a man's changing his church or being asked to do so. Yet the jealousy and suspicion of the bare possibility of men's doing so has blocked and excluded much genuine Christian work.