I believe that this economic motive is religious. It is the quest of what a man has not, but feels to be his. It engages his utmost efforts. It is labor for his wife and children and for all his group fellows, and therefore is involved in his holiest, most self-forgetting feelings. It takes him back to his parents and reminds him constantly of his ancestors. He forms his ideas of justice in his economic experiences. His ultimate conviction as to the goodness or the badness of the world are the outgrowth of his experience in getting a living. Therefore his economic life is his wrestle with nature and with society. It generates in him all the religion he has.
I suppose it was for this reason that Jesus said "I am come that they may have life, and that they may have it abundantly." Probably his meaning was economic, in part, in the saying, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." The quest of a living is a satisfaction of successive economic wants, of which bread is but the first. Every truth that mankind knows involves men in an economic want. Education is one of the most general wants. It comes in the series somewhat later than bread. The love of music is an economic want, which comes generally later than education. But both are a part of a living. I believe that the quest of education and the love of music are religious, just as much as the desire for daily bread. One might enumerate the whole series of economic wants, to satisfy which is to live, but religion is the total of the reflections, and the complex of customs which result from the lifelong quest for a living among common folk. At its highest it is expressed by St. Augustine, "O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our souls are not at rest until we find ourselves in thee." Bread is the first economic want, and God is the greatest and the last.
Economic wants among common folk are usually the source of religious feeling. Few people desire to be rich; a lesser number strive to get wealth; and very few attain a fortune. The most of men seek and get a living. The best of men, and the most religious, are those whose economic experience brings them a series of satisfactions, beginning with bread, clothing, shelter, education in the essentials, music and a little aesthetic culture, and gradually extending into higher forms of human enjoyment. The simplest religious craving is for economic assurance of supply. "The Lord is my Shepherd: I shall not want," is on the most thumbed page of the Bible. The play of these economic aspirations among poor people results in all the simpler and most general religious feelings. With the rise of the aspirations of the individual, and the ideals of the group, toward higher satisfactions, the religious experiences should become nobler, more refined. The penniless college student who prays for an education should be a nobler worshipper than the fisherman who asks his mud-divinity for a good catch. The group of Oberammergau players who present the Passion Play, a highly complex satisfaction of wants, should be nobler believers and worshippers than herdsmen who out on the hills pray for the increase of their flocks and for a better price for wool.
Communities differ from one another according to the living which they supply, or the wants which they satisfy. Modern men will not live in a community that does not satisfy a pretty long series of wants. For instance, a graduate of the American common schools will desire bread, clothing, shelter—all of comfortable quality—and education for his children better than his own, musical enjoyment, aesthetic culture, the possession of some books, access to many magazines and the reading of a daily paper: and varied opportunities for the exercise of the play spirit. The country community satisfies, in most of the United States, only the first of these. It is a place for securing food, clothing and shelter of a comfortable sort. Country people have in the past ten years secured also a better supply of reading matter. Almost all the rest of the series is lacking. The reason for the rural exodus is in the most of cases the quest of education and of music, the craving for aesthetic culture, and the desire for recreation. Country towns and small cities therefore have come to be centers of education, of amusement and of "culture." They are the first step upward on the series of economic satisfaction. Men who have made some money on the farm "move into town," for the satisfaction of the later wants in the series.
None of these wants is itself sinful, for all of them make up life. They are the steps on the way from bread to God. The business of the teacher and preacher of religion is to know the wants of his people: study those which are satisfied in his community, and so to build the community that for most of its people and for the most desirable people, all the vital necessities of life shall be satisfied, in the community in which the desire for bread is satisfied. The problem of amusement exhibits these principles clearly. Farming is austere, and few farming communities have recreation adequate to the demand of the young people and the working people who live on the farms. Agriculture is becoming more systematic and more exacting in its demands: and systematic work creates a demand for organized play. As this demand is not satisfied in the country—indeed it is less generally satisfied now than in former times—the youth and workingman from farming communities go to the towns and larger villages for amusement. These centers of population have a disproportionate burden therefore of cheap vaudeville shows, saloons, professional baseball games, and moving-pictures.
These amusements are, to a degree, abnormal in character because those who enjoy them are away from their home community, and are suffering a reaction from pent-up desires. Just as the lumberman or cowboy or sailor when he comes to town "tears loose and paints the town red," so, in a milder degree, the farmer's son or hired man, because he has at home no recreations supplied by his church or school, patronizes in the town or small city a cheaper and nastier theatre than one would expect to find either in that town, or in his home community. The remedy is to make the country community adequate to the wants of those who live there. The church should promote recreation. The public school should supply entertainment of a high standard, both to satisfy the play instinct and to elevate the youth's ideals of amusement. The community which works should be dependent on no other community for play.
Common-school education is a function which country communities have surrendered to the centers of population. The one-room country school has long been inadequate; but the farmer has not improved it, preferring to rely upon the town schools to which he will remove his family after he has made enough money on the farm. I am told that about Crete, Nebraska, a recent census revealed that half the normal child population is missing from the country districts; and double the normal child population is found in Crete. The quest of adequate schooling explains the condition, which speaks ill for the country community of Nebraska.
In all these cases religious service consists in completing the community. The supply of wants, which are widely and keenly felt, is a religious act. This has been the reason for the success of the Du Page Presbyterian Church in Illinois.[22] The minister, Mr. McNutt, in a religious spirit so well supplied the recreative life needed in the community, that the community has been made whole. Just as Jesus made sick or maimed men whole, as a religious act, so the community builder who supplies to working farmers something besides labor on the land, is making the community whole.
The perfecting of the common school system in McNabb, by Mr. John Swaney and other Friends, and in Rock Creek by Mr. R. E. Bone and other Presbyterians, was a religious act for their communities in Illinois. The farmers who have money can move to the town, but to complete the country community is to satisfy the economic wants of the poor. The wants of the poor are always of religious value.
Moreover, the satisfaction of all wants in the community itself is a moral gain. If [individuals] live this life in the bounds to which their group and family associations are confined, the steadying influence of society is at its greatest. Jacob Riis[23] noted among immigrants the working of a lower sense of obligation due to absence from accustomed home associations. Communities are compacted of the strongest moral bonds. If churches would make men righteous they cannot do better than to complete the community, especially in the country, as a place to live in: making it a place for education as well as profit: of play as well as work, of worship as well as of material comfort.