Religion and the War

by Yale University. Divinity School

These are but a few outstanding factors in a movement greater far than any single organization or group of organizations. There has been an awakening of the spirit of education in religion. Sunday schools the country over have been graded, and here and there week-day schools of religion have been begun; problems of curriculum, method and organization have been studied and graded curricula devised; classes and schools for the training of teachers have been organized; and attempts of various sorts have been made to correlate public and religious education. Churches in general have come to see that they have an educational as well as a religious function in the community, and that there is a sense in which they share with the public school a common task. The public school can teach the "three R's," the sciences, arts and vocations; the church must teach religion. Both are needed if the education of our children is to be complete. Many churches are employing paid teachers of religion and directors of religious education. Courses in religious education have been organized and professorships of religious education established in colleges and theological seminaries. "The Educational Ideal in the Christian Ministry" was the subject of the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, in the Yale School of Religion, a few years ago. The young men who are entering the Christian ministry in these days are being trained, not simply to preach and to care for a parish, but to teach and to direct the educational work of a church.

The immediate effect of the war has been to retard this movement in some degree. Preoccupation with the war itself and with more immediately pressing needs, has made more difficult the work of the churches in this as in other respects. Churches that had planned new buildings for their schools are postponing their erection till the war is over. Training classes for teachers are harder to keep up. Ministers are going into war service; and those who stay at home are doing double work or more. Churches, like business houses and factories, have found their organizations broken by the departure of members of military age. Many of their best teachers and leaders have gone to war; and it is not easy, in these days of urgency and stress, to discover others to take their places.

It is probable, however, that a deeper effect of the war will be to intensify our sense of the importance of religious education and to clarify the church's educational program, in point both of content and method. This conviction rests upon these fundamental facts: that the world is achieving democracy; that it believes in and relies upon education; that it is experiencing what may prove to be a renewal of religion.

Education, democracy, religion—these three, we have long professed and more or less fully believed, belong together. The full life of each of the three is bound up in that of the other two.

Education without religion is incomplete and abortive; it falls short of that life more abundant which is education's goal. Religion without education lacks intelligence and power, and condemns itself to what Horace Bushnell called conquest from without, as contrasted with growth from within.

Democracy without education cannot long hold together or be saved from mediocrity and caprice. Education without democracy perpetuates caste divisions, or else breeds discontent and class hatred.

Democracy without religion is doomed to fail; and religion without democracy cannot realize the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

These, I say, are familiar convictions. They are natural to Protestantism; they have entered into the very making of America. Yet just these old convictions are gaining a new force and a deeper meaning in and through the experiences of these years of war. The struggle for democracy is not only leading us to a new comprehension of the meaning of democracy itself; it is helping us to understand better both education and religion.

It does not lie within the limits of this paper to canvass the wider and deeper meaning of democracy which is opening before us. The messages and addresses of President Wilson have interpreted that meaning not simply to America but to the world. No one yet knows the full promise of life after the war, when Pan-Germanism shall have been not only balked but destroyed. The democracy for which we fight to make the world safe will be a chastened, changed, completer democracy. It will be a democracy between nations as well as within nations, for the doctrine of the irresponsible, beyond-moral sovereignty of the state must return to the perdition whence it came. It will be a democracy applied more fully to the whole of life, social, economic and industrial as well as political. It will be a democracy of completer citizenship, that gives place to women as to men. It will be a democracy of duties as well as of rights.

The world is acquiring a new conscience. Just as the nineteenth century made slavery abhorrent to the moral sense of men in general, the twentieth century will likely be looked back to as the time when the world's conscience decided that the exploitation of man by man is wrong. The general moral sense of men has not been over-tender on this point hitherto. They have checkmated the exploiter if they could, as they did checkmate Napoleon, but they have not always, or even usually, looked upon him as a wrong doer. It required Germany's attempts at conquest and subjugation to wake the world to the absolute wrong of that monstrous thing—that one man should use another as a mere means to his own pleasure or aggrandizement, or that one people should so determine the destiny of another people.