The Local Church as a Social Club

WRITING in the January, 1957, issue of Theology Today, Warren Ashby, associate professor of philosophy at The Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, finds, as an editorial comment puts it, “an alarming parallel between the social club and the local church.”

Writes Professor Ashby: “What are some of these needs and interests that social clubs meet? First, obviously, is the need for social fellowship. . . . The clubs also possess an exclusiveness and thus enhance the members’ desire for status. Sometimes the entrance requirements are class or economic; sometimes they are caste or racial; sometimes they are professional or hobby. Invariably the entrance requirements of a social club are external and not in terms of what a person essentially is but what he possesses. It may take money but it does not take virtue to be a member of the country club; it may take status but it doesn’t require special intelligence to be a Rotarian; it may take religious affiliation but it doesn’t take much faith to be a Knight of Columbus or a Mason. . . .

“The entrance requirements of the church, like those of a social club, are primarily external and they provide status. . . . The requirements are external in that one must profess a faith before men; but this does not necessarily mean that the profession has substance in fact as well as in words. And, again like the social club, once the entrance requirements for admission are passed, the requirements for remaining within the church are not difficult to meet. It is not hard to be a Rotarian. Nor is it difficult to be a member of a local church.

“There is in the local church, as in a social club, a sharing of viewpoints and a minimum of intellectual demands. The viewpoints shared are usually those acceptable in the community-at-large. At least the ideas most frequently expressed within the church are not designed to disturb the social or religious order. The minimum of intellectual demands refers to the fact that doubting, the asking of embarrassing intellectual questions, is not fashionable within the church. The idea is somehow conveyed to large numbers of young intellectuals that since doubting represents a lack of faith it is sinful and therefore like other sins to be suppressed or at least not practiced openly. As a recent visitor to one university put it: ‘If you go to college for four years and never ask searching religious questions or are never plagued by religious doubts you haven’t been to college. You’ve been to church.’”