Religion Goes Modern

TIRED? Feel like a movie tonight? Go to church. Or perhaps the mental pressures of the day have you all wrought up and you would rather step out for an evening of dancing. Go to church. Maybe you prefer a variety show: magic, comedy, ventriloquism, an instrumental program, or if you are a sports fan, how about a lively basketball game? You guessed it: church is the place for you, for nowadays the sternness and austerity of that traditional institution are fast fading away. Take warning though, if you reside in a progressive community like Madison, Wisconsin, you may need a seasoned guide to find your local church. Time magazine recently said of Madison’s new Unitarian edifice, “some people might have to be told it was a church.” Yes, with the help of contemporary architecture and design, “the shape of things” is truly changing. Religion has gone modern with a vengeance!

Religion has gone modern with a reason too. This twentieth century has brought a swift modernization to the world around it, and in too many cases the church has been left in the lurch with out-dated building facilities and weekly services that were relics of bygone days. In August, last year, a group of Presbyterian ministerial students launched an inspection tour of Chicago’s churches to see where they stood with the modern workingman. The results? As the Chicago Daily News stated on August 18, the reports of these seminary students were dotted with comments like, “too intellectual,” “too abstract,” “no relationship to the community,” “preaching dull.” “‘I’m sorry to say,’ said one student minister, ‘if I were a working man I would rather have stayed home and read the papers than listen to those sermons.’”

According to another survey, sponsored last December by the Catholic Digest, one out of every three persons in the United States is doing just that, staying home. England too envisions the wolf of “spiritual bankruptcy” at the door. According to David Hood, London evangelist, “in one English community of 200,000, less than 2,000 people attend church, and the condition in other English cities is almost as deplorable.” From Europe comes more disturbing news, that “the percentage of churchgoers in Europe is probably smaller than in so-called ‘pagan’ Africa”!

What to do about it? is the question. One preacher, Dr. Dallas F. Billington of Akron, Ohio, has come up with a million-dollar answer. His Akron Baptist Temple is the essence of modernity. With its plate-glass and marble marquee, flashing neon sign and outside loudspeakers, it literally shouts the invitation to attend church. Says Dr. Billington, in defense of his expensive methods, “Jesus said, ‘Let the light shine,’ so we have the neon on top. He said, ‘Let us compel men everywhere,’ . . . I believe that He meant to compel by building beautiful temples, having overflowing baptistries, living flowers in the baptistries, glass doors or anything that is legitimate and godly to get them to the house of God to hear the word of God.”

It seems Dr. Billington’s words echo the sentiments of an increasing number of religious men. In 1950 they backed up those sentiments to the tune of $200 million worth of church building. By 1953 their yearly investment in the future had risen to $473 million. They now predict a 1954 expenditure of $500 million.

And just what are all these religious dollars buying? you might ask. Nearly every service modern industry has to offer. Concrete and steel are replacing stone masonry; modern, fireproof, weatherproof, air-conditioned buildings are springing up; the old Gothic design is giving way to a multitude of modern styles and shapes, theater, ranch-house, rectangular, octagonal (eight-sided); anything the ultramodern architect and technician can dream up seems approved. Attenders at Los Angeles’ St. Paul Baptist Church are even protected financially by an elaborate burglarproof network of “electric eyes, buzzer alarms, ‘self-sealing’ chambers and underground vaults.” Young people have a special “youth hall, outfitted with radio and television, two stage platforms for live shows, and ample floor space for ping-pong tables and other games.” And if spiritual food is not enough to bring you to church, you may be enticed by roast beef from an ultramodern kitchen.

But speaking of spiritual food, what has been done about those “intellectual,” “abstract,” “dull” sermons, with “no relation to the community”? Modern surroundings will do you little good in drawing you to church, if, when you get there, you sleep through the sermon.

Many ministers have tackled the problem by shortening their sermons. However, the sermon is still there, with its usual content of material, be that good or bad; so now some are brightening up their delivery with devices borrowed from the modern stage and radio. New York’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine has recently featured sermons in dialogue, with two clergymen debating religious issues. “Reverend” Owen Hoffman of Washington, Georgia, has been using “preaching stones” (stones that glow under “black light”) to illustrate his sermons. A Seattle Sunday-school class has been delighting children with a robot song master named “Sam,” whose light-bulb ears light up and whose long red tongue wags back and forth when their singing is sufficiently loud. Oh yes, Sam also tells short Bible stories, via a hidden tape recorder. If these fail to stir your interest, maybe you would rather hear Joe the Baptist preach. Joe is a dummy, literally, who travels with his ventriloquist master, Preacher Loyd Corder, of the Southern Baptists’ Home Mission Board. Yes, the pulpit has undergone sweeping changes, so that now, in the words of the Christian Herald, “talking is a small part of teaching. Today, perhaps a movie of Paul’s travels, in color and sound, will be shown, or a cartoonist will give a chalktalk on Noah and the Ark, or the [Sunday-school] class will join in making model Palestinian houses.”

RELIGION GOES “ON THE AIR”

One of the factors limiting attendance at church has been the invention of devices to carry entertainment into the home. Especially true is this of the newest device, television. Of 190 ministers surveyed in the Louisville, Kentucky, area late in 1952, “most agreed that video was serious competition for the church: In 50 congregations, attendance at evening services has dropped 10 per cent.” So, not to be outdone in this progressive age, religion has gone “on the air.”

Jumping at the first opportunity, they opened their “air-borne” assault in 1949, over the Du Mont television network, with the “Morning Chapel” program, featuring leaders of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish faiths. By November of 1953 interest in religious TV was so great that the Lutheran Church’s “This Is the Life” dramatization could lay claim to being “by far the most widely telecast program in the world,” broadcast by approximately 125 American TV stations, shown throughout Canada and regularly featured by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Later, on January 31, this year, Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s “Life Is Worth Living” edged out the Lutheran program, tallying up over 169 stations, to gain first place on the networks. The Catholic Herald, of January 8, claimed over 15 million listeners for the bishop. Today, rather than religion’s being on the defensive against secular TV, the reverse is true. Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Hopalong Cassidy and company have gained a most unusual competitor, the church.

EVALUATION

And what are we to say of religion’s shiny new accouterments? They are pretty and attractive, yes, but have they accomplished the tasks for which they were designed?

As to physical changes in the church buildings themselves, we shall say one of the greatest burdens to moderns, next to the high cost of living, has been the high cost of worship. As the Episcopalians’ Dr. William S. Lea said recently, “‘We have spent and perhaps wasted’ millions of dollars in studiously copying Gothic architecture that was in vogue at a period when Christian worship was at one of its lowest ebbs.” So to the extent that simplified modern design alleviates this condition, it is rendering a praiseworthy service. However, the question still remains whether by these modern technical advances religion has been raised out of those “lowest ebbs” of the Gothic period. Is it true that “clothes make the man” and ‘buildings make religion’ what they are? Expressing some doubt, Presbyterian Dr. George M. Docherty of New York recently compared modern religious methods to the production-line methods of the late Henry Ford, and then opined, “you know, Henry Ford is a much wiser man than the church. He knew that at the end of his assembly line was coming out a Ford car, but only the good Lord knows what’s coming off the ‘ecclesiastical assembly line’ of the church today!”

Too often the product of the modern religious “assembly line” is a “die-cast” Christian, stamped into the mold of conformity to modern social standards; more class-conscious than gospel-conscious. Said New York clergyman Ralph W. Sockman: “Many pulpits try to make religion popular by presenting it as the best way of preserving our economic system. Prayer is advocated because it secures for us financial success and social acceptability.” In selling this prepackaged product to the people much of today’s church promotion takes on about the same spirituality as a hair-tonic commercial. But since when did the true worship of God make one popular with this world?—Jas. 4:4.

And what of attempts to “humanize religious instruction,” intermixing it with demonstrations of ventriloquism, magic, “chalktalk,” “song masters” with ears that light up? Said Dr. M. A. Darroch at a recent Moody Bible Institute conference, “Talk about Nero playing while Rome burned—the church is playing . . . while the world is perishing.” Yes, there is much serious, urgent information to be conveyed to hearing ears before this supersonic world plummets into the ditch of destruction, and religions that are too intent on hitching their wagon to this world’s brilliant star may learn too late that they are tied to a doomed meteorite.—Matt. 15:14.

True, clergymen profess a desire to see this urgent information preached. That, ostensibly, is why they see such a boon in radio and television. Large audiences everywhere can benefit, they say, not just from their local pastor but from personalities like Ralph W. Sockman and Fulton J. Sheen. However, this cannot escape the contamination of commercialism. On October 21, 1952, Bishop Sheen’s “Life Is Worth Living” started drawing down a cool million dollars a year from Admiral Corporation. The price of sponsorship? “A typical hard-selling commercial.” From a strictly monetary standpoint, the bishop’s “Life” is worth televising, indeed! From a godly standpoint, though, is it worth the price of cheapening religion by making it a cue for a “typical, hard-selling commercial”? One columnist stated it quite well when he said: “The cause of an everwidening spiritual understanding will not be most nobly served if it is necessary for the churches to adopt the techniques of the marketplace in order to make themselves heard.” Yes, Jesus and his disciples did preach in the market places, but they never made their message a commodity to be bought and sold like the market produce.

Do not misunderstand us. We in no way oppose the use of every up-to-date facility for the preaching of God’s kingdom message. In fact, Jehovah’s witnesses are among the most advanced when it comes to utilizing the printing press, electronic devices, radio and, as opportunity affords, television. However, listen though you will, you will not find their presentations recommending tooth paste, tableware or television sets. Did not Jesus say, “You received free, give free”? (Matt. 10:8, NW) That principle, then, should guide us in our use of modern developments.

But religion’s dabbling into modernism has had its most tragic effect on the content, rather than the methods of delivering their message. They apparently consider not only the church’s physical structure, but also its message as subject to change to fit a modern world. Thus we have read recently in widely published articles of how “American churches today have finally come to terms with an old bugaboo—Darwin’s theory of evolution.” Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy were quoted as seeing “no conflict between evolution and Divine creation.” More and more men of religion are saying it is God’s Word that is absurd. Of the Bible account Texas Episcopalian William Wright asks: “Who does believe those stories that has any mind at all?”

The answer is, true Christians, true worshipers of Jehovah the Most High God who inspired that Bible account. Yes, they will use the inventions of this modern world to facilitate their preaching work, but they will not copy its spirit, its motives, its selfishness and greed, its disregard of God’s Word and deification of its own wisdom. They will borrow its goods, but not its gods, because those false gods will not save this world nor its hangers-on when Jehovah sends this modern, speedy world to a speedy destruction.

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