Lloyd Douglas was an unusual minister. He told his congregation in Akron:
I have never asked your faith to attend to any business that your intellect could handle more easily.
Lloyd C Douglas, “Five Years of Akron,” in The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955)
This was an extremely important point for him. He believed that his progenitors had fought very hard to liberate the human mind from the powers that would shackle it: from political constraints, certainly, but especially from ignorance. And because of this belief, he preached that people should develop their intelligence. “You can bear it in mind,” he said,
…that I have never asked you to think exactly as I think about these matters of religious belief, but only to think. WHAT you thought was not of so great importance, in my opinion, as that you should have access to all the facts that I had access to; and after that, I was entirely willing that you should come to your own conclusions without too much gratuitous assistance from my quarter.
He did, however, urge his congregation to give serious consideration to the things being taught in the (fairly new) state universities, and especially in the natural sciences:
I have taught you that religion and science must be at one—if God is God.
Although many ministers were distrustful of modern science, Douglas was a huge fan of both its history and its latest findings. And although there was much confusion in religious circles about “Darwinism,” Douglas understood that evolution was a fact and that biologists were engaged in research to help explain the known facts. The fossil record showed vast differences in the types of flora and fauna in previous epochs, as well as changes in the structures of animals that still exist, such as horses. Darwin had proposed a theory to explain these facts (natural selection through scarcity of resources), but so had Lamarck (structural changes through use and disuse), and more recently so had Hugo De Vries (change by mutation). By the 1920s, biologists weren’t fighting over whether living things evolved; they were busy trying to explain how and why it happened.
Douglas warned his congregation…
…that the elemental principles of the new biology either must fit in with the elemental principles of Christian faith—or we lose the coming generation from the ranks of the church.
At first that may sound like he was over-accommodating to secular culture, but he believed what I quoted earlier: that “religion and science must be at one – if God is God.” He trusted scientists. He viewed them as honest seekers of the truth. And therefore he believed that any facts they uncovered, as well as any theories that could account for those facts, must be in harmony with what God was doing – and had done – in this world. Any religion that posed as either a judge or an adversary of the scientific enterprise was doomed to obsolescence, because it would fail to attract anyone interested in the truth. It wasn’t that Douglas was worried about the church going out of business; he was concerned that the church would fail to perform its mission: to provide support to truth-seekers in all walks of life.
Douglas not only accepted the “new biology” but actually found it inspiring. I’ll talk more about that in the next post.
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Lloyd Douglas believed that Christian faith ought to be centered on Christ himself. (Note: in the passage I’m about to quote, he uses the word “hypothecated.” He may have meant “predicated,” or perhaps he was thinking about some form of the words “hypothesis” or “hypothetical.” Or maybe he knew exactly what he was doing but the word isn’t used like that anymore; if so, I haven’t found a dictionary that supports his use of that word.) At any rate, as he told his Akron congregation:
You will remember that I have attempted to preach the gospel of a Jesus who presents an ideal portrait of perfect living. I have not hypothecated his divinity on any biological miracle which—instead of distinguishing him—would merely assign him to a place alongside the populous list of saviors whose origins were thought to have been had through miraculous generation. I have not requested you to believe—as actual, veridical facts—the traditional nativity stories. I have preached that he offered himself as our example. And, to be an example for us humans, he would—one thinks—have to live under much the same conditions which surround us.
You have been given full liberty to believe as much or as little as you liked about the magical and mystical element in his recorded career.
If you wanted to believe that he turned water into wine—actually—and thought better of him as a worker of such magic, that was your right, and I hoped you found him greater and more lovable, in your esteem, for having done this strange thing. If you wanted to believe that this was just a poet’s way of singing that Jesus’ personality was so altogether lovely and healing and comforting and comradely, that when he came to their table it was as if the water in their cups had turned to wine—if you wanted to believe that, I saw no reason why you shouldn’t.
If you wanted to believe that he quieted the winds and waves on Galilee, I wanted you to do so—and find your Christ a peace-inspiring power thereby. If you preferred to believe that the magic words he spoke were addressed rather to the troubled hearts of these fishermen, so potently that they became, under his command, greater than their fears, I wanted you to think that!
But I did insist that the Galilean gospel—the Inasmuch declaration [Mt 25:40, 45], the Golden Rule [Mt 7:12], the whole Sermon on the Mount [Mt 5-7]—deserved your full attention and attempted practice.
Lloyd C Douglas, “Five Years of Akron,” in The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955)
This was the most important part of Douglas’s theology: his insistence on knowing and following the things Christ taught. On his view, Christians weren’t just people who believed in the biblical accounts of Christ’s miracles. Professing that Jesus was a miracle worker did not imply that anyone would go on to become Christ-like. If one had to choose between the stories about Jesus and the things Jesus taught, then Douglas was on the side of Jesus’ teachings. (It’s debatable whether such a choice has to be made, but Douglas clearly thought so. He said that the miracles distracted us from the really important thing about Jesus: that his words lead to life.)
In fact, Douglas believed that the entire history of Christianity, and especially of the splintering of denominations, was rooted in creeds and formulas that tried to explain who Jesus was. The focus was entirely on talking about Jesus, not on knowing and doing the things he taught.
Douglas saw it as his mission to turn the tide. He wanted to educate his Akron congregation in what he called “Spiritual Culture”: a way of life based on the teachings of Jesus. He believed that this was how people could find God and have, as a permanent possession, the presence and peace and power of God available in every moment of their lives.
He also believed that this way of life was consistent with the modern (and especially scientific) frame of mind. I’ll tell you about that in the next post.
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The Christian Faith that Lloyd Douglas taught his Akron congregation (1921-1926) was not the kind of thing you’d have found in most of the other churches in town. Here’s an example, from “Five Years of Akron,” in The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955):
I have attempted to present an idea of Deity which portrays Him as a conscious kinetic energy, speaking to the world through all the media of His creation; not a parochial Jehovah, or Zeus, or Apollo, especially concerned with the welfare of any particular class of people at any particular time in history – but a Universal Father of all mankind.
And, because I have so believed, I have made no effort to disguise my opinion that every alleged quotation of God’s voice, reported in holy books (ours or any other’s) which reveals Him as a parochial God, or engaged in any thought or action not consonant with the thoughts and acts of a cosmic and universal God – is no more to be believed or credited, because written several thousand years ago by some pious shepherd, than if it were to have been written yesterday afternoon on some preacher’s typewriter.
This, of course, meant that he was not committed to the infallibility of Holy Writ:
I have taught that the Bible is a library of impressions which certain men have had concerning Deity and their relation to Him. I have not believed these men to have been invariably inspired or supernally endowed with wisdom from on high.
You might assume, then, that he didn’t value the Bible, but he actually did. He took it very seriously. And because he did, he assumed that we could experience God and learn from God today, in our own way:
I have taught that Livingstone knew more about God than Jeremiah; that Pasteur had discovered more divine secrets than Joshua; that Faraday had been at closer grips with the Creator than Solomon; that Phillips Brooks knew as much about the real spirit of Christ as did Paul of Tarsus. I have tried to get religion into the present time. I have wanted you to hear and see God at work in contemporaneous life.
Notice how he appeals to the history of science. From 1920 onwards, Douglas routinely held up scientists as examples of how to seek the truth. Here he mentions David Livingstone (the Scottish physician, Congregationalist, and Christian missionary), Louis Pasteur (the French chemist and microbiologist who gave us the process of pasteurization, along with a lot of other things), and Michael Faraday (the English scientist who discovered the basic principles of electricity). While some may chafe at the invidious comparison he makes between these historical figures and certain biblical characters, what he’s saying is literally true: Livingstone had the whole Bible available to him, as well as two thousand years of church history, and therefore should have known more about God than Jeremiah did; we all should. Pasteur certainly “discovered more divine secrets than Joshua,” whose strength wasn’t in probing the Divine Mind, after all. Faraday was “at closer grips with the Creator than Solomon,” who, at any rate, wasn’t among the Bible’s greatest exemplars.
But we are especially challenged by Douglas’s last comparison: Phillips Brooks was an Episcopalian Bishop, best known as the Rector of Trinity Church in Boston. Those who knew him said he was a great man. But in what sense did he know “as much about the real spirit of Christ as did Paul of Tarsus”? It all comes down to this: “I have tried to get religion into the present time. I have wanted you to hear and see God in contemporaneous life.” That’s the point: not to place biblical characters far above us and, by so doing, disqualify ourselves from participation in the life they exemplified; but to present the gospel as a going concern here and now.
Which leads us to the question, “What did Douglas teach about Christ?” I’ll share that with you in the next post.
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I’ve been telling you that it was during his pastorate in Akron, Ohio, that Lloyd Douglas began to develop his distinctive theology, and last time I promised to summarize the message he preached during those years. Perhaps the best way to begin is to share some of the prayers he offered from that same pulpit; for, as I explained in an earlier post, Douglas believed that the church’s primary mission was to offer people a chance to worship. He felt that a lot of the racket of the street had found its way into the typical Sunday morning service, and he did what he could to “make worship worshipful” (his words).
So! Instead of following a laundry-list approach, outlining his beliefs as bullet-points, I think it would be best to begin with the things he said to God, in worship. Douglas thought that praying off-the-cuff in a church service was one of the worst things a minister could do, because it gave his parishioners the misimpression that the preacher was on a first-name basis with God. Instead, Douglas wrote out his prayers carefully and read them from the pulpit. After his death, his daughters retyped some of these prayers and collected them in a small bound manuscript volume, in preparation for publication of some of his sermons.
The first time I read them, I was surprised. Douglas’s main concern was to bring the gospel up-to-date so that people could live their faith vibrantly in the twentieth century; and yet his prayers were extremely conventional, using Elizabethan language (Thee’s and Thou’s). Over time, however, I realized that this was consistent with his theology. For him, God was (and is) the “sacred presence… Our Father…
Lord of the vast spaces and the unceasing years; Lord of the stars and seas, mountains and forests; Lord of all powers and energies; Lord of the nations; and Lord of our lives who are Thy children.
Make us conscious of Thyself at this hour. Give us understanding that Thy Spirit is in this place, and recreate our desire to live according to Thy will…
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, n.d., p. 4. In Douglas Papers, Box 3, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
I do notice, however, a slight but significant change in his prayers over the years, so I’ll come back to them from time to time in this blog, showing you how his developing theology revealed itself in the things he said to the Divine.
Here are some of the prayers he offered during his years in Akron (1921-1926). One parenthetical note: in both his sermons and his prayers, Douglas used commas and hyphens as breath marks. Since these things were written for use in the pulpit, he punctuated them in a way that would indicate where to pause, although this often meant that he did not follow standard rules of punctuation. Although this habit makes reading his works tedious at times, it also gives us an indication of how his sermons and prayers sounded to the people in the congregation, which is valuable information for later generations like us. I usually remove the distracting punctuation when I share a quotation with you in these blog posts, but today I’ll leave it in, so that you can hear these prayers as he actually uttered them:
Tell us – Our Father – WHY we live.
For a little while we breathe, we love, we strive, we fall – our little orbits change. We seem the helpless children of an inexorable Fate – blindly driven, and very tired – homeless strangers, eager to find a better way for our weary feet.
And then Thou comest with Thy Fatherly assurance that we are Thy children. And, into the sad, bitter chalice of our years, we find love poured – with all its smiles and tears – and, quaffing this, we are content.
So lead us on – triumphant in this faith – until our rest be won.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 7: Akron, Ohio, October 16, 1921.
Some of the words rhyme (years/tears; on/won), and if you follow the breath marks, there’s a kind of poetic cadence. That’s characteristic of Lloyd Douglas the Preacher. He wrote poetry and often included these creations at the conclusion of his sermons. His aesthetic faculties were finely tuned. Nor is this just a stylistic remark that I’m making, for it tells us something important about his theology. He believed that God should be approached with awe and that our prayers should be expressive – and even beautiful.
He offered this prayer over a New Year’s Day communion service:
We invoke Thy divine blessing upon this sacred feast, spread before us, symbolic of the Love and Courage and Faithfulness of Him whose name is graven upon our hearts.
Do Thou bless these symbols of His deathless affection for our souls [long hyphen]
And give them power to renew within us an abiding consciousness of Thy presence, and to restore unto us THE JOY OF THY SALVATION.
And in this newfound strength may we go forth, into the privileges and responsibilities of THE NEW YEAR – prepared for whatever may betide us – whether of joy or of pain.
May we thus meet all the experiences of life, with smiling faces and exultant hearts – walking confidently and fearlessly as Thy children.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 8: Akron, Ohio, January 1, 1922.
Through these prayers, we begin to see glimpses of some of Douglas’s most heartfelt beliefs. We see reverence for a God who is bigger than we can imagine; a passionate devotion to Christ; the importance of connecting with Them here and now; and what follows naturally from forming and maintaining such a connection (strength, joy, peace, confidence).
The following prayer was offered at an Easter service, if I’m not mistaken:
Liberate our souls, today, Our Father, by the power of that LOVE that dwells in the heart of Christ.
Unloose our chains, by the Influence of that TRUTH that makes men free.
Banish our fears of DEATH by the LIGHT that streams from the door of HIS BORROWED TOMB.
And cause us to walk, unafraid, the road that leads to liberty and life, following the nail-pierced footprints of him who knows the way – along the plain paths of daily duty, and through the shadowed valleys, and up the steeps of pain – confident that we shall AT LENGTH reach the hillcrest, and FACE THE DAWN.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 9: Akron, Ohio, April 16, 1922.
In the next blog post, I’ll dive more deeply into his beliefs, but these prayers give us a good jumping-off point. He believed in a God of majesty, yet also believed that God was available to every one of us, to guide and empower us “along the plain paths of daily duty, and through the shadowed valleys, and up the steeps of pain.” This last prayer is perhaps the best, most concise summary of what he thought Christian life was all about (at least as of 1926):
Attune our hearts to the symphony of Thy heavenly grace, that we may evermore understand Thy will for us, in our daily lives, and realize increasingly the peace Thou wouldst have us bear in our souls.
Prayers of Lloyd C Douglas, p. 10: Akron, Ohio, October 10, 1926.
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This is the publicity photo that Douglas used during his years in Akron. See Burton Funeral Scrapbook, Box 5, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
I mentioned last time that Lloyd Douglas made headlines frequently while he was pastor of the First Congregational Church of Akron, mostly for controversial statements he made during his Sunday evening Q-and-A sessions at the church. Some of those remarks (such as his lack of support for the Soldier’s Bonus or his disgust with the KKK) prompted long and angry discussions in the Letters to the Editors (besides earning Douglas a lot of angry mail himself).
Here’s another one: speaking at a luncheon club, he told the astonished listeners that Akron was “a hick town.” Culturally and religiously, it was behind the times, he claimed. These words were reported in the papers, and another round of angry letters began.
But it was just this kind of thing that the journalists respected about Douglas: he spoke his mind fearlessly, especially on religious matters. Here’s a sample of the kinds of things he said on Sunday morning from the pulpit:
I have not encouraged you to worry over all the implications involved in the ancient doctrine of the atonement. I couldn’t see how as great a God as God would inevitably have to be, to create and operate the universe, would get himself entangled in a situation demanding that His son be killed in order that His own integrity might be conserved. I felt that a God so short-sighted as to get Himself into a fix like that would be hardly stable enough to see us through to the end of the trip.
I have told you that this conventional view of the atonement – in which the death of Christ became necessary to justify the parole of Adam – was unwarranted because there was no adequate basis for the Adam story. My grandfather believed in that Adam story. He also believed that the horse-chestnut which he carried in his pocket would keep off rheumatism. He was a good man, too. But he included in his creed a lot of things I cannot possibly believe…
Lloyd C Douglas, “Five Years of Akron,” p. 90. In The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955).
Even now, 100 years later, a pastor must be careful about saying such things out loud, even if he believes them privately. But Douglas didn’t come to Akron to play it safe; he came to bring them a gospel fit for the twentieth century. Over the next several posts, I’ll tell you what his message consisted of. For it was in Akron that Douglas began to articulate the ideas for which he is now remembered.
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As always, when Douglas arrived in Akron, he connected immediately with the editors of the local papers. It was like Washington, DC, all over again: he became the darling of the local press. But Akron was not Washington; it was a small town that had become a city overnight (due to the tire industry), and was now in the grips of an economic depression. Douglas was a fresh, prophetic voice for such a time. The papers hung on his every word, even when they disagreed with him.
There were three Akron newspapers (The Beacon Journal, The Times, and The Press), but other papers in the region also took notice of him. He appeared occasionally in the Toledo Times and was often in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The local Rotary Club also had a newsletter called The Akrotarian, and since Douglas was a member of the club, he figured prominently in its pages, as well.
After his first year in town, Douglas introduced the idea of answering pre-submitted questions at the Sunday evening service, mostly so that he could concentrate all his energies on the morning sermon. But the Sunday evening Q-and-A’s were reported in the local papers and made Douglas the talk of the town.
He expressed his opinions on a number of hot topics:
The Ku Klux Klan: He not only criticized them but made fun of them. When a police officer pulled him over for speeding and realized who he was, the officer thanked him for all that he was doing to squash the Klan and sent him on his way without a ticket. But there were lots of other people who were angry at his remarks. His wife, Besse, worried that the parsonage would be bombed.
Chiropracters: As I’ve already mentioned, Douglas was an enthusiastic fan of modern medical practice, and he fought hard against people’s tendency to accept medical advice from the untrained. He was especially vocal about “the quackery of chiroprackery.”
Blue Laws: The other churches in town wanted to limit what people could do on Sundays. They were especially against moviegoing. Douglas took the unusual stance of opposing blue laws. (Unusual for a minister, that is.) He said that this was the kind of thing that turned people against Christianity. Newspapers all over the region reported his remarks.
Soldier’s Bonus: Decades before the GI Bill, Congress tried to pass a Soldier’s Bonus for veterans of WWI. Douglas mentioned, in an offhand way, that, given the current state of the economy (this was the depression before the Great Depression), he couldn’t support the idea of a Soldier’s Bonus. He felt it would be better to bolster the economy and give veterans jobs rather than make them dependent on the government. He received a lot of angry mail, besides all the talk in the Letters to the Editors. To clear things up, he gave a speech before an audience of veterans at the local American Legion post and explained his stance. There isn’t any indication that he changed people’s minds, but at least one letter from a veteran stated that they respected Douglas for all that he was doing to help the unemployed. (And he actually was doing something. He had accepted Mayor Carl Beck’s invitation to chair the city’s Unemployment Committee, which looked into ways to overcome unemployment. The letter to the editor claimed that he was also known to have contributed time and money into helping individuals find jobs. That’s a somewhat mysterious reference, but very much in line with his belief in investing in others.)
In all these cases (and others besides), it’s clear that local journalists respected Douglas even when they disagreed with them. Here’s my favorite example. In one of his Sunday-night speeches, Douglas claimed that the AP and other wire services were dominated by wealthy individuals who controlled what the newspapers would publish. “It may be that some of this lecture will be printed by the Akron papers,” Douglas said, “but this part of it will not.”
The Akron Times printed it, along with this headline: “Here It Is, Doctor, Even Tho It’s Bunk.”
I’ll tell you more about Douglas’s ministry in Akron in my next post.
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When Lloyd Douglas began his ministry at the First Congregational Church of Akron in the fall of 1921, he viewed it as a chance to share all that he had learned during his time at the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan. As he explained later, “I came to you from an experience of about ten years, spent upon the campuses of two great universities, where I daily faced the new problem of a readjustment in religious thought, to make it consonant with the more recent disclosures of the philosophical and scientific world” (Lloyd C Douglas, “Five Years of Akron,” in The Living Faith (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1955), p. 80.)
During those years, he had been in university towns, but now he was in a city – “Rubber City,” they called it, due to the predominance of the big tire companies like Goodyear and Firestone – and he was putting his ideas into practice out in the world.
If this was ever used as an advertisement in the local paper or as a pamphlet, I’ve been unable to find a clipping of it. But this photograph is pasted into the last page of Douglas’s 1920-1923 scrapbook. The First Congregational Church of Akron is in the upper right corner of the picture. From Box 5, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
The first thing he focused on was worship. Not preaching, but worship.
In his inaugural sermon at the First Congregational Church of Akron on September 18, 1921, Douglas said, “The church is failing in America because it has failed to carry out its true mission…. The church may do philanthropic and social work, but its first duty is to be a house of worship, and when it fails in this it cannot expect the veneration to which it should be entitled” (“SCORES CHURCH/New Akron Pastor Flays Modern Worship,” Akron Press, n.d., 1920-1923 Scrapbook, Box 5, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan).
Over the past several years, Douglas had already established an order of worship that the people in Ann Arbor said was “probably unsurpassed elsewhere.” (This was from a resolution the congregation’s leaders drew up in 1921, accepting his resignation and thanking him for his ministry. Quoted on p. 63 of Calvin O. Davis, A History of the Congregational Church in Ann Arbor, 1847-1947, which was reprinted in A History of the First Congregational Church in Ann Arbor, 1847-1976 (Ann Arbor: First Congregational Church, n. d. [1976?]).
His services were heavily dependent on music. It was a source of great irritation to him that people would talk over the organ prelude. As he told his new congregation, “During the organ prelude in a church recently I learned the recipe for plum jelly, that a certain oil stock was a good buy, that there was to be a bargain sale at a local department store, and that the road to another city was in bad shape on account of the concrete cracking” (from “SCORES CHURCH” cited above).
He thought the church auditorium should be a true sanctuary where people would leave their worldly cares at the door and come into the presence of The Great Mystery. “The LORD is in His Holy Temple,” begins the Order of Worship from his first Sunday in Akron; “let all the earth keep silence before Him.” In Ann Arbor, Douglas had enforced that: ushers were to close the doors as soon as the organ prelude began and not open them again until later in the service. He was so adamant about this that it ruffled a few of his parishioners’ feathers, but he was striving to make the church a place where people could actually come with the expectation of meeting God.
The prelude should begin softly, Douglas felt, to counteract the rat-a-tat-tat of machinery that had assaulted worshipers’ ears for the past six days. It should calm the soul and prepare it for communion with the divine. Then, through subtle use of dynamics and ascending chords, it should end triumphantly in the exact key of the opening hymn and launch into that hymn immediately, so that worshipers would rise and sing without being prompted. Douglas hated how the typical Protestant minister could spoil the whole thing by announcing, “Beloved, shall we not rise and sing Hymn 321? That’s 321, and you’ll find it in the hymnal on the pew in front of you. Hymn 321.”
As Douglas said to an audience of fellow ministers and lay-workers:
Many a sensitive man would greatly prefer to take a book of essays with him to a shady bend in the river on Sunday morning than attend our church; whereas his whole soul cries out for a much closer contact with the divine than he can achieve by his communion with nature. But – it is a great deal better for that man’s spiritual welfare that he should go out Sunday morning and watch the river than to go to some church where the music is so ugly it positively frightens [him] and the preacher talks to the Great Unseen as if he were chaffing with his next-door neighbor over the back fence.
Lloyd C Douglas, “Making Worship Worshipful,” Christian Century, September 9, 1920, pp. 14-17.
What Douglas was trying to achieve can best be understood through his description of the exact opposite:
There wasn’t a single feature of that ‘service of worship’ calculated to quicken a man’s respiration, or grip his throat, or stir his pulse! What little of solemn ritual there was in it possessed no current, no rapids, no eddies, no sudden unexpected plunges over huge ledges into unfathomably deep pools, no sharp turns revealing startlingly beautiful vistas ahead – no! – but just ambled lazily along on a level like the sleepy Yanktse Kiang, for five hundred miles without a ripple. It reached no dramatic climaxes; pointed to no definite goal; never poured its flood into the deep sea. It spread out over the sands, and disappeared.
Lloyd C Douglas, Wanted: A Congregation (Chicago: Christian Century Press, 1920), p. 195.
At the movies, Douglas said – and he was talking about silent movies, remember, for this was 1921 – at the movies “there were certain tense moments when people stopped breathing and sat transfixed,” but at church…
…where the issue involved was the attempted establishment of actual, vital relationship with the Absolute – the invocation of His Presence at whose word light had dispelled the darkness, by whose divine fiat the worlds had appeared in space, by whose supernal genius His creatures had been endowed with a consciousness of their own immortality – this solemn and mysterious function was performed drowsily, calmly, with an air of tedium, boredom, and distaste.
Ibid., pp. 194-195.
Lloyd Douglas was the new minister in Rubber City. His first order of business was to stir people’s pulses… and invite them out into the deep sea.
To be continued…
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Photo taken sometime during the Ann Arbor years (1915-1921.) Douglas’s daughter Betty is on the left, Virginia is on the right, and their mother, Besse, is in the center. From Virginia Douglas Dawson and Betty Douglas Wilson, The Shape of Sunday: An Intimate Biography of Lloyd C. Douglas (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1952).
In their book about their father, Douglas’s daughters Virginia and Betty say that the years their family spent in Ann Arbor (1915-1921) were happy ones. Douglas died before he could write his autobiography (he really didn’t want to do it anyway, and his book Time to Remember is only about his childhood), but in his proposed outline there was a chapter with the heading: “Ann Arbor – Happy Job!”
But Lloyd Douglas was never one to sit still, no matter how happy he was. There’s a scene in The Robe (chapter 22) that seems autobiographical to me. Marcellus, the hero of the story, has spent the summer in the Roman village of Arpino, telling the residents about Jesus; but now he’s leaving. “Aren’t you contented here?” they inquire. “Haven’t we done everything you wished?” “Yes,” he tells them. “That’s why I’m going.”
In the fall of 1921, Douglas accepted the call to be Senior Minister at the First Congregational Church of Akron, Ohio. And it’s fortunate that he did, because it was not until Akron that he began to formulate his ideas about the gospel and its place in modern life. He had learned a lot in the academic environments at the universities of Illinois and Michigan, but now he needed to get out among working people (both white- and blue-collar) and tell them what he had learned.
There are a few final notes I want to make about Ann Arbor, however.
His First Car
It was in Ann Arbor that he began his love affair with automobiles. The members of the church took up a collection in 1920 and surprised him with his own Model-T Ford. There was just one problem: could someone with his nervous disposition ever learn to drive it? Under her breath, his wife Besse whispered, “He’s never been able to mow the lawn in a straight line.” (We’re not talking about a power-mower. We’re talking about one of those old-fashioned manual push-mowers with the blades that extend between the two wheels.)
But Douglas learned quickly, and when he returned home from his “free lesson,” he declared his new car “a humdinger.” His daughters write, “He learned to be a very good driver and had no real accidents all the many years, although he became involved in hundreds of awkward situations” (Virginia Douglas Dawson and Betty Douglas Wilson, The Shape of Sunday: An Intimate Biography of Lloyd C. Douglas (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1952), p. 111).
There is at least one literary reference that comes readily to mind here: Douglas’s novel Green Light was inspired, in part, by his experiences behind the wheel.
His First Honorary Doctorate
Douglas used this image for promotional purposes throughout his Ann Arbor years.
In 1919, Douglas was awarded his first honorary doctorate (a Doctor of Divinity degree), from Fargo College. There is surprisingly little information about it in his scrapbooks. Several years later, he devoted 14 pages to the funeral of Marion LeRoy Burton, who was president of the University of Michigan at the time of his death. Douglas was involved in the ceremony, so he saved clippings of obituaries, photos of the funeral procession, and remembrances of the late president. But of his own honorary doctorate, Douglas left little record.
What we do have is in his 1918 Scrapbook. There’s a letter dated April 9, 1919, from Fargo’s president, E. Lee Howard, who was a classmate and fraternity brother of Douglas’s at Wittenberg, asking Douglas to give the commencement address and to accept the honorary degree. There is a clipping from the Fargo newspaper talking about the upcoming commencement and announcing that Douglas would be the speaker and one of the honorees. There’s another clipping that tells about the ceremony, including the speech, but doesn’t mention his doctorate. And then there’s the printed program. That’s all. No other record of the event. Seems like kind of an important thing to skim over.
A New Church Building
(Some of the information that follows comes from clippings in Douglas’s scrapbooks and from his daughters’ biography, but most of the details are from A History of the First Congregational Church in Ann Arbor, 1847-1976 (Ann Arbor: First Congregational Church, n.d., but probably 1976).)
Because of Douglas’s popularity as a preacher, especially among university students, the Ann Arbor church wasn’t big enough. It was typical for people to be turned away if they didn’t arrive early enough to find a seat. Almost immediately, there was talk of enlarging the building. At first there was enthusiasm for the idea, but the First World War put a halt to it. After the war, they began making plans, but those plans were dashed in 1921 when Douglas announced that he was leaving. It took a year for the congregation to find a replacement for him, but it was not someone who packed the house. The building was starting to deteriorate, though, so costly repairs had to be done – always an uninspiring prospect for a congregation that had hoped for so much more.
In the late 1920s, the idea was revived again, only for the stock market crash and the Great Depression to put the project on hold once more. It wasn’t until Dr. Leonard Parr’s pastorship (1937-1957) that the expansion finally happened. A lot of people contributed substantial sums of money, and as I glance down the list of contributors, I see the names of many people who were active in the church during Douglas’s pastorate.
But it’s also ironic to see the name of Lloyd Douglas, who was by then a world-famous novelist. It’s ironic, I say, because he ended up contributing to the project that initially was planned because the church couldn’t hold all the people who wanted to hear him preach.
And this leads to a related subject…
The Douglas Memorial Chapel
Although I’m getting ahead of the story, I’ll mention it here because it was part of the church’s expansion. After his beloved wife Besse died in the 1940s, Douglas wanted to build a chapel in her honor at the Ann Arbor site. It took a while for the project to happen, however, and when Douglas himself died in 1951, his daughters contributed further funds to make it a chapel in honor of both of their parents. The result was the Douglas Memorial Chapel, a wing of the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor. Its windows evoke images of Douglas’s life as a minister and writer. To this day, the chapel is used for weddings and baptisms, and it is open daily for prayer and meditation. In Green Light and Invitation to Live, Dean Harcourt always began each day alone in the sanctuary, communicating with “Headquarters.” I think Douglas would have loved knowing that the Douglas chapel is a place where people can still do that in the 21st Century.
Lloyd Douglas didn’t win the Christian Century’s essay contest in the summer of 1920; he took second place. But it didn’t matter…
From the July 22, 1920, issue of The Christian Century, p. 22. Available online at The Online Books Page.
…because his participation in the contest had excited the interest of the editor, Charles Clayton Morrison, and Morrison invited Douglas to submit another article to the Century – right away. “Our readers will be particularly interested in an article from you just now when their attention has been put on the qui vive [on the alert] by your taking one of the honors in the series,” Morrison said. “I hope you will feel not only free, but strongly prompted, to write for us at any time.”
Letter from Charles Clayton Morrison to Lloyd C Douglas, July 22, 1920. In 1918 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
Douglas accepted the invitation immediately. And he didn’t just send one article; he sent Part One of a three-part series. It was called, “Wanted: A Congregation,” and it was some of the finest writing he had ever done up to that time.
Letter from Charles Clayton Morrison to Lloyd C Douglas, August 3, 1920. In 1918 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
Upon receiving the first installment, Morrison gushed, “You write splendidly.” He wasted no time publishing it, even announcing it on the front cover (August 5, 1920), and he encouraged Douglas to send the other two installments as soon as possible.
Notice that Douglas now shares the front cover with John Spargo.
Douglas did better than that: he sent three more installments. But first he asked the editor’s permission. Morrison wrote back pretending to be “quite offended that you felt any inhibition at all in the matter of writing a fourth installment when you were prompted to do so.” He wasn’t really offended; he was delighted that Douglas had been “prompted,” either by his Muse or by the Spirit, to add another installment to the series. “The chances are 102 per cent that whatever you write will be available [he probably means ‘accepted’] for publication in The Christian Century.”
So… now Douglas not only had a series running in the Century, but he also had an open invitation from the editor to send him an article anytime, and to expect to see it published in that magazine.
Elesha J Coffman has written, “In 1920, the Century was not yet a magazine that other papers envied or a place where writers could make their names. By the end of the decade, through savvy and serendipity, it would be both.” (The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainstream (NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 63.)
That being the case, Douglas and the Century grew up together, for his frequent contributions beginning in 1920 made his non-fiction writing well-known among America’s Protestant clergy, and at the end of that decade, TheChristian Century would play a major role in making him a world-famous novelist.
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I’ve been telling you about the essay contest that Lloyd Douglas entered at The Christian Century during the Spring/Summer of 1920. The contest was prompted by John Spargo’s article, “The Futility of Preaching,” published May 20, 1920, in the Century.
Douglas’s response, “Preaching and the ‘Average Preacher'” was published anonymously, along with the essays of five other contestants, on July 1, 1920. The issue included a ballot for readers to choose the three best essays.
From the July 1st, 1920, issue of The Christian Century, p. 28. Available online at The Online Books Page.
Meanwhile, the Century’s editor, Charles Clayton Morrison, asked John Spargo to read the six anonymous essays and write a follow-up article in response. Spargo’s reply was published in the July 22nd issue. Notice how Morrison took a single submission (Spargo’s initial article published May 20th) and kept his readers interested in that one article all the way through July and beyond. He paired this with an advertising campaign that told potential readers what was happening. It was this kind of maneuvering that made the Century grow into a successful magazine.
For the most part, Spargo’s reply was general, telling his readers more about himself and his views. He only got angry at one of the contestants. Guess who!
Of course, in this discussion, as in every other, we have the quibbler who is less concerned to establish the essential truth than to score debating points. Shall I confess that I was amused by the sophomoric intensity of one of the writers in his attempt to demonstrate that my use of the term ‘average preacher’ was unscientific and an evidence of the fact that my views were not entitled to serious consideration?
John Spargo, “More about Preaching and the Ministry,” The Christian Century, July 22, 1920.
Amused? I don’t think so. His irritation is clearly displayed in his next remarks:
Of course, this is the characteristic spirit of the Medieval schoolmen that made theology such a terrible incubus upon religion. In the practical affairs of life, this good brother, not animated by sectarian dogmatism or pride, would not think of invoking such a rule. If his neighbor declared the day to be an ‘average’ one, he would not demand that the statement be accompanied by a statistical analysis of the meteorological records. Similarly, if a brother minister declared that he had a good ‘average’ congregation, the writer in question would not think of demanding verification of the statement in statistical terms. I emphasize my reference to this quite incidental and essentially irrelevant criticism because it illustrates the vicious narrowness of a mind fostered by ecclesiasticism. The plain, forthright speech and straight and direct thinking characteristic of honest men in their ordinary intercourse and business relations do not suit a certain familiar type of theologian or an equally familiar type of ecclesiastic.
Ibid
Ouch! He’s right, up to a point: his use of the term “average minister” wasn’t as important as Douglas made it out to be, and Douglas did use it to “score debating points.” But this wasn’t Douglas at his best. On any other occasion, Lloyd Douglas was nothing like the Medieval schoolmen, nor was he guilty of “the narrowness of mind fostered by ecclesiasticism.” It’s unfortunate that these two gifted men were pitted against each other so that it was practically impossible for them to appreciate each other’s talents.
Meanwhile, readers were now encouraged to await the results of the vote, in which they would discover exactly how many “debating points” each of the anonymous contestants had won.
To be continued…
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The Lloyd C Douglas Page 