christianity – The Lloyd C Douglas Page

Douglas on Engaging with Secular Society

An excerpt from Lloyd C. Douglas, “In Re Sermons on Wages,” The Christian Century, 5/12/1921.

[The following is the conclusion of a Christian Century article by Lloyd Douglas entitled, “In Re Sermons on Wages.” It was published in the May 12, 1921, issue, a little over a year after the end of the First World War. Douglas is saying that the church should provide leadership both to business and to labor, even though he admits that neither of those parties will want the church to interfere. He writes:]

“[A]ny modern prophet who goes into this business of straight goods to all parties concerned – to mean and selfish capital, and cantankerous and unreasonable labor – must promise himself in advance that he is in for something interesting.

“Moreover, he will find that he cannot enter upon the subject at all unless he proposes to take the consequences of his own audacity. He mustn’t expect to stir up the animals on Sunday, and be reported in the papers on Monday, with the hope that everybody will forget what he said on Thursday. Not a bit of it. He will find himself in the predicament of the man who caught the bear by the tail and was afraid to let go! He will be bombarded from both sides – if he has been fair – for both sides are almost equally culpable, unreasonable, and selfish. If he has told the truth about them on Sunday, there will be certain elements on both sides heartily agreeing with him and hoping he may have the courage and patience to continue making his contribution to the cause of justice and the common weal.

“It is time the church spoke! Roger Babson [entrepreneur, economist, and founder of Babson Institute (later Babson College)], in his regular letter to his constituency [to whom he sent economic statistics], dated April 18 [1921], says, ‘The need of the hour is not for more factories or materials, not for more railroads or steamships, not for more armies or navies – but for more education based on the plain teachings of Jesus.’ Babson is not speaking to the Central District Conference of the So-and-So Church, either; but to some twenty-thousand of the biggest and brainiest businessmen of this country!

“It would indeed be a cause for considerable chagrin to the church of America if secular business had to lead the way toward a new appreciation of Jesus Christ.”

Douglas on Speaking Truth to Power

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from a Christian Century article by Lloyd Douglas entitled, “In Re Sermons on Wages.” It was published in the May 12, 1921, issue, a little over a year after the end of the First World War. Douglas has offered two fanciful versions of the Parable of the Talents – one with the lord’s servants becoming members of a labor union and the other with the lord colluding with other lords. There are good managers and bad ones, he says, just as there are good and bad employees. He has just made the rather remarkable claim that it is the church’s responsibility to sort them out. Now he writes:]

“When, twenty-five years ago, the greater nations of the world had gone daft on a great program of building larger navies, if the church had had the sense and courage to say to the powder merchants and the greedy statesmen and all other professional disturbers of the peace, ‘That will be about enough!’ – our world would be in a far different condition at this moment. When the war was over, if the church had pointed the way to a quick and just settlement of the issues then confronting the worn and battle-tired nations, in a voice of command, we might not now be whetting the scythe for more harvest of blood and tears.

“But whenever the church has made as if she would speak, there were always kindly, warning voices saying, ‘Better keep out of this. It is really not your business, you know!’

“The time has come for the church to engage in some straight talk on the whole labor situation. It is not yet too late for her to make a distinct contribution to this subject, if she approaches the matter fearlessly and fairly and informed. But the preacher who thinks of having somewhat to say, anent this question, must prepare himself to hear his closest and best friends (some of whom provide for the bulk of his church expenses) say, ‘You are skating on pretty thin ice, old man! You had better confine yourself to your job of pointing people to heaven and telling them about the Bible!’

“That was the trouble they had with Jesus! He didn’t talk enough about Moses! – said the scribes and Pharisees. He insisted on talking about high rents in Jerusalem, and excessive rates of interest on loans, and shady commercial transactions carried on in the very lobby of the temple! It was for that they nailed him to a cross. And any modern prophet who goes into this business of talking straight goods to all parties concerned – to mean and selfish capital, and cantankerous and unreasonable labor – must promise himself in advance that he has let himself in for something interesting.”

[That last sentence was a form of humorous understatement which Douglas employed from time to time. I will give the conclusion of his essay in my next post…]

Douglas’s Comments on Labor Relations in America in 1921

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from a Christian Century article by Lloyd Douglas entitled, “In Re Sermons on Wages.” It was published in the May 12, 1921, issue, a little over a year after the end of the First World War. Douglas has just finished giving two fanciful versions of the Parable of the Talents – one with the lord’s servants becoming members of a labor union and the other with the lord colluding with other lords. Each story has good guys and bad guys on one side or the other. He writes:]

“It is Christianity’s business to lay this responsibility, and blame, and burden, exactly where it belongs. Honest and self-respecting labor must help. Honest and self-respecting capital must help. Any organization that provides a cloak for selfish capital to hide behind, in these critical days, must go! It is part of the church’s task to show it up for what it is – and what it does! Any organization that provides an opportunity for lazy and wicked labor to exploit and menace the cause of the honest workman must mend its ways or get ready to face exposure! Christianity must say, fearlessly, to the blue laborer, ‘If you want any sympathy or assistance in your cause, stop protecting the yellow laborer and the red laborer!’

“There must be a disposition on the part of the church to say to the employer who has tried to do the square thing by his men, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!’ And to him who has followed a policy of grinding his workmen to pieces at a miserable wage, and then tossing them out the back door for the infirmaries and jails to gather up, ‘Thou art a low-lived slacker!’

“To the honest laborer, Christianity must say, ‘Thou hast been faithful over a few things. We will help thee to larger freedom and better privileges.’ To the lazy, sullen obstructionist who has always been ready to throw down his toils and quit at the slight suggestion; and to the professional troublemaker who pretends to be labor’s friend, while undercutting labor’s cause by petty graft and nefarious dickering, Christianity must be bold enough to say, ‘Thou art a wicked and slothful servant!’

“Whether the church will try to lead in establishing a new relationship between the honest men of both parties to this question remains to be seen. If one is to judge the future by the recent past, she will not. She has made the mistake of allowing influences, guised as children of light, but quite otherwise as to character, to lead her around by the nose and lash her into line to serve whatever temporary interests are paramount in the minds of selfish opportunists!”

[Douglas’s essay will continue in my next post…]

The Minister in the Pew

by Ronald R Johnson

A page from Lloyd C. Douglas, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” The Christian Century, 4/14/1921.

[The following is the conclusion of the article, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” which Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century in the April 14, 1921, issue. He is speaking to fellow ministers about ways that they can find inspiration, despite their busy schedules. He writes:]

“Every so often, the preacher ought to get away from his church and sit in a pew. He should not content himself with a visit to some church of the same capacity as his own, where he will inevitably take notes and make comparisons. Neither should he go to hear a preacher of the same caliber as himself, in which case he is sure to get little out of the service or the sermon beyond the mechanics of both. He must go, as a worshipper, into a church equipped and manned so excellently that he will forget everything but his own soul, under the inspiration of the hour. His congregation at home should open the way for him to do this, not less than twice a year. They should not expect him to come back and report, either, on what he heard. He should do this for the sake of his own spiritual culture. Incidentally, the restoration of the joy of his own salvation will inevitably affect his preaching.

“If there was room for just one more movement – there is not; so let us have no further thought of that! – but if there was room for one more movement, perhaps it would be well to start something calculated to assist the preacher in the highly commendable business of cultivating his own soul. This is a live question! It would be interesting to learn of the various expedients to which busy ministers have resorted in their efforts to achieve spiritual culture. If we fail at this point, we fail fundamentally. If we never see or hear anything that inspires us, how may we expect to inspire others? If the light that is in us be darkness, how great is that darkness!”

The Homiletic Mood

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from the article, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” which Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century in the April 14, 1921, issue. He is speaking to fellow ministers about how they are kept so busy on their work that they have no time or opportunity to be inspired themselves. He writes of the busy pastor:]

“If the preacher is alert to the possibilities of his ministry, he is continually in a homiletic mood. Nothing ever passes before his eyes that is not hailed as potential sermonic material. This mood is ever with him. It is with him when he reads the Book in the early morning, presumably for devotional reasons. It is very much on the job as he offers his prayers. And the better preacher he is, the more grave is the menace that his own spiritual life may be starved. He must contrive, somehow, to achieve soul-culture!

“Perhaps if he would make a resolution that one day of the week – Monday, say – he would refrain from assaying books, conversation, and natural phenomena with a view to their possible sermonic ore, reserving that day for his own private consumption, he might, after a while, consistently practice this habit.

“All America is afflicted with a psychosis which might be called ‘the busy bee.’ (Not the bee apis, but the bee bonnet.) Preachers have it about as badly as anybody. Worse than most. The good man is fearful that someone will think him idle, or of leisurely habits. He thinks he must be racing about, with wilted collar, either doing things or going through the motions of doing things, all the day long. When asked if he doesn’t reserve Monday as a rest day, he sighs and says, ‘Oh, dear, no! All days are alike to us! I’ve given up trying to save my Monday!’ He thinks this is as it should be.

“This is the gentleman who gets himself all excited telling his people that even practical, godless economics requires of mortals ‘one day’s rest in seven,’ and points to notable cases of nations that broke the rule and went heels-over-head to the bow-wows. Yes; everybody needs a rest-day but himself. Alas, poor man, he is too busy to knock off at all. Piffle! He can, and he must, make some provision for the salvation of his own soul. Let him name one day of the week to be sacred to the cultivation of his spirit.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

Slave of Church Machinery

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from the article, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” which Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century in the April 14, 1921, issue. He is speaking to his fellow ministers about how they are kept so busy on their work that they have no time or opportunity to be inspired themselves. He writes of the busy pastor:]

“Increasingly has he become enslaved to all the church machinery bequeathed to him by energetic predecessors, plus all the modern conveniences which he himself has installed, in the way of organizations, ‘to assist him in his work.’ Sometimes, when he sits down for a moment before the grate to catch his breath from the exacting labors of the day and contemplates that he must now hurry to the church, with all speed, to meet the executive committee of the Sunny Sons of Something-or-Other – knowing full well that he must adroitly suggest the business to come before the body, hypnotize some Sunny Son into making a motion and another into the act of supporting it and all of them into passing it; and that the outcome of the event will be a smilingly unanimous resolution empowering him to go out, single-handedly, and do whatever it was that he might have done at one-tenth the time and bother without supervising these parliamentary calisthenics – he wonders whether he hasn’t fed both hands, up to the very shoulders, into the rapacious maw of his own machine!

“But it is quite too late to remedy much of this. He has made his bed, and now he must lie in it. He has surrounded himself with cabinets, bureaus, commissions, principalities and powers – The Tri-Mu Fraternity, The Best-You-Can-Do Club, The Merry Matrons, and the Over-the-Tops – from which he may no more readily disengage himself than a mid-August fly with all six legs knee-deep in stickemfast.

“Thus engaged, weekdays, in parish and community duties which leave but little time unmortgaged, the good man is really in as serious need of spiritual rejuvenation on Sunday, the day of rest, as the most jaded beast of burden who appears before him at that time in the sanctuary. But – may he not derive much spiritual uplift from his own sermons? – someone pertinently inquires. Well, let us look into that for a moment.

“Sermon manufacture is a business. It is not exactly the same kind of business as selling gingham, shingling a roof, digging a sewer, or excising a tumor; but it is a business, and if the preacher doesn’t make a business of it his days will not be long in the land as a preacher. It is not an unusual experience for a minister to be so aflame with his subject that the research, composition, and delivery of his sermon develop him spiritually, so that he lives for days in the light and warmth of it. But this is by no means a weekly experience, even with the most ardent, if they themselves are to be believed.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

The Preacher’s Heart Hunger

by Ronald R Johnson

[The following is from the article, “Saving the Minister’s Soul,” which Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century in the April 14, 1921, issue. He is speaking to fellow ministers about how they never get to hear any sermons other than their own. He has just described a typical conference of ministers, in which nuts-and-bolts presentations and requests for money predominate. He writes:]

“If this matter has been overstated, the exaggeration may easily be pointed out and denied by fellow-craftsmen who have failed to observe that the end and aim of most of our ‘inspirational’ conference addresses is fiscal rather than cardiac. One must never forget – and one isn’t at all likely to be permitted to forget – that it takes money, and lots of it, to operate the kingdom, as modernly constituted; but it also takes something else that money cannot buy. It is of this somewhat [in]tangible but highly important ‘something else’ that we need to think seriously these days.

“In the course of his daily activities, the preacher – commonly and erroneously presumed to possess singular opportunities for the culture of his own soul – is almost as beset with secular duties as the busiest man of affairs in his congregation. No cloistral seclusion is permitted him, and it is uncertain he would avail himself of such insular protection were it offered. The nature of his ministerial labors has altered so completely within the past two decades that he is no longer in the mood for that peculiar type of spiritual culture which distinguished our predecessors of a generation past. The modern minister gets little opportunity to develop what our elders used to call ‘piety,’ and so infatuated has he become with the newer features of his business that the very term ‘piety’ is not the most popular word in his working vocabulary. He shies off, uncomfortably, when he meets it, suspecting it of distasteful designs upon the length of his countenance and the manner of his speech or dress.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

Agents of Spirituality

by Ronald R Johnson

“Occasionally we attend conferences with our fellow ministers and selected groups of devout laymen; but there the program consists mostly of the mere buttons-and-pins of church methods, the discussion of administrative problems, and consideration of workaday statistical reports. Not infrequently it turns out the that promised ‘inspirational address’ with which the conference was to reach its ennobling climax deftly maneuvers its way from the pulpit to the receipt of custom, where it attains to such magnificence of appeal that the baskets are passed again – this time in the interest of some undeniably worthy cause that had come ‘to the parting of the ways,’ and was ‘facing an hour of crisis,’ and ‘now throws down an heroic challenge to the sacrificial courage of the red-blooded!’ And so forth. Ad lib.

“But even this drench of distress on behalf of an excellent movement, involving the re-reconstruction of the preacher’s puny purse to the jeopardized philanthropy, does very little to assuage his heart-hunger for spiritual nourishment. To be sure, the traveling secretary of the bankrupt board tells him that the most effective spiritual tonic known to the profession is self-administered by the act of turning one’s pockets wrongsideout; but the preacher, however salutary may be the moral results of charity, or sweet the uses of adversity, still longs for some genuine inspiration, just once, that doesn’t find its ultimate goal in his jeans.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

Hearing Sermons

by Ronald R Johnson

“Our profession seems pretty thoroughly committed to the belief that hearing the gospel preached week after week is so excellent a safeguard and stimulus to correct living that public morality is greatly influenced by the Christian pulpit. Sometimes the doubt is expressed that people who habitually deny themselves the moral and spiritual uplift from the pulpit may order their lives as becomes good Christian citizens. If this proposition has a leg to stand on, what is to become of us who never have a chance to hear the gospel preached, except as we ourselves interpret it, from one year’s end to the next?

“It is not the object of this writing to imply that preachers, as a class, are misbehaving themselves; for such is not the case. Although our ministerial ordination guarantees no immunity against the common weaknesses of mankind, the public expects us to exhibit a high-grade morality. That this demand has been met in a manner fairly satisfactory is evident from the respect generally accorded the clergy as leaders in the moral life of their communities. Once in a while, we are rasped to spluttering indignation over the front-page prominence given to the story of a moral lapse committed by some weak brother whose name had never meant anything until it had contrived to associate itself with odium; but, if we only stop to reason, this is a sort of awkward, left-handed compliment to our vocation. It means that ministers habitually carry themselves with such circumspection that a mistake on the part of any one of them, however obscure, deserves to be played up as sensational news. Were such delinquencies frequent, they would not startle the public; neither would they earn widespread advertisement.

“But it is not the purpose of this paper to discuss the preacher’s morals so much as to inquire somewhat concerning the means at hand for the conservation and development of his spiritual capacities and aspirations. As for the majority of us, we rarely have a chance to hear anything that inspires us to higher thinking or nobler action. Such advices are customarily offered on the first day of the week, at a time when we ourselves are busy with our well-meant, though sometimes ineffective, endeavors to build up a stronger consciousness of human-divine contacts in the souls of our parishioners. We are simply agents and jobbers of spirituality, ourselves menaced with spiritual insolvency due to lack of inspirational income plus a steady drain of expense at that point; starved in the very process of retailing to the ultimate consumer the finest provisions we can lay hands upon – sometimes blissfully unconscious of the pernicious anemia that has sapped our spiritual vigor.”

[Douglas will continue his essay in my next post…]

What About Lent? Part 7

by Ronald R Johnson

A page from Lloyd C. Douglas, “What About Lent?” in The Christian Century, 2/3/1921.

The following is the conclusion of an article by Lloyd C. Douglas in the February 3, 1921, issue of The Christian Century. The title of the article is, “What About Lent?” Douglas has been just been saying that he holds church services every afternoon during Holy Week, and that he handles them topically. He writes:

“For example: Let the general theme of the addresses [all week] be phrased: ‘Suffered Under Pontius Pilate.’ On Monday, the theme might be, ‘The Indictment.’ Pilate asks, ‘Art thou a King?’ That is the indictment. It fits like a glove to the business one was doing on the day before, when the Palm Sunday pageantry was displayed.

“On Tuesday (all of these topics have to do with Pilate’s attitude toward Jesus – Pilate the cold-blooded, self-contained, dispassionate businessman) the topic might be, ‘A Problem of Jurisdiction.’ This deals with the story of Pilate’s sending his prisoner to Herod. He hoped to prove that the adjudication of the case was none of his business. A curious little twist is given to the story when it is noted that ‘Pilate and Herod, who had been previously at enmity, became friends that day.’ Pilate the gentleman strikes hands with Herod, roue and sot. Pilate despised Herod – but today they find common cause.

“On Wednesday a good theme is, ‘A Compromise Settlement.’ Pilate advises the crowd to ‘scourge him and let him go.’ If Jesus was guilty, he should be punished; if innocent, he should be acquitted. Pilate is willing to trim. It all gets back to the old query, ‘What will you do with Jesus?’

“On Thursday the topic might be phrased, ‘A Judgment Affirmed.’ This has to do with Pilate’s remark to the priests, ‘What I have written, I have written.’ After it is too late, Pilate bucks up and reveals a vestige of moral courage. After it is too late, Nicodemus ben Gorion and Joseph of Arimathaea appear as pallbearers. It is a great text – ‘What I have written.’

“Good Friday seems to take care of itself. There should be a program of penitential music, an address on the significance of the sacrifice on Golgotha, a stirring appeal to the courage and devotion of every man who has claimed fealty to Christ. Care must be exercised not to let this service become a mere lugubrious funeral of the Lord. Seeing he is not dead, that manner of memorial is out of drawing. A great theme for that day is, ‘Ye need not weep for me!'”