As I mentioned in earlier posts, in November 1928 (to be effective January 1929) Lloyd Douglas resigned as Senior Minister of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles because there was a small but determined group of members who were opposed to him, and he refused to let the congregation fight over him. Unfortunately, that meant that he was out of work at a time when he badly needed funds. His daughters were studying in France, and he had to get money to them, either to stay there or to come home.
It took a few months, but in March 1929 he was invited to preach at St. James United Church of Montreal, and they ended up extending a call to him. It was a big change from sunny California to what his daughter Virginia later called “the Land of the Frozen North” (Dawson and Wilson, The Shape of Sunday, 220). But it was also a godsend. Despite the few members of his Los Angeles congregation who didn’t like his message, Douglas was at the height of his powers as a preacher, and the sermons he delivered in Montreal are some of his best. At any rate, he was glad to say farewell to “Loose Angels” (his words, not mine).
St. James was (and is) a big church. On April 1st, 1929, Douglas wrote, “Yesterday was a red-letter day at the church. Fully two thousand were there in the morning and at night hundreds stood around the walls after the place was packed. Large chorus choir of excellent voices led by superb soloists accompanied by organ, piano and orchestra. It was quite lifting” (Shape of Sunday, 222). And very much in synch with Douglas’s way of doing church.
“A most intelligent audience,” he continued. “I couldn’t flatter myself they came to hear me.” After the rejection he had experienced in Los Angeles, it was hard for him, at first, to believe that people wanted to hear him preach. But they did, and after a while he allowed himself to accept that fact.
Even his Sunday night services attracted crowds. As he told his Akron friends, the James Van Vechtens, on April 12, “my Sunday night mob here, as compared intellectually with some I’ve seen, are a lot of Platos, Aristotles and Einsteins…. They all looked pretty intelligent to me from where I stood. Of course, I can’t see very well. And I’m a stranger here. Anyway, it’s a lot of fun and I’m glad we came” (Shape of Sunday, 223).
In the meantime, since Harper & Brothers had rejected his novel Salvage, Douglas tried to find another publisher. George Doran of Doubleday, Doran had expressed an interest in Douglas’s writings as early as the nineteen-teens. (See my earlier post on Douglas’s manuscript entitled, The Mendicant.) Douglas sent Doran the manuscript of Salvage, but he declined it for the same reason he had declined The Mendicant: because it wasn’t religious enough.
Douglas tried one more time. With this next company he was a shoe-in and he knew it: Eugene Exman at Harper had suggested a newly-established Chicago firm called Willett, Clark, and Colby, owned by the same people who published the Christian Century. And Douglas was one of the Century’s favorite writers. “The Christian Century and Willett, Clark & Co. are all the same thing as to brick and mortar, men and money,” Douglas explained a few years later.
Although it was fairly certain that they’d publish the manuscript, Douglas was taking a huge step backwards. His first book had been published by the Christian Century Press in 1920, but afterwards he upgraded to more prestigious firms: Scribner, then Harper. Giving his book to Christian Century people was like going back to square one.
But he did so, and Willett, Clark, and Colby accepted the manuscript, bringing it to press in the fall of 1929. When he sent it to them, he had changed the name of the book one last time. He called it Magnificent Obsession.
On November 4, 1928, at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, Lloyd Douglas read to his congregation the following message:
“I have a brief announcement to make which will come in the nature of a surprise to a great many people, friends and members of this church, who may have been scarcely aware that, throughout my two years here, there has been developing a left wing [it would have been more accurate to say ‘right wing’], increasingly out of sympathy with my administration.
“From the first I have been aware of this opposition; but, hoping it might be placated, I continued, happy in such service as I was enabled to render the church, believing the stress might soon be relieved.
“Upon my return from abroad, I learn that the minority has become quite aggressive and outspoken. Were there any principles involved, I might be persuaded to contend for them. There are no principles at issue. What storm there is, centers about myself. The natural solution is that I eliminate myself, and the confusion will be abated.
“I have never been party to a church quarrel. It does not seem to me that the church is the place for them. Anybody who, seeing a church row in the offing, can think of a good way to head it off, should be called blessed, I think, by both factions, if he suggests his remedy. I now crave that blessing. Rather regretfully, grateful to the very considerable majority who have been loyal and cooperative, and without any bitterness toward those who have not seen eye to eye with me, I offer my resignation to take effect on the last day of January.
“We now have three months left to us to demonstrate what sort of people we are. The persons in the church who wish for other leadership will presently have it. As for my friends, I trust they will realize how important it is that the church should carry on with a minimum of friction. I want my friends to be identifiable by the well-bred calmness with which they accept my decision, and the resoluteness of their refusal to discuss it.
“What we have had here is just one of those little predicaments which are apt to arise when there has been a maladjustment. Nobody in particular to blame; most of it arising out of temperamental incompatibility.
“Let us spend these next three months working together like Christians, and give the Los Angeles public a pleasant and perhaps unusual illustration of what the Lord was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount.”
He made it sound so easy. But his daughter Virginia wonders what was really going through his mind. She writes:
I can only imagine what he did. He must have dropped his head to his hands and let sweep over him the exact details of his predicament. A man must have moments of despair when alone he faces a future that seems totally black. Then fear must rush in and overwhelm him for a few moments no matter how he struggles to retain his grasp upon the strong hand of his faith…. Daddy must have had to look squarely at his future, without benefit of retouching. He had given up his job and was stranded in the West when all his connections were in the East; he was fifty-one years old, past the height of his career, many would say; his daughters were in Europe, requiring money to keep them there or bring them home; [and] the novel…
Dawson and Wilson, The Shape of Sunday, pp. 218-219.
Yes, the novel! The one he had been working on so hard for the past several months: Salvage (which would later be retitled, Magnificent Obsession). All his hopes now were pinned on that novel. But things weren’t turning out as well as he had hoped…
An undated photograph of Lloyd C Douglas, from sometime in the late 1920s. In “LCD Photographs,” Box 4, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
By the fall of 1928, Lloyd Douglas had been pastor at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles for two years. His congregation was divided. Many people liked him and appreciated the kind of ministry he was trying to bring, but there was a core group that was unhappy with him. Their complaints included the fact that his wife, Besse, didn’t lead Bible studies like other ministers’ wives did, and his two college-age daughters (Betty and Virginia) didn’t attend Sunday School.
Having been a PK himself (a Preacher’s Kid, that is), he had always been protective of his wife and daughters, refusing to make them behave in expected ways just because he happened to be a minister. In 1927, however, he had succumbed to pressure and had given his daughters a choice: either attend Sunday School or join the choir. So they joined the choir (Dawson and Wilson, The Shape of Sunday, pp. 201-202). But as a long-term solution, he had a better idea: in the fall of 1928 he sent them to Paris. It was something he had always wished he could do, and Virginia says it meant more to him than it did to them, but they went to Paris for a year of study, to soak up European culture, and they enjoyed it very much (pp. 207-208, 213-214). Reading Virginia’s account, it seems to me that, above all, he wanted to protect them from criticism by the core group of members that disapproved of them; sending them away to Europe was a wonderful strategy for getting them out of the picture.
In early fall 1928, he was scheduled to give a series of lectures in Hawaii, so another minister covered for him while he and Besse sailed to the Pacific. While he was gone, discontent grew. Virginia writes, “When Daddy returned from his series of lectures in Honolulu, he discovered that the unpleasant little group in the church who had been opposing him had organized themselves and appointed a spokesman. This man came to call the first evening of Daddy’s return. After polite and smiling preliminaries, he delivered his message. ‘I’m afraid we are going to have trouble raising our budget this year, Dr. Douglas.’
“‘And I am the reason?’ queried Daddy.
“The man did not say no” (pp. 215-216).
In other words, this man, who had no authority within the local congregation, was claiming the equivalent of a vote of no-confidence for Douglas. But, of course, there had been no vote, and if there had been, things might have turned out differently.
To understand what happened next, however, it is helpful to look back at an article Douglas had published seventeen years earlier in The Congregationalist and Christian World. (It’s in the April 22, 1911 issue of that magazine.) It was a lively, humorous retelling of the story of Jonah from the Old Testament. In that story, there is a storm at sea, and Jonah determines that it’s all his fault. He tells the crew to throw him overboard. Commenting on this, Douglas wrote:
I have frequently wondered why some people in the churches, who surely cannot fail of seeing that they are storm-centers and the cause of all manner of tribulation and discomfiture to the other passengers, have not the courage and grace to say, ‘If I am the fault of this disturbance, do pitch me out!’ And upon this, all the people should lend a willing hand and accept this magnanimous proposal; after which there would probably be a calm.
I suppose most people’s reaction would be to say, “Yes, throw the troublemakers out. Get rid of the people who are making it difficult for Douglas to do his work.” But Douglas didn’t react that way. He said, “Then I shall resign.”
And that’s what he did. The very next Sunday.
There were those in the congregation who wanted him to stay and fight, but Douglas had always said, throughout his ministry, that there was nothing more disappointing than the sight of so-called Christians fighting over their religion. It didn’t matter who was right; the fact that they would fight about it at all was disrespectful to the God both sides claimed to serve.
So Douglas resigned. His announcement the next Sunday was rather unusual. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.
From the Los Angeles Examiner, Thursday, 8/30/1928. In Burton Funeral Scrapbook, Box 6, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
Several days after Lloyd Douglas gave his congregation a negative review of Cecil B De Mille’s new film, The Godless Girl, a local reporter asked De Mille for his reaction (Harry Lang, “Atheism Exists in Schools Here, Declares De Mille,” Los Angeles Examiner, 8/30/1928). I will quote from the article at length:
‘ATHEISM?—’
Cecil B. DeMille… yesterday sat at that great desk of his, under the stained glass window of his studio sanctum, and said his say:
‘—so long as atheism remains a belief, a man has a perfect right to believe as he pleases. For myself, I believe in God. I think, if a man doesn’t believe in God, that he’s partially blind and partially deaf. He may think the same about me because I DO believe in God. But those are just our personal beliefs, and we’re entitled to them—I to mine, and he just as honorably to his.
‘But when atheism becomes a profession, and when the professional atheist sneaks into our schools and tries to cram his propaganda into the minds of our school children—now, that’s something else again!
‘And if you don’t think they’re doing just that—’
DeMille pointed to the report of a sermon delivered here last Sunday by the Rev. Lloyd C. Douglas of the First Congregational Church.
‘Doctor Douglas says there’s no such thing as atheism in our schools, among our children. Now, I have the highest respect for Doctor Douglas and his sincerity and honesty—but he doesn’t know anything at all about atheism!
‘Why, one of our big schools right here in Los Angeles has in its student body no less than 269 pupils, every one of them paying dues as a member of a national atheistic society! Even if Doctor Douglas doesn’t know that, it’s a point that the principal of that school knows!’
This picture of DeMille’s – ‘The Godless Girl,’ now showing at the Biltmore Theater – deals with the planting of the seeds of atheism in public schools of America, through an insidious, outside-financed propaganda system.
Indeed! De Mille believed that there was an organization of professionals recruiting students just like the unions were doing in the factories. “Professional atheists,” he called them.
The article continues:
‘Whether you like the picture or not is one thing,’ [De Mille] tells you. ‘But remember this, the picture is true; it is fact. When Doctor Douglas or anyone else says that such things as I show there do not exist, he doesn’t know whereof he speaks.
‘Atheism is a menace in our schools today. I don’t think, mind you, that the youth of today want to be atheists. I think they are as fine and as spiritually inclined as the youth of any other age. I think they are more genuine. But the times are different. They miss, at home, the element of spirituality. I remember my dad—he used to sit every evening and on Sundays and discuss spiritual matters. There weren’t, in those days, any movies, any dances, any night clubs, any automobiles, any radio.
(So… movies have a demoralizing effect on young people? Is that what he’s saying? Should movie theaters be banned, then? Probably not what he had in mind.)
De Mille continued:
‘The lack of that spirit in the home of today gives the professional atheist his great chance. It is at that—the professional atheist—that I aim. The sincere atheist won’t try to inflict his beliefs on your child or my child; it is the paid professional who is the danger, the menace.
‘They laughted, remember, at Trotsky and Lenin. But later nobody laughed!’
In De Mille’s fanciful view of the situation, high school students were being brainwashed by these professionals, who were busy recruiting them and turning them against God. And it was easy to understand how this could happen: as students were taught the theory of evolution, their minds would naturally be more receptive to atheism. Or so De Mille seemed to think.
The article concluded with De Mille emphasizing one more time:
‘Atheism IS a menace in our schools today! And who was it that said, ‘Where there is no God…’’
Over in the corner, the press agent prompted: ‘Proverbs, Mr. DeMille.’
‘Yes,’ concluded Cecil DeMille. ‘It was Solomon who said it – wise old chap – ‘Where there is no God, the people perisheth!’’
That wasn’t what the scripture passage said, but it didn’t really matter. At issue was De Mille’s claim that cadres of “professional atheists” had declared war on the nation’s schools and were even now infiltrating them. And there was simply no way that anyone was going to change his mind. In his autobiography, years later, he started to come in Douglas’s direction. In retrospect, he said, “what seems most dated to me now about The Godless Girl is the high school atheist club. More youngsters of today are more indifferent about God than belligerent toward Him. I wonder which is the more godless of those two attitudes” (De Mille, Autobiography, p. 287). Ironically, this is what Douglas was trying to tell him: that high school students weren’t under assault from “professional atheists” trying to capture their souls but were, instead, being made indifferent to religion because of most churches’ unwillingness to face the facts of modern life.
Instead of being glum about it, like De Mille seems in his autobiography, Douglas was trying to do something about it. But it got him into trouble with a powerful core group of conservatives among the members of his congregation. To conservatives, De Mille’s stand was heroic; for Douglas to oppose him was just one more indication that it was time for him to go. So the conservatives in the congregation made their move weeks later…
Samuel “Bozo” Johnson (Eddie Quillan) declaring himself an unbeliever by placing his hand on the head of a monkey, while Judy, the Godless Girl (Lina Basquette), looks on. From https://silentfilm.org/the-godless-girl/.
In the summer of 1928, De Mille released his last silent movie: The Godless Girl. The “girl” mentioned in the title was busily winning her fellow high school students away from God, inviting them to clandestine meetings in which they would publicly declare themselves unbelievers while placing one hand on the head of a monkey. This was, of course, a comical reference to the theory of evolution, which De Mille thought should not be taught in the public schools.
After seeing this film, Lloyd Douglas preached a sermon about it on August 26, 1928, at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. (It’s included in “Sermons [1],” Box 3, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.)
Douglas described the scene:
“We have here the dramatic spectacle of a large hall, secretly secured, stealthily approached, up a half-dozen flights of rickety stairs, a hall crowded with high school youngsters. This is not offered as an unusual and inexplicable thing that happened somewhere, once, under strange and unaccountable circumstances. No: this is offered as a fair and normal sample of what is going on in high schools of this country.
“The meeting is presided over by a young fanatic, the Godless Girl, who frantically points to a drawing on the wall, replete with ridicule of God, and everybody interested in God. Converts are urged to come forward and take the pledge to abjure God and religion. This they do by putting one hand in the air, in the conventional sign of taking an oath, and the other hand laid upon the head of a monkey, which is the symbol and talisman and fetish of the new order that has staked its claim to knowledge of life on a materialistic biology.
“Now, it is exactly at this point that I, as a believer in an intelligent appraisal of the Christian religion, want to raise an indignant protest. For several years, the people who have been earnestly endeavoring to offer to our youth a system of religious belief which they can hold with intellectual self-respect, have been under heavy fire at the hands of the literalists and tradionalists, who interpret all scientific knowledge in terms of monkeys. If I don’t believe that Jehovah stacked up a pile of dirt and called it a man, and then took a rib from the man and called it a woman, then, perforce, I am an infidel who thinks his forefathers were chimpanzees.
For one, I am all tired of the monkey talk, and the monkey talkers! And the spectacle of a great roomful of eager, serious-minded high school boys and girls pledging their open hostility to God and religion by putting their hands on a monkey’s head, and swearing allegiance to a monkey gospel, is not only willfully and meanly untrue to the facts, but encourages the silly notions of certain classes of well-meaning but uninformed persons, that an intellectual appraisal of religion is, after all, consonant with atheism.
Later in the film, the principal characters are in a reformatory. As Douglas says:
A Bible figures in the scene. The girl who kisses it and makes soft eyes at it is religious. The girl who impatiently tosses it on the floor is an atheist. Here you have a specious form of heathenism—relic of the old obsolescent notion that the Bible… is a fetish. You don’t have to know anything about it—who wrote it and why—all you need to do is hug it and kiss it, make eyes at it – a type of benighted paganism that this age really should have outgrown!
This was Douglas’s main complaint. While he was trying to reach young people by appealing to their intelligence, so very many ministers and laypeople (aided by movies like this one) were declaring war on science, on education, and on the free exercise of the human mind. The problem, he said, “is not atheism at all… The modern student’s difficulty is complete indifference to the kind of religion that is to be had in the typical church.
Nobody can tell me that the youngsters think they have outgrown a need of religion, or emancipated themselves from God. Their seeming air of indifference is due to the fact that they have been invited by the churches to take their pick, whether they will accept a jumble of legends inherited from ancient Jewry as an adequate interpretation of life’s origin, meaning, and destiny, or repudiate the whole business and call themselves atheists! They would sincerely like to know whether they are permitted to have a religion.
“Permitted to have a religion”! That was the issue. More and more, the most vocal proponents of Christianity in America were forcing young people to choose between the things they were learning in high school and college, or the truths of the Bible as interpreted by those who had never been educated. If those young people found it impossible to deny what they had seen with their own eyes in the laboratory, then they were being told they could not call themselves Christians.
A little minority of churches is attempting to show them that they can; that spiritual energies are real; that a man can lay hold upon the power of the presence of God, and make use of that human-divine contact in every endeavor of his life and still pursue his work in the laboratories with a deep respect for the truths of modern science.
But mighty little encouragement do these churches receive. On the one hand they are bombarded by the so-called Fundamentalists who, apparently, would rather see the children lost to the church and indifferent to religion than to budge an inch from the mouldering wall of sixteenth-century dogmatism. On the other hand, they are misinterpreted by a casual public that has been fed up on talk of monkeys and the high importance of kissing Bibles… until it’s not much wonder if an intellectual estimate of religion, these days, is hard to arrive at.
This was the crux of Douglas’s complaint. The sermon ended up in the newspaper, and a reporter asked De Mille what he thought of Douglas’s remarks. I’ll tell you about his response in my next post.
A still from The King of Kings. From The Autobiography of Cecil B De Mille (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959).
Although Lloyd Douglas initially spoke highly of Cecil B De Mille’s The King of Kings in 1927, a year later his remarks were a bit more negative. And what he disliked about the film tells us more about him than about the film itself. During a sermon he preached on 8/26/1928 at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, he said,
“It was a very beautiful and very impressive picture… But – when it was all done – the sum total of it was a confirmation of the quite general belief that Jesus was essentially a magician. A morose, anaemic, death-bound juggler, who performs amazing feats of magic – mostly to the advantage of other people, and done in the utmost kindness, to be sure – but, an oriental juggler, nevertheless, whose ministry was punctuated with inexplicable deeds which brought vast crowds about him to see him do tricks.
“Now, the sad part about this type of appraisal of the character of Jesus is that instead of bringing him closer to the average man, and encouraging discipleship to his theory of living, it has the effect of making Jesus more remote” (from “Sermons [1], Box 3, Lloyd C Douglas papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan).
Douglas then went on to illustrate this point:
He stills the storm with a word of command. Very good: I cannot do that, so we will check that item off as being impossible for me… He asks me to follow him; to be like him; to do as he does – but I cannot do that, so he and I have nothing in common at that point.
Water into wine? Not for me. I can’t do it!
Paying taxes by catching a fish with money in its mouth? Not for me – it isn’t that easy – for me.
‘Be thou healed,’ says Jesus to the blind man… But not for me, or you. It’s not that easy. We have to build big hospitals, and train surgeons, and raise huge budgets to attend to our altruism and works of human rehabilitation.
‘Lazarus – come forth!’ shouts Jesus when his friend is dead and four days in the tomb. But not for you, or me. It isn’t that simple. How passionately we wish we could make our voices heard by our dear departed! But no, we must console ourselves with our hope and faith, believing where we cannot see!
No – the Christ who is able to offer helpfulness to us in our perplexities must stake his claims to our discipleship on the likeness between his life and ours – his powers and ours – his difficulties and ours. Discipleship must be predicated upon our points of likeness, rather than upon our points of dissimilarity. If I follow Jesus, it is because we have much in common.
He must be portrayed as a norm of human character, so linked with God, spiritually, that he makes adequate use of divine power – exactly the same use that any man may make of divine power who confidently seeks it, and righteously employs it.
If these examples sound familiar, they should. This is very close to Dr. Bruce McLaren’s remarks in Chapter 18 of Salvage, as I mentioned in a previous post. Like his fictional character, Douglas believed that emphasis on Christ’s miracles was counterproductive, from the standpoint of daily discipleship. He stated again that he had nothing against De Mille himself: “However I might be inclined to disagree with Mr. DeMille in his appraisal of Jesus, I have the deepest respect for his motive. It is obvious that he would like to make a genuine contribution to the religious thought and Christian idealism of the public. If the average preacher were to go to a tiny fraction of the pains and research and consecration that Mr. DeMille invested in the making of that impressive picture of the Life of Christ, our churches would leap forward into a larger influence.”
But…
The trouble was: Jesus was not presented as an ideal type of spiritual energy in action, in the normal conduct of life, and common affairs of daily duty, where our human problems reside; but he was portrayed as one who possessed a power to which no one of us has access. Indeed, if the calm logic of the drama be considered, the picture was likely to send a man out of the theatre saying: Well, that settles it! If that was Jesus, then he and I can never possibly get together… He and I are not in the same category… And I cannot conceive why I should be invited or expected to follow him, or be like him, or indulge any hope that I might avail myself of the spiritual power he possessed.
Douglas’s disagreement, of course, was not with De Mille but with the traditional view of Jesus. Through his own life experience, Douglas had come to believe that Jesus’ teachings were much more important than any of the stories of his deeds. Christians, he felt, had for too long neglected Christ’s teachings because of their focus on his miracles. Douglas was trying to bring about a course correction in Christian life. Although he admired De Mille’s movie-making, he found it necessary to disagree with his approach.
In the summer of 1928, however, while Douglas was writing Salvage (the novel that would be retitled later as Magnificent Obsession), De Mille released a film aimed at young people, a group very dear to Douglas’s heart. It was called The Godless Girl, and it dramatized De Mille’s belief that the public schools were being taken over by atheists. Central to the film’s message was the claim that the theory of evolution was of Satanic origin. When Douglas saw this movie, he couldn’t keep quiet, and De Mille got involved. I’ll tell you about that in my next two posts.
Book cover from The Autobiography of Cecil B De Mille (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959).
I’ve been telling you about the work Lloyd Douglas was doing on his novel, Salvage, during the summer of 1928. But that same summer he also clashed swords publicly with filmmaker Cecil B DeMille. I’ll tell you about their public disagreement in a later post, but for the next two posts I want to give you some background, for Douglas had already written about DeMille a year before they ended up in the newspaper together.
In the summer of 1927, De Mille’s The King of Kings was in theaters around the country. It was a two-and-a-half hour silent film, but for its day it was quite a spectacle.
A still from De Mille’s 1927 film, The King of Kings. From The Autobiography of Cecil B De Mille (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959).
Much of the dialogue was straight from the scriptures, and the chapter-and-verse citations were even included; but the scriptural context was often disregarded. Events and quotations were all jumbled up, like a weird black-and-white dream. After Jesus cleanses the temple, the crowd tries to make him king (confusing that scene with events in John 6), so he escapes to the top of the temple and then (again out of order) is tempted by the Devil. Early in the film, Simon Peter speaks to a young boy and says something straight out of one of the Epistles of Peter – written decades later.
The way Christ is introduced is interesting, but also a bit confusing. We see his disciples talking to him, but we don’t see him. Then a blind child is brought to him to be healed, and the screen goes black, showing us what the child sees. When the child’s eyes open, we see a bright light, which dissolves into the smiling face of the well-known silent-movie actor, H. B. Warner. It takes a moment to realize that he’s actually supposed to be Jesus. “Oh… okay then.”
It’s also rather distracting, at Christ’s crucifixion, to note that the thieves on either side of him aren’t nailed to their crosses; they’re just tied to them, and they don’t look like they’re going to die anytime soon.
But still, for its time it was quite a spectacle. Lloyd Douglas thought so, too. He wrote an article about it in The Christian Century (Lloyd C Douglas, “The Gospel According to De Mille,” Christian Century, 7/14/1927). The fact that Douglas was the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles made the essay seem like on-location reportage, although it wasn’t.
Of DeMille himself, Douglas was highly complimentary: “Not only does this man know his New Testament, but he has ransacked the entire lore of that era. If the average preacher gave himself with as deep concern to the business of revitalizing the story of Jesus and his times, churchgoing would be vastly more rewarding.”
Of the film’s depiction of Jesus, however, Douglas was critical: “One is conscious, throughout the whole spectacle, that one is seeing the traditional Roman Catholic conception of a Christ who has come to earth primarily to die. Let all the people about him do or leave undone whatsoever they will; befriend or harass; condemn or crown; he is here to die—and everybody is waiting, nervously, for the tragedy. Jesus, in the picture, moves about slowly and sadly, with the air of one already unjustly convicted. Now and again, there is a gesture of futility more reminiscent of Omar Khayyam than Jesus of Nazareth…. The shadow does not lift….
“Persons who think of Jesus as the world’s master teacher, chiefly concerned with the spread of a new message of hope and joy, the promotion of victorious idealism, the development of a broader altruism, the building of a kingdom of heroes, are not quite content with so supine and languid a Christ as the abstracted, detached, time-marking, sighing Jesus who dominates the stage in ‘King of Kings.’”
Douglas liked the film’s depiction of the miracles. He felt it demonstrated just how ridiculous it was to picture Jesus as a worker of wonders. He hoped that “Persons who have been uncertain whether the magician-Jesus is quite adequate to deal with the baffling problems of these modern times, in which there is so little room for necromancy in the thought of intelligent people, will be encouraged by ‘The King of Kings’ to make a fresh examination of the essential character of Christ.”
Overall, Douglas gave the movie high marks, considering the fact that De Mille’s views were conservative and Douglas’s were liberal. Over the next several months, however, he became more critical of the film. I’ll talk about that in my next post.
(In recent posts, I’ve been telling you about the novel that would become known as Magnificent Obsession. When Lloyd Douglas was writing it in 1928, however, the working title was Salvage. In a future post, I’ll talk about the name change.)
The eighteenth chapter of Douglas’s book, Salvage, was remarkable for at least three reasons.
For one thing, he was poking fun at himself. The spotlight in this chapter is on the Reverend Doctor Bruce McLaren, a feisty minister of Scottish descent, who is modeled after fellow Scotsman Lloyd C. Douglas, D.D. This is remarkable because McLaren, although he is said to be “a good sport,” is also a somewhat comical figure. He is so well-educated, he preaches over the heads of his parishioners (as Douglas himself was doing at his church in Los Angeles, or so his critics claimed). McLaren is a modernist all the way.
“The whole business of institutionalized religion,” he says, “demands reappraisal! It appalls me to contemplate what must be the future of the Church when all the people who are now fifty and up are in their graves! This oncoming generation, now in its adolescence, is not in the least way concerned about organized religion. Religious enough, instinctively, I dare say; but out of sorts with the sects; weary of their bad-mannered yammering at one another over matters in which one man’s guess is as good as another’s, and no outcome promised either in faith or conduct, no matter whose guess is right!”
A little later, McLaren says, “A Christ who can help us to a clearer perception of God needs to be a personality confronted with problems similar to our ours, and solving them with knowledge and power to which we also have access – else he offers us no example at all. But here we have a majority of the churches trying to elicit interest in him because he was supernaturally born, which I wasn’t; because he turned water into wine, which I can’t; because he paid his taxes with money found in a fish’s mouth, which – for all my Scotch ingenuity – I can’t do; because he silenced the storm with a word and a gesture, whereas I must bail the boat; because he called back from the grave his friend who had been dead four days, while I must content myself with planting a rosebush and calling it a closed incident! What we want is a Christ whose service to us, in leading us toward God, is not predicated upon our dissimilarities, but upon our likenesses!”
Now… these are the very same things Douglas had been saying for a long time, almost word-for-word, in sermons, speeches, and articles. But when McLaren says them, we’re supposed to grin. For he’s right, up to a point; but he’s also missing the most important thing – the thesis of the whole book – and we know that Bobby Merrick is about to set him straight.
This reflects an important change in Douglas’s thinking, either just before or during his writing of the non-fiction book, Exploring Your Soul.
“I wonder if we modernists,” McLaren says later, “are not somewhat in the predicament of Moses, who had enough audacity to lead the slaves out of their bondage, but lacked the ingenuity to take them on into a country that would support them. We’ve emancipated them; but – they’re still wandering about in the jungle, dissatisfied, hungry, making occasional excursions into paganism and experimenting with all manner of eccentric cults, longing for the spiritual equivalent of their repudiated superstitions – sometimes wishing they were back in the old harness!”
“It’s worthwhile to have fetched them out of that,” says Bobby. “It ought to be equally interesting to lead them on. They mustn’t go back! But they will – if they’re not pointed to something more attractive than the jungle you say they’re in.”
How, exactly, can McLaren lead his people forward? By practicing what Bobby Merrick has just taught him: a message that goes beyond modernism.
In May of that same year (1928), Douglas published an article in the Christian Century entitled, “The Seeming Impotence of Christianity.” In it he asked:
May not the chief difficulty of the churches lie in the fact that we have all been interpreting Christianity in terms of metaphysics to a generation that does its thinking in terms of kinetic energies? Even modernism, for all its twentieth-centuryness, has made no more of a contribution at this point…. The modernist refutes the metaphysics of the fundamentalist by proposing another metaphysics. Both schools are equally absorbed in speculative thought, one hoping to show the public that the other is an infidel, the other hoping to show the public that the one is an ignoramus, but neither of them interested in showing the public that Christianity is a dynamic energy….
In the field of physical energies, it is common knowledge with our boys and girls that an ampere is the current produced by one volt acting through the resistance of one ohm; that a horsepower equals 746 volts-ampere; that a calorie is the heat required to raise a gram of water one degree centigrade. But what the soul can do, under given conditions, by reliance upon and utilization of divine power in fortifying against disappointments, encountering grief, and resisting the demands of appetite, is not only unknown but undiscussed. What manner of vital connection an aspiring soul may practically establish with its Source; under what circumstances spiritual power may be definitely guaranteed; whether prayer may be made a workable pursuit, and, if so, for whom, how, where, and when—these matters are spoken of with vagueness, albeit sung about with pious fervor. This generation has not been trained to think of power as something that should be set to music but set to work.
This is not to mean, however, that the present public is utterly without a spiritual aspiration. An increasing number of yearning people are possessed of the belief that there are certain spiritual energies in existence which, if practically utilized, could extend the reach of a man’s soul exactly as physical dynamics have multiplied the capacities of his eye, ear, and hand. That there is an unseen power, accessible to mankind, is not considered a mere chimera…
Lloyd C Douglas, “The Seeming Impotence of Christianity,” Christian Century, 5/24/1928, pp. 664-667.
This is the second thing that’s remarkable about the eighteenth chapter of Douglas’s novel: in it, Bobby Merrick claims that God can be approached in a manner that mimics applied science.
“Isn’t the modern school just substituting a new metaphysic for the old one?” Merrick asks McLaren. “Our generation is doing all its thinking in terms of power, energy, dynamics – the kind you read about, not in a book, but on a meter! Why not concede the reality of supernormal assistance, to be had under fixed conditions, and encourage people to go after it?”
Douglas’s emphasis here is on the “fixed conditions” – on doing what Jesus taught. To state the matter in religious terms, Merrick shares his testimony with the McLarens. But it’s not the typical tale of sorrowing over one’s sins and asking forgiveness; it’s a story about how he did what Jesus said… and received the promised results.
After the book’s publication, some conservative Christians would balk at the “pseudo-scientific” overtones of the story, but Douglas was really just putting his faith in Christ on the line. He was saying (although not in these exact words), “Do you believe in Jesus’ promises? If so, why be upset if someone follows his teachings and gets the promised results? Why be angry just because they didn’t come to him by following your four-step process? If they come to Jesus by doing what he himself said, how can that be wrong?”
The third thing that’s remarkable about the eighteenth chapter is that Douglas addresses an issue that every college freshman faces in Philosophy 101: the so-called “proofs for the existence of God.”
I’m a philosophy professor. I teach the “proofs.” And I see firsthand how irrelevant they are to people’s day-to-day lives. Students don’t resolve their doubts about the existence of God by having the matter “proven” or “disproven.” In fact, most people in this world never find intellectual resolution, one way or the other. They either believe, or they don’t. “We’ll find out when we die,” they say.
In the eighteenth chapter of the novel Salvage, however, Douglas claimed that resolution was possible.
When McLaren says that God is only “an hypothesis,” Merrick says, rather shyly, “I’m afraid I don’t accept that.”
“Oh – Doctor Merrick!” says Mrs. McLaren. “You don’t mean to say that you do not believe in God at all!”
“I mean that I do not think of God as an hypothesis.”
“But – my dear fellow,” says McLaren, “we really have no hard and fast proofs, you know!”
“Haven’t you?” asks Bobby. “I have.”
The text says: “The two forks in use by the McLaren family were simultaneously put down upon their plates. ‘Er – how do you mean – proofs?’ queried his guest.”
Of the three, this is perhaps the most remarkable feature of this chapter: that Lloyd Douglas claims we can go beyond just believing in God, then finding out if we were right only after we die. Douglas claims that, if we do what Jesus says, we’ll find out now. The things he promises will happen. We’ll come into daily contact with the Living God… and we’ll know.
I can’t speak for anybody else, but I can tell you about my own case: when I read this chapter just before starting my junior year of college, I was thunderstruck – not because I wanted to have that experience for myself, but because I already had; I just didn’t realize that it was intellectually permissible to say so. For me, the reading of this chapter was life-changing.
From the Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 4, “Miscellanea [1],” Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. (There is a typographical error. The series took place in 1928 and the announcement was made in December 1927. The typo must have occurred when this information was retyped in 1951 from a December 1927 church bulletin.)
During the first four Sundays of 1928, Lloyd Douglas preached a series of sermons based on the book he had been writing entitled, Exploring Your Soul. The series followed the topical outline indicated in the announcement imaged above. The first two sermons in the series can be found in The Living Faith: From His Selected Sermons. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), pp. 230-257.
On Sunday, January 6, 1928, he spoke on the subject, “Your Soul: What It Is and How It Operates.” His treatment of the theme was neither systematic nor definitive. Although he avoided giving a definition of the soul, he said, “a man may arise in the morning and wash his face for the same reason that a cat washes hers; and eat his breakfast for the same reason that a dog eats his; and work all day to earn his victuals for the same reason that the horse works all day to earn his…. But when he sits down, quietly, to contemplate the everlastingness of himself, and comfort his mind with his firm belief that he is of eternal stuff; that he proposes to outlive all the material things he sees about him because his essential self was existent long before any of these material things came to be, he immediately puts himself in quite another category than that of the animals. It is his soul that he is dealing with now” (p. 233).
Douglas identified a few different types of souls and invited his listeners to think about what type of soul they might be. There are others, no doubt, and the ones he listed are not mutually exclusive – we might recognize ourselves in more than one category. He said:
One man had the soul of a mystic. As a mere child, the consciousness of God’s living presence in his life was at times quite overpowering. He could sit quietly, in rapt contemplation, and sense a kind of inner illumination, a warmth that was other than thermal, an awareness of the Divine affection. It was a very fine, high-grade potential soul – and needed expert handling. His parents were zealous about his physical welfare and saw to it that he knew his hygiene; were careful that he should have balanced rations and his full quota of sleep and the right amount of exercise and recreation. Equally mindful for the training of his intellect, which was quick and precocious, they were inquisitive about his school, his teachers, his outside reading. But it never occurred to them that his soul demanded direction. He learned about souls at the Sunday School.
There was no discipline in that Sunday School, for the reason that not only was the instruction voluntarily offered but as voluntarily accepted, and a good deal of the teacher’s efforts and ingenuity were spent in the sheer task of keeping her wriggling charges quiet enough to avoid disturbing the class adjacent.
To capture their attention and command interest, [the Sunday School teacher emphasized the fantastic stories of sensational events from the Old Testament]. Religion was something that used to be. It used to perform queer tricks. And certain men used to hear celestial voices; but apparently it had gone out of such business long since, for the teacher made no effort to connect this antique lore with present possibilities.
Obviously, what this lad needed, to develop the type of soul he owned, was the direction and influence of some mature person who, like himself, was of sensitive, mystical quality. As he grew up and went to the services of the church, he learned that the main business of the institution was to raise its annual budget (which is not often accomplished, probably for that reason) and around the family table he heard discussions of the main issues which commanded the attention of his parents’ church, and no one of them even remotely impinged upon the problem of his own soul hunger.
In later adolescence, he became absorbed in the affairs of his physical world – his vocational problems, college, love, the new home, his business – and forgot he had a soul. Now and again it throbbed and stretched and sighed, but he ignored it and it went to sleep again. He had the makings of an important spiritual leader but lost his chance to be that through mishandling – mishandling largely charged to the church, and the church’s misguidance (pp. 241-242).
“Another man,” Douglas said,
had a definitely aesthetic soul, but was so unfortunate as to be taught what passed for spiritual culture at the hands of people to whom the love of natural and moral beauty, for its own sake, had never been evoked. Religion was a sheer matter of conduct – their conduct. They had their own little table of mores, and the business of religion was to make everybody behave just like that. As for the loveliness of life, the livableness of life, the profoundly stirring majesty and wonder of the divinely coordinated beauty of life, they couldn’t teach it because they had never suspected it.
Religion was a gospel of don’t. It began and ended with Thou Shalt Not. It had no sunrises and sunsets; it knew nothing of great music, great literature, great drama. In short, it had nothing to offer to an aesthetic soul, and this particular aesthetic soul hungered awhile and dropped off, through sheer undernourishment and anemia, into a rather fitful slumber – occasionally haunted by longings and dreams, but colorless.
Then there are the inquisitive souls – eager to learn as much as they may of God’s will as apparently deducible from Nature, scientific discovery, and the ripest thinking of other inquisitive souls – people who, falling into the hands of confirmed Traditionalists, have been warned that inquiry is infidelity.
Highly socialized souls, who believe only in a gospel of work, should get themselves into some connection where there will be lots of committees to attend and speeches to make and hats to pass and cards to sign and resolutions to enact – a perpetual procession of things accomplished. For them to find themselves in a mystical atmosphere of quiet contemplation might not benefit their souls at all (pp. 242-243).
“One might suppose, from a survey of the churches of the day,” he said, “that there is abundant room for them to do some constructive work on this subject, in assisting men and women to a discovery of the paths to their own souls.
Too many of our churches are so busy regulating or – to speak more accurately – too busy attempting and failing to regulate the public conduct that they have about left off dealing with spiritual matters. All that Religion is about is souls, and their culture. Most of our modern religion concerns itself with practically everything else but souls and soul culture.
Spiritually hungry people come on Sundays to our churches, wishing they might learn something that would improve their celestial contacts and help them find out their peculiar soul-powers; and they go away pretty sure that they’ll have to muddle along without help…. Let organized religion begin talking about these things, and see what will happen to the churches. And to the people who compose the churches (pp. 243-244).
The following Sunday, January 13, 1928, Douglas addressed the topic, “Your Soul: What It Lives On.”
What does the soul live on? What manner of nourishment makes it conscious of its strength and eager to quest adventure with its powers?
First of all, it must be definitely assured of its own importance!
Out! on all these pale and sickly ballads that timidly chirp of ‘You in Your Little Corner and I in Mine’ and ‘Oh to Be Nothing’ and ‘For Such a Worm as I.’
Quite off pitch is the timbre of a feeble voice like that, when it tries to attune itself to the Galilean: ‘Ask What Ye Will, and It Shall Be Done! Seek, and Ye Shall Find! Knock, and It Shall Be Opened!’ (p. 252).
The first thing that nourishes the soul is its awareness that “I am a child of God.” The second thing is to realize that “all men everywhere are children of God. For if all other men are not the spiritual children of God, there is no sense or significance to my claim that I am” (p. 253). The third thing is “to help other men to… an awareness of their Divine Sonship” (p. 254). But the best way to do this, Douglas said, was not by talking about it; it was to demonstrate it (pp. 254-255). He was a little unclear on how to do this through actions rather than words, but in his next sermon he would take this one step further. And it was a very important step.
The Lloyd C Douglas Page 