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The Religion of a Collegian, Part 3

Lloyd Douglas is speaking to the young people who fill the balcony of his church on this occasion (students at the University of Michigan, October 12, 1919). He has been talking about their leadership responsibilities in the coming days, after graduation and beyond. It is, he says, “an age which faces problems of radical and rapid readjustment” after WWI that are “more serious and far-reaching than any generation has confronted for at least four centuries, if indeed ever before in the long history of mankind.”

(This is from Douglas’s sermon, “The Religion of a Collegian,” in Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.)

Speaking of the rising generation in the third person, he says that, “if they are to deal with this situation wisely, it will require them to be diligent students of the past, especially as it relates to the development of the principle of religion in the life of the race.

“Moreover, if these potential leaders of the new days are to offer any useful contribution to this problem, it will be necessary that they seek to clarify, in their own minds, the elements of religion which need preservation and emphasis today.”

Now he speaks directly to them, addressing them in second person:

“Three courses are open to you in relation to this grave matter.

“First, you may decide that it is none of your business whether the religion of tomorrow survives or perishes; whether it helps or hinders human progress; whether it ministers to or menaces the aspirations of humanity. Now that you have determined to be an engineer, or a lawyer, or a banker, or a physician, it is no affair of yours that the religion of our people shall drift toward this tendency or that. Let the preachers fuss that all out among themselves….”

Douglas pauses to comment: “It is surprising how many people are going through this life minus any sense of responsibility to the broader needs of the human race.”

He continues: “The second course open to you is the advocacy of a stand-pat policy of religious thought, which refuses to admit of any change, either in historic beliefs or ecclesiastical observances and usages….

“The third course open to you is to insist upon the revitalizing of such religious systems as are now in active operation, striving for a return to elemental principles, and the discarding of all non-essential accretions, gathered up from the incidental excursions made along the way through the years.

“I do not mean that Christianity is to cast off its ancient sacramentalism and symbolism, much of which is of undoubted value to the culture of the soul. Neither do I mean that Christianity should become a mere manual training institution for the performance of social service, in which the mystical claims of the spirit are to be set at naught. But rather, that the real elements of Christianity, as taught and exemplified by the matchless Teacher of Nazareth in Galilee, shall be revivified and energized in modern life.”

(There is at least one other option that Douglas doesn’t mention: you can start a new religion. And it’s an important fact about Douglas that he doesn’t bring this up, for one of his most basic assumptions is that religion is a bequest: it is something we inherit from the strivings of people in past ages. Some years later, after a trip to England, he will shake his head at the lack of respect displayed by Mormon missionaries passing out pamphlets beside an old historic cathedral. To Douglas, religious innovations would only be meaningful if made within the context of all that has gone before.)

He has just said that this third option will build on “the real elements of Christianity.” And now he continues: “Just what these elements are may properly engage the attention of all thoughtful people who hope to contribute something to the conservation of religion in our day.

“For a few Sunday mornings, I expect to discuss with you the fundamental principles of religion as I see them, with the hope that we may clarify our thinking on this important subject. As highly privileged members of our generation, it is surely our duty to do some constructive thinking about the problems of life and character which confront the race.”

And so he invites his congregation of students, professors, administrators, and townspeople to join him in thinking this through more thoroughly in the weeks ahead.

The Religion of a Collegian, Part 1

by Ronald R Johnson

The title page of “The Religion of a Collegian,” Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Copyright University of Michigan.

Over the next few posts, I will be sharing a sermon preached by Lloyd C. Douglas at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor on October 12, 1919, entitled, “The Religion of a Collegian.”

It is the beginning of the 1919-1920 school year at the University of Michigan. After talking briefly about higher education and its goals, Douglas sets out to answer the question, “What manner of religion, then, may expect to find favor and acceptance with the average normal type of collegian mind?” His short answer is: a religion in which “the real elements of Christianity, as taught and exemplified by the matchless Teacher of Nazareth in Galilee shall be revivified and energized in modern life.” In other words, a religion based on the teachings of Jesus and applied to daily life in the twentieth century.

To summarize: He starts out, however, with the claim that religion in general is an important part of the cultural bequest that students should grapple with by the time they graduate. Next, he talks about how natural it is for young people to rebel. But today, with so many things to rebel against, where should thoughtful young rebels focus their efforts? If the church is to improve, he says, the laity rather than the clergy must take leadership – and he explains why. In the face of this great need, both on the part of the church and of the larger world, college students are called to respond, if they will accept the challenge.

Over the next few posts, I’ll go back over these points in more detail.

First, then: Why should college students pay attention to religion?

Because “the religious instinct is the oldest recorded interest and hope of mankind – coeval, so far as we can discover, with humanity’s earliest strivings…”

Because “this religious instinct is inseparably linked with human history, as far back as that history runs, and furnishing the chief clue to the achievements of those prehistoric folk whose aspirations may only be guessed at.”

Because “this religious instinct was directly responsible for most of the great migrations which have developed and civilized the world; and for most of the wars which, from time to time, have reset the stage and revised the plot and recast the players of the age-old terrestrial drama.”

Because “any education which fails to comprehend the importance of religion to the mental, spiritual, and physical evolution of the race is sadly deficient…”

He says “there are at least two mental types who fail to appreciate this fact…. Strangely enough, these types are utterly antagonistic to each other, at deadly enmity, holding each other in abhorrence; yet, by circuitous routes contriving to arrive at a common destination where their surprise at meeting is doubtless mutual.

“One is the blatant scoffer, who hoots at all religion as the shameful legacy bequeathed by a long line of superstitious forebears. And the other is the mole-eyed bigot whose sacred books and sacred creed and sacred symbols are the only authoritative manifestation of God to the human race.”

Douglas says that, of the two, it is probably the religious bigot who has “achieved the larger results in making shipwreck of their neighbors’ feeble faith.” People tend to be turned away from the faith most consistently by those who, “with rack and wheel and fagot-fire,” with “denunciation and the selfishness of bigotry, have maintained that their peculiar sects enjoyed a monopoly of religious truth, and that all who differed were without remedy or recourse in a sinful world.”

It is against such displays of narrow-mindedness that college students typically turn away in disgust, Douglas says. But more than that, it is perfectly natural for young people to rebel. It’s part of being young. It’s actually a good thing. It’s what keeps the human race moving forward. And it is that very rebelliousness that the church stands in desperate need of, he says. I’ll explain why in my next post.

Release

by Ronald R Johnson

Although he never flaunted it, Lloyd Douglas knew his New Testament Greek. And that was probably why he chose the working title, Release, for his next novel,in the summer of 1932.

Luke 6:37 is usually translated into English as, “Forgive, and you will be forgiven,” but a literal translation would be “Release, and you will be released.” The Greek verb is apoluō, which means “to release.” It also means “to forgive,” because that is one example of how you can “release” someone. The point Douglas wanted to emphasize in this new novel was that, in releasing others, we ourselves are released.

Here is how he explained his thesis to Ira Rich Kent, the Managing Editor at Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company on 7/26/1932 (from Box 1, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan):

“This book is not in any sense a sequel to Magnificent Obsession…. The thesis of M.O. was, briefly: How to get what you want, and be what you would like to be, through a practice of a Galilean principle of secret philanthropy.

“The thesis of the present work is: how to get free of the encumbrances which block the way to the expansion of personality.

“The most common of these encumbrances is hatred – prejudice, toxic frustrations, cancerous might-have-beens, bottled-up injustices.”

Notice that his examples go beyond just hatred to include disappointment and frustration that has been “bottled-up.” The title Release has even more meaning in this regard. He continues:

“The solution – to be cryptically disclosed through a process not at all homiletic, but by a device capable of sustaining reader interest – is based on the only comment the Lord offered on ‘the Lord’s Prayer’: If ye forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will forgive yours.

“Trespasses, in this book, are considered as ‘invasions of rights.’ My ‘Major Personality’ has a right to energies which He has invested in me. I cannot hope to succeed in a large way unless I concede and honor His right to the control of such power.

“My freedom to enjoy; to savor life; to get out of it all that is in it for me by putting into it all that I possess, depends upon my willingness to put myself into complete harmony with His design for me.

“I cannot hope to do this unless I free myself of the encumbrances that weight me down.

“At this point, there arises a quite definite proposal of NEGOTIATION. If I sincerely forgive all who have made life difficult for me, I have offered the credentials necessary for this FREEDOM.

“All this sounds didactic and brittle, as I attempt to explain it; but it will not appear so in the book.”

That part about “negotiation” will almost certainly appear foreign to Christians. We place our trust in Jesus, not in any sort of “negotiations” or “credentials” we may bring. The thing to remember here is that Douglas isn’t talking about salvation, and he’s not using orthodox vocabulary. He’s talking about unleashing one’s potential in one’s daily pursuits, and he’s using the vocabulary of the ordinary person out in the world. His congregations were filled with people who professed to be Christians but who had never done the things Jesus talked about. He’s trying to get them beyond talking about it and actually doing it. And he’s starting at Square One.

In the book (Chapter 15), he has the character Julia explain it this way (and she seems to be referring to Matthew 18 here):

This little piece [of scripture]… doesn’t whine at all. It doesn’t ask you to whimper for mercy.

It’s just a business proposition same as if you owed a thousand dollars to Mr. Smith, and ten other people owed you a hundred dollars apiece, and Mr. Smith said, ‘Pay me that thousand dollars,’ and you said, ‘I can’t – with all these people owing me.’

And Mr. Smith said, ‘I don’t need the money so much, but I like you and want to be friends with you, and as long as you are owing me you’ll be keeping away from me for fear I’ll ask you for it and make you ashamed. And it won’t do any good for me to tell you just to keep the money and forget it, because that would make you ashamed, too, and you would always feel in debt. So – I’ll make you a proposition. If you will cancel all the debts of these people who owe you, and are afraid to face you, so that they can afford to cancel the debts of the people who owe them, I’ll call it square with you. Then we can all be good neighbors again, and nobody will be afraid of anyone else, or shy, or ashamed.’

This all sounds so much more sensible to me, dear, than the way they talk about it at the meetings. It’s just as if God wanted us to do business with Him about these things that have kept us strangers.

Houghton Mifflin published the book in November 1932 under the title, Forgive Us Our Trespasses. Douglas had thought it would be a clever satire of modern art, but it ended up being much more. And, in writing it, he found his mission in life. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Publishing Miracle 12: The Mystery Page

by Ronald R Johnson

I’ve been listing specific reasons why the novel Magnificent Obsession became a bestseller after its publication in 1929. In today’s post I’ll cover one of the most talked-about reasons: in Doctor Hudson’s secret journal, he says he learned “the secret to power” from a sculptor who clipped a passage out of the Bible and carried it around in his wallet. The author, Lloyd Douglas, wrote the story in a way that builds suspense around the question: “What was on that page?” He gives the essence of the answer, but he never tells his audience what page of the Bible it was.

Here is the passage in which he comes the closest to giving the answer:

From page 138 of the original printing of Magnificent Obsession. This scene is in Chapter 8.

As Laurine Wanamaker Schwan wrote in the Akron Journal shortly after the book’s release (11/1/1929): “This idea is hidden, indeed, in as much mystery and pomp as you will find anywhere. But it is disclosed in bits with much vivid action in between – in bits just big enough to whet your curiosity and interest. And – here is the master stroke of all – is never entirely revealed!”

There is simply this reference to the biblical admonition not to let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. For anyone who knows the Bible (or has access to a good concordance), that’s enough of a clue to find the passage Douglas has in mind. But why didn’t Douglas give the answer?

Here’s what he said later, in his “Author’s Preface” to Doctor Hudson’s Secret Journal in 1939 (p. ix):

“The theme of the novel had derived from a little handful of verses midway of the Sermon on the Mount, but all references to the enchanted passage were purposely vague, the author feeling that a treasure hunt in Holy Writ would probably do his customers no harm. Within the first twelve months after publication, more than two thousand people had written to inquire, ‘What page of the Bible did the sculptor carry in his wallet?’ We left off counting these queries, but they have continued to come, all through these intervening years.”

Notice that even now he didn’t give chapter and verse. If you don’t know where the Sermon on the Mount can be found, you’re out of luck. If you do, then you’ll find it exactly where he says: at the midway point of it.

Why all the secrecy? First of all, because this was his ingenious way of attracting the attention of people who didn’t go to church and wouldn’t be interested in hearing about the Bible under normal circumstances. Second, because citing chapter and verse would have broken the spell. This is a mainstream novel, not Christian fiction. Third, as he says in the paragraph I just quoted, he was hoping his readers would get their hands on a Bible and go for “a treasure hunt,” just like Bobby Merrick ends up doing in the novel.

Laurine Wanamaker Schwan, whose review in the Akron Journal I mentioned a moment ago, thought there might be a fourth reason: “Those who want to see this philosophy in black and white are given a hint as to where they may find it for themselves. And this again is a master stroke. For those who might say, ‘Ho hum! Now what is important about that?’ will never be able to find it. Only those few who will click with its meaning… will ever actually see that idea in cold print!” This is an intriguing suggestion, for it echoes what some scholars believe to be the reason for the so-called “Messianic Secret” in the gospels: to communicate with those who are receptive while keeping critics in the dark. But Douglas himself never said this was his intention.

At any rate, Douglas’s technique of keeping the Bible verses a secret was effective, as the two thousand inquiries he received shows. But it’s interesting to see how reviewers handled this feature of the book.

One reviewer gave it away, without so much as a Spoiler Alert. This was in an article entitled, “Unknown, Read by 150,000,” in the Chicago Herald Examiner (2/20/1932). After admitting that the book’s popularity was due, in large part, to the “mystery of the message in a secret code to be solved,” the review ends with these words: “The ‘magic page’ is apparently Matthew vi:1-6.” (Yeah, thanks a lot. What a killjoy!)

One columnist teased his readers, pretending he was about to reveal the secret… then didn’t. He wrote in his final paragraph: “The scriptural passage in which Dr. Hudson found the secret of his power and which is transmitted to Dr. Merrick is not revealed. The reader is privileged to guess. My own is – but this is Lloyd Douglas’s book.” (W. F. Hardy, “As I View the Thing,” Decatur (IL) Herald, n.d.)

Ozora Davis, writing to an audience of ministers and biblical scholars in the Chicago Theological Seminary Register must have felt that information was more important than letting his colleagues discover it for themselves: “The Sermon on the Mount is in [this book],” he said, “and it is such a comment on the sixth chapter of Matthew as I have not read in many a day.” In this case, Douglas didn’t mind the spoiler. A recommendation from Ozora Davis was a big deal in those days.

One religious periodical scolded Douglas for keeping the passage a secret. The reviewer in Personal Power (October, 1931) wrote, “For the benefit of those who cannot find the scripture passage upon which Randolph’s secret was based, look up Matt. 6:2-7. As a preacher, Dr. Douglas should not have kept people guessing like that.”

A severe critic from Birmingham, Alabama, however, went in the opposite direction: he believed that Douglas had kept the passage a secret because the actual biblical text did not support Douglas’s interpretation. Dean Gilbert W. Mead of Birmingham-Southern College, wrote in the Birmingham News-Age-Herald (3/26/1933), “From the first I felt, as probably many another reader did, that the author was playing a cheap trick on us by never telling us just what was the exact scriptural reference out of which the whole obsession grew…. [T]here isn’t a single thing I can see hindering Mr. Douglas from telling us right out what the discovery was – citing chapter and verse – except, perhaps, that he didn’t dare chance the flimsiness of his absurd structure by exhibiting the weakness of the foundation.”

Whatever one’s opinion may be of the technique Douglas used, it was effective. It got people talking. It prompted thousands of them to write to him, asking questions about the Bible. It motivated columnists and reviewers to write about the book in newspapers all across the country. It accomplished, in other words, what every novelist tries to do, and most fall short of: it made an impression on the larger culture.

But, for many readers, it did something more – something that novels rarely do: it offered a call to action. I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Farewell, Loose Angels… Hello, Montreal!

by Ronald R Johnson

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 United Church of Montreal. From the congregation’s website: https://www.stjamesmontreal.ca/about-us/our-history.

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.

Irreconcilable Differences

by Ronald R Johnson

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…

Douglas Takes a Hint from Jonah

by Ronald R Johnson

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.

Douglas vs. De Mille

by Ronald R Johnson

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…

The Godless Girl

by Ronald R Johnson

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.

Lloyd Douglas’s Criticism of The King of Kings

by Ronald R Johnson

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.