Chapter 10 THE EFFECT OF THE WAR UPON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

LUTHER ALLAN WEIGLE

The term "religious education" stands for two ideas that are ultimately one: for the inclusion of religion in our educational program, and for the use of educational methods in the propagation of religion from generation to generation.

Over seventy years ago, Horace Bushnell pointed out the folly of reliance upon the revival method of dealing with the children of Christian homes, and urged the educational method of Christian nurture. He did more than any other one man to determine the present trend in religious education. Yet his work was prophetic; it took fifty years more of "ostrich nurture," as he called it, to reveal to Christian people generally the full truth of his position.

The past twenty years, however, have witnessed a great movement among the Protestant churches of America toward clearer aims and better methods in religious education. A situation had developed that bid fair to let religion drop out of the education of American children. Changed social, economic and industrial conditions had transferred to the school many of the educational functions once fulfilled by the home, and had wrought a change in the forms of family religion. The public schools had become increasingly secular in aim, in control, and in material taught. The development of science and philosophy in independence of religion had made it possible for college students to get the idea that religion is not a significant part of the life and culture of the time. The Sunday school, indeed, was at work, teaching children of God and his will. But its curriculum was ungraded, its teachers untrained, and its instruction limited to one period of half an hour in each week.

Roughly speaking, the beginning of the present century may be taken as the date when the Christian people of America began to awake to the danger involved in this situation. As early as the late eighties, President W. R. Harper, then Woolsey Professor of Biblical Literature at Yale, had organized the American Institute of Sacred Literature, and had begun to publish a graded series of Inductive Studies in the Bible. In 1900, under his leadership, the University of Chicago published the first of its present series of Constructive Studies, which provides text-books for a graded curriculum of religious education. In 1903, the Religious Education Association was organized, its membership drawn from the whole of the United States and Canada, and its purpose declared to be threefold: "To inspire the educational forces of our country with the religious ideal; to inspire the religious forces of our country with the educational ideal; and to keep before the public mind the ideal of religious education, and the sense of its need and value." In 1908, the International Sunday School Association authorized its Lesson Committee to construct and issue a graded series of Sunday school lessons in addition to the uniform series which it had issued year after year since 1872. In 1910 the Sunday School Council of Evangelical Denominations was organized, a mark of the more definite assumption by the several denominations of responsibility for the educational work of their Sunday schools and for the training of teachers. In 1912, the Council of Church Boards of Education came into being, which has devoted its energies thus far mainly to co?perative effort in behalf of Christian colleges and for the religious welfare of college and university students generally.

These are but a few outstanding factors in a movement greater far than any single organization or group of organizations. There has been an awakening of the spirit of education in religion. Sunday schools the country over have been graded, and here and there week-day schools of religion have been begun; problems of curriculum, method and organization have been studied and graded curricula devised; classes and schools for the training of teachers have been organized; and attempts of various sorts have been made to correlate public and religious education. Churches in general have come to see that they have an educational as well as a religious function in the community, and that there is a sense in which they share with the public school a common task. The public school can teach the "three R's," the sciences, arts and vocations; the church must teach religion. Both are needed if the education of our children is to be complete. Many churches are employing paid teachers of religion and directors of religious education. Courses in religious education have been organized and professorships of religious education established in colleges and theological seminaries. "The Educational Ideal in the Christian Ministry" was the subject of the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, in the Yale School of Religion, a few years ago. The young men who are entering the Christian ministry in these days are being trained, not simply to preach and to care for a parish, but to teach and to direct the educational work of a church.

The immediate effect of the war has been to retard this movement in some degree. Preoccupation with the war itself and with more immediately pressing needs, has made more difficult the work of the churches in this as in other respects. Churches that had planned new buildings for their schools are postponing their erection till the war is over. Training classes for teachers are harder to keep up. Ministers are going into war service; and those who stay at home are doing double work or more. Churches, like business houses and factories, have found their organizations broken by the departure of members of military age. Many of their best teachers and leaders have gone to war; and it is not easy, in these days of urgency and stress, to discover others to take their places.

It is probable, however, that a deeper effect of the war will be to intensify our sense of the importance of religious education and to clarify the church's educational program, in point both of content and method. This conviction rests upon these fundamental facts: that the world is achieving democracy; that it believes in and relies upon education; that it is experiencing what may prove to be a renewal of religion.

Education, democracy, religion-these three, we have long professed and more or less fully believed, belong together. The full life of each of the three is bound up in that of the other two.

Education without religion is incomplete and abortive; it falls short of that life more abundant which is education's goal. Religion without education lacks intelligence and power, and condemns itself to what Horace Bushnell called conquest from without, as contrasted with growth from within.

Democracy without education cannot long hold together or be saved from mediocrity and caprice. Education without democracy perpetuates caste divisions, or else breeds discontent and class hatred.

Democracy without religion is doomed to fail; and religion without democracy cannot realize the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

These, I say, are familiar convictions. They are natural to Protestantism; they have entered into the very making of America. Yet just these old convictions are gaining a new force and a deeper meaning in and through the experiences of these years of war. The struggle for democracy is not only leading us to a new comprehension of the meaning of democracy itself; it is helping us to understand better both education and religion.

It does not lie within the limits of this paper to canvass the wider and deeper meaning of democracy which is opening before us. The messages and addresses of President Wilson have interpreted that meaning not simply to America but to the world. No one yet knows the full promise of life after the war, when Pan-Germanism shall have been not only balked but destroyed. The democracy for which we fight to make the world safe will be a chastened, changed, completer democracy. It will be a democracy between nations as well as within nations, for the doctrine of the irresponsible, beyond-moral sovereignty of the state must return to the perdition whence it came. It will be a democracy applied more fully to the whole of life, social, economic and industrial as well as political. It will be a democracy of completer citizenship, that gives place to women as to men. It will be a democracy of duties as well as of rights.

The world is acquiring a new conscience. Just as the nineteenth century made slavery abhorrent to the moral sense of men in general, the twentieth century will likely be looked back to as the time when the world's conscience decided that the exploitation of man by man is wrong. The general moral sense of men has not been over-tender on this point hitherto. They have checkmated the exploiter if they could, as they did checkmate Napoleon, but they have not always, or even usually, looked upon him as a wrong doer. It required Germany's attempts at conquest and subjugation to wake the world to the absolute wrong of that monstrous thing-that one man should use another as a mere means to his own pleasure or aggrandizement, or that one people should so determine the destiny of another people.

Here lies the supreme moral issue of the war. Shall the world, which has become a neighborhood, organize itself into a great community of mutual respect, good will and brotherhood, or shall its structure be that of restless orders of exploiters and exploited? It is over-familiar; yet, lest we forget, hear some random verses from various Pan-Germanist scriptures: "Not to live and let live, but to live and direct the lives of others, that is power." "To compel men to a state of right, to put them under the yoke of right by force, is not only the right but the sacred duty of every man who has the knowledge and the power." "The German race is called to bind the earth under its control, to exploit the natural resources and the physical powers of man, to use the passive races in subordinate capacity for the development of its Kultur." "Life is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of its own forms, incorporation at the least, and in its mildest form exploitation."

Contrast with this the words of Jesus: "Ye know that they who are accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it is not so among you: but whosoever would become great among you, shall be your minister; and whosoever would be first among you, shall be servant of all." The present struggle is not merely between democracy and autocracy as rival systems of government. It is a struggle between opposed philosophies of life. Nietzsche was more consistent than the Kaiser who has followed him, for Nietzsche did not claim to be a Christian. He frankly proposed a "transvaluation of values" which would do away with the religion of Jesus as fit only for slaves. That proposed transvaluation of values the Kaiser is trying to bring about, however piously he may lie about it or claim God's partnership in his enterprise.

Prophecies are always hazardous; never more so than now. The outlook for religion has been discussed both by puzzled pacifists and by facile forecasters of the fulfilment of their own wishes. One may perhaps question whether there will be any one trend of the churches in the immediate future. Yet this is clear: that the interests of democracy and the interests of true religion are ultimately one. We may confidently expect the churches of tomorrow to realize this more fully, not simply in the ideals they preach, but in the temper and quality of their own life. One effect of the war upon religious education, undoubtedly, will be to make it more democratic in aim, content and method.

Education in general will become more democratic. The experiences of these years are helping us to understand education and to estimate its values. Our eyes are being opened to the diametrical difference between democratic and undemocratic education. We have come to see that the latter may be as great a menace to the world as the former is a vital resource.

The time was, not long ago, when Germany was deemed the school-master of the world. German efficiency and German obedience to authority were seen to be the products of German teachers and German schools. In methods of teaching and in school organization, as well as in ideals of scholarship, the world sought to follow Germany. If here and there one objected that German education seemed to sacrifice the individual to the system and to beget an obedience too implicit, we felt that it was only because the Germans are such docile, pious, family folk, and we rather chided ourselves for our rougher ways and for that self-will that made us unholily thankful that we had been born in a freer land.

But now the character of German education stands revealed. We are no longer as hopeful as we once were of the possible success of an appeal to the German people over the heads of their military masters. They seem on the whole to like the kind of government they have, and to want to be exploited by Prussia. They are perilously near to what Mr. H. G. Wells has given as his definition of damnation-satisfaction with existing things when existing things are bad. They are experiencing what Mr. Edmond Holmes has called the Nemesis of docility.

And it is their system of education that has brought about this result. If the German people are damned to satisfaction with irresponsible autocracy and fatuous docility, their schools have damned them. For a century, German education has been at work to breed the present world-menace. The German schools have made the German people what they are. They have sought to develop habits of mind rather than free intelligence; they have valued efficiency in a given task above initiative and power to think for oneself. They have set children in vocational grooves and molded them to pattern. They have educated the few to exert authority, and have trained the many to obey. They have nurtured the young upon hatred of other peoples; and, much as the Jews of old awaited the Messiah, they have lived and labored in expectation of "The Day." They have exalted Vaterland into a religion, and have degraded God into a German tutelary deity. The German schools have welded the German people into a compact, efficient, military machine. The desires of the State are their desires; the Kaiser's will is their will.

We have been following false gods, therefore, in so far as we have sought to shape our schools upon German models. "The German teacher teaches," wrote one of our great educators some years ago, in criticism of our American way of giving to children text-book assignments which they are expected to study for themselves; yet the text-book method, fumblingly as we have so often used it, gives better training in initiative and intelligence than the German teacher's dictation methods. Professor Charles H. Judd has recently pointed out the confusion and waste of time brought about by the fact that our eight-year elementary school was modeled upon the German Volksschule, which is a school for the lower classes, and not intended to lead on to higher education. Our purpose, on the contrary, is to maintain for every American child an open ladder through elementary school, secondary school and college to the university; and to that purpose a six-year period of elementary education is much better adapted-a plan which many of our school systems have adopted within the last decade. We need better vocational education in this country and better systems of vocational guidance; but we are becoming clear that these must not be of the German sort, that compel a choice before the teens.

Education in a democracy must be education for democracy; and education for democracy must itself be democratic in content and method. Such education practices and aims at intelligence rather than habit of mind. It trains its pupils to think and choose for themselves. It prizes initiative above conformity, responsibility above mere efficiency, social good will above unthinking obedience.

Such education is more difficult, of course, than education of the undemocratic type. We shall at times be tempted to fall back into the ways of the German schools in some respect or other, because they represent the line of least resistance in education. Specious arguments will be presented in favor of these ways by shortsighted "practical" men. Education of the German type is more efficient, they will say; it is more direct and practical; it brings more immediate results. It is more patriotic, moreover, they will insist; it better serves the ends of authority; it makes people more prosperous and contented, each in his appointed niche. But such arguments, we may well hope, will no longer win the uncritical assent that they have sometimes found. German education may be more efficient in the fulfilment of its end than American education-but what an end it has sought and reached! In the moment of our temptation to undemocratic short cuts in education, we shall henceforth look to the Germany of yesterday and today, and shall be strengthened to resist. Her ways are not our ways. Her schools cannot be ours. Education must mean to America something quite different from what it has meant to Germany.

The contrast between democratic and undemocratic types of education is as great with respect to religion as with respect to the rest of life. Germany has been most careful to maintain religion as a subject of instruction in her schools. But the content of this instruction in religion has been intellectualistic and formal. It has pressed upon German children a body of historical facts, moral precepts and theological dogmas; but it has not begotten the freedom of inward spiritual initiative. State-controlled, it has bent religion to state uses, and has in time begotten a generation who can believe in the "good old German God."

Religious education in America has been and will be more democratic. Horace Bushnell used to say that the aim of all education is the emancipation of the child. We teach and train our children in order that they may in due time be set free from paternal discipline. We fail in the religious education of our children if our teaching does not result in their final emancipation from a religion of mere authority and convention and their growth into a religion of the spirit. We aim, not simply to win their assent to a given body of beliefs or to attach them to the church as a saving institution, but to help them to become men and women who can think and choose for themselves. The Protestant principle of the universal priesthood of believers involves democracy in religion. And just as democracy can look forward only to failure unless it can educate its citizens, Protestantism will fail unless it can educate men and women fit to stand on their own feet before God, able to understand his will and ready to enter intelligently and effectively into the common human enterprises of Christian living.

A second effect of the war, closely related to this, is that religious education will concern itself more directly with life, and will put less emphasis upon dogma, especially upon those refinements of creed which have operated divisively in the life of the Christian Church. Its method will be more vital, and less intellectualistic. Instead of proceeding upon the assumption that true belief comes first and that right life is the expression of prior belief, it will recognize that adequate insight and true belief are more often the result of right life and action. "If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching." If this be true of adults, it is even more true of children. Our plans of religious education will first seek to influence the life, and will deal with beliefs as an explanation of life's purposes and motives and an interpretation of its realities and values.

If they will realize this primacy of life, the Christian churches stand in the presence of a great opportunity. The experiences of these years have shown us how much more of Christian living there is in the world than bears the label. Religion is being tested, stripped of sham and embroidery, and reduced to reality. And there are being revealed breadths and depths of real religion that we had not understood. There is a vast amount of inarticulate religion actually moving the lives of men which the churches may lift to the level of intelligent and articulate belief if they will but approach it with understanding and a willingness to be taught as well as to teach.

In Jesus' story of the last judgment, there is surprise all around. Both those on the right hand and those on the left stand fully revealed to themselves for the first time, it seems. "Lord, when saw we thee ..." they cry on both sides. This war has constituted such a judgment day. A great moral issue has stood out, sharp, clean-cut and clear. It has set men on the right hand and on the left. It brooks no moral hyphenates; it permits no half-allegiance, either to country or to God. Beneath all pretense and profession, it lays bare the real man. It reveals the hidden qualities of nations. There have been many surprises. It has shown far more of evil in the world that we had deemed possible; but it has shown, too, far more of goodness and courage and true religion than we had thought was there.

Evil is here-real, powerful, poignant, and more unutterably bad than the farthest stretch of imagination had hitherto conceived that evil could be. Since the world began it was never so full of pain and suffering in body and mind, of needless death and of mothers brave but broken-hearted. And most of this is the result of supreme moral evil, the work of a power deliberately seeking world-domination and exploitation of the rest of mankind, even though it involve the extermination of other peoples, determined to use any methods that bid fair to bring about this result, and organizing deceit and lust and murder as the instruments of Schrecklichkeit.

But goodness is here too-strong, calm, cheerful, brave, self-devoting goodness. These years of war have revealed to us the supreme power of the human spirit to endure pain, to resist evil, and to count all else naught for sake of the right in which it believes and the good upon which its heart is set.

This goodness does not always call itself Christian, be it granted, or even know itself to be such. A chaplain in the English army writes: "There is in the army a very large amount of true religion. It is not, certainly, what people before the war were accustomed to call religion, but perhaps it may be nearer the real thing. It is startling, no doubt, and humiliating to find out how very little hold traditional Christianity has upon men.... So far as I am able to estimate, we are faced now with this situation, a Christian life combined with a pagan creed. For while men's conduct and their outlook are to a large extent unconsciously Christian, their creed (or what they think to be their creed) most emphatically is not.... Nevertheless I feel that out here one is very near to the spirit of Christ. There is a general wholesomeness of outlook, a sense of justice, honor and sincerity, a readiness to take what comes and carry on, a power of endurance genuinely sublime, a light-heartedness and cheeriness (nearly always, I believe, put on for the sake of other people), a generosity and comradeship which are obviously Christ-like."[1]

There is strength and goodness at home, too. We had become accustomed in late years to hear it said that the churches were losing their hold upon the people of America. Whether or not that be true, the war has begun to reveal to America, as it has to our Allies, the depth and power of the real moral and spiritual life beneath the surface. Granted that we are witnessing no widespread evangelistic stirrings, no indications of a great revival. It seems probable, indeed, that the itinerant evangelists who had lately become the fashion among us, have passed the heyday of their power. Neither are the "prophetic" folk who misunderstand their Bibles so persistently and look so confidently for the second coming of the Lord, winning an assent at all commensurate with their effort. But there is a vast amount of quiet, sensible, devoted Christian living in America. There is more of genuine religion among us than we had realized. That religion, for the most part inarticulate, and hardly knowing itself to be Christian, is finding expression in action. The spirit in which America entered the war; the high moral aims which President Wilson, interpreter yet leader of his people, has set before the world; the quiet, matter-of-fact and matter-of-duty way in which the principle of selective service was accepted and carried out as democracy's method of mobilizing its power; the co?peration and the giving; the uncomplaining solemn pride of homes that have already made the supreme sacrifice-these are but the first evidences in America of a moral virility, a real religion, which, we may confidently hope, will strengthen us, with our Allies, not only to carry on to victory, but to resist the victor's temptations.

Will this deep, elemental, common religion of America come to understand itself, and to recognize its fundamentally Christian character? The answer to that question lies with the churches. And there are clear indications that many of them, at least, will not fail to realize and meet their opportunity.

Not that we shall do without dogmas. Religion cannot maintain itself as mere ethics. It is a way of living; but a way of living that justifies itself by a way of believing about God and duty and immortality. The point is, that in the natural order of growth life has a certain priority to belief, action to full understanding. And that certainly is the order of growth involved in the present situation.

As the churches share in the expanding and deepening common life and bring their beliefs to bear upon it, in interpretation of its ultimate motives and hopes, there will be growth on both sides. Men elementally Christian in action will come to know what they believe; and on the other hand the churches themselves will discern more clearly which of their customs and beliefs are relevant to the real issues of life and function in essential ways. Our creeds will become simpler, but more vital. And that will make possible a closer unity of the churches. One may well question both the possibility and the desirability of a complete obliteration of denominational lines. We may always have and need denominational loyalty just as we shall always have and need patriotism. But denominational loyalties can be incorporated into a higher loyalty to the inclusive fellowship of Christ's Church as a whole, just as national loyalties, we now see, can and must be incorporated into a higher loyalty to humanity which will be given expression and body in a world-wide League of Nations.

We may expect religious education after the war, again, to be more fully Christian in its conception of God as well as in its view of life.

Jesus, so far as we know, never used the word "democracy." Yet just such a democratic world-community as we are now beginning in a practical way to understand and strive for, he taught and lived and died for. Christianity's ultimate ideal is no longer a mere ideal. It has become an actual political and social program and possibility.

"The brotherhood of mankind must no longer be a fair but empty phrase," wrote President Wilson to Russia; "it must be given a structure of force and reality. The nations must realize their common life and effect a workable partnership to secure that life against the aggressions of autocratic and self-pleasing power." The world's choice is between "Utopia or hell," is Mr. Wells' striking phrase, which he expounds in a remarkable article in The New Republic on "The League of Nations." "Existing states," he says, "have become impossible as absolutely independent sovereignties. The new conditions bring them so close together and give them such extravagant powers of mutual injury that they must either sink national pride and dynastic ambitions in subordination to the common welfare of mankind or else utterly shatter one another. It becomes more and more plainly a choice between the League of free nations and famished men looting in search of non-existent food amidst the burning ruins of our world. In the end I believe the common sense of mankind will prefer a revision of its ideas of nationality and imperialism to the latter alternative."

Mr. Wells is right. The proposal to establish a league of nations presents itself in our day as a matter of plain common sense. Yet if there is one lesson written with perfect clearness on the pages of history, it is that common sense alone cannot save the world from the tragedies of error, self-will and sin, and that common sense motived by self-interest will in the end defeat itself. In his Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin has called our attention to the remarkable prophecy of the present world war made by Frederick W. Robertson in a sermon preached at Brighton on January 11, 1852, addressed to a generation that glorified commerce as the guarantor of world unity and sought to establish morality upon a basis of enlightened self-interest. The passage cannot be quoted too often, nor too firmly impressed upon the minds of the present generation, for there were those among us who, even up until the invasion of Belgium, kept protesting that there could be no war in a world so bound together by economic and commercial ties, and there are those now who find in such interests the only durable basis for world reconstruction. "Brethren," said Robertson, "that which is built on selfishness cannot stand. The system of personal interest must be shriveled to atoms. Therefore, we who have observed the ways of God in the past are waiting in quiet but awful expectation until He shall confound this system as He has confounded those which have gone before, and it may be effected by convulsions more terrible and bloody than the world has yet seen. While men are talking of peace and of the great progress of civilization, there is heard in the distance the noise of arms, gathering rank on rank, east and west, north and south, and there come rolling toward us the crushing thunders of universal war.... There is but one other system to be tried, and that is the cross of Christ-the system that is not to be built upon selfishness nor upon blood, not upon personal interest, but upon love."

If Wells has stated the world's alternative, Robertson has shown the way of final and permanent right decision. To common sense must be added love. The brotherhood of man must be established upon a common acknowledgment of the Fatherhood of God. The world community can ultimately be motived by nothing less than the life within the hearts of men of the God whom they come to know through Jesus Christ.

This means both that the world must become more religious, and that religion must become more fully Christian. We can no longer believe in any God less great or less good than the God whom Jesus Christ reveals. However much it may be tempted to the lower view from time to time, we may reasonably expect that henceforth the world is done with belief in a mere tribal or national God. The supreme and inmost bond of the world community can be nothing other and nothing less than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who regards all men as his children and who steadfastly seeks, with them and through them, the good of all.

Religious education after the war will be more democratic, more immediately concerned with life, more fully Christian. In so interpreting the present situation, we have had in mind especially the more or less formal religious education in the church and the church school. The same tendencies will influence the more informal and indirect religious education of children in the family. We have reason, indeed, to hope for a strengthening of family ties and a renewal of family religion. The sacrifices of these days are rendering relationships very precious that in a more careless, unthinking time we had accepted as a matter of course. And it is entirely possible that victory may wait until in America, as in England and France, there are few families that do not live in closer fellowship with the unseen world because their sons are there. The gradual disintegration of family life which the past half century has witnessed was but incidental to a rapid change in social, economic and industrial conditions. There is reason to expect that the family will so adjust its life to these conditions as to maintain its character as a social group, wherein genuine democracy and true religion may be propagated from generation to generation by that sharing of interests, occupations and affections which is the most potent and vital of all educational methods. That it should so adjust itself and so fulfill its primary educational function, should be a matter of the utmost concern to both Church and State, for it is hard to conceive how either the Christian religion or a democratic society could maintain itself without the aid of the family.

[1] "The Church in the Furnace," pp. 53-54.