III LABOR'S COMPLAINT AGAINST THE CHURCH "Let judgment begin at the house of the Lord." The Church can save neither the social order nor itself unless it shall recognize its own short-comings. Of these the most perilous is its estrangement from the labor movement, an estrangement largely due to mutual misunderstandings. Hence it is a primary necessity that churchmen should give a full, patient, and candid hearing to the complaints of laboring men against the Church. In so doing, our purpose must not be to controvert our critics, but to get a sympathetic understanding of their views, to judge and mend our own ways, and to find the common ground where they and we can work together for that grand-total of all human interests which we call the Kingdom of God. A statement follows of labor's complaint against the Church. It may not be all the truth nor even all true, but it is urged by men who speak in good faith, and hence it should help us to know the truth. 1. It is charged that the Church "has always stood by the ruling classes, because-it did not dare to oppose the men or the government which gave it support." In Richard Heath's phrase, it is "the captive City of God," and in the younger Henry George's, "the Nobles of Privilege are the chief patrons of the Church and have an overmastering influence."2 In evidence of such charges they cite the coincidence of ecclesiastical wealth and popular poverty during the middle ages; the opposition of Luther to the rising of the German peasants; the alliance of King and Church against the Commons of England; Adam Smith's arraignment of the Church in the Eighteenth Century for its servility to wealth,3 the attitude of American churches toward the anti-slavery movement; the almost unanimous vote of the English bishops in the House of Lords against the Workingmen's Compensation Act, the anti-liquor bills, and the Lloyd-George budget; the familiar clerical apologies for Standard Oil, and the opposition of prominent laymen to child-labor laws and social legislation of almost every sort. It might seem easy to argue that all this 1 See C. Stelzle: "The Church and Labor," p. 9. 2 "The Menace of Privilege,” p. 321. 3 See "The Wealth of Nations," Book V, Ch. I, Part III, Art. III. is only a part-truth, and even a perverted view of that part. But it will be more profitable for us to reflect on the part that is true in spite of partial or perverted views. There is at least occasion for complaint on the part of laborers and for concern on the part of church men. 2. It is charged that the Church is usually neutral when not hostile toward labor's efforts to uplift humanity. Josiah Strong writes that he "knows personally of a committee of labor men who tried to secure the passage of a law limiting child-labor, and in a great city not one clergyman could be found to give them more than casual help;" while, "in another city, some years ago, not one clergyman could be found to aid the bakers agitate for a law giving them Sunday rest." 4 The Commission of the Federated Churches of America found that in a recent and already historic strike for a weekly rest day, the local ministerial union had administered a sharp rebuke to the strikers for alleged disorders, but no corresponding rebuke to the employers who, for some years, had been requiring an unnecessary and increasing amount of Sunday labor. The Archbishop of Canterbury said that he worked seventeen hours a day, and had no time left to solve the prob 4 "The Gospel of the Kingdom," May, 1910, p. 62. lem of the unemployed; to which Keir Hardie replied: "A religion which demands seventeen hours a day for organization and leaves no time for thought about starving men, women, and children, has no message for this age." 5 In other words, the Church is too much preoccupied with working its own machinery. 995 Of course it can be said again that this is only a partial truth. But again it will be better for us to dwell on the partial truth than on the partial error of such complaints. Or, we may point to the organic declarations of the several Protestant denominations and to those of their Federal Council, by all of which the churches are committed to the cause of labor and against all social injustice. To this the laboring men may reply that the Church, by such declarations, has not fully put itself in the right, but has rather acknowledged a standard of right by which not only the social order but the Church itself is to be judged. And workingmen are now asking with some sharpness whether our deeds are fulfilling the promise of our declarations. 3. A working-man asks: "Is it not a fact that in most churches to-day the great majority of so-called 'better class' people look down upon the workingman, who spends his life 5 See "Annals of the American Academy of Social Science," Nov., 1907, p. 18. in toiling for their necessities and luxuries, and do not associate with him as a brother?" 6 A distinguished High Church rector testifies that there are churches in which "the presence of the poor is regarded as bad form. If Christ himself were to enter them, the pew-opener would ask, What is that Carpenter doing here?" 7 A prominent English man of letters writes: "I regard pews and pew-rents as distinctly antiChristian. They foster class-distinctions. They keep the poor at a distance. They encourage snobbishness, and give point to the sneer that Churches only want those who are able to pay." Personally, one may be sure that much of this appearance of exclusiveness is a misunderstanding due to differences between the conventional manners of the rich and the poor. Nevertheless, every man who travels is probably acquainted, as is the writer, with churches where a measure of snobbery is unmistakable. It were better for the Church to be patient under a hundred false suspicions than to countenance this abomination in a single instance. 4. Wage-earners join the outcry against the discrepancy between the way we worship on 6 See George Haw: "Christianity and the Working Classes," p. 4, cf. p. 144. 7 Quoted by H. George, Jr.; "The Menace of Privilege," p. 407. |