Jesus and the American mind

Front matter

Luccock, Halford Edward, 1885-1960.

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Foreword

APPROXIMATELY half of the material in this volume was delivered as the Merrick Lectures of 1930 at Ohio Wesleyan University. The additional material has been added in the hope that the discussion of the themes might be somewhat less inadequate.

To President Edmund D. Soper, of Ohio Wesleyan University, I am deeply indebted for innumerable courtesies and kindnesses both before and during the delivery of the lectures.

HALForpD E. Luccock.

Chapter I Our National Portrait

TowarpD the close of his book, The America of To-day, Mr. J. A. Spender asks this question, “How much of the Christian ethic can be absorbed into the immensely energetic, acquisitive, mundane life of a very prosperous people? Can the Kingdom which is not of this world hold its own in the actual world of wealth and power?’ Mr. Spender does not attempt to answer the question. There is no answer. ‘Time alone will bring one. But to get the question clearly before the mind, to see all that it involves, to look at it without the fog of facile optimism or merely conventional belief, is to take the first step toward framing an answer.

That question of the relation of the Christian ethic to the intricate complex of forces, qualities, and trends which make up American life finds a vivid symbol in the Detroit Art Gallery. Embedded in the wall of one of the rooms is a bit of mosaic of the second or third century, taken from the catacombs of Rome. It is a small section of a larger mosaic, but in it is worked out the Christian symbol of the fish. That crude and rough figure of a fish is a mute reminder of the grim but glorious day when to be a Christian was so dangerous that the name of Jesus must be represented by a secret symbol, the Greek word for fish—zchthus—representing the letters of the phrase, ‘‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.”

II

It is a long lane from the catacombs of Rome to the smokestacks of Detroit. There the mosaic looks out from the wall, a stirring relic of the first fine, careless rapture of Christianity, a symbol of an uncompromising religion and ethic, unafraid of the bright face of danger, now set down in the midst of the mother city of American industrialism. Is it any wonder that it seems out of place? Can the view of life which it symbolizes, the undiluted ethic of Jesus, the implications of its religious faith, ever be anything else but out of place in the Holy City of Mass Production and in the America of which that city is the consummate expression? Will the Christian conception of life be in this industrial civilization just what that mosaic from the catacombs is, a relic, a picture on the wall, a thing for crowds to look at with veneration, but unrelated to the dominant processes and motives of current life?

That little mosaic down in the dark of the catacombs conveyed an unyielding challenge to the whole structure of the Roman Empire, with its pomp, its slaves, its blood and lust, its rule of iron.

A genuine Christianity, of which it is the symbol, has just as unequivocal a challenge to many of the fundamental assumptions and motives of the civilization around it to-day, its smoke and dollars, its production belts, its tickers, its long lines of job hunters, its human junk piles. Can the mosaic dominate the smokestack?

These questions look out on the whole issue of the Christian gospel in the machine age in America to-day. This volume does not attempt to answer the question of ‘how much of the Christian ethic can be absorbed in this acquisitive world.” It essays, rather, the more modest task of exploring somewhat a few of the materials for an answer as they are found in American life. In particular it is concerned with what may be called some leading characteristics of the American mind, if in so conglomerate a collection of individuals, who make up the population of the United States, there can be found enough common traits to justify Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, ‘‘the American mind.” It is, of course, a large question with a thousand pitfalls for anyone with a flair for dogmatism. One of the most interesting features of the large body of literature of the estimates of American character is the frequency with which diametrically opposite qualities are set forth as fundamental American traits. There is hardly to be found in the long catalogue of human values and defects, from strident voices to the love of God, a single one which someone has not discovered to be the peculiar mark of Americans. Such an exhibit counsels caution. All that we shall endeavor to do here is to consider some traits which by the largest obtainable estimate and testimony seem characteristic of the American people to an extensive degree; that is, qualities which can truly be regarded as American in the sense that they are not equally European or merely human. In addition to that, there are included in the understanding of the vague phrase, “the American mind,’’ the forces which are playing upon the mind and character of the American people in greater degree than anywhere else in the world. How do these qualities and forces relate themselves to the Christian purpose and social ideal? Which of them are congenial to the Christian ethic? Which of them are antagonistic, and how deadly is the antagonism? ;

It is hoped that by honestly looking at these questions and attempting to find at least partial answers to them, some light will be thrown on the dimensions and nature of the Christian task in America to-day. Multitudes within the church have never critically scrutinized from the Christian point of view the dominant forces and trends which are forming their minds. For that reason they have been attempting to build the kingdom of God with forces which are thoroughly antagonistic to it; or, to use a figure of speech with some authority, they have been attempting to harvest figs from thistles. The capital blunder of military strategy, that of mistaking foes for friends, has been and is being endlessly repeated.

It is doubtful whether one who does not feel a kind of baffling incongruity between the two can ever visualize with real understanding the problem of bringing together the mind of Jesus and the present mind of America. It is no wonder that there are multitudes to whom the figure of Jesus, brought into the modern scene, is like the advent of Rip Van Winkle. The clothes, the speech, the very ideas, proclaim him an enigma, wandering down from some remote height, hopelessly and pathetically out of date. He is greeted with the spirit if not the very words of the demons of Capernaum, ‘‘What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Nazarene? Art thou come to destroy us?” ‘There is a tremendous incongruity, before which we may well pause in wonder, in the idea of Jesus of Nazareth being the proclaimed Master of the opulent, aggressive America of to-day. If we have never felt deeply that chasm, it simply means that we have a very partial and superficial understanding either of Jesus or of the real nature of our world. Maude Royden has very graphically expressed the amazement which there is in the fact that Jesus was ever accepted by Europe as its acknowledged Lord. She says:

And yet Europe received Christ. Oh, amazing conquest! Surely, the world has not yet realized the significance of the triumph. That China should hear Confucius, that India should receive the Buddha—these were easy conquests compared with the fact that Europe worships Jesus of Nazareth. What a God for a Charlemagne, a Hildebrand, an Otto! What a God for Europe! It does, I think, measure something of the power of Jesus Christ that this ‘materialistic, egotistic Western world should be the place where his throne has been set.

If we say, ‘‘What a God for Europe!’ may we not with equal wonder exclaim, ‘‘What a God for America!’ The Jesus of the Galilean roadside, the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, with his gospel of repentance, meekness, humility, and love, the God of the richest nation in the world—selfconfident, self-assertive, energetic, acquisitive, industrial America!

Surely, as in the case of Europe, that very incongruity measures something of the power of Jesus. But it also gives a startling measure of the dimensions of the Christian task. Leaving aside entirely for the present the question of what is involved in making that formal acknowledgment of Jesus actual, the vivid recognition of contrast between Jesus and many of our most characteristic moods and tempers will do much to free us from the blindness of easy optimism, sentimentalism and complacency, the sins that do so easily beset a Christian church. It will also help to make clear and urgent the necessity of validating the claim of Jesus to dominate the life of this changed world, not through any traditional authority, but as the sure way into the realization of life’s highest values.

An inquiry into the characteristics of the mind of America, and into the action of the forces which are molding it at present, is timely for many reasons.

One reason is the prevalence of the mood of critical examination, now so largely evidenced in our literature and life. Into what Matthew Arnold called, some fifty years ago, “the American rhapsody of self-praise’’ there have come many shrill discordant notes. Indeed, in a very vocal element of the American family the pendulum has swung far to the other extreme. Max Beerbohm has a striking pair of twin cartoons entitled the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Century, In the cartoon depicting the Nineteenth Century we behold John Bull, a corpulent figure, full-fed on Jeremy Bentham, admiringly contemplating his figure in a mirror. In the one for the Twentieth Century we see a long, sallow wisp of a young man, with a slim curved figure, gazing into a mirror. But nothing is reflected back from the glass except a dim and shadowy question mark! It is a fair picture of the questionings of the twentieth century in America. If the mood cannot exactly be called humility, it is at least variously compounded of disillusionment, the puncture of complacency, and realistic thinking, frequently with a dash of cynicism.

OUR NATIONAL PORTRAIT L7

For twenty years in increasing degree we have had a growing literature of self-criticism and self-condemnation, a visible and audible sign of a new mood. It reaches all the way from a serious evaluation of life to a raucous chorus of condemnation. We have grown heretical on the dogma that the evolutionary process ended in us as its crowning masterpiece. In Donald Ogden Stewart’s Aunt Polly’s Story of Mankind that amiable lady looked upon the process of evolution as the ascent from the nasty amoeba to Uncle Frederick standing radiant at the top of a long spiral slope, clothed in a Prince Albert, with one gloved hand resting on the First National Bank and the other upon the Presbyterian church. We are becoming fairly well reconciled to evolution; but we are beginning to have our doubts about Uncle Frederick! For a large number of Americans the calm peace of the days when they could repose in the sweetly solemn thought that they were the noblest work of God has been broken up. Principal L. P. Jacks went back to Europe after a trip in the United States, saying, ‘There is an element of misgiving like that of one who is traveling at a break-neck speed or standing on a giddy height. The voice of the pessimist is heard in the land.” It is abundantly evident to eye and ear that American life does not seem to be satisfactory to a large number of inhabitants. A whole school of novelists is accurately named the “‘futilitarians.”’ The true bill brought in contains a wide variety of discontents; American life is dull; it is ruled by plutocracy. Frightened native-born Americans proclaim it increasingly foreign and Jewish. Cynics roll the words “boob” and “moron’”’ under their tongues with a reiteration which becomes slightly less exciting after a million repetitions; we are uncivilized and soulless. At least there is a notiable halt in the Hallelujah Chorus of self-satisfacton.

One of the most promising elements in the present-day scene is that a large body of intelligent people look on life without any comforting illusions. Sinclair Lewis is acting as reporter for another group of not strikingly intelligent citizens in the words which he puts into the mouth of his loquacious hero, Lowell Schmaltz, in The Man Who Knew Coolidge:

“T tell you, Walt, I’m kind of puzzled. Sometimes I almost kind of wonder (though I wouldn’t want to be quoted) whether with all the great things we got in this greatest nation in the world, with more autos and radios and furnaces and suits of clothes and miles of cement pavements and skyscrapers than the rest of the world put together, and with more deep learning—hundreds of thousands of students studying Latin and bookkeeping and doctoring and domestic science and literature and banking and window-dressing—even with all of this, I wonder if we don’t lack something in American life.”

In large measure this mood is a distinct asset. -The very vigor of self-condemnation makes for encouragement. ‘There is more hope of moral growth when one sighs than when one exults. ‘The end of complacency,’ says Karl Barth, ‘‘may be the first step back to faith.” At least it may be the first step toward a revaluation of the motives and results. of our present order of life.

A second reason for the timeliness of scrutinizing from the standpoint of the ethics of Jesus the

OUR NATIONAL PORTRAIT Ig forces which are making American life is the emergence of industrial and business processes which are bringing revolutionary changes. Science and the machine have combined to make a second industrial revolution of more far-reaching consequences than the first. A whole civilization is being destroyed and a new one being set up. In the present generation scientific management and the methods of mass production, mass consumption and stimulation, the policy of low prices and high wages, are making a more revolutionary age than that of Martin Luther. It is these changes which led President Hoover to declare that American capitalism of to-day is a new and distinct thing in the world. André Siegfried, in a public lecture on his visit to the United States in 1929, declared that his sense of separation from Europe felt here in America was in great contrast to the feeling of nearness on his visit thirty years ago. The distance, he said, is less; the difference is greater. Then he felt at home; to-day he feels a foreigner. That difference he ascribes to present industrial and commercial processes. As these new forces alter life for good or ill, it is a good time to judge them from the large point of view of essential human welfare. What are they doing to life itself? Can they be made friend and ally, or are they the irreconcilable foe of the Christian ethic?

It is from the angle of Europe, however, that the most acute questionings and fears concerning what is called ‘‘Americanism” arise. To many on our shores the Americanization of the world is the consummation devoutly to be wished. To many Europeans it is a monster of hideous mien. Ramsay

Muir has put the feeling of Europe to-day into a vivid parody: “America the Golden, With milk and honey blessed, Beneath thy contemplation Sink heart and voice oppressed.”

There is a fear of American methods, not merely the advertising and hustle, but of the whole process, the numerical and machine-made standards, the materialism which threatens to break up the whole pattern of life and, to use a terrible verb, “‘Detroitize”’ the world.

One German economist says that this industrial and commercial system called “‘Americanization” is the strongest ‘‘apostolic and missionary force in the world.” He finds that in spite of its horror it is making an irresistible appeal to the masses of Europe by its sanitation, its comforts, and its amusements. This fear of American standards and processes is not confined to Europe. It has become very vocal in Japan, for instance. A prominent writer of Japan, Takanobu Murobuse, in 1929 voiced this fear in a widely read lament that Japan, like the rest of civilization, has fallen under the domination of American gold, power, and ideas:

We all admit that the American dollar is the most powerful factor in the modern world, but there are many who do not realize that America, master of the gold and power, is also making the world’s ideas. These people still cherish the illusion that Europe is the center of art, civilization, and culture. But look around you. What of our present-day life in Japan—is it not American rather than European? What is the Marunouchi Building (Tokio’s greatest modern office building)?

What are these sports, this modern journalism, motor Cars, jazz, radio, literature, all these ideas about rights of women, the spread of irreligion, the decline of philosophy, the mania for gold? All these we have taken from America. American ideas control the world in all phases of civilization. Europe still holds American culture in contempt, and most Japanese ape Europe in this respect, without realizing that we are all America’s slaves materially and intellectually.

Deeper still, to Europe, the portent means not only American methods, but American control. On this Paul Hutchinson says:

The American economic threat is seldom absent from the mind of the European business man. In an article in the Neue Zuricher Zeitung last May, Edouard Herriot, leader of the French radicals, after prophesying the coming of some sort of European federation, exclaimed, “We must choose between European solidarity and Boneeean vassalism.” This belief that European business is in danger of being swallowed wholesale is characteristic of large sections of Continental thought. To an American it does not seem to be a well-founded fear. But this does not change the fact that it exists everywhere in Europe, and has just as much influence as though it were well founded.

The greater part of Europe must work for generations to pay what are, ultimately, American claims. But the tariff policy of the United States puts that country in the position of refusing to accept the goods which represent the only commodity in which the European nations can pay. The United States thus has more exports than imports, and at the same time demands large cash payments in respect of debts. The only possible outcome, says the European, is an increase of the American capital investment, in one form or another, in other countries. In other words, Uncle Sam will establish a financial stake that may finally amount to economic control in European countries. And that, in the new era of world relations, will be practically equivalent to political domination.

Our present rate of investment in foreign countries is making for the overlordship of America—a prospect that would be irritating enough, even if the debt settlement were not working in the same direction. ‘This mood of fear and irritation has not been notably allayed by the solemn moral lectures which Europe received gratis from President Coolidge. It is no wonder that a European conception of the United States has been expressed as “little Jack Horner enlightening the world.” In 1928 the net increase of American long-term investments abroad was $1,339,000,000. It is not strange that much of Europe says,

*“My soul from out that shadow ... . Shall be lifted—nevermore. —

This invasion is the A. E. F. translated into dollars —a war with silver bullets. We are seeing a curious parallel to some of the darker periods of European history. In the carnage known as the War of the Spanish Succession foreign nations fought out their battles in Germany and the surrounding states, using hired mercenaries in their armies. The same war for an imperial succession is now going on with different contenders. American automobile kings are carrying their battles into Europe, just as Marlborough and William of Orange used to carry their battles into Germany and Austria. Our American kings are likewise using French and German mercenaries in the fray. The end threatens to be a group of American economic colonies in Europe. It is small wonder that this prospect has been making for the social unification of Europe—all of which calls for a look at this imperialistic force called ‘‘Americanization.”” What is it in terms of ethical standards of life? What does it mean to the world?

Let us, then, step into the photograph gallery and try to get an idea of our own likeness. Our sharply defined viewpoint should be kept in mind that we are not merely exploring general characteristics but are trying to estimate them according to their harmony with or opposition to the Christian ethical ideal. This will mean endeavoring to rethink some of the ethical implications of the Christian faith in the modern world.

America has had her portrait taken more times than a débutante. This is fitting, for she is the world’s premiére débutante, the first one, in fact, to come of age since the modern camera has been invented. In other words, as Bernard Fay observes, the United States is the first nation to be evolved since the process could be watched and measured by the new technique of the social sciences. For our photograph we cannot, of course, depend much on proclaimed and acknowledged ideals. If we went merely to ideals for our picture, then the American would emerge as Sir Galahad in a sack suit, or he would be, to change the haloes a bit, Saint George eternally fighting the dragons of a wicked world.

At the outset it is clear that if we are to get any realistic view of American character, we must work our way through a number of myths. Holy legends obscure the facts of American character; unholy legends as well. There are at least three welldefined clusters of tradition which obscure the view.

One is the classic view of the moral stature of Americans. It is patterned after the miracle of Cana in Galilee: God in his infinite wisdom reserved the best wine to the last. It is the staple of old-fashioned Fourth-of-July oratory, but it still thrives under the protecting shade of many resolute patriotic associations which keep alive the reverent practice of genuflexion to the sacred icon of American perfection. This view may well be called the ‘“‘Whenfreedom-from-her-mountain-height”’ school of interpretation:

“When Freedom from her mountain height Unfurled her standard in the air, She tore the azure robe of night And set the stars of glory there.”

“The azure robe of night’? has been torn to ribbons by a thousand orators and writers. Let two examples suffice. ‘The first is Albert J. Beveridge, in a speech delivered in Indianapolis in that year of Manifest Destiny, 1898:

Fellow Americans, we are God’s chosen people. Yonder at Bunker Hill and Yorktown his providence was above us. At New Orleans and on ensanguined seas his hand sustained us. Abraham Lincoln was his minister, and his was the altar of freedom the boys in blue set on a hundred battlefields. His power directed Dewey in the East, and delivered the Spanish fleet into our hands on liberty’s natal day, as he delivered the elder Armada into the hands of our English sires two centuries ago. His great purposes are revealed in the progress of the flag, which surpasses the intentions of congresses and cabinets, and leads us like a holier pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night into situations unforeseen by finite wisdom, and duties unexpected by the unprophetic heart of selfishness. We cannot fly from our world duties; it is ours to execute the purpose of a fate that has driven us to be greater than our small intentions. We cannot retreat from any soil where Providence has unfurled our banner; it is ours to save that soil for liberty and civilization. For liberty and civilization and God’s promise fulfilled, the flag must henceforth be the symbol and the sign to all mankind—the flag!

But lest we think we have entirely outgrown that self-portrait, look at a more recent example. It 1s the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal who thus delivers himself in the August, 1923, number:

There is only one first-class civilization in the world to-day—it is right here, in the United States. It may be a cocky thing to say, but relatively it is first class, while Europe is second class, and Asia fourth to sixth class.

Amen! The trouble with the Narcissus school is not that its practitioners do not have authentic material to work on; it is, rather, that the haloes block the camera.

Equally distorted is the classic European picture which has been done over with a thousand variations on the same theme—the American shown full length as the materialistic dollar chaser, thrown into startling relief when placed beside the serene idealism of Europe. No matter how strict the immigration laws under the quota, no effective barrier has been set against the flood of foreign labor which comes in yearly under the classification “lecturers” to give impassioned lectures on American materialism at five hundred dollars a lecture. This portrait is often drawn in a naive assumption that material acquisitiveness is an American invention like the incandescent light, or a tree never indigenous to Europe, like that from which quinine is derived. A whole train of far-sighted observers have supplied a corrective to this European mythology, beginning with de Tocqueville and extending down through Bryce, the noblest of them all, Mtnsterberg, Wells, Siegfried, Santayana, and others. But the cartoon as presented with the generous help given by a million American travelers in Europe prevails. The common man in the streets of Europe sees across the water through a glass darkly. |

A current freak mirror held up to America with the cordial invitation to behold herself is what might be called the American portrait, modern style. The camera used by this impressionist group of photographers has all modern attachments—a cynical lens and a contemptuous finder. We do not need to describe its technique or its major artists—they are ever with us. With this school the American bird has undergone a transformation. It is no longer the spread-eagle; it has become the hoot-owl. Now, of course, the owl has a reputation for wisdom, but it did not get it by hooting; it got it by keeping still. There is no more wisdom in a hoot of disdain than there is in a scream of uncritical adulation. ‘These hooters in the forest have had their method well described by J. St. Loe Strachey, in his book, American Soundings. Writing about H. L. Mencken he says that Mr. Mencken’s technique consists of going out into the streets and dragging in all the dead cats he can find into the parlor and saying, ‘‘Here is America, look at it!’’ There is no more curious or amusing type of book than that being produced in some quantities in Europe by authors who have engaged in researches in the back numbers of the American Mercury, supplemented by some earnest conversations with American expatriates in the sidewalk cafés of Paris. A schoolboy once described the well-known painting of the Revolutionary War, ‘‘The Spirit of ’76,” by saying that it was a picture of three men: “one of them had a fife, one of them had a drum, and one of them had a headache.” This modern school of discontent has a headache as its principal item of critical apparatus. The result is that there is more discomfort than insight. The present vogue of the literature of detraction has created in front of publishers’ offices a large traffic jam of authors anxious to cash in before the fashion changes. Undoubtedly, the vogue is beginning to pall. Even within the sacred covers of the American Mercury the familiar slap-stick comedy begins to tire after the thousandth repetition. Even among the enlightened there is a growing suspicion that the American octave includes more than the one bass note. Some are even remembering that while in America there is the National Security League, there is also the Civil Liberties Union. There is not only William Jennings Bryan, but Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; not only Henry Ford, but Jane Addams.

Getting safely past the stock caricatures, let us turn to the rest of the family album, keeping clearly in mind the purpose of our observation that we are not attempting a psychoanalysis of the American soul, not going on a sight-seeing tour or conducting a statistical excavation.

Two points of difficulty confront any assay of American character. One is the infinite variety of Americans; the other is the variety of historical influences. From these come the baffling contradictions present in our life. No wonder that Mr. Siegfried says, ‘No other country is so difficult to understand or so complex in its moral structure.’’ For these reasons, after the most exhaustive research and the most unassailable analysis and cataloguing of American traits, there should appear at the end of such a research Mr. Dooley’s famous “errata.” Mr. Dooley says that in his early years he wrote a book about women. Some years later, when he came to _ republish it, after a critical reading he inserted in the front this statement with the scientific name ‘‘Errata’: “‘Wherever in this volume appears the word is, substitute zs not, and wherever the words is not appear, substitute may be, perhaps, or God knows.” It is well to distrust any generalizations unaccompanied by such a saving footnote.

No continent presents a greater geographical variety. The Everglades and the Rockies, the marshes of New Jersey and the wheatfields of Nebraska, the Maine woods and the deserts of Arizona—all are America. In like manner no continent stretches a wider range of character. Most generalizations about America can be set down as false, too easy, or too hurried. The population is too vast, too many-sided, the elements too diverse to be caught in any single formula. No one adjective can be stretched all the way from