Church finance and social ethics

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Preliminary < . . 1

II The Church as Owner . . . .... .16

Chapter I

It requires only slight familiarity with the newspapers to discern the part which appeals for large funds are playing in present-day church activities. Whether it be that the unprecedented response of the American public to philanthropic calls during the Great War begot a nation-wide habit of extraordinary generosity, or whether the forced prosperity of a country fairly weltering in gold made the public kindly toward Christian appeals in enormous terms, or whether the desperate plight in which European humanity found itself during and at the close of the Great War laid a new burden upon the Christian conscience, the fact is that the Protestant churches have asked and are asking the American people for sums which would have seemed out of all reason ten years ago. One denomination has already received pledges to the total of over one-hundred millions of dollars, another is undertaking a campaign for one hundred millions, another has secured seventy-five millions, and still another fifty millions, — all this since the close of the World War.

"We are to-day praying for the union of the separate Protestant denominations into one organic, or at least federated, whole. The advantages which will come from such union for more direct and simple phrasing of the Christian faith are obvious. Obvious also is the elimination of the scandal of a divided Protestantism giving itself to competitive struggle at home and abroad. Very few of us, however, have faced the duty of thinking through the implications of the fact that such union will pour into some central treasury masses of money beyond all our present calculations. The responsibilities which will be lodged in that centralized office for proper coordination and correlation in the handling of money have not yet been taken into the account, nor have we stopped to plan for the perils involved for the Church in the very possibility that such sums will soon come under its control.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, — the worldly-wise tell us and they counsel us not to build the bridges before we get to the rivers. A deeper wisdom, however, knows that bridge-building is seldom most successful when carried forward extemporaneously. The engineer is always gratified to know beforehand whether the stream can be bridged at all, and what material is at hand for the construction of bridges. It is especially imperative that we cast a glance ahead in view of the tendency of discussions about Churchunion so to focus themselves on the specifically ecclesiastical features that some apparently commonplace issues are in the end left to take a haphazard turn.

For example, representatives of the Methodist Episcopal Church and of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, recently agreed upon a plan of union to be submitted to the supreme legislative bodies of both churches for adoption at the earliest feasible date. The discussion over Methodist union has gone on for years until the consummation seems — according to some prophets — almost in sight, involving as it does the creation of substantially a new church with over six million members. A proposed constitution for the new body has been outlined. Most elaborate precautions have been taken to protect the rights of the Southern minority and to retain the loyalty of the negro, and to forestall autocratically-minded bishops from seizing too much power; all of which is as it should be. There is not in the instrument itself, however, any save the most casual hint as to how the enormous sums of money raised by such an organization are to be handled. I am heartily in favor of the union of Methodism, but as the proposed constitution now stands it makes possible a financial concentration beyond anything in the history of Protestantism; not because anybody intends or desires such a result but because this, — an apparently non-ecclesiastical "detail," — has been allowed to take care of itself. A wiser policy would keep all such grave possibilities out in the open from the beginning.

We apologize for uttering such commonplace as that immense physical resources lodged in the hands even of the best-intentioned Boards are equivalent to immense grants of power. For illustration we may look at two foundations which to-day are influencing the educational institutions of the United States. We refer to the funds coming from the Carnegie properties on the one hand and the Rockefeller properties on the other. It is not our business here to enter into a discussion of the industrial processes by which the Carnegie and the

Rockefeller interests came to success. Very likely the laws to-day would not permit financial activities of the sort displayed forty years ago by Mr. Carnegie or by Mr. Rockefeller. Probably each pioneer of industry was as good or as bad as the other. In their defense it may be said that the social consequences of control of railroads and legislatures and even of public opinion by dominant financial groups had not in their day been thought through. Moreover the past is past and a respectable portion of the funds of each magnate is devoted to the improvement of education in the United States. We are firmly of the conviction that both the Carnegie fund and the Rockefeller fund for education have been productive of far-reaching good. The Rockefeller fund has, so far as we know, never been used in a meddling or tinkering spirit. The grants of money seem to have been voted according to sound educational policy. As to the Carnegie fund perhaps a careful judgment would not be so favorable. The first announcement of the Carnegie purpose led to a frantic scrambling by presidents of denominational colleges to cut loose from church control or to lengthen their tether far enough to share in the contemplated financial blessings. The oracular utterances of some officers of the Foundation also seemed to be based on the assumption that control over such a fund made for final authority on all subjects ranging from pensions and life insurance to politics and religion, though this was incidental and added to the gayety of disinterested persons. On the whole, however, the Carnegie policy on its strictly educational side was probably sound enough. Granting the worthiness of the intentions of both founders and the correctness of the methods with which the trustees work, the fact remains that at least for a generation or two these aggregations of money will be a potent factor in decreeing what colleges in the United States shall survive or perish. It will be understood that we are not deploring the existence of such funds. We are simply stating the self-evident as to their power.

There is no reason to suppose that the piling up of riches in the treasuries of the Protestant churches or of the Protestant Church, when union comes, will generate energy any less compelling. The administrators of the finances, — who will probably go by the innocent title of secretaries — will have in their hands titanic enginery whose effects will be felt through the decades for good or ill. The secretaryships are inevitable — as is their tremendous power. Public understanding of such power, however, is the first step toward keeping it humble and tractable.

In addition there are wider considerations of serious import. Our fathers were declared to have won a notable victory when they achieved a separation of Church and State. Their sure discernment told them that only harm could result if the State attempted to control the Church or if the Church sought to manage the State through any other channel than reasonable persuasion. In recent years, however, we have learned that no matter what the form of government at a given time, the economic forces of that time try to get hold of and control King and Parliament or President and Congress. This is not to suggest anything necessarily wicked. Economic interests should have place in governmental policies. Economics have more to do with the life of man than any other interests. The possibility of such control, however, makes likely an invisible government behind the visible. Much of the harm could be done away with if the economic forces were definitely labeled so that we could watch them at work. If, for example, a railroad manipulates the political machinery of a state so as to send to the senate of the United States a representative of the railroad the peril would be diminished if the newly elected senator could take his oath as the senator from the railroad. Then we would at least know where we were and what to expect. There is a shrewd jest now going the rounds to the effect that the United States is Bolshevist to the extent of being ruled by a congress which is a soviet of lawyers. If the lawyers are just lawyers our plight is not so serious as it is if the lawyers are agents of screened or masked financial giants.

Now this old alliance between Church and State which our fathers thought dangerous can easily return to plague us if both Church and State in their organized capacities are too closely dependent on economic interests which may control both Church and State. It is significant that in the vexing days since 1914, when representatives of this or that religious group have dared to speak out against any war policies which have seemed unchristian, the first patriots to be shocked and outraged have been spokesmen of financial interests who have often called out that government should proceed against such potential treason. Better have Church and State wrangling with one another as to which is entitled to authority over the other than to have both jerked like puppets by a back-lying and irresponsible economic master.

A second general consideration arises out of the possibility of accumulated resources tying the Church to an established social and industrial order, whatever that order may be. Human nature is prone to identify whatever is with what ought to be. This is often true when persons have passed with middle age into prosperity. Radical critics of organized Christianity often remind us that the Church is just about a generation behind the times. This is measurably true, for the good and sufficient reason that the ministers and laymen now in control of the Church were born about a generation ago. Having attained to a degree of success through the methods in which they were trained, they believe in the superiority of these processes and are quite likely to identify a social or industrial state at any one moment with the eternal verities of the Christian revelation. Here is for Christianity an ever-present and serious peril. We need not be radicals to discern the manifest flaws in the industrial system of the year 1920. Suppose we grant for argument's sake that as an instrument for production of wealth the capitalistic system is the best that the world has seen. We could hardly say much for the claim, however, that the capitalistic system has been conspicuously successful in the equitable distribution of wealth. It may be that a producer will not exert himself to the utmost unless society gives him the right to bequeath his property to a great-grandson whom he may never see, — • and who, when he arrives, may be a knave or a fool. Conceding this far from self-evident truth, we can not maintain with much vigor that our present system of distribution is all that it ought to be. Then if the mildest reforms are in order we ought to have an institutional Christianity which can help toward charting the course which the reform is to take. The difficulty of rendering such service if the organized Church is rooted in and interlaced with the established order by the possession of great wealth is altogether too patent.

A third consideration is the possibility of the Church's becoming conformed to secular standards by anxiety over her earthly possessions, or by her unconscious carrying over into the temple a mood and spirit begotten in the business office. In a notable address, while he was still President of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson once called attention to the deleterious effect of the scientific temper of the age on the pursuit of the knowledge of higher human values. In substance he said that it was as if the noxious gases from a laboratory had escaped into the quiet retreat of the brooding philosopher and were choking him with their poison. If this be true as to scholarship, how much more imminent is the peril from the deadly fumes of modern industrialism for the pursuit of the highest Christian ideals! The estimate of Christian results in terms of statistics is but one phase of the danger. "Who doubts that it is impossible completely to square the New Testament ideals with any set of business maxims as yet devised? One of the chief glories of Christianity is the transcendence of its ideals : but we can more easily scale down the ideal to meet a secular mood than tone up the worldly mood to the Christian requirement.

What, then, shall the Church do? One enthusiast is ready with an answer. He would have the Church cut loose from all material possessions whatsoever. He would send evangelists and prophets out upon the highways without plan for support. He would obey literally the New Testament injunction to take no thought for the morrow, and to provide neither scrip nor raiment for the journey. If the prophets relied upon God they would be fed. If they were not fed and so died they would fall as witnesses to a splendid ideal.

The sheer vigor of such eloquence will always commend itself to some minds, but after all Christianity is in the world to save the world. There is something convincing about martyrdom when the victim is thrown to the lions or burned at the stake. The martyrdom is not so impressive when the hero dies of under-nourishment or takes up a life-insurance agency. If the Christian revelation means anything as to method, it means that the world is to be saved by trained leaders. That the training of prophets in the olden time and of apostles in the later day was not always conventional and institutional does not detract from the pertinence of this remark. In every age the effective prophets of God have been as much marked by intellectual energy as by spiritual consecration. The prophecies of Amos, earliest of the literary prophets, are classics forever for the cogency of their expression and the symmetry of their form, as well as for their moral and spiritual passion. But the problem of training a mind for intellectual effectiveness in the midst of a highly complex civilization is somewhat different from that of the day of the herdsman of Tekoa. This one problem of equipping leaders involves all the costly educational apparatus of our modern times.

Moreover, the function of the Church is not exhausted in the vocal articulation of truth. As divine a revelation as any in our day is that of the worth of the scientific method. Fully as important as the actual discoveries made by scientists has been the elaboration of the scientific method itself by which we mean the patient study of given facts themselves, in the search for laws which give us mastery over other facts. It is the duty of the Church to capture the scientific method as an instrument for the advancement of the Kingdom. Especially is this a duty in the search for laws which mean well or ill for social groups. In a day which looked upon sin just as personal guilt to be rebuked, the prophet needed not so elaborate a furnishing as in one which recognizes that some evils spring out of the constitution of society as such. From now on and always a major part of the work of the Church will devolve upon the prepared expert. The training of experts, however, implies a relation to and dependence upon the tangled social institutions in the midst of which we live.

What, after all, is the function of the Church? We are told that the function is to generate the moral and spiritual dynamic out of which all progress comes. Suppose, however, there are in the industrial and social conditions of a time obstacles to the generation of power. The entire social atmosphere may be so chilled as to make it impossible to start the fires of enthusiasm. Or the path of progress may be strewn with innumerable stumbling blocks. Clearly, then, it is the business of the Church to take upon itself the creation of a new social climate, or the removal of the social obstacles in the name of the release of the higher spiritual energies. One reason for a Church's bestirring itself against the immeasurable poverty, for example, which drags down the world is just the Christian impulse to relieve suffering. But a further reason is the desire of any genuine Christian leadership to make an environment in which human beings can exist with measurably normal humanity. The high-tide spiritual energies of the race never will be released until poverty is conquered, or until there is such "universal mastery over nature as to make it evident that if a man lacks the material conditions for normal human life, the lack is his own fault and not the fault of society itself.

The first reason for the organized Church's not seeking to cut its connection with the world of money and property is because it cannot, if it is to keep a foothold on the earth at all, and the second reason is that example is better than precept in the crusade to Christianize the industrial order. It is possible for the Church to do something worth while, in the trusteeship of its own material resources, to erect an essentially Christian doctrine of the use of wealth. There is to-day abundant cataloguing of the faults of the Church. Sometimes the more radical, especially the younger prophets, seem to feel that the wisest course is one of unrelenting criticism of the Church at every point where it touches industry. After all, however, in the face of the certainty of bitterest censure, sound church leadership will struggle on to work out into everyday material deed the industrial and social ideals for which Christianity stands. Any Church that thoroughly understands the problem here will indeed shrink from the difficulties of such a task. It might be easier for the Church to send its ministers and teachers out upon the highways to cry against the evils of the world without financial support from the Church itself, than for it in its official activities to find how righteously to exist in an industrial world, and how to sanctify all the properties coming into its hands by intelligent use for the Kingdom of God. We must not forget the word of Jesus as to the difficulty of a rich man 's entering into the Kingdom of Heaven. His word is as true for an institution as for an individual. We must not forget also that he declared that with the help of God even such a spiritual miracle is possible.

A few words of caution are in order. Let it be understood that we have no dogmatic scheme by which to guide ourselves in our reflections. The Christian system must strive for the fullest and highest life for human beings. It must recognize that the object of all its endeavor is flesh-and-blood men, women and children living in this present world. It must recognize also that these human beings do not come to their amplest selves apart from the multifarious group activities which consume so much of their energies. It must realize further that the soundest endeavor is not merely to make these lives bigger in quantitative terms but to refine them to a higher and nobler quality. To do this there must be passion for those human ideals and values which possess worth for all time.

Having recognized all this, however, we must, we repeat, obstinately resolve that we will not yield to the tyranny of any dogmatic absolutes. We are indeed under the law of absolute good- will one toward another, but that good- will cannot unerringly tell us what to do at a given time or place. In all our attempts to find our path in Christian well-doing there is this element of relativity. There is no one absolute social system which we can to-day accept as final. If we should all become socialists, even Christian socialists, overnight, and should start out to-morrow completely cut from our capitalistic past in an environment wholly favorable to socialism, we should find day after to-morrow that the advocates of a still newer order would be shouting in our ears ; and with that further order established the heralds of a yet brighter dawn would reproach us that we had made so feeble a beginning. Disconcerting to our dogmatic minds as it is, we must admit that in industry, as in every other realm of human conduct, some systems are right at one time, that they have their day, and that then the moral duty becomes that of helping them cease to be. Some moral courses are best in some places and worst in some others. It is conceivable that a half dozen economic systems of widely varying degrees of development should be flourishing in as many different nations in one and the same year, and each best adapted to its own national environment.

This inevitable relativity in moral duties can, on the one hand, be appropriated as an excuse for moral laxity ; or it can, on the other hand, be construed as a summons to the most intense consecration. The compelling moral problem for a man or for an institution is to keep morality up-to-date, — or in other words to make every advancing insight the occasion for revision of and progress in moral practice. From this angle of view the duty of the Church in managing the material resources which are bound to stream into ecclesiastical coffers in increasing flood is to take position at the head of those marching toward a better industrial day and to stay there. This means, of course, that such threadbare adages as ''business is business" and ''business and religion cannot mix" must be cast out once and for all. The most damaging criticism passed upon the Church to-day is that its ideals as to wealth and its contacts with riches and with rich men do not square with one another. In a degree this must always be true, — if an ideal is an ideal worth following it must forever move on ahead. But there is dreadful force in the criticism, especially pertinent when ecclesiastical leaders proceed on the assumption that in business the Church must act just as does any other business concern. There must be some middle course between abandoning material possessions altogether and yielding to the ordinary and conventional business maxims. To abandon material possessions altogether is physically impossible. To bow to a merely conventional business ethic ought to be morally impossible.

Here again some objector may break out that when the Church gets into these business entanglements it is neglecting its true functions, — that the Church is in the world to save souls ; that is its only business. We must bespeak patience as we reply that as a matter of fact the Church is on this material earth, that the Church owns lands and houses, that the Church invests funds, that the Church employs labor, that in carrying forward any enterprise the Church expends money. This is true now, has always been true, and will be true as long as the world stands. In view of this actual situation we are raising the question as to how the Church should comport itself so as not to hinder the work of soul saving, — but rather to facilitate that salvation.

One further note of caution. Throughout this entire essay we are to speak of the Church in its organized form. "We are discussing the Church not as a sum of individuals but as an articulated body working under group laws. We are occupying ourselves with what the Church does as a Church. We are not presuming to enter the closet of individual ethics and to pass judgment upon the financial transactions of individuals. We shall try not to forget what we said a moment ago about the relativity of obligations. In view of that relativity it may be permissible for an individual in peculiar circumstances to sanction, at least provisionally, conduct which would not be permissible for the official vote of the Church to which that individual belongs. We say this in the same breath with which we avow the true aim of the Church to lift the conduct of all individual members up to the ideal set as a standard by the Church in its official policies. For the purposes of this study, however, the most severe exactions are for the Church, which is never to cease to think of itself as the organized body of Christ.

Chapter II

The seriousness of our problem, and possibly some hints as to its solution, may appear from viewing one after another different aspects of the contact of the Church with property. At the outset it may be best to consider the Church as an owner. Much of the wealth which comes into the ecclesiastical treasury will naturally remain in the possession of the Church; and ownership at once provokes criticism from many quarters.

We meet, to begin with, the objection that important sums should not be allowed to remain in the permanent keeping of corporate bodies like the Church. The Church is a corporation, and corporations have no souls. Harm results from the control of huge funds by entities which are personal only by legal fiction. Ownership should be strictly personal. We have heard of recent years that the only inherent right to property vests in the individual human being. Property which an individual has legally acquired is his own by natural and inalienable justice. It is an unwarrantable extension of this right to make it include holdings by Church corporations.

This leads us to ask what constitutes the right to ownership. One type of mind will of course have it that there is something self-evidently divine about the right to private property. We have been informed that one of the Ten Commandments tells us not to steal, and that the context lends indirectly a divine sanction to individual property holding. There may indeed be something divine about the personal right to hold property, but the divinity must publish itself in social benefits. The examination of primitive societies does not suggest that the sacredness of private property is an unmistakable moral intuition peculiar to human consciousness from the beginning. Society seems to have recognized and then agreed, and then enacted, that the material goods which one has acquired in sanctioned ways shall be one's own till one chooses to dispose of them. Centuries of experience are said to have taught that the human life does not come to its best without some such control over physical goods as that which we see in private property. Individual initiative is smothered out if a man cannot retain power over the things which he trades for or produces. Simply because of the social usefulness of private property we have had property rights enacted into our fundamental laws. Much abuse by individual holders is overlooked because of the good of the system as a whole. The legal title is a contrivance intended to protect owners in their rights. But full ethical ownership of material goods implies high mastery of those goods. The bow of Ulysses belonged to Ulysses because he only could bend that bow. The legal title might have rested somewhere else but in just social morality Ulysses was the owner. It is in the hope, often illusory to be sure, that material things will in the main get into the hands of those who can best use them that Society maintains the rights of private property, rights which would be worthless without social support. The privateness of private property is a creation of the public will.

Conceding all the saeredness of individual rights imaginable, however, we see all through history the tendency of Society itself to regulate, and upon occasion to disregard, such rights in the name of the social result. We can hardly imagine a social situation in which it would be otherwise. Where is there a community without taxes? Suppose for our convenience we adopt the familiar division of material things into two classes, consumers' goods and, producers' goods, though the division may not always be clear. Consumers' goods are, roughly speaking, food and clothes and houses in which the consumers live. Producers' goods are the tools with which they work, — ranging all the distance from a hammer or a plow to a railroad or a steel mill. Now we could hardly find any extreme of individualism on the one hand or of collectivism or communism in the brain of the wildest dreamer on the other — even among those theories that say most about every man's natural right to appropriate from a social fund whatever goods he needs — that would fight hard for the right of a consumer to food or clothes or a house if he did not render some service to Society in return. A few talkers about collectivism seem to fancy that under a communistic free-for-all the loafer would have a fine time. Willing servants would bring him food to eat and coats to wear and beds in which to sleep. It would be difficult to find any formulation of communism even of the most extreme type which would warrant any such hopes. The communist would, indeed, maintain that under his system all men would gladly serve, but if they would not serve he would not make much more provision for them than our present competition makes for chronic and incurable laziness. The general assumption is that a man must work if he is to eat. So that on the side of consumers' goods the right to property comes, even among the radicals, to be the right to be furnished with material that will enable one to keep alive enough to work.