Making American Christian

Front matter

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Preface

This is the sixth of a series of books for mission study, issued by the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. Each of the volumes has met with cordial favor, and several have run through two or more editions. There is still a sustained demand for all of these books, but the number of classes in churches which study Home Missions yearly has now become so large that a new book is being called for annually.

It seems fairly obvious that so large a Christian body as Southern Baptists should produce most of their own text-books on missions. The pedagogical principle involved is sound. It introduces the student to the problems of missions which are common to all evangelicals through those particular tasks for which his own group is primarily responsible. Further, it is only in books produced under the auspices of a Christian body that we may expect to find fearless emphasis and painstaking exposition given to those principles and viewpoints which are deeply imbedded in its faith and life. Of all people, Baptists can least afford, for the sake of convenience and popular conformity, to neglect to give attention to what is taught in the books which influence the attitude of their people on missions and other problems.

To prove that America was born Christian is the concern of the first chapter of this book. It assembles facts which demonstrate that the Christian religion was the dominant formative force behind American life and institutions.

America is the only nation in history of which this was true. The implications are tremendous of this unique origin of our nation. In some sense, the whole book is a plea that we shall live up to these implications.

The second chapter marshalls an array of the problems which now challenge the nation. Some topics are here dismissed with a scant two pages which merit a hundred. But the scope of the book seemed to call for a summary, and exhaustive analysis was impossible. It is an unmatched mass of ferment which presses upon this young giant among the nations, before it has passed the half of its second hundred years. Even the brief summary given constitutes a challenge to all the resources of American Christianity.

The third chapter outlines those resources. It is optimistic. The resources of American Christianity, in numbers and wealth, have never been equalled. In purity of faith and life, American Christianity has certainly not been excelled in any nation. But a less cheering light is also turned on the picture. Material resources become a snare in the realm of spiritual progress, when men come to trust them rather than God. Our times call mightily for a Christianity whose hidden union with God shall be its most trusted instrumentality.

The fourth and fifth chapters catalog some kinds of false teaching and preaching against which God's people must contend. The author is neither a pre-millenialist nor a post-millenialist. But he thinks the reader will not be able to study, even in brief outline, the varied and determined anti-Christ teachings which now seek to poison and destroy New Testament faith, without being impressed that they present conditions like those Paul and other Apostolic writers say shall obtain in the last days.

PREFACE 7

The last four chapters discuss some outstanding elements of a constructive program for making America Christian. Space limitations did not permit the introduction of others of perhaps equal importance.

Some special explanation of Chapter V seems necessary. It contains unusual material for a book on mission study. Of course it is not written as a contribution to scientific knowledge, though it has sought to conform to the proven facts of science. It is written, not for the exceptional scholar, but for the rank and file of intelligent Christians.

We would gladly let scientific theories alone. But they will not let alone the faith of God's people. Therefore we cannot let them alone. If the average intelligent Christian has a faith which subtle pseudo-science may unsettle, then somebody must seek to show to him the emptiness of the claims of subtle pseudo-science. Christian writers, both in the press and in their books, have too long and too much side-stepped this subject. But it refuses to be side-stepped. We must face and conquer it, or else it will despoil the faith of multitudes.

The present attacks of rationalism on Christianity in America are far more widespread and influential than is generally recognized. They are subtle, astute and exceedingly difficult to meet. Other false faiths attack from without; rationalism bores from within. Other beliefs form organizations of their own; rationalism, like the cuckoo, steals nests others have built. In the local church, it masquerades as a fuller, more liberal, more "efficient" Christianity. In the institution of learning, it uses any professor of biology, botany, zoology, sociology, or geology who is devoid of saving faith, and determined to accept God only on condition he can find and fathom Him in his scientific investigations. In popular literature, it saturates public thought with the suggestion that the will of the individual, and not God, constitutes the supreme authority to which man is answerable.

What boots it if famous scientists have, as we are authoratively informed, largely forsaken the theories upon which the anti-Christ structure of rationalism was built? To the undergraduates and the general public the rationalistic college or university professor passes for a famous scientist. They know of no higher, and they swallow his teachings bodily. In recent years, many hundreds of young men and women, returning from college to American homes, announce that they cannot longer hold the faith of their parents in the revelation of God. They say: "Professor Blank has taught us better. Professor Blank knows."

The slogan of "Business as usual ! " did not endure long in the World War when the public once learned that civilization was being destroyed. For the German ambition for world domination had created a condition in which no business counted, except as it furthered the chief business of putting down the Hun. Similarly, until American Christianity is safeguarded from the destructive work of rationalism, there is not another tenet we hold or an activity we conduct but must adjust itself to the task of exposing and driving out this great enemy of spiritual religion.

When America entered the World War, she promptly placed guards to protect the water supply of our cities from possible poisoning by a ruthless enemy. A far more ruthless enemy now threatens the American people. His poison murders men's souls; steals away God out of their lives. To

PREFACE 9

combat it we have all too few guards on duty. So few have cried aloud against this arch enemy that for an author to do so is to take the chance of being considered radical. But this author has not dared do less than raise his voice in warning concerning the most insidious spiritual danger in modern times. This he does with the fervent hope and prayer that God may use the thoughts set forth in these pages to arouse His people, so many of whom are unaware of the grave spiritual dangers that now threaten the soul of America.

The author was compelled to write this book in the midst of busy activities which regularly fall to his hands in his service of the Home Mission Board, and without opportunity for that seclusion and sustained effort best suited to such an undertaking. While no diligence was spared toward worthy performance, he wishes the reader might look with leniency upon any apparent lack of complete orientation or of literary finish into which this stressful essay at authorship may have fallen.

He also desires to express his indebtedness to the honored and busy pastors and professors who have kindly read and criticised the manuscript. Drs. Charles W. Daniel of Atlanta, W. 0. Carver of Louisville, John T. Christian of New Orleans, C. C. Brown of South Carolina, and Q. C. Davis of North Carolina, have materially added to the value of the work by their constructive suggestions.

V. I. M.

Atlanta, Georgia, December 23, 1 920.

Contents

Preface 5

I . Christian Foundations 13

II. Conditions W^ich Confront American

Chapter I. Christian Foundations

People are not informed as to the facts. When we set before us the task of making America Christian, we are only proposing to hold to the course in which the providence of God and the faith of its founders started it. American historians generally minify the part religion had in making American institutions. The text-books used in our schools and colleges give scant attention to the vital part the faith of the American fathers had in moulding the form of government. In this authors have done a deep injury to truth and to our people. They are left in ignorance concerning that which is most unique and fundamental among the formative forces of the Republic. The author's search enabled him to discover only three or four books which treat the subject of our country's debt to religion. Perhaps the best of these, "Christianity and the American Commonwealth", by Bishop C. B. Galloway, of the Southern Methodists, had lain unused for years on the shelf of the Carnegie Library, while thousands of volumes of less significance are called for daily. Bishop Galloway throws much light on the subject. Among the vital statements in his book, the following is worthy to be fixed in the memory: "A nation ashamed of its ancestry will be despised by its posterity". The pathos of the general ignorance of our people concerning the part religion played in forming their country is that it has resulted more from the waywardness and materialism of the men who have writ-

14 MAKINK AMERICA CHRISTIAN

ten their history than from any will of the people. Fear of somehow offending against the American principle of separation of Church and State has been a reason why religion has been let severely alone by the average writer of American history. The independence of each in its own field has apparently been thought to forbid an effort to show how each has influenced the other. But this idea can only arise from sad confusion of thought.

AH governments rest on religion. All governments are typed and determined by their religion. Rousseau, the brilliant French writer, though a skeptic, declared: "Never was a state founded that did not have religion for its basis*'. Erskine, a distinguished English jurist and orator, said: "Depend upon it, the world could not be held together without morals: nor can morals maintain their station in the human heart without religion". Philip Schaff, the German-American scholar, adds his testimony, saying: "The destruction of religion would be the destruction of morality and the ruin of the State". Alas, that his native country should give the world its most conspicuous illustration of the truth! David Hume, the renowned historian, adds this testimony: "If you find a people without religion, rest assured that they do not differ from brute beasts". But no testimony carries more conviction to American hearts than that of the Father of his Country. In his "Farewell Address", President George Washington made this declaration: "Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles". These distinguished exponents of the wisdom of experience only confirm divine wisdom as recorded in Holy Writ, which in Isaiah 60:12 declares: "The nation and kingdom that will not serve Thee shall perish", and in Proverbs 13:34: "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people".

Notable examples. The reign of terror which followed the French Revolution was greatly intensified by infidelity. The National Assembly passed a resolution which declared, "There is no God". They abolished the Sabbath, unfrocked the ministers of religion, turned the church buildings into business houses, and enthroned a wicked and beautiful woman as Goddess of Liberty. Then followed a carnival of terror and blood-letting which appalled the imagination of mankind. No wonder Macaulay, after tracing the record of nations, wrote: "Whoever does anything to depreciate Christianity is guilty of high treason against the civilization of mankind". But men who will not learn of God are deaf to the lessons of history. Fat with much learning, postgraduate in the mysteries of science and philosophy, Germany lusted for the glory and power of imperial world dominion. Waking up to a sense of its power, this nation adopted atheistic evolution and Spencer's "survival of the fittest", interpreting the latter to be "survival of the strongest", and being confident that this could only mean Germany. Blinded by the lust of its heart to believe a lie, Germany entered on a course of conquest which ignored God and exalted material science and Wodan, Germany's old heathen God of War. Germany has fallen. Though the victorious Allies desire Germany to live, it staggers like a sick man in weakness. It is a notable demonstration that a nation that forgets God shall perish. Russian Bolshevism proposed to establish a nation without God. After two years of blood and butchery, which by far eclipse the orgies of the French Revolution, this beastly autocracy of a small group of the most depraved element of Russia is weaker and more insecure in its rule than it has been, and will doubtless perish. History, revelation and present facts assure us that the government of God-renouncing wolves who oppress the people and drag the hearts of nations through the mire, shall not endure.

God's hand in settling America. The hand of God has never been so manifestly shown in the settling and developing of any nation as in America. If we eliminate from our history the direct and powerful influence of the Christian religion, we shall have little left but a set of disjointed facts without significance. As surely as the temple of Jerusalem was built by a sacred patriotism and under the benedictions of a favoring providence, so surely were Christian aspirations and teachings the seed thoughts of our political constitution and Christian evangelism the inspiration of American colonization. The Reformation in Europe had emancipated the State from the thraldom in which it had existed under the Catholic Church since Constantine and Rome had united Church and State. But it had stopped short of securing liberty of conscience. The pope was unhorsed in Northeastern Europe, but the king still acted as the guide of men's consciences. Hardship and persecution followed for non-conformists in France, England and Germany. The Huguenots, for example, were persecuted in France for 200 years. Concerning their difference of belief from that of the State religion, the Jesuits said: "Crush these things out of the Huguenots. Crush the Huguenots themselves". This implacable hate of the Jesuits found expression on St. Bartholemew's Day in a wholesale butchery of the Huguenots which will always be a measure of the evil of Jesuitism.

God picked the settlers. Such was the oppression in Europe. It made the noblest and best men and women whom civilization had produced anxious to get away into the American wilderness where they would face wild men and animals, but not the infuriated animosity of religious autocracy. This autocracy had made men who professed to know God, more to be feared than were the savages and brutes in the American wilderness. It is not surprising that such a people should set forth the worship and service of God as their purpose in establishing colonies in America. It is not surprising that the charter of the settlers at Jamestown, in 1606, should set forth that their purpose was "to propagate the Christian religion". It is not surprising that the compact of the Plymouth settlers, in 1620, drawn up on board of the ship before they landed on the bleak New England shores, opened with the expression, "In the name of God, Amen". Nor is it odd that their first act, when they landed on the historic Plymouth Rock, was to bow in prayer and thanksgiving. It is not surprising that the colonial seal of Massachusetts, adopted eight years after the landing, bore the effigy of an Indian, with the motto in his mouth, "Come over and help us". Deep religious conviction and purpose characterized the Huguenots who came in at Charleston, and the Scotch who entered at Philadelphia and the various ports southward. This was the motive which brought the Quakers and many of the Dutch.

God gave a great country to His people. Never was a nation settled by a body of people so strong and admirable.

Adventure or lust of conquest have been predominant motives in colonizing the waste places of earth. They have enlisted mostly the reckless and the unattached. The Spanish settlements to the south and the French to the north of those set up by the American Fathers, were examples of this. They were destined to have little influence in the future of America, but God strengthened the persecuted argonauts of conscience, who came with wives and children and Bibles and preachers and prayers, to subdue and set on its feet the greatest land on which the sun ever shone. It took men of this stripe to endure the hardness and rigor of the wilderness, to overcome the lurking savages, to subdue the wilds to husbandry, to wrest the colonies from the oppression of the mother country, and to write for their national law a constitution which has been the wonder and admiration of the greatest minds of the earth. No such clear evidence of God's providential hand was ever shown in the establishment of any other nation, except in His dealings with the Jews in their Palestinian home. And such a country it was to which God brought these persecuted pilgrims! Large, in the temperate zone, fertile, rich beyond dreams in forests and minerals, well watered, it was destined to become and now is by far the wealthiest land of the earth, the home of the freest and most resourceful and intelligent people.

Religious laws. Their faith was the greatest concern of these settlers. What would they do concerning their faith, when they came to making laws for the control of their colonies? Should they neglect to say anything about it? Surely so great a thing as religion must be safeguarded in the laws that control society, but how can you safeguard without regulating? They did not see how. They had fled from the persecution which necessarily grows out of regulating religion by law, but they proceeded to make a large number of laws to regulate religion, and the penalties for disobedience included death. Some of our Baptist fathers in their own experience found that they included imprisonment, banishment and whipping. President George Washington himself was arrested for breaking the Sabbath law. Returning from a tour through Connecticut, on a Saturday in November, 1 789, and having missed his way, he had to ride a few miles on Sunday morning to reach the town where he expected to attend church service. On his way he was stopped by a "tithing" man, who demanded to know why he was traveling on Sunday. It was only after long explanation by the President and a promise to go no farther than the church, that the constable allowed him to go forward.* The early colonists who had lived in the mother country under the union of the state and a religion which they did not profess, established in American colonial governments under which there was the closest union between the state and the religion which they did profess. The freedom of conscience which had been denied to them in the old country they denied to others in the new country.

How light and liberty were found. It was difficult for them to see how religion can get along without being buttressed by the law. Nobody else had seen it in a way to grapple men's minds, since the time when Constantine and the early ecclesiastics disobeyed Christ's teaching, "Render unto Caesar the things thta are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's". Martin Luther did much in the Re-

*"American State Papers", page 38.

formation. But he did not understand religious liberty. Some Baptists had been preaching in England and on the Continent, but they had no influence with the powers that ruled, no prestige with a worldly public opinion. In God's good providence, some of these same obscure Baptists came to America. Where the loadstone of liberty was, Baptists were sure to be drawn. Soon they saw that liberty was not as thorough-going in the Colonies as they had hoped. In the realm of conscience it had no thoroughfare. Unlike the great majority of their fellow colonists, they promptly saw what was the matter. The hour of the Baptist opportunity had struck. Before twenty years had passed after the landing of the Pilgrims, the rightfulness of Sunday laws was one of the leading subjects for debate in America, and Roger Williams was the outstanding champion against such laws.

Baptist primacy in religious liberty. To Virginia, chiefly to Virginia Baptists, belongs the honor of disestablishing religion in America. To Roger Williams, a Baptist, belongs the honor of first establishing, in Rhode Island, a commonwealth upon the principle of the entire separation of Church and State. "Roger Williams", declares the historian Bancroft, "was first person in modern Christendom to assert the doctrine of the liberty of conscience". Through more than a score of years, toward the close of the eighteenth century, the battle raged in this country for religious liberty. It extended among the Colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia, but the heat of the conflict was in Virginia, and the Baptists were the fearless, determined, untiring and always consistent leaders of the fight. God raised up influential friends for these Baptists. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Patrick

Henry and others came to their support, and at last religious liberty was written into the national Constitution and reiterated explicitly in the First Amendment. In his recent address, during the Southern Baptist Convention, on the capitol steps at Washington, Dr. George W. Truett, after eloquently setting forth the primacy of the Baptists in winning these great privileges for America, added: "I take it that every man informed on the subject, whatever his religious faith, will be willing to pay tribute to our Baptist people as being the chief instrumentality in God's hands in winning the battle in America for religious liberty". Because the truth always helps and its repression always hurts everybody concerned, we could wish the desire expressed by this distinguished Baptist minister might be realized. Baptists can get along without it quite as well as other denominations can afford to withhold from them credit for this outstanding service of theirs to the nation and to every Christian body.

Early law makers and religions. The closer we scrutinize early America, the more conclusive becomes the proof that the formative force of its institutions was not only religious, but Christian. In its meeting at Philadelphia, the Continental Congress humbled itself on its knees in prayer before God, beseeching Him for wisdom and guidance through Christ the Redeemer. It was proposed before the Congress, though not adopted, that the seal of the country should bear a picture of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, surrounded by the words: "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God". For eight years, during the Revolution, this Congress appointed days of national fasting and prayer, and urged the people to repentance for their sins, and to reformation and

Christian faith. At the beginning of the struggle, it expressed the desire to have the "people of all ranks and degrees duly impressed with a solemn sense of the superintending providence of God, and of their duty, in all of their lawful enterprises, to rely on His aid and direction". It called on the people "to repent, and through the mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain pardon and forgiveness". What the Congress did in Philadelphia to honor God and encourage faith, ministers of the gospel were forward to do among the people and in the camps of the Revolutionary Armies. As one student of the period says: "The preachers of the Revolution were the secret of that moral energy which sustained the Republic in its national weakness against the superior members and discipline and all the powers of England". In another volume the author has recounted how Dr. Richard Furman, a distinguished Baptist preacher of the Revolutionary period, was sent by the civil authorities on a tour through South Carolina and into the American camps to preach to the people. He so stirred the patriotism of the people and soldiers that Lord Cornwallis offered a reward of five thousand pounds for his head. The power of those preachers had behind it the spirit of the National Congress, and the Congress in turn only sought to voice the recognized spirit and purpose of the people of the nation concerning religious faith.

The Constitution and religion. There are those who would have us believe that the Federal Constitution proposed a nation that should have no concern with religion. They point to the fact that the name of God is not mentioned in the document. They would have us observe that the two references to religion are rather of a negative character.

The first reference to religion declares that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States". The second is the First Amendment, which our Baptist fathers were so influential in securing: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances". The Constitution did not create a nation or its religion or institutions. The purpose of the two references to religion was not to exclude religion, but to equalize the opportunities of religious bodies. It was not anti-Christian, but anti-sectarian. The Constitution-makers had the task of organizing a general government for the nation out of materials already in hand. This government was to do what the States could not do so well for themselves. The States, as abundant testimony affirms, were committed to the idea of Christian faith as a formative force, to a degree and with a unanimity never elsewhere equalled in history. Since there was to be separation of Church and State, the Constitution had no business to legislate on religion, except to make sure fair play on the part of the government itself. If the Constitution had not a single word about religion, law and reason would yet bid us seek its religious character among the States and the people who formed it, a people who were religious by profession and through their ancestors.

National principles which come from God. The limits of this chapter will not allow us to study the great principles of government which our Constitution announced to mankind, for the first time in history. But it is pertinent to remark that what our Lord Jesus Christ does for the individual soul in setting it free and magnifying its worth, the American Constitution seeks to set forth in terms of the fundamental law of a nation. No autocrats willed the Republic; the soul of a people willed it. No king was to be obeyed, but law was to be obeyed. And the people themselves made the law. They are the sovereigns. By separating the government into three departments, each independent and equal in authority, it was sought to prevent the possibility of centralization and autocracy on the part of some ambitious President. By specifically reserving certain inalienable rights to individuals, it was intended to protect the single man against the persecution or injustice of the majority, should the majority be misguided enough to invade his rights. These safeguards of the Constitution are now openly flouted in America by certain classes. They find the Constitution too conservative to represent their advanced ideas. The majority rules in America, but it rules according to law and with respect for certain rights of the individual. If these safeguards should be taken away v/e would no longer have a republican democracy. We would have a social democracy, in which the closely organized minority, by agitation and propaganda, could often put over their selfish schemes to the undoing of unorganized majorities. For our present purpose we only remark that the Constitution which the American fathers gave us is far more in consonance with the religion of Christ than any of the socialistic propositions which now harass the public mind, just as it was far in advance of any similar compact which preceded it. England's great statesman, Gladstone, said of it: "It is the greatest piece of work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of men", and the world-famed William Pitt, when he read it, exclaimed: "It will be the wonder and admiration of all future generations and the model of all future Constitutions". It becomes American Christians to defend it and be proud of it. For never on this earth was the fundamental law of another nation so shot through with that spirit of peace, good will, justice and righteousness, which our Lord came to establish.

Views of eminent jurists. The views of early statesmen and jurists on the position of Christianity in America are of great value, because they were in the best position to judge of the facts, and their position in society is such that they may be expected to understate rather than magnify the facts about Christianity. James Madison, who probably gave more effort toward establishing religious liberty than any other statesman, declared: "Religion and government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together". Daniel Webster said: "There is nothing that we can look for with more certainty than the general principle that Christianity is a part of the law of the land". Chief Justice Brewer wrote a book, the thesis of which is that America is a Christian nation. Chief Justice Corley, writing on constitutional limitations, says: "The Christian religion was always recognized in the common law, and so far as that law continues to be the law of the land, the fundamental principles of that religion must continue to be recognized". Judge F. W. Dent, once dean of Columbia University Law School, declares: "Our national development has in it the best and purest elements of vital Christianity. Should we tear Christianity from our law, we should rob our law of its fairest jewels, arrest its growth and unfit it as a vehicle for progress". Chief Justice Kent says: 'We are a Christian people and the morality of the country is deeply grafted on Christianity". Our whole social fabric and legal procedure is shot through with evidences that this country was born a Christian country.