The Church and the Veteran: An American Forecast
by BERNARD IDDINGS BELL
1
THE churches these days are devoting much time and thought to the veteran who soon will he returning from the wars. Denominational commissions have been set up to examine into how religious bodies may do necessary things to, for, and with him; the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America has held regional conferences about him; there emerges, in circles Catholic and Protestant, what a few months ago was a trickle, and what threatens soon to become a flood, of books, pamphlets, tracts, articles in the religious press, describing what he will be like, his psychological problems, his marital problems, his moral problems — no end of problems, in the solution of which the churches would like to lend a helping hand.
This is all very well. It is as it ought to be that the churches should be less unprepared to handle the human problems incident to demobilization than they were to deal with those which followed the call to arms. But there are some of us, mostly from among those more given to critical observation of ecclesiastical enterprises than to participation in the active direction of them, who are inclined to think that, so far at least, most of this varied utterance of the churches shows none too great an understanding of what the serviceman is like in general or, in particular, of what his attitude is toward Christianity as a way of life. Before too much is attempted for the veteran, it might be well to make a more careful evaluation of the people now in uniform; otherwise what is planned may turn out to be of zeal but not of wisdom.
Convinced of this and concerned to be of what use I may be in the premises, I have devoted lately a good deal of time — my efforts voluntary and unsolicited — to looking into these things a bit. I have read everything I could lay hands on about the attitudes toward life of the soldier, the sailor, the marine, not to neglect the Wac, the Wave, the Spar, the member of the Nursing Corps. I have sought out a great number of people and talked with them — not with professional church people so much as with laymen interested in the human aspects of our coming change to a life again predominantly civilian: demobilization authorities of the various services, medical men and psychologists and psychiatrists who have contact at first hand with the armed personnel, those in charge of hospitals for the injured.
It has also been my privilege to have had during the months since Pearl Harbor a correspondence — in some cases a frequent correspondence — with seventy-three chaplains, able clergymen of various denominations, Catholic and Protestant, whose knowledge ought to be considerable, and seems to me in fact to be so, about what goes on in the serviceman’s head.
The net result of all my inquiry is verification of a suspicion that up to now the well-intentioned churches of America, with rare exceptions, have been content to deal almost wholly with the periphery of the problem; that they have shown small ability, possibly not much willingness, to get to the heart of it; that in consequence they are in for a good deal of unpleasant disillusionment.
It seems an indisputable fact that with the exception of a quite small minority those in the armed forces, officers and men, neither know much nor care much about Christianity. This is most apparently true of those who call themselves Protestants, less so of Catholics (Roman and Anglican); but even of this latter group the wiser chaplains are a bit aghast to find to what an extent interest in religion is confined to a routine of ritual practice.
Not many even of the professedly religious soldiers in either group seem to have much understanding of the more intimate and penetrating devotional implications of their faith, just as few show that they understand the relationship of that faith to personal behavior; there is almost none who reveals that he possesses a realization of the possible impact of Christianity on economics, on politics, on world affairs. A number of competent and candid Catholic observers have remarked with concern that very few indeed of their men have ever heard of Catholic Action or are aware that the Pope has stressed its major importance in Christian strategy. Why so important a movement is unknown to the rank and file of their people puzzles them. Has Roman Catholic education been too content to leave Christianity on a basis of individualistic adherence to a self-centered communion? More than a few fear that it has.
The Protestant chaplains complain of a similar ignorance of their service adherents about the social pronouncements of the Federal Council or of its constituent communions. Almost no Protestant in the services seems to have heard of the Federal Council’s Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, of which John Foster Dulles is the chairman.
The religion even of those who admit that in some sense they regard themselves as “religious,” with rare exceptions, seems not to have penetrated much below the surface of their thinking and to have little to do with patterns of conduct.
This ought to bring the churches up quite sharply to a realization of the pathetically inadequate job they have done in training these service men and women when they were boys and girls. The churches may well ask if many of their former students who donned the uniform had when they left home more than an accidental allegiance to religion; ask if any great number of their supposed spiritual children had any clearly understood religious precepts to be steadfast to while away; inquire whether their loyalties have in many cases survived the strain of life in an utterly new environment; question whether these men and women can, when they arc home again, be reinterested in churchly activities on anything like the old pre-war basis.
The possibility of a large interest in religion by the veterans, taking them as a whole, appears even less promising when we go on to realize that most of them came into the armed service from that large section of the American people which has not even a nominal connection with a religious body and, in consequence, never have had in school or church, and rarely in their homes, any religious training whatsoever. These have performed their war duties like the valiant young pagans that they are, never bothering their heads about God except perhaps when sheer, stark danger of death aroused in them a desperate longing for supernatural protection — a kind of religious awareness which almost always fades away as soon as the battle is done.
When one adds, then, to the supposed Church members whose connection is largely with a vague God who lived in the old home neighborhood and was soon forgotten when they left his locus, this even greater number of those who were, and still are, utterly untrained in thought of God, you have, so my informants agree, fully 80 per cent of Uncle Sam’s fighting men. Four in five know little and care less about Christianity. There would not seem to be much for the churches to build on, then, in their earnest endeavor to gear the veterans into post-war religious interest and cooperation. There would seem to be few of these men and women who will suspect that possibly Christianity can be of assistance to them in the difficult days of readjustment.
2
SOME pastors, especially those who were in the First World War and have not forgotten too much, understand all this quite well. I was talking with one of them the other day. We were looking at his parish service flag, on which were sewed two hundred and nine stars, six of them gold. “In a certain sense,” he said, “those stars represent men and women of my spiritual cure; but of the two hundred and three still alive, eighty-six have never been admitted to communicant membership and forty-five more, when they put on a uniform, were (and they still are) on our list of lapsed communicants.
“That leaves seventy-two out of the two hundred and three who are properly to be counted as Christians of the flock, and only about forty of those were regular in devotional practice before they went away. Of the two hundred and three, moreover, nearly half are personally unknown by name or face to any of our three clergymen or to anyone on the administrative staff. To the two hundred and three we write every month; only seventy-one have bothered to acknowledge a letter from us.
“You ask how all these scarcely attached people got on that service flag? Some relative or friend requested it, and said that once the man came here for a while to Catechism, or sang in the choir when he was a small boy, or maybe got married here years ago. But things are even more discouraging if one considers the whole community, for a survey of the churches of this county reveals that if you add up allthe men on all the church service flags, Catholic and Protestant, you have only 42 per cent of those who have been inducted. We in the churches hereabouts are getting ready to welcome the veterans when they come back; but barring a miracle, most of them won’t care a rap whether the churches welcome them or not.”
That pastor is a wise man, but his clerical brethren seem not to share his awareness that Christian churches will be ignored by most of the returning men; that most even of those whom the churches regard as belonging to them will leave them alone.
This will not be because the war has torn them away from the arms of their spiritual mother. They eit her never were in that mother’s arms or else they slipped out long before the day they answered their country’s call. It might be just as well to recognize frankly that there will be no spontaneous flocking of the veterans into the old home meetinghouses. If veterans are to be found there eventually, the churches will have to persuade them, which they have ill done hitherto, that Christianity has relevancy to life as these men must live it, as they intend to live it. The clergy and those who admonish them keep thinking of the veterans as fine fellows to whom the churches must be prepared to do things kind and beneficent; but as anyone with half an eye who has lived with the armed forces knows quite well, the real problem is going to be more one of how the churches can find some veterans who are willing to let the churches speak to them, much less for them.
3
THIS problem of the churches and the veteran is only one phase of the problem of the veteran in general. The twelve millions or so who come home after years of unpleasant discipline, deprivation of normal pleasures, delayed and often ruined careers, — for many of them years in which they went through the hells of battle and fever and unbelievable strain,— these twelve millions or so are going to take command over this country which they sacrificed themselves to save. In respect to culture and in determination of economic patterns, of politics, of industry, of education, it will not be possible for the stay-at-homes to adjust the returning service people to take their places in old familiar grooves and to shout the pre-war shibboleths. Rather, for good or ill, it will be the veterans who take the American folkways and force them into new patterns, as they, and not the stay-at-homes, desire.
We Americans do not easily see this, most of us, because we have had small experience with veterans. The Civil War aftermath is long since forgotten, and our participation in World War I was too short and inexpensive to produce many hardened veterans. The other nations, after that war, soon came to know how veterans behave: and we may learn from them. It was veterans who put. over every political and economic revolution in Europe between 1919 and 1939: in Russia first, then in Italy, in Germany, in Spain. These countries all went totalitarian during those post-war years because the democratic leaders were not revolutionary enough, daring enough, to satisfy the veteran type of m ind.
The democratic forces made the fatal mistake of becoming would-be conservators of what had been. Will our American leaders who believe in democracy make the same fatal mistake? However that turns out to be, the world of tomorrow will be run by the iron men who have done the fighting. Institutions which would continue must persuade those men that they are worthy to survive.
This general principle applies to the churches. Not too many even of the bishops and chief pastors and leading laymen seem to understand it, while the rank-and-file church members hardly suspect it. But it is hard for any competent and dispassionate observer to conclude that, once face to face with a veteran mentality which questions all that has been, all that is, the various Christian communions can carry on pretty much as before the war, or that any particular parish can remain the same in purposes, in ideas, in methods, and can reabsorb into an unreformed corpus its own veterans, much less attract new converts from that greater number who are unchurched. These veterans have not been away to an Elks Convention or a Boy Scout Camp.
They will return unadjusted to the usual church routines, often unadjustable to them. They have been knocking about the world, facing boredom, facing death. They will come back sure that the churches have small influence on American life, or on world life, as it must be lived. In other words, they will come back at worst contemptuous of the churches and at best ready to do little more than to give those churches a chance to prove that they have life, vigor, sincerity, pertinency. As Father Otis Rice has well asked, in a paper written for the Federal Council of Churches, “What will happen if they come home to be disillusioned by the kind of church that is to be found in Main Street?”
Tt is not bishops, clergymen, and vestries which will set terms for the return of veterans to the altar, to the pew, to the parish house. If the churches want the veteran, the churches must justify themselves in the veteran’s appraising estimate. Those who come back from the services will not wish to tell the churches what is the churchly business — far from it; but they will expect that the churches make clear to them in what ways churchly religion amounts to something.
They will ask themselves, “Is this church, my old church, this church which seems to think I ought to be interested in what it is and what it does, worth much of anything to God or to us? If it is only a polite club of nice people with a faint flavor of well-washed piety, if it dodges issues moral and devotional, if it lives for itself and makes no saerifices, if parson is a fuddy-duddy or a social climber or a politician on the make, if he is controlled by timid lay people scared by life, then time is too short and the human job too real to bother with the dear old thing. We shall neither expect leadership from the churches nor bother ourselves to go around.”
4
IT is going to be far from easy for the churches to persuade the veterans that Christianity has relevancy to life, for the very simple reason that the American armed forces are made up, with negligible exceptions, of men who have been educated to believe that life’s satisfactions overwhelmingly are satisfactions material and of this world, satisfactions in the pursuit and attainment; of which the church is certainly not needed. The American way of life is materialistic and secularistic. Such elements in it as have spiritual validity arc incidental; they are regarded by most Americans as decorative, as luxuries. The serviceman, who soon will be the veteran, for good or ill is a child of this era and reared in this country. It would be a miracle if he were not secularistic, materialistic, given to judging life and institutions from that point of view.
An officer in the Marine Corps Reserve, back in this country after arduous campaigning in the South Pacific, has written me a long letter about it. His conclusions seem valid to those service people to whom I have communicated them. He says: —
“You ask what these brave men under my command are thinking about in terms of after the war. As near as I can make out, and I think I do know what is in their minds, they long to get back home ns quickly as possible, to the best land on earth, the U.S.A. Why docs it seem to them the best land on earth? Because they think that they can have good jobs here, with fine pay and easy work to do, security from want, freedom to say any old thing they please, a good time for them and their girls, maybe some but not many kids (though most of them do not think that far ahead). I myself agree that all these are mighty good things for any man to have; but I am not at all sure that life on those terms only is worth the living, or that a country whose way of life is determined by those desiderata is apt to remain either a good country or one likely to survive if brought into competition with such a country of mystics as, for example, Russia.
“Such a life as my men long for and talk about leaves out the passion lor mutual sacrifice which our fathers knew. It leaves out religion, for religion involves an appreciation of the universal as greater than the particular. Most of my men are so absorbed in the immediate that they have no longterm view of America or of man. Their way of thinking of things leaves out, too, that haunting wistfulness about life, that, sense of tragedy to be surmounted at great cost, which is back of music and poetry, the sort of thing which makes men gentle, and living an art. It leaves out, in short, the things of the spirit.”
The American soldier, in other words, is the product of the American system of education, a system which concentrates attention almost wholly on mastery of materials and processes, on production and consumption, with an apparent assumption that man does live by bread alone, though it is to be desired that the bread be spread with butter and jam. About how to deal with things physical these American warriors have been carefully and systematically trained from babyhood; in respect to things phenomenal they are mature, efficient, at ease. But in respect to spiritual values they are ignorant, inept, and indifferent. No one has taught them about such matters. One trembles a little at the thought of a civilization built in terms of their unbalanced desires; but they do not tremble. They are mightily sure of themselves and of the future.
It is inevitable that these honest but hardly subtle young men, products of the miseducation to which we have subjected them, should doubt that religion has relevancy, for to them it seems obvious that a spiritual comradeship with God is unnecessary for the only enterprise they deem important: namely, the building up of a materialistic Paradise. They are quite right about it. If life is only what most of these young Americans suppose it is, then religion is a diversion, a hindrance, with its talk of giving up all else if only one may know God as God knows man, if only one may love Him who is the Meaning and by Him be beloved.
The only possible chance the churches have to win and hold respect by the American veteran is for them to make a determined frontal attack upon the philosophy of life now current in America.
The veteran does not need readjustment soothingsyrup, coddling, flattery; he needs to be told that he is the product of an infantile civilization, that he is a child crying for candy, that if he has any real manhood in him he will regard America as something more than a glorified factory, movie house, ball park, and corner drugstore. He needs churches which make it clear that they care about him and are grateful to him and admire his courage and efficiency and unselfishness but which insist, because they love him well and truly, that the things that really matter, thanks to the American school and college, lie beyond his untrained cognizance.
The veteran needs a church which will tell him the truth about his own incompetence and the incompetence of the generation which bred and trained him.
He may reject that sort of church, resent its existence, persecute it, try to stamp it out. That will not matter much to the churches if they are honest. Religion, if it is real religion, must of necessity proclaim, even at risk of martyrdom, the truth that things seen are temporal, relative, secondary; that it is the unseen which is eternal, absolute, primary. It is not to be supposed that churches out to rebuke the present secularistic mood of America, no matter how lovingly they speak and act, will win the allegiance of the vast throng of veterans; but such churches will attract those of them, not a few, to whom it has come home forcibly that, for freedom to be worth a man’s life laid down, it must be not only freedom from oppression but also, and even more, freedom from triviality. A church which goes on making compromises with secularism, trying to bless the unblessable, wall not interest any honest man for long.