1914
The summer of 1914 was marked by the inception of a fresh stage in the revolution to which we have repeatedly called attention and which began at least as far back as the Renaissance. During the half-century between 1914, and the time when these lines were penned, it continued to mount with increasing rapidity. We must first outline the main features of that stage of the
revolution, next describe, also succinctly, the fashion in which it threatened Christianity, both by open attack and by less open but subtle and more dangerous erosion, and then call attention to how the challenge was faced -- with the result of a greater impact of Christianity upon mankind as a whole than at any earlier time.
The Main Features of the Revolution
The feature of the augmented revolution to be mentioned first is that, as in its earlier stages, it originated in and radiated from what was formerly called Christendom -- Europe, and especially Western Europe, where Christianity had longest had its best opportunity to make itself effective in the life of man. As we have earlier hinted, the question emerges as to how far, if at all, the revolution is attributable to Christianity. Had Christianity set in motion forces which it could not control and which were inherently destructive, not only of Christianity, but of all human
civilization and even of mankind itself ? Had Christianity unwittingly created and opened a Pandora’s box? We can venture no conclusive answer. We can simply remind ourselves what he have repeatedly noted: that on this planet God seems to be intent on developing children and not robots and that in doing so He has deliberately taken the risk, as in the incarnation and the
crucifixion, of having His freely offered gifts abused by the evils to which mankind is heir; but that here are also a challenge and God’s offer of power to overcome the evil in such fashion as to augment man’s welfare -- that where sin abounded grace might much more abound.
The second and most spectacular feature was war. In contrast with the preceding century of relative peace, two major world wars engulfed all mankind. The major theater of both was Europe. The first (1914-1918) began in Europe, and the second, while having its initial rumblings in the invasion of China by Japan (1931), is usually reckoned as breaking out in Europe in 1939. Even if September 1939, is counted as the inception, World War II was more prolonged than World War I, for it lasted almost six years, until August, 1945. It was more widely destructive and exhausting than its predecessor. Other wars, mostly local, were born of forces released by the revolution -- notably the civil war in Spain in the 1930’s, war in Korea in the 1930’s, and the prolonged struggles in what was once called Indo-China in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Overshadowing them all was the menace of thermonuclear war. The major accumulation of atomic weapons was in countries once counted as Christian. The order for the first use of the atomic bomb was given by a President of the United States who was a communicant in good standing in a Protestant church and had declared -- although not specifically in that connection -- that he endeavored to be guided by the Sermon on the Mount.
A third feature was closely associated with war: the emergence of totalitarian regimes out of the wreckage wrought by war -- the most prominent being Communism in Russia and China led by Stalin and his successors and Mao Tse-tung, the Nazis and Hitler in Germany, the Fascists and Mussolini in Italy, and the Falange and Franco in Spain. Most of them professed to be
democratic but all departed far from the Anglo-Saxon democracy sprung from radical Protestantism.
A fourth feature was the triumph of anti-religious (not just anti-Christian) Communism in large and growing segments of the world and the confidence expressed by its spokesmen that it would eventually be adopted by all mankind.
A fifth feature, more dangerous than Communism, was secularism. Secularism threatened to undermine the foundations not only of Christianity but also of all religion. It, too, was due to factors within the erstwhile Christendom and spread to other parts of the world. One source was intellectual. The scientific discoveries and the philosophies of the age appeared to many to make Christianity and every religion untenable by informed and honest minds. Another factor was the absorption of men’s interests in obtaining what they deemed the good things of life -- the
physical comforts and aesthetic values which seemed to be independent of religion. Still another factor was the disintegration of the social structure with which religion had been associated and the consequent weakening or disappearance of customs that ordinarily accompanied religion.
Contributing to secularism was the surging tide of nationalism which made religion ancillary to patriotism and supported it only as it reinforced loyalty to the State. Thus conservative, anti- Communist forces in the United States invoked Christianity as a bulwark of "the American way of life." Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism were reviving, but they were valued chiefly because they were identified with particular nationalisms -- Arab, Indian, Singhalese, or Burmese. One keen Chinese intellectual, Hu Shih, not a Communist, declared that the Chinese, because of a long tradition of agnosticism, would be the first people to outgrow religion -- suggesting that
religion is a stage through which mankind passes on its pilgrimage from infancy to maturity.
Nationalism, like the other sources of secularism, had its first appearance in "Christendom."
A sixth feature of the mounting revolution was the surging tide of revolt against Western imperialism and colonialism. It was in part a fruit of nationalism and in part the almost
inevitable reaction against the nineteenth-century domination by Western European peoples of most of the non-Western world. To no small degree it could be ascribed to the former
Christendom, for one of its major causes was a burning and formerly impotent resentment against the assumption by the European that he was of a superior race and civilization and so had an inborn right to rule.
Even before World War I sensitive observers discerned the writing on the wall. Indians,
Chinese, and Japanese were seething with indignation and were seeking ways of forcing respect from the Westerners and gaining full independence. In a very real sense the two world wars were Occidental civil wars, reciprocally destructive to the combatants. Western European powers were so badly weakened that demands for independence could not be ignored. After World War I in several lands concessions looking towards autonomy were forced on reluctant Western governments. After World War II independence progressed apace. Before the 1960’s most of Asia and Africa had been freed from the Westerner’s yoke.
The situation was complicated by the fact that in large sections of the globe a new imperialism, that of Communist Russia and China, succeeded Western imperialism. Communist Russia dominated much of Central Europe, the Balkans, and Mongolia, was seeking to penetrate the Americas through a puppet regime in Cuba, and was aspiring to control much of the Middle East and Africa. The Chinese Communists, from their capital in Peking, had mastered Tibet, were reaching their tentacles into Southeast Asia, and were endeavoring to make their weight felt in Latin America and Africa.
Associated with revolt against imperialism and colonialism was a seventh feature: conflicts over race. The legal emancipation of Negroes brought by the Protestant conscience in the British Empire and the United States did not immediately solve the problems born of slavery. If anything, for a time it aggravated them. In many countries interracial tensions existed and mounted in Africa, especially South Africa, between peoples of African habitat or ancestry and
"Christian" peoples of European ancestry, in the West Indies, and in the United States. Conflict arose in Assam from the demand of hill tribes, recently become Christian, for a degree of
autonomy as against Indian nationalism, which insisted on their integration with the predominantly Hindu Republic of India.
An eighth aspect of the revolution was a further stage in the industrial and technological
revolution. This, too, had its radiating center in the former Christendom. It made vast strides in Europe, the Americas, and Australasia and spread throughout the non-Western world. It was a means to material wealth and as such was eagerly sought by industrially "backward" peoples, for
to them it appeared to be a way of freeing themselves from their chronic poverty and acquiring the wealth and the power which they envied in Western European peoples.
The industrial and technological revolution was made possible by advances in science. Men now seemed about to eliminate poverty and disease and aspired to reach beyond the planet into the other members of the solar system. All peoples sought to equip themselves with science and its tools.
From the industrial and technological revolution came a ninth aspect of the revolution. Vast changes were wrought in the life of mankind. Rapid communication and travel -- by radio, television, and the automobile and airplane -- made the planet a shrinking world and brought men into a neighborhood. The neighborhood was quarrelsome, all the more dangerously so because of its narrowing physical dimensions and the tools of destruction with which industries and technology had equipped it. Cities burgeoned. In several countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and even Africa, lately brought into the zone of the revolution, great urban centers and clusters of urban centers appeared, almost before men were aware of them. They became aggregations of deracinated individuals and small family units. The older rural communities dwindled, and with the new means of communication their collective life was threatened or disappeared. Through the improvement in public health brought by science, populations
mounted. Few parts of the world escaped the population explosion brought by the reduction of the death rate.
The Threats to Christianity Brought by the Revolution
In each of its features the revolution was a threat to Christianity. The menace brought by war is obvious. The toll of life in the twentieth-century wars was numerically larger than that of their predecessors. Among the losses were young men who held promise of constructive contributions had they lived to maturity, even more millions of non-combatants, and other millions of
deracinated refugees. Still more serious from the standpoint of Christian morals were the inevitable concomitants of dishonesty, cruelty, and hate.
The totalitarism régimes were accompanied by the loss of that respect for the individual which is inherent in Christianity and the callous liquidation of minorities who stood in the way of the dictator. Among the mass atrocities were the executions of those who were obstacles to Stalin and the starvation of millions in Russia through the deliberate neglect of the Communist rulers, and the execution of thousands in the accomplishment of "land reform" by the Communist Party of China, and the virtual enslavement of other thousands in forced labor by that party. Especially sobering was the fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the lands overrun by the Nazis, for
Germany had been the original source of the Protestant Reformation and was the home of some of the most vital movements in both Protestantism and the Roman Catholic Church. Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were nominally Roman Catholics. Was Christianity powerless to prevent the horrors wrought by the descendants of generations who for centuries had been nurtured in a
civilization which was ostensibly Christian?
The threat of Communism was sobering too, for it had been formulated in "Christendom," by men reared as Protestants, and had its first triumphs in "Holy Russia," whose capital, Moscow, had been acclaimed by Russian Orthodox as the third Rome, the seat of true Christianity. As we shall see, the Communists did not succeed in fully eliminating Christianity in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but one of their early acts was to sever the tie between the Russian Orthodox Church and the State and they waged a persistent anti-Christian -- and anti-religious -- campaign. In the Soviet satellites in Central Europe and the Balkans the Roman Catholic,
Protestant, and Orthodox Churches were curtailed. In China, during the latter half of the nineteenth and the first five decades of the twentieth century, as much Christian missionary effort, Roman Catholic and Protestant, had been expended as in any other one section of the nonEuropean world. By the mid-l960’s the (Communist) People’s Democratic Republic was slowly tightening the noose about such Christian churches as survived on the mainland -- the area under its domination.
Secularism, more dangerous to Christianity and all religion than Communism, was taking heavy toll in lands where either the Roman Catholic Church or Protestantism had long had its chief strength. In Latin Europe, Eire, and much of Germany, historically Roman Catholic, the
overwhelming majority were baptized. The same was true in the Protestant portions of Europe, including Great Britain and North Ireland. But Roman Catholic authorities sorrowfully said that only a minority of their baptized, even in almost solidly Catholic Spain and Portugal, were practicing their faith. In the 1950’s two French Roman Catholic priests, Henri Godin and Yvan Daniel, wrote a book, La France, Pays de Mission? in which they spoke of their native land as a mission field. In the Protestant sections of Western Europe after 1914 church attendance in both cities and rural districts drastically declined and recruits for the ministry fell off: Christian
conviction was confined to minorities. In Latin America secularism and skepticism continued to penetrate the nominally Roman Catholic majority, of whatever class. For example, in Uruguay Christmas was re-named "Family Day" and Easter "Tourist Day," and the leading newspaper in Montevideo printed the name of God in small letters. In Brazil the vacuum left by the decay of the Roman Catholic faith was partly filled by spiritualism, much of it a crude animism derived from Africa and some a more sophisticated form inspired by Hinduism. In the United States the proportion of church members to the population fairly steadily increased, until it was nearly two- thirds. But the complaint was repeatedly voiced that the growth was more from social
convention than religious conviction and that actually among professed Christians much
indifferentism existed. In French Canada the Roman Catholic Church was vigorous, but much of the loyalty could be ascribed to a French Canadian particularism as against the Anglo-Saxon majority -- as could that in Eire of Irish nationalism against the long-standing tie with Great Britain, recently dissolved. Of the Protestant elements in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in the census returns almost all continued to express a church preference, but church attendance, while large, was only of a minority, and the numbers of indigenous clergy did not keep pace with the demand. In Protestantism and among non-practicing Roman Catholics in both Europe
and the Americas much religious relativism existed. The opinion was widely held that truth and error in all religions were equal, that religion was a symptom of man’s effort to penetrate the mystery of his existence and of the universe, and that none of the many answers which had issued from the quest had ultimate validity. Significance may be seen in the fact that most of the comprehensive studies of the religions of mankind had been made in Christendom rather than by adherents of the non-Christian religions.
The revolt among non-European peoples against Western imperialism and colonialism often heightened the denunciation of Christianity because of its association with the Occidental expansion of the nineteenth and earlier centuries. Presumably the mounting nationalism and resentment against the white man would erase the footholds won by missionaries from the Occident.
The industrial and technological revolution augmented secularism, in whatever part of the world it was found. The vast increase in population which arose from that phase of the revolution multiplied the numbers of non-Christians. Since the most spectacular growth was in Asia, overwhelmingly non-Christian, by the mid-1960’s the earth contained more outside the
Christian fold than when Christ died -- or even at the outset of the twentieth century. Although the numbers whom religious statistics labeled Christian -- at best a doubtful and superficial classification -- were increasing, the proportion of mankind listed in that category was declining.
The Response of Christianity
Serious as was the threat, and sobering as were the losses, the response in the fifty years which succeeded the summer of 1914 shows that far from being moribund, Christianity was rising to meet the challenge. More than in any preceding age, the contrast to which we have repeatedly called attention was striking. On the one hand were the mounting dimensions of the chronic ills of mankind -- the outcome of man’s ignorance, folly, self-interest, and pride -- reaching their most colossal expressions in an ostensible Christendom; on the other hand was the power issuing from what Christians believe to have come from the incarnation, the cross, the
resurrection, and the Holy Spirit. As always, much of that power was seen in humble persons who were remembered only by a few and of whom a later generation and the historian would be unaware. But some was displayed in ways which the historian could detect.
Part of the response was directed to the challenge of war. In World War I, fought almost entirely between professed Christians, most of the belligerents invoked the aid of God and declared that they were fighting for justice. In the case of the United States, late to come into the war, its President, Woodrow Wilson, summoned the nation to enter the struggle as a war to end war.
Himself earnestly Christian, from a long Protestant heritage and from a commitment made in impressionable adolescence, Woodrow Wilson was inspired and sustained by his faith. From that faith arose his championship of the League of Nations. For many years the dream of such an international organization to bring all mankind into cooperation, to seek the welfare of non-
European peoples ruled by Westerners, to solve international tensions through international action and without war had been cherished in Christendom. Since the Napoleonic Wars it had become more insistent and had taken the form of concrete proposals, Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Covenant of the League of Nations be written into the peace treaties which terminated World War I. The League of Nations did not prevent the outbreak of World War II. Although technically it survived until 1946, actually it had been proved impotent before 1939.
The dream did not die. Chiefly through the determined labors of Protestants, it was embodied in the United Nations, through the Charter framed in 1945. No one strove more earnestly to make the United Nations an effective instrument than its Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, who, reared in the Lutheran household of Nathan Soderblom, in his later years returned with deepened convictions to the faith which for a time he had felt himself intellectually constrained to
surrender. Through Protestant leadership the United Nations adopted the Declaration of Human Rights. Because of the Christian convictions of a Protestant, John Foster Dulles, the treaty of peace between the victorious United States and the defeated Japan was not made punitive but gave the vanquished an opportunity for recovery. During and after each of the two world wars measures for the relief of suffering by combatants and non-combatants on both sides of the warring front were undertaken by Christians, Roman Catholic and Protestant, on a scale greater than in any previous war, and far larger than any in wars waged by non-Christians -- such as those of Moslem Arabs, animist Mongols, Hindu and Buddhist conquerors, and the Moslem Timur (Tamerlane).
In 1964, when these lines were penned, in no country, except possibly North Korea and North Vietnam, had Communism succeeded in fully liquidating Christianity. In the U.S.S.R. the Russian Orthodox Church, the Armenian (Gregorian) Church, and Protestantism not only
persisted but as well recruited members and clergy from the younger generation. Much the same record was seen in Rumania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. In the People’s Republic of China both the Catholic Church and Protestantism survived, and
Protestantism had some adult conversions and trained clergy. The possible disappearance of Christianity in North Korea and North Vietnam -- for in 1964 no dependable religious news came from either -- was partly due to mass migrations of Christians to South Korea or South Vietnam.
The erosion by secularism in Western Europe, the Eastern Churches outside Communist domains, the Americas, and Australasia was countered by vigorous movements, some of them new, in all branches of Christianity.
In Western Europe the Papacy saw the continuation of the succession of able and devoted Pontiffs which had marked the second half of the nineteenth century. Benedict XV (reigned 1914-1922) spanned the years of World War I and the first quadrennium of the uneasy peace. He worked tirelessly to relieve suffering and put forward proposals for terminating the agonizing struggle. Pius XI (reigned 1922-1939) was an able administrator of vision, determination, and