Seedpots of a New Social Order

DEAR MEMBER, A question that will “bear a lot of thinking on” is raised in a letter from one of our members. After expressing his appreciation of the News-Letter he goes on to say:

“Let me first say what it is more than anything else that dashes my hopes of the effectiveness of this effort and tends to damp down any rising enthusiasm. I doubt its having any lasting effect, because I am compelled to doubt the effectiveness of any appeal to reason in this present age. Something has happened either to the minds of men or to the thoughts which fill them. These have grown somehow thinner. There is no faith in ideas and in their compelling power comparable to that which ruled in the nineteenth century. Whether there is simply too much newsprint about, or systematic propaganda has poisoned the wells, or whatever the cause may be, the average man of today has lost faith in ideas. When he has followed some chain of thought to its logical conclusion and given his assent, he will turn to another page of his newspaper and read, without dissent, the exact opposite. The mind of the German nation as it listens to Goebbels and Ribbentrop, first before and then after the Russian-German Pact, is only an extreme instance of this. It is not the startling exception we should like to think it.”

I limit myself to stating the problem. I shall return to it later and let you have more of the letter from which I have quoted. If you have anything to say about it please let me hear from you.

Voices of the Younger Generation

The March issue of Christendom contains two instructive articles showing the direction in which some of the minds in the younger generation are tending. Both betray a despair of existing society, thought not of life.

In the first, the writer dismisses as unpromising any attempt to influence public events towards a more Christian instead of a more pagan society. He denies, however, that his disbelief in such an attempt necessarily implies anarchism or concentration on a purely spiritual mission or a retreat into pietism. It may mean devotion to the creative task of growing something new. The purpose is to change society in spite of the politicians. Those for whom the activities of the state have come to seem alien and meaningless have no choice but to turn to growing potatoes and onions or conducting experimental schools outside the educational system or to betake themselves to such reactionary things as having wives and children or even going to church. They are disposed to reverse the drift in the wrong direction by personal and corporate action in local affairs and by example, rather than by direct intervention in party politics. They want to demonstrate that to keep rabbits and grow Brussels sprouts and keep window-boxes belong to a mode of life different from that of those who spend all their time at the pictures or dog-racing or football matches.

The writer of the second paper admits that Christians did at one time suppose that socialism or liberalism were a means of bringing nearer social reforms demanded by their religion, and that the League of Nations was a sort of secular counterpart of the Communion of Saints, but he is convinced that “today no Christian of integrity and discernment believes in any of these things.” He believes that the true wisdom for today is found in the sayings that when the fish have gone far out to sea we had best take to mending our nets against the return of the next tide. This involves in present circumstances a necessary limitation of the scope of Christian influence and a concentration on the basic realities of life, such as our homes, our land, our immediate associates. It is not to disown the responsibilities of citizenship, but to discharge them in spheres in which citizenship means something. The true meaning of politics can be rediscovered only in a community small enough to allow a sense of real civic responsibility to everyone.

We are far more likely, he holds, to exert an influence on the nation’s life by dealing with it in detail – by splitting up the problem – than by attempting a large and general control of nation-wide movements. But even if the opportunity for large-scale influence were offered, the Church would have to reject it as a snare and temptation. Social disease has gone so deep that the immediate task is to promote healthy living in those basic spheres of life which are essentially independent of State control.

A Partial Truth

In the first letter of this year (C.N.-L No 10) I urged that if we want a Christian society we must distinguish at least five great tasks, all of them immense and all of them indispensable. What the writers I have quoted insist on with force and persuasiveness is the importance of two of these. But what of the others?

The positive demand made in these papers is essential to the recovery of a more Christian order of society. The disease of civilization is radical. We have come under the tyranny of a false scale of values. It is a true insight which recognizes that in these conditions the real values of life cannot be regained by merely talking about religion, but only by living it, and in particular by a return to the simplicities of life in contact with nature and in direct relations with other persons. It is as true of spiritual as military warfare that it cannot be waged successfully with untrained and undisciplined troops. Those who have gained through contact with fundamental realities a new strength of soul will be in the days to come the seed-plots of a new social order.

It is also an important truth that democracy is alive and real only where there is a widespread diffusion of initiative and responsibility; and that a Christian order of society, in which men act as responsible persons, will find room for a multiplicity of groups pursuing in freedom their own social, cultural, and professional ends.

But, true as all this is, I cannot help suspecting that the writers unconsciously assume the continuance of the conditions created by the liberalism which they disparage. Where in the Nazi or Communist systems shall we find the “basic spheres of life essentially independent of State control,” within the happy shelter of which the process of religious and social regeneration is to take place? What will be the fate of the proposed program if the battle for freedom is lost in the national life as a whole?

With the view that what is advocated is an essential part of the total task and that some have a vocation to serve God in this particular way we can cordially agree. But to those who would push the argument beyond this positive demand and maintain that we can stand aside and allow public events to take their course, three questions must be put.

First, what about the large majority of Christians who are not so fortunate as to be able to keep rabbits or grow potatoes or serve on Parish Councils, but have to earn their living amid the hustle and pressure of industrial life? I have on my desk a letter from one of our members in which he raises this very problem.

“I am compelled to ask,” he writes, “whether the alternative to the present organization of society is to be found in separate communities. These live a life within their own terrain. Probably they have their problems of which we are not aware, but do they have the everyday worries which the ordinary Christian has? To be a spoilsport because you do not join in the staff raffle; to lose promotion because you won’t go out drinking with the manager; to lack popularity because your conversation is comparatively clean – little things, these everyday worries, but they and their like are the struggles of the ordinary man.”

Secondly, what about the changes which are taking place in our society with extraordinary rapidity? If things are allowed to drift we may wake up to find ourselves in the inexorable grasp of a totalitarian system. How can this disaster be averted if Christians refuse to exert themselves. Before we commit ourselves either in theory or practice to the view that in the main fields of human activity and struggle Satanic forces are omnipotent and cannot be fought, we must do some hard thinking. Are we not in danger of surrendering belief in the first article of the Apostle’s Creed? A policy of retreat may mean one of two quite different things. It may be a flight from total, spiritual war or a renewed dedication to its prosecution. Everything hinges on the difference.

Thirdly, is this cultivation of soil and soul the only proper sphere for the Christian or has he also a part to play in the hurly-burly of existence? Is it the duty of Christians to contract out of the “high tumultuous lists of life”? I read the articles on which I have commented while I was in the middle of Douglas Reed’s Nemesis? It is a biography of Otto Strasser, Hitler’s implacable foe and, his biographer believes, potential successor. It is a book to be read by all who would understand the forces by which history is made. Must Christians remain aloof from these conflicts? A party of gangsters is no place for a Christian; but is the defeat and restraint of gangsters no part of his concern? May the coming into existence of a Christian society demand among other contributions the qualities and deeds of the soldier and the knight? Perhaps between the ideas with which the discussion began and that which we have reached at the end there may be not only an opposition but a connection. Some who in the days to come will contend most valiantly in the heat of the battle may be the sons of those who in retreat have re-won their souls.

Yours sincerely,

J. H. Oldham