THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
JUNE, 1912
Should Smith go to Church?
I think he should. Moreover, I think I should set Smith an example by placing myself on Sunday morning in a pew from which he may observe me at my devotions. Smith and I attended the same Sunday school when we were boys, and remained for church afterwards as a matter of course. Smith now spends his Sunday mornings golfing, or pottering about his garden, or in his club or office, and after the mid-day meal he takes a nap and loads his family into a motor for a flight countryward. It must be understood that I do not offer myself as a pattern for Smith. While I resent being classified with the lost sheep, I am, nevertheless, a restless member of the flock, prone to leap the wall and wander. Smith is the best of fellows, an average twentieth-century American, diligent in business, a kind husband and father, and in politics anxious to vote for what he believes to be the best interests of the country.
In the community where we were reared it was not respectable not to go to church. I remember distinctly that in my boyhood people who were not affiliated with some church were looked upon as pariahs and outcasts. An infidel was a marked man: one used to be visible in the streets I frequented, and I never passed him without a thrill of horror. Our city was long known as ‘a poor theatre town,‘ where only Booth in Hamlet and Jefferson in Rip might be patronized by church-going people who valued their reputations. Yet in the same community no reproach attaches to-day to the non-church-going citizen. A majority of the men I know best, in cities large and small, do not go to church. Most of them are in no-wise antagonistic to religion; they are merely indifferent. Clearly, there must be some reason for this change. It is inconceivable that men would lightly put from them the faith of their fathers through which they are promised redemption from sin and everlasting life.
Now and then I hear it asserted that the church is not losing its hold upon the people. Many clergymen and laymen resent the oft-repeated statement that we Americans are not as deeply swayed by religion as in other times; but this seems to me a case of whistling through a graveyard on a dark night.
Mr. Fosdick, in his good-humored paper ‘Heckling the Church,‘[1] cries, in effect, that the church is moving toward the light; don‘t shoot! He declares that no one who has not contributed something toward the solution of the
- ↑ The Atlantic for December, 1911.
VOL. 109—NO. 6
