The West once was pagan and then became Christian; historically, it is the pagan-Christian West. Today, in contrast, it has become the Christian-pagan West. No century was ever more misjudged than the twentieth by those who hailed it as the “Christian” century. For the once banished demonic spirits have returned again to inhabit the abode of Western culture, and some, indeed, seem to be securing permanent tenure.

Thinking men may scorn the phrase “the Christian-pagan West” as ill-tempered. The West is, after all, the Christian West; what specially distinguishes Occident from Orient is this Christian motif. Moreover, even the compound “Christian-pagan” may seem as artificial as “pagan West,” for after all, whatever is pagan is non-Christian, even as what is Christian is assumed to be Western.

Decline Of Christian Spirit

Such an evaluation of events, however, is outdated; indeed, it is actually irrelevant. It reflects the romantic overconfidence of earlier generations and of the past century. It assumes, and erroneously so, that traditional patterns of the home and work, of civilization and culture still prevail. It perpetuates the illusion of a people who took for granted that the inherited spirit of the West could not die.

Never Fully Christian

Admittedly the West has never been the totally “Christian West.” At best, it has been the “Christian West plus or minus,” the Christian West qualified by some limiting word, e.g., the “imperfectly Christian West.” Scholars now admit, indeed, that the Dark Ages were less dark than historians once pictured them; yet the Middle Ages stood nonetheless in drastic need of the Reformation. The tradition of papacy, monasticism and scholasticism developed an hierarchical, ritualistic and legalistic religion. Superstition and legend abounded; faith was often blind and unreasoning; piety and sacrifice were common substitutes for virtue; ascetic self-denial and gross sensuality flourished side by side; and the church was drawn frequently into the current of political intrigue and immorality. As Philip Schaff remarks, “the medieval light was indeed the borrowed star and moonlight of ecclesiastical tradition, rather than the clear sun-light from the inspired pages of the New Testament; but it was such light as the eyes of the nations in their ignorance could bear, and it never ceased to shine until it disappeared in the day-light of the great Reformation” (History of the Christian Church, Vol. IX, p. 12).

Yet Luther and Calvin, no less than Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, stood in hourly need of justification on the ground of Christ’s death for sinners. The same applies to the early apostles Peter, Paul and John, and in our century to evangelical giants like Dwight L. Moody and Billy Graham. The smudge of sin discolors even the best Christian history.

Heritage Of Greatness

Nevertheless it must be said that no other world culture has lived on the Christian side of life and history; it has had a Christian past, with a lease on Christian experience. The classic pagan mind, shaped by Graeco-Roman idealism, even at best was not good enough for the West. The old culture at its vulgar or common level was beneath the dignity of Christians. And the vices of infanticide, religious prostitution, slavery were abhorrent and repugnant to believers. Because they revered Christ as the guardian of purity and as the champion of sexual virtue, the Christians renounced adultery, covetousness, craftiness, dishonesty, drunkenness, theft. Doubtless the New Testament exhortations, and the picture in the Revelation of the decline of the seven churches in Asia Minor, caution us against painting the first century only in the brightest colors. Yet even in wicked Corinth the apostle Paul could write the world-stained believers: “Such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”

Virtue In Abundance

Actually, Christians were known from the very beginning more for their positive ethical and spiritual performance than for mere abstinence. Pagan observers marveled “how they love one other.” An inexplicable joy irradiated the lives of these ordinary mortals; the peace that became theirs was unknown even to an age free of international hostilities; a boundless flood of kindness and benevolence was turned toward neighbors and strangers; godliness came to live in human flesh. These were a holy people, graced by the Holy Spirit. Acquaintance with the Risen Christ endowed them with a spiritual treasure so surpassingly superb that they laid down their lives rather than renounce Him. Even where totalitarian rulers brandished steel against them, they preferred martyrdom to the sin of silence. They were “called Christians first at Antioch” (Acts 11:26), and they were worthy of His Name. They had a divine commission to go to a perishing world; they were “under orders” to witness of the Redeemer to lost men. Their “conversation”—their walk as well as their words—was halo-bright. The incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ was the meeting place of their hopes and fears. Their marching orders were to confront the world in an armor the pagan empires had never worn. They eclipsed all the previous generations in their embodiment of love, of joy, of peace, of long-suffering, of gentleness, of goodness, of faith, of meekness, of temperance.

Inspiration Of Christianity

All that became noblest in the West was but the lengthened shadow of such faith and life. In a world abounding with religions, biblical Christianity supplied a distinctive view of God and the universe, of man and his destiny. The life of the West came to revolve around the drama of divine incarnation and atonement. The span of human existence was related in every sphere to the God-man who died in the stead of sinners and who rose for them in triumph over death. Between the divine creation of man and the final judgment of the race, the advent of the Redeemer stood as the dominating peak of history. Time “before Christ” lacked any climax; it was a movement of events in which the redemptive promise of God waited fulfillment. “The year of our Lord” became synonymous with the age of grace, in which redeemed men and women were adopted into the family of faith, with the risen Redeemer as their living Head. Since the sixth century the West has based its calendar upon the reality of the incarnation.

While Christian monotheism furnished the lofty inspiration of religion and morality, its influence did not stop there. It shaped literature and the arts. It even furthered the confidence of the West (although contemporary thought arbitrarily obscures this debt) in the unity and rationality of space-time existence, and hence stimulated the growth of science. Christianity upheld the ultimate significance of reason and conscience under God, and it proclaimed as well a providential universe on the basis of divine creation and preservation. Neither ancient polytheistic religion nor philosophical dualism had produced this lively sense of God and the supernatural world, and of man’s awesome destiny.

A Squandered Inheritance

Today this inheritance is all but squandered. No doubt those who disparage life in the Middle Ages as measured by the purity of New Testament religion can make their case, but nonetheless the world today, in contrast with earlier centuries clothed by Christian influences, stands starkly naked in moral shame.

Call it a return to paganism or barbarism or what one will, the fact remains that in the West for three centuries Christian influences upon society, the state and culture have decreased while secular influences have increased to dominating proportions. In the eighteenth century the upper classes of society broke with Christian beliefs, and the unity of Western Christendom vanished. While phantom unity rémained in the balance of power preserved by the absolute monarchies, when these fell, only the myth of the West’s ongoing progress concealed its fragmenting ideals. When progress, in turn, seemed doubtful, only the rise of dictators preserved the outward illusion of unity.

Terrifying Ambiguities

Today’s situation is awesome in its ambiguities. The largest strength of the Communist party, next to Russia and China, is in Italy, home of Vatican City and the organizational head of the largest body of professing Christians. Many who vote Communist still attend Roman Catholic mass in Italy (in contrast with the French).

The Italian Senate’s only woman member, Senator Lina Merlin, has charged that between two and three million women live by prostitution; that in Rome houses of prostitution operate under government license “all over town, and near schools and churches.” Such confusions and contradictions strike ever deeper and deeper in nominally Christian centers today; principle and piety seem ever less and less a central concern of human existence.

The Reformation warned that the Christian West had deteriorated to quasi-Christian foundations, and called for a full and swift return to biblical supports. Scholasticism had one-sidedly emphasized the intellectual element in Christianity. The community it produced repeated the Apostles’ Creed, but without putting heart and soul in the opening word. For Credo (I believe) it tended to substitute Credendum est (it is believed). A generation merely mouthing the creed led to another generation that could not in good conscience even repeat it. The highest language of faith, used first by saintly men, next by carnal men, and then by unregenerate men, at last vanished entirely from the vocabulary of the modern pagan.

Medieval Compromises

The medieval compromise, in fact, reached far beyond matters of doctrine and personal virtue. It involved also a misconception of the social order and of the church’s relation to culture.

In the provocative volume Man in This World, Hans Zehrer reaches back a thousand years to A.D. 1075 and the autocratic Pope Gregory VII’s Twenty-Seven Theses, which led in 1308 to the bull Unam Sanctum as the pivot of the Western revolt against authority. By their own claims the papal despots began to lessen the distance between God and man, and man and God. Drawing the spiritual sword, popes presumed to rule over emperors and their subjects in place of God. “In setting himself in the place of God, the Pope gave the signal for every class to do likewise. ‘Why should you be God and not I?’ is a question before which title-deeds lose their force” (Zehrer, op. cit., p. 67). Thereafter, the man who would be God becomes in swift turn the man freed from all superior authority, who loses at last not merely the image of God, but in doing so loses also the image of man, and descends to bestiality. He becomes the herd man of our era, easily led by totalitarian superiors. In the Christian-pagan West he emerges as the beast-man of evolutionary naturalism, although in actuality he is the man-beast.

Men With Half A Soul

Whatever may be said about Zehrer’s thesis, the fact is that for five centuries, since the mid-fifteenth century yielded to the post-medieval era, the man of Europe and the Americas has stood increasingly confounded and mute in the presence of the Great Questions. His distant forefathers had been heirs of the classic Graeco-Roman world view and prized the Christian inheritance even above that. The death of ancient culture they counted gain because of the birth of a higher. But the modern man, by contrast, gave half his soul to the Renaissance, and was half-hearted toward the Reformation. He now gave snap answers to Ultimate Problems, answers which blurred the Christian motif, and from which all remaining biblical hues, already pallid, would soon fade.

Those who today call merely for “a new Reformation” thereby betray the fact that they judge current history unrealistically. Latin America, perhaps, is a prospect for such a duplication within history. There, as nowhere else, the smoldering revolt against a medieval temper could erupt into a war of ideas, involving Renaissance as well as Reformation claims. But elsewhere the West has already stripped human life of much of its traditional meaning. The inherited patterns of civilization are paling swiftly. Priority Answers of the past are now repudiated, and the Priority Problems along with them. The current failure to grasp the world of ultimates commits man to categories that imply the end of a rational-moral cosmos and the consequent insignificance of reason and the good. For two generations influential philosophers in the once-Christian West have ceased to ask, “Who is God?” “What is the purpose of history, and of the universe?” “How shall we define man’s dignity?” “What are the permanent aspects of truth and morality?” but instead have been asking “Is there a God?” “Does purpose exist in history and the universe?” “Is man essentially unique?” and “Have reason and goodness any objective significance?”

The Drift Downstream

The chorus of intellectual giants answering these questions negatively has swelled. Paraded as the verdict of modern intellectual genius are the dogmas that the binding force of reality is not supernatural and that life and society are held together best if God be dissolved. Confused Western man has been floating downstream on the river of negation, for driftwood requires nothing in the way of spiritual decision. Today, tossed by doubt and uncertainty, modern man is wearying of this world and of himself. His day-to-day existence balances on the sharp edge of chilling questions.

The geographical frontiers of Christendom have shrunk perceptibly. The Russian Orthodox Church and the vast evangelical Stundist movement in the U.S.S.R. eke out their existence by the tolerance of a totalitarian government. The Ukraine, where Roman Catholic congregations date back a millennium, is enslaved behind the Iron Curtain. France, a half-century ago included in every list of nominally Christian great powers, has a bankrupt faith; of its 42 million inhabitants, 35 million no longer attend mass (a mortal sin for Catholics). Only European lands on which the Reformation made a strong theological impact are today virile in their resistance to Communism.

But the shriveling of the Christian claim upon modern thought and life is even more shocking than the shrinking of Christian territorial frontiers. Almost everywhere the West shows a return to pagan ways of thinking and living. Before Christ and before conscience it puts a score of substitute allegiances.

Eroding The Patience Of God

First, the boundless wickedness of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, the cradle of civilization, eroded the patience of God’s Spirit, and the early human enterprise was finally deluged in doom. The new beginning was grounded in revealed religion; the sacred Hebrew narratives carry forward the best of the old history from Abraham to Moses and Sinai, to David and the Hebrew temple, and through the prophets of the Old Testament. Furthermore, they light up this whole venture of faith with Messianic expectation.

Then, the decline of the proud and classic Graeco-Roman civilization ended in the tribal sack and fall of Rome. This extremity of the pagan world became the Christian believer’s opportunity; the weakness of the pagan gods revealed the strength of the Lord of glory.

The third long night of human barbarism seems to have begun. To many observers, the horizon of this third night exhibits little, if any, prospect of a sunrise. Earlier and once benign cultures perished in judgment. The first civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates valley came to naught with the destruction of a generation hardened in its revolt; the glory of the Hellenic world could not withstand its later disintegration and doom. Descending from its pinnacle of lofty achievement, the Christian West in becoming pagan is ¡leaded for inevitable doom. The light men shun today is blinding, for the post-Christian era revolts against the most sacred inheritance of the race. To assume that an anti-Christ culture will escape perdition is sheer madness.

“Then I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf” (Ex. 32:24).

Not often does the preacher find it proper or helpful to quote a poet like Ogden Nash. Nevertheless, I find myself listening in memory to a couplet of his which, like so much that he writes, is accompanied by a mischievous twinkle of the eye:

Why did the Lord give us agilityIf not to escape responsibility

That is one man’s biting satire on a gravely widespread tendency of our time—the tendency to run away from life’s demands instead of meeting them with willing shoulders.

The same thing has been said in chaste but challenging prose by Elton Trueblood in The Life We Prize. After reminding us that the heavy strain under which modern life must be lived is essentially the same for all of us but that the reactions to this strain differ sharply in different persons, he says: “It appears that the most common reaction is that of some form of escape, and especially the effort to escape responsibility.”

Although there is no comfort in it, there is perhaps instruction in the fact that this shabby way of treating life and the Lord of life is not altogether new. To this our text can testify—it goes back three thousand years.

Description Of Failure

Consider, then, the description of Aaron’s failure as we have it in biblical history.

Only three months earlier the people of Israel had left Egypt. God had drawn a curtain over the four dismal centuries they had spent there. Now they were encamped over against Mount Sinai on their way to the Promised Land. Already Moses had made one ascent into the solemn heights of the mountain, returning with the Ten Commandments.

Again he is lost in the unapproachable splendor of Sinai, this time to receive a revelation from God as to the order of worship that the people are to follow. Before his six weeks’ absence had run its course, the people grew restless. Where was he? Why so long withdrawn from them? Was he dead or alive?

In this restlessness they conceived the idea of holding a festival. Since Aaron was second in command, would he make them an image around which they might have a religious dance? We may be sure that he was not for it. The pity is that he wasn’t firmly against it.

Under his supervision golden earrings were collected and melted down. From this molten gold a calf was fashioned. Aaron then built an altar in front of the calf and offered sacrifices.

Whether this was primarily a violation of the first commandment or of the second is a matter I make no attempt to settle. Each view has its advocates. If the sacrifice to the calf meant that the people were giving up Jehovah, then certainly it was flying in the face of the law they had just accepted: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

If, as some believe, it was an effort to hold on to Jehovah and to mingle with spiritual worship the visible image of deity, then it was a transgression against the law that says, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” We may not be able to read all of their thought. What we know is where their conduct led them. Their dancing became reveling. Their reveling became their shame. Their shame exposed them to the leering gaze of their pagan enemies.

In the midst of this disgusting spectacle Moses appeared. He “saw that the people had broken loose [for Aaron had let them break loose, to their shame among their enemies” (Ex. 32:25)]. The stern challenge that Moses flung at Aaron is set down in verse 21: “What did this people unto thee, that thou brought so great a sin upon them?”

To which the red-faced Aaron offered the feeble, flustered reply: “Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief” (Ex. 32:22).

Then comes a further build-up of self-defense, after which Aaron says, in the words of our text: “I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.”

Aaron was a good man, whose name was to become famous as the founder of the priestly line in Israel, but in that hour Aaron was a weakling. It was cowardly of him to refuse responsibility for his part in Israel’s sin.

Cowardly or not, he did it; and, cowardly or not, you and I in one way or another are sorely tempted to soften down or sneak around this tall, titanic fact of responsible living. Under God we are accountable not only for the evil we may do or condone but for the good we might achieve or encourage. Let cabbages be vegetables, let animals be bundles of instincts, but let men know, creatures of God as they are, that the Lord of life will one day reckon with them for the way they have handled themselves and others. Let them know, too, that over the Day of Judgment is written: “No Excuses Accepted.”

Directions Of Responsibility

In view of this, it would be helpful to look around at the directions in which the lines of responsibility run.

To start with, there is our responsibility for ourselves. However we got here, whatever we find here, one thing is certain: we have ourselves on our hands. That’s something that won’t be changed by motoring to Miami or flying to Rio or taking a drawing room to Southern California. “For every man shall bear his own burden” (Gal. 6:15). Just that bluntly did St. Paul express it long ago, meaning centrally, I take it, the burden of responsibility. Professor Hocking expresses the same idea when he says: “Other creatures nature could largely finish: the human creature must finish himself.” “Therefore,” to quote St. Paul again, “thou are inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest” (Rom. 2:1).

Or, take the family, the first and closest social organism in which our relationships spell responsibility. Between husband and wife, mutually, there’s a love to be given, a care to be exercised, a loyalty to be guarded. Between parents and children there’s a table to be spread, a wardrobe to be furnished, a set of physical, emotional and spiritual habits to be fashioned, a system of responsible sharing to be worked out. It was a thoughtful father who said that he purposely delayed, by a year or two, the installation of an automatic heating plant because he wanted his teen-age son to gain experience by getting up at an early hour and firing the coal-burning furnace. Today’s irresponsible homes are the spawning grounds for tomorrow’s juvenile deliquents and day-after-tomorrow’s shiftless citizens or chronic criminals.

Still another line of responsibility runs into the schoolroom. It is easy enough for us to say that the school is responsible for the child. What we need to see more clearly is that part of that responsibility consists of making the child feel responsible for the school—responsible, in a measure, for its cleanliness, its physical care and upkeep and, in larger part, for the classroom atmosphere, for the grades he will receive and for the progress he will make.

Again, there is responsibility as it relates to one’s work. Usually, to start with, it takes the form of what one owes to his employer. Later the tables may be turned and the duty is that of an employer toward his employees. In either case, of course, there must be recognition that these responsibilities are mutual. When employers frequently fall back on injunctions and employees frequently fall back on strikes, it takes no expert economist to tell that somewhere the sense of responsibility has broken down. Nor will the trouble be cured merely by laws and penalties. There must be a new spirit, a different disposition.

Or, once more, there is community responsibility. Whose concern is it that we shall have decent housing, proper sanitation, good schools, respectable government, a healthy moral climate? There is only one intelligent answer: it is everyone’s concern. It is when this simple, basic fact is forgotten, when, in short, responsibility is shirked, that government rots, gangsters have a field day, vice flourishes and community standards deteriorate.

Let me name only one more direction in this survey of our responsibilities. It is the church. I’m not quite satisfied with this way of expressing my thought. Actually, what we owe the church is not just one of many responsibilities. What we owe the church and her Divine Head, Jesus Christ, should be the center of all our concern.

This gripped me powerfully the other morning as I was reading the fourth chapter of Ephesians. Christ’s gifts and appointments to the church, says Paul, were for “the equipment of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (vv. 12–15, RSV).

Not one of us has reached this goal. Until we have, we had better put the church first on our list of loyalties and responsibilities.

Go back to that phrase “responsible living.” It is inescapable. Ourselves, our families, our schools, our jobs, our communities, the church of Jesus Christ our Lord—these circle us with claims we dare not deny. They lay upon us obligations we shun only at our peril.

Yet, shun them we do. Aaron did, long, long ago. Some of you have done it within the week. How?

Devices For Evasion

Let’s think next of the devices that we commonly use as we follow feeble Aaron down the road of refusing responsibility.

For one thing, it is frequently a trick of ours, as it was Aaron’s, to blame natural forces for our failures. Mark Aaron’s words: “I cast it (the gold) into the fire and there came out this calf.” Don’t blame me, the accused man seems to say; blame the fire. When the heat had done its work, this idol happened to be the result.

Moses’ comrade never looked so little as in the moment when that piece of sophistry escaped his lips. What of the pattern he had cut out for the idol? What about the graving tool he had used? No mention of these! Instead, the complaint is that by the play of natural forces, by the prankish effect of the fire, this image was produced over which Israel had corrupted itself.

You know the modern equivalent of such weakling talk, don’t you? You get it in crude form in the popular song of some months ago—“Doing What Comes Naturally.” You get it in somewhat more refined form in many current novels. You get it in a still more sophisticated version in some—by no means all—half-baked courses in psychology. In gist it says: Nature made me this way; I have these urges and drives; it’s really not my fault if I run counter to old-fashioned morals, which after all were foisted on the people by frustrated priests and old maids.

So a man who has been untrue to his wife, while admitting mildly that he has caused a tangle, says to a minister, self-defendingly, “I did exactly what other men in my position would have done.” The urge was there; I simply satisfied it.

Actually such nonsense is not modern. It is as old as Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage. It makes man an animal reacting to stimuli instead of a person responding to challenge. It takes no notice of what Jesus Christ said: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24).

What is more, it takes no notice of the sanest and soundest findings of psychiatry. Listen to Dr. Starke Hathaway in his Physiological Psychology: “After going through the experimental and clinical literature, the thoughtful reader will conclude that the effects of personality upon glands are more impressive and easier to illustrate than the effects of the glands upon personality.”

No, when we are confronted with personal responsibility, we can’t slither down the rabbit hole of nature and so escape blame.

But there’s another device, also tried by Aaron, which commonly serves as a means of shirking responsibility. It is putting the blame or the load on

other people. Look at verse 22: “Thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief.” In verse 23: “They said unto me.” In verse 24: “They gave it me.”

Some scholars say that in verse 1, where the Authorized Version reads “The people gathered themselves together unto Aaron,” it would not be incorrect to render it, “The people gathered themselves together against Aaron.” To use contemporary slang, “they ganged up on him,” jostled him, challenged him, threatened him.

Everybody likes to be talked up; most people like to be talked about; but nobody likes to be talked against. So we buckle at the knees and bow down to the great god called the crowd. “They … they … they!” They decide what clothes I shall wear, what books I shall read, what music I shall play or hear, what TV programs I shall view. They determine whether I shall drink or go sober, whether I shall smoke or go free, whether I shall support Hollywood or the Kingdom of God, whether I shall rate success in terms of money made or in terms of manhood dedicated, whether I shall behold the fair face of Jesus Christ and cry “Away with him” or whisper worshipfully, “My Lord, and my God!”

A member of this church, invited to a gathering in honor of a distinguished university professor, found herself surrounded by members of the intelligentsia who engaged in round after round of cocktail drinking and became the giddier for doing so. When her courteous insistence brought her ginger ale in place of alcohol, she was gently chided as one who was still held in the grip of a “cultural taboo.” With that light phrase they would dismiss a deliberate conviction held fast in conscience. It is that kind of smiling paganism that you and I must meet as Christians.

We must meet it, let me add, not with sour visage, not with a martyr’s halo self-fixed, not with a whipped and whining resignation to duty but with a passionate and unashamed devotion to Jesus Christ and all the high things for which He stands.

It is year’s end. Some of us have stood up to our responsibilities creditably well, all thanks to the grace of God on which we have leaned. Others have sagged miserably, like Aaron. We haven’t been as true to ourselves as we might have been, nor to our families, nor to our work nor to our church.

Let’s confess it. Let’s come out of hiding. Let’s stop making excuses. Let’s throw back our shoulders to bear the full weight of whatever responsibilities God presses down upon them. And then, taking gratefully His forgiveness for every one of yesterday’s failures, let’s head straight into the new year, trusting, dauntless, unafraid.

Paul S. Rees is an alumnus of University of Southern California, which conferred the honorary doctor of divinity degree upon him in recognition of his gifts. Since 1938 he has been Pastor of First Covenant Church of Minneapolis, which has about 1500 members. He has 18 years of continuous broadcasting experience and is author of seven books.

In an afterlife, H. L. Mencken is an intriguing idea. He always hoped there would be none, but he did say—when he realized he would not get everything done—that it would be nice to have one life for observation and another for comment. He felt, though, that a place where there would be no sinning people—even preachers—would be boring indeed; there would be nothing to laugh at!

Wherever he is now, Mencken is passe as far as this world is concerned. And with him lie many of his radical ideas. Along with speak-easies and the village atheist, he represents an era gone.

And most Christians are glad. United States 1956 with its fashionable churchgoing and its staid approval of evangelists makes quicker soil for growing Christians than the humus that Mencken stirred around Bryan. But though the soil seems to produce rapid growth, this may be the rocky ground of which Jesus spoke as producing plants that could not bear adversity.

Churchgoing America 1956 prefers the millions who quietly snooze in church pews to the one who threw brickbats at the stained glasss. And one can hardly blame them. But even from the grave Mencken’s missiles may stir Christians today—and perhaps even toughen them.

How irritated he would be if some of his brickbats became solid building blocks!

No one would accuse Mencken—the cynic, the cocky, the iconoclast, the sceptic, the impious, the arrogant, the irreverent, the blasphemer—of consciously backing Christianity or helping Christians. It would be unkind! And yet in what he said was so much basic truth that he often defended what are Christian ideas despite himself. Though he stood a long way from the church, some of the bricks he threw at religious superficiality, at hyprocrisy, at pious dishonesty are the same bricks that Jesus used, the same ones His followers must handle if they would build the church by His standards.

Mencken said much that needs to be said today—both to Christians and to those who go along on the 1956 Religion Bandwagon just for the ride.

Mencken And The Supernatural

For one thing, Mencken insisted that Christianity was basically supernaturalistic. With telling thrusts he made his point again and again that it was based on supernaturalistic revelation, not philosophy or science.

And this is a point old-fashioned Modernists all too often ignored. Mencken never forgot (many professing Christians do) that Christianity teaches that “without faith it is impossible to please God.”

Of course, supernaturalism was to Mencken superstition. God and ghosts, hell preaching and snake oil for rheumatism—they were all the same; and there was as much evidence for witches as for immortality. “Faith may be defined briefly,” he said, “as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.” Since he felt he did not accept anything on faith, every Christian was, ipso facto, a fool, since being a Christian demanded acceptance of the supernatural by faith.

Obviously Mencken was not proselytizing for Christianity when he thus insisted on the supernaturalism of Christianity. But he drew the line clean in a way many with more claims to Christian truth than he could well emulate.

Mencken saw Christ’s supernatural Resurrection as central to Christian doctrine and demanded to know if it really happened. If it did, he admitted, there might be something to Christianity. If not—and of course he chose that side—it was “sheer nonsense.”

He said he preferred science to theology, but he honestly admitted that science too left “dark spots.”

The whole matter of Mencken at the Scopes trial was concerned with the same idea. To Mencken, Evolution removed the necessity of supernaturalistic creation and was therefore the only reasonable answer to the conundrum of man’s presence on this planet. Since he felt it was obvious that the Bible taught supernaturalistic creation, Evolution proved Christianity again a fool’s philosophy. In the same way he believed Copernicus’ discovery not only proved that the earth revolved around the sun but also that the “Old Testament was rubbish” instead of revelation. There is little indication that he would have been intrigued by the problems of metaphor, myth, and symbol that contemporary Christian thinkers struggle with. If the angel blew from the “four corners of the earth,” then the earth was square; and, since it had been proved not to be, then the Bible was false and irrelevant. Within his naturalistic presuppositions there could have been no honest alternative in any event.

Men are civilized, Mencken said, in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The larger a man’s stock of faith and “adamantine assurances,” the more stupid he was in Mencken’s eyes. Perhaps there would be fewer wrangles and splits in Protestant churches if Christians reserved their faith and “adamantine assurances” for the essential and supernaturalistic elements of their faith and allowed some of Mencken’s doubt to creep into their vociferously held opinions on other matters.

Mencken sometimes seems to be battling windmills or adolescents converted last Saturday night—youths who know the seven steps to becoming and remaining Christian and are sure that these cover everything necessary. Mencken seems to think that all Christians, like enthusiastic youths, believe they can reason out or know the answer to every question. He’s there to assure them that they can’t. But not all Christians are as stupid as he makes them out; some not only hold to the Christian truth which the human mind can understand but also unabashedly believe the Christian revelation of those things which have not “entered into the heart of man.”

Words From The Silence

Mencken’s pronouncements and example in regard to the use of words is another way he can speak to Christians even from the grave. He has been called the greatest prose stylist America has produced. He loved to shock and overstate. He insisted on being read. And he worked at finding a vital idiom that would arouse interest. He wanted American language for Americans. He liked the specific, concrete, even vulgar word because it got the meaning across sharply.

This is the impulse that provides a new rendering of the Bible every few years. This is the contention of teachers of English and of religious journalism or creative writing in Christian colleges when they red-pencil out the religious cliche and the jargon that is meaningless to the uninitiated and worn out to the rest.

Mencken tried a body blow to religious shibboleths by using cliches for satiric purposes—e.g., signing his letters “I pray for you constantly.”

Christian writers almost without exception can learn in Mencken’s school. Vital truth deserves vital garb.

Ideas That Smash Idols

Obviously it was not his language alone that made Mencken readable and also read. He had ideas and he scattered them freely although he said that the average man prefers cliches and resents new thoughts. Mencken knew how to ask questions. Few Christians—even the propagandists—excel in either of these areas. What campus pastor can hold a group of sophomores spellbound for twenty minutes of listening the way Mencken could through a long essay? And then give them enough for a week’s bull sessions in addition? If one can, let him then try a group of Saturday night stein wavers like those Mencken delighted every week!

Admittedly it is easier to be exciting when one’s ideas are iconoclastic like Mencken’s. But there are some things in Christianity that might smash a few idols too if they were preached interestingly. And what Christian would be ready to admit that Christianity is potentially less exciting than Menckenism?

You name it and Mencken had an idea on it—language, politics, food, literature, liquor, religion, music, minorities, liberty, democracy, Puritanism, sex, the theater, etiquette, prohibition, and a hundred others.

And if he didn’t have an idea—or more especially if he did have—he could ask a good question, particularly about Christianity and its application. He asked the tough questions professing Christians often don’t dare ask: Is Christianity a matter of deeds or beliefs? How far can human reason go? Can a man be a hypocrite and a Christian at the same time? Why do mission bums listen to the preaching? Who is qualified to censor the press? How do we know that God hasn’t turned the world over to a lesser deity to operate? What was the origin of the double standard? What is the psychological basis of commercial morality? Why do churchmen believe it unlucky to meet a black cat and lucky to find a pin? What happens at death? Why are artists so often scoundrels? Is the soul merely the product of wishful thinking? How does a man decide to be a martyr for a religious belief?

What could not a Menckenesque Christian—preacher or teacher or parlor conversationalist—do for the Christian cause?

One Day At A Time

Though he may not have realized it—and would surely have been irritated to have it pointed out—Mencken agreed with Jesus that men ought to live one day at a time. He declared that he woke every morning to an interesting life in which there were still men who were “worse asses” than he! His version of the day-by-day walk—to get through life with the least possible pain and the most possible entertainment—is different from Christ’s “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” in its selfishness but not in its emphasis on living one day at a time.

With this idea, it is foregone that Mencken would be hard on the pie-in-the-sky boys who live not for today but only for the rewards of the future. He declared that a mountebank who thought only of “tomorrow’s cakes” would be less dangerous with power than a “prophet and martyr” living for rewards in heaven.

In this he turns the light of truth on the professing Christian who is merely in it for what he can get—who tithes because he believes he will become richer, who serves the church for fifty years so that he may wear a crown for eternity—the irreligious of the class of Peter when he asked, “What then shall we have?” The tragedy of Mencken was of course that he missed entirely the biggest thing in the life lived one day at a time.

The Art Of Puncturing Frauds

For all his exaggeration and posing—he apparently often took the side least likely to succeed simply for kicks—Mencken was refreshingly honest on important issues. He curried favor with no one and punctured frauds wherever he found them. He did not aim for popularity; he aimed for truth and scorned those who, he felt, did not.

He believed that religion hurt clear, honest thinking. He felt that religious people cared nothing for the truth so long as they retained “a hopeful and pleasant frame of mind.” That he was shockingly close to right can be easily demonstrated by the perusal of a dozen stories in so-called “Christian literature”—papers and books produced by religious presses. With sickening monotony they present a world where life is pleasant for the good, where sinners are few and soon fail, die, or get converted, where the Christian—especially the preacher—can do no wrong. Mencken, along with old and new orthodoxy alike, saw men as sinners. “Man is inherently vile,” he said, “but he is never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and deny his vileness.”

Mencken hated hypocrisy and untruth. And he made no bones about it.

Though he had no time for the homo boobus, Mencken loved individual liberty. And he fought hard for it. Whether the ban was Prohibition or a statute preventing the election of Socialists, the prosecution of young people who talked against war, the prevention of the teaching of Evolution, or Boston’s Watch and Ward Society’s Index, he battled. He was willing to suffer personal loss when he felt that the personal liberties of others were at stake.

In our day when religion is popular we too often forget that it was individuals whom Christ came to free—not majorities that He came to enslave. We forget too that it behooves us to defend the freedom of minorities in every age because we are bound to be a minority ourselves, since “few there be who find” the Way.

What Mencken overlooked, of course, is that even the minority sometimes champions a freedom that is only a form of slavery after all, and that Christ alone frees man from moral bondage.

Gibes Of A Tamed Cynic

Mencken is dead. And so are many of his opinions. But his scorn of hypocrisy and dishonesty, his insistence on human liberty, his daring to ask questions, his clear and pungent language, his insistence on straight thinking—these still live. And they lived—perhaps less colorfully—in his day too because they are basically Christian.

From his grave even Mencken can help Christians—and even with his brickbats. He can help insofar as he speaks truth. But the Christian must go beyond Mencken’s negations to the positive message which was Christ’s as well—that the supernatural exists and that in it there are answers.

If we do, Mencken may really (though unwittingly) help undo the work of a life spent, we can’t help believing, on the wrong side.

But as we read him how we wish we had some Christain Menckens!

Virginia Lowell Grabill (wife of Dr. Paul E.), Ph.D. in English from University of Illinois, is Professor of English and Chairman of the Department at Bethel College, St. Paul. Formerly she taught at University of Illinois, and then at Western Illinois State. She is former editor of His magazine, and author of numerous articles.

To A Scientist Friend

Your stories of the shrunken sea’s abandonOf palm trees high within a mountain range,And of the tiger (saber-toothed) whose skeletonSunken in tarry pit, defied time’s change,Were open door to where past ages are:Mountain and lake repeat primordial criesOf life and death that echo in my ear.Today this mystery before me lies:These wild bird feathers fallen by the way—Grey clip of wing, quill torn, swirl auburn flame;“Life values I cannot describe,” you say.O ageless woe, and beauty without name,He lives Who heard the ascending creature fall,And ancient shore and lair, forsaken, call.

RACHEL CROWN