In 1952, Bernard Iddings Bell described the general attitude of society towards the Church thus: “[M]ost Americans regard the Church as promoter of a respectable minor art, charming if it happens to appeal to you, its only moral function to bless whatever the multitude at the moment regards as the American way of life.”
The truth stings all too sharply through that statement, more true today than it was over a half-century ago. Bell, who was an Episcopal priest and educator, had a great many harsh words to say about the state in which he found the Church, particularly the Church in America. She had lost her prophetic calling, no longer standing against the deformities and perversions of the surrounding culture, but instead had simply joined hands with the prevailing cultural forces, thereby consigning herself to cultural captivity and irrelevancy.
The quotation above comes from Bell’s book Crowd Culture, which was reprinted in 2001 by ISI Books. Much of what Bell argued in that book can be found in a more condensed form in this article titled “Will the Church Survive?”, published in the October 1942 edition of The Atlantic.
In it, Bell has more words of reproach:
It is because the Church has thus obscured the socially prophetic note that it seems to most people to have no relevancy. The masses of the folk, observing the Church as of late the Church has been willing to present itself, say, ‘There is nothing here to bother with. These people bear within themselves no salvation. They are as mad as all the rest of us. They are not worth listening to. They are not even worth crucifying.’
Bell eventually answers his hypothetical question with a definitive “yes”; the church will, in fact, survive. But it will take a small minority of Christians who are willing to speak prophetically and boldly against prevailing fashions:
By no means all the Church’s membership is still placidly content with relegation to insignificance. In the ears of more and more Christians there sounds, ever louder, ever more insistent, the command that the kingdom of the world must become the kingdom of God and of His Christ. There are those who begin again to believe, with more than a verbal acquiescence, that all of man belongs to God: his doings economic, industrial, political, sexual, marital, creative, recreational. These rebellious souls, to be sure, are a small minority of Christians; but among them are persons both of high position and of influence intellectual and moral.
Let’s hope that Bell’s words are still true, and that there still remain that small minority of Christians willing to be rebels.
Related reading and listening
- Unmasking claims of “secular neutrality” — Lesslie Newbigin on the Church’s prophetic duty concerning public life
- The kingdom of God has public consequences — Lesslie Newbigin on the subversiveness of the Church’s message to the world
- Sports in America — FROM VOL. 21 Robert Higgs looks at the history of sports in American experience and at how organized religion has interacted with that history. (12 minutes)
- Divorcing the spirit of the age — Thomas C. Oden on overcoming the theological faddism of the late twentieth century
- Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
- Consecrating the world — Paul Evdokimov on the cosmic effects of the Incarnation
- Eternal seeds, temporal fruit — Henri de Lubac on how the Church should (and shouldn’t) make a difference in the world
- David K. Naugle, R.I.P. — Philosophy professor, author, and compassionate mentor David K. Naugle (1952-2021) explains the long history of the concepts of “worldview” and “happiness.” (26 minutes)
- Questioning the “sacred-secular” division — With the stage set by Michael Sandel, Jean Bethke Elshtain, David L. Schindler, and John Milbank, Andrew Willard Jones examines a medieval alternative to the modern liberal paradigm. (61 minutes)
- Fr. Chad Hatfield and Peter J. Leithart on Alexander Schmemann — Alexander Schmemann’s book asks a set of questions about “Christianity and culture” that typically don’t get asked, questions that re-center our lives in gratitude and worship. (20 minutes)
- Not just a counterculture — Peter J. Leithart on the public (and prophetic) mission of the Church
- Assimilation or identity in Christ — Francisco Javier Martínez Fernández on the modern choice given the Church to conform or die
- The Church as a public reality — William Cavanaugh on how we must be disciples in public, not just citizens
- Intellectual apostasy and Christian witness — Harry Blamires on unfashionable beliefs about the ends of human beings
- Cultural participation in reconciliation — Jonathan Wilson on faithfully representing Creation in the culture of the Church
- The publicly inert Christ of modernity — Dom Anscer Vonier on secularism’s confidence in its freedom from Christ
- Which story is ours? — “Instead of allowing the Bible to shape us, we may in fact be allowing our culture to shape the Bible for us.”
- The dead-end of privatized faith — T. S. Eliot on the Church’s duty to interfere with the World
- True transcendence, true immanence — D. C. Schindler on how believers can be practical atheists
- The disabling consequences of winsomeness — Stanley Hauerwas on how many modern Christians offered atheists less and less in which to disbelieve.
- Who strangled God? — James Turner examines the ways in which the pursuit of “relevant” theology helped to make atheism plausible in Western culture
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 92 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jake Halpern, Stephen J. Nichols, Richard M. Gamble, Peter J. Leithart, Bill Vitek, and Craig Holdrege
