Book excerpt

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

Links to posts and programs featuring Oliver O'Donovan:

Links to posts and programs featuring Adam K. Webb:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark Bauerlein:

Links to posts and programs featuring Felicia Wu Song:

Links to posts and programs featuring Joseph E. Davis:

Links to posts and programs featuring Thaddeus Kozinski:

Links to posts and programs featuring Craig M. Gay:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark T. Mitchell:

Links to posts and programs featuring Karen Dieleman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Tim Clydesdale:

Links to posts and programs featuring J. Mark Bertrand:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mathew Levering:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mark G. Malvasi:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kirk Farney:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bradley J. Birzer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Ralph C. Wood:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Heintzman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Gil Bailie:

Links to posts and programs featuring Zygmunt Bauman:

Links to posts and programs featuring Matthew Lee Anderson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Mike Aquilina:

Links to posts and programs featuring Bishop Robert Barron:

Links to posts and programs featuring Frederick Buechner:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jeffrey Bilbro:

Links to posts and programs featuring James A. Herrick:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Wilson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Susan Cain:

Links to posts and programs featuring Marilyn McEntyre:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andrew Spencer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Albert Borgmann:

Links to posts and programs featuring Catherine Prescott:

Links to posts and programs featuring Maggie M. Jackson:

Links to posts and programs featuring Garret Keizer:

Links to posts and programs featuring Andy Crouch:

Links to posts and programs featuring Kyle Hughes:

Links to posts and programs featuring Philip G. Ryken:

Links to posts and programs featuring Eric Miller:

Links to posts and programs featuring Landon Loftin:

Links to posts and programs featuring Barry Hankins:

Links to posts and programs featuring Quentin Schultze:

Links to posts and programs featuring Paul Walker:

Links to posts and programs featuring Jason Peters:

Links to posts and programs featuring Alexander Lingas:

Links to posts and programs featuring Fr. Damian Ference:

Links to lectures and commentary by Ken Myers:

Links to posts and programs featuring David Cayley: