Religion: What They Believe

For historians who put philosophical labels on epochs in man’s history—Age of Faith, Age of Reason, Age of the Enlightenment—the mid-century in U.S. history may go down as the Age of Tolerance, in the sense that strong feelings, about religion at least, are in bad taste. A good text for such an age is a book published this week called This I Believe (Simon & Schuster; $3). Written for CBS Newscaster Edward R. Murrow, This I Believe is a series of doggedly non-controversial statements by representative Americans about the faiths they live by.

As a five-minute radio show, This I Believe has been one of the most popular items that ever hit CBS. It has been snapped up by 196 U.S. radio stations; its thumbnail texts have been reproduced in 85 U.S. daily newspapers, and relayed over the Voice of America to 97 foreign countries.

In preparing their radio show and their book, the directors of This I Believe set only one ground rule: “No one can attack another’s beliefs.” Program Director Edward Morgan told potential contributors that This I Believe must be “non-religious,” and he made a point never to bring up the subject of a contributor’s religious faith in conversation.

Indecent Exposure. Some of those approached decided they were unable to whip up their beliefs in handy, non-controversial form for delivery in 3½ minutes of radio time. Wrote Novelist Kathleen Norris in refusing: “It’s either a mawkish sermon, or it’s indecent exposure.” But an impressive cross-section of U.S. opinion did respond. Excerpts:

NOVELIST PEARL BUCK: “I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.”

NEWSCASTER ELMER DAVIS : “We should try to promote an increase of decency. Decency in the sense of respect for other people, of taking no advantage.”

AUTHOR THOMAS MANN: “I believe that man is meant as a great experiment whose possible failure of man’s own guilt would be paramount to the failure of creation itself.”

ANTHROPOLOGIST MARGARET MEAD: “I believe that human life is given meaning through the relationship which the individual’s conscious goals have to the civilization, period and country within which one lives.”

PROFESSOR HARRY (The Mature Mind) OVERSTREET: “If I expand the areas of my awareness, I move understandingly into realities beyond me.”

MRS. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: “I don’t know whether I believe in a future life. I believe that all that you go through here must have some value.”*

People Unadulterated. In discussing the faiths they live by, barely half of the contributors to This I Believe found it necessary to mention “God” and only ten owned up to having any formal religious belief. Among them: Poet Robert Hillyer, Educator Elizabeth Gray Vining, National League Umpire Ralph (“Babe”) Pinelli. (Said Umpire Pinelli: “I believe in my God, my family, my country and baseball.”)

If many of the others believed in churches or some sort of Christian system of values, they did not say so. Most of them, however, said they believed in “people” or “humanity,” and almost all were strong for “freedom,” “democracy” and the Golden Rule. There was a general feeling that “we can build a better world,” where there will be “no bloodshed, hatred and disease.”

Perhaps this document of the Age of Tolerance found its ultimate expression in the contribution of Sarah Lawrence College’s alert young President Harold Taylor. Said he: “I believe in people, in sheer, unadulterated humanity . . . The most important thing in life is the way it is lived, and there is no such thing as an abstract happiness, an abstract goodness or morality, or an abstract anything, except in terms of the person . . . I believe we must, each of us, make a philosophy out of believing in nothing . . .”

*Earlier Americans had stronger views about this. Wrote De Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America (1835): “While I was in America, a witness who happened to be called at the Sessions of the county of Chester (state of New York) declared that he did not believe in the existence of God or in the immortality of the soul. The judge refused to admit his evidence on the ground that the witness had destroyed beforehand all the confidence of the court in what he was about to say. The newspapers related the fact without any further comment.”