Religion: Biblical Draft

General Hugh Samuel Johnson is a lively columnist, a good Episcopalian, a strong believer in conscription. Last week, seeking ammunition for a pro-conscription broadside, Columnist Johnson resorted to Holy Writ. Titling a column “Biblical Draft,” he cited Scripture to his purpose: Numbers XXVI, 1-2, for registration of the whole adult population and classification as to its availability for military service; Numbers XXXI, 3-4, for assignment of quotas, and Deuteronomy XX, 5-9, for a likely list of exemptions from active service.

Few clerics like to have laymen do their preaching for them. Columnist Johnson was soon under a ministerial barrage of counter-citation. His critics charged: 1) that “you can prove anything you want to prove by the Bible”; 2) that he had plucked his texts from the militaristic Old Testament and glossed over the New; 3) that he had skipped the Old Testament’s direst precedent against registration—II Samuel XXIV, wherein King David ordered a military census. It showed a count of 1,300,000 “valiant men that drew the sword” but the Lord, wroth at David, punished his presumption by killing 70,000 of them with pestilence in three days.

Said Dean Ernest Cadman Colwell of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School: “You can’t establish the Christian position in relation to conscription by quoting isolated passages from the Bible. … I long ago stopped using proof-text to justify conduct.” Director Paul Burt of the University of Illinois’ Wesley Foundation told a pious anecdote about a proof-text layman who turned to the Bible for guidance in his life work, opened it at random to “Judas went and hanged himself.” On his second try the alarmed layman hit on “Go thou and do likewise.”