Religion: Plain Speaking in England

If the editor of the Christian Science Monitor retired to denounce Mary Baker Glover Eddy and all her works, the U.S. would be no more surprised than England was last week when the editor emeritus of the Empire’s No. 1 religious weekly told what he really thinks of the church in Britain.

For 17 years Sidney Dark quietly edited the Church Times. He was known as an Anglo-Catholic and a mild socialist, but no one expected him to celebrate his resignation this year with a jeremiad like The Church, Impotent or Triumphant? “Now,” said he, “I [can] say exactly what I believe with no polite reservations.”

So Editor Dark denounced his own established Church of England for living off taxes paid largely by non-members and off income from slum property (“money extracted from the half-fed for . . . bug-infested attics is paid to men whose business it is to preach the Gospel”). The Anglicans, he says, have strong support only from the middle class. “The once crowded slum churches in London . . . are now for the most part almost empty. The fashionable churches are emptier.” Only 18% of the population attend any church regularly (U.S. estimate: 23%).

Roman Catholics fare no better in Editor Dark’s book. He assails the Vatican for temporizing with Hitler and for ditching Catholicism’s Popular Party in Italy to come to terms with Mussolini in the Lateran Treaty. “With its Right definitely Fascist and its Left timorously sentimental,” says he, “the Christian reformer can expect nothing of any constructive value from the Roman Catholic communion in England.”

Nonconformists are handled equally harshly as “the Sunday edition of the Liberal Party”—and, like the Liberals, Nonconformity “has lost both its spiritual fervour and its political influence. . . . The young people of the class to which Bunyan belonged, [the class which produced] the Wesleyan local preachers and the Salvation Army [today] have no understanding of the possible dignity and beauty of life which Bible-reading teaches, and no appreciation of moral values.”

Chief criticism Dark levels at British churchmen is that “Protestantism and Catholicism have both urged the patient acceptance of injustice in the sure and certain hope that things will be put right one of these days”—i.e., kept the poor in line by promising them future bliss. This, he finds, plays right into the dictators’ hands, since they promise the poor something much more immediate.

The church must stop being “woolly and wordy,” grab “the last chance that it can have for generations to affect the course of history. . . . Christianity is a revolutionary religion or it is nothing. . . . The Church [must] enthuse the young as Bolshevism has enthused them in Russia and Naziism … in Germany.” One reason he considers Christian leadership particularly necessary in Britain: political power has passed largely into the hands of “unimaginative” trade-union heads who “have little interest in anything but hours and wages.”

Specific reforms he favors:

1) Disestablish the Church of England. “When the Church of Wales was disestablished, it lost the tithe and has done very well without it. … Since a crusade cannot possibly be led by gentlemen who live in palaces, the Church needs hedge priests and hedge bishops.”

2) Merge parishes and close the extra churches. “Hitler has helped towards this end, for it is almost certain that a considerable proportion of the bombed churches will never be rebuilt.”

3) Send out preaching friars “intent not only on the saving of individual souls, but on the salvation of society.”

4) Emphasize the Church’s duty to the poor.

5) Christianize the nation by training boys and girls as “an eager young army, ready and equipped to fight the devil of greed and all his works. . . . But if children are merely to be taught to mumble that their duty is [in the words of the Anglican catechism] ‘to submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters; to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters . . . and to do my duty in that state of life into which it shall please God to call me,’ then the sooner the Church schools are shut and religious teaching is forbidden the better it will be both for the nation and the Church.”

6) Get better sermons. (“90% of the sermons I have heard during the past 15 years have been deplorable.”)

7) Put much less emphasis on sexual sin and much more emphasis on the social sins that make for injustice, since thoroughgoing religion “is impossible in a society where there is gross inequality of possessions and opportunity.”

OPM approved the release of brass for lamps and lipstick holders, disapproved release of brass for religious medals that the Holy Name Society wanted to give Catholic soldiers. When the news seeped out last week, six tons of “high brass” were released for medals pronto.