Religion: Valiant Young Pagans

The churches these days are devoting much time and thought to the veterans who soon will be returning from the wars. . . . It might be just as well to recognize frankly that. . .it is going to be far from easy for the churches to persuade the veterans that Christianity has relevancy to life. . . .

The author of this prediction in the current Atlantic Monthly is a brilliant maverick Episcopal priest, Dr. Bernard Iddings Bell. Four out of five servicemen, says he, are “valiant young pagans” who “know little and care less about Christianity. . . . They will come back sure that the churches have small influence on American life . . . ready to do little more than to give those churches a chance to prove that they have life, vigor, sincerity, pertinency.”

No church which is “only a polite club of nice people with a faint flavor of well-washed piety” can offer convincing proof, concludes Dr. Bell. “The veteran does not need readjustment soothing syrup, coddling, flattery; he needs to be told . . . that if he has any real manhood in him he will regard America as something more than a glorified factory, movie house, ball park and corner drugstore. He needs churches which make it clear that they care about him . . . that the things that really matter … lie beyond his untrained cognizance . . . that things seen are temporal, relative, secondary; that it is the unseen which is eternal, absolute, primary.”