Pulpits and Politics

...It would really seem that all measures do not require the same cooperation, and the suspicion is in order that it is not prohibition, nor temperance, nor morals at all which are the real concern of the board, but rather control over the lives of the community at large by a church which cries eternally for the right of private judgment, and in the same cry denies the right of any opposition to the latest and dearest article of its shifting creed...

...Governor Smith may not run for office, it declares, because he does not support and further a particular statute, the subject and matter of which has now become part and parcel of the creed and dogma of a group of churches...

...If in the pulpits of a particular group the representatives of a particular organization are always to be found, and if the leaders of the organization are the prominent preachers of the group, the names which these activities assume become a matter of very secondary importance...

...Lodge traces back the evil seed of intolerance, has so brazen an attempt been made to identify the policies of a church organization with affairs of state as the action of the Methodist board in its present pronunciamento...

...PULPITS AND POLITICS IT IS ancient wisdom that one man may appropriate, abstract and convey to his own uses, a steed to which his title is as clear as mud without creating a ripple upon the surface of the plundered community, while another may not even cast a speculative eye towards the stable door without throwing the same community into a ferment of righteous—even riotous—indignation...

...He, at least, has no doubt where support to the dry forces is massed...

...Thus it must continue...

...One might plausibly enquire when, in its most ardent accesses of social indignation the same board has complained of lack of an "act" to assist federal authority in the suppression of counterfeiting, or against the restriction of Negro voting in the South, or to help carry out the purposes of so moral a measure as the Mann act...

...Not a day passes but the readers of the daily press are told that this or that well-paid agent of the dry forces has addressed a congregational meeting at a regular service in some Methodist church or another...

...Church and state have gone, each its own way, each seeking its own ends undisturbed...

...Put down those who oppose by force of arms, call out army and navy to carry on our plans," said these representatives of the board of morals and its allies in their Chicago convention, anxious only to see their will imposed on all, their creed crammed down the throats of unwilling, unsympathetic unbelievers...

...If a gentleman may not be a candidate because he is not acceptable to the Board of Temperance, etc., and if the approbation of that board is necessary to make a candidate acceptable, and further, if, as a consequence that cannot be precluded, other communions, evangelical and non-evangelical in turn, submit a list of their own requirements to which all aspirants to the chief magistracy must measure up—then, it is clear, we are no longer facing a theory, but a fact...

...The specific complaint against the governor of New York state is that he does not further what is known as a state enforcement act, i. e., an act to enforce the provisions of the Eighteenth Amendment and its "appropriate" legislation in the form of Volsteadism...

...General Andrews himself has announced his intention, as national director of prohibition, to work through the "churches" and through the Young Men's Christian Association, a distinctively evangelical religious group...

...Catholics have been accustomed for decades to the charge that with them politics and religion are intermingled without discrimination as to the merits of measures...

...This detestable attempt to commingle church and state is aimed directly at the one feature of American life to which we have ever pointed with most pride...

...Religion has entered politics, and a blow to the entire conception of American government has been administered before and between its very eyes...

...Lodge (who, one hardly needs to be told, is neither Irish, Catholic nor Democrat) goes on to say, referring to another letter on the subject, "hits the nail on the head when she says that 'none is more tolerant of religious differences per se than the average Catholic layman . . . none is more intolerant than the old type of hard-shell Puritan, descendant of those early fanatics who conceived of religious freedom only as hostility to the Papacy.' " Never, in fact, not even in the distant days to which Mr...

...In this very year an estimable monthly has gone so far as to conduct what it calls an open forum in order to determine the exact extent to which the present Pontiff has gone in seizing the government within a sovereign state, and the discussion has led 86 THE COMMONWEAL December 2, 1925 to certain evidence that may or may not have lain within its editors' intention, but which is certainly most illuminating...

...Would not the uttermost habitat of the Klan sound to high heaven with urgent warnings of the efforts of the Pope of Rome, at last unmasked, to subjugate the hundred million odd non-Catholic population of this land of the free ? To ask the question is to answer it...

...The blast recently uttered by the Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Morals of the Methodist Episcopal Church leads one to pause and wonder just what the populace at large, to say nothing of this same board, might say and do if a similar eruption should issue from a Catholic group, say the Holy Name Society, or the Knights of Columbus...

...The denunciation of Governor Smith is but one more manifestation of an old struggle whose causes lie far below the surface...

...Here we have had no national church...

...Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a grandson of the late Senator, goes so far as to say that "Irish Catholics are probably less well organized than any other political group,1' and compares them strikingly to uthe various organizations among certain Protestant sects which can deliver a perfectly solid, unbroken vote on prohibition, and which can compel a majority of our state and national legislators to vote their way, often against their personal inclination...

...He is un-American, say the spokesmen of this group, because he does not support the Constitution, which means, in plain language, that he may wish to change the Constitution from what it now is to what it once was...

...When these same reverend board members actually changed the same Constitution from what it once was to what it now is, none would have more heatedly resented the implication that, in seeking that change and pleading for it, they too might be considered un-American...

...It may be urged in rebuttal that many of the activities to which exception is taken by liberty-loving Americans are those of the Anti-Saloon League and that this league is a body of lay citizens...

...Would not the entire theocracy, urban and agrarian as well, burst into a vast chorus of extempore appeal for heavenly thunderbolts of a Protestant contexture...

...Al" Smith, as the Methodist board unmannerly terms New York's popular governor, may be all they say he is...

...Does any record exist of a corporate appeal by the Methodist, or Baptist Churches, for special legislation to assist states in controlling the present dreadful wave of homicidal mania, of diminishing the enormous and growing volume of thefts and depredations, of lessening and lightening the black scandal and shame of the fetid American divorce courts...

...The truth is there, for him who runs to read...

...But, despite the disclaimer they file, that the attack on him is not due to religious prejudice, the mere fact that a powerful board of an active and energetic church sees fit to enter a solemn pronouncement, based on the tenets of their creed, as to who is and who may not be an acceptable candidate for the Presidency, is enough to make any honest and unbiased mind wonder to what else it can be attributed...

...Men resent now as they have resented in the past a tyranny which seeks to subject them to the religious holdings of any other man, or group of men, whether hired spy, paid director of a theological dictatorship, or simple minister of an evangelical church...

...The situation, in a word, is fundamental...

...As an answer, it is quite enough to point to the leaders and supporters of the league, and to the identity between the declarations of these leaders, when they happen to be laymen, and those of the ministers themselves...

...Your correspondent," Mr...

...They resent it with especial hatred when it comes through forced subjection, designed, as they believe, to meddle with their own religious beliefs and practices, to interfere with those sacred rites to which they hold fast at any cost with unflinching determination...