A Case of Orthodoxy in Ethics
By Ralph Lynn
A professional student of history as well as a professed follower (from afar) of Jesus, I have been dismayed all of my adult life by the depressing fact that much of the Christian world — aided and abetted by prominent Christian spokesmen — has been, and still is, on the wrong side of almost all human rights issues.
An obvious exception to this statement, of course, is that Christian forces have stood for the “right” of all people around the world to have the Christian gospel preached to them.
A startling statement in this December’s Harper’s magazine started me on this essay: “Among the 17 leading industrial nations, the United States has the largest percentage of its citizens living in poverty.” So little has changed over the years!
To support these sweeping statements, I offer a few abbreviated specifics which, given space, could be massively adduced.
In the United States of the mid-19th century, sponsors of church schools opposed public schools with the same argument now mounted against public health care.
One must note that public morals were, as can now best be ascertained, no better when the churches — with much praying and preaching — had, by public default, a monopoly on education.
People who now think prayer in public schools would solve all social, moral, and personal problems should read The Education of Catholic Americans written by the Roman Catholic Andrew M. Greeley and the non-Catholic Peter H. Rossi, as well as Ronald L. Johnstone’s The Effectiveness of Lutheran Elementary and Secondary Schools as Agencies of Christian Education. These readers would discover that church schools are seldom successful in improving the characters and habits of at-risk students most needing help. The graduates of whom the parochial and private school people are really proud arrive at their elitist schools with desirable character traits and admirable habits already established by home influences.
The picture on the class struggle front is no better. In 1886 in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, some trade unionists conducted an orderly meeting calling for an eight-hour day. As the unionists were dispersing, some policemen “for no apparent reason,” entered the area seemingly intent on using force. Somebody (a few anarchists were fishing in troubled waters) tossed a bomb which killed a policeman.
At the trail of the eight men arrested, Judge Joseph E. Gary admitted that the eight had not been convicted of any crime but maintained that they had been “influenced to do so.”
Four of the eight were hanged, one committed suicide, and Illinois Governor Altgeld pardoned three after they had spent six years in prison. The agnostic, Robert G. Ingersoll, protested against the whole travesty but “Dr. Lyman Abbott, the great religious leader,” condemned Governor Altgeld as “the crowned hero and worshipped deity of the anarchists of the Northwest.” Even the civilized, intelligent, reformist Theodore Roosevelt attacked Altgeld as a man who “condones and encourages the most infamous of murders.” One more of these: In 1902 the miners in Pennsylvania were on strike for an eight-hour day and higher wages. One of their leaders appealed to the industrialist, George F. Baer, to intervene.
Baer’s reply was a classic which shocked and embittered not only the miners but other intelligent readers of the news as well: “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for, not by labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of the country.”
When we turn to Europe, we find the same story: Protestants as well as Catholics, then, as now, characteristically survey the society in which they operate and — like God at creation — they call it good. As it is. No change needed. Keep the status quo.
In nominally Catholic France in the 1840s, the premier, Francois Guizot, advised the poor “to work hard, enrich yourselves, and then you can vote.” He seemed not to know that wages were so low and employment so uncertain that an entire family trying to work every day in the year could barely survive. At that time in Britain, as in France, both Protestant and Catholic churches were conducting state-subsidized revivals with the fervent hope of keeping their submerged classes from revolution.
In Russia in the centuries before the revolutions of 1917, the ruling class, supported by the Russian Orthodox Church, opposed every move toward the peaceful changes which might have prevented the horrors of Communism. Our current race problems, our chaos in health care, and our millions living in poverty make further specifics unnecessary.
That Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries do so much better in these matters demonstrates that we could improve our record if we had the will and the leadership, both of which our churches could provide.
Finally, Christian people, especially those who stridently demand pledges of creedal orthodoxy, should be demanding orthodoxy in Christian ethical conduct.
