Charles Josiah Galpin

“ In touch with these men and women, under the spell of the intelligent hope for the American farm and farmer, a school of religion can grow up which will train men to go into the country and help redeem it from its present social chaos. They can carve out community churches of distinction. They can create a line of such churches, wholly in rural territory, which will furnish steps of promotion for the most strenuous and ambitious pastors. Flight is not the cure of the plight of country parsons. ”

“ The nation might possibly assimilate a million bibleless children if they were brought up among several millions of children who know the concepts of religion; but absorbing godless children in great numbers from whole godless groups is a bird of a different feather. What is still more disconcerting, the trend, we are led to suppose, is not from bad to better, but from bad to worse.
“There is no national passion for seeking out the godless community and setting the Bible there,” we hear on every hand. ”

“ This raw-boned farmer and his wife, possessed of the fairest intentions in the world for their children, had become trapped in a godless community before they were aware of it; all because the seed-bed of human life had not been plowed deep with social religion at the very outset. Is this community a fair example of bibleless country groups? ”

“ So it is that the Johns and Marys who leave the farm and its open spaces for city life give up having children of their own,—often without knowing it when they leave the country, to be sure,—and find themselves later doomed to work out human contentment in some other way; for the high cost of city space, of just sufficient elbow-room for a child to grow in and acquire the human characteristics desired, is almost as prohibitive as if a law were on the statute-books forbidding the rearing of children in city blocks. ”

“ It is a church of the people—a democracy in very truth. Any subtle influence that would tend to wash in upon this democracy and wear it down to a dominating set of people or to a group of negligible folk or to a loose aggregation of nondescripts must be walled off with reinforced concrete.
A single type of religious temperament will not govern the range and character of the community church. ”

“ Having seen with my own eyes these last communities of a State quickened into intellectual fervor through the devotion of university men and women, do you think I do not know what would happen to the spiritual life of these out-of-the-way communities if the supreme love of devoted church men and women were brought to bear upon them? ”

“ The day and generation is getting suspicious of pietists of all sorts who can tell sinners how to behave individually to one another; yes, who can even tell the labor group how to behave to the employer group and the employer group to the labor group, but who have no conception of what Christian principles apply as between one church group and another church group in the realm of religion, except to beat the other church group at all costs. ”

“ In a nutshell, we know in some measure what the contribution of human force and influence was from these thousand farms, farm by farm, to the upbuilding of the cities of the nation. The unfolding picture of this farm community’s impact upon the nation’s life during the century just passed is precisely the thing many persons have looked for [Pg 28] to put national meaning into the daily disappearance from the farms of the surplus of young adults which every few years amounts to a strong small nation poured into city industry. ”

“ It was, however, the meanest lick of Satan against the peace of the tenant to bewitch him into flitting from farm to farm and from community to community. And now the situation has come to such a pass that, unless the American church has the grace and backbone and subtlety to outgeneral the devil in his game, the devil wins; for in matters of religion, the landless man is between the devil and the deep sea. ”

“ Men got to coming for miles to the glover’s cot to tell their troubles and look into his deep eyes, hear his counsel, and feel his glad hand. He was a real peacemaker under the guise of a lawyer. His ethics backed up to and rested upon the Sermon on the Mount. He bought land, hired it tilled, built himself a better house, and settled into the character of a country squire. He was of the little church flock, and the rest of the flock came to set great store by his good sense, his wholesome cheer, indomitable activity, and, withal, his straight reliance on God. ”

“ The view of a layman, as this easily betrays itself to be, may prove something of a shock to the rank and file of the clergy; but it will serve, at least, to [Pg viii] show that a section of laymen take religion more seriously after all than they do economics, which forms their daily adventure. Deep in our hearts, many of us know that business is the great masculine sport of the age; and in comparison, the rôle of the priest and pastor and the function of the church lie in the far different realm of the heroic. ”

“ Here we have before our very eyes, then, a kind of a church which is run, [Pg 135] as President Van Hise said his university was run, not for a select few within its walls, but for the whomsoever within its own territory; a church that views every single member as a “carrier” of the goods of life to the last man, rather than as a precious mechanism in which should be lodged all the mysteries of a peculiar cult. ”

“ And this bald fact virtually declares the truth I am uttering—that the country contains the children of the nation, that the farm is the natural rearing-ground of well-bred children, and that the city core—the stamping-ground of business and adults—abhors children as “nature abhors a vacuum.” ”

“ This self-criticism will lead the great Protestant church bodies, let us hope, to a church conscience in regard to destructive church competition. Then it will be an easy step to coming to terms with one another in any locality, so as to give the community a chance to have a community church.
The community church, if we can have any faith in mankind, is sure to come along strong. If high officials become obstructionists, they will be swept away; for the people, when they once clearly see, will have their way in churches and religion as in the long run they do in government and politics. ”

“ God knows that the farmer already carries along enough of a handicap in community matters without being afflicted with this canker on his religion, as a discipline. It certainly looks like jumping on the man that’s down. But this sin against the farmer is not the worst of the wicked business. ”

“ But of recent years the percentage of rural church-goers has almost seemed to be in an inverse ratio to the increase in churches. One out of every five is not a showing that would have brought joy to the Puritan Fathers. What is the reason [Pg 13] for, this precarious situation in the rural churches of our nation? Does it indicate that our country population is made up of a less God-fearing folk than in former years? Does it demonstrate that religion is less near to the hearts of the farm workers of the United States than is true of its city dwellers? ”

“ Regular men and women long for children as they long for good luck, long life, and sweet happiness. But they do not want just children, any kind whatever so that they be children. No indeed! It is always a whole, healthy child, a bright, intelligent child, a loving, obedient child, a beautiful, virtuous child, that lives warm in their dreams. ”

“ The important thing, however, is that out of a general unrest and dissatisfaction with churches that aim to keep breeding up within themselves a highly pedigreed group of personalities which possess decidedly exclusive, if not aristocratic, characteristics, have arisen overnight, as it were, churches which admit to the inner circle all the pedigrees and aim at the democratic ideal of acting in the realm of religion for the last man, woman, and child in the community. ”

“ The children of rural America deserve by good rights a Foch to lead the forces of Bible literacy against a creeping, godless paganism. I have refrained from presenting the religious case for this crusade. The menace is so great that the social appeal should be sufficient—and should reach every intelligent lover of America, be he fundamentalist, modernist, ethicist, or just plain man. ”

“ I could not [Pg 40] refrain from asking, more to myself than to him, in my own perplexity, as I tried to share in the problem.
“The only thing I can do,” said he, as if the conversation had strengthened a previous resolution half-heartedly entertained, “is to yield to my wife’s judgment; sell the farm, go to some safe community where there is a church, Sunday-school, and a high school. We people here in this community made our great mistake in starting out wrong. We made a religion of our pure-bred hogs and cattle, and let our boys and girls go to the dogs.” ”

“ But when we are all consciously confronted with the problem of working out the religious life of 30,000,000 of isolated farm people, we wake up to the fact that we occupy a position where cult pride, cult individualism, and cult exclusiveness break down. ”

“ When all was ready, the separator began to sing, the cream came trickling out, the skim-milk poured into a ten-gallon can, as the gaunt six-foot-three, narrow-shouldered farmer turned the crank. At the first whirring tune-up of the separator, I hear a scurrying of feet in the timber lot below, and soon a regiment of hogs and pigs were at the fence, standing with hind feet in the long trough, front feet over the top rail of the fence, black heads in a row, beady little eyes peering up the hill, open mouths giving vent to a long-drawn [Pg 36] squeal of jubilant petition. ”

“ The church that shall go into the business of becoming self-conscious and of realizing its democracy will hear God’s summons to community redemption and begin to re-scale the map of church importance and usefulness in the community on heroic lines. ”

“ These facts, of course, offer a severe shock to those who have the little white church of the countryside enshrined in memory along with the little red school-house. We have fallen into the rut of taking it for granted that our country churches not only keep pace with the best religious life of the nation, but even stay a step or two in advance, if not in theology, at least in interest in godly things and in piety. ”

“ In three of these churches, including his own, he knew that the members of the congregation might be counted upon the fingers of each pastor’s two hands. The third church was closed that day; its flock could afford only an occasional shepherd.
In all four of those churches put together, not one fair-sized congregation. In all four, not one pastor paid a salary large enough to enable him to live on his income as a minister. In all four, men and women taxed by religion beyond [Pg 5] their ability to pay, yet unable to support their church without outside aid. ”

“ The force of this plain story of the human product of good farms, in a community where God was known, lies not in what might be considered the exceptional character of the community, but rather in the fact that the story of this particular community of farms is the story, in one respect or another, of all American farm communities. ”

“ The chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, in a call published (in the April 1924 number of “St. Isadore’s Plow”) for the second annual Catholic Rural Life Conference, says:
“We have two distinct entities of population, and, we might say, of civilization in the United States—the urban and the rural. The church is decidedly urban. So far as the Church is concerned, the country towns and villages are still ‘pagani.’”
Thus you see Protestant and [Pg 56] Catholic agree in seeing the menace of rural paganism within the borders of Christian America. ”

“ The history of the church, running back through the centuries, is, as I read it, dotted with awakenings, with the rise of a thought, of a hope-dream, with the rise of a man who out of the [Pg 78] very fog and blackness of popular waywardness, wantonness, unbelief, depravity, has stood up and successfully denied that human life must be all to the strong and that the poor must live unillumined. ”

“ It does not require a clever mind to know what will happen. When from two to ten kernels of corn are planted [Pg 111] in a piece of soil which has nutritive elements sufficient to bring only from one to five stalks to maturity, we know that a struggle for life is on which may doom one stalk, several stalks, or even all stalks. It is so with the competitive churches; but the corn simile fails to illustrate the case at the really tragic point. The subsidized churches, which make up the redundance, create in the community what is known by everybody there to be a case of veiled malignancy. ”

“ The residuum is five and a half millions of white tenants. This is the group that has swelled in numbers during the past four decades. This is the group that is all the time spreading over more and more acres, all the time creeping on to more and more valuable land. This group of landless men, women, and children (I do not mean to say that this is the only landless group of white farm people, for the agricultural-labor class makes another story) , occupying more and more the strategic positions in agriculture and country life, contains the devil’s quarry. ”

“ Only one fifth of the rural population goes to church.
Two fifths of the rural churches of the country are standing still or losing ground.
A quarter of all rural churches have no Sunday-school.
One fifth of all rural churches are kept alive by home-mission aid. Of these subsidized churches, a large number are in active competition with churches of very similar doctrines.
Seven out of every ten rural churches have only a fraction of a pastor apiece.
One third of all rural pastors receive so low a salary that they can live only by working at some other occupation. ”

“ Do we need any 30,000 more preachers in the country trenches? Do we need any shock troops at all? Isn’t it perfectly orthodox pacifism in these days for all the picked soldiers in the war on the devil to fall back into comfortable winter quarters? ”

“ The mission interest, the Bible interest, the educational interest, the interests social, musical, ceremonial, disciplinary, the evangelistic interest, the civic and industrial interest, the financial interest, the idealistic interest, both personal and social—all these and the rest will have good footing in the community church.
A church which should undertake to be a democracy in fact would find that there is only one way of “maintaining interest” enough actually to keep bringing the people together. ”