We come now to the final question of our chapter.  How has this renewal of naturalism affected the church and Christian preaching?  On the whole today, the Protestant church is accepting this naturalistic attitude.  In a signed editorial in the New Republic for the last week of December, 1919, Herbert Croly said, under the significant title of “Disordered Christianity”:  “Both politicians and property owners consider themselves entitled to ignore Christian guidance in exercising political and economic power, to expect or to compel the clergy to agree with them and if necessary to treat disagreement as negligible.  The Christian church, as a whole, or in part, does not protest against the practically complete secularization of political, economic and social life.”

You may say such extra-ecclesiastical strictures are unsympathetic and ill informed.  But here is what Washington Gladden wrote in January, 1918:  “If after the war the church keeps on with the same old religion, there will be the same old hell on earth that religious leaders have been preparing for centuries, the full fruit of which we are gathering now.  The church must cease to sanction those principles of militaristic and atheistic nationalism by which the rulers of the earth have so long kept the earth at war."[20] Thus from within the sanctuary is the same indictment of our naturalism.

[Footnote 20:  The Pacific, January 17, 1918.]

But you may say Dr. Gladden was an old man and a little extreme in some of his positions and he belonged to a past generation.  But there are many signs at the present moment of the increasing secularizing of our churches.  The individualism of our services, their casual character, their romantic and sentimental music, their minimizing of the offices of prayer and devotion, their increasing turning of the pulpit into a forum for political discussion and a place of common entertainment all indicate it.  There is an accepted secularity today about the organization.  Church and preacher have, to a large degree, relinquished their essential message, dropped their religious values.  We are pretty largely today playing our game the world’s way.  We are adopting the methods and accepting the standards of the market.  In an issue last month of the Inter-Church Bulletin was the following headline:  “Christianity Hand in Hand with Business,” and underneath the following: 

“George W. Wickersham, formerly United States attorney-general, says in an interview that there is nothing incompatible between Christianity and modern business methods.  A leading lay official of the Episcopal Church declares that what the churches need more than anything else is a strong injection of business method into their management.  ‘Some latter-day Henry Drummond,’ he said, ’should write a book on Business Law in the Spiritual World.’”