1. Indifference to the Church.  As one typical young sergeant, a member of the student movement, puts it:  “The men simply have no time for it.  They do not care for the Church because it did not care for them.”  There is a general feeling that the churches do not understand them or sympathize with the social and industrial disabilities of the men.  They feel that the ideals of life for which the Church stands are dull, dim, and altogether unnatural; its standard of comfort and complacent respectability makes no appeal to them and they have no part or lot in it.  They feel that this respectability of the Church is quite in keeping with flagrant selfishness in social and industrial relationships, that the Church is largely in the possession of the privileged classes, who monopolize it, and who have neither sought nor welcomed them within its doors.

As one representative chaplain in a most influential position in France says:  “There is the plain fact that the great mass of men are out with the Christian Church, and do not look to it as being in any vital relation to life as they know it, either in peace or war.  There is the deeper and sadder fact that to a very large proportion of them God Himself means little or nothing, or means something that is very unchristian.  Where there is a living presentation of religion men are responsive—­extraordinarily so.  Put it how you will, men must be summoned to a new thought, a new outlook on life, a new attitude towards the unseen and eternal.”

2.  An attitude of separation and alienation from the Church.  For the most part the men are largely ignorant of what the Church really is, and for this the churches are largely responsible.  They believe that its message and presentation of truth are often too feminine and impractical and that its fellowship is too cold and exclusive.  They do not understand the vocabulary and tone adopted frequently by preachers in speaking of religious things, and they feel that the churches are almost complete strangers to the real facts of life with which they have to deal.

It is true that the practical work of the churches in their helpful ministry through the various organizations working in the camps has brought many of the men into vital contact with religion for the first time.  But the war has revealed the lack of the churches’ hold upon the men in pre-war times.

3. Criticism of its worldliness.  The men have an unuttered belief in God, and they reverence Jesus Christ as the friend and brother and comrade of man, as the embodiment of the highest ideal they can conceive.  But they feel that somehow the churches do not adequately represent Christ, that they have become merely the adjunct of the State to second its schemes and aims.  Many feel that the Church has lowered its colors in the present war, that in some countries it has been little more than a recruiting station for enlistment and that its message cannot be reconciled with the Sermon on the Mount.