Goodby to Methodism

Burt J. (for nothing) Denman, 59, nervous, energetic vice president & general manager of United Light & Power Co., has an office in Chicago's Bankers Building, lives in suburban Wilmette. A devout Methodist, he has been vice chairman of the trustees of Garrett Biblical Institute and a pillar of First Church in Evanston. Burt Denman has lately had cause to wonder about Methodism. In Hearst-papers he has seen its preachers attacked as Reds. In Methodist journals like Zion's Herald and the chain of Advocates he has read editorials criticizing businessmen, bankers and especially utilitarians like himself. He has heard bold sermons even in First Church, out of the side of the mouth of popular, liberal Dr. Ernest Fremont Tittle.

With all this on his mind, Burt Denman got together in Chicago's Union League Club last July with onetime (1929-33) Secretary of Agriculture Arthur Mastick Hyde, President Fred Wesley Sargent of Chicago & North Western Lines, President Troy W. Appleby of Ohio National Life Insurance Co., Utility Lobbyist Hugh Stewart Magill, Banker Henry Samuel Henschen, and some 30 others. Good Methodists all, they were thoroughly alarmed over Methodism's leftward trend. They prepared a statement deploring substitution of "economic and social systems for the Christian ideal of individual responsibility and freedom of choice."

Quick to suggest the obvious retort that the Union League Club meeting smelled of money were liberal papers like The Christian Century and Zion's Herald. The latter weekly printed an editorial which cited "forged telegrams" and "whispering campaigns" as "the diabolical methods used by the utility companies in their efforts to forestall legislation affecting them." Last week its editor, Lewis Oliver Hartman, received and printed a letter from Utilitarian Denman:

"This editorial has brought me to a decision which I have been resisting for two years or more: that is, to withdraw from the Methodist Church. . . . I happen to be an officer of a public utility holding company and consequently I am an 'untouchable' and probably ought not raise my voice in protest, but I have been doing it and I am going to do so increasingly. . . . The Methodist Church . . . has meant much to me. . . . However, I can no longer continue to support in my small way, either financially or spiritually, a course with which I so thoroughly disagree."

Genuinely concerned, Editor Hartman hoped that Mr. Denman--first man of affairs publicly to take a step which many a man of affairs has predicted would be taken--"may find a satisfactory church home in some other denomination."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.