Soldiers into Churchmen?

When the ten million and more come marching home again--such of them as do come back--most of them will not be bothering their young but hard-boiled heads any more about religion in the old home parish than they did about religion in their outfits--which was mighty little.

So Dr. Bernard Iddings Bell, in the current Harper's, answers the sanguine who believe that World War II will turn U.S. fighting men into peacetime churchgoers. Dr. Bell, High-Church Episcopalian priest, author of the caustic Church in Disrepute (TIME, Feb. 22), takes no stock in the no-atheists-in-foxholes idea, quotes a chaplain that if the saying is true it is only "because there are few atheists anywhere." On the lack of religious interest among men in the forces, Dr. Bell sides with the realistic fighting-front report brought back by World's Christian Endeavor Union President Daniel A. Poling.

Dr. Bell's explanation: "The separation of Church and State in the schools, and the astounding incompetence of most of the churches in respect" to religious education, and the indifference of parents to God, have combined to turn out a group of young people composed, to the extent of about 80%, of religious illiterates.

"The churches had not won them in the days before they went away. They will not have lost religion while in the forces. Few of them had any to lose."

The men, says Bell, think of the churches "as social clubs . . . smothered by respectability and enervated by timidity ... led chiefly by parsons more intent to please the congregations than to blurt out the disconcerting will of God . . . controlled ... by small-bore laymen fearful lest the Church blow ardently upon the latent fires of spiritual and moral revolution . . . impotent to prevent the war . . . [unable] to stand for prevention of a revengeful and dishonest peace."

But he can see a way out. The churches, he thinks, can redeem themselves in the eyes of the returning servicemen and win their loyalty if they will cultivate three attributes:

"Simplicity ... the blazing centrality of God as He is in Christ.

"Sincerity ... a Church which is the conscience of Society . . . which . . . will condemn selfish, nationalistic, imperialistic, compromising social action . . . [and will] insist upon a Society which will recognize, as Jesus does, that man is more than a producer and consumer of goods, more than a breeder of wage-slaves and cannon fodder.

"Sympathy . . . not pity but fellow-suffering. . . . The churches must lose their lives for Christ's sake and that of the brethren, become the hidden leaven of a selfless love in the lump of misery called mankind, go out and share the bitter things with not one timid shudder, or else be trodden under foot by men who have learned what life is all about."

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