Orthodox Superstition

There are not many U.S. economists with a doctor's degree in Biblical archeology. Dr. George Hedley, 52, is one of the few. As Professor of Sociology and Economics at California's Mills College (for women), Economist Hedley has explained Adam Smith to eleven classes of Mills girls. As college chaplain, Methodist Hedley packs Sunday services with his wise and scholarly preaching. But he is impatient with student intellectuals, left or right, who respect his secular scholarship while looking down on his religious beliefs. Last week, in a book called Superstitions of the Irreligious (Macmillan; $2.50), he chucked a few stones at his irreligious friends' "glass houses of preconception and prejudgment."

The Proudly Impious. Hedley has a neat answer for Superstition No. 1: "that the content and emphasis of religious thought undergo no change." Says Dr. Hedley, who believes man's knowledge of God can expand as much as his knowledge of science: "The proudly impious yet persist in judging all religion by their own childhood memories . . . Perhaps it is well that [they] did not meet Albert Einstein until they got into Upper Division courses, John Dewey until they entered Teachers' College; or, on as good grounds as they can show for religion, they might have declared physics and philosophy unworthy of their notice . . ."

To Superstition No. 2--the popular neglect of Western culture's Christian basis --he answers: "Public education . . . in trying to be nonsectarian, quickly became nonChristian, and so in total impact often anti-religious . . . The thinking of the Christian philosophers, being commonly uncredited to them, is diffused into general overtones, and so is neither rightly appreciated nor soundly criticized . . . It is as if the chemist were forbidden to include in his course outline any reference to the salts, or the botanist were required to be completely silent about conifers . . ."

The Free Soul. Point by point, Hedley ticks off some other superstitions of the irreligious: that religious ideals are impractical, that religion is an escape mechanism, that religion is necessarily at odds with fact and reason. His reply: "To say that we believe in God is something neither based on scientific evidence nor contrary to it . . . The realm of religious faith is the realm of values."

He heaves his heaviest boulders at the old argument that Christian moral values can be maintained by the individual outside of any organized religion. "The experience of worship is something different in community from what it is in solitude . . . To say that one adheres to Christian values, and then to refuse to have any share in the institution that has preserved those values, and that today is struggling to make them ever more real among men, is hypocrisy indeed . . .We shall always need the free soul, the adventurer . . . his flashes of personal inspiration. But the greater the service he renders, the surer it is that an institution will have to assume the task of cherishing his insights and advancing his enthusiasms."

Concludes Author Hedley: "The great majority of the self-consciously irreligious . . . are devout seekers of truth, so long as it is not called 'religion.' They are loyal defenders of value, most of whose sources they have forgotten or ignore . . . How sad it is, then, that . . . superstition has them so firmly in its grip."

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