[Excerpts] ...

[...]

This deeper framework for life came to me rather suddenly, as to many in those years, through the speaking and writing of Reinhold Niebuhr.

Here was a searching realism that was willing to face all the ambiguity and squalor of any human social situation.

At the same time, it was intensely moral, for it had a deep commitment to human good. The difference was that this commitment was not based either on a belief in the overriding goodness of men or even on the possibility of establishing ideal solutions in social history—both of which seemed contradicted by the obvious facts. It was based on faith in God, and it resulted in a call to serve one’s fellows however ambiguous the situation in which man might find himself.

It was now possible for me to face the war with a realism that was not cynical and an idealism that was not naïve. I was intensely interested in this new “realistic theology” when, just out of college, I went out in 1940 to China to teach English at Yenching. Although I had had no seminary training, I devoured theological tomes every moment of my free time from then until I went to camp in 1943.

By that time my whole orientation had changed: from the naturalistic humanist of my college days, I became what I felt to be a “convinced Christian.”

My new faith, however, was not so much the result of any personal religious experience as it was the intellectual conviction that only in terms of the Christian view of things could I make sense out of the social history in which we live and the ethical decisions we humans have to make.

And so to camp I went, replete with theological jargon, many secondhand concepts, and a conviction that mine was the only way in which to view life. For a person thus encumbered, those first months of camp raised the most urgent and devastating of questions: What’s so important anyway about the way a person looks at life? Isn’t this a typically intellectualist way of looking at our crises?

Are these “big problems of life” really problems at all?

Surely the issues of our existence are not these intellectual points of naturalism vs. Christian faith, or even of idealism vs. psychoanalysis.

Such are all right for the philosophically minded collegian; but are they basic? The real issues of life are surely material and political:
how we can eat and keep warm, be clothed and protected from the weather, and organize our common efforts. These matters are resolved by practical experience and by techniques, not by this or that philosophy or religious faith, however, convincing an expression of that faith may be to the cool observer of the scene. It was not that I thought religion wrong; I simply thought it irrelevant. What real function in actual life does it perform under conditions where basic problems are dealt with by techniques and organizational skill?

I was quite willing to admit that there are people who are interested in the nature of man and the universe; and that apparently there are others who enjoy religion and going to church.

But, unlike food and sanitation which one must have in order to live, is not religion merely a matter of personal taste, of temperament, essential only if someone wants it but useless if one does not happen to be the type that likes it?

Is there any “secular” use for religion; does it have any value for the common life of mankind? Or is it there useless, because secularity with its techniques, its courage, and its idealism is quite able to create a full human life without religion?

As I asked myself these questions over and over throughout those first months of camp, I became what we might call “secular”. That is, I was a man convinced that while religion might help those who liked it, it was a waste of time for others. Certainly “the others” now included myself.

Wherever I turned, everything I saw reinforced this view. Of what use to our life were the vocations of teaching philosophy or preaching Christianity?

Those of us who had performed these tasks in the outside world now carried our weight of camp work; yes— but not in those roles. We were useful only insofar as teacher or evangelist became able stoker or competent baker.

No one on the Labor Committee ever ventured to suggest that philosophizing or preaching be regarded as valid camp jobs. That fact alone appeared to me to be an adequate commentary on their social usefulness. Apparently our intellectual, and especially our “religious,” vocations were so unrelated to the real needs of life that they had to become “avocations.”

They were relegated to the categories of leisure-time and Sunday activities. The engineer, the doctor, the laborer, the producer, on the other hand, were asked to modulate, but not to abandon, their vocations when they entered our community. Each of their calling proved its worth by the necessity for it in the support of our material existence, and by the fact that those of us in “spiritual’ vocations had to learn other skills if we were to take part in the daily work.

For these reasons, after I arrived at camp, I quickly lost my former interest both in religious activities and in theological reflection. The missionaries were, it is true, achieving a unity and accord hitherto unknown, both among the various groups of Protestants and between the Protestants as a whole and the Catholics.

Numerous joint enterprises consisting of lectures, services, and the like were planned and initiated. In all of this I took only the mildest interest, and soon found myself dropping out altogether.

My feelings found full expression one Sunday when, rushing by the church bent on some errand for the Housing Committee, I heard a familiar hymn ringing out through the open windows. I asked myself irritably, “What for—when there are so many important things to be done?” And shaking my head in disbelieving wonder, I went on about my business.

[excerpt]

By the end of the first month of camp, my view of life was being altered. I went back to the confident humanism so characteristic of the liberal academic circles in America I had recently quitted.

As I looked around me during those early weeks, I felt convinced that man’s ingenuity in dealing with difficult problems was unlimited, making irrelevant those so-called “deeper issues” of his spiritual life with which religion and philosophy pretended to deal.

[excerpt]

One had to do with a prominent American missionary family. The head of the house, although then middle-aged, was a handsome, intelligent, sophisticated Ivy League graduate.

With graying hair, ruddy complexion, and clean-cut features, albeit now a little rotund, he cut a suave figure in gatherings of either business or religious leaders. His wife was a capable, respectable, motherly woman, wedded to innumerable social causes, a born hostess, at once elegant and gracious. They represented almost the model of the American professional couple: educated, liberal, kind-hearted, epitomizing good will and Christian concern. They had two sons, one sixteen and one thirteen, one or both of whom might, therefore, move into a dorm.

Since one of the overcrowded families of four lived right next door, I knew these good people were by no means ignorant of the problem. When I knocked at their room, I expected a relatively easy time.

Mrs. White greeted me, as I anticipated, with courtesy and graciousness.

As I warmed to my subject, she expressed concern for the plight of these unfortunate people, and assured me that she and her husband were only too willing to do what they could to help solve this problem. Considerably encouraged, I unfolded our plan for a dorm for boys. I told her of the “fine Christian schoolteacher” who would proctor it, and how much I hoped they might agree to help us effect this resolution. At this point in our conversation, Mrs. White, if anything, grew even more polite. But she also grew more vague—I noticed a certain hesitancy. It became harder and harder to get back to the practical details. Finally, I suggested that perhaps they would like to have time to think it over and that I would come back the next day for her answer.

“Why, thank you so much,” she said with her soft smile, “This will give my husband and me a chance to think and pray about it tonight.”

On that encouraging note, I left.

When I returned the next day, she seemed both more definite and more sure of herself. I was mildly elated. Here at last, I thought, is someone who will take the lead, not in opposing us but in helping us. I listened eagerly as she began graciously to approach the subject. “We have had our evening of thought and prayer about the problem you shared with us,” she said, smiling at me, “and we have reached our decision.

We cannot allow our young sons to go into the dorm.”
“But they will be only fifty yards away, Mrs. White!” I exclaimed.
“Surely you don’t think anything will happen to them there under Eric Ridley’s [Liddell’s] care!”
“Oh no, it’s just that Paul is only sixteen and subject to so many influences right now. I don’t want to say anything about those other boys, but you know how they are! And besides, the heating and drafts here are very unusual, and I know that, with the little he gets to eat, unless someone watches over him, he will always be getting colds and flu. And it is quite out of the question for Johnny at thirteen to leave us.” “Okay, fair enough”—though I was very disappointed—”Let’s look at another alternative then.

How about your youngest moving into this room with you, and Paul moving in with the two Jones boys in the next block?”
“Oh no. We talked about that, too, and have made up our minds. We believe in keeping a nice home for our boys to come to, and that would be impossible with three in one room. As we talked last night, all this became clearer and clearer: home and family are so important in a place like this.

We decided that our first moral responsibility in the camp is to keep a real American home for our two boys.”

I could see that in her gracious but determined way, she was feeling more comfortable now that she had found a clear moral principle to back her up. etc., etc.

[excerpt]

To our mixed amusement and dismay we found that our stomachs, like implacable slave masters, completely supervised our powers of thought. A conversation might begin with religion, politics, or sex, but it was sure to end with culinary fantasies.

As we would warm to the topic, soon we would again be describing in intricate detail and tasting in our excited imaginations long forgotten dishes in restaurants visited in some dim past.

My one silly ambition, which obsessed me day and night, was to walk once again into a Howard Johnson restaurant and to savor their hamburger and chocolate milkshake.

[excerpt]

The ultimate roots of social law and order extend down to the same moral and religious depths of the self where lies the basis of cooperation and sharing.

If a man is committed only to his own survival and advancement, or to that of his family and group, then under pressure, neither will he share with his neighbor nor be obedient to the law. Had our community been made up solely of such men, all cooperative action devoted to the production and distribution of food, and all courts and laws devoted to the maintenance of order would have become inoperative.

My early indifference to the moral element in society faded, as our splendid institutions were threatened with collapse from within. I had thought that the only vocation that the camp could not use was the religious calling.

But now it was clear that all the many secular vocations and skills the camp needed were of use to us only if the men who performed them had some inner strength. Hardheaded men of affairs are inclined to smile at the moralist and religionist for concentrating his energies on the problems of morality and conscience far removed from what he considers to be the real business of life: that is to say, producing food, building houses, making clothes, curing bodies, and defining laws.

But as this experience so cogently showed, while these things are essential for life, ultimately they are ineffective unless they stem from some cooperative spirit within the community. Far from being at the periphery of life, spiritual and moral matters are the foundation for all the daily work of the world.

This same hardheaded man of affairs will probably continue to smile—but the effectiveness of his day-to-day work will still be based on that ethical core.

[excerpt]

A community needs ethical people, but does the secular world need religious people?

Are the saints really good, is religious piety a requisite for communal virtue, do we need God in order to love our fellow man?

These questions occurred to me with increasing frequency as the deep significance of the moral dimension of life came clear to me. I looked around to find enlightenment. I had to admit to myself that no easy answer to these questions could be found merely by noting the way in which different types of people, religious and irreligious, behaved.

It was not possible to study us and say,
“There, that proves you must be religious, for only the pious are good.”

People continually leap out of all the categories we try to put them in, and behave in totally unexpected ways. The most important lesson I learned is that there are no cut-and-dried categories in human life, no easily recognizable brand names by which we can estimate our fellows. Over and over “respectable people,” one of the commonest labels applied in social intercourse, turned out to be uncooperative, irritable, and worse, dishonest.

Conversely, many who were neither respectable nor pious were in fact, valiant.

At the same time, many obvious bums were just plain bums. It was the mystery, the richness, and the surprise of human beings that struck me the most when I looked round at my fellows.

[excerpt]

The Catholic fathers possessed a religious and moral seriousness free of spiritual pride, they communicated to others not how holy they were but their inexhaustible acceptance and warmth toward the more worldly and wayward laymen.

Nothing and no one seemed to offend them, or shock them; no person outraged their moral sense.

A person could count on their accepting him, as he could count on their integrity—and such acceptance of others is sadly rare on the part of “moral” people.

Consequently, no one felt uncomfortable with them, or sensed that sharpest of all hostilities of one human being to another—that non-acceptance which springs from moral disapproval and so from a feeling of moral superiority.

The fathers mixed amiably with anybody and everybody; with men accustomed to drinking, gambling, swearing, wrenching, even taking dope, men replete with all the major and minor vices. Yet they remained unchanged in their own character by this intimate, personal contact with “the world.”

Somehow they seemed able to accept and even to love the world as it was, and in this acceptance the presence of their own strength gave new strength to our wayward world. How much less creative, I thought—and how far from the Gospels—is the frequent Protestant reaction of moral disapproval, and of spiritual if not physical withdrawal.

Although they did try to be friendly, the Protestants nevertheless typically huddled together in a compact “Christian remnant.” Not unlike the Pharisees in the New Testament, they kept to their own flock of saved souls, evidently because they feared to be contaminated in some way by this sinful world which they inwardly abhorred. In contrast, the Catholic fathers mixed.

They made friends with anyone in camp, helped out, played cards, smoked, and joked with them. They were a means of grace to the whole community.

[excerpt]

All in all, therefore, the Catholic fathers played a most creative role in our camp life, and the internees responded with genuine affection. It is true that many of the peculiar and difficult problems of traditional Catholicism and its relations to non-Catholics were not evident in our situation.

Wisely at the start, the “bishop” in charge determined not to try to control in any way the political or the moral life of the camp as a whole.

As a minority group, they carefully refrained from any action against the freedom of expression of other faiths.

The one Achilles’ heel which I saw in their relations with the rest of the camp concerned the problem of intellectual honesty, one which every authoritarian form of religion must finally face.

Among the Protestant missionaries, diversity of opinion was so prevalent that at first it seemed embarrassing when compared to the clear unity enjoyed by our Catholic friends.

The fundamentalists and the liberals among us could work together, to be sure, when it came to services in the church and other common activities. But still their frequent bitter disagreements were painfully obvious and damaging. This was especially clear one night when a liberal British missionary gave a learned lecture on Christianity and evolution. The next night a leader among the fundamentalists responded with a blistering attack on “this atheistic doctrine” because it did not agree with the account of creation in Genesis.

A day later I happened to be sitting in the dining room next to a scholarly Belgian Jesuit. We had often talked together about theology and its relation to science. The Jesuit thoroughly agreed that the lecture by the fundamentalist had been stuff and nonsense.

He said that the quicker the church realized that she does not have in her revelation a mass of scientific information and so allows science to go on about its business without interference, the better for both the church and the world.

Two nights later, however, the leader and temporary “bishop” of the Catholic group gave his lecture on the same topic. He was a big, jovial, American priest, large of heart but not overburdened with education, either in science or in theology.

As he declared, he was only “going to give the doctrine I learned in seminary”.

Apparently the series so far had sown confusion (as well it might) in the minds of his flock, and so he had “to tell them what the truth is.” I gathered that to him truth was equivalent to what he had “learned in seminary.”

Knowing him, we were not surprised that his lecture, although based on dogmatic ecclesiastical statements of various sorts rather than on particular verses of Genesis, repeated idea for idea the fundamentalist’s position of a few nights before.

From that time on my Jesuit friend sedulously avoided the subject of science and religion. Nor would he criticize in his temporary “bishop” the very concepts he had ridiculed in the Protestant.

Both critical faculties and independence of thought seemed to wither, once a matter had been officially stated, even on such a low level of ecclesiastical authority as we had.

[excerpt]

Over a year later, this same priest to my great surprise revealed again the difficulty an authoritarian religion has with intellectual honesty.

There was in camp a good-hearted but not intellectually very sophisticated British woman—divorced and with two small children—who was increasingly unhappy with her Protestant faith. As she explained to me once, her Anglican religion was so vacillating and ambiguous that she found no comfort in it.

It seemed to say Yes and then No to almost every question she asked.

Such vagueness on matters of great concern to her failed, apparently, to provide needed inner security for a lone woman in that crumbling colonial world.

So she was searching for something “more solid,” she said, to hang on to. I was not surprised when she told me this same Jesuit priest had begun to interest her in Roman Catholicism, nor even when a month or so later she said she had been confirmed.

But I was surprised when she showed me with great pride the booklets the priest had given her to explain certain doctrines. Among them was one she especially liked. It described in great detail—and with pictures of Adam, Eve, and all the animals—the six days of creation and all the stirring events of the historical Fall.

Here were statements clear and definite enough for anyone looking for absolute certainty.



But whether she would have found that certainty had she heard the priest talk to me of science and theology, I was not so sure.

One thing I learned from this incident was that a mind needing security will make a good many compromises with what it once knew to be false.

When these same views—now expounded by the priest—had been expressed by the fundamentalist, she had felt them to be absurd. Clearly, the fundamentalist’s faith did not offer her the certainty she yearned for.

With the Jesuit, she was willing to pay the price of her own independence of thought, which she had formerly prized, in return for the greater gain of religious assurance. The same price, of course, was paid by the priest.

For the sake of the authority and growth of his church, he paid heavily in the good coin of his own independence and honesty of mind. Perhaps she, as a lonely woman in need, gained from her bargain.

But I concluded— although no Catholic would agree with this—that he, as a highly educated and intelligent man, was quite possibly a loser with his.

Certainly, the most troublesome, if also exciting, aspect of our life for the younger Catholic fathers was their continual proximity to women—women of all ages, sizes, and shapes. With their rules relaxed so that they could work, they found themselves mixing with women to an extent which they had not known for years.

[excerpt]

Baker’s religion was rigidly fundamentalist and conservative, and his moral standards equally strict.

Any deviation from his own doctrinal beliefs or any hint of a personal vice spelled for him certain damnation. From his bed in the corner, as we “bulled” together around the stove, he would cheerfully assure us that anyone who smoked, cussed, or told off-color jokes was certain to go to hell.

Near him in the row of beds were two American ex-marine-named Coolidge—and so-called “Cal”—and Knowles, and a Scottish atheist named Bruce who, despite his name, assured us he was not of Celtic origin:
“Goddamn it, I’m a Jew, I’m a Jew,” he said to Baker one day when the latter tried to convert him.

[excerpt]

This bizarre view of Baker’s was by no means typical of even conservative missionaries. What was typical of much conservative religion, however, was the radical separation in Baker’s mind of what he thought of as moral concerns and what were, in fact, the real moral issues of our camp life.

For him holiness had so thoroughly displaced love as the goal of Christian living that he could voice such a prejudiced and inhuman policy with no realization that he was in any way compromising the character of his Christian faith or his own moral qualities.

As Cal put it with a laugh, “Thank the Lord he’s only a harmless missionary.”

[excerpt] Everyone in camp—missionary and layman, Catholic and Protestant—failed in some way or another to live up to his own ideals and did things he did not wish to do and felt he ought not to do.

It was not of this common human predicament that I was thinking.

What I felt especially weak in these Protestants were their false standard of religious and ethical judgment that frustrated their own desire to function morally within the community, for this standard judged the self and others by criteria which were both arbitrary and irrelevant. In the end, it left the self-feeling righteous and smug when the real and deadly moral issues of camp life had not yet even been raised, much less resolved.

[excerpt]

“If that is morality, then I want none of it,” said a man on our shift disgusted with this narrowness.

Serious religion in this way became separated from serious morality, with the result that both religion and morality—and the community in which both existed—were immeasurably debilitated.

The most pathetic outcome of this legalism, however, was the barrier it created between the self-consciously pious and the other human beings around them. Almost inevitably the conservative Protestant would find himself disapproving, rejecting, and so withdrawing from those who did not heed his own fairly rigid rules of personal behavior.

Once I watched with fascinated horror this process of rejection and withdrawal take place when a nice, young British fundamentalist named Taylor joined our cooking shift. Taylor wanted with all his heart to get along with the men there, to be warm and friendly to them, as he knew a Christian should be.

All went well for the first few hours or so; no one told a dirty joke or otherwise made life difficult for Taylor. But then when we were ladling out the stew for lunch, a few drops of the thick, hot liquid fell on Neal’s hand.

Tom Neal was an ex-sailor of great physical strength and brassbound integrity.

Naturally, this British tar made the air blue with his curses as he tried to get the burning stew off his hand. When the pain was over, as it was in a minute or so, he relaxed and returned to his usual bantering, cheerful ways.

But something was now different. Taylor hadn’t said a word, nor had he moved a muscle. But he looked as if he had frozen inside, as if he had felt an uprush of uncontrollable disapproval.

That feeling, like all deep feelings, projected itself outward, communicating itself silently to everyone around. An intangible gulf had appeared from nowhere, as real as the stew both were ladling out of the cauldron.

Of course Neal felt it, and looked up closely and searchingly into Taylor’s withdrawn and unhappy eyes. With surprising insight he said, “Hey, boy, them words of mine can’t hurt you! Come and help me get this stew to the service line.”

Taylor tried to smile; he hated himself for his reaction. But he felt immensely uncomfortable and spent the rest of his time with us on the shift spiritually isolated and alone.

He was happy, so he told me one day, only when he was with the other “Christian folk.”

[excerpt]

Among the missionaries were indeed many who seemed free of the proud and petty legalism characteristic of numerous others. When this was the case, they contributed a great deal to our life: not only rugged honesty and willingness to work, but also the rarer cooperative and helpful spirit of persons dedicated to a wider welfare than their own.

Those missionaries were most creative; it seemed to me, whose religion had been graced by liberalism in some form. By this I do not mean to include people with any particular brand of theology. Rather it seemed apparent that people with all sorts of theological opinions, liberal or orthodox, could be immensely impressive as people so long as they never identified their own beliefs either with the absolute truth or with the necessary conditions for salvation.

These people were able to meet cooperatively and warmly with others, even with those who had no relation to Christianity at all. Whatever their code of personal morals might be, they knew that love and service of the neighbor and self-forgetfulness even of one’s own holiness, were what a true Christian life was supposed to be. Unlike the pious legalist, they attempted to apply no homemade plumb lines to their neighbors’ lives, but sought only to help them whenever their help was really needed.

[excerpt]

The man who more than anyone brought about the solution of the teenage problem was Eric Ridley [Liddell].

It is rare indeed when a person has the good fortune to meet a saint, but he came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.

Often in an evening of that last year I (headed for some pleasant rendezvous with my girl friend) would pass the game room and peer in to see what the missionaries had cooking for the teenagers.

As often as not, Eric Ridley [Liddell] would be bent over a chessboard or a model boat, or directing some sort of square dance—absorbed, warm, and interested, pouring all of himself into this effort to capture the minds and imaginations of those penned-up youths.

If anyone could have done it, he could.

A track man, he had won the 440 in the Paris Olympics for England in the twenties, and then had come to China as a missionary.

In camp he was in his middle forties, lithe and springy of step and, above all, overflowing with good humor and love of life. He was aided by others, to be sure. But it was Eric’s enthusiasm and charm that carried the day with the whole effort.

Shortly before the camp ended, he was stricken suddenly with a brain tumor and died the same day. The entire camp, especially its youth, was stunned for days, so great was the vacuum that Eric’s death had left.

etc., etc., etc.

[further reading]
http://www.weihsien-paintings.org/books/Gilkey/BOOK/p_preface.htm

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