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Contribution of the Church to the Preservation of Freedom (draft), September 6, 1950
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Contribution of the Church to the Preservation of Freedom (draft), September 6, 1950
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The original documents are located in Box D13, folder "Contribution of the Church to the
Preservation of Freedom (draft), September 6, 1950" of the Ford Congressional Papers:
Press Secretary and Speech File at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
Copyright Notice
The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of
photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. The Council donated to the United
States of America his copyrights in all of his unpublished writings in National Archives collections.
Works prepared by U.S. Government employees as part of their official duties are in the public
domain. The copyrights to materials written by other individuals or organizations are presumed to
remain with them. If you think any of the information displayed in the PDF is subject to a valid
copyright claim, please contact the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
Digitized from Box D13 of The Ford Congressional Papers: Press Secretary and Speech File at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library
HN 35 Gen.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE CHURCH TO THE PRESERVATION OF
FREEDOM
(Draft of Speech Prepared at the Request of the
S. Arthur Devan
Analyst
National Defense
September 6, 1950
FORD i LIBRARY GERALD
Though we have but recently emerged from the most extensive war
in history, we are not at peace, but stand on the brink of another and
greater world conflict. In imagination we vaguely see the maelstrom
swirling by us. We are not in the midst of it, but our feet are in the
waters. It is not a dynastic struggle like the old wars or a quarrel
between two powers over some conflict of interest. It is not primarily
a political strife. It is not, as yet, a contest of military force. It is a
great spiritual struggle for the minds of men.
We know dimly what is at stake - all the things we have treasured
as civilisation. Here is our Free world, and over against it, hostile
and minatory, is the world of totalitarian communism. In between are vast
masses of humanity, hundreds and hundreds of millions of people, in Europe
ans Asia and even here in the Americas, who will some day decide where they
belong.
Our world is a world of freedom under law; the Soviet world is a
world of despotism in which the human being as such has no reason for existence
except to serve the will of the State as embodied in a little oligarchy of
self-chosen leaders. One world acknowledges nothing higher than economic
determinism; the other world - our world - believes in God. Mankind can not
permanently remain in this dual existence, any more than the United States
could stand half-slave and half free. One or the other kind of life will
prevail an this planet.
FORD j LIBRARY GERALD
- 2 -
I have been asked to discuss with you today the contribution of
the Christian Church to the preservation of freedom. That is a very
large and difficult subject, because it has so many angles and ramifi-
cations. Yet it is an appropriate subject, for it is what the Church stands
for, and even the Church itself as an institution, which is at the vortex of
the conflict. Totalitarianism as developed by Hitler and the Nasis, was
able to take over, remodel or destroy everything but the Church. The leaders
of capital succumbed, the labor unions succumbed, the political parties
succumbed, the universities succumbed, but the Church - Protestant and
Catholic did not succumb, to Hithr. The new red fascism of communism has
swept aside everything else in the areas which it rules, but it has not
succeeded in destroying religion, even in Russia. Yet, the Church is under
attack in every Communist satellite country - Hungary, Bulgaria, Csecho-
slovakia, East Germany. They are trying to make the people cease believing
in God. They are imprisoning and executing clergymen. They are preventing
the religious instruction of youth. Where the institutions of the Church
are too strong to be destroyed outright, they are restricted and perverted
and repressed. Everything connected with religion is hateful to communism.
And with good reason. Until the spiritual forces that lead men to believe
in God and in eternal laws of righteousness, and in the inherent worth of
each human soul, until these forces, I say, are destroyed, no victory for
communism can be final, and the leaders of communism are well aware of that
fact. That they will finally succeed in this destruction I do not believe.
It is more likely that the negative attitude of the Soviet system toward
religion, will be the rock on which it splits. But in the meantime there is
this desperate struggle going on, and we must ask ourselves, what is to
GERAL Be FORD LIBRARY
- 3 -
our part in it as loyal adherents of the Christian Church.
Religion and Vitality
I want to begin by pointing out to you a fact of human history
that is too little realized. That fact is the close connection between
religion and vitality. The law of history seems to be that the vitality
which any large group of people, such as 8 nation, reveals, is more or less
commensurate with the religiousness of that group. There are two conditions.
The religion of the group must be intensely held; second it must be of a
high grade or quality. If any people 1s very religious, and their religion
is of 8 high quality (at least relatively to their neighbors) then you may
expect that people to show a high level of achievement along whatever lines
may be appropriate to their genius and environment. The vitality will be
there, and it will blossom in many possible forms - it may be physical
endurance and prowess, or military or artistic or literary or political
achievement or in the deep thinking of philosophys or in exploration or
commerce. But the vitality, which may manifest itself in any of 80 many
modes of achievement, connects itself with a vigorous religious conscious-
ness of a high order.
It is often said that modern civilization 1s based on the
abhievements of three ancient peoples. - the Hebrews, from whom derive our
religious and moral concepts, the Greeks to whom we are indebted for their
philosophy, their mathematics their sesthetics and their immortal literature,
and the Romans from whom have come, in direct descent, our law and political
organization and military science. Now every one of these peoples was,
at the time of its flowering, an intensely religious people, and the
FORD & LIBRARY GERALD
- 4 -
religion of the Greeks and Romans, while pagan by our standards, was
of a very high order compared with that of other peoples. The Hebrews,
of course are the most conspicuous representatives of this law of human
life. Starting as a Bedouin people undistinguishable from their Semitic
neighbors except for certain religious concepts which began to dominate
their life, they have endured through some three thousand years. Their
kinsmen have been lost in the sands of history as have their various
contemperaries. But this people has maintained its group and cultural
and other identity through more difficulties and vicissitudes than we
can well imagine, and done so without the support of a common home
territory, without a political organisation, and without a common language.
But they have retained their religious earnestness, and the level of
their religion has been far superior to that of most of the world. The
vitality of this group has been amasing. It has been d emonstrated not
not only in their physical survival (which is amasing), but in their
emotional energy, in their diversified intellectual achievements and in
all the manifold contributions which they have made and are making to the
life of the world, and especially that of every nation, where like our own,
they choose to settle.
It would be very interesting to follow this thesis of the
connection between religion and vitality through history, to note for
example, that when at any time a people has taken a jump forward in its
religious life, there has been immediately an efflorescence of vital
achievement. Take Sectland, for example. It was a poor country, small
and with a barren soil and few inhabitants. It was very backward, its
to the French Kingoford
chief function apparently being to furnish soldiers of fortune/when indeed
GERALD
LIBRAR
- 5 -
it was not purely barbarian. Then came John Knox and his compeers.
Religious life in Scotland suddenly rose to a new level both of
quality and intensity. Then Scotland began to furnish scholars and
statesmen and soldiers and captains of industry and inventors and
preachers and writers and bankers and poets and all kinds of leaders
to the English-speaking world, and has been doing it ever since. The
vitality of the Scottish people is not to be attributed to the scenery
of the country, or to the oatmeal the people eat; it is due to the
Kirk and all that the Kirk stands for in the hearts of Scotchmen.
We have abundant evidence of this connection between religion
and vitality in the history of the American people. Our first settlers
were many of them religious migrants, who came here because of the
depth of their religious consciousness. Not only Puritans in New
England and Quakers in Pennsylvania, but Catholics in Maryland and
Huguenots in South Carolina. One way and another they were people of
intense religious convictions and their religion was of a high order of
quality. No wonder they laid the foundations of an amazing civilization
after they had cleared the wilderness and quelled the savages, and
branched out into every kind of undertaking possible to adventurous
colonials.
Everywhere they built churches along with their homes. Here
in Virginik we have, down by Hampton Roads, the recently unsovered
foundation stones of the church built in 1609 or 1610, the first English
speaking ehurch on this continent. And as the pioneers want west the
shurch went with them in the person of the itinerant preacher, who soon
had a log cabin to preach in.
FORD is LIBRARY GERALD
- 6 -
The se things are ingrained in our people . Here is the
lifespring of the vitality which hitherto we have had in this country.
Ill betide us if in our pride of achievement we ignore and neglect it,
forgetting, as the Bible puts it, "the pit whence ye were digged."
It seems to some observers, nevertheless that this is
exactly what we are in danger of doing. An American church leader
had this to say recently, and his address was quoted impressively in a
metropolitan paper:
The materialism of our generation has prepared for the
destruction of our most powerful motive force. The best
remaining forces in America today are those provided by the
faith of our fathers.
The founding fathers and their offspring were, as a
people, utterly convinced that they came to these shores
because God led them here for purposes of spiritual import.
They were far from being saints; they had their weaknesses
and their faults and their bitter prejudiess, but with all
their mistakes they had the one quality that is most
necessary to the upbuilding and preservation of a nation.
This was a belief that they were a part of God's plan.
They were people who believed in the inspiration of the Bible and
took care to read it and search it daily for the answers to their
problems. They prayed with the utter simplicity of faith and
knew that God would see them through their seemingly unsur-
mountable difficulties. He did.
Churches were filled. Grace was said at every meal.
Family prayer was regular routine and men gave proportionately
far more freely of their substance for work of missions throughout
the world.
Then came prosperity; faith in self was substituted for
trust in God, and worship of the intellectual Golden Calf
was set up, whereby man trusted in his own mind. Education,
not God, was to save the world ...
FORD & LIBRARY GERALD
- 7 -
Untold damage has been done to the American Christian
character, and even though our fabulously rich universities
turn out doctors of philosophy annually by the mile, we are
at present in a state of bevilderment as we stand on the
brink of the most barbaric adventure in race suicide in
history.
The momentum we have been coasting on, given us by our
forefathers through their faith, has almost run out and the
new age of salvation by brains has become the greatest
hoax of our time."
It is for us to search our minds and our own lives and
the society in which we live, to find out whether the charge of
Bishop Pardue, whom I have just been quoting, can be sustained or
dismissed. Is it true that we are coasting on the strength of the piety
of our forebears and that the momentum is running out? There is such
a thing as living on inherited capital, and letting that dwindle away
without doing anything to rebuild it. Can it be that that is what we
are doing today? If so, the outlook for us in the struggle with
communism for a free world, is not promising. For communism itself has
many of the aspects of a religion, not a very high-grade one, to be
sure, but one capable of touching its adherents with an extreme fanaticism,
leading to enthusissm for sacrifice and martyrdom. An American communist
leader told an American religious leader that his group were going to
win out against the Church, because its members worked harder for the
cause and gave a larger proportion of their income to it than the church
members did. to their cause.
However, the point I am making here is that genuine religion
is the spring of personal and group vitality. Why should it not be so?
Religion is man in contact with God, and God is the Lord and Giver of Life.
FORD & LIBRARI GERALD
- 8 -
If in our struggle with communism for the minds of men, we depend
wholly on politics, economics, science and warfare, and ignore the
springs of life, we need not expect any permanent good to come out
of our efforts. If on the other hand we employ these things as tools
of the Spirit, we shall win and the world will be set forward in
paths of brotherhood and peace and freedom.
Religion and Freedom
The first point I am making today, then, is that the
vitality which alone can make the free way of life vigorous and
effective, is only to be found where there is an intensity of
religious life and where the concepts around which that intensity
gathers are themselves of a high order, morally and intellectually.
The second great fact that I wish to emphasize is that it
is in the areas of the world which are influenced by the distinctly
Christian tradition, that freedom finds its congenial climate. There
is, in other words, a very close connection between the freedom which
we Americans enjoy, and which we are now called upon to defend, and
the religious background of our history. It is not an accident that
we love freedom and insist on the freedom of the individual. It is a
product of our history, and that history is to no small degree religious
history. As President Truman put it, standing by the tomb of the Unknown
Soldier at Arlington last Armistice day, "We have created here a govern-
ment dedicated to the dignity and the freedom of man. It is a Govern-
ment whose creed is derived from the Word of God, and its roots are deep
in our spiritual foundations. Our democracy is an expression of faith
GERA FORD LIBRARY
- 9 -
the spirit of man, and it is a declaration of faith in man as created
by God. On these spiritual foundations we have established a creed of
self-government, more precious to us than life itself."
Sometimes we talk and think of freedom as if it were merely
a political device, without grasping the fact that fundamentally it
is something spiritual and religious. All the great etinic religions -
Judaism, Mohammedanism and Christienity - and to some extent others,
according to their points of view, emphasize the fact that each men is
a. spiritual being, that he is of importance and worth as an individual
soul. Communism denies this, and right here the issues join. To
communism a man is of no importance in himself; he is a creature of
materialistic economic determinism. He has no rights, and his life has
no meaning, except as part of the State. Nor are there any criteria of
right and wrong: right is simply what authority determines to be of value
to the state; wrong is simply what the same authority decides is against
the interests of the state. Lies, slavery, imprisonment, murder, any-
thing is right that serves the state.
All this, both our ideas of right and wrong and our idea of
the worth and rights and dignity of each individual derive from a growing
apprehension of the Christian outlook on life and the world, which itself
derives from the outlook of Moses and the prophets and psalmists of
Judaism. Although through the Christian centuries the truth has often
been obscured, growingly there has been realised the human implications
of the Gospel of Christ. Every man, says that Gospel, is of infinite
worth, of such worth that Christ died for him.
FORD i LIBRARY GERALD
- 10 -
King, lord or legislature are limited in what they can do to
the individual because the individual is a creation of God and redeemed
by Christ himself at infinite cost. That is why we have the writ of
habeas corpus, while in communist countries the pelice can come to your
door in the middle of the night and take you away to disappear, unheard
of for ever afterwards, because of some real or alleged deviation from
the supposed interests of the state.
Our modern emphasis on freedom derives from such utterances
as Luther's saying, in his work On the Liberty of the Christian Man #
Every man, because of his faith, is & free lord of all
things, subject to none; every man because of his love, is in
bondage, a servant of all;
or John Milton's
Give me liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely
according to conscience, above all other liberties;
or Thomas Jefferson's
All men are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights.
It took our spiritual forbears a thousand years to win through
to these conceptions. Our freedom has been dearly bought, at the price
of blood sweat and tears, through battles md ware and spiritual agonies
almost as bitter. We ourselves got it cheaply we inherited it. The
sacrifices were made by those who lived and struggled before us. Yet I
an proud to say that when tests have come - twice in our generation - we
too have not as a people shrunk from harsh struggles and the last complete
measures of devotion, in order to preserve this heritage. And I am proud
that even now, in this difficult period, our warfare in Korea - dreadful
FORD
as it is - is for the preservation of freedoms not only for ourselves BERALB as
LIBRARY
- 11 -
we nee the threat approaching, but for all the little countries of the
world.
Religion and Insti tutions of Freedom
It has not always been an easy thing even for peoples who have
a thirst for freedom and cherish the freedom that they have, to enshrine
this treasure in practical political institutions. It is easy to drift
over into discord and anarchy while each man or group asserts his rights
over against those of other persons and other groups. We have before
us in the world today in Indonesia and other parts of the world, the
pathetic spectacle of peoples who have attained some measure of freedom
and now do not know how to use it in ways of order and peace and growth.
Under such conditions there is only too grave a possibility that they
may lose the freedom they have, because their political immaturity is
such that they can not enshrine their freedom in stable institutions,
and may yet become a prey to communism or some other form of tyranny.
To a very considerable degree we of this country and the
peoples of other democratic countries, have solved these difficulties.
Our freedom is secured by a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, by a
generally accepted tradition of majority rule, by a two-party system,
by a habit of voluntary cooperation in emergencies for public needs, by
our acceptance of authority without tyranny, by the immense number of
honest public-spirited citizens who at the ballot-box and elsewhere are
willing to put national welfare over that of party, class, commercial
group, race group, or religious faction, by our wide system of public
education, by our unfettered press and a great corps of journalists
FORD is LIBRARY GERALD
- 12 -
whose function it is to give the public the facts without undue fear
or favor, and by many other favorable factors of our common life.
Now I call you to notice that these institutions in the
pattern of successful democracy are closely connected with the influence
of the Christian Church in its many forms. I do not want to overstate
this point, but it is true that through religion and the church there
have come into our American way of life not only vitality, and our
underlying sense of the dignity of the individual, but also many of the
actual patterns of democracy by which these things have been translated
into political facts.
It was a group of religious migrants, the Pilgrim Fathers, who
in their cabin on the Mayflower ratified & pact which expressed the
momentous determination that when they should reach the new land, theirs
should be "a government of laws and not of men", which is the quintessence
of democracy; and then, out of their local church government, which was
established on a majority-rule basis, they evolved the idea that these
governing laws should be those for which the people themselves voted.
They established along with the church-mesting, the town-mesting, which
is the archetype of democracy and set a pattern which went from New
England throughout the country. Down in Virginia, Thomas Jafferson is
said to have reached some of his conclusions about the dependability of
the people to govern themselves by observing the democratic self-govern-
ment of some local Bartist Churches. The Church Mfe of the people not
only gave ideas and inspiration but actual practice and education in
self-government. As one historian says:
FORD i LIBRARY GERALD
- 13 -
The ideal of self-government was brought to America by the
pilgrims; the separation of Church and State was derived from the
Baptists: the right of free speech was the development of the right
of conscience, established by Roger Williams and William Penn; the
equality spoken of in the Declaration of Independence was an out-
growth of the equality practiced by the Quakers. Democracy was
envisaged in religious terms long before it assumed a political
terminology.
It is & very striking thing to observe the stability of our
democratic institutions. We sometimes are spoken of as a "young"
country and sometimes speak of ourselves so, but the fact is that, next
to Great Britain, we have the oldest government on earth. We have
weathered many storms; we are meeting more and may expest to do so in
the future, for tranquility is not an attribute of human life. Moreover
we are threatened in our freedoms, not only by the outside world of
communism, but by some internal factors as well. I believe however in
the future of America and I believe that it will be greater than the
past. But for the future as for the past we must recognize the importance
to us of the Christian Church and all that for which it stands.
Religion and Our International Policy
The fact is that religious influences have very thoroughly
permeated American life, and are more or less completely responsible
for a great many things that we do not ordinarily think of as connected
with religion at all. He have what we call "our way of life"; we take
certain attitudes because we think they are "right"; we have a more or
less unconscious standard of "decent" or "civilised" behavior for men
and nations. We take all this for granted so completely, even people
who are personally irreligious, that we hardly dream that our attitudes
GERALOR FORD LIBRARY
- 14 -
are simply an echo of the teachings of the Christian Church. They are
not simple, normal human reactions: they are highly conditioned responses,
as the mychologist would say, and in fact they add up to something new
and hopeful in the history of the world.
Think how calmly the American people have taken the often-
expressed ideal of our foreign policy: that we want simply peace, with
mutual good-will and cooperation among all nations. Always before in
human history any nation with the colbssal power which the United States
had at the end of the war, would have staked out the gains which it
wished to make and now had the power to take. We did not ask for a foot
of territory, but gave up our suzerainty ofer the Philippines. We
promptly proceeded to tax ourselves to keep the Germans and the Japanese,
who had attacked us, from starving. We asked no trade concessions from
any part of the world, and no unique advantages for ourselves that we
were not willing others should have. (Parenthetically, I believe that
is what has buffaloes the Russians; they assumed that Russia, the United
States and Great Britain, the three powerful groups to emerge among the
victors, would calmly divide up control of the desirable parts of the
world. To them it was the only natural thing to happen. The United
Nations organization was just to be 8 kind of gesture to the small
nations. The Russians have been so astounded at our policy, and at our
willingness to take the United Nations seriously and make it work, that
they find the whole situation incomprehensible, and still do not think
we mean it but must be playing some very deep game.)
FORD & LIBRARY GERALD
- 15 -
Think of the startling degree of welcome which President
Truman's "Point Four" Program has elicited from the Nation. It is a
very amazing thing for us to propose to export our money, our machinery
and our technical skill to needy and backward countries, and perhaps put
them in & position where they may some day be commercially independent
of us and perhaps even compete with our own products.
From the point of view of all recorded history, which knows
nations as purely selfish units, and not with enlightened selfishness
at that, Point Four and similar programs are breath-taking. But not
so to Americans. Why? Because we are more or less used to this kind of
thing. "Point Four" is nothing but an extension on a national, govern-
mental scale, of what the Formign Missions of American churches have
been doing in all the backward parts of the world for a hundred years.
We have had not only evangelistic missionaries, but agricultural
missionaries and medical missionaries and industrial missionaries and
educational missionaries, whose work has been generously supported out
of church collections. Now we are thinking of doing this on a great
scale with the resources of the Nation's Government and the Nation's big
business behind it. But it was the shurches which showed us how, and
led us to see that this kind of thing, like all good and generous
Christian giving, brings back a blessing on the giver too, sometimes a
blessing 80 pronounced that a cynic could call the whole procedure selfish!
Let us not belittle the part which the "hurch has played in
to it
giving us our freedom and showing us how to use it. Let us see/that the
spiritual momentum involved does not run down. That is something we
can all contribute to the world's freedom, right here in our own home
GERAL towns. FORD LIBRARY
- 16 -
At the same time let us beware of the grim struggle that is
going on in the world, for the soul of mankind. A few weeks ago, on
August 28th, to be exact, the radio station at Leningrad in Russia
announced that the Soviet Society for Political and Scientific Research,
had decided to launch an intense struggle against what it called the
"medieval Christian outlook". Anti-religious films are to be distri-
buted. Twenty-nine million pamphlets are to be circulated. The
chairman said: "The struggle against the gospel and Christian legend
must be conducted ruthlessly and with all the means at the disposal
of communism."
Against the propaganda, which will reach almost one half of
the population of the world, we must pit our lives, our prayers, our
gifts and the loyalty of our hearts to the cause of Christian freedom.
FORD is LIBRARY GERALD