Feb 15, 2015 4
When Presidents Urged Church Attendance and Warned of Islamic Extremism
2-16-15
President’s Day, 2015. I’m not sure I could have written this a year ago; certainly five or 10 years ago I would have considered even my pessimistic and alarmist self straining credulity. The events of our time; the lack of leadership from the presidency; the transformed nature of our civic culture… remind me of my warning only months ago, now a reality. America looks for wishbones, when we should be finding backbones.
Never have the men who filled the presidential chair seemed more historical – that is, remote.
Regular readers will expect me to invoke Theodore Roosevelt, and I shall. Not a reflexive habit, but I think this year, more than most, he stands in starkest contrast to the current resident of the White House. Also, of TR’s many wise words that thunder down through the years to guide us, two topics he addressed resonate today.
In some ways Roosevelt was very private about his faith – odd for this most extroverted of men – but he nevertheless quoted scripture, referred to God, cited Bible verses, and lived the life of Christian faith as much, if not more, than any other president. When in college he organized Sunday School classes; when he was a young hunter in Maine he slipped out of his camp on early mornings to read his Bible (that spot is now a designated landmark, Bible Point); when he retired from the presidency he shunned lucrative offers from many quarters to serve as an editor of a weekly Christian opinion magazine; he called his most significant speech in the heat of the Bull Moose campaign “A Confession of Faith” (“We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord!”); he titled two of his books from Bible verses.
Even so, he was private about aspects of his faith. Yet to his diary he confided after the death of his father: “Nothing but my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ could have carried me through this.”
TR soft-pedaled theology, and stressed the personal and social benefits, of church attendance in an article for Ladies’ Home Journal. Here is my point: imagine an American president today writing in a high-circulation magazine, urging church attendance. These were his words:
There are enough holidays for most of us that can quite properly be devoted to pure holiday-making. Sundays differ from other holidays, among other ways, in the fact that there are 52 of them every year. On Sunday, go to church.
Yes, I know all the excuses. I know that one can worship the Creator and dedicate oneself to good living in a grove of trees, or by a running brook, or in one’s own house, just as well as in church. But I also know as a matter of cold fact the average man does not thus worship or thus dedicate himself. If he strays away from church, he does not spend his time in good works or lofty meditation. He looks over the colored supplement of the newspaper.
He might not hear a good sermon at church. But unless he is very unfortunate, he will hear a sermon by a good man who, with his good wife, is engaged all the week long in a series of wearing, humdrum, and important tasks for making hard lives a little easier.
He will listen to and take part in reading some beautiful passages from the Bible. And if he is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss.
He will probably take part in singing some good hymns.
He will meet and nod to, or speak to, good quiet neighbors. He will come away feeling a little more charitably toward all the world, even toward those excessively foolish young men who regard churchgoing as rather a soft performance.
I advocate a man’s joining in church works for the sake of showing his faith by his works.
Church work and church attendance mean the cultivation of the habit of feeling some responsibility for others and the sense of braced moral strength, which prevents a relaxation of one’s own moral fiber.
The man who does not in some way, active or not, connect himself with some active, working church misses many opportunities for helping his neighbors, and therefore, incidentally, for helping himself.
In the actual world, a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed at or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid downgrade.
“On Sunday, go to church.” Good advice for TR’s time, our time, all the time.
Another contemporary topic where Roosevelt’s words thunder through the years, grabbing our attention, are from his book – note again the title – “Fear God and Take Your Own Part” (1916):
“Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan, and the Christian religion would be exterminated.
“Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Jan Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.
“The civilization of Europe, American and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization… The Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from [those] two continents… During [a] thousand years, the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do – that is, to beat back the Moslem invader.”
The lessons of Roosevelt’s history were hard; the truth often is. Today, evangelists have done what warriors did not: advance the gospel in Africa and Asia, bringing light to millions. But, of course, they sustain persecution, torture, and murder in their defense of Christian faith.
But on President’s Day 2015 we must come face to face with the possibility that Western Civilization – “Christendom” – has lost that pride of heritage and reverence for the traditions of our faith, for the first time in 1500 years. Are we to bear the shame, invite the obloquy, of all those previous brave and faithful generations?
Our precious communities and nations, claimed for the gospel and open to its free exercise, were sometimes established amidst strife, and sometimes were opened freely to believers. All, however, tell inspiring stories. Can this all be slipping away in our lifetimes, so quickly before our eyes? Where is our responsibility? Is this not the Land of Beulah?
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