The Evolution of the Country Community: A Study in Religious SociologyWilson, Warren H. (Warren Hugh)
Religion
The Evolution of the Country Community: A Study in Religious Sociology
Wilson, Warren H. (Warren Hugh)
Christian sociology; Country life
The duty, then, of the religious worker, and the task of the prophet and
the seer, is to enlarge the consciousness of kind. Worship is to be
placed on a larger plane. Americans must be taught to see their unity
with immigrants. Owners of land must be made to recognize that they are
one with their tenants. The employer must be shown that his alliances
are with those who help him to get his living. At once, when this task
is put before us, we see the futility of the ideals of our time. Church
workers and other teachers have played up before the eyes of the people
those ideals which separate men into artificial classes. The
consciousness of kind has been a consciousness of money and
consciousness of belonging to old families, or a consciousness of the
ideals of higher education. A great many American families live in the
ideal of sending their boys and girls to college. This leads them to
feel a difference between themselves and the larger number of people who
do not care for higher education, and who discover no energies in
themselves that move on the path of learning. The result is that their
worship is narrow; churches become culture clubs: the preachers are
exponents of literature: the service of worship is a liturgy of esthetic
pleasure.
The true consciousness of kind must be economic and social. There is no
escape from this for religious people. They must go deep down to the
unities with men who co-operate with them in getting a living. The
Pittsburgh mill owner has no other unity by which he can find himself at
one with his foreign born mill-hand, than the fact that he and the
mill-hand are fellow workers in the mill.
What other bond of union is there between the farm landlord and the farm
tenant? They have no common idealism. The one reads books, the other
does not. The one sends his son to college, the other sends his into the
stable and the field. The one is enjoying a life of leisure and his
hands are clean; the other sweats, saves, and produces, in soiled
clothing, and with hard, coarse hands. They have only one basis of
unity, namely, that they co-operate in tilling the soil, and in the
producing of food and raw materials. The teacher, or preacher, who
attempts in this case to escape the economic unity, will find no other.
The trouble with most of the ideals which express themselves in
diversified worship, is that they are peculiar to the life of leisure,
they are a part of "the leisure class standard." Many teachers and
preachers reiterate similar demands which can only be responded to by
people who do not have to work.
From this leisure class standard our ideals must be changed to the
standard of work, and the man who has vision is he who shall see the
economic, the industrial unities, and who with compelling voice, will
call men together to worship in a new consciousness of kind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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