The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New AgeBland, Salem Goldworth
Religion
The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New Age
Bland, Salem Goldworth
Christian sociology; Church and social problems
The Labor movement is based on the solidarity of the workers. It abhors
competition. It represents the triumph of the we-consciousness over the
I-consciousness. It organizes in unions. There have been few things in
history that had more of the morally sublime in them than the way in
which the individual has been called upon by the Labor movement to risk,
not his comfort merely or his advancement, but his livelihood, in
defence of some one whom he would never know but with whom he was linked
in the sacred cause of Labor.
And these principles of the Labor movement are at the same time the
characteristics of the corresponding Christianity of the new age. For,
as we found an aristocratic type of Christianity in the aristocratic
medieval period, the social conditions demanding the aristocratic
organization in Church and State and permitting no other, and as, in the
age which succeeded the feudal, a freedom-loving, competitive,
individualistic class imposed its character on the social and the
ecclesiastical organization, so institutional Christianity will undergo
a third transformation and, in a society dominated by Labor
organizations, will become democratic and brotherly.
Protestantism must pass away. It is too rootedly individualistic, too
sectarian, to be the prevailing religion of a collectivist age. It is
passing away before our eyes. Everywhere it reveals the marks of decay
or of transformation. It must change or die.
Not to Protestantism, not to Roman Catholicism, belongs the age now
dawning, but to a new Christianity which will, indeed, have affinities
with them both but still more deeply with the Christianity of Jesus.
This Christianity, indeed, is already here. Like its Master when He
came, it is in the world and the world knows it not. It is still
immature, undeveloped, unconscious even of its own nature and destiny.
It will receive large and valuable contributions from both the great
historic forms of Christianity, not improbably from the Eastern, or
Greek Christianity, as well. But in promise and potency the coming
Christianity is more fully and truly here in the Labor movement than in
any of the great historic organizations. Perhaps a more accurate
statement would be, that the Labor movement needs less radical change
than the great Church organizations to become the fitting and efficient
Christianity for the new age.
It needs, in the main, but two great changes.
1. It must broaden.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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