The Church and the Undergraduate

I

THERE seems to be a belief commonly current that the college student is both religiously and morally in a parlous state, and a feeling that the Christian Church ought to be doing something about it. After ten years of careful and dispassionate observation of undergraduates the present writer has come to the conclusion that the current indifference to religion, which indubitably exists on most of our many campuses, is largely caused by the fact that the students are entirely too moral. This statement is not intended as a paradox, but rather as a sober statement of fact. The terms of this thesis need only to be defined in order to make the contention seem reasonable. Much of the confusion which is all about us in regard to campus problems is due to hazy understanding of what is really involved. There are three elements which need to be considered. First of all, what sort of person is the usual undergraduate? Second, what are morals? Third, what is the Church, and what is the legitimate basis of its ethical message?

Exactly how many students are at present studying in our colleges is not easy to determine. A good deal depends upon one’s definition of a college. Including all professional schools and the junior colleges, the number seems to be approximately 500,000. Any casual thinker ought to be able to understand at once that these half million young people must for the most part be medium-grade persons, by no means young men and women of genius or extraordinary insight. They are probably, on the whole, slightly more intelligent than the vast majority of their noncollegiate compatriots. Collegians are usually quite ordinary human beings, normally between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, for the most part living away from home, more or less earnestly studying about themselves and their world. The first thing to be noted about them is not the difference between them and others, but their extraordinary likeness to others. Probably seven eighths of all undergraduates are children of their time, accepting without question current opinions, prejudices, standards. All youths are conservative, collegiate youths not excepted. They are shy, self-conscious, overmodest, fearful of being considered eccentric. There are, to be sure, the relatively few exceptions, those who have really questioning minds. They are so rare that the discovery of one of them is an event in a college professor’s year. They represent the kind of men who in the old days, before the flood of democracy inundated our institutions of higher learning, predominated in the American colleges. At present, chiefly owing to the huge numbers and impersonal organization of our contemporary mills of knowledge, such students, although they struggle to be vocal, have a decreasing influence. The deadening mass of those who are incapable of much intellectual effort beyond the accumulation of facts numbs and discourages this small group of activeminded students, separates them from contact with one another, and diffuses all insurgency. The majority considers such persons with good-humored patience. It has coined for them a phrase of benevolent contempt. It says that they are ‘all wet.’

The average undergraduate is, then, a creature of the general public opinion of his time. Wise is the campus manipulator who recognizes this fact. Unhappy are those many teachers who have never yet learned its truth. No matter how wisely faculties may labor, most of us who deal with collegians have come to know that if we are striving for any end not widely approved by the great mass of more or less ignorant citizens in the world outside our walls, if we are trying in the least to resist the mores, our results must of necessity be exceptional and usually temporary. Most professors feel kinship to that colleague in an Eastern college who looked down from a library window upon an alumni procession on commencement day and sighed, ‘See what the world has done to our brave young men! ’

All of this means, really, that the college student is an intensely conformist person, a moral young man. For what are morals? Morality means conformity to whatever is considered socially useful in the group to which an individual happens to belong. In other words, what is respectable is moral, and vice versa. If one is inclined to think this definition somewhat shocking, that one is respectfully referred to a good dictionary. Morality is conforming to custom, the custom of one’s group and time. This does not mean that there are no standards of right and wrong eternal in the heavens. Being right from a considered, reasoning, personally matured point of view, being right according to the best apprehension one may gain of that ultimate truth, beauty, goodness which men call God, is a very different thing from being moral. To be moral is to do what one’s social group considers necessary for common welfare. It is always a thing of the mob. It differs with the character of the mob. To an unreconstructed Igorot it is moral to cut off the head of anyone who does not happen to live in one’s own village. It would be immoral for a citizen of Boston to do that to a citizen of New York, great though the provocation undoubtedly is. It is moral for a Turk to have three wives at once; moral for a citizen of Nevada to have three wives seriatim; immoral for a Christian to have more than one wife living at one time; immoral for a monk to have any wives at all. It all depends upon the group to which one by birth or by choice belongs.

Public opinion all about us presses in upon the colleges with a force which most of the students never think of resisting and which even the few find it difficult to withstand. Does the collegian disregard the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act? He does it, not because he is in revolt, but because he wishes to conform to current middle-class custom. His ideas in regard to purity he derives from the conversation, the books, the magazines, the plays, the motion pictures which are prepared, not for him, but for the world of which he is a part. Is he complacent, conceited, sell-centred? Of course he is, but no more than the people who are all around him. Does he cheat in examinations and defend the practice? He does, and he learned to do it from the worship of success at any price which characterizes our entire age. In short, for better or worse, he is a moral young man. It is this very morality which interferes in his case, as in that of most other people, with apprehension of what the Christian religion is all about or of what the functions of the Christian Church may possibly be.

What is the Christian Church? The usual undergraduate has only the vaguest idea, and that mostly an erroneous idea. This lack of comprehension is partly due to the timidity of the Church itself, but chiefly it is due to the unwillingness of our whole civilization at the moment to listen to any kind of religious message which may interfere with its own comfortable complacency. What does the undergraduate think about the Church? He thinks what almost everybody else thinks. To some students the Church means a collection of long-faced persons who anæmically admire one another. To others the Church is such a thing as may indeed function through the Antisaloon League. To still a third group it seems to be a loose society of those who are interested in listening, semioccasionally, in an atmosphere of intense respectability, to discussions of the good, the true, the beautiful, phrased with sufficient vagueness to disturb nobody. But to an even larger group the Church is supposed to be a collection of puritanical joy killers who have, for some unexplained reason, retained into this age of enlightenment a considerable group of antiquated and outworn personal inhibitions. In the light of history, none of these ought to be considered seriously as a definition of the Christian Church. The chief task for anyone who wishes religiously to get at the contemporary undergraduate is to crack through this crust of conventional morality and conventional misconception of the Christian religion.

If the forces of Christendom, instead of worrying about minutiæ in student conduct, would make one concerted demand that undergraduates, despite current ways of thinking, actually examine into the functions of religion and the Church, something might be accomplished. They might persuade their hearers of the wisdom of substituting, in the place of the current American middle-class misconceptions, that view of the Church held by the vast majority of Christians during the centuries since Christianity first began. The Church, in the estimate of its members, has been a society of those who, having accepted Christ Jesus as Lord and God in human terms, have been organically united to Him, in order that, by virtue of the supernatural strength which He imparts within sacraments and in prayer, they may struggle closer to that personal reality which is God. The thing that primarily matters about historic Christianity is not the dogmatic faith, which is only an intellectual reflection upon the life lived with Christ within His Body; nor is it the Christian order, with episcopacy and priesthood and the like, for these are merely the mechanical contrivances normally necessary for the preservation of life with Christ within His Body. The thing that has mattered has been the life itself, a life within a supernatural organism composed of those called to be Christ’s, a mystical society within this world and yet not of it.

II

These, then, are the three elements involved in the character development of undergraduates: the nature of the student, the nature of morals, the nature of the Church. How are they usually fitted together in the campus mind? How ought they to be fitted together?

Ordinarily the collegian, this very moral young person, conforming to the standards of society about him without much question, cannot help observing that those standards are no longer the standards of the Church. Usually he jumps to the easy conclusion that the difference between the Church’s ethics and the ethics of the world at the moment lies merely in this, that the Church’s ethics are outworn and outmoded. Ergo, the teachings of the Church as to conduct seem to him, at the best, negligible; at the worst, a positive hindrance to reasonable progress.

Because he does not understand that the Christian Church involves a life lived for supernatural ends, admittedly different from those of the world at large, he almost always fails to understand the real basis for Christian morals. It would seem that he might be helped to understand that the moral standards of his secular group are one thing and the moral standards of Christ’s Church quite another thing, and that they differ from one another, not in relative contemporaneity, but because the aim in life presupposed in each is different. He ought to be helped to see that it is quite all right to conform to the world’s standards, provided the good which is offered to those who thus conform seems a sufficient good; but that , if one deems the good offered by Christ’s Church to be better and more satisfying than that which is offered by the world, one must in reason adopt, since one has accepted a new purpose and affiliated himself with others pursuing that purpose, the quite different moral standards of this quite different society. The good offered by the world of our day is a good limited essentially to a life soon to end in death. It consists chiefly of food, shelter, opportunity for procreation, distraction from too probing thought, comfort, security, admiration from one’s fellows. If these seem adequate ends, the game may well be played according to the rules laid down by the world. He may possibly also come to understand that there have been and still are those who are persuaded that these goods are relatively unimportant and inadequate; that what the wise man seeks is nothing less than such personal unity with reality as makes the possession of all things else of second-rate importance; that man is really thirsty for God, lonely for God. If Christianity is based, as historically it has always been based, upon such convictions as these, then it is not unreasonable that the mystical Body of Christ should claim, as the price of the bread of life, a moral living quite its own, a unique ethics. If the undergraduate can only get it through his head that Christian morals and natural morals are two quite different things, get it out of his head that the former is merely old-fashioned while the latter is up-to-date, get it into his head that they differ in aim and in purpose, a vast confusion may be resolved.

Whenever morality is discussed nowadays, the argument almost always resolves itself into talk about matters connected with the Seventh Commandment. While we may deplore this tendency to limit good or bad living to the relationship of the sexes and to regard fornication as vastly worse than pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy,— a thoroughly vicious seeing things out of focus, — yet we may take sex for an example. It well illustrates the point being made. Here, as it happens, anyone with half an eye can see that natural morality differs from Christ’s morality and that the difference is due to a differing definition of man and his highest good. When people believe as a matter of course that a man is an immortal soul, lodged within a body, they also believe that in matters of sex the interest of souls is more worth conserving than the interest of bodies.

There was a time when most people in America thought that way and when current natural ethics maintained just that. Such was not the case in the world to which Christ came and to which Paul preached. It is not the case in the world at the present moment. Nowadays most people do not believe any such thing about man and his highest destiny, and prevailing natural ethics has changed accordingly. The usual man of the moment may admit that there is a soul, but only in the sense of a higher function of the body. Man may be a superbeast, but he is essentially a beast. So people think. And because they think it the impulse toward chastity and monogamy loses force. This is to be expected, for the simple reason that chastity is not an animal virtue and never was, while monogamy is not a natural arrangement for the handling of the family and never has prevailed among the beasts. The only natural argument that ever has been advanced for monogamy is that in order to rear children through the long helplessness of early years parents must be made to stay together that we may avoid social disaster to the upcoming generation. That is a good argument as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. Suppose there are no children. Suppose the children are grown up. Suppose the children are endowed. What then? If man is only a socialized beast, if his highest goods are animal goods, there is not the slightest reason why companionate marriage, so called, or some other form of thinly disguised promiscuity should not prevail. As a matter of fact, it is to some such thing that increasingly our contemporary natural standard, embodied in the changing laws governing matrimony, is approaching.

What is the Christian to do about it? Nothing can be done about it as long as people believe that man is a higher animal and nothing more. When the Church or her ecclesiastics thunder against divorce and its attendant evils and demand monogamy and fidelity within marriage, and continence outside of marriage, unless they make it plain that they are speaking of wisdom for those who as Christians are seeking God, and not for people who care nothing much about Christ or His definition of man, she and her officers, in the eyes of the world at large, which means incidentally in the eyes of undergraduates, seem to be advocating merely something which was and now is not, simply on the ground that the old is better, a very dubious contention. There was a laughable example not long ago in New York when a prominent ecclesiastic told a large audience at an urban university that marriage was indissoluble for everybody. His audience consisted very largely of Jews, who were living, it is to be assumed, faithfully under the Mosaie religion, which permits divorce almost at will. It is this kind of confused talk which does as much as anything else to undermine undergraduate respect for Christian morals as such.

In matters of sex and in all other matters of conduct, the prime necessity is that we shall make plain that Christian ethics claims a more than natural sanction and applies only to those who have acknowledged the validity of that sanction. We may as well abandon the attempt to make people live like Christians when they are not Christians, to preserve a Christian civilization without belief in that God-search which alone justifies a Christian civilization. One’s God implies one’s good. To ask people who worship Mammon to live lives of sacrifice, to expect devotees of Venus to be chaste, to hope that people whose real God is comfort at any price will suffer gladly for the truth, is grotesque.

III

Willy-nilly, each man is a citizen of his social group or groups. Let him conform to the customs of the nation, unless he also becomes and remains a citizen of that higher nation which is the Church. When he does that, and only when he does that, the whole new series of Christian ethical judgments comes into play in his life. We live in a pagan world, as did the Hebrew prophets, as did the Christ, as did His early disciples. Christians are now — they probably always have been and always will be — a chosen people, set apart. What is right or wrong for others may not be right or wrong for them. They have been bought by Christ’s love, at the price of His blood. But they who are Christians have equally no right to judge others.

It would help the undergraduate a good deal if the Church would plainly say: ‘If you wish Christ’s grace, if you believe that He is the Way, the Truth, the Life, the Sustainer of souls, then you must try to live according to that morality which is of Him. If you do not desire Christ, if you are satisfied with lesser aims, then conform to the standards of conduct prevalent about you. If you do, the Church will be very sorry, but she cannot then be held responsible for your eventual, or present, happiness or unhappiness.’ There are some who listen if we talk bravely of an ascetic morality, practised in order that men may see God; but most students rightly ignore the hesitant, conformist type of Christian ethics which wails because worldly people have worldly morals — the sort which says, ‘You are animals, of course. That is a scientific fact. But do not act like animals.’ For that sort of thing the student with brains has a healthy contempt.