5/31/64

Scripture: Read Acts 22: 17-29.

Text: Acts 22: 28; ...“I bought this citizenship for a large sum.”

What connection is there between Christian faith and democracy? There is, in truth, a very close connection. For the Christian tradition, as perhaps no other, asserts the essential dignity of every person. This tradition is even older than the Christian era. It is rooted far back in Hebrew tradition. In that book of the Bible which treats of beginnings, namely Genesis, there is this great affirmation: “God created man in his own image.” [Genesis 1: 26]. The concept of democracy got started in that spiritual expression of the unique dignity of man.

We read that, in early Hebrew history, Moses took a company of slaves out of Egypt, taught them to think for themselves as a people of God, planted in their minds ideas of their own significance in the creation. Of course Jesus added a revolutionary concept to the idea of human dignity. His idea of human greatness was nearly opposite to the common assumption. To most people, the ruler -- the top man on the totem pole -- was the freest of all; the servant the least free. Jesus had a startling way of reversing the values. To him, the measure of human greatness is the ability to serve -- not the ability to dominate.

The pagan lord, the Caesar of the empire, can live only by domination. The price of his leisure is other persons’ toil; the price of his freedom is others’ bondage. But Jesus lived on the theory that his life is to work for others; to liberate them. With the spending of his life, he pays the ransom of their release.

Insofar as this idea of serving is accepted by us people, the structure of our society is altered; the conditions of human life are transformed. In the political field, our governors are not dictators; they are public servants. This is political democracy. As far as we make it work in government, this is a genuinely Christian thing about our society. It is vastly different from the pagan idea that political authority belongs to him who can seize it and hold it by brute force; that the greatest man is he who can dominate the greatest number of people, impose his will upon them, and command their obedience through the flaunting of his power.

In the Christian tradition, the essential worth of every person is reflected in his dignity as a free moral agent if he affirms in his own personal choice the covenant that makes the common life possible. In other words, the Christian idea of democracy is not the liberty of aloofness; it is responsible participation in the common life. It involves the prophetic demand for justice and it involves Jesus’ gospel of love. Justice affirms every person’s right to be respected as a person, as an end in himself, never as a means to others’ ends. Love affirms every man’s destiny to find life for himself only as he gives his life in service to the whole community. Democracy has meaning as that kind of love forms its motive, and that kind of justice its goal.

There is, then, this close connection between Christian faith and the kind of democracy which we treasure. Our democracy is a spiritual result of ideas that emerge in the Bible and become part of the life of those who read and meditate upon it. This spiritual idea has struggled with old tyrannies, old autocracies, old slaveries. It gets lost in a maze of secular contradictions; it sometimes suffers setback or defeat. But it always gets up to fight again. For it is part of the good in God’s creation, and it can not be obliterated. Few things are more persistent than the longing for responsible liberty.

There have been times in history when the doctrine of human dignity was little more than a whisper, to be uttered only in secret. There was little enough freedom for the common person in the world into which Christianity was born. Man has had to struggle to get the tyrants off his back, and the shackles off his mind. Often he has had to resist kings. Sometimes he has had to fight the ruling classes of his church in order to find freedom for his mind.

It was a new thing upon the earth when our country was born. A free people, in a free land, had shaken off the ecclesiastical and political tyrannies of the old world. These responsible people set up a government by the consent of the governed. They wrote laws safeguarding the rights of common people. It was something new in the history of nations that political documents should so clearly embody the ideal of human dignity as did the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with its Bill of Rights.

There were old world aristocrats who simply could not grasp, nor believe it. This was “mob rule” and it couldn’t last, they said. But everywhere in the world, oppressed people took new hope. This country in America had shown a new thing for which the world had been preparing for thousands of years. It was the revolution of the common man.

In the century after the American Revolution, the political trends in most lands tended to be set in the direction of freedom. And people of many nations and ethnic backgrounds paid their respects to the new land of liberty. It was a French man who created the great statue for the new nation -- the one which we call the Statue of Liberty. It was a Jewish girl who wrote the inscription: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” --- In all the world, the United States of America was regarded as a haven, a home, a symbol of the free mind, a great step forward in the history of man.

Now, in our day, we are seeing a vast counterrevolution to this basic concept of freedom. Two worlds of ideas are in desperate conflict. The battle for freedom is being fought fiercely and on a wide battleground. In one country after another, your generation and mine has seen the principle of freedom relinquished in the interest of something which it was supposed would be more effectively efficient. And people have surrendered what liberty they had for some kind of collective authority which rejects and ridicules the whole biblical concept of the free mind.

It was not clear to everyone what was happening at first. Deceptive slogans and smooth words proclaimed a new order through liberation of the toiling masses. Some of the phrases common to our democratic way were misappropriated. The hoax identified itself with the hopes of the common man. But it was bent, not on the development of new channels of understanding and agreement, but on widening the breach between classes and fomenting hatred. In a very short time it became clear that this kind of “new order” was not new and it was not order; it was a resurgence of the old tyrannical past -- a return to the old pagan gods of despotism from which men had thought the world had been delivered. In the name of the workers, a grab for despotic power succeeded in much of the world. And the tyranny breathes out over the world like one of the fiery dragons of nightmarish mythology.

One new thing about this modern tyranny is its ruthless efficiency; the scientific thoroughness with which it enslaves minds and crushes all resistance to its rule. Old tyrannies tortured bodies to break down men’s resistance to their rule. This tyranny has introduced brain warfare as its weapon of torture. By propaganda, terror, intimidation, and merciless relentless hounding, its agents can condition the mind so that it cannot think or operate on the basis of freedom. These methods are scientifically calculated both to destroy opposition and the very capacity to oppose.

The nation which operates under this system has evolved a kind of efficiency that has promoted some material gains. But the gains are not those of the free mind. And the system can function only in a population that has surrendered its right to think and to disagree. We must resist the encroachment of its philosophy with all our strength. For two thousand years, the Christian Church has been trying to win the world for Christ. The church’s very existence depends on belief in God and the free mind of mankind. And yet one hears, now and then, the accusation that some of the leaders of the Christian Church are communists, or communist sympathizers, or communist pamperers. When you hear this, you can be pretty sure that the accuser is misinformed, or that he believes everyone else is.

It is quite probable that communists would like to infiltrate the church as well as everything else. But there is no credible evidence that they are succeeding. And a main reason for their lack of success is that Christians simply are not atheists. They believe in the kind of God-given liberty that tyranny only tries to crush. The Christian churches --- and we may observe in a special way the Protestant Christian churches --- are a bulwark in the resistance to communism’s tyranny.

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Now let us consider another threat to the free mind which may not be as clearly recognized as it ought to be --- partly because it often comes in the role of someone who poses as a great patriot. Let us call it “the threat from the right” which arises out of fear of “the menace from the left.” We need to remember the word of an old world philosopher [Neitzsche] who said, “Beware lest, when you fight a monster, you become a monster.” There are people in all countries, including our own, who are vigorously opposed to communism, but to whom the principle of Christian democracy is not palatable. They appear not to believe in the free mind, nor in the spiritual principle that prompts the free mind, any more than the communist believes in it. If they could have their way, they seem to want to stifle every voice unlike their own; and they would crack down on points of view that do not conform to theirs. They are undoubtedly against communism; but they are not for freedom.

Now this is a touchy matter. And it is difficult to think soberly in an atmosphere that is as highly charged as is this one. But we must not forget our own spiritual history in some mass emotionalism. Church people, especially must think; must remember, and not forget, how the United States of America was born and what it started out to do. We must remember at what great cost our freedom has been purchased. We must seek to keep clearly in mind, and stand up fearlessly for, the principles of our faith and our nation, lest in fighting a monster we become a monster.

One of our principles is free expression. In America everyone is free to express his opinion without fear. Many of us are troubled by increasing dislike of differences, impatience with critical opinion, disapproval of free discussion. Some of us are anxious in the face of a growing disposition to define subversive activity in terms so broad that they include just about any unpopular ideas. Through the years, we have seen various manifestations of this tendency.

I remember when the Ku Klux Klan was going strong not only in the south, but all over a lot of the North. It was active for a time in my native state of South Dakota. I spent one summer as a student preacher in a neighborhood where I could see the impact of the Klan. A village creamery operator was a Klan organizer and saw to it that there were regular meetings planned in various parts of the county. Out of curiosity, I attended an open meeting, and found there a climate of opinion which I could not approve. The Ku Kluxers were quite sure that Catholics were out to undermine America; and if not Catholics, then certainly Jews. There was little point in their discussing Negroes. Few of those rural folk had even seen anyone with black skin. Now and then the Klan would burn a cross, or subtly threaten to do so, just to frighten people into “pure Americanism” --- by which the Ku Klux Klaners appeared to mean white-Gentile-Protestant Americanism.

We have seen the hysteria over Mrs. Dilling’s book, The Red Network, in which even William Allen White was classified as “one of the lap dogs of Moscow.” This disposition flares up, dies down, flares up again; and every so often the flare gets fanned into a kind of frenzy. What starts out as a legitimate need for a fair and honest and necessary investigation into subversion becomes some politician’s opportunity to stir up the frenzied fringe groups, each with a pet hate. And presently good people are turned against good people; loyal Americans are being encouraged to mistrust other loyal Americans; names are flung about, and everybody starts investigating everybody. And what happens to the free mind? Are we afraid of it? Do we lose faith in our own faith? Can we still debate issues, fairly and honestly, on their own merit, without resorting to the tactics which we despise in the enemies of freedom?

Some people don’t like the church’s social message -- they insist on the gospel for the individual only. Some don’t like the oneness of mankind, the brotherhood of man, the implications of the Kingdom of God. Some don’t like the organized church and they pour into the mails pamphlets vilifying the National Council of Churches as a ringleader in a plot to undermine American ideals. Some people don’t like labor unions, or pacifists, or civil rights moves, or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or fluoridation of water supplies. And sometimes, instead of debating these issues on their merits, they lump them together as “the infiltration of communist ideology.”

Some people don’t like minority groups, and deeply suspect those who would try to improve race relations. Some don’t like any internationalism and believe that children should not be taught anything about the United Nations. And there are some who have gone to such extreme length as to publish a handbook listing the late Dag Hammarskjold, the late John Foster Dulles, former president Dwight Eisenhower and Milton Eisenhower as agents of the communist conspiracy. It seems to me that the right of free expression in America is too precious to be abused by blackening the name and motive of those with whom one disagrees.

America is an amalgam of many ideas, each with equal right to be expressed, provided the corresponding right of those who disagree is conceded and maintained. Pilgrims came to this country to escape the tyranny of those who would not grant that right. Catholics came, in many cases, for the same right. It has not always been easy for all of us to maintain that right for ourselves and for others. To be truly American, it seems to me, is to be vigilant about maintaining that right. The principle of free expression is something in the American heritage to stand up and cheer about! --- Something to be exercised responsibly and maintained conscientiously and vigorously.

Another principle of freedom that Christians should stand for, against all pressures, is what we may call justice in the law -- lawyers call it, I believe, “due process of law.” It has been hard-won. It was a great day for the common man when democracy finally reached the courtroom; when no king or party could snatch little men from the streets or shops or fields and throw them into prison or liquidate them at will. It took centuries of experience to wrest the process of justice out of political hands and deliver it to the quiet, deliberate chambers of constitutional law. There, every person is presumed innocent until proven guilty; there every person accused has the right to know beforehand what are the charges against him and to know who his accusers are; there every person is allowed, through counsel, to challenge his accusers by cross-examination.

Of course the Soviets scrapped all such ideas of justice (except for some attempt at appearance for propaganda purposes) and went back to mankind’s old star-chambers. Let Americans be on guard that we do not allow any mass hysteria to educate us away from our constitutional ideal.

It is extremely sobering that not a few people seem to think that an accused person should be forced to testify against himself regardless of what the Constitution has said about that. It is disquieting that some procedures of Congressional investigating committees appear to put a witness where he can not face accusers or challenge them. Investigation of subversion is a necessary part of our national alertness, but to abandon the “due process of law,” preserved in our courts, by permitting political inquiry to operate under different rules is, many believe, a step backwards in the cause of freedom.

Christians should, further, support with all our strength the friendliness of freedom. One of the, to us, utterly abhorrent things about communism is its contempt for human feelings -- its crushing of self-respect and kindliness in people, its ruthless use of intimidation, so that nobody dares to talk back! Surely, Americans do not want that kind of control from either the left or the right!

It is a sad day for Americans when any kind of intimidation stifles free criticism of government, of church, of the social order; when kindly, friendly people keep still because they begin to fear each other. Our nation could become stagnant if fear destroys the decent friendliness of free people. And that is exactly what the tyrant groups want.

In much of the world, nobody can talk back. Everyone know that one must “be careful what you say,” “be careful what you write,” “be careful whom you telephone.” In American one can talk back; and one can laugh out loud, spontaneously, in the freedom of the soul. This is precious almost beyond our comprehension.

One of the worthy memorials to heroes who have spent life for our country and to loved ones who have passed from our sight into the eternal realm is our recognition that we have a stake in true freedom. All the world has a stake in liberty. And the Christian has a special responsibility for its maintenance and its mission.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, May 31, 1964.