Abstract

Religion and the Lost Leadership

This year's Labor Day message of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S. called boldly upon the churches to demand fundamental changes in the present economic order and to assert "their rightful place of ethical leadership." The whole modern movement for social Christianity came into the churches not as part of the internal development of religious doctrines, but as an external attempt to vitalize the decaying church institution through the introduction of interests and problems that had grown up in the world outside. The connection between religion and social justice is today as extrinsic as, for example, the connection between religion and physical gymnasiums. For institutional religion to blossom again into spiritual leadership of society (and not merely to advocate borrowed social doctrines), there are required intellectual and sociological conditions which can no longer be found today.