Taking It Big

"The average ministerial output is correctly heard as a parade of outworn phrases. It is generally unimaginative and often trivial. As public rhetoric, it is boring and irrelevant. As private belief, it is without passion."

Those words might have been written today by critics of mainline Christianity, including some Christians themselves. They were, however, spoken nearly half a century ago to a conclave of Protestant clergy by a leading social critic who, in the heyday of the Cold War, was invited to address them "On Religion and War, or Moral Insensibility."

The evangelical board of the United Churches of Canada may have got more than they bargained for when they invited C. Wright Mills, the maverick sociologist whose books, like "White Collar" and "The Power Elite," shook up the complacency of the 1950s and served as inspiration for the student radicals of the '60s.

Mills called his talk to the ministers "A Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy," and it became the basis for another of his controversial books, "The Causes of World War III." At a time when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were engaged in a nuclear arms race that threatened to blow up not only each other but the whole world, Mills was calling on Christian ministers to speak out against the madness, "to serve as a moral conscience and to articulate that conscience."

Mills followed the Quaker dictum to "speak truth to power," and although he admired their nonviolent protests against the arms race and their willingness to take political stands, he did not join them or any other religious group, just as he did not join any political party or movement, preferring to "go it alone."

A visitor who couldn't fit him into a political pigeonhole once asked what he believed in. At that moment, Mills, who was tinkering with his beloved BMW motorcycle (he rode it from his home in Nyack to his office at Columbia on 116th and Broadway), answered without hesitation: "German motors."

In his "Pagan Sermon," Mills said that according to their belief he was "among the damned," for he was "secular, prideful, agnostic, and all the rest of it."

He was also, I believe, a spiritual man in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "spirit" as "the animating or vital principle in men (and animals); that which gives life to the physical organism, in contrast to its purely material elements; the breath of life."

Continued on page 2: »