Welsh Journals

Christianity and the Press. By Rev. M. Watcyn Williams. ONE of the urgent questions which the Church must face has to do with the enormous output of energy that marks her present life. On every hand Christians are highly organised for certain purposes, and by methods that are almost feverish the churches are expending time and money in a hundred directions. Little has been done to correlate these activities, to see where they overlap, and to discover whether in some cases they are not mutually destructive. The question I would raise is simple in the ex- treme are we wasting our time? Indignant 'Noes' may be expected from every quarter, and ultimately, I think, the 'Noes' have it, but the question cannot be lightly dismissed. There is, for example, the relation between foreign trade and foreign missions, or looked at from another standpoint, the relation between the mixed export of missionaries, traders, soldiers and civil servants on the one hand, and the import of Oriental students on the other. I am ready to admit at once, and without cavil, that however great may be the harm done by unchristian and anti-christian methods of com- merce and government, the missionary is still integral to the very idea of the Church. That said, we have to admit, too, the obvious way in which our confused notions about the Church and Society are undoing the work of the men we send abroad. So much by way of illustration. A similar problem exists at home in the relation between preaching (or more accurately, listening to sermons) and newspaper reading. Dean Inge has expressed his opinion that the pulpit is rapidly losing all justification for its existence, because people are reading far more than they used to, instead of attending Divine Service, and hearing sermons. Even those who do attend, and who find real help and encouragment in public worship, are probably influenced by what they read to an extent which neither they nor the church at large would care to allow. I do not agree with the Dean's conclusion, but I am convinced that he has helped to state a problem we continue to shirk at our peril. The facts are at any rate clear. People are reading far more than they used to, and listening to sermons a good deal less than was their fathers' wont. There is, of course, another aspect of our problem, and that is the value of modern preach- ing to those who actually hear it. A public-spirited journalist might very well retort with a "Tu Quoque" to much that follows, but while I admit its relevance I must leave that feature of the discussion to him. My main contention is that however badly our work may be done, it is a Christian witness, which the Press largely vitiates. Our question must recur; are we wasting our time? For two periods of half-an-hour, once a week, with an occasional extra in the form of a paper read at the Young People's Guild, or some such meeting, the members of our congregations hear Christian truth expounded from the pulpit. Many of them do not honour us with two visits on the Sunday, and very large numbers of them do not supplement what they hear with any consistent study of the Bible. Over against this comparative trickle of preaching and class-work are the out- pourings of the daily and weekly Press, eagerly sought and hungrily swallowed by most of us. The vital question is whether what people read does not render null and void much of the truth they hear. At a Methodist Summer School held in Swanwick since the war. one of the delegates asked the chairman if he would "suggest any practical steps an individual could take at once towards the redemption of society." "Yes, take care to read a righteous newspaper" was the quite unexpected reply, and the Challenge, in which I read the report and some illuminating comments on the subject of this article, com- mended the answer as a sound piece of common- sense, so obvious that most of us overlook it. This little incident was followed by the drawing up of an index of righteous newspapers, in which the Manchester Guardian came an easy first, with the Westminster Gazette and the Observer (a weekly) as the only two papers worthy to be mentioned in its company. It is possible, though doubtful, that some of us may know a news sheet that satisfies the same test, but which can hardly be compared with these great organs of opinion because of its local and more restricted appeal. Another point needs to be cleared up before we pass on to any indictment of the Press, and that is the meaning of the word "righteous." It is important that we avoid reading into it our own prejudices and pre-suppositions, but its general sense will be definite enough for the purpose we have in hand. It now remains for us to advance certain charges against the newspaper world, and to see whether any practical remedies suggest themselves. (1) There is to begin with, the obvious pandering of the Press to sensationalism, and when editors retort that they are only supplying a demand, we have to remember that newspapers have been the most powerful instrument but one in the creation of the craze. (That other is of course our unnatural and unhealthy industrialism). In the long intervals which occur between great deeds set in circumstances that provide us with a genuine thrill, journalists are forced by their em- ployers to rake up anything, provided that it will tickle the popular fancy. The result is that the dividing line between the merely exciting and the actually unhealthy is crossed again and again. The plea of realism is often made in justification, but a realism which sees only the sordid and filthy