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| Angel, c.1956 (Red with H... |
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W.W. II Brought the Americans Back to Church (Click Magazine, 1942)
When this article appeared on the U.S. newsstands at the close of 1942, the American people were fully committed to a war on two fronts that quite often was not generating the kinds of headlines they would have preferred to read. Certainly, there was the naval victory at Midway, but the butcher's bill was high at Pearl Harbor and North Africa and after a thirteen year lull in church attendance, America was once again returning to the church:"Two years ago most churches were considered fortunate if forty-five people attended the morning service; today devout worshipers fill the pews morning and night." Read about the reduction in male church attendance in the Twenties.
| The Persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses (Literary Digest, 1936)
An article concerning the persecution of that Protestant faith so unique to American shores: the Jehovah's Witnesses, a religion that numbered 50,000 world-wide in 1936. The attached article reported on the school expulsions of various assorted young followers for failing to show proper respect to the American flag on campus:
"A year ago the first such case, in Pennsylvania, startled the newspapers. 'If you kill me I won't salute!' quavered an eleven year-old schoolboy. He was expelled. Soon after, in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, a teacher was was dismissed for refusing to honor 'the flag of horror and hate.'"
Similar instances are reported to have taken place throughout much of 1935, while in Hitler's Germany: "More than 1,000 of Jehovah's Witnesses, for daring to tell Hitler that the Third Reich is 'the Devil's Kingdom,' were thrown into Nazi concentration camps." Today there are over seven million people who follow the faith.
| A British View of American Christianity (Literary Digest, 1913)
A short article concerning the observations of an English clergyman found in THE CHRISTIAN WORLD (London) as to that distinct brand of Christianity practiced in the United States in the early Twentieth Century:"...Christianity in America is divided into two camps. The one is orthodox. It's orthodoxy is apt to degenerate into the senile attachment to the letter of Scripture...There is a lack of mental breadth, of intellectual enlightenment, about the members of this school which is a little disheartening to one who is in agreement with them on the central matters...The other school seems to have sacrificed almost everything which makes Christianity distinct from a temporary philosophy. It's members have the bad habit of preaching eugenics or sociology in place of the Gospel. They appear to be afraid of the great epistles and the nobler passages of the Gospels, and are apt to speak in terms which would suggest that there was nothing distinctive in Christianity which can make it an absolute and universal faith." In 1925 these two groups would go head to head in a Tennessee courtroom debating Darwin's Theory of Evolution and its place in the schoolhouse.
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