nineteen hundred and forty-six - Amazon Web Services

PROCEEDINGS 121
This imperative responsibility has been, taken all too lightly in the past by our
people, our churches and our conventions. At least one State Convention of
Baptists participating in this Convention has no committee on morals or social
service. In most of the states committees are given from fifteen to thirty
minutes at the annual session of the Convention to introduce into the minutes
some facts, judgments and resolutions that are soon forgotten. And in this
Convention the same thing has been largely true. No provision has been made
for the Social Service Commission to inaugurate any sort of program of service
or education between meetings of the Convention. Its financial allotment
has been so small as not to permit the members of the Commission to meet for
any thorough study of the subjects it is appointed to consider. We have done
all too little. The annual reports have been a gesture, a noble gesture and a
token of a slightly aroused social conscience; but time and circumstance are
upon us that call us to take steps, to move forward in a genuine and forthright
concern for the social, political and economic procedures in whose creation and
direction our nation and our God have committed to us the responsibility of
sharing. We must be concerned as individuals; we must also be concerned as
groups in united protest against evil and in support of good and right. We
must be concerned with the inside of life, its spirit and faith and motive; but
also with the outside of life, its framework and customs and institutions. The
primary emphasis of our religion is on the inside of the cup, but nowhere can
we find any Christian virtue in leaving the outside unclean. We must present
to God pure hearts and clean hands. We must walk humbly before God and do
justly, and love mercy. We have a moral demand from heaven to do right in the
present situation. We cannot do wrong today or shirk the responsibility for
doing right today in order to escape some imagined ill or promote some
imagined good tomorrow. And we have a moral task as Christian citizens which,
as patriots, we cannot shirk, and, as Christians, we cannot approach in an unchristian
way.
Time (the beginning of our second century), circumstance (a broken and
desperate and imperiled society) and the moral authority of Jesus Christ demanding
righteousness and love in all our relationships, all combine to lay
upon us the need of re-appraising the purpose and function of the Social Service
Commission as an expression of the moral and social concern of the Convention
and as an agency of the Convention in the promotion of righteousness, justice,
and love in our social life. It is for this reason that the Commission is request-
' ing (in a separate recommendation) that the Executive Committee of the Convention
be authorized PROBLEMS and instructed THAT to study CHALLENGE the proper function and scope
There of the are Commission now before in order the to American make necessary people provision many issues for its that support. cannot be
settled until Christian moral leaders bring to light their moral meaning and
subject them to examination by the principles of high morality. Polls of public
opinion are very popular and very significant. Some of them reflect with amazing
accuracy the attitude of the nation. But that does not mean that the majority
have by thought and understanding arrived at a seasoned judgment.
They reflect for the most part attitudes that are created by partisan, sectional
or parochial sentiments.
Christian citizenship must rise to the level of understanding and objective
moral judgment, arrived at only by a study of the issues and of the relevant
teachings of our Lord concerning righteousness, truth and love. Our country
needs and must have a revival of education in basic moral principles, and of moral
purpose that will apply and implement a new moral understanding. There is in
the original and fundamental spirit of American civilization a basic morality
that must be reclaimed from the perils that beset it in this revolutionary time.
It held to the worth of the individual man, and his right to freedom, to individual
honor and social justice, to truth and honesty in economic and political
life to the sacredness of the monogamous family and the dignity of law. Its
democracy was not a political expedient, but a moral principle based upon the
nature of man, the nature of society and the will of God. The basic morality
must be revived.
It was jealousy for individual freedom that gave us a democratic government
and separated the church from the state. But it was never contemplated that