nineteen hundred and forty-six - Amazon Web Services

122 SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION
religion would be banished from political thinking or that the education of our
youth, delivered from sectarian control, would omit the moral foundations of
our very life and give pagan ethics a welcome to the curriculum that is denied
to Christian ethics. It is time for American Christians, including Baptists, to
find an unprejudiced way to bring basic morality that springs from belief in
a holy and righteous God back into American education. Else these issues and
problems that threaten our domestic peace and the freedom that we enjoy will
be too much for us, for they will yield only to truth and justice and love.
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
Among these issues that so urgently call are the industrial issues and
problems of the present hour. They are too critical to be ignored and too
complex to be treated lightly. Their solution requires a continued search for
truth, clear ethical perception, and full recognition of Christian responsibility
for honesty and justice in the production and distribution of goods. In a
democracy Christian men and women have an opportunity and a corresponding
obligation to exert a constructive influence upon the economic order and to
apply Christian standards to concrete economic situations.
At a time when industrial relations are marked by sharp and bitter conflicts,
what can Christian individuals do to correct economic injustices and to secure
economic cooperation? Disavowing Utopian expectations, and recognizing the
complexity of the highly controversial issues involved, we make the following
suggestions:
1. Christian men and women, acting under the inspiration of faith, should
• work for economic security as an important factor in raising the level
of American society. It is an incontrovertible fact that delinquency and
mortality ^"ates among children are higher in the lower income groups and
in the deteriorated areas of urban communities.
2. We should discover more effective ways of expressing the Christian spirit
of respect for persons in the midst of the impersonal relationships which
characterize so much of modern industry.
3. We should challenge the monetary standard as the sole criterion of success
and work for the introduction of higher motives than financial profit
into economic enterprises.
4. We should remind the organizers and managers of capital (investors and
management) that if our capitalistic economy is to endure as the chosen
system of the American people it must recognize in the full measure of
, reality the part played in industry and the equity rightfully claimed by
the producer, the laborer and the consumer. The manager, hitherto
identified too exclusively with the interests of the investor^ must accept
the moral responsibility of advancing the morally and socially legitimate
interests of the laborer and of the producing and consuming public also.
The survival of "the American way" depends upon his activity in eliminating
from our industrial order the concept of war.
5. We should also remind the organizers and managers of labor (the laborer
and the labor leader) that, in claiming their rights, they too must recognize
in the full measure of reality the part played and the equity rightfully
claimed by the investor, capital manager, the producer and the
consumer. Labor, organized and unorganized, must assume moral responsibility
commensurate with its enormous power, to practice democracy
in all of its procedures, and to insist upon a competent leadership whose
moral integrity and conviction will inspire the confidence of good men.
6. Recognizing the equal right of men to organize their labor on the one
hand, and their money, on the other, we should insist that the managers of
labor and the managers of capital seek, in the name of patriotism, humanity
and basic morality, peaceful methods of adjustment and cooperation.
7. While advocating peaceful methods of adjustment and change in the
economic realm, we should at the same time assume personal responsibility
as the consumers of goods to buy rationally, to use constructively, and
to abide by the social controls that are instituted for the benefit of all
citizens.