The Support of the Nation

The Harvard CRIMSON has made a sharp protest against the proposal of the corporation to build a great new chapel as a war memorial. The New York Times ridicules the protest, saying: "Some of the children are bawling in the college papers": "So the infants bleat"; and more to the same effect. One of the editors of the Harkness Hoot, in a letter to the Yale Daily News, strongly supports the CRIMSON. The honors, in our judgment, rest with the younger generation. The grounds of objection to the proposed memorial actually set forth by both the editors and the contributors of the CRIMSON seem to us evidence of a sound and serious concern with a question of real educational interest, and we congratulate them on their protest. The letter of Selden Rodman to the Yale Daily News supporting the stand of the CRIMSON raises at least three questions deserving of serious thought. His objects to the assumption of most of our war memorials that we were right and our enemies were wrong; he questions incidentally the right of universities to spend vast sums in unnecessary building: and, most striking of all, he declares: "The very gesture of sinking a million dollars in a Protestant chapel when the validity of Protestantism (and Christianity in general as a solution for contemporary problems) is being questioned must, to be unprejudiced observer, appear at least extravagant."

Now these protesting young men, if we understand them, are not objecting to religion as such, however much they may be questioning some of its current manifestations. They do seem to objects however, to the assumption that God is Nordic, Protestant, capitalistic, and pro-Ally. And they do not believe that the universities have the right to use the millions they can so easily command for the uncritical propagation of accepted ideas and beliefs. The students seem to be doing honest and genuine thinking, and in their thought we see far more of hope both for the universities and for the religion of the future than we can see in the action of a corporation that would build an unneeded chapel in the midst of a living university, or in the ideas of a great newspaper that finds it possible to defend such a waste provided only that the proposed building is "beautiful."

The controversy brings up another question that cries out for answer. Is it not full time to stop setting up religious war memorials of any kind? The churches, with a few honorable exceptions, blessed the last war, just as they have blessed every preceding one--and just as they will bless the next one, we are tempted to add. But during the past few years some of our prominent religious leaders have professed repentance, and have declared that they will be on the side of peace next time even when the drums beat. If their professions mean anything, they ought to fight every attempt to associate religion and war, even in retrospect. Let us build memorials, if we must, to our war dead, and let them express our grief at our folly and wickedness in sending these young men to death; but let us not help prepare another war by sanctifying the last one through associating its losses and sacrifices with the service of God instead of the devil. --The Nation.