Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, IX: Jedgar on Sunday School

Randall Stephens

Everybody ought to go to Sunday School,
Sunday School, Sunday School.
The mothers and the fathers,
and the boys and the girls,
everybody ought to go to Sunday School.*

Below is an excerpt from J. Edgar Hoover's article on the merits of Sunday School. (Subversives, he wrote, wanted to abolish it.) The piece, in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction category, appeared in Christian Life Magazine (May 1970). As I was flipping through the pages and stumbled on this, I did a double take. Yes, indeed, this was the J. Edgar Hoover stumping for a cherished institution of Protestant education. I take it that he wrote for other Christian magazines, too. Haven't seen him in CT, but perhaps he graced their pages as well.

J. Edgar Hoover, "The Sunday School Can Lead Us Back," Christian Life (May 1970)

Today the Sunday School is on the defensive. There are those who minimize its positive role. There are others who, whatever their motives, seek to abolish it outright. Should they succeed, they will destroy for much of our youth as well as many older citizens, opportunities to study, discuss and consider, on a regular basis and with others, the real source of this Nation's spiritual strength. . . .

Our Nation has survived the sixties. Save perhaps for that of a century ago when the Union was rent by civil war, no decade in the history of the United States has been more fraught with uncertainty, more torn by violence, or subjected more frequently to high peaks of intense emotion. . . .

The guidance derived from study of the Bible has been immense from our beginnings as a Nation. The French observer, de Tocqueville, tells us that the sovereign authority in the United States in the 1830's was religious. He explains that religion exercised little influence ". . . upon the laws and upon the details of public opinion; but it directs the customs of the community, and by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state." De Tocqueville found that there was no country in the world where the Christian religion retained a greater influence over the souls of men than in this one. And he found the average American to be, in his words, ". . . a highly civilized being, who consents for a time to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates into the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and some newspapers." . . .

It is because believe the future of freedom in our Nation--and. therefore, the fate of the entire world-is dependent upon improving the spiritual life of our country--the quality of life, if you will--that I wholeheartedly support the Sunday School as an institution. I believe it has within it the capacity to become an even more dynamic and evangelistic force than it now is. I believe it must reach out in some manner to encompass and enlighten that great body of pathetic young people who, in the main because they are ignorant of Him, do not believe in God and cannot believe in themselves. I refer particularly to the immature and demanding children of affluence. the "Now!" oriented young people, who--because of parental neglect in the area of discipline--have as their sale guides to action only their own wants and desires.

Make the Devil Mad, Go to Bob Jones U.

Randall Stephens

I've been slogging through a chapter that deals with the evolution of the family values agenda, Christian psychology, and evangelical child rearing. It's always harder when one moves further up in time. I feel more secure in what I have to say when the characters I'm writing about have been dead for at least half a century. (You know, when I'm writing about old time Nazarene preacher "Uncle" Bud Robinson or the Earth-quaker Seth Cook Rees.)

I've spent some recent days reading through issues of Christian Century, Christianity Today, the Herald of Holiness, Christian Life, and Christian Herald. (Evangelicals loved to us words like "herald," "trumpet," "harbinger," and "advocate" in the titles of their mags. What about "liberator" or "dissenter"?) The time frame: 1966 to about 1975. Though this is really recent history I've also been struck by what a distant era this now seems like. Many of the concerns of writers and editors, it's safe to say, are deep in the dustbin of history now. At other times what would amount to a kind of baroque political incorrectness today was no big deal then. Take for example one of the most interesting headlines from one of these magazines (and it wasn't Christian Century): "Good News for Retards."

As I'm thumbing through yellowed copies--always better to look through print versions, I think--I've also been fascinated by the graphics, layout, and general look of these mags. Part Madmen Moderne, part Batman. Evangelicals, even those not so enthralled with Jesus People, quickly adopted the Haight, Op, and Pop Art wildness of the day. So, I include here a couple of my favorites. (Click images to enlarge.) The Bob Jones U. advert from 1968 is priceless! Pat Boone's take on the rapture might be worth more than a gospel car full of gold. Also, great use of passive voice: "Pat Boone's RAPTURE has been heralded as the greatest new religious record in 35 years." Heralded, see.

That reminds me of a recent news item from the English newspaper, not so affectionately called the Daily Torygraph by some: "Jesus will return by 2050, say 40pc of Americans." The paper picked up on a Pew, The Press/Smithsonian Magazine poll. Brits always like to be shocked by how unlike us they are. Few snakehandlers, supermalls, megachurches, kids with adult diabetes, or WWF wrestlers-turned-politicians across the pond. "41 per cent say Jesus Christ will return within the next 40 years while 46 per cent say this will definitely or probably not happen." 71% also think cancer will be cured by 2050. Are these two items related?

Pat Boone might have been a pop singer only a parent could love, but he was on to something with this rapture business!