their grievances
expressed in their own words. Again Jerome Davis asks, "Is it possible
that our Church leaders are to some extent blinded by current
conventional standards? Are they so busy sharing the wealth of the
prosperous with others in spiritual quests that they fail to see some
areas of desperate social need? Do they to some degree unconsciously
exchange the gift of prophecy for yearly budgets and business boards?"

James H. Maurer, the president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor,
speaks for labor and the title of his subject is, "Has the Church
Betrayed Labor?" Mr. Maurer's opinion follows: "A worker living from
hand to mouth, and lucky if he is not hopelessly in debt besides,
working at trip-hammer speed when he has work, with no security against
enforced idleness, sickness, and old age, can hardly be expected to
become deeply interested in, or a very enthusiastic listener to sermons
about Lot's disobedient wife, who because she looked back was turned
into a pillar of salt. He is far more concerned about his own overworked
and perhaps underfed wife who, due to the strain of trying to raise his
family on a meager income that permits of no rest or proper medical
care, is slowly but surely turning into a corpse. To go to a church and
listen to a sermon about the sublimeness of being humble and meek, that
no matter how desperate the struggle to live may be one should be
contented and not envy the more fortunate, because God in His infinite
wisdom has ordained that there shall be rich and poor and that no matter
how heavy one's burdens on this earth, one should bear them meekly and
look for reward in the world to come and remember that God loves the
poor--such sermons naturally sound pleasing to the ears of the wealthy
listeners, and the usual reward is a shower of gold and hearty
congratulations by the sleek and well-fed members of the congregation.
But to an intelligent worker such sermons sound like capitalistic
propaganda, upon which he is constantly being fed by every
labor-exploiting concern in the country, and quite naturally he tries to
avoid getting an extra dose of the same kind of buncombe on Sunday....

"In Churches, men have listened for nearly two thousand years to lessons
and sermons about 'the brotherhood of man,' 'the forging of swords of
war into plowshares of peace,' 'man is his brother's helper,' 'peace on
earth, good will toward men,' 'thou shalt not kill,' We are taught to
say the Lord'