My Attitude Toward Church During World War II

I Started Hating Church

About the time we moved to Elmdale I started hating church.   I’ve already mentioned the fact that shoes were rationed.   I was a growing boy, and my feet expanded before the OPA (Office of Price Administration) would issue stamps that allowed my parents to purchase shoes.   The only leather shoes I owned were my Sunday shoes but I was made to wear them to church on Sunday, and my feet really hurt  I never put them on until we arrived at the building.  

 I threw a fit about it, but it didn’t get me anywhere, except one time when Mama went to church, and Daddy didn’t.  I threw up such a howl that I was allowed to wait outside in the pickup until church was over.  That proved to be pretty boring.

But it wasn’t just the clothes.  I really liked the singing.   This was long before anyone ever dreamed of contemporary Christian music, so it didn’t matter to me that we were singing 19^th century songs.  I didn’t know what we were singing about when we sang, “here I raise my Ebenezer,” or “night with ebon pinion brooded oe’r the vale,”  but I loved four part harmony then, and I still do.

On the other hand I detested preachers and preaching.  At that point you could never have convinced me that I would someday make preaching my life’s work.  I either wanted to be a cowboy or an airplane pilot.  For a short period of time I thought it would be great to be a high wire walker, but that was before I fell and broke a couple of ribs trying to walk across the top of a gate.  

I had several reasons for not liking preachers.    For one thing most of them were too loud.  In the days before PA systems I guess they thought they had to be in order to make themselves heard.  After I started preaching I was pretty loud myself for a long time.  I just thought that was the way you were supposed to do it.  

For another it always seemed like they were always mad about something.  One of the things they didn’t like was cussing, and I had become quite proficient at the art of using blue language.  I’ll have to admit they got my attention on that one, however.  One day a horse threw me, and I turned the air blue with profane expletives.  Then it dawned on me what the preacher had been saying about taking the Lord’s name in vain.  I began to think you could go to Hell for talking like that, and I quit cussing cold turkey.

On the other hand, I didn’t see too much harm in some of the other things they warned us about.  They didn’t like the movies. You weren’t supposed to go to the theater at all.    They admitted that there were some wholesome films, but most of them weren’t according to them.   People like Clark Gable and Tyrone Power were evil, and they all had gone through multiple marriages.   They argued that if you only attended the wholesome films, somebody might see you go into the theater and classify you as a moviegoer.  They wouldn’t that you like Gene Autry and wouldn’t have anything to do with Tyrone Power.  Guilt by association was as bad as real guilt.  

They hated card playing because cards were sometimes used in gambling.   It never occurred to them that the same thing was true with dominoes, which they considered good Christian entertainment.    They were death on smoking.  Dancing, shorts, pants on women and mixed swimming were also banned, although they didn’t call it mixed swimming.  They called it “mixed bathing.”     Years later, a friend told me that his wife began attending church and later stopped attending.    Someone went to see her and asked why.   She had heard one of the sermons on “mixed bathing” and was deeply disturbed.   She said, “I consider myself of high moral character, and if you’ve got problems with church members taking baths with each other, you’re in real trouble.”

Obviously my aversion to church didn’t last very long.  I think church got better when I got better shoes.