Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 237, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 October 1915 — MINISTER’S ACTION DIDN’T SUIT EDITOR [ARTICLE]

MINISTER’S ACTION DIDN’T SUIT EDITOR

Benton Review Thinks Closing of Gala Week Shows Will Not Get Sinners Into Churches. Commenting on the action of Rev. J. Van Nice. Bundy and other ministers and a farmer living near Fowler who complained about the immorality of the shows in that town gala week, Editor George L. Roby, of The Benton Review, says: As a community, Fowler is very, very good just now. The preachers’ committee decided that we are so good that it would corrupt our morals if three or four women danced around in a tent, making-a good deal less showing of their flesh and form than several hundred thousand women have been doing at the bathing beaches of the United States the past summer arid a good deal less exciting to the male species than the pictures of the women bathers printed true to life in the rotrogravure sections of the Sunday papers. The most aristocratic women have been wearing their dress with no underskirts for some years, and the average man has become so blunted to excitement at the sight of a live female form that many of them can look at nude statuary without blushing. From our observation ,we think that the ministers have done their cause a great deal of harm in this crusade. It advertised the shows most thoroughly, and several times as many attended as have in former years when similar shows have not been advertised in this way. Only 35 per cent of the people in the United States even nominally belong to any church and we would judge the per cent to be even less in Fowler, where all the preachers talk to empty benches and if all the congregations were comthere are not enough people who go to church Sunday nights to rep*ay even one pastor for the labor of preparing a sermon, because the audiences are mostly made up of the pitiful little fraction of the 35 per cent who have formed a habit of going, and are content in the smug idea that they are Christians and anything the preacher may say means someone else. The number of new faces at the churches will not be greatly increased by the action taken last week, because even a temporary combination of church and state produces jptense antagonism whenever tried in this country, and what good are churches if no sinner attends them ?