We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Movies and the Church J. E. MacAfee Community Counselor, University of Oklahoma t'l F y' can't lick the enemy, j'in 'im." That, in his own words, expresses the phil- >sophy of one of the most successful nanipulators of American municipal >olitics. The gentry of which he is io distinguished a representative have lot establish a code of ethics which :hurch leaders, and educators, and eputable citizens generally, have been nclined to accept in to to. Yet with )roper modifications, and refinements n diction, the formula propounds one of the fundaments of efficient com- nunity building. If you cannot win, :Io not fight. And, by all that is sane is well as holy, do not fight if you do rot deserve to win. Certain church leaders have believed that they discover in the movie the very incarnation of the devil, and per- laps some still entertain that belief. Having arrived at that conviction, of course they fight. They ought to fight, if their conviction is sound. That is what the devil is for, to furnish the piece de resistance upon which the pious may expend his belligerent spirit without compromise or shadow of weakness. But this conviction is not sound. The movie is not the modern incarnation of Satan. Certain of Satan's henchmen may have espoused the movie industry, and may be bent upon its employment for certain devilish purposes. That is not a ques- tion which it will be in order to affirm or deny in this connection. But noth- ing is more apparent to intelligent and conscientious folks today than that there is no necessary connection between the movie and the evil one. Churchly resistance to the movie must yield, must compromise, must recognize that unconditional opposi- tion means defeat, not to the movie, but to the churchly resister. Those who stubbornly stand in the way of the ongoing of the motion picture enterprise will be run over, ground to powder, not because anybody ma- liciously wishes them ill, but because they are doomed by the divinely benefi- cent laws of human progress. This is a lesson of primary and fundamental importance for all of our churches and church people to learn. Sermons which attack the movie as such are not only an impiety but a kind of insanity. The only possible treatment worthy of religion or of intelligence is one which seeks to find the way by which the movie may be utilized for whole- some and holy ends. This is a lesson of peculiar import- ance in the smaller community, that in which the movie industry has not been rigidly commercialized, and so thoroughly entrenched in the com- munity's "business" program that it 181