Christianity makes no sense if you think you are all right.

Chad Walsh's Campus Gods on Trial

From inside the book cover flap

"When Chad Walsh first surveyed our godless colleges in 1952, he discovered that godless was the least fitting epithet to apply to the campus. There, of all places, gods abounded in staggering profusion. If the God of Judaeo-Christian tradition was not much in evidence, a dozen new gods were, with Progress, Materialism, Scientism, Humanistarianism, Relativism, and Security heading the roll."

Walsh, Chad. Campus Gods on Trial: The Changing Pattern of Religion on the College Campus. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962.

Pages 83-85. [Some elements highlighted or italicized]

Chapter 10: Psychological Reasons for Not Being a Christian

"The self-reliant man comes up against his own limitations. The Christian (who by definition is un-self-reliant) can also fail. But the Christian has one advantage. He knows he can't do it alone. There is only one expert who can mold the I and guide its quiet, steady growth. The progress the Christian achieves may seem slower than that of his grimly etermined, self-sufficient neighbor. But the progress he makes is more permanent, because it reflects the basic alterations that God produces in the I. In the long run, the somewhat relaxed tortoise will outstrip the tense hare.

But why can't we lift ourselves by our bootstraps and win perfection of chracter? Because there is something wrong with each of us at the center -- something that only God can remedy. Christianity makes no sense if you think you are all right.

"In each of us there is a stubborn self-centeredness. It shows itself most transparently in small children, who make it clear that parents, planets, and stars ought to revolve around them. It is revealed more subtly and danerously in grownups. (How about your big [campus SGA] wheels? Do they ever try to manipulate other students to increase their own prestige?)

"We are jealous of God himself. He is our rival. We are rebels. This kind of rebellion is not going to be overcome by graduate school and a Ph.D.; nor will many expensive hours on the psychoanalyst's couch cure it. And yet we are not happy rebels. Down underneath, we intuitively know that the future holds little for us except tenseness, inward frustration, an dulcers, unless we call in the services of the only expert who is competent to make the necessary adjustments and alterations.

"Most of us, when we really think about it, can see that objectivity and self-reliance are vitamins in moderation but viruses when gulped to excess. Freedom, however, seems the cure-all and universal tonic. But freedom, like objectivity and self-reliance, easily becomes the mask for pride, which Christian psychology has shrewdly sized up as the most deep-rooted sin and the highest hurdle between man and God.

"Writing home to explain why the dean has suspended you from school is a blow to your pride, but only a fain hint of what it means to turn to God and say, You take over. Two students, writing from opposite viewpoints, agree on this:

To realize his full potential, man must stop using God and religion as a crutch. Only with true independence and self-dependence can man reach great heights of progress, and becuase the Christian God -- and most other gods -- deny me that complete self-reliance, I cannot accept him.

I believe the greatest stumbling block [to religious commitment] lies not in a person's acceptance of a creed but being able to humble himself before God ... To let his will be done, not ours.

"Putting yourself in God's hands is an act of surrender; his Church is the P.O.W. camp. If anyone tells you this is easy, the right answer is a horselaugh. Freedom is a word properly dear to us; nobody likes to walk across no man's land, white flag in hand."