Gene Veith surprisingly misses what early radio preachers like Walter A. Maier of The Lutheran Hour were really up to in helping to reverse "America's Religious Depression"

 

At one point in his excellent review of Ministers of a New Medium: Broadcasting Theology in the Radio Ministries of Fulton J. Sheen and Walter A. Maier, Gene Veith makes passing reference to their opposition to the atomic bombings of Japan, which for the time seems like a pretty conventional position for churchmen to take who were already grappling with the profoundly demoralizing effects of the atrocities of the World Wars.

Veith, however, might have better considered this larger theme of American demoralization and how preachers such as these rose to address it. In a word, they did it first, by reasserting the primacy of God's law, calling a spade a spade. The two broadcasting luminaries were, as he says, "robustly orthodox", and frequently "began with a searing condemnation of sin, often occasioned by a current issue or event".

Veith, a Lutheran, oddly misses that the phenomenal recovery of the churches in the post-war from the malaise of the period 1930-1950, "America's Religious Depression", stems precisely from preaching what Lutherans call Law and Gospel. First, they called the wars' sins actual sin, something most men and women who lived that hell needed and wanted to hear, something which made sense of the senseless maelstrom into which the whole world had been plunged, not once but twice. Second, they proclaimed the gospel's antidote to that sin in the form of Christ's gracious act of redemptive death on the cross. We had blood on our hands, but Christ's blood washed it away.

People forget how amazingly popular The Decalogue, The Ten Commandments, became during the 1950s. Preachers preached it, film makers dramatized it, President Eisenhower himself promoted it, monuments to it went up everywhere. It was what war weary souls most needed to hear. Love for God's law reoriented the entire country.

We were a victorious nation, but a nation literally sick of the immorality of war and desperate for forgiveness. The Law, and then the Gospel, together answered this situation. The churches boomed, the population boomed, the economy boomed.

 

Snoring upon the flint

Weariness can snore upon the flint,

when resty sloth finds the down pillow hard.
 

-- William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act 3, Scene VI

Weary Jacob made stones for his pillows at Bethel

Why we bear the fardels along

 

 

 

 Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

Old Samuel Johnson's witty lines about a hermit mock these by a young John Milton

 

And may at last my weary age

Find out the peaceful hermitage,

The hairy gown and mossy cell,

Where I may sit and rightly spell

Of ev'ry star that heav'n doth shew,

And ev'ry herb that sips the dew;
Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain.
These pleasures Melancholy give,
And I with thee will choose to live.

-- John Milton, Il Penseroso (c. 1631)