Legalists & Charismatics

The latest religious census of the U. S. was taken in 1926. At that time 55,000,000 people listed themselves as members of a church. Of these church members, 97% belonged to the 24 principal denominations. There are, however, more than 200 U. S. religious groups, half of them with less than 7,000 members. Some of them date from the theological squabbles which attended the religious revivals of the early 19th Century. Some comfort their members with assurances that all the rest of the world is wrong, and will be painfully proved so by some spectacular, millennary cataclysm. Some cater to adepts of what Dr. David Starr Jordan called "sciosophy" ("systematized ignorance"). Out last week was a book about these teeming little sects, result of 15 years of study by Rev. Dr. Elmer Talmage Clark of Nashville. Tenn., secretary of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church. South.*

Dr. Clark classifies U. S. sects as Pessimistic (Adventists who believe that most of mankind is bad, that Jesus Christ will return to take members of the "True Church" into Heaven); Perfectionist (Methodist and "Holiness" groups which hold that moral perfection should be the goal of Christians); Charismatic (Pentecostal or "Holy Roller" sects whose members consider themselves endowed with special charismata or gifts, such as the gift of speaking in "unknown tongues"); Communistic (the almost-defunct Shakers, the defunct Oneida Community, the still-existing Church Triumphant of Estero. Fla., whose members believe that the world is a hollow ball, with men living inside it) ; Legalistic (Old Catholics, Mennonites, Primitive Baptists and other churches which stress certain rules, practices, objective "things" as essentials of true religion).

Some odd facts Dr. Clark gathered on U. S. sects:

P: A woman, Mrs. Alma White, is bishop of the pentecostal Pillar of Fire church, in Zarephath, N. J.

P: The Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists (27 churches, 300 members) believe that Adam & Eve were infused with a "good seed" from God; that Eve received a "bad seed" from Satan. Since everyone today is born of either a good seed or a bad seed, and nothing can be done about it, this church does no gospel preaching or missionary work.

P: The Church of the Living God, Christian Workers for Fellowship, thinks Jesus was a Negro, because his ancestor, David, said: I am become like a bottle in the smoke.

P: The Catholic Apostolic Church believes that apostles are appointed by God and that the last one died in 1901; since then it has been waiting eagerly for new appointments.

P: The Church of the Plymouth Brethren has repeatedly split over the question of baptism: whether it should be in running water or calm, forward or backward, with one plunge or three.

P: The River Brethren have two branches, the One-Mode holding that, in their foot-washing ritual, the same person should wash and dry the feet, while the Two-Mode believes that one should wash, another dry.

*SMALL SECTS IN AMERICA -- Cokesbury Press ($2).

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