THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION Volume II JANUARY 1922 Number 1 THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE OPEN FORUM TO DEMOCRACY IN RELIGION masses." GEORGE W. COLEMAN ABSTRACT The open forum is a direct result of the eagerness of the church to "reach the Three of the pioneer organizations of the forum-at Cooper Union, in the Church of the Ascension, and at Ford Hall-were all inspired by the ideals of the church. The purpose of the forum is to give an opportunity for open discussion, where objections may be raised as well as positions defined. The result has been to jar church people out of their complacency, to modify unintelligent radicalism, and to stimulate thinking and reading. Dogmatism is immediately checked. No ecclesiastical or other conditions are prescribed for participation in the discussion. Those who have been alienated from the church find that religion, like other human interests, is progressing and is dealing with real issues. A wider sense of brotherhood is developed. A new community interest is aroused. Brief descriptions of typical experiments reinforce the foregoing points. The open forum brings together all kinds of serious-minded people at stated times for the purpose of discussing the issues of life under the leadership of recognized experts who stand ready to meet the challenge of any person in the audience who wishes to cross-examine them. The open forum is utterly democratic, but never chaotic. It guarantees a freedom of discussion which neither the speaker nor the audience may monopolize or subvert. The motto of the open forum is "Let there be light!" The forum generates more light and less heat than any other form of public discussion. Even applied science in the material realm has not yet discovered how to give us light without heat. Although the modern forum idea is of very recent origin, it has quickly spread throughout the United States and Canada until now forums are numbered by the hundred. To those who are interested in religion let it be noted that this new instrument for democracy is an outgrowth of the life of the church, although it must be admitted that it has taken the church some time to recognize its own child. But the day of distrust and suspicion on the part of the church has given place to a time of eager inquiry, earnest appreciation, and active co-operation. It was the Rev. Charles E. Jefferson, D.D., of the Broadway Tabernacle Church, New York City, who some time ago prophesied that within a few years the forum would be as necessary an adjunct of the city church as are the Sunday-school and the prayer meeting today. The open forum came as an aftermath of that great urge of the Protestant church in America to reach the masses. Thirty years ago and more, "How to Reach the Masses" was the great hue and cry heard on every religious convention platform with interminable repercussions from our pulpits all over the land. Just about the time, years later, when we woke up to the fact that our effort to reach the masses was a continuing failure and we had begun to grow very anxious as to what the masses would soon be doing to us, one or two bold spirits within the church proceeded to do the obvious thing: they quit talking in the church about the masses and went out to the masses and talked to them. That was the beginning of the modern forum idea. The late Mr. Charles Sprague Smith at Cooper Union, New York City, Dr. Percy S. Grant of the Church of the Ascension on lower Fifth Avenue, New York City, and the writer in his work on Sunday evenings at Ford Hall in Boston, were the first to develop the technique and to practice the spirit of the forum as it is now conceived. At least they were the first to give a large, outstanding, and permanent exhibit of what an open forum can be and do. All three of these enterprises owed their existence to the life and inspiration of the church. Charles Sprague Smith was the son of a minister, Dr. Grant used his church to father and mother the infant forum, and it was the Boston Baptist Social Union that gave me my opportunity to demonstrate what could be done in Boston. In all three of these ventures the driving force was the desperate need of finding some way to bridge the widening chasm between the well-meaning people within the churches and the good folks outside. It is doubtful if any one of us had at the start any clear vision of the open forum as it is conceived today. As we look back over the work of fourteen seasons at Ford Hall, our success in interesting the masses is unmistakable. Not even our severest critic would gainsay that. And to tell the story of the effect of these open-forum meetings on the masses of Boston who have frequented Ford Hall would be to write a romance. Many experts in social work have pronounced this method the soundest and most successful process of Americanization that they have witnessed-a process which awakens the smug and somnolent native just as surely as it informs and molds the confused and uncouth foreigner. But the purpose of this paper draws me away from this absorbing side of the story to another phase of the subject. What contribution does this open-forum idea make to democracy in religion? Perhaps there is even more significance in the answer that can be made to that question. Let me say first of all with reference to this single forum at Ford Hall, after fourteen years of the most intimate acquaintance with its work and the results flowing from it, that the reaction on the life of the churches in Boston is in itself worth all these meetings have cost, if they have accomplished nothing else. Greater Boston now has twenty-five or more forums, and churches and church people are responsible for a generous share of them. Not only have Protestant churches taken up readily this method of discussing vital issues with the average man and woman, regardless of church connections, but the Roman Catholic church and the Jewish synagogue are also alert in taking advantage of this democratic method of discussing everything that interests the public mind. The Common Cause Forum, conducted under the auspices of the Roman Catholic church every Sunday evening during the season in the Franklin Union Hall in the city of Boston, would be a very interesting study in itself. There you would find twelve hundred people in the most serious frame of mind, listening to the pros and cons of religion, the church, democracy, education, and every other vital topic, as set forth not only by responsible lay leaders of the church, but also as challenged, contradicted, and defied by some of the keenest young radicals this day of unrest has produced. Such an extraordinary spectacle was never witnessed before the coming of the forum idea, but it is a commonplace now at the Franklin Union after about ten years of continuous operation. This forum under Catholic auspices goes much farther in the democratic discussion of religious questions than we at Ford Hall, under Baptist auspices, think is wise and fitting. In one Jewish synagogue in Boston some years ago the forum for the entire season was given over to the discussion of distinctly Jewish questions with a large audience of Jewish young people every Sunday night. The older men of the synagogue looked on in amazement and some of them in fear and trembling as they saw the young people gathering by the hundreds to discuss freely and frankly everything of interest to serious-minded Jews. But the establishment of forums under religious auspices, significant and interesting as that may be, was not the only mark made upon the religious life of the city by the Sunday evening meetings at Ford Hall. Neither would I lay special stress upon the forum method of discussion introduced into |