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great need for opportunities for education. Expenditures for school buildings, salaries, and equipment show definite inequalities. The result is national loss in trained manpower both in war and in peace. Political participation is hampered by restrictions such as the poll tax, the white primary, which has been recently declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and other unconstitutional measures. Churchmen should work for their abolition. Projects in health, housing, and recreation call loudly for people of good will and religious convictions. Discriminations in the armed forces are rampant and ministers should declare themselves against such practices.

7. Religious Interpretation of All Social Questions

We hear over and over again that churchmen must leave politics, economics, and all social questions to the experts: politics to politicians, questions of economics to the economists, and social questions to experts in sociology. The ministers' duty is to preach the Gospel. Although ministers for the most part are not experts in the areas stipulated above, the minister should remember that the motivation for social action does not automatically flow from technical expertness. The dynamic is to be found in a religious interpretation of history, which the experts for the most part are qualified neither by training nor by religious experience to give. The Ministry must continue to point out that this is an ethical and moral universe and that there is an ethical and moral vein running through all social, economic, and political questions, and that violation brings the judgment of God. No amount of patriotism, no over-anxiety to win the war, no program of expedience can remove our obligation to God.

The minister may not have the last word on how to avert war, but there must be no doubt in his mind that war is sin and that it is against God. He may not know what labor should be paid—but he must know that each individual that works is entitled to enough to buy adequate clothes and food, to live in a decent home, to educate his children, to lay aside something for the rainy day, and to have time for leisure. The minister may not know how to abolish discrimination and wrong—but he must never have any doubt in his mind that all discrimination based on color or race is un-Christian and undemocratic. A prophetic Ministry of this kind is the inescapable responsibility of both Negro and white church leaders.

The question may be asked "why burden the church with such problems?" The answer is that the church

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is the only institution in America that lays claim to being a representative of God on the earth. It claims for itself more than any other institution. And further we know that the country will hear the Church once it makes up its mind.

Concluding Statement

Negro and white leaders may proclaim all these truths and seek in earnest to implement them in every day life without achieving final solutions. The outcome is in the hands of God. Man alone cannot establish the Kingdom of God. But man's stubborn resistance to the Good can impede even the work of God.

Let us not deceive ourselves. Our social and racial ills do not necessarily grow out of ignorance of the teachings of the Christian Religion, Science, and Democracy. Thousands of people agree with science, do not deny the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, accept the words of the Federal Constitution; but in their behavior negate all these in their concrete dealing with race. Human beings can know what is right and fail to do it. We have assumed too much and too long that the conflict between man and man, race and race, is based upon ignorance. However informed man may become, he will continue to need the Gospel that calls him to repentance and to complete submission to God's will. The mind, the heart, and the will of man must be changed. And this is the power of the Gospel of Christ and the task of the Christian Ministry.

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