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The Political Order
337
siderations into the background. Uncritical citizens are often beguiled
into supporting a particular candidate on the basis of personal con
siderations such as these which are largely irrelevant to the weightier
matters of social justice and the public welfare. In reality, under our
two-party system of politics, the party which a candidate represents—
the organization, the policies it stands for—is generally far more im
portant than the individual who happens to be its standard-bearer.
On other occasions, attention is focused throughout a campaign
upon a single issue such as race relations, federal aid to education,
farm policies, small businesses, alcohol, or Communism. Obviously
each of these issues is important, but each needs to be seen as a facet
of the total problem of promoting social justice and fostering the
total well-being of society. Exaggerated and exclusive attention to
only one such issue serves as a kind of smoke screen behind which
many other forms of evil may go unchallenged. Moreover, such an
approach to single social problems ignores the many interrelationships
between the different social evils and prevents an effective attack upon
the fibrous roots of the particular ill one has selected as “the number-
one social problem.”
In
The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel,
Professor Paul A.
Carter makes a provocative evaluation of the effect of the alliance of
the Protestant churches with the Prohibition movement. He points
out that in the championing of this cause they came inevitably to be
identified with the conservative political policies of right wing groups.25
The Protestant churches generally had to pay a price for this align
ment in terms of loss of the support of liberal forces and labor groups
in the years which followed. But there were two other consequences
which were even more serious, Carter declares. In the first place, “The
emotional heat generated by the wet-dry controversy destroyed, in the
minds of many supporters of Prohibition, any sense of the
propor
tionate importance
of social issues other than the Demon Rum.”26
As one “old-fashioned parson” wrote in the
Churchman
, “One won
dered whether there were not other and greater evils against which a
valiant Christian knight could tilt his word.”27 And, secondly, “The
general prestige and moral influence of the churches suffered un
precedented damage, so that all of their teaching—religious as well as
25 Paul A. Carter,
The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel,
Ithaca,
New York, Cornell University Press, 1954, p. 41.
26 Ibid.
Italics added.
27
Ibid.,
p. 42.