Meta Chestnutt Sager on the Christian Church's Neglect of the Poor and the Social Sources of Denominationalism

The long, rambling letters that Meta Chestnutt Sager sent to her sister-in-law, Clara Dixon Chestnutt, include reflections on religion in America during the Depression era. Here, a bit of context will help. In a 1929 book entitled The Social Sources of Denominationalism, H. Richard Niebuhr wrote at length about "churches of the disinherited." These Christian sects emerged partly because they provided religious homes for people whose poor grammar and shabby clothes didn't fit in at the established, middle-class denominations.[1]

Along this line, in a letter to Clara dated April 28, 1935, Meta wrote about the Christian Church in Chickasha, Oklahoma, where she attended:

I tell you the church does not care for the downright poor and uneducated. I'm glad there is a Holiness Methodist Church, a Nazarene Church and other little squads of poor people who worship God in some way. I'm sorry that Christian people have made it necessary for such to exist, but they have so much society doings in the churches that the poor and uneducated have no place in their midst, they are lost, and seldom go long, even if they start. The church is just so many cold storage stations. The most they think of is what they can have next. I tell you I get more joy out of going down to the jail and trying to lead those poor despised skeletons of humanity upon higher ground than I do at all the church services except the Communion service.[2]

According to Niebuhr the academic, and Meta Sager the keen observer, new sects in American did not strike out on their own because they were following some new doctrinal aberration or false teaching. It is tempting to conclude that heresy was not a source, so much as a consequence, of the proliferation of various Christian groups in the U.S.

Notes

[1] H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1929).

[2] Meta C. Sager to Clara, April 28, 1935, box 3, folder 26, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society.