By Bishop James Cannon Jr.
Al vigorous religious press is needed, First. To furnish an accurate record of religious and church news. It is true that he secular press is giving more space to religious matters than in former years, but the average reporter is no qualified either by training or by comprehension to give careful and adequate news of the Church. The desire to make a headline or to create some special interest is so strong that accuracy is subordinated to color. Moreover, few secular papers will give as full a record of church news as those interested in church work should have.
Second. A religious press is needed to furnish an interpretation of the life in the world about us from the Christian standpoint. This does not imply that the secular press does not frequently give a proper interpretation of life. But it does imply that men who themselves are not Christian and who do not look at matters from the Christian standpoint, cannot interpret the events of everyday life as they should be interpreted. No more important service is rendered by the religious press than the review of current happenings in the world and the discussion of the attitude of the Church with reference to them.
Third. The Church press furnishes a necessary medium for presenting and advocating policies and programs of the church as indicated by assemblies, conferences, conventions and church boards. The secular press could not, even if it would, properly occupy this field. The general public is not sufficiently interested in the policies and programs of the denominations to justify the secular papers in furnishing space for such matters. Furthermore, the religious press furnishes the space and the medium for the exchange of opinions among church leaders on all the varying phases of the Christian life.
Fourth. The religious press is needed for the publication of articles of a devotional nature. Many people get the vest of their devotional reading from the pages of the church press. Especially in the rural sections of the country is the religious paper a great help in presenting to the young stories with a distinct moral tendency and impulse.
For these and other reasons the church press is a necessity. But it is a lamentable fact that it is exceedingly difficult to pay the necessary running expenses of a well-edited and will printed church paper. Few indeed of the church papers of the present day are meeting their expenses by receipts from advertising and subscribers. The writer was the editor of a denominational Church paper for 25 years, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that he was able to pay the current expenses out of the current receipts, and it was done only by the restriction of the usefulness of the paper because of the inability to pay for a sufficient staff of workers and contributed articles.
The weekly church paper is as great a necessity for the maintenance and development of the work of the church as are the publications of the Sunday School Boards, the Church Extension Boards, the Mission Boards and other special literature necessary for the carrying on of the work of the great agencies of the Church. The Conferences, Assemblies and Boards recognize the necessity for large appropriations for the preparation and distribution of various kinds of literature in the homes of the members of the Church. Each denomination should have a Board of Christian Literature which should consider the needs of the Church for high-class weekly, monthly and quarterly publications, and such boards should e given the authority to subsidize all publications which such Boards may deem necessary for the work of the Churches. Either the endowment of the Church press, or a yearly appropriation of such amounts as may be necessary to guarantee an adequate church press service would seem to furnish sensible, if not indeed the only, solution of the present problem.
Certainly, this question is worthy of the most careful study by our church leadership, and the Federal Council of Churches might perform a very useful service if its Research Department should, under the direction of the Administrative Committee, make a thorough survey of the church press of the nation and present the facts as they exist today.
From the front page of The Star of Zion, The Official Organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Charlotte, N.C., Jan. 21, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sf88092969/1926-01-21/ed-1/seq-1/
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