American Protestantism, they say, is reviving intellectually—in the divinity schools. But among students on the average campus, Protestant Christianity is no more intellectually respectable than it was in my own undergraduate days. (Our Christian activities consisted chiefly of singing “Clementine” and “I Ain’t a-Gonna Grieve My Lawd No Mo’ ” at YMCA parties on Friday nights.) Indeed, it seems to have sunk into greater silliness since those dear dead days beyond recall—and certainly into worse sentimentality and error.
As example, I have to hand a leaflet, published quarterly by the United Campus Christian Fellowship. It is called Campus Encounter; and the number to which I refer consists almost wholly of an essay called “Love without Fear: a Personal View of being Physical,” reprinted from Dialogue, which magazine in turn is published by “the service area of the Cornell United Religious Work,” at Cornell University. The author of this confused and impressionistic article is a young Mr. Robert C. Buckle, who once taught in a Nigerian village, but is now working and writing in Dallas.
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