Bernard Iddings Bell

Bernard Iddings Bell was an American Christian author, Episcopal priest, and conservative cultural commentator. His religious writings, social critiques, and homilies on post-war society were acclaimed in the United States, England, and in Canada, receiving praise from intellectuals such as Albert Jay Nock, T. S. Eliot, Richard M. Weaver, and Russell Kirk. Featured on the cover of Time magazine as America's "brilliant maverick," he authored over 20 books and numerous articles appearing in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Criterion, Scribner's, and Commonweal. For the majority of his career, he toured and lectured at universities such as Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, and Princeton as well as "almost every cathedral in England."

Life

Early years and education

Bernard Iddings Bell was born in Dayton, Ohio, the second of four children to Charles Wright Bell, a paper manufacturer, and Valentia Bell, née Iddings. His siblings were Florence, Myrta, and Alfred. They were of Portuguese descent.
Several early experiences helped to shape Bell's "maverick" ideas and character. Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and friend of Bell, related the following anecdote in memoria:

In educating his only son, in extensive travel, and in devotion to his ordained duties as a priest, he spent his money as it came: and that on principle. For when Bell was a little boy, he learned something from his grandmother. His grandparents, straitened in their means, had been frugal, saving all their lives to build and furnish a house to their liking. In old age they achieved their end, and their house was built and well furnished; and just then Bell's grandmother discovered that she was suffering from an incurable malignant cancer. Put to bed, she had her grandson called in, and said this to him: "Bernard, your grandfather tells me that they are going to put me under drugs soon, and then I will not be able to talk to you. So I want to tell you now what I have learnt from life. I have had a long life and a rather hard one, and I have learnt this: Never save any money."

Charles and Valentia raised their children in the Episcopal Church, which at the time was considered evangelical but by the 1930s "would probably be given the name Fundamentalist." Bell recalled that as a child, his mother once told him that God was in Heaven and that Heaven was "up there," so he imagined God to be a silvering gentleman who lived on the roof and looked like "a somewhat glorified copy of my paternal grandfather." However, this mental picture gradually lost its vividness and dissolved into "a vague aura, a spiritual influence, a permeating benevolence."
The midnight of December 31, 1899, Charles Bell gathered his children together to give thanks for the coming century, whose blessings of technology and modernism, he believed, would bring about a more enlightened, peaceful world. In A Man Can Live Bell recalled, " was quite sure that the modern world was wise, sound in structure, giver of all good. We children too were sure of it. Our friends were sure of it. What we heard and read made us more sure of it. Our teachers were sure of it. Even our priests, preachers, rabbis were sure of it." Struck by this vision of human salvation, he became profoundly disillusioned with the church and ceased praying, except intermittently and perfunctorily.
When he had completed his freshman year of college, the religion of his childhood "had been demolished." He spent much of the time experimenting "in the philosophical realm, looking for a sane theory of life" and at one point briefly adopted scientific mechanism or materialism; however, it too fell short of being an adequate motivation for living. Failing to find guidance from either his professors, the religious leaders on campus, or the writings of modern philosophers, he declared them all "blind leaders of the blind" and "hair-splitting pedants." It was soon thereafter that Bell made the acquaintance of an Anglo-Catholic priest who oversaw a nearby parish. Though he was initially uncomfortable with the high church vestments and traditions, the priest

had a winsomeness that came from inner peace. He did not bother much to argue with me. He quite understood that my literalistic and legalistic Protestantism had to go. He also understood why I, at least, could not become a Roman Catholic... He managed to show me rather than tell me most illuminating discovery of my whole life... I began at last my adult search for God...I do not think he has ever known how much he helped me.

At the age of 21, Bell graduated with a bachelor's degree in social history from the University of Chicago. For a brief period he worked as "a paddy-wagon-chasing newspaper reporter." When he finally decided to pursue his calling to the priesthood, his father, who was then a vestryman, lamented: "I am very sorry that a son of mine should become a parasite."
The following year, he entered Western Theological Seminary to study sacred theology, but found himself "more than a little oppressed by the stifling smell of controversies long dead." It was then that he stumbled upon G.K Chesterton's Orthodoxy. He identified with Chesterton, having also formulated his own theology, only to find it "a dull copy of a more brilliant orthodoxy." He particularly praised the way it portrayed the Christian religion as rising above pure rationality, confirming both the empirical nature of science and the invisible, unquantifiable mysteries of human life.
He was ordained to the priesthood on the Feast of St. Thomas the Doubter in 1910, and graduated with his second bachelor's in 1912. He was the first vicar and builder of St. Christopher's Church in Oak Park, Illinois from 1910 to 1913.

St. Paul's Cathedral

In the summer of 1912, the venerated Bishop Charles Chapman Grafton died, leaving behind a legacy as well as high expectations for his replacement at St. Paul's Cathedral, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Bell was instituted as vicar and first-ever dean of St. Paul's in 1913 and remained there until 1918. He married Elizabeth Woods Lee, who gave birth to their only child Bernard Lee Bell in 1913. The next year, he wrote an article titled "The Dynamite of the Sacraments" describing some of the practical theology which formed the basis of his decision to join the U.S. Navy during World War I.

First World War

Bell served as a chaplain in the United States Navy for twenty months from February 1917 to November 1918 in the Great Lakes Naval Training Station located near North Chicago in Lake County, Illinois. At first, he was denied enlistment due to a medical issue; however, as new conscripts flooded in at an increasing rate, "tent cities sprouted up" on the 165-acre compound. This created a shortage of commissioned land chaplains, prompting Rear Admiral William A. Moffat to make an exception. During his time there, Bell oversaw roughly 87,000 of the total 125,000 recruits, preaching on Sundays to congregations ranging from 3,000-7,000, teaching a total of 267 courses on morals and religion, and holding daily office hours "to which men came with problems ranging from how to believe in God to how to get a dance invitation." In March 1918, the first case of Spanish influenza cropped up in Fort Riley, Kansas, and soon the pandemic was sweeping America, ultimately claiming the lives of 700,000 Americans and 50 million worldwide. In this state of emergency, Bell found himself frequently providing Communion in barracks and visiting hospitals to perform last rites. Meanwhile, his first book Right and Wrong After the War was published prior to the war's end, thus establishing the "prophetic" voice and style for which he is known.

Challenge to Christianity's Decline

Throughout his time in the Navy, Bell enjoyed informal meetings with both individuals and "small groups who were willing to sit around and talk about religion." And it was here that he was first confronted by the young men's overall passivity toward religion. He confessed that, like many clergy in the church, he had believed that "the great mass of the people...was to be regarded as without any religion at all." However, this proved not to be the case:

The discovery I made, which came to me at once as a challenge and as an encouragement, was that most of the non-interest was due, not to deliberate disbelief or even to indifference, but rather to plain ignorance. They had, for the most part, scarcely any idea what the Christian religion was all about...It does not seem quite reasonable that four out of five of our young people should never have learned what Christianity, in its essence, really is. We seem to have been astonishingly inefficient in passing on the Faith.

According to Bell, the essential truths of Christianity had been lost in a "mass of non-essential facts, alleged facts, and discarded 'facts' of a more or less religious flavor." Rather than possessing a useful religion which helped in hardship, theirs was a weak collection of Bible stories, moral lessons, unanswered doubts, and negative-to-neutral impressions of churchgoing. Understandably, these men had come to view religion as well intended, but otherwise useless to their faith.
Bell worked out an explanation of the Christian religion to address directly their questions and anxieties. He sought to use as little theological terminology as possible, reasoning that people did not despise religion for religion's sake, but that they disliked hearing a jargon-rich language which they could not understand. Encouraged by the men's predominantly positive response, he later delivered it as a series of lectures in New England before being prompted again to set it down in book form under the title The Good News. It became the bedrock of Bell's ministry, and he dedicated the remainder of his life to training men and women in the basics of the Christian religion.