Preaching When Times Are Tight

So what is a preacher to do? Well, in a sense, if you can’t beat them, join them. This is not an argument for watering down value-driven preaching, but rather it is simply a reminder that even preachers can’t ignore an elephant in the room—especially if the big beast is plastered with dollar signs.

What Happens When All the Wells Seem to Be Running Dry?

Certainly, when times are tight, and when people are looking for answers, preachers must first avoid a powerful pitfall. We must be careful to avoid the arrogance and excess of demagoguery. We must not play the blame game and look for scapegoats. Our message is not about a particular theory of economics from Adam Smith, to Karl Marx, to Milton Friedman; rather it is about truth that transcends systems and systemic failure.

Do you know the name of the most popular preacher during the dark days of the Great Depression? He was a man listened to by millions every week. He became for a brief time so powerful that even the president of the United States feared him. He was so popular on the radio that it was said that if you walked down the street on a summer day, you could hear his complete broadcast through every opened window without missing barely a word.

His name was Charles Edward Coughlin; and he was a Catholic priest, overseeing a local parish in Royal Oak, Michigan. He was a hard-working and fiercely ambitious clergyman, who guided the growth of his church, the Shrine of the Little Flower, during the late 1920s, while experimenting with the then-new medium of radio.

By the 1930s, and as the Great Depression was strangling the life out of the nation itself, he had transformed himself into the voice of the disaffected. During a decade when cultural circumstances were ripe for exploitation by charismatic leaders who offered simplistic answers, Father Coughlin became an incendiary force in the nation. And he did so by becoming a notorious, though highly effective, demagogue—someone who exploited the fears that Franklin Roosevelt himself had been trying to calm since uttering the phrase “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The priest was a poisonous preacher. Father Coughlin used his pulpit, both in his church and via the radio, to foster a spirit of anger, hatred and divisiveness. He was very effective, but it was clearly a monumental abuse of preaching itself. The messenger became the message. That is a grave sin in light of what Paul said about not preaching “ourselves.”

So powerful did the pugnacious priest become that Roosevelt spent a great deal of time trying to neutralize him as a political force. Fearing that Coughlin was going to join causes with Huey Long, the would-be-American-dictator from Louisiana, Roosevelt had another Catholic supporter, Joseph P. Kennedy, arrange for the priest to meet with the president at his Hyde Park, N.Y., home in September of 1935. And in an interesting twist of fate, their meeting took place in the hours just after Senator Long had been shot in Baton Rouge. FDR and the priest were together when news came through about the Kingfish’s death.