Church and Theater Alliance
AN “Actors’ Church Alliance” has been organized in Chicago, with branches in other prominent cities throughout the United States. The object of the organization is to have the church and theater work together, instead of pulling apart. Actors and clergymen are associated together on the executive boards of the Alliance and its branches. The papers applaud the step. “There was never a time,” says the Chicago Chronicle, “when the stage was in greater need of the church. Extermination of the social foul from the footlights is as necessary a work for the church as expulsion of the scandalous from the home. Too many of the plays which are certain now of large and continuous profits at the box office are those which no decent family would permit to be discussed at the home table. The most conspicuous drama on the boards at the present moment is one of which a judicious journal says that ‘the heroine is an insane cat.’ Ibsen is the author.” But what if, instead of being elevated by the church, the theater drags the church down to its own level, the level of that “which no decent family would permit to be discussed at the home table”? Has this contingency been duly considered? The church is set in the world to lift it up, but not by making an alliance with the world.