Today I was going through some stuff in our Archives. A pastor had donated some material he’d accumulated in researching a book a few years ago, and I’d been letting it sit. Today, I decided, I will start putting it in some kind of order.

Archiving is a very odd occupation, and one for which (I might mention) I have no formal training. Do I catalog a pamphlet as a book, or file it as a document? How do I organize my document files? It appears the previous librarians weren’t sure either, so I can’t even refer to their precedents most of the time.

I decided to catalog the Christmas annuals as books. Our predecessor church body published a Christmas annual, and (God bless ’em) operated with such humility that they didn’t even include publishing information in many of them (no bragging from the editors!). One issue didn’t even contain any mention anywhere of what year it was for. I had to work it out deductively, and I’m not entirely sure I got the right answer.

I think that mystery issue (1952, I decided) was also the one that depressed me. It included a two-page montage of “the progress of evangelism” in the United States. One picture (black and white, of course) showed an early Billy Graham rally. Exactly opposite it on the facing page was a picture of a rally where “Reverend Charles Templeton” preached.

Templeton is a name most Americans don’t know anymore, but back in those days the jury was out as to whether he or Graham would be the next Dwight L. Moody or Billy Sunday. He and Graham were close friends (I understand their friendship is central to the recent movie about Graham’s life, which I haven’t seen).

But Templeton fell under the influence of the higher critical approach to Scripture, and of theological liberalism. He followed the natural logic of those belief systems more quickly than most, and declared himself an agnostic in 1957, to the shock and disappointment of many (though I might suggest that we’d all be better off if many secret agnostics in the church today had his honesty). He became a well-known journalist and broadcaster in his native Canada.

Looking at Christian material from that particular period in history—the period when I was born—always makes me sad. There was so much optimism then. We’d licked the Nazis, and now, by thunder, we were gonna win the world for Christ. All the time since then, the span of my own life, has been an almost relentless progression of disappointments, setbacks, and cinched-in expectations.

When I look at society itself—setting aside our technological achievements—it seems to me that only one thing is better now than it was then. We marginalized racism. That was a good thing, and long overdue.

Other than that, I can’t think of one thing about society that’s better today.