Sometimes The Better Christian Isn't Christian At All

Jim was a college graduate, had fallen away from his early faith but regained it by reading Claudel.  He was so painfully shy that he was no good at all in contacts with the rank and file.  He went to sea because he loved it; he loved the ship he served and the responsibility it entailed.  Perhaps there was much of romance and youth in his attitude.  He wrote to us of the clubs in the Russian port, and how the men were treated as men, capable of appreciating lectures, concerts, dances, and meetings with student groups.  In this country, he said, the seamen were treated as the scum of the earth; port towns and the port districts in these towns were slums and water-front streets made up of taverns and pawnshops and houses of prostitution.  He felt that the Russians treated their American comrades as though they were creatures of body and soul, made in the image and likeness of God (though atheism was an integral part of Marxism) and here in our professedly Christian country they were treated like beasts, and often became beasts because of this attitude.--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 209