A Jester for Wesleycms

The publications of the Methodist Church's Board of Education run mostly to sober catechisms, Sunday-school texts, and gentle lives of Jesus for six-year-olds. Standing out in this array like a miniskirt at a church social is motive, a monthly magazine aimed at Christian college students in general and Methodist ones in particular. As most of its 40,000 youthful readers will affirm, motive is probably the most provocatively adventurous church publication in the U.S. today.

Non-Methodists will soon have more opportunity to find out what motive is all about. This month the magazine became the official organ of the interdenominational University Christian Movement, although the Methodist Church will continue to provide a large part of its $125,000 annual budget. Actually, the new sponsorship will make no difference in motive's outlook, since it was never very parochial to begin with. In its 25 years of publication, motive has consistently taken the stand that its college readers were adults and has given them adult, avant-garde fare. Never preachy in tone, the magazine has nonetheless assumed that religion is relevant and has tried to apply a critical Christian intelligence to the interests of modern youth, from biochemistry to the Beatles.

Pauper's Pay. In doing so, motive has gained an enviable record for pioneering. It was one of the first church journals to accept and define civil rights as a theological problem. Although Methodist morality frowns on premarital sex, motive has dealt sensitively and sympathetically with student difficulties related to the problem. Such is the magazine's reputation for intellectual openness that theologians of the stature of Thomas Merton, Joseph Sittler and Albert Outler have frequently contributed some of their freshest thoughts to its pages, although $50 is maximum pay for an article.

Under its current editor, B. J. (for Billy John) Stiles, 33, a Methodist minister who studied at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, motive has consistently had an eye on the unusual. This month's cover, for example, is a striking serigraph by Sister Mary Corita, the famed art teacher of Los Angeles' Immaculate Heart College. Last spring the magazine came briefly to national attention after it published--as a sly commentary on the Christian atheism of Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton--a mock obituary for God, written by Poet Anthony Towne in the noncommittal style of the New York Times. The obit had previously been turned down by The New Yorker, the Christian Century and, of course, the Times--which later reprinted it.

Uncritical Leftism. The consistent radicalism of motive has frequently brought it into conflict with Methodism's leaders and has won it such scornful epithets as "a jester in the house of Wesley." When the magazine first denounced segregation, a group of Southern bishops demanded that it cease publication. One of those who came to its defense was the late Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, who showed up at a meeting of the education board with several copies of motive under his arm. "I have read every word of these," thundered the best-known Methodist liberal of his day. "Now I am prepared to discuss it with you." Rather than tangle with the fiery Oxnam, the Southerners decided to drop the matter.

In its eagerness to point out where the action is, motive sometimes falls into a naive, uncritical New Left attitude; much of the poetry it publishes peers through a dark glass, obscurely. At times, too, the magazine's bizarre layout and typography look artsy enough to have been dreamed up by a gaggle of interior decorators. But even its mistakes suggest the variety and vitality of Methodism, and plenty of its older but doubtful readers concede that the magazine appeals to the young in a unique and valuable way. Says Bishop Donald Tippett of San Francisco, "Motive speaks to thoughtful students in a language that makes religion and the church relevant. They will make our best leaders, and frankly, we'd lose them if we had to depend on most of the other church publications."

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