Religion: Unrepentant Liberal

In Washington. D.C., where many talk but few listen, spare, sharp-profiled Rev. A. (for Arthur) Powell Davies, 44, is a man who is heard. Every Sunday his congregation* at the chaste, red brick, All Souls’ Unitarian Church overflows from the church auditorium into adjacent halls and recreation rooms. Reason: his 35-minute sermons are protein-rich with wit, wisdom, sincerity and invective. His preaching has made Welsh-born Powell Davies one of America’s outstanding liberal clergymen.

This week, in a sermon called “Communist Dynamics and the Hope of Peace.” the onetime Methodist minister drew a badly needed, clear-cut line between liberalism and Communism. Said he: “Communism is a sincere but psychopathic attempt to adjust the life of man hurriedly to the world of the machine. . . . Its fatal defect is that wherever its principles are applied man loses and the machine wins. This is inherent in the nature of Communism because its faith is not in man but in social mechanics. . . .

“American liberals are spending too much time on their knees, repenting, and not enough on their feet, going somewhere. Communism will be defeated by liberalism . . . but not until Americans understand that their own Revolution was much more fundamental than the Russian Revolution, and that Lincoln and not Lenin is the predestinate symbol of the common man.”

Pulpit Rebel. Davies, who calls himself a “theological radical,” is under constant attack by both right & left. Reason: he openly rebels against any political or clerical form which he believes is fundamentally empty. He regards the Apostles’ Creed as inadequate. Says he: “The Creed goes: ‘. . . Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate. . . .’ The comma between those two phrases is the most important part of Christ’s life. After all, the life of Christ is something more than a punctuation mark.”

Born in Birkenhead, England, Powell Davies spent a robust youth on his father’s farm (he rode a bull calf at the age of two, wore out five motorcycles). He almost went into British politics, finally decided that “the crucial field was an honest, believable religion,” was graduated from London University’s Richmond College of Divinity in 1925. For three years he was a Methodist minister in London, then left for the U.S. and two consecutive pastorates in Maine.

By 1933 Davies had become a “radical,” thus had no qualms when he was called as minister of the Unitarian Church in Summit, N.J. There he wrote many a provocative article, and his first book, American Destiny. (His second: The Faith of an Unrepentant Liberal, published this year.) Real recognition of his stature came with the call to Washington in 1944.

Church & Pastor. All Souls’, probably the most important Unitarian church in the U.S., was founded in 1821 by John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun and Charles Bulfinch, architect of the Capitol. Its most famed minister: Edward Everett Hale. If the size of the congregation is a gauge, Davies has proved a powerful successor; almost overnight he brought about its present overflow. His explanation of his success:

“People come to hear me because they are hungry for a religion that makes sense, that does no violence to the spirit. I say as simply as I can what I have to say, and that is why people listen. . . . I call for courage rather than give a promise of solace.”

* Including Supreme Court Justice Burton, Washington Letter-Writer Kiplinger, Massachusetts’ Senator Saltonstall, Federal Union’s earnest Clarence Streit.