Religion: Heathenish Britain

All good Anglicans had something to think about last week: the Church of England’s Commission on Evangelism had proposed a fiveyear, $800,000-a-year publicity program “to help [convert] Eng land to the Christian faith.” It was hardly news to most of them that England — or any other “Christian” country — stood in need of conversion. But, coming from the staid Church of England, the flat statement was a bombshell.

In its 172-page report, the commission found that the state of religion in Eng land has fallen so low that bold, modern methods (i.e., extensive use of radio, cinema, stage, television, the press) should be tried to revive it. Of the British people the commission said: “We are called to a far harder task than to evangelize heathen, who do worship (however ignorantly) a power higher than themselves. In England the Church has to present the Christian gospel to multitudes in every section of society who believe in nothing, who have lost . . . the spiritual dimension, and for whom life has no ultimate meaning. . . . Only a small percentage of the nation today regularly joins in public worship of any kind. The war has revealed and has also accelerated a sharp decline in truthfulness and personal honesty and an alarming spread of sexual laxity and the gambling fever.”

The commission did not flatter itself that it had the final solution to the Church’s problems: “We do not argue that evangelism by advertising will effect conversions [but] we do believe . . . that [it] may prove of incalculable value in the preliminary stage of preparing the soil . . . and can bring into touch with the Church . . . thousands now thirsting for spiritual strength and peace at heart.”

The report comes up for action at the next Church Assembly in October. Meanwhile, many were likely to feel, with the tabloid London Daily Mirror, that “there is much to be said for … the mechanism of modern propaganda to bring religious truths before the nation . . . [but] what is more important than the advertising of the article to be sold is the nature of the article itself. … In recent times Christianity—or rather, the churches which represent it—have not been delivering the right sort of goods.”