Religion: Tedium Yes, Ministration No

Fifteen busloads of Episcopalians—bishops, priests and laymen—took a morning off from the General Convention to tool through industrial Detroit for a look at “the 20th century workingman.” Trailing through the pounding, whirring world of the assembly lines, the men and women from greystone, Gothic city churches and suburban spires stared at the men who are making the ’62 models. The auto workers stared back.

“Do you know where you’re going?” a riveter in the Plymouth plant asked the Rev. Charles G. Leavell of Henderson, Ky. “No,” answered the minister mildly. Said the riveter: “You are going through hell.”

“Do you like your work?” asked a kindly bishop of a man endlessly putting caps on radiators. “Hell no,” was the reply. “It’s boring, but it’s a living.”

The Episcopalians were impressed. “This sort of thing is soul-destroying,” said the Rev. Bernard G. Buley of Waukesha, Wis. “A very strange world,” mused the Rev. John G. Forrell of Glen Ridge, NJ. “I would not know how to talk to these men and women.” Suffragan Bishop Charles F. Boynton of New York summed it up: “This has done us a lot of good. We normally don’t realize that so many human beings are riveted to one operation with no opportunity to exercise creativity or imagination.”

Afterward, members of the Episcopalian human affairs commission, which sponsored the tour, explained to the convention delegates that the kind of industrial workers they had just seen were practically untouched by the church. Consulting Sociologist Guy E. Swanson of the University of Michigan said that though surveys had shown that factory workers were receptive to religion, no attempt was actually being made to reach them. “If the church cannot find means to influence this new character of society,” Sociologist Swanson added, “it has no meaning or relevance.”