Words & Works

P: "There is a kind of folk culture in America that makes almost everyone want to sit in the back of the church," said Assistant Secretary of Labor J. Ernest Wilkins to the Methodist Church Council of Bishops in Seattle. "A friend of mine the other day was telling me about an old saying . . . 'Beware of the man in the front pew.' The implication being, I suppose, that there is a certain amount of respectability in the admission that we are all sinners."

P: There are 69,362,978 Lutherans in the world, announced the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva (not counting Lutherans in countries where no organized church exists). This increase of 1,650,794 over the 1953 total gives Lutherans about 3% of the world's population, about 10% of the world's Christians, and about a third of the world's Protestants.

P: Washington is currently experiencing a flowering of "rank religiosity," writes John Cogley in the weekly, Commonweal, which he used to edit (he is now with the Ford Foundation). "Religiosity--or the God-bit, as it is called in the more cynical capital circles--has long been a part of our political tradition . . . The people, especially religious people, seem to demand it--and who is to say that there may not be some faint ring of sincerity as the politico's little coins of godliness are dropped? [But] the new God-bit is more serious. It is the identification of our national cause, our needs, our ends--conceived in political and military terms --with God's cause, His needs and His ends . . . Certain vestiges of America's Calvinist past seem to have reappeared [and] even people who know better talk as if ours is not only God's country but that we are indeed His Chosen People . . . It may even be that when a great nation begins to think of itself as godly because it is great, it has gone a long way toward losing its claim on godliness."

P: "Presumptuous liberals," according to leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals, are out to break down the barriers between Protestant denominations. The Rev. George L. Ford, executive director of the ultraconservative N.A.E., told the organization's convention in Chicago that unless it is stopped, "the liberal ecumenical movement will usurp the rights of the churches." The ecumenical movement, he said, favors such things as "downtown worship centers which would not only take the place of regular Protestant churches, but would be headquarters for Catholics and Jews as well." Cried N.A.E. President Henry H. Savage: "The only statement of faith of [the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches] is so inane that a Unitarian or an apostate from the faith can easily consort to it."

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