U.S. ATTITUDE TO RELIGION

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27628, 7 April 1955, Page 10

U.S. ATTITUDE TO RELIGION

“Real Revival Of * • Interest” CHRISTCHURCH MAN’S IMPRESSIONS Many of the new churchgoers in America now were people with “very inadequate ideas of God,’ said the Rev. D. M. Taylor, Vice-Principal of College House, Christchurch, in an interview yesterday bn his return from America. “There are many who think Christianity is a good thing because the Communists think it is a bad thing; they think of God as the great anti-Communist.” Though .realising that such conceptions existed in their congregations, the church leaders he had met were convinced there was a real revival of interest in religion, said Mr Taylor. The cynics sometimes accused new churchgoers of going to church for the wrong motive; President Eisenhower, not a regular churchgoer while in the Army, was now accused by his political of going to church to catch Votes, said Mr Taylor. “The general feeling seems to be that that is an unfair charge, and I would agree,” he said. “He quite rightly ignores the critics and continues to go to church to seek guidance in his great responsibility.” Having been told that many of the new churchgoers’ motives were open to question, he could say that in the many churches he visited he found growing congregations of men, women and children, and had been impressed by their sincerity, Mr Taylor said. “It is plain that Americans have lost faith in materialism. That is bringing many people to church, and giving the Church its opportunity. “This is a social phenomenon that cannot be ignored. There is a great contrast between America and New Zealand in this respect.” Religion in Advertising

Mr Taylor described a full-page advertisement he had seen in a secular American magazine recently, which showed a man, a woman, and a child kneeling together. The sponsoring firm’s message to the reader was along these lines: “We are proud of our nation for various reasons—proud of the fact that we haven’t turned from God.”

There were two possible motives behind such an advertisement, said Mr Taylor. The first was that the executives were sincerely religious people, and the second was that they were just shrewd businessmen who sensed the way the public was thinking. “But whichever view you take, the fact that such an advertisement is published in a secular magazine is in itself a comment on the increased interest in4religion that is apparent in America,” Mr Taylor said. In the American secular universities, there was a “wide recognition of the fact that the insights of a religious people can contribute something real to the thought of a university,” he said. One of the aims of his visit had been to look into the place of religion in American university life, said Mr Taylor. He had found that many colleges felt they had a duty to provide courses in religious subjects. Though such courses were still not allowed in some States—for reasons similar to those that inspired the secular education in New Zealand —many colleges provided excellent courses which were well attended.