Religion: Town Warming

• Share

One of the things that depress U. S. liberal churchmen is that the Church is supported largely by the upper and middle classes, by people who believe that God is a capitalist. Although many churchmen have accustomed their congregations to socially radical words from the pulpit, most parsons pipe the tunes which businessmen call. Last week in a Chicago suburb (Barrington, Ill.) there was a prodigious politico-religious piping. Occasion: "The Barrington Town Warming Plan ... a combination of the early American town meeting and the old time religious revival." Tune-caller: Barrington's biggest business, Jewel Tea Co., Inc., makers of tea, coffee and groceries, and benevolently paternalistic employer of 300 of the town's 3,500 people.

The Barrington Town Warming was an idea of Jewel Tea's Vice President Clarence W. Kaylor who, like many of his fellow executives, was worried about "isms" threatening the U. S. Mr. Kaylor lined up all of Barrington's civic bodies behind the plan, including the principal churches (Methodist, Catholic, Christian Science). Although a collection was to be taken to finance the Town Warming, no one expected it to amount to much: Jewel Tea Co. would make up the deficit. The plan itself was simply to get as many Barringtonites as possible to go to a series of lectures (free to all regardless of "economic status, or any other reason") in the High School Auditorium, with an invocation by a local minister and community singing.

Billed as "nonsectarian and non-partisan," the 13 lectures were "expected to result in a rediscovery of spiritual and patriotic values in this community." Playwright Channing Pollock labeled his address: "I Am a Reactionary." The others did not need to. Among them: George Ephraim Sokolsky; Mark Sullivan; Editor Henry Justin Allen of the Topeka State Journal; handsome Dr. Ruth Alexander, who has been touring the U. S. publicizing religion as a prop for capitalism (TIME, Dec. 19); and two Methodists, onetime Governor Arthur Hyde of Missouri and Chicago Banker Wilbur Helm, who four years ago formed the Conference of Methodist Laymen to drum "radicals" out of key posts in their church (TIME, Sept. 23, 1935).