Religion: The Full House

In the rain that lashed the green Ruhr Valley, one sleek Mercedes after another swung off the highway and pulled up in the courtyard of a big white farmhouse. Well-fed, important-looking Germans hurried inside. A movie-fan would have guessed that some plot was afoot.

It was. A group of mine directors was plotting with a group of miners, foremen and factory workers on how to give their work a Christian basis. The farmhouse they met in—Haus Villigst—is headquarters for what might be a new kind of revolution in Europe.

Knowing, Being, Believing. Haus Villigst was a typical farm estate, battered and sagging under...