Religion: Chorus

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As the experts debated the question of whether to go on testing nuclear weapons, thousands of U.S. Protestant churchmen and churchwomen lined up last week on the stop-the-tests side. Items: ¶A widely assorted 140 Protestant clergymen and educators, including nine bishops, signed an appeal to all Christians to back up the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches in its declaration against testing (TIME, Aug. 12). Among the signers: Methodist Bishops Charles W. Brashares of Chicago, Eugene M. Frank of St. Louis and John Wesley Lord of Boston; the Right Rev. W. Appleton Lawrence, retired Episcopal Bishop of Western Massachusetts; Presbyterian President John A. Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary; Congregational Dean John C. Bennett of Union Theological Seminary; Baptists Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick (retired) and Dr. Robert J. McCracken of Manhattan's interdenominational Riverside Church; Methodist Dr. Ralph W. Sockman of Manhattan's Christ Church; and Baptist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of Montgomery, Ala. ¶The Woman's Division of Christian Service of the Methodist Board of Missions threw its 1,800,000 members behind an appeal to the U.S. Government "to abandon its inflexible position on disarmament and to explore the possibility of dealing separately with ways of ending nuclear-weapons tests."