Religion: To End a Scandal

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Americans on the move to new communities today tend to take their faiths with them, but they switch them easily under a variety of influences. This may betoken the decline of Protestantism, or it may be a kind of built-in unity movement on the grass-roots level. For if U.S. Protestants think of themselves as Presbyterians or Methodists, they tend more and more to pick their churches because they are within walking distance, or because their friends go there, or because they like the preacher—all too few care passionately about doctrinal differences between the limestone church with stained glass, the spired white clapboard and the Georgian brick. Typical is a Hollywood man whose parents were Lutherans and then Methodists; he became a Presbyterian "because the bass soloist's position was open."

One element in this homogenization of U.S. Protestantism is the decline of ethnic differences between Americans; many a church used to be kept alive by the national loyalties of first-generation citizens and the parental loyalties of their children. Another element is the pressure on Protestantism of an expanding Roman Catholic Church, which is currently growing more than twice as fast as the leading Protestant denominations.

These pressures toward union please Gene Blake. "I don't believe it is God's will to have so many churches in the United States," he says. Too many people, he feels, are willing to settle for unity among the Christian churches rather than out and out union. ''The other day, a student at Union Theological Seminary asked me why the goal shouldn't be intercommunion rather than union. Well, if you're going to make the effort—the prodigious effort—for intercommunion, why not go all the way and try for union itself?"

A Boy With Drive. Blake's drive to go all the way for church union is typical of him; one of his older brother's earliest recollections is of Gene as a five-year-old, charging into a horse-drawn cab so hard that he went right on through and out the other side. But Gene Blake as a 54-year-old charges with his head up. He is a savvy salesman-executive who remembers first names, keeps up his contacts, runs two offices of his church (in Philadelphia and Manhattan) and gets around.

Blake was born the son of a salesman for the Inland Steel Co. in St. Louis. "My father always taught a Sunday school class," he recalls. "Even when we moved around—to Winnetka or Bronxville—it was never more than a month before we were members of the local Presbyterian church. We had morning prayer each day at home, and of course we said grace at meals."