"Four-Wheeler Christians"

"Keep this woman off the air! Britain is a Christian country." So wrote the London Daily Sketch when Psychologist Margaret Knight advised parents over BBC to straighten out their children on the "myths" of Christianity (TIME, Jan. 24 et seq.) In the current weekly Commonweal, British Correspondent Michael P. Fogarty, a Roman Catholic, argues that Mrs. Knight actually struck a blow for Christianity in Britain. He adds: "the idea that Britain is a 'Christian country' is at best a half-truth . . . There is a mass of what [have been called] 'four-wheeler Christians, people who arrive in the church only in pram, car or hearse, for their christening, marriage and burial.' There is much distrust ... of what are said to be the reactionary and hypocritical views of professed Christians. There is great ignorance ... A recent inquiry among secondary-school children in Leeds showed that to many of them . . . 'words such as baptize, resurrection, ascension, testament, gospel, epistle . . . were often simply unknown.'

"What, positively, is needed to re-evangelize Britain? ... It will be no use to stifle debate . . . That will merely leave people in the fading twilight of religiosity in which they are stranded already. We have got to get them arguing . . . The great days of the Nonconformist chapels and of the splits among Presbyterians in Scotland must come back--the days when, as still happens in parts of Wales, it seemed as natural to drop into an argument over theology as over the Test Match. The first step towards this is to get people to think out their own present position . . ."

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