Trend

A growing interest in religion is evident all over the U.S. On this point members of the Associated Press Managing Editors' Association agreed almost unanimously at their Atlanta convention last week (see PRESS). Polled as to their explanations of the trend, most of the editors gave psychological insecurity as the chief cause, with war a close second. But at least three credited the swing to the aggressiveness of religious groups.

"Religion has been doing a good selling job," said E. N. Jacquin of the Champaign (Ill.) News-Gazette. "Religious promotion efforts, plus the perplexities of modern life" were the causes, said M. H. Williams of the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram-Gazette. David Patten of the Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin answered: "Religious people seem to want everyone else to get religion."

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Under the title Is There a Revival of Religion? Union Theological Seminary's Reinhold Niebuhr, in the New York Times Magazine, says that "there are certain marked tendencies in both the cultural and the popular interests of our day which would seem to prove the reality of such a revival."

The evidence, he says, is of two types: "Mass conversions under the ministrations of popular evangelists," who are enjoying more success "than at any time since the days of Billy Sunday"; and "in the world of culture ... a receptivity toward the message of the historic faiths, which is in marked contrast to the indifference or hostility of past decades . . . There is scarcely a college or university which has not recently either created a department of religious studies or substantially enlarged existing departments."

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