The Oldtime Guilt

When Evangelist Billy Graham began drawing crowds to Washington's National Guard armory with his prayer "crusade" (TIME, Jan. 28), most of the capital's Protestant clergymen looked on with either approval or polite silence. Not so the Rev. A. Powell Davies, pastor of Washington's socially prominent All Souls' Unitarian Church. Fortnight ago, in a sermon reported in Washington newspapers, Dr. Davies expressed Unitarian disapproval of Billy Graham's oldtime religion. Said he: "Heaven and hell, the description of God, the provision of a supernatural salvation--all these, at best, are mere assertions." He warned his congregation that too much talk of sin is apt to stir up several varieties of "guilt feelings," with lamentable Freudian results.

Last week, in a letter to the Washington Post, Glasgow-born Dr. George Docherty, pastor of historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, took up Evangelist Graham's defense: "Unitarians may not believe in the Revealed Truth of God in Holy Scripture, but those who do may not all be living in a 'religious dark age' . . . Dr. Graham did not come to Washington to put 'guilty ideas' into the minds of the youth of the city ... These 'guilt complexes,' so dear to the psychologist's heart, are as old as the Garden of Eden."

Answered Dr. Davies, citing some graphic samples of Billy Graham's theology: "I do want Dr. Docherty, as a mature theologian, to justify on orthodox grounds the assertion by Dr. Billy Graham that the three persons of the Trinity hold regular conferences in heaven . . . Then I would like Dr. Docherty as a mature Biblical scholar ... to support from Scripture Dr. Graham's assertion that heaven is a 1,600-mile cube containing trees that produce a different kind of fruit each month."

Evangelist Graham, possibly too busy, took no public notice of the controversy. Washington crowds were packing his meetings at the rate of 7,000 a night.

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