Truth Salesman

"My line is leather," said the English salesman to the American in the railway carriage "What's yours?" The average-looking American looked up and smiled. "Truth," he replied.

This week Truth Salesman David Elton Trueblood, 53, got the biggest selling job of his life. He was appointed chief of Religious Policy for the U.S. Information Agency. As such, he will be in charge of one of the busiest, farthest-flung and least-known religious enterprises in the world.

To 119 posts in 77 countries the International Press Service of U.S.I.A. sends reprints of religious articles, news and feature stories, and background essays on such subjects as "Communism and Religion" and "The Growth of Religious Liberty in America." All 158 overseas libraries of U.S.I.A. are stocked with 48 basic books on religion* and are regularly provided with lists of current religious periodicals and new books from which to order. The U.S.I.A. International Motion Picture Service produces religious documentary films for distribution abroad.

The Voice. But U.S.I.A.'s most important religious outlet is the Voice of America, which devotes between 7% and 8% of its weekly broadcasting time to religious programming, mainly to countries behind the Iron Curtain.

The Voice broadcasts sermons, interviews with clergymen, recordings of church services and religious music, religious news from the U.S. and talks on the spiritual principles underlying U.S. democracy. Where the audience is predominantly nonChristian, broadcasts stress cultural, moral and philosophical values.

Dr. Trueblood's job is technically a new one, but for the past three years Dr. Albert Joseph McCartney, minister emeritus of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., has served as full-time religious consultant to U.S.I.A. with the help of an inter-faith council.

Only in Snippets. "It's very exciting," said Quaker Trueblood last week. "The job seems to take in everything I've ever known and learned. It's really an enlargement under government auspices of what I've already been doing."

What he has been doing is to conduct one of the most effective ministries to laymen, churched and unchurched, in the U.S. In 1944 Iowa-born Dr. Trueblood, then chaplain and professor of philosophy of religion at Stanford University, decided to begin writing and working for all literate people instead of merely other writers and scholars. He wrote a successful book called The Predicament of Modern Man. But he was still unsatisfied. "We knew what the Nazis believed," he says. "All we had to do was read Mein Kampf. We knew what the Russians believed; we could read Lenin and Stalin. But where was the Western way stated? Only in snippets, here and there."

Trueblood went to England "to get a better perspective on the West," wrote The Life We Prize, which he considers the most important of his 13 books. Since 1946 he has been professor of philosophy at Quaker-run Earlham College in Indiana and a leading light in the Society of Friends.

"There is more good life to the square inch here than any place else in the world," says Trueblood. But "we need the Three Ps the Communists have: a philosophy, a program and a passion . . . We must learn to wage peace as boldly as we wage war . . . We are noted for salesmanship but we sell the wrong things . . . We have kept silent about our spiritual possessions, which really have the power to kindle human minds."

* Among them: Christ and Culture, by H. Rich ard Xiebuhr; Catholic Social Principles, by John Francis Cronin; Judaism, A Way of Life, by Samuel Solomon Cohon.

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