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8 A Church on Wheels, 1945–1963 william w. cutler iii In the fall of 1957 Henry C. Gibson was nearing the end of his second year as rector’s warden at the Church of Our Saviour in Jenkintown. Once recognized as one of the fastest-growing parishes in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, it still ranked among the largest and most prosperous. That spring, the vestry at Our Saviour had decided to confront an old dilemma. Stored in the church basement was a large and ornate altar. Acquired from St. James’s, Philadelphia (Twenty-second and Walnut) after it dissolved in 1945, the altar and its reredos had been a memorial to Mr. Gibson’s mother. But these artifacts were too big to fit into the sanctuary at Our Saviour. Either the church would have to be remodeled, or the altar and its accoutrements would have to be made smaller. Painful as it must have been for the rector’s warden, he and his colleagues decided not to spend the many thousands of dollars it would have taken to install the Gibson altar. But it did not end up being forgotten or discarded. In November, the Church of the Redeemer, Springfield, bought it for $5,000. Achieving parish status in 1947, Redeemer grew rapidly in the 1950s, just as Our Saviour had done two decades earlier.1 The story of the Gibson altar is, in effect, metaphorical. The Diocese of Pennsylvania was on the move, and in keeping with this transformation a religious artifact whose home had once been in the heart of the city would now come to rest in a distant suburb. The Episcopal Church in the 1940s and ’50s Organized religion deeply affected American life in the years that followed World War II. It shaped what many people thought and did as they struggled to reconcile the democratic values for which they had just fought 264   this far by faith overseas with the blatant injustices that were still so much a part of everyday life at home. In this unsettled climate, thousands sought reassurance from inspirational books like The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale. Millions looked to the Most Reverend Fulton J. Sheen for guidance through his weekly television program, Life Is Worth Living. Even the president, Dwight David Eisenhower, made piety a part of his leadership , demonstrating an approach to faith that was both personal and pragmatic . In so doing, he was in concert with most of those he led. In 1954 a Gallup poll attributed a belief in God to 96 percent of all Americans. Three years later the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 96.4 percent of all adults identified with a religious tradition. Some scholars tried to explain this trend in material rather than spiritual terms. “The trend toward religious identification and church affiliation may . . . be a reflection of the growing need for conformity and sociability,” the social philosopher Will Herberg observed.2 Such cynicism notwithstanding, many Americans were more than ready to put their finances where their faith was. In fact, such a boom in church construction occurred in the 1950s that a priest and theologian of the Episcopal Church, Bernard Iddings Bell, was prompted to warn against confusing the building itself with the worship it sheltered.3 After World War II the national Episcopal Church experienced significant growth. Starting from a base of about 1,500,000 communicants in 1945, the denomination surged, climbing to a near-record high of 2,300,000 in 1965 before leveling off in the 1970s and then declining thereafter. The number of baptized persons affiliated with the church increased commensurately , rising from 2,270,000 in 1945 to 3,616,000 twenty years later.4 Such growth may have occurred because the Episcopal Church resisted change until the 1960s. In keeping with the political and cultural climate of the times, it stuck with familiar ideas about theology and well-established rituals. Episcopalians worshipped using a prayer book adopted by the previous generation and maintained their long-standing commitment to governance by localism. According to historian David Hein, “the diocese was the real center of church life, or, more accurately, the diocese and the parish together, for this denomination always had a strong congregationalist streak in its make-up.”5 Episcopalians resisted change in the postwar era in many other respects. Despite or perhaps because of the presence of nuclear weapons in their midst, they were inclined to think that the power...

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