Pearl Harbour and Church attendance - 23 March 1990

Mr Alec McCowen the actor, came back to New York on Wednesday evening to report, once again, on the life of Jesus Christ.

I think that’s a fair way of describing his performance of the Gospel according to St Mark because he doesn’t recite it, or declaim it, or intone it, as holy scripture. He tells it as a gifted reporter might tell it to a group of friends on his return from having covered a marvellous story. Mr McCowen has been doing this for, what, 20 years or more, but he still tells it with the concentration and awe of an old reporter recalling the most fascinating foreign assignment he ever had.

It is, to young theatregoers especially, a revelation for it’s safe to say that in this country no children in the public schools have bible reading as a regular, or irregular course, since the prohibition and the bill of rights against an establishment of religion applies to religious teaching of any kind in the schools.

You’ll get it at home or you don’t get it at all and you get it at home very little these days, except in the families of devout blacks and among fundamentalist believers who are mostly congregated in the south.

Anyway the experience was so invigorating, so fresh, for one theatregoer, Mr McCowen told us that she asked him where she could find the script of his wonderful play. He replied in almost any hotel room.

I’m not sure about the almost, I have inhabited, I suppose, in my travels thousands of hotel rooms in the United States and I can’t remember one which did not have in the drawer of the bedside table, a Bible, universally known as a Gideon’s Bible.

It’s exactly 100 years ago since three commercial travellers named Hill, Nicholson and Knights did something together to supply a want that they sorely missed when they were on the road. They were, as we say, devout Christians and what’s more they were practicing Christians. And if they forgot to take their Bibles along with them they were bereft of decent reading matter, not to mention spiritual comfort.

So they organised themselves into something called the Gideon Society, they took out little advertisements from their own pay in the newspapers of the towns they travelled through. They invited subscriptions to the society from the congregations of their own churches.

Within a year or two they had enough money to buy thousands of Bibles and distribute them free to inns and hotels. I’m sorry to say I can find no record of their early experiences in doing this. They didn’t offer just one Bible per hotel to sanctify the house, they asked how many bedrooms and dished out the scriptures accordingly.

But there must have been innkeepers who were lackadaisical Christians, if not downright atheists, and certainly there have come down stories about hotel men who didn’t much care having on hand for every guest a book, so full of injunctions to avoid strong drink, especially the favourite tipple of the east coast long after colonial times, the demon rum.

But I imagine in 1899 when, according to the record, at the very least three American families in four were regular churchgoers (it’s now down to 50%, just over), a hotel keeper wouldn’t want to risk a local reputation of being a heathen, or a man positively against religion.

Anyway, after 20 years of the Gideon Society which later was incorporated as the Christian Commercial Travellers Association of America, over a million and a half Bibles had gone into hotel bedrooms. Today it must be 40, 50, 60 millions, I’ve never heard of a hotel that turned them down.

Last time I consulted a Gideon’s Bible to find some text appropriate for the next talk, I looked down to read the chosen passage and looked up to see the blazing lights of the night clubs along the strip in Las Vegas Nevada.

Why Gideon? I was hoping nobody would ask. I really don’t know. Perhaps you can work it out for yourself, if I remind you that Gideon was a judge of Israel, that he laid his fleece, his woolly, down in the open for two nights, on the first morning the fleece was wet and the ground was dry, on the second morning the woolly was dry and the ground was wet.

For some reason no cleric has ever explained to me, Gideon looked on this oddity as a favourable omen, time to wage war. He went off into battle and won and set Israel free from it’s Midianite oppressors. How he seemed just right as the patron of three travelling salesmen I leave you to figure out.

You might gather from this that commercial travellers in America were a remarkably pious lot. Not at all. When I first came here there were rafts of jokes about commercial travellers, all of them racy, all of them involving the farmer's daughter or some other local lass.

In these sophisticated times the jokes seem to have languished, though not so long ago I did hear a lamentable story about a travelling parson who used apt quotations from the Gideon Bible to have his wicked way with the girl changing the sheets. Enough.

That was by way of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the brave initiative of the Messrs Hill, Nicholson and Knights. An anniversary that makes me realise how drastically the Bible has gone from the public speeches, the debating speeches of politicians.

When I first sat in the press gallery of the Senate there was hardly a speech that didn’t resound with phrases and echoes of, especially, the Old Testament. I say the Senate in particular because its leaders, its committee chairmen, hence its regular spokesmen, were all southerners.

This came about because 50 years ago the south was known as the Solid South, it was in every election solidly Democratic, sending back every six years the same senators. And since the rule in those days was that committee chairmanships went always to men who had the longest service in the Senate, the chairmen were almost all of them southerners.

There were days when you would have thought that the Confederates had won the civil war and all the powerful speakers were southern. By the same token, the south was the most earnestly doggedly religious part of the country.

Perhaps I should say the most invincibly Protestant, colonised as it was in the early days by Methodists and in the later days by Protestant Ulstermen, what Americans call Scotch Irish. And all the old southerners, whatever other bits of literature they knew, were steeped in the language, in the parables of the Bible.

I remember the Sunday the word came in that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and we reporters rushed off to the White House and while we were waiting to be called into the Oval Office to hear the worst from the president's press secretary, we could her distinctly through the door of an adjoining room the high tremulous southern voice, verbally pulverising the two Japanese envoys Admiral Nomura, I think, and a Mr Kurusu, who had been sent as a blind to Washington.

Obviously, the Japanese calculated, correctly, that the Americans would not expect anything belligerent to happen while they had two peace-seeking negotiators as guests of the president.

What keeps this memory very green is the stream of colourful abuse that the southerner, the secretary of state Mr Cordell Hull, was pouring out on the meek Japanese.

I wish it had ever been recorded, all I can remember is that his denunciation of their treachery was a combination of running quotations from the Old Testament interspersed with unflattering comparisons and examples of animal biology.

That was – and still is – a style of southerners telling stories and there are no storytellers like southerners. Half their similes and metaphors are taken from the habits of muskrats, raccoons, hound dogs, skunks and opossums.

That still remains, but the younger southerners nowadays talk much like the northerners. I mean the prose they use, not the accent, just as the members of parliament seem to have shed all the fire and colour of the Lloyd Georges and Churchills and Nye Bevans and talked like company prospectuses.

The last of the old breed in this country was not a southerner but a Midwesterner, son of a Welsh immigrant mining family. His name was John L Lewis, and he himself left school early and went into the mines. He became the leader of the first national industrial union and in the late '30s and early '40s he was the most powerful labour leader in the United States.

His appearances to testify before Senate committees, usually as a defiant or uncooperative witness, were star performances of a vanishing kind, for he talked as well as speechified in biblical quotations.

The last time I remember him appearing before a committee this great bull of a man, with eyebrows like a thatched roof, he recited to the committee how far the miners and the automobile workers and the steel workers had come thanks to 40 years of his efforts.

A senator intervened to remark that Mr Lewis certainly knew how to blow his own horn. Lewis turned on the man and said, “It is written in the word, he that tooteth not his own horn the same shall not be tooted.”

In the past week, one congressman has sounded a line from the Bible on the theme of taxes which can no longer be ignored even by President Bush who was elected on the promise “No new taxes”. With the national deficit now estimated higher than the White House predicted, President Bush has called for a national increase in the tax on petrol and on airline passengers. He doesn’t call them taxes, he calls them "user fees".

A howl has gone up from the farmers and the parents in the Midwest, the south and the western states, who have to drive many miles to work or school. At the same time the president wants to reduce the taxes on income derived from the sale of stocks and other investments, a reduced capital gains tax.

Hence the cry of a Democratic congressman, “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, save only the rich.”

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