The Church of England did not have it all its own way in the religious maelstrom that was mid-twentieth century Twivertonian Protestantism. The Sunday School run by the rival Baptist Church ("Fight truth decay!" has been its catchy slogan since 1902) succeeded in enticing the ture believers of tomorrow with cupboards and cardboard boxes full of reams of coloured drawing paper, crayons, rubbers, and bottles of glue.
"He has gone to the other one!" my mum had to tell the miffed lady recruiter from the Saint Michael Is No Angel after an entire squad from the prefab estate - an entire squad! - defected to the Sunday School ("make your own badges and cakes thrown in as well!") organized by the Methodists. Perhaps never before in the history of institutionalised religion have so many trinkets and baubles been on offer for listening to so few pieces of theology.
Not that Twivertonians are easily taken in. They are, after all, renowned throughout north-east Somerset for judging people "by what they do and not by what they say." (As the revolutionary communist and textiles factory owning capitalist Friedrich Engels so unselfconsciously used to say). What impressed them was not so much the free cigarette cards or the reams of coloured papers dispensed by the Sunday School teachers but the complete absence of leading members of the local Baptist, C of E and Methodist congregations from police charge lists of violent assault, burglary and fraud.
Or as Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic succinctly put it in a TLS special issue on religion: "Were it not for its implication in the Holocaust, Christianity would be in fine shape in the coming battle for
planetary moral supremacy."