The catchy slogan of Twiverton Baptist Church in the 1950s was "Fight truth decay!" Potential true believers were enticed through its portal by blandishments of coloured drawing paper, crayons, rubbers, and - this was perhaps the clincher - aromatic bottles of glue.
"They have gone to the other one!" a miffed recruiter from Saint Michael Is No Angel was told at prefab number twenty-four when an entire squad - yes, an entire squad! - defected to the Methodists after news got out that chocolate cakes and lemonade were to be included in its Sunday School largesse. Never before in the history of Christain theology had so many treats been bestowed in return for listening to such slender morsels of divinely revealed doctrine.
Friedrich Engels noted that people are to be judged "by what they do and not by what they say." (Which makes judgements about Engels himself - who was at one and the same time a
revolutionary communist and a Manchester textiles capitalist - a shade tricky.) The cigarette cards and cakes handed out by Twiverton's competing Sunday Schools had a very ephemeral impact. What really impressed the local population was the fact that not a single Twiverton Sunday School teacher's name ever appeared on the list of criminal convictions published by the Bath & Wilting. ("Married Sunday School teachers were a different kettle of fish" Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic would say in a witty aside.)
Towards the end of the 1950s religious observance in Twiverton went into decline and its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" was heard as clearly here as it had been on Dover Beach. Although in its formative years some New Testament texts had been wilfully given a sinister
anti-Jewish edge (thereby implicating Christianity in all kinds of atrocities culminating in those of the twentieth century) the narrative of the slaves' heroic struggle for human dignity against the merciless power of Rome remained a great source of ethical inspiration to Twivertonians.