Laissez-Faire in Religion
I
The composition of this paper was inspired by a careful and, in much, a sympathetic reading of Mr. Winston Churchill’s novel, The Inside of the Cup; although it is in no sense to be a review of that book or a criticism of its author. It is significant that most of the comment which one hears upon the book is concerned with its religious rather than with its sociological teachings; and this notwithstanding that the author has made the latter the more prominent. This is a bit of unconsciously offered testimony that the world at large is still a great deal more interested in religion than it is in sociology.
The religious significance of the reception of The Inside of the Cup, however, is even greater than this. In it one finds evidence of the willingness of the public to accept, in popular form, an utterance of the belief that, religion today is being smothered by a blanket of inherited dogma, and that all that is necessary to insure men’s flowering religiously is to take the burden of that dogma off and let them grow. From the enthusiasm with which the book has been greeted, one perceives how many people there are who welcome and applaud this belief. It is because the present writer believes that this position is quite unscientific, quite out of accord with the facts of life as they may be historically observed, that this article is written.
The whole of life to-day is marked by a revolt from that extreme individualism which grew out of the decay of feudal controls. Toward the end of the Middle Ages one can plainly observe a revulsion — current in almost every realm of thought and action — from a social concept of life, however crude, to an individualistic concept of life. The development of a philosophy based upon this concept was, of course, gradual. In practical affairs, in economics, this developing individualism reached full expression in the doctrine of Laissez-faire, as enunciated by such classic economists as Adam Smith, Ricardo, and J. S. Mill. These men and their followers voiced a demand that every individual should be let alone to fight out his economic salvation in a state of unrestricted competition. They made the unit the individual instead of the social group. Their avowed purpose was to make it. impossible for the democracy of mankind to hinder, economically, the aims, desires, and purposes of any person within that democracy.
When the rest of thought became individualistic in this way, religion, as one who perceives the unity of life might expect, became individualistic too. There was a revolt, not merely from group-control of the individual in secular matters, but also from groupcontrol of the individual in matters religious. The man who thought that he ought to be allowed by society to do as he saw fit, also, as a matter of course, thought that he should be permitted to believe as he saw fit. If he had a right to found a business and run it as he liked, he had an equal right to found a religion and run it as he liked. He would have his conduct controlled by no overweening state; neither would he have his religion dictated by any external ecclesia. Secularly he stood sufficient unto himself alone. Sacredly he stood likewise.
The result was, soon, the splitting of Christendom into sects and yet more sects. If every man were sufficient to himself in determining religious truth, the possible number of sects was limited only by the number of individuals in the world. The one thing which prevented this tendency from developing at once, the one thing which held people together, was their devotion to a common fetich-book, the Bible. When at length modern scientific criticism had torn the Bible from its fetich-throne and restored it to its proper place, the state of religion became plain as a state of anarchy.
Nothing has been more marked in the thought of the last twenty years than a growing rejection of this individualism in economic and political realms. The revolt against Laissezfaire, ineffectually voiced by Ruskin, is now assisted in by the greater part of the economists. Even the most conservative of them have so modified the doctrine as to have made it almost unrecognizable. This revolt has been due to the coming of humanity to its senses, to a realization that in placing the interests of an individual above those of society as a whole it denied a fundamental law of the human race, a law inherent in the nature of that race, and so deserved, and experienced, calamity and social degeneration. To-day, most people see life clearly and sanely enough not merely to know, themselves, that the social group as a whole is of more importance than any individuals within it, but to insist more and more on enforcing that judgment upon the minority who still do not believe it. Once more the race seems to have awakened to the truth that its advancement comes best and quickest from an advance of the interests of the whole group, and not from the encouragement of individuals at the expense of that whole group.
In the realm of religion, however, this return to a social emphasis has not progressed to the same extent. In lact, it has hardly begun. The demand for the abolition of dogma, about which one hears so much, is the logical conclusion toward which religion has been tending ever since it abandoned the principle of socialized control of the individual. It is the inevitable end of religion, when religion is considered with the individualistic bias.
The strange, the almost startling incongruity, about our modern situation is that the same people who insist on the right of democracy to control all individuals economically are the very ones who are loudest in their demands that the democracy control no individual religiously. Thus we find Mr. Churchill, in this novel of his, coupling a highly socialized concept of economics with a diametrically opposite, individualized concept of religion. The same man who is a socialist (in the larger meaning of that term) in one realm of thought is an individualist in another realm of thought; and not only that, but he seems to think this intellectual inconsistency the most natural thing in the world. And many, many people, reading the book, applaud it vigorously, not seeing, apparently, that in so doing they are indulging in one of the most remarkable feats of mental gymnastics ever known in the history of man. Seemingly, they fail to see that in holding at the same time these diametrically opposed positions they have accomplished a real divorcement between things secular and things religious such as the arch-plutocrat in the novel never could have brought to pass. He believed as he chose, and acted as he chose, and he admitted the right of no group, political or ecclesiastical, to control him. He at least was consistent.
II
Is it not astonishing to find how many people there are who mightily exaggerate their own importance in those parts of life which are deeper than the merely material? Is it not as truly pathetic as it is remarkable, to observe how most of us look upon ourselves, in these aspects of life, as beings apart from the great, flow of humanity, as remarkable and extraordinary special creations, each individually of transcendent importance in the scheme of the universe? And is it not, when we come to think of it, equally pathetic to see how each generation, in these respects, and especially our own generation, exaggerates its importance in the age-long world-development?
Of course the disparagement of dogma is due not merely to the individualism of individuals, but also to this individualism of generations. How common this larger sort of individualism is! To hear current talk, one would imagine that this generation was a thing apart, in some way peculiar, for some reason not subordinate to those great general laws which have governed the development of past generations. It would almost seem, at times, that those of this generation thought themselves the only generation which had really counted for much — with possibly a generous inclusion of its fathers and grandfathers. As for the days of our ancestors, mention them not in the same breath with us of this wonderful twentieth century!
We speak, to-day, lightly and contemptuously of the ‘Dark Ages,’ implying thereby that our own age is not dark at all, but light; ignoring the fact that all records of life in those past days seem to be records of happiness amid adversity and poverty, while our own life manifests itself largely as a life of dense unhappiness in the midst of prosperity and wealth. We call our ancestors intolerant because they believed things intensely, on no better basis than the Catholic religion, and utterly forget that this same spirit is manifested among us by those who believe things on no better warrant than the guesses of physical science.
Some advanced thinkers prate of the Black Death as an awful instance of the lack of preventive medicine, and at the same time refuse to vaccinate their own children against smallpox. Folks talk of the dense ignorance of the days of yore, which in their ignorance, however, produced a Chaucer, a Dante, a Petrarch, a Boccaccio, a Thomas Aquinas, a Spinoza, and also a public which read them. People talk of art, as if it had been our province to create it, when the despised ages of the past produced painters and sculptors and architects whose work our own age has not surpassed or even equaled, and when in past times, instead of our hideousness, the observer might have seen nations whose cottages, barns, fences, chickenyards, bridges, and even pig-styes were beautiful.
As a matter of fact, in considering any period of history, any generation, the permanent things about the life of that period, the things that really count for the most in it, will almost always be found to be those things which are developments of habits, institutions, customs, possessions, inherited from previous generations, tested in the crucible of previous centuries and found good; and the evil things of that generation, the impermanent things, the silly things, will almost always turn out to be the things in which the period has ignored and abandoned those inherited habits, institutions, customs, and possessions. Not that the old things are ever suited to any generation in every particular. They must be altered, slowly and gradually, to fit new developments. But it is always the old and well-tested things modified which are better than the new creations.
This is true because humanity remains very much the same in essentials throughout the centuries. You and your great-great-grandfather are not very different the one from the other, save in accidents. You may not eat with your knife as George Washington did; you wear neither knee-breeches nor a powdered wig; when you get a fever you are not bled; you write your s’s above the line, and not so that they look like deformed f’s; you think and talk in the patois of the highly organized society of the twentieth century, not in the vernacular of rural Virginia in the eighteenth. But, after all, you and Colonel Washington are about the same in all points essential to humanity. The same passions rule you; the same needs impel you; the same sort of mental and physical equipment expressed itself in him in terms of his environment and expresses itself in you in terms of your environment. The only difference between this age and any age that has gone before, is a difference in accidents, a difference in environments. The great, essential things of life are the same in all generations.
By now, doubtless, the reader is thinking that our argument has wandered rather far afield; but possibly the pertinence of all this may become clear when one remembers that there is no branch of thought which, as much as religion, is concerned with those fundamental things which are the same in human life of all generations. Religion deals with such things as love and hate, service and selfishness, man in his ultimate relationships to the race and to the Eternal, the reason for living, life and death, here and hereafter, earth and Heaven. In all times the problems concerned with these things are the great problems of the race. In successive and changing environments these problems remain the same. It would seem, therefore, that in religion, of all things, men would pay most reverent heed and devote the most careful study to the religious experiences and beliefs of past ages, as revealed in those precipitations from the age-long crucible into which all men have poured their religious reactions, those precipitations to which is given the name of dogmas.
That, however, is the thing which the contemporary temperament relishes not to do. People ignore and despise that act of attaining comradeship with the Infinite which is called prayer, for example; because, forsooth, it does not appeal to them. They expect to gain spiritual poise and power without it. The mere fact that the whole religious experience of humanity, as revealed by history, shows that their attitude is faulty, apparently makes not the slightest difference to them. Others declare their emancipation from symbolic and ritualistic religious expression, although history reveals that sort of thing as an inevitable concomitant of religion. Others ridicule sin and redemption as absurd concepts, despite the fact that the race in all generations has, in one form or another, held them. And they would have, all of these moderns, a religion with no stopping of individual vagaries, no correction of individual mistakes, no system of social control, no regard for the past, no belief in truth as a reality, no dogma. All the ages shout aloud their message that such a thing neither has been nor can ever be.
III
Is there not room for another development in religion, furthered by those who are just as dissatisfied as is Mr. Churchill with social and economic individualism, just as satisfied as he to proclaim that those holding to such individualism can never be religious, and yet who are equally unwilling to attempt the impossible task of holding, economically, one thing and, religiously, its diametrical opposite? Is it not time for those whose intellectual processes have become completely and not merely partially socialized, to lift their voices with a religious message somewhat different from that commonly heard to-day, to call men away from the contemplation of their religious eccentricities, and the age from its admiration of its own complacent and superficial religious experiments, back to the contemplation of that which alone has in it any promise of real knowledge — the religious experiences of the race? Is it not time for some hardy souls, who fear not popular clamor, to insist that the only kind of religion which is scientific at all is dogmatic religion, and that the reason dogmatic religion is scientific is because it is based upon the fundamental human law that the experience of the race is vastly more important than that of any individual or of any generation within it?