Are We to Have a Non-Moral Religion?
I
RELIGION stepped into the American scene wearing the homely dress of a prophet of righteousness. The Puritans were narrow, says Lowell, ‘as the sword of righteousness is narrow.’ Religion and morality were to them one and the same thing. Theological beliefs were largely weapons to wield in the interests of right conduct; the doctrine of an angry God was preached to gain control of sinners.
Religion was not only moral, but it presumed to include the most trivial and minute details of conduct within the scope of its authority. We recall the unfortunate sea captain who was put in the stocks for several hours for kissing his wife on the Sabbath day, as she met him at the gate upon his return from a two years’ voyage. If John Newton, back in Olney, boasted that twelve people went mad after one of his sermons, many a preacher over here must have fortified his soul with glee as he saw his hearers tremble under the threat of his preaching. The plain fact is that in our early history the man of religion was the centre of social authority, known and accepted as such. No realm of private conduct or public morals was immune from the scrutiny of his eye or the proscription of his preaching. When a new colony set forth from New England to subdue the hinterland, it invariably comprised forty men who could bear arms, two kegs of whiskey, and a preacher. The preacher was teacher, judge, and mentor of the moral life.
Throughout our history, until very recent years, the right of religion to concern itself with morals has remained undenied. The reason why Freud gained widespread popularity was because the inhibitions which Puritanism laid on us were so abundant. Our modern novelists would be hard put to it for themes were it not for those same inhibitions. But now the revolt against Puritanism has finally taken on the proportions of a revolution. If Prohibition be credited to the moral fervor generated by religious conviction, then its unpopularity is a fruit of the resentment we now feel toward a religion that presumes to be a conscience to the social order. Twenty years ago Edith Wharton wrote Ethan Frome. It is a story of desire in conflict with convention. It ends in disaster. Less than three years ago Sinclair Lewis wrote Elmer Gantry. It, too, is a story of a similar conflict, but it ends in the triumph of desire. A generation ago Walt Whitman called religion ‘that aimless sleepwalking of the Middle Ages.’ How long will it be before someone will be shrewd enough to call morality ‘that futile tight-rope walking of the Victorian Age’?
The historic technique of Christianity has been to suggest that, in any situation where it is difficult to square desire with fulfillment, one should abate desire in the hope of future satisfaction; that one should retire within the comforting habit of ascetic practice when the full control of social habit is denied. Even that technique seems destined to fail to-day because we are living in a world where, if we do not admit attainment of the ends set by our desires, we at least insist that they are attainable. Obviously, in a world where desire reigns and its fulfillment is undenied, religion that insists on a moral emphasis has a difficult time.
The process of our development as a nation has blunted the edge of our morality. Were one to choose one word to sum up our history, that word would certainly be ‘emancipation.’ The Pilgrim came to these shores to emancipate himself from an order that had become unpleasant. No sooner had he come here than he faced the necessity of winning emancipation from an inhospitable soil and a no more friendly red man. The Colonial era culminated in the elimination of an unnecessary foreign ruler. The Scotch Presbyterians moved out to the conquest of the Alleghenies; the Norwegian Lutherans, as we now see them in Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, subdued the prairie and made it serve the needs of man, all in the interests of physical emancipation. The trail of the covered wagon to Oregon was strewn with the bones of a sacrificial effort to achieve the same end. Even the black man benefited by our general passion for emancipation. After the Civil War began that long and effective thrust at economic insecurity. To-day the long struggle for freedom seems to most of us to have ended: America is yielding a larger measure of economic well-being for the common man than any other state in history. We are free from a recalcitrant soil, a cruel red man, and the spectre of economic insecurity.
Like most free people, we now heap malediction on the very disciplines that won us our freedom. We insult the institutions we erected to vouchsafe our security. While the struggle was on, we disciplined ourselves for the effort. Necessity held us in check while we accomplished our task. Much has been made of the superior morality of the earliest Pilgrim community. From 1620 to 1690 its population ran way up into the thousands, yet there were only six divorces and very few cases of sex delinquency. In contrast, modern life appears to come off very badly, with a divorce rate that, in one city at least, has reached the alarming proportion of one divorce to every two marriages. But suppose one of those Pilgrim wives had wanted to leave her husband — where would she have gone? Moral rebellion in those harder days entailed disaster. Right conduct was not of free will but of necessity. Not so to-day. We are facing, it may be for the first time in history, the great experiment of establishing a morality that is self-imposed. While Moses is up in the mountain communing with God in the interests of moral wellbeing, we are always tempted to pool our golden earrings and other trinkets that Aaron may fashion a calf of gold for us to worship. What another age would have considered a tragedy of morals, it has been suggested, we have turned into a comedy of manners.
The order of American life has shifted. When Roger Williams founded the first modern state based on the principle of taking the control of religious matters entirely out of the hands of the civil government, he at the same time set in operation a force that has finally taken out of the control of religion the affairs of civil and social life generally. Religion in the institution of the church came in conflict with the state. In that conflict religion has finally lost, in America. The centre of social authority now resides in the secular institution. That conflict was really decided when, less than a century ago, education became a function of the state. Religion as an institution of dogma came in conflict with science. The issue is still joined, but no one need be in doubt as to the outcome. The authority of the scientific spirit is so universally acknowledged that it is safe to say that the authority of religion in matters intellectual, except in the sphere peculiarly its own, is pared down almost to the vanishing point. Religion stands before the modern world, its face covered with confusion.
II
Religion as a cultural force is apt to be like a stream that takes color from the soil through which it flows. When Christianity penetrated the Greek world, its devotion to righteousness faded out before the seductive charm of metaphysical speculation. The Hebraic view of religion as trust in a personal friend gave way to the Greek view of it as belief in a dogma. Similarly the pomp and circumstance of the Roman Empire soon begot the imposing splendor of the mediæval ecclesiastical structure. The age of commercial expansion was followed by an era of missionary enterprise that leaves no one in doubt as to its parentage. To-day, John Dewey says, ‘prosperity is our God.’ As may be expected, our religion is already showing the effects of this environing medium.
It is too early to say what the full psychological consequences of a protracted era of prosperity are likely to be. Even if American prosperity be proved finally to be — as many believe — a myth, we Americans at least think we are prosperous and, thinking so, we develop all the psychological traits of a prosperous people.
‘Men are always apt to impute their good fortune to their merit,’ according to Clutton-Brock. Wherefore, we have been only too apt to conclude that because we are so very prosperous we must be unusually meritorious. We are prosperous, in short, because we deserve it. The richest blessing of heaven is none too good for such as we. And so we have been pushed back, religiously, to the days of pre-prophetic Israel, identifying material blessings with the approval of God, the experience of good fortune with the achievement of righteousness.
It is very difficult to induce a man to think critically of his own conduct when he is so very able to bear the expense of that conduct. It is difficult to get a man to care very greatly about God or the Decalogue when he has a comfortable balance at the bank. A balance at the bank gives one a thrill of independence, confers a sense of dignity, develops a feeling of personal assurance. To induce a prosperous man to consider the Sermon on the Mount in any but a liturgical sense is utterly impossible. This is not pessimism, but everyday experience. Prosperity is hard on idealism, just as victory is death to discipline. If defeat turns an army into a mob and success turns a convention into a riot, then surely prosperity turns a nation into a country club. Prophets do not flourish in country clubs. The only one who ever tried was Amos at Samaria, and he failed. He has had no imitators.
What ails our youth perhaps as much as the green sickness caused by an overindulgence of unripe instincts is the ardent seriousness with which they took our preaching of idealism. They thought we meant it when we preached brotherhood; they thought we meant it when we preached industrial justice; they thought we meant it when we preached redemption. So they descend upon us, these young idealists, naïvely and embarrassingly serious, only to find that we do want a redeemed world, but are unwilling to go to the expense of having a changed world; that we do want a just order of economic life, but only within limits that will protect our own stake in the economic order; that we do want a warless world, but only on warlike terms. Our preaching has raised hopes that preaching cannot satisfy, but for the practice we have not the heart.
It is only fair to add at once that the modern world loves, praises, and encourages idealism, provided it is of the uncreative sort. Industry loves and adopts the most extravagant and expensive schemes of welfare work, so long as they will help to hide effectively the more unlovely aspects of capitalism. Nations love and sign the most exacting peace pacts, so long as they leave them their gleaming swords. Churches love and consider the most unselfish projects of institutional cooperation, so long as they tend to strengthen present denominational lines. At least part of the popularity science is enjoying to-day is due to the extraordinarily practical value in dollars and cents of the scientists’ discoveries. But the moment you play the fires of a refining idealism on the system of modern social organization rather than on its spurious and malignant growths merely, the alarm is raised.
Prosperity disposes the mind to vanity, as idealism generates humility. Vanity is the premature high blood pressure that overtakes cultures and civilizations from time to time. In 1835 Macaulay wrote, ‘The English have become the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw. They have produced a literature which may boast of works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us. They have speculated, with exquisite subtlety, on the operations of the human mind and have become the acknowledged leaders of the human race on the career of political improvement.’ A century and a half before Macaulay, a brilliant essayist at the court of Louis XIV of France, Charles Perrault, wrote: ‘Our age has, in some sort, arrived at the summit of perfection. And since for some years the rate of progress is much slower and appears now almost insensible, it is pleasant to think that probably there are not many things for which we need envy future generations.’ Less than a century after Macaulay, a German, not to be outdone by others, — a grandson of Queen Victoria, William II, now resting quietly in Holland, — said in his own peculiarly modest way: ‘God would never have taken such pains with our German Fatherland and its people if he had not been preparing us for something still greater. We are the salt of the earth.’
But when was an American struck speechless in a tournament of boasting ? (Only none of these are boasts. They are the mature convictions of the civilizations that they symbolize and, as such, grow out of the prevailing assumptions of the time.) America has not been outdone. Only recently the committee on citizenship of t he American Bar Association, so Whither Mankind assures us, put in its creed for the salvation of America this article: ‘I believe that we Americans have the best government that has ever been created, the freest and most just for all people; that as an American citizen the Constitution of the United States ought to be as actual a part of my life and my religion as the Sermon on the Mount.’ Frankly, I myself believe that. So do most of us. That is why religion in modern America is confused. How can you continue to promote a religion of redemption in a world where there is nothing to redeem; a gospel of improvement where nothing needs improving? One may be excused for feeling like Goethe, who, in his old age as he looked out over the world at the conclusion of the peace of Vienna, said, ‘I thank God I am no longer young in a world so thoroughly finished.’
In such an age of complacency the man of religious passion, informed by ethical insight, must feel ‘like a beached fish on the ebb of the tide.’ The medium in which our idealism can live and flourish has subsided and left us to flap out our futile careers. And that is exactly where prosperity is likely to leave religion if religion keeps insisting on an ethical emphasis.
Prosperity, of course, rests on achievement. Past achievement is apt to develop a sense of power to achieve. Increasing areas of life are looked upon as within the range of man’s capacity for achievement. Proud of our achievement, we soon learn to be just as proud of our power to achieve and refuse to deny it any limitations. That we fail makes no difference. All we think we need is a better technique. Our power seems quite adequate. Siegfried still insists that the most American thing he found in an America come of age was a national convention of ‘morticians,’ who were met in Chicago to discuss the vexing question, ‘The death rate is falling; what are we going to do about it?’ When man is so conscious of his own sufficiency, when every incentive of modem life encourages him to trust himself to accomplish anything, how can he be expected to act as if he felt dependent upon God? Humanism may yet prove to be the characteristic religion of our age, except that it will be not the humanism of Erasmus so much as that of, say, Henry Ford — a very different brand indeed.
Religion in the modern world finds itself at the confluence of two streams of social tendency: the one the calm and even flow of the historic development of American life; the other the turbulent and swirling whirlpool of contemporary prosperity. Either one of these tendencies would have been sufficient to direct religious emphasis toward the non-moral. The conjunction of the two tendencies more than tempts religion to abandon creative moral thought and leadership and to give itself to other kinds of endeavor.
III
Religion, of course, will not die, for it is deathless. It will change. Like other disciplines of the cultural world, it will fashion moulds into which it will run its stream of glowing emotion. Industry in the day of the automatic machine reduces man to an adjunct to that machine and strips him of the perquisites peculiar to personality (though it endows him, too, with the wealth of a mediaeval prince); along comes a discouragingly popular philosophy to console him with the reminder that he is really not a personality, but only the victim of a series of conditioned reflexes and so ought to be very contented with his lot. The occupations of men first impoverish the spirits of men, and out of that impoverishment philosophy fashions a convincing doctrine of futility. With less boldness but equal logic, religion proceeds to a really imposing series of outward evidences of an inner fervor which it suspects it lacks. Cathedrals, liturgies, and neatly prepared prayers for private devotions lend every incentive to at least a show of life in a world that denies scope and elbowroom to a really redemptive enterprise of religion. We are all beginning to find satisfaction in these newer works of religion. And they do have the virtue of raising no moral issues.
The modern world is not likely to give up religion; indeed, it will probably have more rather than less. Nor is it likely to admit that its religion does not function in establishing and maintaining moral codes. And in a limited sense it will be correct: the religion which adapts itself to the new era will have some interest in morals. But morals are of two kinds: those ideals and aspirations that are creative in intention, and those codes and formulas that are merely protective of the established order. Christianity ought to be interested chiefly in the first kind, at least so far as it derives from Jesus. Whatever be the final conclusion about the ethical insight of Jesus, he has raised hopes for a better world by what he taught, and, for its attainment, an attitude of acquiescence is not enough. But what the modern world is likely to demand from religion is the teaching of morality as a means of social control, and I think it is fair to refer to a religion that will sponsor that kind of morality as fundamentally a non-moral religion.
To look upon religion as the means of keeping people subservient to the dominant powers of the time is to hold what may very fairly be called ‘the Napoleonic view of religion.’ When Napoleon, his hands dripping with the blood of a dozen nations, stepped inside the Cathedral of Chartres, he exclaimed, ‘How can anyone be an atheist here?’ To the Council of State he said, as First Consul, ‘What I see in religion is not the mystery of the incarnation, but social order. It associates with heaven an idea of equality, which prevents the poor from massacring the rich. Religion has the same sort of value as vaccination. It gratifies our taste for the miraculous, and protects us from quacks, for the priests are worth more than the Cagliostros, the Kants, and all the German dreamers. Society cannot exist without inequality of property; but this latter cannot exist without religion. One who is dying of hunger, when the man next him is feasting on dainties, can only be sustained by a belief in a higher power, and by the conviction that in another world there will be a different distribution of goods.’
Pious awe is the cheapest form of social control. Communist Russia found it necessary, for the sake of its own well-being, to turn Communism into a religion. Mussolini soon discovered that it was advisable to make his peace with the Pope. Thus have modern times again ratified the insight of Voltaire, who cried, ‘If there were not a God, we should have to create one.’ An eighteenth-century atheist insisted that his servants go to church regularly that they might neither rob nor murder him.
To the student of society, the most amazing fact about the modern world is that its large enterprises are in the control of Christian people. The followers of Jesus literally and specifically hold the balance of power in the business and political world to-day. The same student, having marked that fact, would immediately point out that the ethical effect of these large enterprises on the lives of men and women is certainly not controlled by any influence that has descended upon it from Jesus’ teaching. The world, as it now is, is organized by the followers of Jesus, but distinctly apart from the moral aims and ideals of Jesus. Religious people carry forward the enterprise of life in ways that convince one that their religion makes no moral demands on them. Obviously, the dominant religion of the modern world is non-moral in its effect on life. The Great War, of course, is the most tangible evidence on which this argument rests. Indeed, the only nations, with possibly one exception, which are fully armed to-day and able to negotiate another war of colossal proportions are the nations whose citizens are followers of the Prince of Peace. All of which creates the suspicion in one’s mind that the Napoleonic view of religion is still in vogue.
It may be that non-moral religion is the only kind that can live in a world where the legitimacy of the acquisitive instinct is taken for granted. To attempt to interpret, in terms of modern industrial enterprise, the self-renouncing, non-acquisitive, simple way of life of Jesus in our self-assertive, aggressive, acquisitive industrial and commercial world would be like tampering with the foundations of an enormous building at the very moment when ten new stories are being added at the top. Ever since the collapse of feudalism and the rise of the middle class, acquisitiveness has been achieving increasing respectability. To-day it is almost universally accepted as a proper motive of life. We worship success, industry, thrift, achievement, as sincerely as the Italians of the Renaissance worshiped leisure, beauty, insight, and creative æsthetic effort.
Whether consciously or not, religion is giving itself to the erection of works amenable to the attitude of our times. It is institutionalizing the modern spirit and installing it within the portals of the church. The first, and at this date perhaps most visible, result is the widespread trend toward liturgy and liturgical practice that has overtaken religion.
IV
The trend to liturgy has much to commend it to our good sense. It may be our instinctive attempt to do something, not by way of preparation for doing something else, but for its very own sake. As such, it may be a legitimate revolt against the philosophy of instrumentalism, as John Dewey calls it. By the widest possible stretch of the imagination, one can see no ulterior purpose being served by much of the modern liturgical practice. It is not designed to prepare us for something else; it exists for its own sake and its own sake only. The thrill of the moment, the sense of interaction with reality that liturgy confers, is its only justification. It is worship, pure and undefiled. Setting aside its genesis and earlier implications, for many now it implies no preparation for work; it cherishes no illusion as to any possible usefulness that may result from its practice. It is a process by which man isolates himself from the secular world and transports himself to a realm of independent spiritual enjoyment and ecstasy. And while man carries with him into the secular world the mellowing consequences of the liturgical experience, those consequences stand in marked contrast to the secular experience. Liturgy is really the one emphatic protest that religion is making on behalf of man as an end and not a means only.
It is only natural that, in a world where secularism is dissolving the fixed and substantial attainments of religion, as acid dissolves metal, religion should attempt to guarantee the preservation of those attainments. Liturgy too often to-day is the spiritual varnish that religion is laying on material things to ensure their preservation. It is an attempt to guarantee permanence to beliefs and formulas that are plainly threatened by the disintegrating influence of secularism. But it is religion mummified, and, unfortunately, ‘ mummies do not beget children.’
The supreme danger of liturgy is that, like the symbolist movement in literature, it will always tempt us to sacrifice truth to effect; it will induce us to exploit the mysterious; it will put us ‘more at home in Zion,’ in the phrase of Carlyle, ‘than any man has a right to be.’ You can’t raise money for cathedral building by asking embarrassing questions about the way money is made in modern times. That would be poor salesmanship. You can’t promote mammoth processions down cathedral aisles by asking the meaning of the slogans that rule those processions. That would be an uncivil and paralyzing question. The fresh air and glowing sunshine and riotous color of the hillside by the lake dull the splendor of robes and vestments no more than the dim light and vaulted arches of the cathedral deaden the strident tones of the prophet. The age of moral fervor is ending; the era of the æsthete has begun. The raucous voice of the prophet must take on the soothing modulation of the priest. The voice crying in the wilderness must somehow manage to chant in a cathedral. The camel’s-hair shirt is giving way to the silk gown, a much more agreeable garment.
The dominant spirit of the age, the spirit of getting on in ways that men may see and praise, has so smitten us that we are prepared to go to very extreme lengths for its fulfillment. Time was when a Pope made an emperor stand at Canossa for days and nights barefooted in the snow; to-day a Pope comes halfway to meet a dictator. The significance of the fact is that the Pope is willing to come. Not only has that transformation taken place in a distant land and under another sky, but, even in this land of the free and home of the brave, as one of our historians points out, the fathers of the Constitution have displaced the fathers of the church and the flag has outmoded the cross in popular fashion.
V
But the life of religion consists not in yielding to the dominant spirit of the age, but in thwarting it; not in acquiescence, but in resistance. Its continuity through the ages has been by the way of the creative personalities who, like Saint Francis of Assisi, Luther, and Wesley, were created by their age only to oppose that age, asserting the independence of their inner integrity. There is no virtue, of course, in being peculiar. Too many people think they are inspired when they are only peculiar. On the other hand, the very destiny of a civilization informed by the passion and insight of religion turns on those truly inspired personalities who, while they are made by that civilization, yet are endowed with an insight adequate to remake it. The priest as we know him is usually a child of his age and is content to behave himself. The prophet is no less a child of his age, but, accepting his inheritance, he dedicates himself to the reinvestment of it in the interests of greater returns.
The danger we are facing is that we may discover that American prosperity rests on geographical good luck and the grace of geology rather than on any divine intention to make us a chosen people. When that discovery is made — if it is not already made — may we not come full upon the disconcerting thought that, after all, religion is n’t so important to this civilization of ours? Robert Hall is said to have been upset for a week in the performance of his clerical functions because, by reading Miss Edgeworth, he saw a picture of a world of happy, active people without any visible interference of religion. It was a sensible and, on the whole, a very healthy world, and yet a world without warnings and exhortations, without any apparent terrors concerning the state of souls. The sanctions, restraints, and aspirations that religion confers were totally lacking, and yet the world was happy, prosperous, and well off. If one had to make a phrase for that sort of experience, one would call it ‘optimistic agnosticism.’ Are we not on the verge of exactly that experience ?
If we are, then this turning to the cult of beauty may be an unconsciously clever little trap that we are setting to capture God for modern life. We shall undoubtedly succeed in capturing Him. When we have Him, what shall we do with Him? The prophet alone can tell us. Our only hope will turn on the emergence of a group of prophets who can again socialize and moralize God as a group of prophets did once, eight centuries before Christ. Meanwhile, that depressed minority of troubled souls who yearn for an effective release through our institutions of religion for their creative moral energy must confess their despair and humiliation before the fact and tendency of modern life.
Oddly enough, this humiliation before the thoroughly secularized intention of modern society is really the very opportunity of the church. Who can tell what one good-sized Calvary in the modern world — when, daring greatly and speaking bravely, the forces of religion fail completely and confess it — would do, both to the modern world and to the life of religion itself? One such failure, convincing in nature and offering no relieving prospect of later success, would go very far, not to build up the church, but to rehabilitate religion and undergird civilization. What ails the forces of religion really is that they are entirely too anxious to be fighting always on the winning side.