RELIGION IN AMERICA
The rarest experience in America is a discussion of morals. You can
hear morals preached about, but that is not a discussion. You can read
about morals in arguments disguised as essays, but these seldom cause
discussion. Fully a third of successful American plays and stories turn
upon a moral axiom, but one that we accept without argument, like rain
in April and the August drouth. One hears very little real discussion
of moral questions here because “old Americans,” at least, agree in
their moral standards as remarkably as did the Victorians.
In this respect we are, indeed, still Victorians, though in others
already a century beyond them. Some of us may (or did) get drunk,
but we do not believe in hard drinking; not even the saloon-keepers
believed in hard drinking. Some of us make license of our liberty in
sex relations; but the public disapproval of promiscuity is, to fall
into the current phrase, nation wide. Some of us steal in a large and
generous fashion, taking from him who hath not business ability for the
benefit of him who hath shrewdness and its fruits. But if these actions
can be described in terms of theft or misappropriation, every one will
agree that they are wicked, even stock-holders and profiteers. You
cannot get up a decent argument on moral questions in America, because,
as with small boys in war-time, no one will take the unpopular side.
The ethics of America are as definite as a code.
This accepted and not unlofty moral code, with its extension to justice
and the rights of individuals, is the force behind our idealism that
has made it an international factor to be reckoned with from the days
of Jeffersonian ideology to our own. Like the dissenters’ vote in
England, it is a dangerous force to oppose. Despite occasional hysteria
and sentimentalism, despite its frequent betrayals by an unlovely
common sense, it is strong because it has the momentum of tradition
and the tenacity of prejudice. Of its worth I am American enough to
be convinced. Of its intelligence one cannot be so certain. But what
really concerns all lovers of our hard-built civilization is how
durable under stress is this moral idealism, under such stress as the
approaching change in our social order is sure to bring to morals and
morale, as well as to railroad stocks and the Constitution.
Indeed, the inner fire, the spirit, is not easily discoverable in this
American idealism with its moral causes. Historically, it is easy to
explain it; habit has carried it on, and common sense must usually
approve a moral investment that has been profitable; but, nevertheless,
it is hard to see a continuing _raison d’être_ for such idealism in
America. It seems, as I have suggested in an earlier chapter, to lack
a definable spiritual basis. Its persistence, its weaknesses, its
dangers, raise constantly the question as to the status of religion in
America.
I remember hearing Graham Wallas--who will not be suspected of bias
in this matter--remark that England would not pass out of clouds and
darkness until she had made for herself a new and felt interpretation
of religion. America, founded by a curious partnership of the religious
instinct and economic need and brought up on the moral and material
profits of the union, cannot be supposed to be less in need of a
fundamental spiritual readjustment. Every socialist and communist,
every corporation president and ex-Secretary, every professional
intellectual and amateur prophet, is declaring his mind on the one
thing needful to save the world and America. I do not know why we,
whose profession it is to teach, whose duty it is to interpret and to
sympathize with every motion of the American mind, should hesitate
to speak out also in this matter. It is, I think, demonstrable that
America needs religion as much as steel and automobiles, as much as a
better distribution of wealth and cheaper bread and meat.
The status of religion in America has been as peculiar as the status
of politics. Our religious attitudes have been profoundly affected and
from early periods by the separation of church and state. Struggle
against a vested institution, dissent from traditional power,
conciliation with sacred authority, have been burning points in the
modern history of Europe. They have made great literature in England
from Shelley through Tennyson and Arnold and Swinburne. Our first
battle against the tyrannical in tradition wherever found was won in
the Revolution; our second, in the defeat of the Federalist party in
1800.
In those contests we were freed, perhaps too early and too easily, from
the menace of the church as a function of government. Since then we
have been, and we still are, freer than the European to seek religion
wherever it may be found. Our great religious literature is creative,
not protestant. Woolman of the Quakers was a seeker; Emerson, in
greater measure, was a seeker, seeking spirituality for Americans, and,
like Woolman, fanning their moral enthusiasms. Hawthorne and Thoreau
were searchers for a new morality; Whitman and William James, in their
fashion, searchers also.
Emerson in his religious attitude belongs a century later than Matthew
Arnold. Fed from almost identical intellectual sources, he is the
liberated mind seeking new allegiances, Arnold, the rebel not yet free.
And in general American religion, without reference to its quality, has
had, like American politics, a status some generations ahead of the
rest of the world. Hamilton and Jefferson and Lincoln were prophets
for Europe. The independent sects of America, none established, all
respectable, and the free seekers after new truth which sprang from
them, seem to have prefigured a condition that is common in a world
growing democratic.
In truth, we old Americans, who with all our faults still best
represent America, gained freedom of conscience at the expense of
shattering the ideal of a church universal. Religion for us came in
general to be a personal matter because the church, separated from the
state, lost the visible authority that made it easy--or necessary--to
trust to an institution the responsibility for one’s soul. We felt, as
was to be expected, the need of new authority, new sanctions for our
religion. And we were free, freer than others, to seek and to find a
religion for democracy. What has been the result?
The results in bourgeois America, which goes to the theater, wears
the commonly advertised collars, sends its children to college, and
keeps out of the slums and the police-court, are clearly visible and
highly significant. Four classes, interlocking, but distinct enough
for definition, may be readily described; and though they do not
include the recent immigrant or the fire-new sophists of radicalism,
the strongest brains, the most characteristic emotions, and the best
character in America belong there with the mass of the mediocre
undistinguished who are public opinion and the ultimate America.
There are, first, the militant advance-guards of our idealism, the
ethical enthusiasts who carry on the moral fervor of America. They
range, like colors of the spectrum, from the rarer violet of the
philosophical moralists, inheritors of the New England ethics or the
Virginia ideology, through the solid blue of the organizers of great
movements in social reform, to the blatant red of the prohibitionists
and the Anti-tobacco League. I do not mean to be flippant. The irony,
if there is irony, is bred of the sardonic humor aroused by so various
an army all certain that by stopping this and beginning that the world
can be saved.
It is their certainty that makes them impressive--the same certainty
which drove our colonials toward republican government and our pioneers
to the conquest of a wilderness. Sneers at their banner, “Progress,”
satisfy none but the reactionary. Progress where? Who knows. Progress
for whom? It is hard to tell. But only the man who honestly believes
in civilization for the benefit of the few can doubt the advance that
has been made. I should have preferred the twelfth century to the
twentieth if I could have lived in the right Benedictine monastery or
been a count in Provence. I should have enjoyed the Elizabethan age
more than my own if I could have voyaged--in the cabin--with Raleigh,
been Shakespeare’s patron, or possessed a manor neither too near nor
too far from London. I still think that life in a good English college,
with a taste for letters and the proper port, is superior to any mental
or physical luxury we can offer in America. Yet all this is aside
from the point. Provençal poetry and perfect social intercourse, high
adventure, the intellectual life in an appropriate physical setting,
and even good port, may come again somewhere on the line along which
our progress is marching. In the meantime, though the war has been
a cooling card to optimism, the ethical enthusiasms of the age have
made the opportunities of the average man for most good things in life
better, have made him, in the most accurate sense of the word, not
nobler, but more civilized, and particularly in America, where the fire
of opportunity was first set burning.
The moral enthusiasts whose religion has been transformed into ethical
idealism are safe from ridicule. Religious persecution, slavery, the
tyranny of disease and ignorance, they have already reformed out of the
brighter parts of the world, and perhaps alcoholism and poverty are to
follow. We can well afford to risk their mistakes and their excesses,
their blind trust in works, so long as they are propelled by a sincere
energy of will to make the world better. But what lies behind this
will? What keeps it from decaying? For these men are seldom religious
in the sense that their reforming zeal springs from a deep spiritual
need. A part of their energy is moral habit; a part is exactly
identical with the energy that builds up a great industrial plant in
order to satisfy a craving for laudable action. If the certainty that
the community must be bettered, can be bettered, should slacken, where
would it find revival? In faith, hope, and charity? But can hope endure
and charity be permanent without faith? And what is their faith?
The faith of our moral idealists is as strong, I suppose, as that which
supported the Stoics or the clear-sighted reformers of the eighteenth
century. They believe in the perfectability of man and the pragmatic
value of right-doing. This, for a strong man, may be enough; but it is
not a religion. It is questionable whether it would stand adversity.
It was not shaken in the war, but it is shaking now. If the enthusiasm
of the reformers should be spent or exhausted, they would have little
to fall back upon. Their idealism has already shown signs of hysteria,
spots of sentimentalism, evidences of a basis in habit and impulse as
much as in deep spiritual conviction.
It has become almost a commonplace to say that the spiritual seekers,
the second of our observable classes--more numerous, I believe, in
America than elsewhere in the white world since the seventeenth
century--are products of reaction against the dry moral will that
seeks its satisfaction in works, not faith. Yet their importance has
not always been grasped. Commercial America has not only been the home
of the greatest of modern philanthropies, but also the source of the
only powerful religious sect created in the nineteenth century, as
well as one of the few new strains in idealistic philosophy. They are
not happy in our commercialism or content with ethical reform, those
more sensitive spirits whose numbers and weight in bourgeois America
are evident whenever an emotional crisis arrives. And the freedom from
ecclesiastical restraint which was won for them by their ancestors has
left them free to construct new religions.
But as it was the earnestness of the moral enthusiasts that seemed more
valuable than any reason they had for goodness, so it is the spiritual
craving of American seekers that is more impressive than anything they
have found. I do not undervalue the hopeful idealism of Emerson or the
strong protest of the Christian Scientists against surrender to petty
worry and pain. Yet in so far as we may generalize in so vast a matter,
the seekers of spirituality have been singularly out of harmony with
the needs of a democracy. They have found religions that solace the
optimistic temperament when it has been duly intellectualized; they
have found medicine for the ills of prosperous people; but the breadth
and often the depth of appeal that must characterize a religion for
all men they have missed or failed to seek. The Friends, later called
Quakers, began with the will that all the world should become Friends;
it was only in later stages that they regarded themselves as a peculiar
people with whom only those fitted by temperament should join. But it
is with such an exclusiveness that the seekers of to-day who promulgate
religion commence. One can prophesy in advance who will or will not
be Christian Scientists. And beyond the bounds of sects the spiritual
adventure exhausts itself in emotional vagaries, or rises into regions
of pure mysticism where, no matter how noble or how satisfying it may
be for individual persons, we shall never find the religion for a
democracy.
The third group is again a result of that early freeing of America
from ecclesiastical control; but its members are those whom such
unchartered freedom tires. The reactionaries, if I may call them by
that name without offense intended, are the lovers of tradition, whose
modern craving for the sanctions of religion leads them back into
dependence upon the old rites, the old theologies, the old authority,
which many, indeed, never have left. They, in our history, are the
Federalists of religion.
And, like the seekers, they, also, have put restrictions of temperament
upon their faith. For many Americans of the old stock the breach with
authority made by the Reformation is permanent. They could not go back
without an intellectual debasement that would be degradation, not
humility. For many others the scientific revolution of the nineteenth
century has still further unfitted minds for harmony with the forms and
pressures of the ecclesiastical past. Sheer scientific materialism as
an explanation of God and the universe has broken down. The need for
religion emerges from the controversy more palpitating than before.
Nevertheless, the science of theology has suffered from the science of
inductive research. Tradition carries many a man to the door of past
beauty, decorum, and harmonious faith, and he longs to enter. But his
way is barred. He leans upon and loves the past. He cannot enter it.
The traditionalist, to give him a better and more lovely name, has
been a bringer of joy to many; but, like the seeker, his help has been
partial only. He is a chaplain attendant upon the regiments of his own
faith.
But by far the most significant product of our precocious religiosity
in America and our early emancipation from ecclesiastical control
has been indifferentism--that American indifferentism which has
been easy because of our willingness to be responsible for our own
evils, wide-spread because of our necessary obsession with material
development, defensible in our century of good luck and the easy
optimism that accompanies it.
Here lies the group by all odds the largest, and certainly worthy of
the most anxious study. Here belongs the mass of everyday Americans
upon whom rests the outcome of the immediate future. What lies
beneath the seeming religious indifference of the American who is not
ritualist, reformer, or seeker for spiritual consolation, who is, in
short, the average American of office, mill, and law-court? That is the
crux of the problem.
Indifferentism, of course, is the fashion of the age, and fashions are
always delusive. In a Pullman smoker, watching the faces that, like
a day of south wind in July, are soggy, unillumined, one despairs of
one’s America. The human product of too much selling and buying has
never been attractive; our half-education and the semi-intelligence
that accompanies it have but defined the ill features, like careful
breeding of pig or goat. It was a novel principle of primitive
Christianity that lowliness and poverty might hide the noblest soul. If
you followed these men home, saw their minds freed from the pressure
of competition and out of the atmosphere of distrust, would your
opinion alter? Are their religious instincts hidden by the mask of
American commercialism, inactive merely because suppressed by custom
and fashion? Are they lying fallow? Or are they like seed too long
dormant and decaying?
If only we knew by what ingenious statistics these men might be
classified, prophecy would not be difficult. If only we knew how many
have become mere traffickers in bodily comfort, sensualists in fact,
whatever they may be in name. If only we knew how many in their hearts
were dumb seekers for some spiritual satisfactions that would raise
the heart in adversity, lift the mind above the necessity for safety,
pleasure, success, so that all might be pursued, all enjoyed, without
flatness and disillusion. But no answer is ready; for there has been no
test of the latent religion of America.
It is true that in the mass of American indifferentism the suppressed
religious instinct exhibits itself by queer shoots of emotional
enthusiasm for high things whether in war or in peace. It shows itself,
or rather its suppression, by unexpected sentimentalism in hard places.
It touches with melancholy many a typical American face in which one
would expect to find self-satisfaction or arrogance. We struggle with
our religious emotions in youth, suppress them in the middle years; in
old age, deep buried like a hidden disease, they torment us. Old age is
proverbially restless in America.
Nevertheless, the test that will reveal how much religion is latent in
our democracy has not come yet; nor have our moral enthusiasms, our
spiritual adventures, our reachings for tradition, been in our day
really tested for the spirit behind them. There is reason to believe
that the time is approaching. In a normal evolution of the bourgeois
society that has made America, some clear revelation must have come
of the religious spirit that as a race and a nation we are developing.
Doubtless we would slowly have found our way to an expression more
true to our nature than any of the partial modes so far allowed us.
But there will be no normal, or at least no slow, evolution in the
religious emotions of the old Americans. A factor from without, a
sudden emergency, calls for an immediate reckoning of our spiritual
assets. All, in every class, who are responsible for the American
inheritance of ideals and morale and character are challenged, but
especially the indifferents. Those neutrals in the conflict between
spirit and matter can stay neutral no longer.
Bourgeois America, which means most of America, is, as every one sees,
on the verge of a revolution like the political-social revolution
of 1800. For a century we have pursued economics, and now economics
is pursuing us. A new class is coming to the front, and yet that,
perhaps, is of minor importance in America, where money and a little
education extinguish distinctions between classes in two decades. What
is coming with more significance is a new social system, wherein a new
control of industry and a more equitable distribution of the products
thereof is to be substituted for competitive individualism. Many are
skeptical of the proposed practices by which this revolution is to be
accomplished; few now doubt that its theory is correct and will some
day be demonstrated.
But there has never been a revolution of any kind in world history
that did not bring with it a revolution of all that tradition had
established and custom made familiar. And this revolution, peaceful or
otherwise, that is upon us differs from earlier examples in that its
economic nature is clearly distinguished and, therefore, its challenge
to all that we term esthetic, cultural, spiritual, religious, doubly
sharp and direct. Food, clothing, and recreation, not religious or
political liberty, are its legitimate, but also its only expressed,
objects. If it gains these at the expense of the soul--of what we all
understand by the soul in the ancient warning, “What is a man profited,
if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”--if it gains
material welfare and material welfare only, it will fail; and if it
fails, we all go down with it.
In western Europe, one guesses, the struggle between a socialism always
threatening to become purely materialistic and our own imperfect order
will be differently conducted. There, and, especially in France and
Great Britain, church organizations are powerful politically, socially,
and in their grip upon the popular imagination. They will sharpen the
conflict and confuse the issues, making the struggle seem to resemble
many earlier combats between church and anti-church. But in bourgeois
America no such easy and fallacious division will be possible. Here
the question as to whether the new order is to satisfy the religious
and moral, as well as the economic, needs of society will rest
squarely upon the individual person. No church can speak for America,
for no church ever has held or ever can hold Americans together. The
responsibility here, and ultimately in Europe, must be personal. It
will come to the question of how much religion is possessed by the
normal American. When he is aroused by a struggle that sweeps into far
wider questions than the tariff or the income tax, when his method
of working, his method of living, his method of thinking, are all
challenged by a new and militant social order, more dormant idealism,
more latent cynicisms, intenser passions, will be aroused than one
would ever have suspected in that shrewd and easy-going face in the
Pullman smoker. Will religion be aroused also?
It is essential that we should bring about a better distribution of
wealth; that we should give every child the equal opportunity that
Jefferson had in mind when he wrote the vague, but magnificent,
phrases of the Declaration of Independence. Democracy cannot be said to
have been tried until we have made an economic democracy, and we are
too far on the road of democratic experiment to stop half-way. But it
is even more essential that we should carry on into the new community
our moral enthusiasm, our ideals, and also that reverence for the
shaping power, and love for its manifestations that lie behind them,
and constitute the religious emotion which I shall not here attempt
otherwise to define. Many fear that the nice taste, the trained mind,
which have been borne upon the crest of civilization, will go down
in the welter of indistinguishable breakers. There is little danger
of this, since already it is the intellectuals who direct, and will
direct, the new movement; and the professional man stands to gain as
much as the laborer by a peaceful revolution. But in a socialistic
world, built on the recovery of the unearned increment, standardized
by wages, whose _raison d’être_ is the distribution of wealth, it is
the religious instinct, with all that its free development implies for
democracy, that is in the gravest danger. If we all become relatively
rich--and this is an idea of the earthly paradise that socialism
undoubtedly encourages--how many will crawl through the eye of the
needle?
The labor party is not immediately responsible for the saving or
the freeing of the religious instinct. Its first objectives are the
comforts and material opportunities of civilization; and until these
are reached we have no right to expect religious leadership from
the proletariat. If any one is responsible, it is the old American,
the bourgeois American. He has inherited the spiritual tradition of
his ancestors; he has profited by emancipation from superstition
and institutional tyranny; he has lived in a comfortable world with
opportunities to illumine the spirit by literature and the arts
and education. He is not going to be crushed or driven out of his
inheritance; there are too many of him, and he too closely resembles
in everything but habit of life the proletariat that is rising. Upon
this American rests the burden of spiritualizing as well as educating
his new masters--upon the moral enthusiasts, the traditionalists, the
seekers, most of all. It is such a task as the church faced in the dark
ages, when barbarians had to be not only spiritualized, but civilized
as well. It is a lesser task, for our new invaders are not barbarians,
and their leaders are intellectually the equal of ours. Whether the
outlook for success is greater, depends upon the spirit we bring to the
enterprise. Our knowledge is greater; is our will that man should make
more than a market of his time, sleeping and feeding, as great as the
great wills of earlier centuries?
No one can answer; but of this we can be assured, that the solution
rests in American indifferentism. If the commercial American is as
material as he looks, if common sense is his only good, if his idealism
is merely inherited habit, if he responds to two impulses only,
restlessness and sentimentality, then he will go over to socialism
in its most mechanical phase and, instead of saving the new party,
he will ruin it. Potentially the most ardent supporters of a purely
materialistic socialism, in which the individual person counts for
nothing aside from his appetites, are precisely the “practical”
business men who now curse the new order most loudly because it
threatens their accumulations. For them it is civil war between seekers
for the dollar; and civil war is always the bitterest, and the soonest
healed. Such men have been our leaders. Is the army behind them?
I think that the rank and file of bourgeois America are less concerned
with wealth and the struggle for wealth than we suppose. I think that
they are not so much dazzled by millions as in the ’nineties; more
anxious for simplicity of heart, which spells content, and worthiness
of aim, which satisfies conscience, than one would guess from Wall
Street or Broadway or public life in the Middle West. I think
that, while distrusting the economic paradise of the more material
socialists, they are closer in sympathy to a thoughtful laborer than
to a cynical capitalist. If the religious instinct among them emerges
as a disgust for petty emotions, as a passionate interest in humanity,
as a willingness to sacrifice privilege and prejudice for a fuller
life more generously shared, if the religion of our democracy finds
no more expression than this, the crisis will pass. If even thus far
indifferentism should yield to active spiritual faith, the bourgeoisie
would cease being bourgeois, and we could cease to fear the triumph of
the proletariate, since, if there was anything good in our old stock,
we could convert them to it.
But if the American has lost his religious instincts, if behind
his practical common sense and his vigorous idealism and his eager
experiments in spirituality there is nothing but a restless energy
working upon the momentum of convictions long dead, then let the new
Americans absorb us quickly, for we are worn out.
With all humbleness, with a full realization of the trivialities of
hustle and bustle in which we have sunk our religion, with concern for
our escape from easy-going optimism and skeptical content, I, for one,
feel too sure of the depth of our racial legacy of reverence, and the
fundamental religiosity of the American character at its truest, to
admit for a moment that conclusion of despair.