CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY.
The association of religion with morality is a very ancient one. This is
not because the one is impossible without the other, we have already
shown that this is not the case. The reason is that unless religious
beliefs are associated with certain essential social activities their
continuance is almost impossible. Thus it happens in the course of
social evolution that just in proportion as man learns to rely upon the
purely social activities to that extent religion is driven to dwell more
upon them and to claim kinship with them.
While this is true of religions in general, it applies with peculiar
force to Christianity. And in the last two or three centuries we have
seen the emphasis gradually shifted from a set of doctrines, upon the
acceptance of which man's eternal salvation depends, to a number of
ethical and social teachings with which Christianity, as such, has no
vital concern. The present generation of Christian believers has had
what is called the moral aspect of Christianity so constantly impressed
upon them, and the essential and doctrinal aspect so slurred over, that
many of them have come to accept the moral teaching associated with
Christianity as its most important aspect. More than that, they have
come to regard the immense superiority of Christianity as one of those
statements the truth of which can be doubted by none but the most
obtuse. To have this alleged superiority of Christian ethical teaching
questioned appears to them proof of some lack of moral development on
the part of the questioner.
To this type of believer it will come with something of a shock to be
told quite plainly and without either circumlocution or apology that his
religion is of an intensely selfish and egoistic character, and that its
ethical influence is of a kind that is far from admirable. It will shock
him because he has for so long been told that his religion is the very
quintessence of unselfishness, he has for so long been telling it to
others, and he has been able for so many generations to make it
uncomfortable for all those who took an opposite view, that he has
camouflaged both the nature of his own motives and the tendency of his
religion.
From one point of view this is part of the general scheme in virtue of
which the Christian Church has given currency to the legend that the
doctrines taught by it represented a tremendous advance in the
development of the race. In sober truth it represented nothing of the
kind. That the elements of Christian religious teaching existed long
before Christianity as a religious system was known to the world is now
a commonplace with all students of comparative religions, and is
admitted by most Christian writers of repute. Even in form the Christian
doctrines represented but a small advance upon their pagan prototypes,
but it is only when one bears in mind the fact that the best minds of
antiquity were rapidly throwing off these superstitions and leading the
world to a more enlightened view of things, we realize that in the main
Christianity represented a step backward in the intellectual evolution
of the race. What we then see is Christianity reaffirming and
re-establishing most of the old superstitions in forms in which only the
more ignorant classes of antiquity accepted them. We have an assertion
of demonism in its crudest forms, an affirmation of the miraculous that
the educated in the Roman world had learned to laugh at, and which is
to-day found among the savage people of the earth, while every form of
scientific thought was looked upon as an act of impiety. The scientific
eclipse that overtook the old pagan civilization was one of the
inevitable consequences of the triumph of Christianity. From the point
of view of general culture the retrogressive nature of Christianity is
unmistakable. It has yet to be recognized that the same statement holds
good in relation even to religion. One day the world will appreciate the
fact that no greater disaster ever overtook the world than the triumph
of the Christian Church.
For the moment, however, we are only concerned with the relation of
Christianity to morality. And here my thesis is that Christianity is an
essentially selfish creed masking its egoistic impulses under a cover of
unselfishness and self-sacrifice. To that it will probably be said that
the charge breaks down on the fact that Christian teaching is full of
the exhortation that this world is of no moment, that we gain salvation
by learning to ignore its temptations and to forgo its pleasures, and
that it is, above all other faiths, the religion of personal sacrifice.
And that this teaching is there it would be stupid to deny. But this
does not disprove what has been said, indeed, analysis only serves to
make the truth still plainer. That many Christians have given up the
prizes of the world is too plain to be denied; that they have forsaken
all that many struggle to possess is also plain. But when this has been
admitted there still remains the truth that there is a vital distinction
in the consideration of whether a man gives up the world in order to
save his own soul, or whether he saves his soul as a consequence of
losing the world. In this matter it is the aim that is important, not
only to the outsider who may be passing judgment, but more importantly
to the agent himself. It is the effect of the motive on character with
its subsequent flowering in social life that must be considered.
The first count in the indictment here is that the Christian appeal is
essentially a selfish one. The aim is not the saving of others but of
one's self. If other people must be saved it is because their salvation
is believed to be essential to the saving of one's own soul. That this
involves, or may involve, a surrender of one's worldly possessions or
comfort, is of no moment. Men will forgo many pleasures and give up much
when they have what they believe to be a greater purpose in view. We see
this in directions quite unconnected with religion. Politics will show
us examples of men who have forsaken many of what are to others the
comforts of life in the hopes of gaining power and fame. Others will
deny themselves many pleasures in the prospect of achieving some end
which to them is of far greater value than the things they are
renouncing. And it is the same principle that operates in the case of
religious devotees. There is no reason to doubt but that when a young
woman forsakes the world and goes into a cloister she is surrendering
much that has considerable attractions for her. But what she gives is to
her of small importance to what she gains in return. And if one believed
in Christianity, in immortal damnation, with the intensity of the great
Christian types of character, it would be foolish not to surrender
things of so little value for others of so great and transcendent
importance.
To do Christians justice they have not usually made a secret of their
aim. Right through Christian literature there runs the teaching that it
is the desire of personal and immortal salvation that inspires them, and
they have affirmed over and over again that but for the prospect of
being paid back with tremendous interest in the next world they could
see no reason for being good in this one. That is emphatically the
teaching of the New Testament and of the greatest of Christian
characters. You are to give in secret that you may be rewarded openly,
to cast your bread upon the waters that it may be returned to you, and
Paul's counsel is that if there be no resurrection from the dead then we
may eat, drink, and be merry for death only is before us. Thus, what you
do is in the nature of a deliberate and conscious investment on which
you will receive a handsome dividend in the next world. And your
readiness to invest will be exactly proportionate to your conviction of
the soundness of the security. But there is in all this no perception of
the truly ethical basis of conduct, no indication of the inevitable
consequences of conduct on character. What is good is determined by what
it is believed will save one's own soul and increase the dividend in the
next world. What is bad is anything that will imperil the security. It
is essentially an appeal to what is grasping and selfish in human
nature, and while you may hide the true character of a thing by the
lavish use of attractive phrases, you cannot hinder it working out its
consequences in actual life. And the consequence of this has been that
while Christian teaching has been lavish in the use of attractive
phrases its actual result has been to create a type of character that
has been not so much immoral as _a_moral. And with that type the good
that has been done on the one side has been more than counterbalanced by
the evil done on the other.
What the typical Christian character had in mind in all that he did was
neither the removal of suffering nor of injustice, but the salvation of
his own soul. That justified everything so long as it was believed to
contribute to that end. The social consequences of what was done simply
did not count. And if, instead of taking mere phrases from the
principal Christian writers, we carefully examine their meaning we shall
see that they were strangely devoid of what is now understood by the
expression "moral incentive." The more impressive the outbreak of
Christian piety the clearer does this become. No one could have
illustrated the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice better than did the
saints and monks of the earlier Christian centuries. Such a character as
the famous St. Simon Stylites, living for years on his pillar, filthy
and verminous, and yet the admired of Christendom, with the lives of
numerous other saints, whose sole claim to be remembered is that they
lived the lives of worse than animals in the selfish endeavours to save
their shrunken souls, will well illustrate this point. If it entered the
diseased imagination of these men that the road to salvation lay through
attending to the sick and the needy, they were quite ready to labour in
that direction; but of any desire to remove the horrible social
conditions that prevailed, or to remedy the injustice of which their
clients were the victims, there is seldom a trace. And, on the other
hand, if they believed that their salvation involved getting away from
human society altogether and leading the life of a hermit, they were as
ready to do that. If it meant the forsaking of husband or wife or parent
or child, these were left without compunction, and their desertion was
counted as proof of righteousness. The lives of the saints are full of
illustrations of this. Professor William James well remarks, in his
_Varieties of Religious Experience_, that "In gentle characters, where
devoutness is intense and the intellect feeble, we have an imaginative
absorption in the love of God to the exclusion of all practical human
interests.... When the love of God takes possession of such a mind it
expels all human loves and human uses." Of the Blessed St. Mary
Alacoque, her biographer points out that as she became absorbed in the
love of Christ she became increasingly useless to the practical life of
the convent. Of St. Teresa, James remarks that although a woman of
strong intellect his impression of her was a feeling of pity that so
much vitality of soul should have found such poor employment. And of so
famous a character as St. Augustine a Christian writer, Mr. A. C.
Benson, remarks:--
I was much interested in reading St. Augustine's _Confessions_
lately to recognize how small a part, after his conversion, any
aspirations for the welfare of humanity seem to play in his mind
compared with the consciousness of his own personal relations with
God. It was this which gave him his exuberant sense of joy and
peace, and his impulse was rather the impulse of sharing a
wonderful and beautiful secret with others than an immediate desire
for their welfare, forced out of him, so to speak, by his own
exultation rather than drawn out of him by compassion for the needs
of others.
That is one of the most constant features which emerges from a careful
study of the character of Christian types. St. Francis commenced his
career by leaving his parents. John Fox did the same. In that Puritan
classic, _The Pilgrim's Progress_, one of the outstanding features is
the striking absence of emphasis on the value of the social and domestic
virtues, and the Rev. Principal Donaldson notes this as one of the
features of early Christian literature in general. Christian preaching
was for centuries full of contemptuous references to "filthy rags of
righteousness," "mere morality," etc. The aim of the saints was a purely
selfish and personal one. It was not even a refined or a metaphysical
selfishness. It was a simple teaching that the one thing essential was
to save one's own soul, and that the main reason for doing good in this
world was to reap a benefit from it in the world to come. If it can
properly be called morality, it was conduct placed out at the highest
rate of interest. Christianity may often have used a naturally lofty
character, it was next to impossible for it to create one.
If one examines the attack made by Christians upon Freethought morality,
it is surprising how often the truth of what has been said is implied.
For the complaint here is, in the main, not that naturalism fails to
give an adequate account of the nature and development of morality, but
that it will not satisfy mankind, and so fails to act as an adequate
motive to right conduct. When we enquire precisely what is meant by
this, we learn that if there is no belief in God, and if there is no
expectation of a future state in which rewards and punishments will be
dispensed, there remains no inducement to the average man or woman to do
right. It is the moral teaching of St. Paul over again. We are in the
region of morality as a deliberate investment, and we have the threat
that if the interest is not high enough or certain enough to satisfy the
dividend hunting appetite of the true believer, then the investment will
be withdrawn. Really this is a complaint, not that the morality which
ignores Christianity is too low but that it is too high. It is doubted
whether human nature, particularly Christian human nature, can rise to
such a level, and whether, unless you can guarantee a Christian a
suitable reward for not starving his family or for not robbing his
neighbour, he will continue to place any value on decency or honesty.
So to state the case makes the absurdity of the argument apparent, but
unless that is what is meant it is difficult to make it intelligible. To
reply that Christians do not require these inducements to behave with a
tolerable amount of decency is not a statement that I should dispute; on
the contrary, I would affirm it. It is the Christian defender who makes
himself and his fellow believers worse than the Freethinker believes
them to be. For it is part of the case of the Freethinker that the
morality of the Christian has really no connection with his religion,
and that the net influence of his creed is to confuse and distort his
moral sense instead of developing it. It is the argument of the
Christian that makes the Freethinker superior to the Christian; it is
the Freethinker who declines the compliment and who asserts that the
social forces are adequate to guarantee the continuance of morality in
the complete absence of religious belief.
How little the Christian religion appreciates the nature of morality is
seen by the favourite expression of Christian apologists that the
tendency of non-religion is to remove all moral "restraints." The use of
the word is illuminating. To the Christian morality is no more than a
system of restraints which aim at preventing a man gratifying his
appetite in certain directions. It forbids him certain enjoyments here,
and promises him as a reward for his abstention a greater benefit
hereafter. And on that assumption he argues, quite naturally, that if
there be no after life then there seems no reason why man should undergo
the "restraints" which moral rules impose. On this scheme man is a born
criminal and God an almighty policeman. That is the sum of orthodox
Christian morality. To assume that this conception of conduct can have a
really elevating effect on life is to misunderstand the nature of the
whole of the ethical and social problem.
What has been said may go some distance towards suggesting an answer to
the question so often asked as to the reason for the moral failure of
Christianity. For that it has been a moral failure no one can doubt.
Nay, it is an assertion made very generally by Christians themselves.
Right from New Testament times the complaint that the conduct of
believers has fallen far short of what it should have been is constantly
met with. And there is not a single direction in which Christians can
claim a moral superiority over other and non-Christian peoples. They are
neither kinder, more tolerant, more sober, more chaste, nor more
truthful than are non-Christian people. Nor is it quite without
significance that those nations that pride themselves most upon their
Christianity are what they are. Their state reflects the ethical spirit
I have been trying to describe. For when we wipe out the disguising
phrases which we use to deceive ourselves--and it is almost impossible
to continually deceive others unless we do manage to deceive
ourselves--when we put on one side the "rationalizing" phrases about
Imperial races, carrying civilization to the dark places of the earth,
bearing the white man's burden, peopling the waste places of the earth,
etc., we may well ask what for centuries have the Christian nations of
the world been but so many gangs of freebooters engaged in world-wide
piracy? All over the world they have gone, fighting, stealing, killing,
lying, annexing, in a steadily rising crescendo. To be possessed of
natural wealth, without the means of resisting aggression, has for four
centuries been to invite the depredations of some one or more of the
Christian powers. It is the Christian powers that have militarized the
world in the name of the Prince of Peace, and made piracy a national
occupation in the name of civilization. Everywhere they have done these
things under the shelter of their religion and with the sanction of
their creed. Christianity has offered no effective check to the
cupidity of man, its chief work has been to find an outlet for it in a
disguised form. To borrow a term from the psycho-analysts, the task of
Christianity has been to "rationalize" certain ugly impulses, and so
provide the opportunity for their continuous expression. The world of
to-day is beginning to recognize the intellectual weakness of
Christianity; what it has next to learn is that its moral bankruptcy is
no less assured.
One of the great obstacles in the way of this is the sentimentalism of
many who have given up all intellectual adherence to the Christian
creed. The power of the Christian Church has been so great, it has for
so long had control of the machinery of public education and
information, that many find it almost impossible to conclude that the
ethical spirit of Christianity is as alien to real progress as are its
cosmical teachings. The very hugeness of this century-old imposture
blinds many to its inherent defects. And yet the continuous and
world-wide moral failure of Christianity can only be accounted for on
the ground that it had a fatal moral defect from the start. I have
suggested above what is the nature of that defect. It has never regarded
morality as a natural social growth, but only as something imposed upon
man from without. It has had no other reason for its existence than the
fear of punishment and the hope of reward. Christian morality is the
morality of the stock exchange _plus_ the intellectual outlook of the
savage. And with that in control of national destinies our surprise
should be, not that things are as they are, but rather that with so
great a handicap the world has contrived to reach its present moderate
degree of development.