DOES CIVILIZATION
NEED RELIGION?
_A Study in the Social Resources
and Limitations of Religion
in Modern Life_
BY
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1927
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1927,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped.
Published December, 1927.
SET UP BY BROWN BROTHERS, LINOTYPERS
_Printed in the United States of America by_
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK
TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER
WHO TAUGHT ME THAT THE CRITICAL
FACULTY CAN BE UNITED WITH A
REVERENT SPIRIT
_and_
TO MY MOTHER
WHO FOR TWELVE YEARS HAS SHARED
WITH ME THE WORK OF A
CHRISTIAN PASTORATE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The State of Religion in Modern Society 1
II. Nature and Civilization as Foes of Personality 19
III. The Social Resources of Religion 35
IV. The Social Conservatism of Modern Religion 63
V. Religion and Life: Conflict and Compromise 79
VI. Social Complexity and Ethical Impotence 124
VII. Transcending and Transforming the World 165
VIII. A Philosophical Basis for an Ethical Religion 190
IX. Conclusion 220
DOES CIVILIZATION NEED RELIGION?
DOES CIVILIZATION NEED RELIGION?
CHAPTER I
THE STATE OF RELIGION IN MODERN SOCIETY
Religion is not in a robust state of health in modern civilization.
Vast multitudes, particularly in industrial and urban centers, live
without seeking its sanctions for their actions and die without
claiming its comforts in their extremities. While its influence is
still considerable among agrarians and the middle classes of the city,
an ever-increasing number of the privileged classes are indifferent to
its values. Spiritual and moral forces have always been in a perennial
state of decay in those circles of society in which physical ease and
cultural advantages combine to make intellectual scruples more pressing
than moral ones. But modern scientific education has greatly multiplied
the intellectual difficulties of religion and the increasing opulence
of Western life has rendered its moral problems more perplexing.
Industrial workers, in as far as they are socially self-conscious,
are almost universally inimical to religion, and their opposition
represents a type of anti-religious sentiment which is entirely new in
history.
Since the dawn of the modern era the tides of faith have ebbed and
flowed so that it is not easy to chart their general course; but it
is difficult to escape the conclusion that each new tide has barely
exceeded the mark left by a previous ebb. The stream of religious life
has been deepened at times, as in the Protestant Reformation, but the
impartial observer will note that it has been narrowed as well. A
psychology of defeat, of which both fundamentalism and modernism are
symptoms, has gripped the forces of religion. Extreme orthodoxy betrays
by its very frenzy that the poison of scepticism has entered the soul
of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties
when their hold upon them has been shaken. Frantic orthodoxy is a
method for obscuring doubt. Liberalism tries vainly to give each new
strategic retreat the semblance of a victorious engagement. To retreat
from untenable positions is no doubt a necessary step in preparation
for new advances; but this necessary strategy has not been accompanied
by the kind of spiritual vigor which would promise ultimate victory.
The general tendencies toward the secularization of life have been
consistent enough to prompt its foes to predict religion’s ultimate
extinction as a major interest of mankind and to tempt even friendly
observers to regard its future with grave apprehension. There are
indeed many forms of religion which are clearly vestigial remnants of
another day with other interests. They have no vital influence upon
the life of modern man, and their continued existence only proves that
history, like nature, is slow to destroy what it has found useless, and
even slower to inter what it has destroyed. Scattered among the living
forms of each civilization are the whitened bones of what was once
flesh and blood.
The sickness of faith in our day may be the senility which precedes
death; on the other hand, it may be a specific malady which time
and thought can cure. If history is slow to destroy what has become
useless, it may be as patient and persistent in reviving what is
useful but seems dead. Five hundred years are but a short span in
history, and a constant tendency over such a period may lead to
premature conclusions. If religion contains indispensable resources
for the life of man, its revival waits only upon the elimination of
those maladjustments which have hindered it from making its resources
available for the citizen of the modern era. Whatever may be said of
specific religions and religious forms, it is difficult to imagine
man without religion; for religion is the champion of personality in
a seemingly impersonal world. It prompts man to organize his various
impulses, inherited and acquired, into a moral unity; it persuades
him, when its vitality is unimpaired, to regard his fellows with an
appreciation commensurate with his own self-respect; and it finally
discovers and creates a universe in which the human spirit is
guaranteed security against the forces of nature which always seem to
reduce it to a mere effervescence unable to outlast the collocation of
forces which produced it. The plight of religion in our own day is due
to the fact that it has been more than ordinarily pressed by foes on
the two lines on which it defends the dignity and value of personality.
The sciences have greatly complicated the problem of maintaining the
plausibility of the personalization of the universe by which religion
guarantees the worth of human personality; and science applied to the
world’s work has created a type of society in which human personality
is easily debased. The pure sciences have revealed a world of nature
much more impersonal and, seemingly, much less amenable to a divine
will and to human needs than had been traditionally assumed; and the
applied sciences have created an impersonal civilization in which human
relations are so complex, its groups and units so large, its processes
so impersonal, the production of things so important, and ethical
action so difficult, that personality is both dwarfed and outraged in
it.
Personality is that type of reality which is self-conscious and
self-determining. The concept of personality is valid only in a
universe in which creative freedom is developed and maintained in
individual life as well as in the universe. Religion therefore needs
the support of both metaphysics and ethics. It tries to prompt man to
ethical action by the sublime assumption that the universe is itself
ethical in its ultimate nature whatever data to the contrary the
immediate and obvious scene may reveal; and through the cultivation
of the ethical life in man it seeks to make such a personalization
of the universe both necessary and plausible. It teaches men to find
God by loving their brothers, and to love their brothers because
they have found God. It inspires a mystical reverence for human
personality, prompted by the discovery and creation of a universe in
which personality is the supreme power and value; and it persuades men
to discover personal values in the universe because they have first
come upon clues to the transcendent value of personality in the lives
of their fellows. Its ethics is dependent upon its metaphysics and its
metaphysics is rooted in its ethics. Religion is thus obviously placed
in a desperate plight when its metaphysics and its ethics are imperiled
at the same time. It must face and do battle with two hosts of enemies,
those who do not believe in men because they do not believe in God, and
those who do not believe in God because modern civilization has robbed
them of their faith in the moral integrity of men.
Since it is difficult to fight on two fronts at the same time,
the forces of religion have been forced to choose one of the two
fronts for their major defensive effort. Perhaps it was inevitable
that they should choose the easier task. It is easier to challenge
the idea of an impersonal universe than to change the fact of an
impersonal civilization. That is what the modern church has done and
is doing. It is spending all its energy in discounting the excessive
claims of a deterministic science. It has exhausted its ingenuity
in retreating from the untenable positions of an orthodoxy which
overstated the freedom and the virtue in the physical universe and
therefore aggravated the very determinism by which it was defeated.
Outraged truth has a way of avenging itself. The idea of a capricious
God working his will in the universe without the restraint of law or
the hindrance of any circumstance helped to create the concept of a
mechanistic world in which all freedom is an illusion and therefore all
morality a sham. Thus the strategic retreats of religion in the field
of metaphysics have been the necessary prelude to any new religious
advance. Religion may in fact be forced to make some concessions
which even modern liberalism seems still unwilling to make. Modern
religionists, particularly popular apologists are inclined to add the
word creative to the word evolution, and assume that their problem is
solved. The modern church has very generally borrowed its apologetic
strategy from John Fiske and Henry Drummond, and has tried to
visualize a God who differed from older conception only in this—that
he took more time to gain his ends than had once been assumed. The
important fact which has escaped many modern defenders of the faith is
that the patience of the creative will is a necessary characteristic
rather than a self-imposed restraint. There is a stubborn inertia in
every type of reality which offers resistance to each new step in
creation, so that an emerging type of reality is always in some sense
a compromise between the creative will and the established facts of
the concrete world. Whether we view the inorganic world, organic life
or the world of personal and moral values, each new type of reality
represents in some sense a defeat of God as well as a revelation of
him. Religious apologetics will probably be forced to concede this fact
more generously than has been its wont before it can bring religious
affirmations into harmony with scientific facts. Modern liberalism is
steeped in a religious optimism which is true to the facts of neither
the world of nature nor the world of history. The ultimate worth of
human personality in the universe may not be guaranteed as immediately
nor as obviously as liberal religion seems inclined to assume. Liberal
religion may be forced to discard its metaphysical and theological
monisms, which have been its support even more than orthodoxy’s, and
concede that freedom and creativity in both man and the cosmic order
are more seriously circumscribed than religion had assumed. But after
that concession is made it is not likely that the idea of freedom, and
the dignity of personality which is associated with it, will ever be
completely discredited, whatever may be the deterministic obsessions of
modern science. The various sciences can momentarily afford to indulge
in their various determinisms because the prestige of metaphysics as
a coördinator of the sciences has been destroyed for the time being.
Each science is therefore able to disavow the authority of metaphysics
and work upon the basis of its own metaphysical assumptions, which
are usually unreflective and generally deterministic. But the bulk
of new knowledge which has momentarily destroyed the authority of
any unifying perspective must in time be mastered by philosophical
thought; and absolute determinism is bound to be discredited in such a
development.[1]
There can be no question but that the development of the physical
sciences has permanently increased the difficulty of justifying the
personalization of the universe upon which all religious affirmations
are based. Every new form of reality is so closely linked to every
preceding form out of which it emerges that it is not easy to discern
the place where free creativity functions. Yet no total view of reality
can ever be permanently mechanistic, for new types of reality do emerge
and science is able to explain only the process and not the cause of
their emergence.
Important, then, as the metaphysical problem of religion is, it is
not the only problem which it faces. Though it is a real task to
reinterpret religious truth in the light of modern science, it is by
no means a hopeless one; and though it is necessary, it is not the
only necessary task. In the light of modern philosophical inquiries it
is justifiable to assume that the most needed hypotheses of religion
are metaphysically defensible. In the present situation of religion
in civilization, it is more necessary to inquire if and how the
peculiar attitudes and the unique life which proceeds from a religious
interpretation of the universe may be made to serve the needs of men in
modern civilization. The fact is that more men in our modern era are
irreligious because religion has failed to make civilization ethical
than because it has failed to maintain its intellectual respectability.
For every person who disavows religion because some ancient and
unrevised dogma outrages his intelligence, several become irreligious
because the social impotence of religion outrages their conscience.
Religion never lacks moral fruits so long as it has any vitality. It
has been placed in such a sorry plight in fulfilling its ethical task
in modern civilization because the mechanization of society has made
an ethical life for the individual at once more necessary and more
difficult, and failure more obvious, than in any previous civilization.
If we are not less ethical than our fathers, our happiness is certainly
more dependent than that of our fathers upon the ethical character of
our society. Rapid means of commerce and communication have brought
us into terms of intimacy with all the world without increasing the
spiritual dynamic and ethical intelligence which makes such close
contact sufferable. We have multiplied the tools of destruction which a
confused conscience may wield and have thus armed the world of nature
which lives in the soul of man by the same science by which we imagined
ourselves to have conquered nature. We have developed so complex a
society that it cannot be made ethical by moral goodwill alone, if
moral purpose is not astutely guided. Lacking social intelligence,
modern civilization has thus robbed man of confidence in his own
and his neighbor’s moral integrity even when ethical motives were
not totally lacking. Civilization with its impersonal and mechanized
relationships tends on the one hand to make society less ethical,
and on the other to reveal its immoralities more vividly than in any
previous age. Religion has a relation to both cause and effect to the
moral life. Both its friends and its foes are inclined to judge it
by its moral fruits, regarding it as primarily the root, fancied or
real, of morality. Yet morality is as much the root as the fruit of
religion; for religious sentiment develops out of moral experience
and religious convictions are the logic by which moral life justifies
itself. In a civilization in which the dominant motives and basic
relationships are unethical, religion is therefore doubly affected.
The immoralities which bring the reproach of impotence upon it are
also the reason for the impotence. Thus modern civilization creates
a temper of scorn for a religion which fails to challenge recognized
social iniquities, and at the same time it destroys the vitality
which religion needs to issue such a challenge. The defection of the
industrial workers from religious life and institutions, one of the
most significant phenomena of our time, has this double significance.
The industrial worker is indifferent to religion, partly because he
is enmeshed in relations which are so impersonal and fundamentally so
unethical that his religious sense atrophies in him. On the other hand
he is hostile to religion because he observes the ethical impotence of
the religion of the privileged classes, particularly in its failure to
effect improvement in economic and social attitudes. The industrial
worker raises a general characteristic of modern urban man to a unique
degree. His own experiences help him to see the moral limitations of
modern civilization more clearly than do the more privileged classes;
but what is true of him is generally true of all members of a complex
society in which human relations are impersonal and complicated. If
religion is senescent in modern civilization, its social impotence is
as responsible for its decline as is its metaphysical maladjustment.
The restoration of its vitality must wait upon the adjustment of
its tenets and the reorganization of its life to meet the problems
which both the pure and the applied sciences, which both the
depersonalization of the universe and the depersonalization of
civilization, have created. The metaphysical problem of religion cannot
be depreciated. In the long run religion must be able to impress the
mind of modern man with the essential plausibility and scientific
respectability of its fundamental affirmations. But the scientific
respectability of religious affirmations will not avail if the life
which issues from them will not help to solve man’s urgent social
problems. If modern churches continue to prefer their intellectual
to their ethical problems, they will merely succeed in maintaining a
vestige of religion in those classes which are not sensitive enough to
feel and not unfortunate enough to suffer from the moral limitations
of modern society. An unethical civilization will inevitably destroy
the vitality of the religion of the victims and the sincerity and
moral prestige of the religion of the beneficiaries of its unethical
inequalities.
The future of religion and the future of civilization are thus hung
in the same balance. Both as a means to a moral end and as an end in
itself, for which the moral life is the means, the future of religion
is involved in the ethical reconstruction of modern society. Social
and economic problems are not the only problems which fret the mind
and engage the interest of modern men. But they are proportionately
more important in an advanced than in a primitive society. Modern men
face no problem that is greater than that of their aggregate existence.
How can they live in some kind of decent harmony with their fellow men
when the size and intricacy of their social machinery tends continually
to aggravate the vices which make human life inhuman? How shall they
gain mastery over the instruments by which they have mastered nature
so that these will not become the means of projecting nature’s vices
into human history? How shall they bring the life of great social and
political groups under the dominion of conscience and moral law? These
are the problems upon which hangs the future of civilization. Such
social problems are fundamentally ethical and the intimate relation
between religion and morality bring them inevitably into the province
of religion. Can it help to solve them? Will their solution give
religious idealism new vitality? Is the present social impotence of
religion due to innate defects? Or is it due to specific and historical
limitations which the years may change at least as quickly as they
produced them? To such questions we must address ourselves.