THE SOCIAL RESOURCES OF RELIGION
The task of analyzing and isolating the ethical limitations and the
social deficiencies of religion is to no purpose if there is not in
religion itself, at its best, some resources which civilization and
society need for the solution of their problems. Some critics of
religion discount it entirely as a social force, or at least as a force
of social progress. Bertrand Russell’s prejudices on this subject
are too violent to make his testimony against religion particularly
weighty. Yet he speaks for a large number of ethically sensitive
individuals who share his critical attitude, if not his vehemence,
when he declares: “Since the thirteenth century the church has
consistently encouraged men’s blood lust and avarice and discouraged
every approach to human and kindly feeling.... Emancipation from the
churches is still an essential condition of improvement, particularly
in America where the churches have more influence than in Europe....
Of all requisites for the regeneration of society the decay of religion
seems to me to have the best chance of being realized.”[2] The number
of people among the middle and higher classes who would subscribe to
such a denunciation of organized religion is probably not very large.
But there are very many who ignore the church as a force for social
amelioration; and in the class of industrial workers a temper against
the church exceeding even Mr. Russell’s violence is very general.
Whatever may be the facts in regard to contemporary religion and to
other specific types of organized religious life, it is relevant to ask
whether religion as such, freed from its specific limitations, contains
indispensable resources for the ethical reconstruction of society.
The first resource which would seem to be of social value is the social
imagination which religion, at its best, develops upon the basis of
its high evaluation of personality. A spiritual interpretation of the
universe may not issue automatically in a high appreciation of human
personality, but religion is never quite able to deny this ethical
implication of its faith, and in occasional moments of high insight
it revels in it. It persuades men to regard their fellows as their
brothers because they are all children of God. It insists, in other
words, that temporal circumstance and obvious differences are dwarfed
before the spiritual affinities which men have through their common
relation to a divine creator. Thus Jesus could deal sympathetically
with the harlot of the street, the publican at the gate, the Samaritan
woman at the well and the blinded fanatics and their dupes who
crucified him. The apostle Paul, though he did not always understand
the genius of his master, was nevertheless able to apprehend this
central dogma at the heart of religion and declare: “In Christ there
is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free.” Celsus, the critic
of the Christian church in the first century, derides the church for
its failure to distinguish between outcasts and respectable citizens.
The fervor and consistency with which the church has espoused the ideal
of the equal worth of all personalities has not always equaled that
of the early church; many compromises with the brute facts of history
have been made; yet the church has never been able to betray this faith
altogether. The missionary enterprise with all its weaknesses is still
a revelation of this power in religion. Oceans are bridged and varying
circumstances of race and environment are ignored in order that the
soul inspired by God may claim kinship with other souls of every race
and every clime.
The physical characteristics and outward circumstances in which men
differ are sometimes not so great as they seem to the superficial
observer; wherefore education may do as much as religion to cultivate
and discover those profounder unities which made all men brothers.
There are hatreds which are due merely to misunderstanding. They
spring from the parochialism of the average mind, which knows no
better than to regard with contempt what differs from the standards
and values to which it has become habituated. Education and culture
may emancipate men from such hatreds. Other misunderstandings which
are caused by a superficial analysis of men’s action may be dissipated
by a profounder appreciation of the complex life of every individual
out of which each action emerges. Yet understanding alone does not
solve all the problems of living together. We do not hate only those
whom we do not know or understand. Sometimes we hate those most whom
we know best. Love does not flow inevitably out of intimacy. Intimacy
may merely accentuate previous attitudes, whether they be benevolent or
malevolent. Anthropologists are easily obsessed with the inequalities
which men reveal in their natural state, and the very abundance of
their knowledge prompts them to an ethically enervating determinism
when they attempt to gauge the potentialities of so-called primitive
peoples. The modern psychologists are more inclined to accept the
dogma of the total depravity of man than the ancient theologians were,
and they prove thereby that a profound knowledge of human nature need
not incline men to regard human beings with reverence and affection.
Mr. H. L. Mencken may not speak for the scientists, but he is somewhat
typical of the cynicism which follows in the wake of intellectualism.
His estimate of human beings is: “Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride
on a gigantic flywheel.... He is lazy, improvident, unclean.... Life
is a combat between jackals and jackasses.” Love is always slightly
irrational and requires an irrational urge for its support. It is at
least as irrational as hatred and the same intelligence which mitigates
the one may enervate the other. A highly sophisticated intelligence is
generally unable to survey the human scene with any higher attitude
than that of pity for human beings, and pity is a form of contempt
under a thin disguise of sympathy.
The facts of human nature are sufficiently complex to validate
almost any hypothesis which may be projected into them. Therefore
the assumptions upon which we essay our social contacts are all
important. One reason why the social sciences can never attain the
scientific prestige of the physical sciences to which they aspire is
that the importance of hypotheses increases with the complexity and
variability of the data into which they are projected. Every assumption
is an hypothesis, and human nature is so complex that it justifies
almost every assumption and prejudice with which either a scientific
investigation or an ordinary human contact is initiated. A vital
religion not only prompts men to venture the assumption that human
beings are essentially trustworthy and lovable, but it endows them with
the courage and inclination to maintain their hypothesis when immediate
facts contradict it until fuller facts are brought in to verify it.
Mere sentiment is easily defeated by life’s disappointing realities.
Anatole France observed that if one started with the supposition that
men are naturally good and virtuous, one inevitably ends by wishing to
kill them all. Human nature is neither lovable nor trustworthy in its
undisciplined state and a sentimental overestimate of its virtue may
well result in the reaction to which Anatole France alludes. Yet its
undeveloped resources are always greater than either a superficial or
critical intelligence is able to fathom. There must be an element of
faith in love if it is to be creative. “Love,” said Paul, “believes all
things”; and it may be added that it saves its faith from absurdity
by creating some of the evidence which justifies its assumptions. It
“hopes till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”
Nothing less than a religious appreciation of personality, supported
by a spiritual interpretation of the universe itself in terms of
moral goodwill, will make love robust enough to overcome momentary
disappointments and gain its final victory. The injunction of Jesus
to his disciples to forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven,
represents the natural social strategy of a robust and vital religious
idealism, which subdues evil by its unswerving confidence in the good.
While it is true that religion does not issue automatically in an
attitude of reverence and goodwill toward all human personalities, it
nevertheless remains a fact that a religious world view does incline
men to regard their fellow men from a perspective which obscures
differences and imperfections and reveals affinities and potential
virtue. Even if intelligence became imaginative enough to discover
the affinities, it could not be courageous enough to challenge the
evil in men in the name of their better selves. The art of forgiveness
can be learned only in the school of religion. And it is an art
which men must learn increasingly as a complex society makes human
associations more and more intimate. Whatever improvement a growing
social science may establish in the technique of social intercourse,
men will never escape the necessity of overcoming the evil, which they
inflict upon each other, by creative patience and courageous trust. A
higher intelligence may mitigate our fears and an exacter justice may
restrain the inclination to wreak vengeance upon the wrongdoer; but
only the stubborn forces of religion will turn fear into trust and
hatred into love. Sometimes mutual fear and hatred reduce themselves to
such an absurdity (as in the late World War) that even a superficial
intelligence can recognize it; but their absurdity does not become
patent until they have issued in mutual annihilation. Even then the
person with an ordinary commonsense view of life can do no better than
to substitute partial trust for fear and partial understanding for
hatred. So one war breeds the next. All men are potentially at once our
foes and our friends. An unreflective social life assumes that they
are enemies and helps to make them so. A higher social intelligence
establishes a nicely balanced compromise between trust and mistrust so
that the one cannot be very creative and the other not too destructive.
Only the foolishness of faith knows how to assume the brotherhood of
man and to create it by the help of the assumption. A religious ideal
is always a little absurd because it insists on the truth of what
ought to be true but is only partly true; it is however the ultimate
wisdom, because reality slowly approaches the ideals which are implicit
in its life. A merely realistic analysis of any given set of facts is
therefore as dangerous as it is helpful. The creative and redemptive
force is a faith which defies the real in the name of the ideal, and
subdues it.
Love is, in short, a religious attitude. There are circumstances in
which it may prosper without the inspiration of religion. In the family
relation and in other intimate circles proximity and consanguinity
may prompt men to regard human beings as essentially good, and direct
experience validate their faith. That is why Jesus discounted love in
the family as a religious achievement. “If ye love those who love you,
what thanks have ye?” In the secondary relations, which are no longer
secondary in the matter of importance to human welfare, the matter
is not so simple. In these only a sublime assumption will persuade
men to embark upon the adventure of brotherhood, and only a robust
and constantly replenished faith will inure them against inevitable
disappointments. The religious interpretation of the world is
essentially an insistence that the ideal is real and that the real can
be understood only in the light of the ideal. Since the family relation
is the most ethical relation men know, religious faith interprets all
life in terms of that relation. In view of many of the facts of history
which seem to reveal the world of man as but a projection of the world
of nature in which animal fights with animal and herd with herd, this
kind of interpretation is superficially too absurd to persuade a highly
sophisticated intelligence. It is the truth which is withheld from the
wise and revealed to babes. Yet it is the truth without which men will
not be able to build a peaceful society. It is the truth which even the
physical facts of a highly complex civilization, in which space and
time are being annihilated, are conspiring to make true. The races and
groups of mankind are obviously not living as a family; but they ought
to. And as the necessity becomes more urgent the truth of the ideal
becomes more real.
It would be foolish to insist that goodwill alone will create
conscience and that to detect the ethical core at the heart of man’s
being is all that is required to make him ethical. It is a task to
persuade human beings to trust their fellows; but is equally important
to prompt their fellows to trustworthy action. If human nature is left
unchallenged and undeveloped, it hardly qualifies the brute struggle
for survival sufficiently to validate any religion or ethic of trust.
Men’s actions are not as free as we have imagined. The social, economic
and psychological sciences have restricted the concept of freedom in
the soul of man as the physical sciences have restricted it in the
universe. Man is not only less free than he had once imagined, but he
is not as free as he once was. If science has discredited the idea of
freedom, civilization has circumscribed the fact. It is easier for man
to act as an ethical individual in a comparatively simple social group,
such as the family, than in a very large and complex social group when
even the most robust ethical purpose must meet the resistance and
the corruption of the primitive and untamed desires of the group. If
man is capable of sacrificing immediate advantages for ultimate ones
and his own advantages for the sake of society, this capacity is an
achievement which he gains only after much effort and preserves from
corruption only at the price of eternal vigilance. The first requisite
of an ethical life in modern civilization is a realization of the
difficulties which face the human conscience in maintaining itself
against the pressure of immediate desires to which the whole emotional
life of man is wedded. It is not easy to sacrifice meat for beauty,
pleasure for some seemingly ephemeral value, self-interest for the sake
of the family, the interest of the family for the sake of society, the
interest of our generation for the society of to-morrow. Yet only by
such sacrifices can man prove the reality and potency of his creative
will. If such sacrifices are not actually made, all so-called morality
becomes in fact a device for obscuring the bestiality of man without
overcoming it.
The fact that, in spite of the pressure of the struggle for survival,
man has created a kingdom of values in which truth, beauty and goodness
have been made real, is proof that he is more free and more moral than
the modern cynic is willing to concede. But his kingdom of values is
never as uncorrupted as he imagines. The task therefore of binding
men to spiritual values, and of prompting them to sacrifice immediate
pleasures and physical satisfactions for them, is difficult almost to
the point of desperation. Religion makes its contribution to it by
giving man the assurance that the world of values really has a relevant
place in the universe and that values are permanent and will be
conserved. He is challenged to sacrifice in a universe in which love is
a basic law. He is asked to prefer personal values to property values
in a world in which personality is the highest reality. He is prompted
to exercise his conscience under the scrutiny and with the sympathy of
a higher conscience. Religion in its purest form does not guarantee
man an immediate reward for every ethical achievement; indeed it may
offer him no reward at all except the reward which inheres in the act
itself. But it does give him the final satisfaction of guaranteeing
the reality of a universe which is not blind to the values for which
he must pay such a high price, and which is not indifferent or hostile
to his struggle. It asks him to respect human personality because the
universe itself, in spite of some obvious evidence to the contrary,
knows how to conserve personality; and to create values in a world in
which values are not an effervescence but a reality. Religion is in
short the courageous logic which makes the ethical struggle consistent
with world facts. In its most vital form religion validates its sublime
assumptions in immediate experience and gives man an unshakable
certainty. It thus becomes the dynamic of moral action as well as the
logic which makes the action reasonable.
The force of its faith operates not only to preserve moral vigor but to
sensitize moral judgments. The God of religious devotion is not only
revealed in the moral values of the universe outside of man, but he is
revealed in the aspirations of man which are beyond his achievements.
God insures not only the preservation of values but their perfection.
All moral achievement is qualified by the relativities of time and
circumstance. The worship of a holy God saves the soul from taking
premature satisfaction in its partial achievement. It subjects every
moral value to comparison with a more perfect moral ideal. Of course
the absolute perfection of God is itself conditioned by the imperfect
human insight which conceives it. A cruel age may picture God more
cruel than itself, and to a generation lusting for power God may be
the supreme tyrant. Thus religion may become the sanctification of
human imperfections. Yet in its highest form religion does inculcate
a wholesome spirit of humility which gives the soul no peace in any
virtue while higher virtue is attainable.
The force of religion in moral action and the necessity of religious
assurance for the highest type of social life may be gauged by
an analysis of possible alternatives to a social life which is
oriented by a religious world view. There are two real alternatives
to such a life. The one is based upon an ethical but unreligious
world view, and the other scorns both ethics and religion in its
absolute determinism. An ethical life which claims no support from
religion may on occasion develop a very high type of social idealism,
particularly since it escapes the ethical defects of religion even
while it sacrifices religious resources. Stoicism is in many respects
superior to pantheistic religions; for there are moral advantages in
underestimating rather than overestimating the virtue of the universe.
It is better to create a sense of tension between the conscience of
man and a morally indifferent nature than to obscure the moral defects
of nature by a deification of the natural order. But if men disavow
all faith in a power not their own which makes for righteousness,
they cannot finally save themselves from either arrogance or despair.
Religion may destroy man’s self-reliance by an undue sense of humility,
but even that limitation is no more destructive of moral values
than a self-reliance which prompts the human spirit to strut for a
while on this narrow world in the consciousness of unique virtue
before capitulating to a world which is too blind to know what it has
destroyed. Thomas Huxley thought he would as soon worship “a wilderness
of monkeys” as to give himself to the worship of humanity after the
fashion of Comte. To insist too strenuously upon the uniqueness of
human life in the cosmic order must inevitably issue in the pride
which such a worship implies. Since the Renaissance there has been a
marked decay of the spirit of humility in Western civilization which
is closely associated with the secularization of its ethical idealism.
The difference between the pride of secular idealism and the humility
implicit in genuine religion may be gauged, as Professor Irving Babbitt
suggests, by comparing Confucius with Buddha and Marcus Aurelius with
Jesus. Pascal thought the stoics were guilty of “diabolical pride.” The
judgment may be too severe, but it must be confessed that a purely
secular idealism has difficulty in escaping a morally destructive
arrogance from which true religion is saved because it subjects all
values and achievements to measurement, with its absolutes as the
criteria. “Why callest thou me good?” said Jesus: “no one is good save
God.” In the religion of Jesus the perfection of God is consistently
defined as an absolute love by comparison with which all altruistic
achievements fall short. “I say unto you, love your enemies; bless
them that curse you; do good to them that despitefully use you and
persecute you; that ye may be children of your Father in heaven; for he
maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sendeth rain upon
the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what
reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same?... Be ye therefore
perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.”[3] Here the value
of an absolute standard to save from undue pride in partial ethical
achievements is particularly apparent. Prudential morality can hardly
go beyond the encouragement of altruism within the social group, i.e.
loving those “which love you.” That is precisely what Stoicism did.
It is just this pride in partial achievement which complicates the
moral problem of modern life; for our ethical difficulties are created
by the very tendency of reasonable ethics to make life within groups
moral and never to aspire to the moral redemption of inter-group
relations. Humility is therefore a spiritual grace which has value
not only for its own sake but for its influence upon social problems.
Traditional religions, which live off of original inspirations and
experiences without recreating them, easily fall into a pride of their
own, the pride which comes from identifying the absolute standards of
their inspired source with their partial achievements and inevitable
compromises. But religion in its purest and most unspoiled form is
always productive of a spirit of humility which regards every moral
achievement as but a vantage point from which new ventures of faith and
life are to be initiated toward the alluring perfection which is in God.
An ethical idealism unsupported by religion is almost as certain to
issue in final despair as in unjustified pride. A few choice spirits
are sometimes able to imagine themselves in rebellion against the
universe without finally succumbing to a temper of sullenness; but the
dreadful logic of insisting upon conscience in a conscienceless world
inevitably leaves its mark upon the multitude. Oswald Spengler, in his
morphology of civilizations,[4] presents “religion without God” as the
unvarying symptom of a dying civilization, too sophisticated to believe
in the cosmic worth of its moral values but not quite ready to abandon
them. The enervating effect of a moral idealism which has sacrificed
its hopes with its illusions always becomes apparent in the long run,
but frequently it reveals itself quite immediately in the very lives of
its most robust champions.
Mr. Russell may think that the “firm foundation of unyielding despair”
is an adequate basis for an ethical life, but his own growing
bitterness betrays how such a philosophy corrupts moral idealism
with a sense of frustration. The idealist is put into the position of
sacrificing everything for values which have no guaranteed reality
in the cosmic order. Even his faith in mankind is finally destroyed;
for however precious personal values may seem in a given moment, his
philosophy denies him the right to attribute any lasting worth to them.
True religion gives man a sense of both humility and security before
the holiness which is at once the source and the goal of his virtue;
and thus it saves him at the same time from premature complacency and
ultimate despair. The choice between irreligious and religious idealism
is the choice between pride which issues in despondency and humility
which becomes the basis of self-respect. There is an irrational element
in either alternative; but the irreligious idealist is in error when he
imagines that he has chosen the more reasonable alternative; his choice
is no more reasonable and morally much less potent.
The absolute determinists who have as little confidence in the moral
integrity of human nature as in any moral meaning in cosmic facts
are more consistent than the Stoics, but they are involved in worse
absurdities. Their cynicism robs them of both an adequate motive and an
adequate method for social reconstruction. Discounting moral idealism
even while they exhibit it in their social passion, they ostensibly
desire social reconstruction only in the interest of the class to which
they belong. But their personal interests are not frequently identical
with those of the oppressed classes and they are moved as much by
sympathy for the plight of the victims of our present society as by any
selfish considerations. They profess to be prompted by the reflection
that individual action has become useless in a capitalistic age and
that it is possible to advance the interests of an individual only by
making common cause with other individuals in a similar predicament.
Meanwhile there is hardly an economic determinist, even among those
who are actually members of the class of the oppressed, who could not
gain higher advantages for himself by disassociating himself from his
class than by making common cause with it. This is certainly true of
those who are intelligent enough to evolve or elaborate the theory of
absolute determinism.
Absolute determinism, when developed consistently, must disavow all
other methods of social reconstruction but that of ruthless conflict.
If nothing qualifies the self-interest of men, a conflict of interests
becomes inevitable. This defect in method is even more important than
the defect in its motive. A ruthless struggle can result in an ordered
society only if the victors are able to annihilate their foes. But even
in that event the interests of the members of any class engaged in a
social or political struggle will cease to be identical as soon as its
foes are eliminated. Thus a new and equally ruthless struggle must
result between the comparatively strong and comparatively weak, the
comparatively privileged and the comparatively underprivileged victors.
Ultimately men cannot escape the necessity of building a stable society
by the mutual compromise and the mutual sacrifice of conflicting
rights. The determinists have made an important contribution to the
modern social problem by revealing the brutal nature of much of man’s
social life. Even if the human conscience could be sensitized to a
much greater degree than now seems probable, it will not be possible
to eliminate conflict between various social and economic groups.[5]
Good men do not easily realize how selfish they are if someone does
not resist their selfishness; and they are not inclined to abridge
their power if someone does not challenge their right to hold it.
Religious and moral idealism cannot be expected to eliminate, but it
can be expected to mitigate social warfare. The conscience of man
must finally be the force which builds a new society; and a man with
a conscience must be the end for which such a society is built. If
there is no virtue in man which lifts him above the brute struggle for
survival, there is no value in him to justify the effort of building
a new and more perfect society—and he is not the stuff out of which
such a society can be built. It is difficult to escape the conclusion
that the reverence for personality which is implicit in religion is
necessary to establish an adequate motive and an adequate method
of social reconstruction. Reverence for personality qualifies the
individual’s will to power so that his life can be integrated with
other lives with a minimum of conflict; and it saves society from
sacrificing the individual to the needs of the group. In the religion
of Jesus both a social and an individualistic emphasis issues from a
spiritual appreciation of human personality. The individual is given a
place and prestige which he never before possessed in society. Western
civilization owes much to the high evaluation of the individual which
Jesus introduced into the thought of the world. On the other hand this
emphasis is saved from mere individualism by an ethic which helps
the individual to realize his highest self by sacrificing personal
advantages for social values.
The contribution of religion to the task of an ethical reconstruction
of society is its reverence for human personality and its aid in
creating the type of personality which deserves reverence. Men cannot
create a society if they do not believe in each other. They cannot
believe in each other if they cannot see the potential in the real
facts of human nature. And they cannot have the faith which discovers
potentialities if they cannot interpret human nature in the light of a
universe which is perfecting and not destroying personal values.