CHAPTER IX
CONCLUSION
At the risk of unnecessary repetition it may be well to capitulate the most important conclusions which emerge from our study of religion in contemporary civilization. Religion is dying in modern civilization not only because it has not yet been able to restate its affirmations so that they will be consistent with scientific fact, but also because it has not been able to make its ethical and social resources available for the solution of the moral problems of modern civilization. Its rejuvenation therefore waits upon a reorientation of its ethical traditions as well as of its theological conceptions. It is under the necessity of finding some metaphysical basis for its personalization of the universe, but its scientific and philosophical respectability will be of no avail if the moral fruits which issue from its affirmations and experiences do not actually qualify the brute struggle of life, so largely determined by natural forces.
Religion is scientifically verified if freedom and purpose are found to have a place in the cosmic processes, and it is ethically justified if it helps to create and maintain creative freedom and moral purpose in human life. The present moral impotence of Protestant Christianity is partially derived from the inadequacy of some of its traditions which it inherited out of periods of history which had different moral needs than our own day. Its individualism rendered a universal service at the dawn of the modern era but survives to-day chiefly as a sanctification of the peculiar interests and prejudices of one particular class in Western society. The limitations of its ethical traditions are easily obscured not only because all religion easily gives the semblance of finality to the relativities of history, but because a religion which imagines itself devoted to the spirit of Jesus is under the temptation of exploiting the prestige of his absolute ethics without approximating his ethical position.
The moral effectiveness of religion depends upon its ability to detach itself from the historical relativities with which its ideals are inevitably compounded in the course of history. The avowed loyalty of the Christian church to the spirit of Christ may become the basis of such a detachment, since there is little in the gospel of Jesus which conforms to the dominant interests of modern life. But the very reverence in which Jesus is held may operate to obscure the essential genius of his life. Religion is therefore under the necessity of developing the critical faculty even while it maintains its naïvete and reverence. The necessity of coöperation between the naturally incompatible factors of reason and imagination, of intelligence and moral dynamic, is really the crux of the religious and moral problem in modern civilization. The complexity of modern life demands that moral purpose be astutely guided; but moral purpose itself is rooted in ultra-rational sanctions and may be destroyed by the same intelligence which is needed to direct it. Both humility and love, the highest religious virtues, are ultra-rational; yet they cannot be achieved in an intricate social life without a discriminating intelligence which knows how to uncover covert sins and to discover potential virtues. The incidental limitations which every historic type of religion reveals can be dealt with only if the religious devotee can be persuaded to regard the values of his religion critically; yet the cultivation of such a critical spirit may easily lead to the enervation of the religious spirit itself. If the highest values of religion are themselves conditioned rather than absolute, it must be possible to assign them a place in the hierarchy of values, without encouraging a complete loss of confidence in them. Such a task is difficult but not impossible. A robust moral idealism will help to create a spiritual fervor which will not be easily defeated by any superficial intellectualism. If institutions of religion gave preference to the ethical rather than the intellectual problem of religious faith, it might be possible to create a religious spirit sufficiently vigorous to permit the free play of the critical faculties without a loss of moral or spiritual dynamic. Obviously civilization cannot afford to dispense with either the irrational moral will or the critical intelligence by which it is made effective in complex situations. Men need to subject all partial moral achievements to comparison with the absolute standards of truth, beauty and goodness of their religious faith, and yet be able to see and willing to concede the relativities in the absolute values of their devotion. They can be saved from a morality of mere utilitarianism only by the religious quest for an absolute moral standard; yet they need to be discerning enough to see that every ethical achievement, even when inspired by religious motives, is tinged with prudential self-interest. They must continue to strive after freedom and yet realize that human life and character is largely determined by environment. If they seek happiness, divorced from fortune, they nevertheless cannot escape the duty of making the material world serve human welfare. Their ability to discover the transcendent values in human personality has value only if they maintain faith in human nature after they have discovered its imperfections. They must search after the perfect goodness in God and yet be prepared to face the cruelties of life without either denying their reality or being driven to despair by them.
If it is true that moral sincerity is even more necessary to a vital religion in modern life than intellectual modernity, a strategy must be developed to sever religious idealism from the unethical tendencies in modern civilization. Any strategy which will succeed in such an enterprise will savor of asceticism. The limitations of historic asceticism may teach the present how to avoid inevitable pitfalls in the task of detaching religious idealism from the corruptions of society. An asceticism which flees the world and develops its saints at the price of abandoning industrial civilization even more completely to the natural and anarchic forces which operate in its life, is obviously of no use to modern civilization. Yet a type of asceticism is needed, if for no other reason, because greed is the dominant motive of Western civilization and nothing less than an ascetic discipline will free religious idealism from its entanglement with the covetousness of modern life. Since Western life is intent upon material advantages, no religious idealism can maintain any degree of purity if it does not enter into a conscious conflict with the civilization in which it functions and succeed in setting some bounds to the expansive desires of men and of nations.
The church as such has sufficient spiritual resources to become the recruiting ground for such a movement of detachment, but it is too much to hope that it will take the leadership in it. It is too deeply enmeshed with the interests and prejudices of contemporary civilization to possess the insight and courage which the enterprise requires. Such a movement of detachment must be, as it has always been, a minority movement. But the minority ought not detach itself from the majority so completely that it will sacrifice the possibility of acting as a leaven in it. There is no force or strategy which can prevent the great majority from using religion to give human personality dignity and self-respect without a serious effort to approximate a moral ideal which would justify religion’s estimate of human worth. Some types of religion will continue to obscure the defects in nature and human nature. They will reassure the perplexed soul by recounting the victories of the past without seeking new triumphs. They will build systems of faith upon past experiences without any effort to validate or amend them in fresh experience. Thus rejuvenation and progress must come from the few who understand the fuller implications of the faith which they share with the multitudes whose eyes are holden and who lack the courage to follow even such visions as may come to them.
A highly spiritual religion cannot be an esoteric possession to which the multitudes may never aspire. It cannot afford to lose confidence in the multitudes; yet it must resist the gravitation toward moral mediocrity among them. It certainly must avoid the cultivation of a priestly cult into which the layman cannot be initiated. If the modern movement of detachment is to be effective it must in fact be a layman’s movement; for it must express itself in rebuilding the social order rather than in building new religious institutions. Its most effective ministers will be laymen who will lack neither the technical skill nor the spiritual resource to deal with the practical problems of industry and politics. Religious teachers may help to inspire such a movement, but its efficacy will depend upon those who are engaged in the world’s work. If the greed of Western civilization is to be qualified by religious idealism, it will be accomplished by men who use and direct the machines of modern industry without making mechanical efficiency an end in itself and without succumbing to the lure of the material rewards which come so easily to those who are proficient in the industrial enterprise. A revival of either puritan or monastic asceticism will be unequal to the task which faces modern religion. Puritanism sanctified economic power, and monasticism fled its responsibilities. The new asceticism must produce spiritualized technicians who will continue to conquer and exploit nature in the interest of human welfare, but who will regard their task as a social service and scorn to take a larger share of the returns of industry than is justified by reasonable and carefully scrutinized needs. The new asceticism must, in short, be in the world and yet not of the world. It must be truly scientific in gauging the advantage to human personality in the conquest of nature and truly religious in finding a basis for human happiness beyond the material rewards which this conquest returns.
If Christian idealists are to make religion socially effective they will be forced to detach themselves from the dominant secular desires of the nations as well as from the greed of economic groups. The socially minded portion of the church has in fact made some progress in this direction. The lessons of the World War have not been altogether futile, and there is a wholesome mood of repentance in the church for its easy connivance with an unethical nationalism in the past centuries. The church has not yet had an opportunity to prove the sincerity of its contrition in this matter, for the moment of crisis has not yet come. In that moment, which will come inevitably, many religiously inspired peace idealists will no doubt bow their knees to Baal; but there is real reason to hope that there is a new conscience in the church which will resist the claims of an unethical nationalism to the utmost. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the religious idealists who have become critical of an unethical nationalism is that they are not sufficiently aware of the intimate and organic relation between the imperialism of nations and the whole tendency of avarice which characterizes Western life. Too few realize that it is not possible to detach oneself from an unethical nationalism if one continues to enjoy the material advantages which flow from the nation’s unqualified insistence upon the right to hold its advantages against the world. It may be impossible to arrive at a complete equalization of living standards among all individuals who desire to achieve and express the ideal of the brotherhood of man. But a religious idealism which does not move in that direction will be convicted of insincerity and moral confusion. Unrepentant political realists may well pour contempt upon it and justly accuse those who profess it of profiting from policies which they ostensibly condemn. Religious idealism is in desperate need of a strategy which will express its detachment from the dominant desires and impulses of modern civilization by something more than desultory and usually qualified criticism of unethical political ideals and industrial policies.
The old challenge “be ye not conformed to this world” must be accepted anew in a more heroic fashion than is customary in enlightened religious circles. The policy of building a Kingdom of God by regenerating individual lives has become discredited, not because moral character is dispensable to a wholesome social life, but because the criteria of moral character have been too individualistic to serve the needs of modern society. It is important enough that men gain some control over their immediate desires and discipline their momentary passions. Society is always in need of integrated personalities. But the validity of the religious ideal must finally be judged by its capacity to create not only unified personalities but personalities which know how to restrain their expansive desires for the sake of social peace. Religion intensifies selfishness when it adds sanctity to a respectable selfish life and creates a self-respect which is impervious to emotions of contrition. If the religious ideal is to gain any potency in modern life it must be able to convict men of sin and inspire them to a conversion. But the sins of which they need most to be convicted are those which are covert in the social and economic relations which custom has hallowed; and the conversion of life which is most needed is that which will express itself in terms of the economic and political relationships in which men live. Not to be conformed to this world, if it is to have any real meaning in modern life, will mean that the religiously inspired soul knows how to defeat the avarice and to overcome the indifference to the worth of human personality which inheres in the whole economic and industrial structure of modern society. Practically and individually such a detachment from the world will express itself in the sacrifice of material advantages for the sake of realizing a more intimate fellowship with the underprivileged, in the careful analysis of industrial policies from the standpoint of their effect upon personality, in an unwillingness to profit by social and economic practices and policies which are fundamentally unethical and in a willingness to bear some pain for the sake of expressing loyalty to the community of mankind as against all lesser and conflicting loyalties.
The hope of persuading any large number of religious people to express their spiritual convictions in any such socially tangible and revolutionary terms is made rather desperate by the fact that the modern church seems no more inclined to undertake the task of spiritual regeneration than the orthodox church. The orthodox church still possesses some of the religious fervor which is required to defy the world, but it is too anti-rational in its theology to gain the respect of the intelligent classes and too individualistic in its ethics to express religious idealism in socially helpful terms. The modern churches are not acutely conscious of any serious defects in contemporary civilization. If they do recognize limitations in the social order, they give themselves to the pleasant hope that time and natural progress will bring inevitable triumph to every virtuous enterprise. They have relegated the eschatological note of the gospel, by which Jesus expressed his sense of the tragic, to the limbo of theological antiquities. The possibility of a catastrophe seems never to arouse their fears or to give energy to their ambitions. Life, according to their gospel, goes automatically from grace to grace and from strength to strength.
Though neither the orthodox nor the modern wing of the Christian church seems capable of initiating a genuine religious revival which will evolve a morality capable of challenging and maintaining itself against the dominant desires of modern civilization and yet expressing itself in terms relevant to civilization’s needs, there are resources in the Christian religion which make it the inevitable basis of any spiritual regeneration of Western civilization. Christianity, as Dr. Ernst Troeltsch has observed, is the fate of Western society. Spiritual idealisms of other cultures and societies may aid it in reclaiming its own highest resources; and any universal religion capable of inspiring an ultimately unified world culture may borrow from other religions. But the task of redeeming Western society rests in a peculiar sense upon Christianity. It is congenial to the energy and activism of Western peoples and is yet capable of setting bounds to their expansive desires. It has reduced the eternal conflict between self-assertion and self-denial to the paradox of self-assertion through self-denial and made the cross the symbol of life’s highest achievement. Its optimism is rooted in pessimism and it is therefore able to preach both repentance and hope. It is able to condemn the world without enervating life and to create faith without breeding illusions. Its adoration of Jesus sometimes obscures the real genius of his life but cannot permanently destroy the fruitfulness of his inspiration. If there is any lack of identity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of religious experience, the Jesus of history is nevertheless more capable of giving historical reality to the necessary Christ idea than any character of history. Intelligence will gradually soften prejudices and allay the conflict between Christianity and the Judaism out of which it emerged and with which it is organically related so that the religions of the prophetic ideal may make common cause. Such a coöperation will probably never lead to complete fusion because Christianity cannot afford to sacrifice the Christ idea and the Jews will continue to regard this as a Hellenistic and unacceptable element in the Christian religion. Christianity will not disavow it, for it gives dramatic force and historical concretion to its theism and dualism. The God of our devotion is veritably revealed most adequately in the most perfect personality we know, as he is potentially revealed in all personal values; and his conflict with the inertia of the concrete and historical world is expressed most vividly in the cross of Christ. When dealing with life’s ultimates, symbolism is indispensable, and a symbolism which has a basis in historic incident is most effective. The idea of a potent but yet suffering divine ideal which is defeated by the world but gains its victory in the defeat must remain basic in any morally creative world view.
It is possible of course that the resources of the Christian religion will not be made available in time to save Western civilization from moral bankruptcy. It is possible that life will continue to run its course of conflict between the unrestrained ambitions and desires of individuals and groups until unqualified self-assertiveness will issue in mutual destruction. It is possible that cynicism will continue to discount the moral potentialities of human nature while science continues to give plausibility to a depreciation of the moral factors in life by arming the brute in man and making his vices more deadly. Civilization may be beyond moral redemption; but if it is to be redeemed a religiously inspired moral idealism must aid in the task. A purely naturalistic ethics will not only be overcome by a sense of frustration and sink into despair, but it will lack the force to restrain the self-will and self-interest of men and of nations. If life cannot be centered in something beyond nature, it will not be possible to lift men above the brute struggle for survival. Intelligence may mitigate its cruelties and prudence may prompt men to eliminate its worst inhumanities; but the increased power which the conquest of nature supplies merely substitutes unintended cruelties for those which have been consciously abolished. Living on the naturalistic level men are bound to contend for life’s physical prizes and to use physical force in the contest with more and more deadly effect.
It is the virtue of a vital religious idealism that it lifts life above the level of nature and makes the development of an ethical personality the ultimate goal of human existence. Without the vivid and realistic other-worldly hopes and fears with which the medieval church disciplined life and which the modern church cannot restore, it may seem that religion possesses no force which could counteract the primitive impulses which move men and nations. But these hopes and fears were merely crude ways of expressing the idea that life is fundamentally moral and that its destiny transcends the animal conflict. Life will continue to develop in the direction of the ideal implicit in it and every organism is impelled to move toward the goal of its own completeness. The ideal implicit in human character is that of ethical freedom; and awakened personalities will seek to realize that ideal. They will seek to realize it even at the expense of physical sacrifices and pain. They will learn how to find life by losing it. It is the quest for what is not real but is always becoming real, for what is not true but is always becoming true, that makes man incurably religious. Modern religion is therefore not without resource in contending against the forces of nature. The great difficulty is that the struggle for ethical integrity is so painful that most men are tempted to seek some short-cut to it; and organized religion generally expresses the hopes and desires of this easygoing multitude. In the medieval church magic provided the short-cut. In the modern church it is provided by a sanctified prudence which teaches men how to be unselfish and selfish at the same time, how to gain moral self-respect without sacrificing too many temporal advantages. The hope of a revival of ethical religion and of an ethical reconstruction of society therefore depends, as it did in the past, upon a renunciation of the religious short-cuts which lead to hypocrisy.
If religious aspiration can be united with perfect moral sincerity a fruitful partnership may again be established between religion and morality. The moral struggle will give meaning to the affirmations of religion and the religious experience will strengthen the moral purpose. While religion does not issue automatically in moral action and the moral enterprise does not inevitably create religious experience and hope, there is nevertheless a relation of interdependence between religious aspiration and moral endeavor. This relationship is due to the fact that a perfect ethical freedom is possible only if personality is withdrawn from or lifted above the immediate necessities of the physical life. The other-worldly hopes and the mystical experience of religion by which the strategy of withdrawal and transcendence has been effected is momentarily discredited because it has resulted too frequently in absolving the soul of its moral responsibilities in the specific problems of society. But the fact that religious hopes and religious experiences may help people to escape the onerous duties of the moral enterprise cannot permanently obscure the need of religious experience and religious hope for the development of an ethical life. If men are to center their life in moral purpose they must reassure themselves periodically on the moral purpose in life itself. That is mysticism and prayer. If they are to develop a perfect ethical freedom which makes no compromises with life’s immediate necessities, they must find a content and a meaning in life beyond its present conflict of interests and desires. That is other-worldliness. If the quest for ethical freedom and integrity does not lead to religious experience and religious hope, it will issue in despair. If the assurances of religious hope and the certainties of religious experience are not accompanied by sincere moral effort, they result in hypocrisy. The hope of an ethical society is therefore bound up in the possibility of restoring ethical integrity to religion and religious dynamic to the moral effect.