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.