The Profits of Religion
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Upton Sinclair >> The Profits of Religion
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This is the system. It is the crown and culmination of all the
wrongs of the ages; and in proportion to the magnitude of its
exploitation, is the hypocrisy and knavery of the clerical
camouflage which has been organized in its behalf. Beyond all
question, the supreme irony of history is the use which has been
made of Jesus of Nazareth as the Head God of this blood-thirsty
system; it is a cruelty beyond all language, a blasphemy beyond
the power of art to express. Read the man's words, furious as
those of any modern agitator that I have heard in twenty years of
revolutionary experience: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on
earth!--Sell that ye have and give alms!--Blessed are ye poor,
for yours is the kingdom of Heaven!--Woe unto you that are rich,
for ye have received your consolation!--Verily, I say unto you,
that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of
Heaven!--Woe unto you also, you lawyers!--Ye serpents, ye
generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?"
"And this man"--I quote from "The Jungle" again--"they have made
into the high-priest of property and smug respectability, a
divine sanction of all the horrors and abominations of modern
commercial civilization! Jewelled images are made of him, sensual
priests burn insense to him, and modern pirates of industry bring
their dollars, wrung from the toil of helpless women and
children, and build temples to him, and sit in cushioned seats
and listen to his teachings expounded by doctors of dusty
divinity!"
BOOK FIVE
The Church of the Merchants
Mammon led them on--
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and
thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific.....
Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.
Milton.
The Head Merchant
Ours is the era of commerce, as its propagandists never weary of
telling us. Business is the basis of our material lives, and
consequently of our culture. Business men control our politics
and dictate our laws; business men own our newspapers and direct
their policy; business men sit on our school boards, and endow
and manage our universities. The Reformation was a revolt of the
newly-developing merchant classes against the tyrannies and
abuses of feudal clericalism: so in all Protestant Christianity
one finds the spirit, ideals, and language of Trade. We have
shown how the symbolism of the Anglican Church is of the palace
and the throne; in the same way that of the non-conformist sects
may be shown to be of the counting-house. In the view of the
middle-class Britisher, the nexus between man and man is cent per
cent; and so in their Sunday services the worshippers sing such
hymns as this:
Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee,
Repaid a thousand fold shall be;
Then gladly will we give to Thee,
Who givest all.
The first duty of every man under the competitive system is to
secure the survival of his own business; so on the Sabbath, when
he comes to deal with eternity, he is practical and explicit:
Nothing is worth a thought beneath
But how I may escape the death
That never, never dies;
How make mine own election sure,
And when I fail on earth secure
A mansion in the skies.
Just as the priest of the aristocratic caste figures God as a
mighty Conqueror--
Marching as to war
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before
so the preacher to the trader figures the divinity as a glorified
Merchant keeping books. This Head Merchant has a monopoly in His
line; He knows all His rivals' secrets, so there is no getting
ahead of Him, and nothing to do but obey His Word, as revealed
through His clerical staff. The system is oily with protestations
of divine love; but when you read the comments of Luther upon
Calvin and of Calvin upon Luther, you understand that this love
is confined to the inside of each denomination. And even so
restricted, there is not always enough to go around. Recently I
met a Presbyterian clergyman, to whom I remarked, "I see by the
papers that you have just finished a church building." "Yes," he
answered; "and I have had three offers of a new church." I did
not see the connection, and asked, "Because you were so
successful with this one?" The reply was, "They always take it
for granted that you want to change when you've finished a new
building, because you make so many enemies!"
The business man puts up the money to build the church, he puts
up the money to keep it going; and the first rule of a business
man is that when he puts up the money for a thing he "runs" that
thing. Of course he sees that it spreads his own views of life,
it helps to maintain his tradition. In the days of Anu and Baal
we heard the proclamation of the divine right of Kings; in these
days of Mammon we hear the proclamation of the divine right of
Merchants. Some fifteen years ago the head of our Coal Trust
announced during a great strike that the question would be
settled "by the Christian men to whom God in His Infinite Wisdom
has given control of the property interests of this country". And
on that declaration all pious merchants stand; whatever their
denominations, Catholic, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist,
Presbyterian or Hebrew, their Sabbath doctrines are alike, as
their week-day practices are alike; whether it is Rockefeller
shooting his Bayonne oil-workers and burning alive the little
children of his miners; or smooth John Wanamaker, paying
starvation wages to department-store girls and driving them to
the streets; or that clergyman who, at a gathering of society
ladies, members of the "Law and Order League" of Denver, declared
in my hearing that if he could have his way he would blow up the
home of every coal-striker with dynamite; or the Rev. R. A.
Torrey, Dean of the Bible institute of Los Angeles, who refused
to employ union labor on the million dollar building of the
Institute, declaring that "the Church cannot afford to have any
dealings with a band of fire-bugs and murderers!"
"Herr Beeble"
The business of the Clerical Department of the Merchants' and
Manufacturers' Association is to justify the processes of trade,
and to preach to clerks and employees the slave-virtues of
frugality, humility, and loyalty to the profit system. The depths
of sociological depravity to which some of the agents of this
Association have sunk is difficult of belief. Twelve years ago I
was invited to address the book-sellers of New York, in company
with a well-known clergyman of the city, the Reverend Madison C.
Peters. This gentleman's address made such an impression upon me
that I recall it even at this distance: a string of jokes spoken
with an effect of rapid-fire smartness, and simply reeking with
commercialism. I could not describe it better than to say that it
was on the ethical level of the "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant
to His Son". Again, I attended a debate on Socialism, in which
the capitalist end was taken by another famous clergyman, pastor
of the Metropolitan Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill. He was so
ignorant that when he wished to prove that Socialism means free
love, he quoted a writer by the name of "Herr Beeble"; he was so
dishonest that he garbled the writings of this "Herr Beeble",
making him say something quite different from what he had meant
to say. I could name several clergymen of various denominations
who have stooped to that device against the Socialists; including
the Catholic Father Belford, who says that we are mad dogs and
should be stopped with bullets.
Or consider the Reverend Thomas Dixon. This gentleman's
pulpit-slang used to be the talk of New York when I was a boy;
and when I grew up, and came into the Socialist movement--behold,
here he was, chief inquisitor of the capitalist Holy Office. I
had a friend, a man who saved my life at a time when I was
practically starving, and to whom therefore I owe my survival as
a writer; this friend had been a clergyman in a Middle Western
state, and had preached Jesus as he really was, and so was hated
and feared like Jesus. It happened that he was unhappily married,
and permitted his wife to divorce him so that he might marry the
woman he loved; for which unheard of crime the organized
hypocrisy of America fell upon him like a thousand devils with
poisoned whips. The Reverend Dixon's holy rage was fired; he
applied his imagination to my friend's story, producing a novel
under the title of "The One Woman"; and it is as if you were
reading the story of Jesus and the Magdalen transmitted through
the personality of a he-goat. Of late years this clerical author
has turned his energies to negrophobia, and militarism, making
millions out of motion-picture incitements to hatred and terror.
The pictures were made here in Southern California, and friends
in the business have described to me the pious propagandist in
the position of St. Anthony surrounded by swarms of cute and
playful little movie-girls.
Or take the Rev. James Roscoe Day, D. D., S. T. D., L. L. D., D.
C. L., L. H. D., a leading light of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, who offers himself as comic relief in our Clerical
Vaudeville. Dr. Day is Chancellor of Syracuse University, a
branch of the Mental Munitions Department of the Standard Oil
Company; his function being to manufacture intellectual weapons
and explosives to be used in defense of the Rockefeller fortune.
It is generally not expected that the makers of ruling-class
munitions should face the dirty and perilous work of the
trenches; but ten years ago, during a raid by an active squad of
muckrake-men, Chancellor Day astonished the world by rushing to
the front with both arms full of star-shells and bombs. He
afterwards put the history of this gallant action into a volume,
"The Raid on Prosperity"; and if you want the real thrill of the
class-war, here is where to get it!
The Chancellor is a quaint and touching figure; an enthusiast and
dreamer, idealist and martyr, in whom the ordinary human virtues
have been fused, absorbed, transformed and sublimated into a new
supreme virtue of loyalty to Exploitation, patriotism for
Profiteering. He began life as a working-man, he tells us, in the
good old American fashion of hustle for yourself; but he differed
from other Americans in that he had an instant, intuitive
recognition of the intellectual and moral excellence of
Plutocracy. The first time he met a rich man, he quivered with
rapture, he burst into a hymn of appreciation. So very quickly he
was recognized as a proper person to have charge of a Mental
Munition Works; and the ruling classes proceeded to pin medals
upon the bosom of his academic robes--D. D., S. T. D., L. L. D.,
D. C. L., L. H. D.
The Chancellor knows the masters of our Profit System, those
"consummate geniuses of manufacture and trade by which the earth
has yielded up her infinite treasures." And having been at the
same time in intimate daily communion with the Almighty, he can
tell us the Almighty's attitude towards these prodigies. "God has
made the rich of this world to serve Him.... He has shown them a
way to have this world's goods and to be rich towards God ....
God wants the rich men ....Christ's doctrines have made the world
rich, and provide adequate uses for its riches." Also the
Chancellor knows our great corporations, and gives us the
Almighty's views about them; they mean that "the forces with
which God built the universe have been put into the hands of
man." Likewise by divine authority we learn that "the sympathy
given to Socialism is appalling. It is insanity." We learn that
the income tax is "a doctrine suited to the dark ages, only no
age ever has been dark enough." Somebody raises the issue of
"tainted money", and the Chancellor disposes of this matter also.
As a Deputy of Divinity, he settles it by Holy Writ: "Paul
permitted meat offered to idols to be eaten in the fear of God."
And then, to make assurance doubly sure, he settles it with plain
human logic; and you are astonished to see how simple, under his
handling, the complex problem becomes--how clear and clean-cut is
the distinction he draws for you:
Every boy knows that one cannot take stolen goods without being a
partaker with the thief. But the proceeds of recognized business
are quite a different thing.
Holy Oil
And here is Billy Sunday, most conspicuous phenomenon of
Protestant Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth
century. For the benefit of posterity I explain that "Billy" is a
baseball player turned Evangelist, who has brought to the cause
of God the crowds and uproar of the diamond; also the commercial
spirit of America's most popular institution. He travels like a
circus, with all the press-agent work and newspaper hurrah; he
conducts what are called "revivals", in an enormous "tabernacle"
built especially for him in each city. I cannot better describe
the Billy Sunday circus than in the words of a certain Sidney C.
Tapp, who brought suit against the evangelist for $100,000
damages for the theft of the ideas of a book. Says Mr. Tapp in
his complaint:
The so-called religious awakening or "trail-hitting" is produced
by an appeal to the emotions and in stirring up the senses by a
combination of carrying the United States flag in one hand and
the Bible in the other, singing, trumpeting, organ playing,
garrulous and acrobatic feats of defendant, by defendant in his
talk leaping from the rostrum to the top of the pulpit, lying
prone on the floor of the rostrum on his stomach in the presence
of the vast audience and from thence into a pit to shake hands
with the so-called "trail-hitters" and the vulgar use of
plaintiff's thoughts contained in said books. Said harangues and
vulgarisms of said defendant and horns, drums, organs and singing
by said choir and vast audience which are assembled by means of
said newspaper advertisements for the purpose of inducing a habit
of free and copious flow of money through religious and patriotic
excitement produced by and through the vulgarisms, scurrility,
buffoonery, obscenity and profanity of defendant pretending to be
in the interest of the cause of religion through what he
denominates "hitting the trail", the real object being to induce
a religious frenzy and enthusiasm which he announces in advance
is to result in large audiences composed of thousands of people
generously contributing vast sums of money on the last day and
night of the so-called revival which is invariably appropriated
by the defendant and through which scheme and device defendant
has become enormously wealthy.
As I write, the evangelist is in Los Angeles, and twice each day
he holds forth to a crowd of ten or fifteen thousand; in addition
the newspapers print literally pages of his utterances. The
entire Protestant clergy for a score of miles around has been
hitched to his triumphal chariot, and driven captive through the
streets. Here in this dignified city of Pasadena, home of
millionaire brewers and chewing-gum kings, all the churches have
been plastered for weeks with cloth signs: "This Church is
Cooperating in the Sunday Campaign." To give a sample of the
intellectual level of the performance, here is what Billy has to
say about modern thought:
All this blasphemy against God and Jesus Christ, all this
sneering, highbrow, rotten, loathesome, higher criticism,
wriggling its dirty, filthy, stinking carcass out of a beer-mug
in Leipzig or Heidelberg!
Whether willingly or reluctantly, the preachers sit upon the
platform and smile while Billy thus slangs the devil; and being
themselves, poor fellows, at their wits end to draw the crowd,
they watch and see how he does it, and then return to their own
churches and try the same stunt; so the manners of the baseball
diamond spread like a contagion. I open my morning paper, and
find a picture of an intense-looking clerical gentleman, the Rev.
J. Whitcomb Brougher, pastor of the Baptist Temple. He is
discussing certain slanderous rumors which he has heard about
Billy Sunday, and he offers ten thousand dollars reward to anyone
who can prove these things; though, as he says,
The dirty, low-down, contemptible, weazen-brained,
impure-hearted, shrivelled-souled, gossipping devils do not
deserve to be noticed..... Scandal-mongers, gossip-lovers,
reputation-destroyers, hypocritical, black-hearted, green-eyed
slanderers..... Corrupt, devil-possessed, vile debauches.....
Immoral, sin-loving, vice-practicing, underhanded sneaks.....
Carrion-loving buzzards and foul-smelling skunks.
You will be prepared after this to hear that when the Socialists
were near to carrying Los Angeles, this clergyman preached a
sermon in support of the candidate of "Booze, Gas and Railroads".
In so far as Billy Sunday is trying to keep the neglected youth
of our streets from drinking, gambling and whoring, no one could
wish him anything but success; but his besotted ignorance, his
childish crudity of mind, make it impossible that he could have
any success except of a delusive nature. He is utterly devoid of
a social sense; utterly unaware of the existence of the forces of
capitalism which are causing depravity ten times as fast as all
the evangelists in creation can remedy it. So he is precisely
like the Catholics with their "charity", cleaning up loathsome
and unsightly messes for a thousand years, and never stopping to
ask why such messes continue to come into existence.
More than that, I question whether the spirit of commercialism
which he fosters does not help the development of evil more than
his preaching hinders it. The newspapers always report the cost
of the tabernacle, of the "free-will offering", which amounts to
hundreds of thousands of dollars in each "campaign", In each city
the expenses are guaranteed by men who are generally the most
sinister exploiting forces of the community; they welcome and
fete him, and he visits their homes, and is in every way one of
the crowd. After the big strike in Paterson, N. J., the
employers, Jews and Catholics included, all subscribed a fund to
bring Billy Sunday to that city; and it was freely proclaimed
that the purpose was to undermine the radical union movement.
This was never denied by Sunday himself, and his whole campaign
was conducted on that basis.
Later Billy came to New York, where he met a certain rich young
man, perhaps a thousand times as rich as any that lived in
Palestine. This young man came to Billy and said: "What shall I
do to inherit eternal life?" And Billy told him to keep the
commandments--"Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal,
Do not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother." The
young man answered; "All these have I kept from my youth up." And
Billy said: "Yet lackest thou one thing; sell all that thou hast
and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in
heaven; and come follow me." And when he heard this he was very
sorrowful, for he was very rich.
--No, I have got the story mixed up. That is what happened in
Palestine. What happened in New York is that Billy said, "I am
delighted to meet you, Mr. Rockefeller." And Mr. Rockefeller
said, "Come be my guest at my palace in the Pocantico Hills; and
then we will go together and you may preach submission to my
wage-slaves in the oil-factories at Bayonne and elsewhere." And
Billy went to the palace, and went and preached to the
wage-slaves, telling them to beware the "stinking Socialists",
and to concentrate their attention on the saving of their souls;
so the rich young man was delighted, and he sent for all the
newspaper reporters to come to his office at 26 Broadway, and
told them what a great and useful man Billy Sunday is. As the New
York "Times" tells about it:
Mr. Rockefeller seldom gives interviews and certainly he has
never been charged with having an excess of verbally expressed
enthusiasm on any subject. But he talked for an hour and a half
about the evangelist. He was full of the subject of Billy Sunday.
"Billy did New York a lot of good," he said. He went on to tell
of 187 meetings held in 100 different factories, attended by
50,000 men. "That's good work." And he expressed his satisfaction
with Sunday's theology: "He believes the Bible from cover to
cover and that is good enough for me." The Sunday campaign had
cost $200,000, and "If it had stopped here, if it was not kept
up, it would be poor business; a poor dividend on the $200,000
and the work invested. But we expect to get dividends in the next
year."
Again you note the symbolism of the counting-house!
Rhetorical Black-hanging
It is the duty of the clergy, not merely to defend large-scale
merchants while they live, but to bury them when they die, and to
place the seal of sanctity upon their careers. Concerning this
aspect of Bootstrap-lifting I quote the opinion of an earnest
hater of shams, William Makepeace Thackeray:
I think the part which pulpits play in the death of kings is the
most ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying eulogies, the
blinking of disagreeable truths, the sickening flatteries, the
simulated grief, the falsehood and sycophancies--all uttered in
the name of Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous
Threnodies which have been sung from time immemorial over kings
and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson must
bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical
black-hanging......
And this, of course, applies not merely to kings of England, but
to kings of Steel, kings of Coal, kings of Oil, kings of Wall
Street. When a certain king of Western railroads died, a
Methodist clergyman, afterwards Bishop, likened his heir to the
boy Christ; a statement which requires for its appreciation a
mention of the fact that this heir died of syphilis. In the year
1904 there passed from his earthly reward in Pennsylvania a
United States senator who had been throughout his lifetime a
notorious and unblushing corruptionist. Matthew Stanley Quay was
his name, and the New York "Nation", having no clerical
connections, was free to state the facts about him:
He bought the organization, bribed or intimidated the press, got
his grip on the public service, including even the courts;
imposed his will on Congress and Cabinet, and upon the last three
Presidents--making the latter provide for the offal of his
political machine, which even Pennsylvania could no longer
stomach--and all without identifying his name with a single
measure of public good, without making a speech or uttering a
party watchword, without even pretending to be honest, but solely
because, like Judas, he carried the bag and could buy whom he
would.
Such was the lay opinion; and now for the clerical. It was
expressed by a Presbyterian divine, the Reverend Dr. J. S.
Ramsey, who stood over the coffin of "Matt", and without cracking
a smile declared that he had been "a statesman who was always on
the right side of every moral question!"
In that same year of 1904 died the high priest of our political
corruption, Mark Hanna. He had belonged to no church, but had
backed them all, understanding the main thesis of this book as
clearly as the writer of it. In his home city of Cleveland the
eulogy upon him was pronounced by Bishop Leonard, in St. Paul's
Episcopal Church; while in the United States Senate the service
was performed by the Chaplain, the Rev. Edward Everett Hale. This
is a name well-known in American letters, as in American
religious life; it was borne by a benevolent old gentleman, a
Unitarian and a liberal, who organized "Lend-a-Hand Clubs" and
such like amiabilities. "Do You Love This Old Man?" the signs in
the street-cars used to ask when I was a boy; and I promptly
answered "Yes"--for my mother took the "Ladies' Home Journal",
and I swallowed the sentimental dish-water set out for me. But
when I read the Rev. Edward's funeral oration over the Irrev.
Mark, I loved neither of them any longer. "This whole-souled
child of God," cried the Rev. Edward, "who believed in success,
and knew how to succeed by using the infinite powers!" You
perceive that the Chaplain of the Millionaires' Club agrees with
this book, that the "infinite powers" in America are the powers
that prey!
The Great American Fraud
Among the most loathesome products of our native commercial greed
is the patent medicine industry, "The Great American Fraud," as
its historian has called it. In 1907 this historian wrote:
Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five millions
of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration
of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an
appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of
varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart
depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of
all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud, exploited by
the skillfullest of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the
trade.
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