The Profits of Religion
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Upton Sinclair >> The Profits of Religion
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One by one Mr. Adams tells about these medical fakes:
habit-forming laxatives, head-ache powders full of acetanilid,
soothing-syrups and catarrh-cures full of opium and cocaine,
cock-tails subtly disguised as "bitters", "sarsaparillas", and
"tonics". He shows how the fake testimonials are made up and
exploited; how the confidential letters, telling the secret
troubles of men and women, are collected by tens and hundreds of
thousands and advertised and sold--so that the victim, as he
begins to lose faith in one fake, finds another at hand, fully
informed as to his weakness. He quotes the amazing "Red Clause"
in the contracts which the patent-medicine makers have with
thousands of daily and weekly papers, whereby the makers are able
to control the press of the country and prevent legislation
against the "Great American Fraud."
There are a thousand religious papers in America, weekly and
monthly; and what is their attitude on this question? Mr. Adams
tells us:
Whether because church-going people are more trusting, and
therefore more easily befooled than others, or from some more
obscure reason, many of the religious papers fairly reek with
patent medicine fakes.
He gives us many pages of specific instances:
Dr. Smith belongs to the brood of cancer vampires. He is a patron
and prop of religious journalism. It is his theory that the
easiest prey is to be found among readers of church papers.
Moreover he has learned from his father-in-law (who built a small
church out of blood-money) to capitalize his own sectarian
associations, and when confronted recently with a formal
accusation he replied, with an air of injured innocence, that he
was a regular attendant at church, and could produce an
endorsement from his minister.
And here is the "Church Advocate", of Harrisburg, Pa., which
publishes quack advertisements disguised as editorials. One of
them Mr. Adams paraphrases:
As Dr. Smith is, on the face of his own statements, a
self-branded swindler and rascal, you run no risk in assuming
that the Rev. C. H. Forney, D. D., L. L. D., in acting as his
journalistic supporter for pay, is just such another as himself!
And again:
Will the editor of the "Baptist Watchman" of Boston explain by
what phenomenon of logic or elasticity of ethics he accepts the
lucubrations of Dr. Bye, of Oren Oneal, of Liquozone, of Actina,
that marvelous two-ended mechanical appliance which "cures"
deafness at one terminus and blindness at the other, and all with
a little oil of mustard?
And again:
The "Christian Observer" of Louisville replied to a protesting
subscriber, suggesting that the "Collier" articles were written
in a spirit of revenge, because "Collier's" could not get patent
medicine advertising. When I asked the Rev. F. Bartlett Converse
for his foundation for the charge, he said that one of the
typewriters must have written the letter! Doubtless also the same
highly responsible typewriter imitated the signature with
startling fidelity to Dr. Converse's handwriting!
And here is--would you think it possible?--our "Church of Good
Society"! It has an organ in Chicago called the "Living Church",
most dignified and decorous. You have to study quite a while to
ascertain what denomination it belongs to; it will not tell you
directly, for the Anglician pose is that it is the church
Elect from every nation,
Yet one oer all the earth,
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one Faith, one Birth;
One holy name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And toward one Hope she presses,
With every grace endued.
And this one holy institution was found setting at its peak the
black flag of the trader, the "Jolly Roger" of the modern
commercial pirate--"Caveat emptor!" To quote the precise words:
The editors and publishers of the "Living Church" assume no
responsibility for the assertions of advertisers.
And so it threw open its columns to the claims of America's
champion labor-baiter, the late C. W. Post, that his "Grapenuts"
would prevent appendicitis, and obviate the need of operations in
such cases!
And here is the "Christian Endeavor World", organ of one of the
most powerful non-sectarian religious bodies in the country. Some
one wrote complaining of its medical advertising, and the answer
was:
To the best of our knowledge and belief, we are not publishing
any fraudulent or unworthy medical advertising ...... Trusting
that you will be able to understand that we are acting according
to our best and sincerest judgment, I remain, yours very truly,
The Golden Rule Company, George W. Coleman, Business Manager.
Whereupon the historian of "The Great American Fraud" remarks:
Assuming that the business management of the "Christian Endeavor
World" represents normal intelligence, I would like to ask
whether it accepts the statement that a pair of "magic foot
drafts" applied to the soles of the feet will cure any and every
kind of rheumatism in any part of the body? Further, if the
advertising department is genuinely interested in declining
"fraudulent and unworthy" copy, I would call their attention to
the ridiculous claims of Dr. Shoop's medicines, which "cure"
almost every disease; to two hair removers, one an "Indian
Secret", the other an "accidental discovery", both either fakes
or dangerous; to the lying claims of Hall's Catarrh Cure, that it
is "a positive cure for catarrh", in all its stages; to "Syrup of
Figs", which is not a fig syrup, but a preparation of senna; to
Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root, of which the principal medical
constituent is alcohol; and, finally, to Dr. Bye's Oil Cure for
cancer, a particularly cruel swindle on unfortunates suffering
from an incurable malady. All of these, with other matter, which
for the sake of decency I do not care to detail in these columns,
appear in recent issues of the "Christian Endeavor World".
Riches in Glory
There came recently to Los Angeles a "world-famous evangelist",
known as "Gipsy" Smith. There was a shirt-waist strike at the
time, and the girls were starving, and they sent a delegation to
this evangelist to ask for help. They told him how they were
mistreated, exposed to insults, driven to sell their virtue
because their wage would not support life; and to their plea he
made answer: "Get Jesus in your hearts, and these questions will
take care of themselves!"
So we see the most important of the many services which the
churches perform for the merchants--taking the revolutionary hope
of Jesus, for a kingdom of heaven upon earth, and perverting it
into a dream of a golden harp in an uncertain future. To
appreciate the fullness of this betrayal, take the prayer which
Jesus dictated--so simple, direct and practical: "Give us this
day our daily bread", and put it beside the hymns which the
slave-congregations are trained to sing. In my neighborhood is a
one-roomed building with a plate glass front, upon which I
observe a painter inscribing in red, white and blue letters the
sign "Glory Mission". I approach him, and he drops his work and
welcomes me with eager cordiality. Am I "living in grace"? I
answer that I am. I have to shout the good tidings into his ear,
as he is very deaf. He presents me with his card, which shows
that he bears the title of "Reverend", also the sobriquet of
"Mountain Missionary". I ask him to permit me to examine the
hymn-book which he uses in his work, and with touching eagerness
he presses upon me a well-worn volume bearing the title "Waves of
Glory". I seat myself and note down a few of the baits it sets
out for hungry wage-slaves:
O, there's a plenty, O, there's a plenty,
There's a plenty in my Father's bank above!
Riches in glory, riches in glory,
Royal supply our wants exceed!
Feasting, I'm feasting,
I'm feasting with my Lord!
Beautiful robes, beautiful robes,
Beautiful robes we then shall wear!
Jerusalem the golden,
With milk and honey blest!
Yes, I'll meet you in the city of the New Jerusalem,
I'll be there, I'll be there!
Blest Canaan land, bright Canaan land,
I love to be in Canaan land!
Oh, Beulah land, sweet Beulah land,
As on the highest mount I stand,
I look away across the sea,
Where mansions are prepared for me!
In the sweet bye and bye
We shall meet on that beautiful shore--
I stopped there, being reminded of Joe Hill, poet of the I. W. W.
who was hanged three or four years ago in Utah, and who used this
tune in his little red book of revolutionary chants:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In the glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die!
Captivating Ideals
In one of the writer's earlier novels, "Prince Hagen", the hero
is a Nibelung out of Wagner's "Rheingold", who leaves his
diggings in the bowels of the earth, and comes up to look into
our superior civilization. The thing that impresses him most is
what he calls "the immortality idea". The person who got that up
was a world-genius, he exclaims. "If you can once get a man to
believing in immortality, there is no more left for you to
desire; you can take everything he owns--you can skin him alive
if it pleases you--and he will bear it all with perfect good
humor."
And is that merely the spiritual deficiency of a Nibelung--or the
effort of a young author to be smart? Would you like to hear that
view of the most vital of Christian doctrines set forth in the
language of scholarship and culture? Would you like to know how
an ecclesiastical authority, equipped with every tool of modern
learning, would set about voicing the idea that the function of
the teaching of Heaven is to chloroform the poor, so that the
rich may continue to rob them in security?
Here under my hand is a volume in the newest dress of
scholarship, dated 1912, and written by Professor Georges
Chatterton-Hill, of the University of Geneva. Its title is "The
Sociological Value of Christianity", and from cover to cover it
is a warning to the rich of the danger they run in giving up
their religion and ceasing to support its priests. It explains
how "the genius of Christianity has succeeded in making the
individual suffering, the individual sacrifices, which are
indispensible for the welfare of the collectivity, appear as
indispensible for the individual welfare." The learned professor
makes plain just what he means by "individual suffering,
individual sacrifices"; he means all the horrors of capitalism;
and the advantage of Christianity is that it makes you think that
by submitting to these horrors, you are profiting your own soul.
"By making individual salvation depend on the acceptance of
suffering, on the voluntary sacrifice of egotistical interests,
Christianity adapts the individual to society". And this, as the
professor explains, is not an easy thing to do, in a world in
which so many people are thinking for themselves. "The only means
of causing the rationalized individual to consent to the
sacrifice...... is to captivate him with a sufficiently powerful
idea!" And the professor shows how beautifully Jesus can be used
for this purpose. "Jesus, the so-called humanitarian, never
ceased to insist on the necessity of suffering, the desirableness
of suffering--of that suffering which a weak and sickly
humanitarianism would fain suppress if it could."
You get this, you "blanket-stiff", you "husky", or "wop", or
whatever you are--you disinherited of the earth, you proletarians
who have only your labor-power to sell, you weak and sickly ones
who are condemned to elimination? There has come, let us say, a
period of "overproduction"; you have raised too much food, and
therefore you are starving, you have woven too much cloth, and
therefore you are naked, you have finished the world for your
masters, and it is time for you to move out of the way. As the
sociologist from Geneva phrases it, "Your suppression imposes
itself as an imperious necessity." And the function of the
Christian religion is to make you enjoy the process, by
"captivating you with a sufficiently powerful ideal"! The priest
will fill your nostrils with incense, your eyes with
candle-lights and images, your ears with sweet music and soothing
words; and so you will perish without raising a finger! "Here,"
reflects the professor, "we see how magnificently the teaching of
Jesus applies to all classes of society!"
Somebody has evidently put up to our Christian sociologist the
embarrassing fact that so many of those who survive under the
capitalist system are godless scoundrels. But do you think that
troubles him? Not for long. Like all religious thinkers, he
carries with his scholar's equipment a pair of metaphysical
wings, wherewith at any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out
of reach of vulgar materialists, like you and me. "Inequality
signifies inequality of capacity," he explains; but the standard
whereby we judge this capacity "cannot be the standard of the
moral law."
The laws which govern the biological evolution of man are known,
but those which govern his moral nature cannot be known; the
moral nature appertains to the Absolute, and hence is not subject
to the law of inequality!
As an exhibition of metaphysical wing-power, that is almost as
wonderful as the flight of Cardinal Newman when confronted with
the fact that his divinely guided church had burned men for
teaching the Copernican view of the universe; that infallible
popes had again and again condemned this heresy ex cathedra. Said
the eloquent cardinal:
Scripture says that the sun moves and the earth is stationary,
and science that the earth moves and the sun is comparatively at
rest. How can we determine which of these opposite statements is
the very truth till we know what motion is?
Spook Hunting
Do not imagine that it is only in Geneva that Christian
professors realize this peril from the loss of faith. It is never
far from the thoughts of any of them--for, of course, no man can
look at the present system and not wonder how the poor stand it,
and more especially why they stand it. There have been many
thinking men who have given up the miracle-business quite
cheerfully, but have stood appalled at the idea of letting the
lower classes find out the truth. You note that idea continually
in the writings of Professor Goldwin Smith, who was a
free-thinker, but also a bourgeois publicist, with a deep sense
of responsibility to the money-masters of the world. He was about
as honest a man as the capitalist system can produce; he was the
beau ideal of the New York "Evening Post", which indicates his
point of view. He wrote:
It can hardly be doubted that hope of compensation in a future
state, for a short measure of happiness here, has materially
helped to reconcile the less favored members of the community to
the inequalities of the existing order of things.
When I was a student in Columbia University, I took a course
called "Practical Ethics", under a professor by the name of
Hyslop. The course differed from most of the forty that I tried,
in that it gave evidence that the professor was accustomed to
read the morning paper. He had learned that American politics
were rotten; his idea of "Practical Ethics" was to outline in
elaborate detail a complete scheme of constitutional changes
which would make it impossible for the "boss" to control the
government. I think I must have been born with a charm against
bourgeois thought, for the good professor never fooled me an
instant; I remember I used to smile at the idea of how quickly
the "boss" would brush through his constitutional cobwebs. The
reforms required an elaborate campaign of publicity--and of
course long before they could be put into practice, the
politicians would be ready with devices to make them of no
effect.
Soon after this, my ethical professor resigned and went to
hunting spooks. I don't want to be unfair to him; I know that he
is a determined and courageous man, and it seems possible that he
may really have bagged some spooks. All I wish to point out here
is the method he uses in seeking to persuade the heedless rich to
support the spook-hunting industry. The very same argument as we
got from the University of Geneva and the University of Toronto!
Says our head spook-hunter:
There has been no belief that exercised so much power upon the
poor as that in a future life. The politicians, men of the world,
have known this so well as to postpone the day of political
judgment by it for many years.
And again:
The Church, having lost all its battles with science, and having
abandoned a strenuous intellectual defense of its fundamental
beliefs, has lost its power over the poor and the laboring
classes..... The spiritual ideal of life has gone out of the
masses as well as the classes, and nothing is left but a venture
on a struggle with wealth.
And again, more menacingly yet:
The rich will learn in the dangers of a social revolution that
the poor will not sacrifice both wealth and immortality.
What is to be done about this? The question answers itself: Step
up, ladies and gentlemen, and empty your purses into the
Psychical Research hat! So that we may accumulate statistics as
to the cost of milk and honey in Jerusalem the Golden!
You read what I had to say about Bootstrap-lifters, and the
Wholesale Pickpockets' Association making use of their
incantations. You admired my ability to sling language, but not
my taste; and you certainly did not think that I would back my
rhetoric with facts. But what do these quotations mean, unless
they mean what I have said? Are not these three professors men of
culture? Are they not as "spiritual" as any men of learning you
can find in our present-day society?
And now stop for a moment and put yourself in the position of the
young student of the working-class, who goes to these books and
discovers that truth is not truth, but only a bait for a snare.
Who discovers that professors of ethics, practical or
impractical, are not interested in justice among men, but only in
collecting funds for their specialty; that in order to get funds,
they are willing to teach the rich how to paralyze the minds of
the poor! Do you wonder that such young students conclude that
bourgeois thinkers do not know what honesty is, but are
prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be kicked out of the
temple of truth?
Running the Rapids
And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what it
means to society that practically all its moral teaching should
be in the hands of men who are incapable of clean, straight
thinking? That all the intellectual prestige of the Church should
be lent to the support of vagueness, futility, and deliberate
evasion? Here we are, all of us, caught in the most terrific
social crisis of history; I search for a metaphor to picture our
position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the wilds of Ontario,
hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit in the bow of
the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead; and there
comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over it, and into
a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along
with the speed of a race-horse. With every sense alert, You watch
for the rocks, and when you see one, you dip your paddle on one
side or the other and with a quick motion draw the canoe clear of
the danger. If by any chance you fail to do it, over you go, and
your partner with you, and all your belongings go down-stream,
and maybe you are sucked into a whirlpool, and not seen for
several hours afterwards. Precisely like this is the voyage of
life, for the whole of society and for every individual. The
paddle which would save us from the rocks is experimental
science; but in most of our canoes we put a man who has no
paddle, but a Holy Book; and he casts up his eyes and murmurs
words in ancient Greek and Hebrew, and now and then, when he sees
an especially formidable obstruction--a war, or the gonococcus,
or the I. W. W.--he casts a holy wafer upon the foaming torrent.
And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you could
save yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and we all go
overboard together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into
the trenches in winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud,
because in Europe the Catholic party supported militarism, and
kept aristocratic criminals in control of states. Or you find
yourself involved in a marital tragedy, and in order to free
yourself from unendurable misery, you are obliged to go to
law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul, the Roman
bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a means
of gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry
than to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of
course those who think him a voice of God can form no conception
of the dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and
wholesome sex-conventions, you will be as apt to find them among
the Ashantees or the Kamchadals as among the followers of the
Apostle to the Gentiles.
You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by this
Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you from a
second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire.
You are not permitted to tell your own story, for that would be
"collusion;" you listen while your intimate friends recite the
pitiful and shameful details of your domestic misfortune, under
the cross-questioning of lawyers who have suppressed for the time
whatever decent instincts they may possess, and follow blindly
the details of a prescribed procedure, at the cost of all
sincerity, humanity and truth. The next morning you find that the
privacy guaranteed you by law has been taken from you by corrupt
court officials, who have sold copies of the testimony to the
newspapers, so that all the intimate details of where you slept
and where your wife slept and what you saw your wife doing have
been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who scream with glee as
they rend the carcass of your dead love. And in the end, perhaps,
you find that you have gone through this horror for nothing--the
august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out your
petition, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that
when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave
like a civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of
like a sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an Italian grand opera.
Birth Control
I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by
minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated
curse to the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which
might be used to slay the monsters of disease and vice--but these
weapons are not allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be
mentioned. Consider the misery which is piling itself up in the
slams of our great cities---the degenerate, the defective, the
insane, who are multiplying as never before in history. There
exists a perfectly harmless and painless method of sterilizing
the hopelessly unfit, so that they can not reproduce their
hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this operation, and
so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There exists a
simple, entirely harmless, and practically costless method of
preventing conception, which would enable us to check the blind
and futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods instead
of as animals. Consider the festering mass of misery in the slums
of our great cities; consider the millions of terrified,
poverty-hounded women, bearing one half-nurtured infant after
another, struggling desperately to feed and care for them, and
seeing them drop into the grave as fast as they are born-until
finally the mother, worn out with the Sisyphean labor, gives up
and follows her misbegotten offspring. Consider how many women,
in their agony and despair, make use of the methods of the
primitive savage, to escape from Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr.
Wm. J. Robinson has estimated that in the United States alone
there are a million abortions every year; and consider that all
this hideous mass of suffering--a bloody European war going on
continually, unheeded by any newspaper correspondent--might be
avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing formula, which we are
not permitted to give! The Federation of Catholic Societies have
placed a law upon the statute-books of the nation, and of all the
states as well; the whole power of police and courts and jails is
at the service of religious bigots, and a young girl is sent to
prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose for telling
poverty-ridden, slum-women how to keep from becoming pregnant!
And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world, the judges and
district attorneys, the commissioners of correction and doctors
who perpetrated this infamy under a so-called "reform"
administration in New York City--and what do you find? The first
thing you find is that they themselves, one and all, practice
birth-control with their wives or their mistresses. The second
thing you find is that the statute-books are crowded with other
laws which they make no pretense of enforcing; for example, the
law which forbids the saloons to be open on Sunday--which law
they take the liberty of understanding to mean that the saloons
shall not have their front doors open on Sunday. You will find
that they are not at all afraid of the religious taboos; they are
afraid of the religious vote--and even more they are afraid of
the campaign contributions of sweat-shop manufacturers and
landlords, who cannot see what would become of prosperity if the
women of the slums were to cease to breed. So once more we
discover the wolf in sheep's clothing, the trader, making use of
Tradition-worship; hiding behind the skirts of devout old maiden
aunts and grandmothers, who repeat the instructions which God
gave to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the
earth." As if God were as blind as a Fifth Avenue preacher, and
could see no difference between the Garden of Eden, full of all
fruits that grow and all creatures that run and fly and swim, and
a modern East Side tenement-room, with an oil stove and no
windows and no water-closet, and the price of cabbage seven cents
a pound!
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