The Profits of Religion
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Upton Sinclair >> The Profits of Religion
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Hell-Fire
If such a scene could be witnessed in the world today, it would
only be in some remote and wholly savage place, such as the
mountains of Hayti, or the Solomon Islands. It could no longer
happen in any civilized country; the reason being, not any
abatement of the pretensions of the priesthood, but solely the
power of science, embodied in the physical arm of a secular
State. The advance of that arm the church has fought
systematically, in every country, and at every point. To quote
Buckle: "A careful study of the history of religious toleration
will prove that in every Christian country where it has been
adopted, it has been forced upon the clergy by the authority of
the secular classes." The wolf of superstition has been driven
into its lair; but it has backed away snarling, and it still
crouches, watching for a chance to spring. The Church which
burned John Huss, which burned Giordano Bruno for teaching that
the earth moves round the sun--that same church, in the name of
the same three-headed god, sent out Francesco Ferrer to the
firing-squad; if it does not do the same thing to the author of
this book, it will be solely because of the police. Not being
allowed to burn me here, the clergy will vent their holy
indignation by sentencing me to eternal burning in a future world
which they have created, and which they run to suit themselves.
It is a fact, the significance of which cannot be exaggerated,
that the measure of the civilization which any nation has
attained is the extent to which it has curtailed the power of
institutionalized religion. Those peoples which are wholly under
the sway of the priesthood, such as Thibetans and Koreans,
Siamese and Caribbeans, are peoples among whom the intellectual
life does not exist. Farther in advance are Hindoos, and Turks,
who are religious, but not exclusively. Still farther on the way
are Spaniards and Irish; here, for example, is a flashlight of
the Irish peasantry, given by one of their number, Patrick
MacGill:
The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest, who always
told the people if they did not pay their debts they would burn
for ever and ever in hell. "The fires of eternity will make you
sorry for the debts that you did not pay," said the priest. "What
is eternity?" he would ask in a solemn voice from the altar
steps. "If a man tried to count the sands on the sea-shore and
took a million years to count every single grain, how long would
it take him to count them all? A long time, you'll say. But that
time is nothing to eternity. Just think of it! Burning in hell
while a man, taking a million years to count a grain of sand,
counts all the sand on the sea-shore. And this because you did
not pay Farley McKeown his lawful debts, his lawful debts within
the letter of the law." That concluding phrase, "within the
letter of the law," struck terror into all who listened, and no
one, maybe not even the priest himself, knew what it meant.
There is light in Ireland to-day, and hope for an Irish culture;
the thing to be noted is that it comes from two movements, one
for agricultural co-operation and the other for political
independence--both of them definitely and specifically
non-religious. This same thing has been true of the movements
which have helped on happier nations, such as the republics of
France and America, which have put an end to the power of the
priestly caste to take property by force, and to dominate the
mind of the child without its parents' consent.
This is as far as any nation has so far gone; it has apparently
not yet occurred to any legislature that the State may owe a duty
to the child to protect its mind from being poisoned, even though
it has the misfortune to be born of poisoned parents. It is still
permitted that parents should terrify their little ones with
images of a personal devil and a hell of eternal brimstone and
sulphur; it is permitted to found schools for the teaching of
devil-doctrines; it is permitted to organize gigantic campaigns
and systematically to infect whole cities full of men, women and
children with hell-fire phobias. In the American city where I
write one may see gatherings of people sunk upon their knees,
even rolling on the ground in convulsions, moaning, sobbing,
screaming to be delivered from such torments. I open my morning
paper and read of the arrest of five men and seven women in Los
Angeles, members of a sect known as the "Church of the Living
God", upon a charge of having disturbed the peace of their
neighbors. The police officers testified that the accused claimed
to be possessed of the divine spirit, and that as signs of this
possession they "crawled on the floor, grunted like pigs and
barked like dogs." There were "other acts, even more startling",
about which the newspapers did not go into details. And again, a
week or two later, I read how a woman has been heard screaming,
and found tied to a bedpost, being whipped by a man. She belonged
to a religious sect which had found her guilty of witchcraft.
Another woman was about to shoot her, but this woman's nerve
failed, and the "high priest" was called in, who decreed a
whipping. The victim explained to the police that she would have
deserved to be whipped had she really been a witch, but a mistake
had been made--it was another woman who was the witch. And again
in the Los Angeles "Times" I read a perfectly serious news item,
telling how a certain man awakened one morning, and found on his
pillow where his head had lain a perfect reproduction of the head
of Christ with its crown of thorns. He called in his neighbors to
witness the miracle, and declared that while he was not
superstitious, he knew that such a thing could not have happened
by chance, and he knew what it was intended to signify--he would
buy more Liberty Bonds and be more ardent in his support of the
war!
And this is the world in which our scientists and men of culture
think that the battle of the intellect is won, and that it is no
longer necessary to spend our energies in fighting "Religion!"
BOOK TWO
The Church of Good Society
Within the House of Mammon his priesthood stands alert
By mysteries attended, by dusk and splendors girt,
Knowing, for faiths departed, his own shall still endure,
And they be found his chosen, untroubled, solemn, sure.
Within the House of Mammon the golden altar lifts
Where dragon-lamps are shrouded as costly incense drifts--
A dust of old ideals, now fragrant from the coals,
To tell of hopes long-ended, to tell the death of souls
Sterling.
The Rain Makers
I begin with the Church of Good Society, because it happens to be
the Church in which I was brought up. Reading this statement,
some of my readers suspected me of snobbish pride. I search my
heart; yes, it brings a hidden thrill that as far back as I can
remember I knew this atmosphere of urbanity, that twice every
Sunday those melodious and hypnotizing incantations were chanted
in my childish ears! I take up the book of ritual, done in
aristocratic black leather with gold lettering, and the old worn
volume brings me strange stirrings of recollected awe. But I
endeavor to repress these vestigial emotions and to see the
volume--not as a message from God to Good Society, but as a
landmark of man's age-long struggle against myth and dogma used
as a source of income and a shield to privilege.
In the beginning, of course, the priest and the magician ruled
the field. But today, as I examine this "Book of Common Prayer",
I discover that there is at least one spot out of which he has
been cleared entirely; there appears no prayer to planets to
stand still, or to comets to go away. The "Church of Good
Society" has discovered astronomy! But if any astronomer
attributes this to his instruments with their marvelous accuracy,
let him at least stop to consider my "economic interpretation" of
the phenomenon--the fact that the heavenly bodies affect the
destinies of mankind so little that there has not been sufficient
emolument to justify the priest in holding on to his job as
astrologer.
But when you come to the field of meteorology, what a difference!
Has any utmost precision of barometer been able to drive the
priest out of his prerogatives as rainmaker? Not even in the most
civilized of countries; not in that most decorous and dignified
of institutions, the Protestant Episcopal Church of America! I
study with care the passage wherein the clergyman appears as
controller of the fate of crops. I note a chastened caution of
phraseology; the church will not repeat the experience of the
sorcerer's apprentice, who set the demons to bringing water, and
then could not make them stop! The spell invokes "moderate rain
and showers"; and as an additional precaution there is a
counter-spell against "excessive rains and floods": the
weather-faucet being thus under exact control.
I turn the pages of this "Book of Common Prayer", and note the
remnants of magic which it contains. There are not many of the
emergencies of life with which the priest is not authorized to
deal; not many natural phenomena for which he may not claim the
credit. And in case anything should have been overlooked, there
is a blanket order upon Providence: "Graciously hear us, that
those evils which the craft or subtilty of the devil or man
worketh against us, be brought to nought!" I am reminded of the
idea which haunted my childhood, reading fairy-stories about the
hero who was allowed three wishes that would come true. I could
never understand why the hero did not settle the matter once for
all--by wishing that everything he wished might come true!
Most of these incantations are harmless, and some are amiable;
but now and then you come upon one which is sinister in its
implications. The volume before me happens to be of the Church of
England, which is even more forthright in its confronting of the
Great Magic. Many years ago I remember talking with an English
army officer, asking how he could feel sure of his soldiers in
case of labor strikes; did it never occur to him that the men had
relatives among the workers, and might some time refuse to shoot
them? His answer was that he was aware of it, the military had
worked out its technique with care. He would never think of
ordering his men to fire upon a mob in cold blood; he would first
start the spell of discipline to work, he would march them round
the block, and get them in the swing, get their blood moving to
military music; then, when he gave the order, in they would go. I
have never forgotten the gesture, the animation with which he
illustrated their going--I could hear the grunting of bayonets in
the flesh of men. The social system prevailing in England has
made necessary the perfecting of such military technique; also,
you discover, English piety has made necessary the providing of a
religious sanction for it. After the job has been done, and the
bayonets have been wiped clean, the company is marched to church,
and the officer kneels in his family pew, and the privates kneel
with the parlor-maids, and the clergyman raises his hands to
heaven and intones: "We bless thy Holy Name, that it hath pleased
Thee to appease the seditious tumults which have been lately
raised up among us!"
And sometimes the clergyman does more than bless the killers--he
even takes part in their bloody work. In the Home Office Records
of the British Government I read (vol 40, page 17) how certain
miners were on strike against low wages and the "truck" system,
and the Vicar of Abergavenny put himself at the head of the
yeomanry and the Greys. He wrote the Home Office a lively account
of his military operations. All that remained was to apprehend
certain of the strikers, "and then I shall be able to return to
my Clerical duties." Later he wrote of the "sinister influences"
which kept the miners from returning to their work, and how he
had put half a dozen of the most obstinate in prison.
The Babylonian Fire-god
So we come to the most important of the functions of the tribal
god, as an ally in war, an inspirer to martial valour. When in
ancient Babylonia you wished to overcome your enemies, you went
to the shrine of the Firegod, and with awful rites the priest
pronounced incantations, which have been preserved on bricks and
handed down for the use of modern churches. "Pronounce in a
whisper, and have a bronze image therewith," commands the ancient
text, and runs on for many strophes in this fashion:
Let them die, but let me live!
Let them be put under a ban, but let me prosper!
Let them perish, but let me increase!
Let them become weak, but let me wax strong!
O, fire-god, mighty, exalted among the gods,
Thou art the god, thou art my lord, etc.
This was in heathen Babylon, some three thousand years ago. Since
then, the world has moved on--
Three thousand years of war and peace and glory,
Of hope and work and deeds and golden schemes,
Of mighty voices raised in song and story,
Of huge inventions and of splendid dreams--
And in one of the world's leading nations the people stand up and
bare their heads, and sing to their god to save their king and
punish those who oppose him--
O Lord our God, arise, Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On him our hopes we fix,
God save us all.
Recently, I understand, it has become the custom to omit this
stanza from the English national anthem; but it is clear that
this is because of its crudity of expression, not because of
objection to the idea of praying to a god to assist one nation
and injure others; for the same sentiment is expressed again and
again in the most carefully edited of prayer-books:
Abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their
devices.
Defend us, Thy humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies.
Strengthen him (the King) that he may vanquish and overcome
all his enemies.
There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God.
Prayers such as these are pronounced in every so-called civilized
nation today. Behind every battle-line in Europe you may see the
priests of the Babylonian Fire-god with their bronze images and
their ancient incantations; you may see magic spells being
wrought, magic standards sanctified, magic bread eaten and magic
wine drunk, fetishes blessed and hoodoos lifted, eternity
ransacked to find means of inciting soldiers to the mood where
they will "go in". Throughout all civilization, the phobias and
manias of war have thrown the people back into the toils of the
priest, and that church which tortured Galileo in the dungeons of
the Inquisition, and shot Ferrier beneath the walls of the
fortress of Montjuich, is rejoicing in a "rebirth of religion".
The Medicine-men
Andrew D. White tells us that
It was noted that in the 14th century, after the great plague,
the Black Death, had passed, an immensely increased proportion of
the landed and personal property of every European country was in
the hands of the Church. Well did a great ecclesiastic remark that
"pestilences are the harvests of the ministers of God."
And so naturally the clergy hold on to their prerogative as
banishers of epidemics. Who knows what day the Lord may see fit
to rebuke the upstart teachers of impious and atheistical
inoculation, and scourge the people back into His fold as in the
good old days of Moses and Aaron? Viscount Amberley, in his
immensely learned and half-suppressed work, "The Analysis of
Religious Belief", quotes some missionaries to the Fiji
islanders, concerning the ideas of these benighted heathen on the
subject of a pestilence. It was the work of a "disease-maker",
who was burning images of the people with incantations; so they
blew horns to frighten this disease-maker from his spells. The
missionaries undertook to explain the true cause of the
affliction--and thereby revealed that they stood upon the same
intellectual level as the heathen they were supposed to instruct!
It appeared that the natives had been at war with their
neighbors, and the missionaries had commanded them to desist;
they had refused to obey, and God had sent the epidemic as
punishment for savage presumption!
And on precisely this same Fijian level stands the "Book of
Common Prayer" of our most decorous and cultured of churches. I
remember as a little child lying on a bed of sickness, occasioned
by the prevalence in our home of the Southern custom of hot bread
three times a day; and there came an amiable clerical gentleman
and recited the service proper to such pastoral calls: "Take
therefore in good part the visitation of the Lord!" And again,
when my mother was ill, I remember how the clergyman read out in
church a prayer for her, specifying all sickness, "in mind, body
or estate". I was thinking only of my mother, and the meaning of
these words passed over my childish head; I did not realize that
the elderly plutocrat in black broadcloth who knelt in the pew in
front of me was invoking the aid of the Almighty so that his
tenements might bring in their rentals promptly; so that his
little "flyer" in cotton might prove successful; so that the
children in his mills might work with greater speed.
Somebody asked Voltaire if you could kill a cow by incantations,
and he answered, "Yes, if you use a little strychnine with it."
And that would seem to be the attitude of the present-day
Anglican church-member; he calls in the best physician he knows,
he makes sure that his plumbing is sound, and after that he
thinks it can do no harm to let the Lord have a chance. It makes
the women happy, and after all, there are a lot of things we
don't yet know about the world. So he repairs to the family pew,
and recites over the venerable prayers, and contributes his mite
to the maintenance of an institution which, fourteen Sundays
every year, proclaims the terrifying menaces of the Athanasian
Creed:
Whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he
hold the Catholick faith. Which faith, except one do keep whole
and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
For the benefit of the uninitiated reader, it may be explained
that the "Catholick faith" here referred to is not the Roman
Catholic, but that of the Church of England and the Protestant
Episcopal Church of America. This creed of the ancient
Alexandrian lays down the truth with grim and menacing
precision--forty-four paragraphs of metaphysical minutiae,
closing with the final doom: "This is the Catholick faith: which
except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved."
You see, the founders of this august institution were not content
with cultured complacency; what they believed they believed
really, with their whole hearts, and they were ready to act upon
it, even if it meant burning their own at the stake. Also, they
knew the ceaseless impulse of the mind to grow; the terrible
temptation which confronts each new generation to believe that
which is reasonable. They met the situation by setting out the
true faith in words which no one could mistake. They have
provided, not merely the Creed of Athanasius, but also the
"Thirty-nine Articles"--which are thirty-nine separate and
binding guarantees that one who holds orders in the Episcopal
Church shall be either a man of inferior mentality, or else a
sophist and hypocrite. How desperate some of them have become in
the face of this cruel dilemma is illustrated by the tale which
is told of Dr. Jowett, of Balliol College, Oxford: that when he
was required to recite the "Apostle's Creed" in public, he would
save himself by inserting the words "used" between the words "I
believe", saying the inserted words under his breath, thus, "I
used to believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."
Perhaps the eminent divine never did this; but the fact that his
students told it, and thought it funny, is sufficient indication
of their attitude toward their "Religion." The son of William
George Ward tells in his biography how this leader of the
"Tractarian Movement" met the problem with cynicism which seems
almost sublime: "Make yourself clear that you are justified in
deception; and then lie like a trooper!"
The Canonization of Incompetence
The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in
all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of
mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it
canonizes incompetence. Consider the power of the Church of
England and its favorite daughter here in America; consider their
prestige with the press and in politics, their hold upon
literature and the arts, their control of education and the minds
of children, of charity and the lives of the poor: consider all
this, and then say what it means to society that such a power
must be, in every new issue that arises, on the side of reaction
and falsehood. "So it was in the beginning, is now, and ever
shall be," runs the church's formula; and this per se and a
priori, of necessity and in the nature of the case.
Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the
church's opposition to every advance in every field of science,
even the most remote from theological concern. Here is the
Reverend Edward Massey, preaching in 1772 on "The Dangerous and
Sinful Practice of Inoculation"; declaring that Job's distemper
was probably confluent small-pox; that he had been inoculated
doubtless by the devil; that diseases are sent by Providence for
the punishment of sin; and that the proposed attempt to prevent
them is "a diabolical operation". Here are the Scotch clergy of
the middle of the nineteenth century denouncing the use of
chloroform in obstetrics, because it is seeking "to avoid one
part of the primeval curse on woman". Here is Bishop Wilberforce
of Oxford anathematizing Darwin: "The principle of natural
selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God"; it
"contradicts the revealed relation of creation to its creator";
it "is inconsistent with the fulness of His glory"; it is "a
dishonoring view of nature". And the Bishop settled the matter by
asking Huxley whether he was descended from an ape through his
grandmother or grandfather.
Think what it means, friends of progress, that these
ecclesiastical figures should be set up for the reverence of the
populace, and that every time mankind is to make an advance in
power over Nature, the pioneers of thought have to come with
crow-bars and derricks and heave these figures out of the way!
And you think that conditions are changed to-day? But consider
syphilis and gonorrhea, about which we know so much, and can do
almost nothing; consider birth-control, which we are sent to jail
for so much as mentioning! Consider the divorce reforms for which
the world is crying--and for which it must wait, because of St.
Paul! Realize that up to date it has proven impossible to
persuade the English Church to permit a man to marry his deceased
wife's sister! That when the war broke upon England the whole
nation was occupied with a squabble over the disestablishment of
the church of Wales! Only since 1888 has it been legally possible
for an unbeliever to hold a seat in Parliament; while up to the
present day men are tried for blasphemy and convicted under the
decisions of Lord Hale, to the effect that "it is a crime either
to deny the truth of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian
religion or to hold them up to contempt or ridicule." Said Mr.
justice Horridge, at the West Riding Assizes, 1911: "A man is not
free in any public place to use common ridicule on subjects which
are sacred."
The purpose, as outlined by the public prosecutor in London, is
"to preserve the standard of outward decency." And you will find
that the one essential to prosecution is always that the victim
shall be obscure and helpless; never by any chance is he a duke
in a drawing-room. I will record an utterance of one of the
obscure victims of the British "standard of outward decency", a
teacher of mathematics named Holyoake, who presumed to discuss in
a public hall the starvation of the working classes of the
country. A preacher objected that he had discussed "our duty to
our neighbor" and neglected "our duty to God"; whereupon the
lecturer replied: "Our national Church and general religious
institutions cost us, upon accredited computation, about twenty
million pounds annually. Worship being thus expensive, I appeal
to your heads and your pockets whether we are not too poor to
have a God. While our distress lasts, I think it would be wise to
put deity upon half pay." And for that utterance the unfortunate
teacher of mathematics served six months in the common Gaol at
Gloucester!
While men were being tried for publishing the "Free-thinker", the
Premier of England was William Ewart Gladstone. And if you wish
to know what an established church can do by way of setting up
dullness in high places, get a volume of this "Grand Old Man's"
writings on theological and religious questions. Read his
"Juventus Mundi", in the course of which he establishes, a mystic
connection between the trident of Neptune and the Christian
Trinity! Read his efforts to prove that the writer of Genesis was
an inspired geologist! This writer of Genesis points out in
Nature "a grand, fourfold division, set forth in an orderly
succession of times: First, the water population; secondly, the
air population; thirdly, the land population of animals;
fourthly, the land population consummated in man." And it seems
that this division and sequence "is understood to have been so
affirmed in our time by natural science that it may be taken as a
demonstrated conclusion and established fact." Hence we must
conclude of the writer of Genesis that "his knowledge was
divine"! Consider that this was actually published in one of the
leading British monthlies, and that it was necessary for
Professor Huxley to answer it, pointing out that so far is it
from being true that "a fourfold division and orderly sequence"
of water, air and land animals "has been affirmed in our time by
natural science", that on the contrary, the assertion is
"directly contradictory to facts known to everyone who is
acquainted with the elements of natural science". The
distribution of fossils proves that land animals originated
before sea-animals, and there has been such a mixing of land, sea
and air animals as utterly to destroy the reputation of both
Genesis and Gladstone as possessing a divine knowledge of
Geology.
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