The Profits of Religion
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Upton Sinclair >> The Profits of Religion
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And there was William Wilberforce, as sincere a philanthropist as
Anglicanism ever produced, an ardent supporter of Bible societies
and foreign missions, a champion of the anti-slavery movement,
and also of the ruthless "Combination Laws," which denied to
British wage-slaves all chance of bettering their lot.
Wilberforce published a "Practical View of the System of
Christianity", in which he told unblushingly what the Anglican
establishment is for. In a chapter which he described as "the
basis of all politics," he explained that the purpose of religion
is to remind the poor:
That their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand
of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties,
and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the objects
about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are not worth the
contest; that the peace of mind, which Religion offers
indiscriminately to all ranks, affords more true satisfaction
than all the expensive pleasures which are beyond the poor man's
reach; that in this view the poor have the advantage; that if
their superiors enjoy more abundant comforts, they are also
exposed to many temptations from which the inferior classes are
happily extempted; that, "having food and raiment, they should be
therewith content," since their situation in life, with all its
evils, is better than they have deserved at the hand of God; and
finally, that all human distinctions will soon be done away, and
the true followers of Christ will all, as children of the same
Father, be alike admitted to the possession of the same heavenly
inheritance. Such are the blessed effects of Christianity on the
temporal well-being of political communities.
The Court Circular
The Anglican system of submission has been transplanted intact to
the soil of America. When King George the Third lost the
sovereignty of the colonies, the bishops of his divinely inspired
church lost the control of the clergy across the seas; but this
revolution was purely one of Church politics--in doctrine and
ritual the "Protestant Episcopal Church of America" remained in
every way Anglican. The little children of our free republic are
taught the same slave-catechism, "to order myself lowly and
reverently to all my betters." The only difference is that
instead of being told "to honour and obey the King," they are
told "to honour and obey the civil authority."
It is the Church of Good Society in England, and it is the same
in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington,
Charleston. Just as our ruling classes have provided themselves
with imitation English schools and imitation English manners and
imitation English clothes--so in their Heaven they have provided
an imitation English monarch. I wonder how many Americans realize
the treason to democracy they are committing when they allow
their children to be taught a symbolism and liturgy based upon
absolutist ideas. I take up the hymn-book--not the English, but
the sturdy, independent, democratic American hymn-book. I have
not opened it for twenty years, yet the greater part of its
contents is as familiar to me as the syllables of my own name. I
read:
Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore Thee, Casting down their
golden crowns around the glassy sea; Cherubim and seraphim
bowing down before Thee, Which wert, and art, and ever more
shall be!
One might quote a hundred other hymns made thus out of royal
imagery. I turn at random to the part headed "General," and find
that there is hardly one hymn in which there is not "king ... ..
throne," or some image of homage and flattery. The first hymn
begins--
Ancient of days, Who sittest, throned in glory;
To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray.
And the second--
Christ, whose glory fills the skies---
And the third--
Lord of all being, throned afar,
Thy glory flames from sun and star.
There is a court in Heaven above, to which all good Britons look
up, and about which they read with exactly the same thrills as
they read the Court Circular. The two courts have the same
ethical code and the same manners; their Sovereigns are jealous,
greedy of attention, self-conscious and profoundly serious,
punctilious and precise; their existence consisting of an endless
round of ceremonies, and they being incapable of boredom. No
member of the Royal Family can escape this regime even if he
wishes; and no more can any member of the Holy Family--not even
the meek and lowly Jesus, who chose a carpenter's wife for his
mother, and showed all his earthly days a preference for low
society.
This unconventional Son lived obscurely; he never carried
weapons, he could not bear to have so much as a human ear cut off
in his presence. But see how he figures in the Court Circular:
The Son of God goes forth to war,
A kingly crown to gain:
His blood-red banner streams afar:
Who follows in His train?
This carpenter's son was one of the most unpretentious men on
earth; utterly simple and honest--he would not even let anyone
praise him. When some one called him "good Master," he answered,
quickly, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good save one,
that is, God." But this simplicity has been taken with
deprecation by his church, which persists in heaping compliments
upon him in conventional, courtly style:
The company of angels
Are praising Thee on high;
And mortal men, and all things
Created, make reply: All Glory, laud and honour,
To Thee, Redeemer, King. . . . .
The impression a modern man gets from all this is the unutterable
boredom that Heaven must be. Can one imagine a more painful
occupation than that of the saints--casting down their golden
crowns around the glassy sea--unless it be that of the
Triumvirate itself, compelled to sit through eternity watching
these saints, and listening to their mawkish and superfluous
compliments!
But one can understand that such things are necessary in a
monarchy; they are necessary if you are going to have Good
Society, and a Good Society church. For Good Society is precisely
the same thing as Heaven; that is, a place to which only a few
can get admission, and those few are bored. They spend their time
going through costly formalities--not because they enjoy it, but
because of its effect upon the populace, which reads about them
and sees their pictures in the papers, and now and then is
allowed to catch a glimpse of their physical Presences, as at the
horse-show, or the opera, or the coaching-parade.
Horn-blowing
I know the Church of Good Society in America, having studied it
from the inside. I was an extraordinarily devout little boy; one
of my earliest recollections--I cannot have been more than four
years of age--is of carrying a dust-brush about the house as the
choir-boy carried the golden cross every Sunday morning. I
remember asking if I might say the "Lord's prayer" in this
fascinating play; and my mother's reply: "If you say it
reverently." When I was thirteen, I attended service, of my own
volition and out of my own enthusiasm, every single day during
the forty days of Lent; at the age of fifteen I was teaching
Sunday-school. It was the Church of the Holy Communion, at Sixth
Avenue and Twentieth Street, New York; and those who know the
city will understand that this is a peculiar location--precisely
half way between the homes of some of the oldest and most august
of the city's aristocracy, and some of the vilest and most filthy
of the city's slums. The aristocracy were paying for the church,
and occupied the best pews; they came, perfectly clad, aus dem Ei
gegossen, as the Germans say, with the manner they so carefully
cultivate, gracious, yet infinitely aloof. The service was made
for them--as all the rest of the world is made for them; the
populace was permitted to occupy a fringe of vacant seats.
The assistant clergyman was an Englishman, and a gentleman;
orthodox, yet the warmest man's heart I have ever known. He could
not bear to have the church remain entirely the church of the
rich; he would go persistently into the homes of the poor,
visiting the old slum women in their pitifully neat little
kitchens, and luring their children with entertainments and
Christmas candy. They were corralled into the Sunday-school,
where it was my duty to give them what they needed for the health
of their souls.
I taught them out of a book of lessons; and one Sunday it would
be Moses in the Bulrushes, and next Sunday it would be Jonah and
the Whale, and next Sunday it would be Joshua blowing down the
walls of Jericho. These stories were reasonably entertaining, but
they seemed to me futile, not to the point. There were little
morals tagged to them, but these lacked relationship to the lives
of little slum-boys. Be good and you will be happy, love the Lord
and all will be well with you; which was about as true and as
practical as the procedure of the Fijians, blowing horns to drive
away a pestilence.
I had a mind, you see, and I was using it. I was reading the
papers, and watching politics and business. I, followed the fates
of my little slum-boys--and what I saw was that Tammany Hall was
getting them. The liquor-dealers and the brothel-keepers, the
panders and the pimps, the crap-shooters and the petty
thieves--all these were paying the policeman and the politician
for a chance to prey upon my boys; and when the boys got into
trouble, as they were continually doing, it was the clergyman who
consoled them in prison--but it was the Tammany leader who saw
the judge and got them out. So these boys got their lesson even
earlier in life than I got mine--that the church was a kind of
amiable fake, a pious horn-blowing; while the real thing was
Tammany.
I talked about this with the vestrymen and the ladies of Good
Society; they were deeply pained, but I noticed that they did
nothing practical about it; and gradually, as I went on to
investigate, I discovered the reason--that their incomes came
from real estate, traction, gas and other interests, which were
contributing the main part of the campaign expenses of the
corrupt Tammany machine, and of its equally corrupt rival. So it
appeared that these immaculate ladies and gentlemen, aus dem Ei
gegossen, were themselves engaged, unconsciously, perhaps, but
none the less effectively, in spreading the pestilence against
which they were blowing their religious horns!
So little by little I saw my beautiful church for what it was and
is: a great capitalist interest, an integral and essential part
of a gigantic predatory system. I saw that its ethical and
cultural and artistic features, however sincerely they might be
meant by individual clergymen, were nothing but a bait, a device
to lure the poor into the trap of submission to their exploiters.
And as I went on probing into the secret life of the great
Metropolis of Mammon, and laying bare its infamies to the world,
I saw the attitude of the church to such work; I met, not
sympathy and understanding, but sneers and denunciation--until
the venerable institution which had once seemed dignified and
noble became to me as a sepulchre of corruption.
Trinity Corporation
There stands on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street a towering
brown-stone edifice, one of the most beautiful and most famous
churches in America. As a child I have walked through its church
yard and read the quaint and touching inscriptions on its
gravestones; when I was a little older, and knew Wall Street, it
seemed to me a sublime thing that here in the very heart of the
world's infamy there should be raised, like a finger of warning,
this symbol of Eternity and Judgment. Its great bell rang at
noon-time, and all the traders and their wage-slaves had to
listen, whether they would or no! Such was Old Trinity to my
young soul; and what is it in reality?
The story was told some ten years ago by Charles Edward Russell.
Trinity Corporation is the name of the concern, and it is one of
the great landlords of New York. In the early days it bought a
number of farms, and these it has held, as the city has grown up
around them, until in 1908 their value was estimated at anywhere
from forty to a hundred million dollars. The true amount has
never been made public; to quote Russell's words:
The real owners of the property are the communicants of the
church. For 94 years none of the owners has known the extent of
the property, nor the amount of the revenue therefrom, nor what
is done with the money. Every attempt to learn even the simplest
fact about these matters has been baffled. The management is a
self perpetuating body, without responsibility and without
supervision.
And the writer goes on to describe the business policy of this
great corporation, which is simply the English land system
complete. It refuses to sell the land, but rents it for long
periods, and the tenant builds the house, and then when the lease
expires, the Corporation takes over the house for a nominal sum.
Thus it has purchased houses for as low as $200, and made them
into tenements, and rented them to the swarming poor for a total
of fifty dollars a month. The houses were not built for
tenements, they have no conveniences, they are not fit for the
habitation of animals. The article, in Everybody's Magazine for
July, 1908, gives pictures of them, which are horrible beyond
belief. To quote the writer again:
Decay, neglect and squalor seem to brood wherever Trinity is an
owner. Gladly would I give to such a charitable and benevolent
institution all possible credit for a spirit of improvement
manifested anywhere, but I can find no such manifestation. I have
tramped the Eighth Ward day after day with a list of Trinity
properties in my hand, and of all the tenement houses that stand
there on Trinity land, I have not found one that is not a
disgrace to civilization and to the City of New York.
It happens that I once knew the stately prelate who presided over
this Corporation of Corruption. I imagine how he would have
shivered and turned pale had some angel whispered to him what
devilish utterances were some day to proceed from the lips of the
little cherub with shining face and shining robes who acted as
the bishop's attendant in the stately ceremonials of the Church!
Truly, even into the goodly company of the elect, even to the
most holy places of the temple, Satan makes his treacherous way!
Even under the consecrated hands of the bishop! For while the
bishop was blessing me and taking me into the company of the
sanctified, I was thinking about what the papers had reported,
that the bishop's wife had been robbed of fifty thousand dollars
worth of jewels! It did not seem quite in accordance with the
doctrine of Jesus that a bishop's wife should possess fifty
thousand dollars worth of jewels, or that she should be setting
the blood-hounds of the police on the train of a human being. I
asked my clergyman friend about it, and remember his patient
explanation--that the bishop had to know all classes and
conditions of men: his wife had to go among the rich as well as
the poor, and must be able to dress so that she would not be
embarrassed. The Bishop at this time was making it his life-work
to raise a million dollars for the beginning of a great Episcopal
cathedral; and this of course compelled him to spend much time
among the rich!
The explanation satisfied me; for of course I thought there had
to be cathedrals--despite the fact that both St. Stephen and St.
Paul had declared that "the Lord dwelleth not in temples made
with hands." In the twenty-five years which have passed since
that time the good Bishop has passed to his eternal reward, but
the mighty structure which is a monument to his visitations among
the rich towers over the city from its vantage-point on
Morningside Heights. It is called the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine; and knowing what I know about the men who contributed its
funds, and about the general functions of the churches of the
Metropolis of Mammon, it would not seem to me less holy if it
were built, like the monuments of ancient ravagers, out of the
skulls of human beings.
Spiritual Interpretation
There remains to say a few words as to the intellectual functions
of the Fifth Avenue clergy. Let us realize at the outset that
they do their preaching in the name of a proletarian rebel, who
was crucified as a common criminal because, as they said, "He
stirreth up the people." An embarrassing "Savior" for the church
of Good Society, you might imagine; but they manage to fix him up
and make him respectable.
I remember something analogous in my own boyhood. All day
Saturday I ran about with the little street rowdies, I stole
potatoes and roasted them in vacant lots, I threw mud from the
roofs of apartment-houses; but on Saturday night I went into a
tub and was lathered and scrubbed, and on Sunday I came forth in
a newly brushed suit, a clean white collar and a shining tie and
a slick derby hat and a pair of tight gloves which made me
impotent for mischief. Thus I was taken and paraded up Fifth
Avenue, doing my part of the duties of Good Society. And all
church-members go through this same performance; the oldest and
most venerable of them steal potatoes and throw mud all week
--and then take a hot bath of repentance and put on the clean
clothing of piety. In this same way their ministers of religion
are occupied to scrub and clean and dress up their disreputable
Founder--to turn him from a proletarian rebel into a
stained-glass-window divinity.
The man who really lived, the carpenter's son, they take out and
crucify all over again. As a young poet has phrased it, they nail
him to a jeweled cross with cruel nails of gold. Come with me to
the New Golgotha and witness this crucifixion; take the nails of
gold in your hands, try the weight of the jeweled sledges! Here
is a sledge, in the form of a dignified and scholarly volume,
published by the exclusive house of Scribner, and written by the
Bishop of my boyhood, the Bishop whose train I carried in the
stately ceremonials: "The Citizen in His Relation to the
Industrial Situation," by the Right Reverend Henry Codman Potter,
D. D., L. L. D., D. C. L.--a course of lectures delivered before
the sons of our predatory classes at Yale University, under the
endowment of a millionaire mining king, founder of the
Phelps-Dodge corporation, which the other day carried out the
deportation from their homes of a thousand striking miners at
Bisbee, Arizona. Says my Bishop:
Christ did not denounce wealth any more than he denounced
pauperism. He did not abhor money; he used it. He did not abhor
the company of rich men; he sought it. He did not invariably
scorn or even resent a certain profuseness of expenditure.
And do you think that the late Bishop of J. P. Morgan and Company
stands alone as an utterer of scholarly blasphemy, a driver of
golden nails? In the course of this book there will march before
us a long line of the clerical retainers of Privilege, on their
way to the New Golgotha to crucify the carpenter's son: the
Rector of the Money Trust, the Preacher of the Coal Trust, the
Priest of the Traction Trust, the Archbishop of Tammany, the
Chaplain of the Millionaires' Club, the Pastor of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, the Religious Editor of the New Haven, the
Sunday-school Superintendent of Standard Oil. We shall try the
weight of their jewelled sledges--books, sermons,
newspaper-interviews, after-dinner speeches--wherewith they pound
their golden nails of sophistry into the bleeding hands and feet
of the proletarian Christ.
Here, for example, is Rev. F. G. Peabody, Professor of Christian
Morals at Harvard University. Prof. Peabody has written several
books on the social teachings of Jesus; he quotes the most rabid
of the carpenter's denunciations of the rich, and says:
Is it possible that so obvious and so limited a message as this,
a teaching so slightly distinguished from the curbstone rhetoric
of a modern agitator, can be an adequate reproduction of the
scope and power of the teaching of Jesus?
The question answers itself: Of course not! For Jesus was a
gentleman; he is the head of a church attended by gentlemen, of
universities where gentlemen are educated. So the Professor of
Christian Morals proceeds to make a subtle analysis of Jesus'
actions; demonstrating therefrom that there are three proper uses
to be made of great wealth: first, for almsgiving--"The poor ye
have always with you!"; second, for beauty and culture--buying
wine for wedding-feasts, and ointment-boxes and other objets de
vertu; and third, "stewardship," "trusteeship"--which in plain
English is "Big Business."
I have used the illustration of soap and hot water; one can
imagine he is actually watching the scrubbing process, seeing the
proletarian Founder emerging all new and respectable under the
brush of this capitalist professor. The professor has a rule all
his own for reading the scriptures; he tells us that when there
are two conflicting sayings, the rule of interpretation is that
"the more spiritual is to be preferred." Thus, one gospel makes
Jesus say: "Blessed are ye poor." Another puts it: "Blessed are
the poor in spirit." The first one is crude and literal;
obviously the second must be what Jesus meant! In other words,
the professor and his church have made for their economic masters
a treacherous imitation virtue to be taught to wage-slaves, a
quality of submissiveness, impotence and futility, which they
call by the name of "spirituality". This virtue they exalt above
all others, and in its name they cut from the record of Jesus
everything which has relation to the realities of life!
So here is our Professor Peabody, sitting in the Plummer chair at
Harvard, writing on "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," and
explaining:
The fallacy of the Socialist program is not in its radicalism,
but in its externalism. It proposes to accomplish by economic
change what can be attained by nothing less than spiritual
regeneration.
And here is "The Churchman," organ of the Episcopalians of New
York, warning us:
It is necessary to remember that something more than material and
temporal considerations are involved. There are things of more
importance to the purposes of God and to the welfare of humanity
than economic readjustments and social amelioration.
And again:
Without doubt there is a strong temptation today, bearing upon
clergy and laity alike, to address their religious energies too
exclusively to those tasks whereby human life may be made more
abundant and wholesome materially..... We need constantly to be
reminded that spiritual things come first.
There come before my mental eye the elegant ladies and gentlemen
for whom these comfortable sayings are prepared: the vestrymen
and pillars of the Church, with black frock coats and black kid
gloves and shiny top-hats; the ladies of Good Society with their
Easter costumes in pastel shades, their gracious smiles and their
sweet intoxicating odors. I picture them as I have seen them at
St. George's, where that aged wild boar, Pierpont Morgan, the
elder, used to pass the collection plate; at Holy Trinity, where
they drove downtown in old-fashioned carriages with grooms and
footmen sitting like twin statues of insolence; at St. Thomas',
where you might see all the "Four Hundred" on exhibition at once;
at St. Mary the Virgin's, where the choir paraded through the
aisles, swinging costly incense into my childish nostrils, the
stout clergyman walking alone with nose upturned, carrying on his
back a jewelled robe for which some adoring female had paid sixty
thousand dollars. "Spiritual things come first?" Ah, yes! "Seek
first the kingdom of God, and the jewelled robes shall be added
unto you!" And it is so dreadful about the French and German
Socialists, who, as the "Churchman" reports, "make a creed out of
materialism." But then, what is this I find in one issue of the
organ of the "Church of Good Society"?
Business men contribute to the Y. M. C. A. because they realize
that if their employes are well cared for and religiously
influenced, they can be of greater service in business!
Who let that material cat out of the spiritual bag?
BOOK THREE
The Church of the Servant-girls
Was it for this--that prayers like these
Should spend themselves about thy feet,
And with hard, overlabored knees
Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat
Bosoms too lean to suckle sons
And fruitless as their orisons?
Was it for this--that men should make
Thy name a fetter on men's necks,
Poor men made poorer for thy sake,
And women withered out of sex?
Was it for this--that slaves should be--
Thy word was passed to set men free?
Swinburne.
Charity
As everyone knows, the "society lady" is not an independent and
self-sustaining phenomenon. For every one of these exquisite,
sweet-smelling creatures that you meet on Fifth Avenue, there
must be at home a large number of other women who live sterile
and empty lives, and devote themselves to cleaning up after their
luckier sisters. But these "domestics" also are human beings;
they have emotions--or, in religious parlance, "souls;" it is
necessary to provide a discipline to keep them from appropriating
the property of their mistresses, also to keep them from becoming
enceinte. So it comes about that there are two cathedrals in New
York: one, St. John the Divine, for the society ladies, and the
other, St. Patrick's, for the servant-girls. The latter is
located on Fifth Avenue, where its towering white spires divide
with the homes of the Vanderbilts the interest of the crowds of
sight-seers. Now, early every Sunday morning, before "Good
Society" has opened its eyes, you may see the devotees of the
Irish snake-charmer hurrying to their orisons, each with a little
black prayer-book in her hand. What is it they do inside? What
are they taught about life? This is the question to which we have
next to give attention.
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