Everyday Americans

by Henry Seidel Canby

But as it was the earnestness of the moral enthusiasts that seemed more valuable than any reason they had for goodness, so it is the spiritual craving of American seekers that is more impressive than anything they have found. I do not undervalue the hopeful idealism of Emerson or the strong protest of the Christian Scientists against surrender to petty worry and pain. Yet in so far as we may generalize in so vast a matter, the seekers of spirituality have been singularly out of harmony with the needs of a democracy. They have found religions that solace the optimistic temperament when it has been duly intellectualized; they have found medicine for the ills of prosperous people; but the breadth and often the depth of appeal that must characterize a religion for all men they have missed or failed to seek. The Friends, later called Quakers, began with the will that all the world should become Friends; it was only in later stages that they regarded themselves as a peculiar people with whom only those fitted by temperament should join. But it is with such an exclusiveness that the seekers of to-day who promulgate religion commence. One can prophesy in advance who will or will not be Christian Scientists. And beyond the bounds of sects the spiritual adventure exhausts itself in emotional vagaries, or rises into regions of pure mysticism where, no matter how noble or how satisfying it may be for individual persons, we shall never find the religion for a democracy.

The third group is again a result of that early freeing of America from ecclesiastical control; but its members are those whom such unchartered freedom tires. The reactionaries, if I may call them by that name without offense intended, are the lovers of tradition, whose modern craving for the sanctions of religion leads them back into dependence upon the old rites, the old theologies, the old authority, which many, indeed, never have left. They, in our history, are the Federalists of religion.

And, like the seekers, they, also, have put restrictions of temperament upon their faith. For many Americans of the old stock the breach with authority made by the Reformation is permanent. They could not go back without an intellectual debasement that would be degradation, not humility. For many others the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century has still further unfitted minds for harmony with the forms and pressures of the ecclesiastical past. Sheer scientific materialism as an explanation of God and the universe has broken down. The need for religion emerges from the controversy more palpitating than before. Nevertheless, the science of theology has suffered from the science of inductive research. Tradition carries many a man to the door of past beauty, decorum, and harmonious faith, and he longs to enter. But his way is barred. He leans upon and loves the past. He cannot enter it. The traditionalist, to give him a better and more lovely name, has been a bringer of joy to many; but, like the seeker, his help has been partial only. He is a chaplain attendant upon the regiments of his own faith.

But by far the most significant product of our precocious religiosity in America and our early emancipation from ecclesiastical control has been indifferentism—that American indifferentism which has been easy because of our willingness to be responsible for our own evils, wide-spread because of our necessary obsession with material development, defensible in our century of good luck and the easy optimism that accompanies it.

Here lies the group by all odds the largest, and certainly worthy of the most anxious study. Here belongs the mass of everyday Americans upon whom rests the outcome of the immediate future. What lies beneath the seeming religious indifference of the American who is not ritualist, reformer, or seeker for spiritual consolation, who is, in short, the average American of office, mill, and law-court? That is the crux of the problem.

Indifferentism, of course, is the fashion of the age, and fashions are always delusive. In a Pullman smoker, watching the faces that, like a day of south wind in July, are soggy, unillumined, one despairs of one’s America. The human product of too much selling and buying has never been attractive; our half-education and the semi-intelligence that accompanies it have but defined the ill features, like careful breeding of pig or goat. It was a novel principle of primitive Christianity that lowliness and poverty might hide the noblest soul. If you followed these men home, saw their minds freed from the pressure of competition and out of the atmosphere of distrust, would your opinion alter? Are their religious instincts hidden by the mask of American commercialism, inactive merely because suppressed by custom and fashion? Are they lying fallow? Or are they like seed too long dormant and decaying?

If only we knew by what ingenious statistics these men might be classified, prophecy would not be difficult. If only we knew how many have become mere traffickers in bodily comfort, sensualists in fact, whatever they may be in name. If only we knew how many in their hearts were dumb seekers for some spiritual satisfactions that would raise the heart in adversity, lift the mind above the necessity for safety, pleasure, success, so that all might be pursued, all enjoyed, without flatness and disillusion. But no answer is ready; for there has been no test of the latent religion of America.

It is true that in the mass of American indifferentism the suppressed religious instinct exhibits itself by queer shoots of emotional enthusiasm for high things whether in war or in peace. It shows itself, or rather its suppression, by unexpected sentimentalism in hard places. It touches with melancholy many a typical American face in which one would expect to find self-satisfaction or arrogance. We struggle with our religious emotions in youth, suppress them in the middle years; in old age, deep buried like a hidden disease, they torment us. Old age is proverbially restless in America.

Nevertheless, the test that will reveal how much religion is latent in our democracy has not come yet; nor have our moral enthusiasms, our spiritual adventures, our reachings for tradition, been in our day really tested for the spirit behind them. There is reason to believe that the time is approaching. In a normal evolution of the bourgeois society that has made America, some clear revelation must have come of the religious spirit that as a race and a nation we are developing. Doubtless we would slowly have found our way to an expression more true to our nature than any of the partial modes so far allowed us. But there will be no normal, or at least no slow, evolution in the religious emotions of the old Americans. A factor from without, a sudden emergency, calls for an immediate reckoning of our spiritual assets. All, in every class, who are responsible for the American inheritance of ideals and morale and character are challenged, but especially the indifferents. Those neutrals in the conflict between spirit and matter can stay neutral no longer.

Bourgeois America, which means most of America, is, as every one sees, on the verge of a revolution like the political-social revolution of 1800. For a century we have pursued economics, and now economics is pursuing us. A new class is coming to the front, and yet that, perhaps, is of minor importance in America, where money and a little education extinguish distinctions between classes in two decades. What is coming with more significance is a new social system, wherein a new control of industry and a more equitable distribution of the products thereof is to be substituted for competitive individualism. Many are skeptical of the proposed practices by which this revolution is to be accomplished; few now doubt that its theory is correct and will some day be demonstrated.