The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

One must respect what is respectable only.

“Christianity,” Guizot said, “is a necessity for mankind; it is a school of reverence.” No doubt; but less so perhaps than Hindu religions, which go the length of proposing the absolute division of mankind into castes as an object for reverence; however contrary it may be to the natural sentiments of mankind and the operation of social laws. Assuredly no society can subsist if its members neither respect nor reverence what is respectable and venerable; respect is decidedly an indispensable element in national life; the fact is one which we too easily forget in France; but society is barred from progress if one respects what is not respectable, and progress is a condition of life for a society. Tell me what you respect, and I will tell you what you are. The progress of human reverence for objects ever higher and more high is symbolic of all other kinds of progress achieved by the human mind.

Christianity quite the opposite of a defence against communism.

But for religion, say the Guizot school, the property-question would sweep away the masses of the people; it is the Church which holds them in check. If there is a property-question, let us not seek to ignore it; let us labour sincerely and actively at its solution. Qui trompe-t-on ici? Is God simply a means of saving the capitalist? More than that, the property-question is not one which is more intimately bound up to-day with religion than with free-thought. Christianity, which implicitly contains within it the principles of communism, is itself responsible for spreading ideas among the people which have inevitably germinated in the course of the great intellectual germination which distinguishes the present epoch. M. de Laveleye, one of the defenders of liberal Christianity, confesses as much. It was well known that among the first Christians all property was held in common, and that communism was the immediate consequence of baptism.[74] “We hold everything in common except our women,” Tertullian and St. Justin say; “we share everything.”[75] It is well known with what vehemence the Fathers of the Church have attacked the right of private property. “The earth,” says St. Ambrose, “was given to the rich and poor in common. Why, oh, ye rich! should ye arrogate to yourselves alone the ownership of it?” “Nature created rights in common, usurpation has created private rights.” “Wealth is always the product of robbery,” says St. Jerome. “The rich man is a robber,” says St. Basil. “Iniquity is the basis of private property,” says St. Clement. “The rich man is a brigand,” says St. Chrysostom. Bossuet himself cries, in a sermon on the distribution of the necessities of life: “The murmurs of the poor are just: why this inequality of condition?” And, in the sermon on the eminent dignity of the poor: “The politics of Jesus are directly opposed to those of this century.” And finally Pascal, summing up in an illustration all the socialistic ideas which compose the bulk of Christian doctrine: “‘That dog is mine,’ say these poor children; ‘that place there is my place in the sun.’ Behold the beginning and the type of the usurpation of the earth.” When “these poor children” are men, they do not always view the usurpation of the earth with resignation; from the Middle Ages down they have, from time to time, risen in revolt and there have been resulting massacres. Men like Pastoureaux and Jacques in France and Wat Tyler in England, the anabaptists and John of Leyden in Germany, are examples of what we mean. But, these great explosions of popular clamour once at an end, the Christian priest had always at his disposal, to subdue the crowd, a robust doctrine of compensation in heaven for one’s sufferings on earth; all the beatitudes are summed up in “Blessed are the poor, for they shall see God.” In our days, owing to the progress of the natural sciences, anything like certitude on the subject of compensation in heaven has disappeared; even the Christian, less sure of Paradise, aspires to see the justice and compensations of heaven realized in this world. The most durable element in Christianity is, therefore, less the check that it imposes upon the masses than the contempt for the established order with which it inspires them. Religion is nowadays obliged to call in social science to aid it in its struggle against socialism. The true principle of private property as of social authority cannot be religious; it lies essentially in the sentiment of the rights of other people and in an increasingly scientific acquaintance with the conditions of social and political life.

Religion not necessary to morality.

But is not religion a safeguard of popular morality? It is true that immorality and crime are habitually conceived as associated with non-religion, and as products of it. Criminologists, however, have demonstrated that no proposition could be less tenable. If one considers the mass of the delinquents in any country, one will find that irreligion among them is an exception, and a rare exception. In unusually religious countries like England delinquents are not less numerous, and the average of belief among them is higher; the greater number, Mayhew says, profess to believe in the Bible. In France, where non-religion is so common, it is natural that it should also be common among the criminal classes, but it is far from being the rule; it is most frequent among the leaders, the organizers of crime, those, in effect, who rise above the mass of their fellows, like Mandrin in the last century, La Pommerais, Lacenaire. If sociologists find themselves obliged to attribute a positive antisocial bias to certain criminals, it is not surprising that they should recognize in a number of them an amount of instruction and a degree of talent amply sufficient to disembarrass them of the superstitious beliefs of the multitude, which are shared by their companions in crime. Neither their talents nor their culture have sufficed absolutely to check their evil disposition, but certainly they have not been responsible for it. Criminologists cite a number of facts which go to prove that the most minute and sincere practice of religion may go along with the greatest crimes. Despine relates that Bourse had scarcely finished a robbery and a homicide, before he went to kneel and take part in a church service. G., a courtesan, as she set fire to her lover’s house, cried: “God and the ever blessed Virgin do the rest!” The wife of Parency, while her husband was killing an old man as a preliminary to robbery, was praying God for her husband’s success. It is well known how religious the Marquise of Brinvilliers was; her very condemnation was facilitated by the fact of her having written with her own hands a secret confession of her sins in which she made mention, along with parricides, fratricides, arsons, and poisonings without number, of the list of the number of times that she had been remiss or negligent in confession.[76] Religion is no more responsible for all these crimes than non-religion is; the higher elements of both are equally debarred of entrance into the brain of a criminal. Although the moral sense and religious sentiment are in origin distinct, they act and react incessantly upon each other. It may be announced, as a law, that no one whose moral sense is obliterated can be capable of experiencing genuine religious sentiment in all its purity, though such a person may well be more than usually apt to attach a value to the superstitious forms of a cult. The religious sentiment, at its height, always rests upon a refined moral sense, although, when religious sentiment goes further and becomes fanaticism, it may react on and debase the moral sense. On a person who is deficient in moral sense, religion produces no effects but such as are evil—fanaticism, formalism, and hypocrisy—because it is of necessity ill-comprehended and misconstrued.

Ignorance, not Catholicism, responsible for immorality.

Catholic countries often supply an unusually high percentage of criminals, because Catholic countries are more ignorant than Protestant countries. In Italy, for example, as many as sixteen out of every hundred deaths in the Papal States and Southern Italy, have at times been deaths by violence, whereas in Liguria and Piedmont only two or three out of every hundred are deaths by violence. The population of Paris is not, on the whole, more immoral than that of any other great European city, although it is distinctly less religious; what a difference, for example, between London and Paris! The churches, temples, and synagogues in Paris would not hold one-tenth of the population, and, as they are half empty in time of services, a statistician may with some show of reason conclude that only about a twentieth of the population fulfil their religious duties. Whereas Paris contains only 169 places of worship, London, in 1882, possessed 1231—without counting the religious assemblies which regularly gather in the parks, the public squares, and even under the railway viaducts.

Non-religion not responsible for French Revolution and the Commune.

But should not the crimes of the Commune and those of the French Revolution be set down to non-religion? One might, with more show of truth, render religion responsible for the massacres of St. Bartholomew and of the Dragonnades, for, in the wars of the Huguenots, of the Vaudois, of the Albigenses, the issue was a religious issue, whereas in the case of the Commune the issue was wholly a social one; religion was only very indirectly involved in it. The analogy for the Commune is to be found in the wars concerning the agrarian laws of ancient Rome, or in contemporary strikes which are so often accompanied by bloodshed, or in any of the brutal uprisings of the labourer or the peasant against the capitalist or the owner of the soil. Be it remarked, moreover, that in all these and the like contests the stronger party—the representative of society and, it is alleged, of religion—commits, in the name of repression, violences comparable to and sometimes less excusable than those with which they charge the party of disorder.