The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Labour for labour’s sake.

What demoralizes races and peoples is not so much the downfall of religion as the luxury and idleness of the few and the discontented poverty of the many. In society demoralization begins at the two extremes, top and bottom. The law of labour is open to two species of revolt; the revolt of the discontented working man who curses the law of labour even while he obeys it, and the revolt of the idle noble, or man of fortune, who ignores it simply. The richest classes in society are often those whose lives show a minimum of devotion, of disinterestedness, of true moral elevation. For a fashionable woman, for example, the duties of life too frequently consist in an unbroken round of trifles; she is utterly ignorant of what it means to take pains. To bear a child or two (to exceed the number of three, one of them has said, is the height of immorality), to have a nurse to take care of them, to be faithful to one’s husband, at least within the limits of coquetry—behold the whole duty of woman! Too frequently, in the upper classes, duty comes to be conceived simply as a matter of abstinence, of not being as nasty or as wicked as one might. Temptations to do evil increase in number as one mounts in the social scale, whereas what one may call temptations to do good decrease in number. Fortune enables one to hire a substitute, so to speak, in all the duties of life—in caring for the sick, in nursing children, in rearing them, and so forth; the rich are not obliged to pay, as the saying is, with their person—payer de la personne! Wealth too often produces a species of personal avarice, of miserliness of one’s self, a restriction of moral and physical activity, an impoverishment of the individual and of the race. The shopkeeping class constitute the least immoral section of the rich, and that because they preserve their habits of work; but they are constantly affected by the example of the higher classes, who take a pride in being useless. The remnant of morality, which exists among the middle class, is partly due to the love of money; money does, in effect, possess one advantage, that it must in general be worked for. Nobles and business men love money but in different ways. Young men of good family love it as a means of expense and of prodigality, people in a small way of business love it for its own sake, and out of avarice. Avarice is a powerful safeguard for the remnants of morality in a people. It coincides, in almost all its results, with a disinterested love of labour; it exercises no evil influence except in the matter of marriage, where the question of the girl’s portion becomes paramount, and in the matter of children, of which it tends to restrict the number. All things considered, as between prodigality and avarice, the moralist is obliged to cast his vote for the latter on the ground that it is not favourable to debauchery, and does not therefore tend to dissolve society; both are maladies which benumb and may destroy one, but the former is contagious and is transmitted by contact. We may add that love of expense rarely serves to encourage regular labour: it produces, rather, an appetite for gambling and even for robbery; clever strokes on the stock-exchange amount, in certain cases, to robbery pure and simple. Thence arises a secondary demoralizing influence. Prodigals are necessarily attracted to the more or less shaky forms of financial speculation, by which, absolutely without labour properly so called, more money can be amassed than by labour; the miser, on the contrary, will hesitate, will prefer effort to risk, and his effort will be more beneficial to society. In effect, the only thing that can maintain society in a healthy state is that love of labour for its own sake which is so rarely met with, and which one must endeavour to develop; but this love of intellectual and physical labour is in nowise bound up with religion; it is bound up with a certain broad culture of the mind and heart which render idleness insupportable.

Religion the creature of circumstance.

Similarly with the other moral and social virtues which are alleged to be inseparable from religion. In all times humanity has found a certain average of vice, as of virtue, necessary. Religions themselves have always been obliged to give way before certain prevalent habits and passions. If we had been living at the time of the Reformation, we should have heard Catholic priests maintaining, with all the seriousness in the world, that, but for Catholic dogmas and the authority of the Pope, society would dissolve and perish. Happily experience has proved that these dogmas and that authority are not indispensable to social life; the conscience of mankind has attained its majority and no longer needs the services of a guardian. The day will come, no doubt, when Frenchmen will no more feel an inclination to enter into a house of stone and invoke God to the sound of a hymn than an Englishman or a German experiences to-day an inclination to kneel before a priest and confess to him.

III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion and free-thought?

Dependence of Catholicism on power.

Over and above free-thinkers, properly so called, there exists in every country a class of men who understand perfectly the defects in the religions in force about them, but have not the power of mind necessary to lift them above revealed dogma generally, and every form of external cult and rite. They begin accordingly to dabble in the religions of neighbouring peoples. A religion which is not in force in one’s immediate neighbourhood always possesses the advantage of being seen from a distance. At a distance its faults are scarcely distinguishable, and the imagination freely endows it with all excellent qualities. How many things and persons gain thus by aloofness! When one has seen one’s ideal, it is sometimes good not to approach it too near if one is to preserve one’s reverence for it. A number of Englishmen, indignant at the aridity of the hard and blind fanaticism of the extreme Protestants, cast envious glances across the Channel, where a religion seems to reign that is more friendly to art,—at once more æsthetic and more mystical, capable of affording a completer satisfaction to certain human needs. Among those who are thus favourable to a properly understood Catholicism may be cited Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman; and one might even add the Queen of England herself. In France, as might be expected, quite the opposite disposition obtains. Wearied of the Catholic Church and of its intolerance, we should gladly escape its dominion: compared with the objections against Catholicism which assail our eyes, the objections against Protestantism appear to us as trifling. And the same notion has occurred simultaneously to a number of distinguished Frenchmen: why should France remain Catholic, at least in name? Why should not France adopt the religion of the more robust people who have recently vanquished her; the religion of Germany, of England, of the United States, of all the young, strong, and active nations? Why not begin again the labour interrupted by the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the Edict of Nantes? Even if one should not succeed in converting the masses, it would suffice, according to the partisans of Protestantism, to propagate the new religion among the élite of the population very sensibly to modify the general course of our government, of our national spirit, even of our laws. The laws regulating the relations of Church and State would promptly be corrected; they would be reconstructed so as to offer protection to the development of the Protestant religion, as they at this moment do in a thousand ways to the outworn religion of Catholicism. Ultimately Protestantism would be declared to be the national religion of France; the religion, in other words, toward which she ought to endeavour to move, and which constitutes her real ideal, her sole hope of the future, the sole means open to Latin nations to escape death, and to outlive, in some sense, themselves. Add that, in the judgment of the authors of this hypothesis, the Protestant religion, once fairly entered in the lists against Catholicism, must inevitably and speedily win the day; the iron pot would make short work of the earthen pot. The partisans of Protestantism invoke history in support of their conclusions; Protestantism was vanquished among us by force, and not by persuasion; its defeat is therefore not definitive. Wherever Catholicism has not employed violence, persecution, and crime to maintain itself, it has always succumbed; its only tenable argument has been to put its opponents to death; to-day this comfortable method of backing the syllogism by the sword is out of date, and Catholicism is condemned the instant it is attacked. It contains, moreover, an essential and irremediable vice, auricular confession. By the confessional it excites the open or secret hostility of every husband and every father, who sees the priest interposing between him and his wife, between him and his children. The confessor is a supernumerary in every family; a member who has neither the same interests nor the same ideas, and who, nevertheless, is perfectly informed of everything the other members do, and can, in a thousand ways, oppose their projects, and, at the moment when they least expect it, bar their path. When one takes into consideration the mute state of war which so often exists between the married man and the Catholic priest; when one analyzes the other causes of dissolution which are working in Catholicism; when one considers, for example, that the dogma of infallibility is simply inacceptable to anyone whose conscience is not absolutely distorted, one must admit that the project of Protestantizing France, how strange soever it may seem at first glance, is worthy of serious attention.

Proposal to Protestantize France.

It is not astonishing that it should have won to its side a number of partisans, and should have provoked a certain intellectual fermentation. Michelet and Quinet were desirous that France should become Protestant, at least transitorily! In 1843, during a journey to Geneva, Michelet discussed with some clergymen the means of accelerating the progress of Protestantism in France and of creating a really national church. Two men, whose names are known to all those who have laboured in philosophy or in social science, MM. Renouvier and De Laveleye, are among the promoters of this movement. Convinced free-thinkers, like M. Louis Ménard, acquiesce in it, making use of the names of Turgot and Quinet; and M. Pillon also has sustained the project. Many Protestant ministers have turned the whole of their activity in this channel, have founded journals and written for the reviews; pamphlets, works often remarkable in their kind, have been composed and circulated. Protestants are more disposed than Catholics to propagandism, because their faith is more personal. They feel that in a number of provinces they form an important nucleus which may grow in time like a snowball. A number of villages, of Yonne, la Marne, l’Aude, etc., have already been converted; in spite of all the obstacles raised by the civil and religious authorities, in spite of vexations and annoyances of every sort, the neophytes have finally succeeded in establishing a Protestant pastor among them. Materially considered, these results are small; their consequences, however, may some day be of great importance. One never suspects how many people there are ready to listen and to believe; how many people there are ready to preach and to convert. It need not be a matter of surprise, some day or other, to see Protestant clergymen fairly rise out of the soil and overrun our country districts. The Catholic clergy, who present an almost unbroken front of incapacity, will scarcely be able to hold their own against a new and ardent adversary.

Contrary to the tendency of French history.