The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

I. Decline of religious education—Defects of this education, in especial in Catholic countries—Means of lightening these defects—The priest—The possibility of state-action on the priest.

II. Education provided by the state—Primary instruction—The schoolmaster—Secondary and higher instruction—Should the history of religion be introduced into the curriculum.

III. Education at home—Should the father take no part in the religious education of his children—Evils of a preliminary religious education to be followed by disillusionment—The special question of the immortality of the soul: what should be said to children about death.

I. Decline of religious education.

Unfitness of religious dogma as material for education.

The religious education given to children by the priest possesses defects and even dangers which it is important to set in a clear light, and which explain the gradual decline in secular education. An opinion regarded as divine is an opinion which is as unfit for purposes of education as for purposes of science. The great opposition which obtains between religion and philosophy—in spite of their outward resemblances—is that the one is seeking and that the other declares that it has found; the one is anxious to hear, the other has already heard; the one weighs evidence, the other puts forth assertions and condemnations; the one recognizes it as its duty to raise objections and to reply to them; the other to shut its eyes to objections and to difficulties. From these differences result corresponding differences in methods of instruction. A philosopher, a metaphysician, aims to convince, the priest inculcates; the former instructs, the latter reveals; the former endeavours to stimulate and to train the reasoning, the latter to suppress it or at least to turn it aside from primitive and fundamental dogmas; the former awakens the intelligence, the latter in some measure lays it asleep. It is inevitable that revelations should be opposed to spontaneity and liberty of mind. When God has spoken man should be silent, in especial when the man is a child. And errors, which are often inoffensive if taught by a philosopher, are grave and dangerous if taught by a priest who speaks in the name and with the authority of God. In the first instance the remedy lies always at hand: an insufficient reason may always be made to give way before a sufficient reason; the child holds the standards of weight and measure in his own hands. And indeed it is not always easy to teach error at all by reason and reasoning: to attempt to give reasons for a prejudice is an excellent means of making its essential untruth prominent. It has always been some attempt on the part of humanity to demonstrate its beliefs that has resulted in their disproof. Whoever endeavours to examine a dogma is close upon the point of contradicting it, and the priest, who regards contradiction as a failure in faith, is always obliged, in the nature of things, to avoid an examination of it, to interdict a certain number of questions, to take refuge in mystery. When a priest has filled a brain with faith he seals it. Doubt and investigation, which are the life of philosophy, the priest regards as a mark of distrust and suspicion, as a sin, as an impiety; he lifts his eyes to Heaven at the bare notion of anybody’s thinking for himself. God is both judge and party in every discussion; at the very time when you are endeavouring to find reasons for believing in his existence, He commands you to affirm it. The believer who hesitates at a dogma is a little in the position of the sheep in the fable, who wished to reason with the wolf and to prove to him that the water was not muddy; he proved it indeed, but he was eaten up for his pains; he would have done just as well to hold his peace and yield. Also there is nothing more difficult than to shake yourself free from a faith that was fastened upon you in your childhood and that has been confirmed by the priest, by custom, by example, by fear. Fear, in especial, is a capital guardian to watch over the interests of positive religion and a religious education, a guardian who is always on the qui vive; but for it the body of belief which is known as dogma would soon fall into decay and blow away in dust. One person would reject this, another that; everybody would rise in open revolt, running hither and thither gaily like a lot of schoolchildren out for a holiday. Happily they are always accompanied by a tutor, who keeps them in order and brings them home like a flock of lambs to the sheepcote. What power can reasoning have over anybody who is afraid? How can you be expected to see anything as in itself it really is, if you have been accustomed from childhood to walk with your eyes closed? Truth becomes for you as variable and unstable as your own sensibility. At an audacious moment you deny everything, the next day you are prepared to affirm more than you were before. It is very easy to understand; nobody is obliged to be brave always, and, more than all, one’s conscience is involved. Conscience, like government, is conservative; it is naturally inimical to revolution and change. It is early taken in hand, and taught its little lesson; it becomes uneasy the instant you call in question a line on the map; you cannot take an independent step without some inner voice crying out to you to take care. Accustomed as you are to hear people anathematized who do not think as you do, you shudder at the thought of incurring such anathemas yourself. The priest has corrupted to his interest every sentiment in your soul—fear, respect, remorse; he has fashioned your soul, your character, your morals to his hand. Insomuch that if you call religion in question, you call everything in question.

Impropriety of suppressing the clergy.

Subsidence of thought, benumbment of the spirit of liberty, love of routine, of blind tradition, of passive obedience, of everything, in a word, which is directly opposed to the spirit of modern science are the results of a too exclusively clerical education. These dangers are being more and more distinctly felt, especially in France—perhaps too much so. We go the length of demanding that religious education shall be suppressed and that immediately, as being hostile to liberty and to progress. An irresistible movement has begun toward lay education, a movement to which Catholics must some day or other adjust themselves. But it should be done slowly, transition should not be pushed too rapidly. To suppress at a blow the whole clergy who once had complete control of the national education, and still have charge of some portion of it, ought not to be the aim of free-thinkers; the clergy will suppress themselves if they are but given time; they will simply become extinct. At bottom it is not a bad thing that fifty-five thousand people should be or appear to be occupied with something else than their personal wants. No doubt one never lives completely up to one’s ideal, and the ideal of disinterestedness that the priest proposes to himself is rarely realized; still it is good that a certain number of men here below should labour at a task which is above their strength; so many others labour at tasks only which are beneath them.

A religion at its best only in competition.

It must be confessed, however, that no religion is at its best in a country in which it reigns supreme; really to estimate it, one must see it struggling for supremacy against some rival faith, Catholic against Protestant, for example. Under such circumstances the priest and the pastor in a sense run a race with each other, compete with each other in activity and intelligence. One may see the results in the Dauphiné, in Alsace, and in a number of foreign countries. The zeal of the priest profits immensely by some such struggle for existence on the part of the religion to which he belongs; whoever does the most good, gives the best advice, the best education, to the children in his charge, wins a victory for his faith. The result, which is easy to foresee, is that a mixed population of Protestants and Catholics is better instructed, more enlightened, is possessed of a higher morality than many other countries wholly Catholic.