The Next Step in Religion: An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance

by Roy Wood Sellars

This situation had its bad side as well as its good. While it helped to enforce the tribal laws by means of the awe of the divine witness who could not be escaped, it tended to merge valuable with trivial things. Society was quite irrational as yet, and was as likely to punish the violation of accidental taboos as really serious attacks upon society. It is a commonplace of history that religions have stressed ritual observances more than vital phases of conduct. The greater Hebrew prophets stand out just because of their emphasis upon human morality, upon justice and righteousness and love. Amos and Hosea are social reformers who conceive their national god as a god of righteousness who will turn his face away from the doers of evil. They threaten their compatriots with his wrath if they continue in their evil ways. "Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye say. Hate the evil and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate." Thus the setting of religion was used as the leverage for an attempted ethical reformation, the exalted reformer conceiving himself as the mouthpiece of his god. But the prophets were exceptions. The priestly class, the class that has always held closely to traditional ways of thinking, brought the usual multitude of non-moral acts under this impressive sanction.

The struggle between priest and prophet, traditionalist and ethical reformer, took place within the religious view of the world, but the conflict was, after all, a purely human process. The prophets loved righteousness because they knew that it was good, because they fell repelled by unmerited poverty and by careless wealth, because they admired the decencies of life. They could not have given the justification of their sentiments as well as a theorist of to-day, but they had these sentiments as keenly as to-day's prophet has them. When we read their wonderful discourses, we are thrilled by the depth and intensity of their ethical life. But we are too apt to forget that the social situation in Palestine was the stimulus to their denunciations. They were noble enough to feel that conditions were intolerable, and it was not a far step to believe that Yahweh would not tolerate them. A noble man has always a noble god. That is the reason why the god of Amos is noble. The theological view reverses the true causal relation. Morality is always human morality, expressive of human nature and human conditions. Man may assign his ideals to some superhuman source because he is convinced that this source has selected him as its interpreter; but the fact that he has thought and judged in this moral way is indubitable, while his theory that Yahweh is speaking through him is merely an expression of the religious view of the world common to the time. When we stop a moment to think, we realize that Amos and Hosea were certain to put their views under the sanction of their national god. Not to have done so would have been far stranger psychologically than the ideals which they championed.

Did the prophetic claim that social justice was sanctioned by Yahweh help its advance? Probably. I see no reason to doubt that it did somewhat—how much it is impossible to say. So far as the claim was accepted by the nation, it would assist the forces working for reform. But religious sanctions are far more powerful when they are explicit and detailed, as the history of Christianity has shown. And we must remember that the prophetic claims were not always accepted. Religion is usually conservative and more or less conventional. The ritual element plays a considerable part in religious morality. It is as hard to change the people's ideas of God as it is to change their conceptions of justice and goodness. For this reason, I am not convinced that the religious sanction was of much advantage in the evolution of morality. The old has even more of the use of the sanction than has the new. Moral forces need to be vigorously based upon human nature and human relations if they are to dominate society and control the ethical standards which public opinion demands. The presence of religious sanctions simply beclouds the real factors at work. Morality can never, in the long run, be something pressed upon man from outside; it must express his life and its needs.

It cannot be denied that supernatural sanctions have often been very effective for certain types of people in certain anarchic periods. The robber baron of the Middle Ages, credulous and superstitious, was restrained at times by his fear of the penalties threatened by Mother Church. But so is a burglar by a pistol pointed at him, even if it is not loaded. In the past, a code of morality much in advance of the times has, no doubt, often been aided by religious sanctions. But it is foolish to base one's theories upon exceptional conditions. We must remember that the situation confronted by the Christian tradition after the breakdown of the political and social life of the Roman Empire was abnormal. A turbulent mass of barbarians faced the ethics and theology of an overthrown civilization. It cannot too often be pointed out that this situation was unhealthy in many ways. It is not good for a people to have codes of morality thrust upon it from outside. Especially is it bad when the code is in many ways untrue to human nature under normal conditions. Ascetic, other-worldly Christianity distorted the impulses of mediæval man. And it is certain that religious sanctions, alone, enabled it to control society.

We have seen that religion and morality marched together as long as the evolution of the society was healthy and natural. Often there was a struggle over the ritual and mythical elements in religious morality; but, as a rule, the civic type of morality gained the upper hand. Religious sanctions were called in because of the faith in divine powers interested in the welfare of the community, but these sanctions soon ceased to be creative. While the gods remained, these sanctions would necessarily remain; yet they tended to become benevolent and secondary.

But Christianity, by reason of the forces at work at the time of its origin, nourished vicious interpretations of morality. The despair of human nature which we note in the writings of St. Paul tinged the outlook of Christian ethics. Man is by nature evil; only the working in his soul of a supernatural grace can lead him to value the things which are pure and of good repute. This pessimism cannot be too sharply spurned. Man is neither angel nor devil; he is just man. And the modern thinker is pretty well convinced that morality is a purely human affair growing out of the instinctive tendencies which man has inherited in the course of evolution as these find themselves in various situations. Moral problems are meaningless apart from their setting on this earth. Man is moral because he can pass judgments upon courses of behavior and decide what best conduces to his welfare. He is moral because he can build up standards of social and personal conduct and adhere to them more or less completely. The assumption that man is immoral is psychologically untrue. The asceticism and pessimism of mediæval Christianity was a reflection of false ideals and of an unhealthy social system. There was an element of strain in the demands held up before the individual. The spiritual life was a task which he had to accomplish because it possessed a supernatural sanction.

But the inherent pessimism of much of Christianity was not its only fault. It taught men to suppose that morality was not something which paid for itself. So much did it stress the necessity of supernatural sanctions that it led the majority to believe that no man would be good unless he had to, unless he was afraid of the external consequences which would be meted out to him at the bar of judgment. But how false such a view is. We know to-day that morality pays here and now, in the specie of a happy, healthy, well-developed life. Any other view makes morality irrational and unnatural and, consequently, dependent upon sanctions which rest upon the will of some agent apart from this concrete life of act and fact. To put this criticism in the technical language of ethics, Christianity has tended to think of conduct in terms of heteronomous ethics, i.e., in terms of precepts and laws coming from outside of human life and pressed upon it by authority, rather than in terms of autonomous ethics for which ideals and customs are wise adjustments to the natural relations in which man finds himself.

This assumption that morality is a hardship played into the hands of a juridical notion of the sanctions of conduct, for which the conception of immortality furnished the grandiose opportunity. The arm of society is eluded at death, but death offers no escape for the wicked from the outraged deity they have offended. It is the motive of fear which is here employed. Human beings are to be scared into being good. Morality is on the defensive because it has no real charm and natural loveliness, because it does not grow out of a rational study of human relations.

How tragically false this view was! Its existence can be explained only as an expression of an ill-organized society in which impulsive violence was not enough held in check. Supernatural sanctions could be used to restrain malefactors of great power in less happy times. Society has grown beyond this need. Courts of law and outraged public opinion are quite able to deal with criminals. If the reason for punishment is prevention, it is certainly true that punishment by society is more likely to be effective than the postponed pains of an hereafter, because of its immediacy and power of being repeated. But it is very doubtful whether fear is a moral motive or whether it is a very effective deterrent. Social thinkers are agreed that punishment is a very bungling method at the best. It does not show the presence of a very constructive imagination.

Hell has always been a magnified torture chamber. It has been the reflection on the gigantic background of the next world of the penal ideas of the time. That is why it has always been more interesting than heaven. Man feared to make a social utopia out of heaven because he conceived it as a kingdom in which he was to play a very minor role, while he was quite certain of his importance in hell. But the morbid results of his imaginings were tragic in their effects when connected with such damnable doctrines as infant damnation and eternal punishment for lack of belief in a particular creed. What distorted ethical notions, what mixture of horrible fear before a world-tyrant and callous delight in the punishment of others are revealed in these pictures of a place of eternal torment! Thank goodness, the civilized world is outgrowing the whole savage set of ideas.