Posted on 02/24/2004 7:48:50 PM PST by Land of the Irish
Traditional Catholics frequently speak of the secularization of society, and indeed there can be no question that traditional religious imagery, to say nothing of a traditional religious perspective, has all but disappeared from public life. But more has been going on than simply this. In a very real sense, one religion is replacing another.
As Professor Paul Gottfried argues in his recent book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (which I reviewed enthusiastically for Pat Buchanan’s magazine earlier this year), the liberalism with which we are today confronted has adapted for its own use the theological terms and categories of liberal Protestantism. Gottfried speaks of a liberal Christianity that “recasts the narratives of the Fall, Christ’s suffering, and the promise of redemption in socially fashionable terms.” When a member of a designated oppressor group (whites, Southerners, Christians of any sort, etc.) publicly divorces himself from his own civilization, race, or ancestors, he demonstrates “sanctified living in a world or society held to be reprobate.” The spectacle of Bill Clinton apologizing for slavery may come to mind.
Along these lines, Professor Philip Jenkins of Penn State University finds overwhelmingly religious overtones in the way the Matthew Shepard case of several years ago was treated. Shepard, the reader may recall, was a homosexual man who was beaten to death by three men after having propositioned them in a bar. “The crime,” Jenkins wrote, “was portrayed strictly in terms of martyrdom and Calvary, complete with the grotesque image of crucifixion on barbed wire. The rhetorical implications were hammered home repeatedly and unsubtly. We are all guilty for his death; we must purge such sins from ourselves and our communities, how thoroughly our whole culture is permeated by sin and ungodliness.” Jenkins could therefore speak of an American public “which mistakenly thinks of itself as secular but is actually imbued with biblical and apocalyptic assumptions.” The Shepard case thus gave the anointed the opportunity to stand above the rest of society, proclaim themselves not as other men, and render judgment on their insensitive and reprobate brethren, whose bigotry and lack of enlightenment created the atmosphere in which “hate crimes” were inevitable.
It should not surprise us that the liberalism that surrounds us should possess such a distinctly spiritual and messianic veneer, for since the nineteenth century a self-consciously religious strain has existed within liberal thought. This strain has deliberately sought not so much to abolish religion but to transform it into something else.
Auguste Comte and the Strange New Religion
Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is evident in the life of the nineteenth-century French social thinker Auguste Comte (1798-1857), with whom classical positivism originated. According to this doctrine, the only data that can count as genuine knowledge is that which can be subjected to empirical testing.
Comte is perhaps most famous for the three-stage model he proposed for understanding the evolution of civilization. Civilization, according to Comte, begins with what he called the theological stage, in which man, in his search for the causes of things, finds them in the wills of a variety of supernatural beings or in that of a single such being. The theological stage is followed by what he calls the metaphysical stage, at which man now attributes events to abstract causes. The metaphysical stage, in turn, is followed by what Comte considered the highest stage: the positivist or scientific stage.
At this stage, man gives up as fruitless any quest to look beyond sense phenomena for deeper meaning or significance, and is content simply to understand the workings of physical phenomena. Rather than ask why, he simply asks how. Religion and speculative philosophy drop out of the picture altogether, since they either deal with phenomena that cannot be observed or delve into questions that the world of phenomena cannot answer. Men now look for answers (to the now attenuated series of questions they are still permitted to have) to a priesthood of scientists and experts of various kinds who understand the workings of the universe sufficiently well to be able to predict and even to control the forces of nature.
Strangely enough, this apostle of science, recognizing that worship responded to a need that existed deep within human nature, sought to construct an alternative religion that he called the “religion of humanity.” In place of God, man would worship what Comte called the “Great Providential Being” or the “New Supreme Being” – namely, humanity itself. This was “the only true great Being, of which we are consciously necessary members.” This does not mean that every person who ever lived was incorporated into the humanity to which worship would be directed; criminals and evildoers would be excluded. The humanity of which he spoke consisted of “all the men who have cooperated in the great human task, those who live on in us, of whom we are the continuation, those whose genuine debtors we are.”
One of Comte’s followers wrote:
Mankind becomes the focus
Of all speculations:
Centered in that locus
Are all our heart’s affections.
It is the fair ideal and hope
Toward which the infant race did grope
While still confined in error’s maze.
Now all men worship at its fane,
And all men hail its coming reign
To end the tempest of our days.
To say that in his new religion Comte mimicked Catholicism would be an understatement. To the cult of the saints Comte answered with a cult of the great benefactors of humanity, and organized a liturgical year around them. To the seven Catholic sacraments he responded with nine “social sacraments.” His “angels” were those great women, living or dead, whether mothers, daughters, wives, or in any way beloved, whose virtues made them fit candidates for “private worship.” The supreme deity, of course, was humanity itself. (Comte would be the Supreme Pontiff.)
We have not yet seen Comte’s answer to the Blessed Mother, but one there was. In 1844 Comte, who was already married to a former prostitute, fell in love with Clotilde de Vaux, the wife of a convicted felon. When she refused to become his mistress, he nevertheless cultivated a deep platonic relationship with her. When Clotilde died within a year of meeting him, Comte began to venerate her as a saint of his new religion. As Eric Voegelin explained, in Comte’s scheme “the place of God has been taken by social entities (by family, country and mankind) and more particularly by woman as the integrating, harmonizing principle. Woman in general and Clotilde concretely as the representative of the principle has become the unifying power for the soul of man; hence the cult of Clotilde is an essential part of the Comtean religious foundation.”
In his Testament, Comte spelled out some of the specific institutional arrangements of his religion of humanity. His apartment would be the Holy See, as it were. It would be occupied by successors, all of whom were required to respect the relics of Clotilde, especially “the red chair, enveloped in a green cover, and marked on its front board with my initials in red wax.” This chair was owed such reverence because upon it had sat Clotilde herself during her Wednesday visits. Comte wrote, “I have erected it, even during her life-time, and still more so after her death, into a domestic altar; I have never sat on it except for religious ceremonies.” According to Comte’s instructions, it was never to be used for any other purpose.
John Stuart Mill
The eccentricities of Comte’s religious system could fill the rest of this issue, and even some of those who were sympathetic to his general aims could not follow him in specifics. Yet a respected lineage of thinkers nevertheless continued to be attracted to his overall project. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the English political philosopher perhaps best known for his famous books On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism (1863), was one such figure.
For all his disagreements with Comte, Mill strongly supported the establishment of a religion of humanity. In Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), he wrote: “Though conscious of being in an extremely small minority, we venture to think that a religion may exist without belief in a God, and that a religion without a God may be, even to Christians, an instructive and profitable object of contemplation.” He wrote in a private letter: “I always saw…in the idea of Humanity the only one capable of replacing that of God. But there is still a long way from this speculation and belief to the manifest feeling I experience today – that it is fully valid and that the inevitable substitution is at hand.” The best aspect of Comte’s Système de politique positive (1851-54), Mill once wrote in his diary, was “the thoroughness with which he has enforced and illustrated the possibility of making le culte de l’humanité perform the functions and supply the place of a religion.” In Utilitarianism, he argued that Comte had “superabundantly shown the possibility of giving to the service of humanity, even without the aid of belief in a Providence, both the psychological power and the social efficacy of a religion, making it take hold of human life, and color all thought, feeling, and action, in a manner of which the greatest ascendancy ever exercised by any religion may be but a type and foretaste.”
Thus Mill, too, was an apostle of this new religion. “Although Mill may not have taken as extreme a position as a Comte or a Marx,” writes Linda Raeder in John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity, “his aims and intentions were shaped by a similar impulse – to replace God with Humanity and to elevate mankind, however implicitly, to the status of divinity.”
Mill not only disparaged traditional morality, bound up, as he thought, with the selfish Christian concern with personal salvation, but also invested its alleged opposite, social morality, with an intense religiosity. It is not coincidental that the social sciences have replaced what were called in Mill’s era the “moral sciences,” for as a result of the efforts of Mill and his compatriots, the social has become identified with the moral. [F.A.] Hayek enumerates over a hundred different uses of what he calls the “weasel word” social in modern ethical and political discourse. Terms like social justice, social conscience, social morality, social duty, social democracy, social problems, social service, and so on, have been thoroughly assimilated into Anglo-American moral consciousness.
This is why some have argued that for all his hostility to religion in general and Christianity in particular, Mill is not accurately described as a purely secular thinker. He expressly aimed to found a new religion. To be sure, writes Dr. Raeder, the realization of this new religion “did require the evisceration of the transcendent God of the Western tradition and of the belief in a morality and justice grounded in transcendent truth. But what is of special significance with respect to political developments is that it also required the reorientation of spiritual aspirations and yearnings away from that God and toward the intramundane substitute, Humanity. The result…was the quasi-religious valorization of ‘service to Humanity.’”
The Social Gospel
Mill’s project would move ahead and reappear in various guises as the decades passed. To a degree, they can be seen in the Social Gospel movement that swept through American Protestantism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That movement wasn’t exactly what Mill or Comte had been aiming for, since its preachers made more frequent and more explicit reference to Christ and to a transcendent God than those nineteenth-century innovators would have preferred. But the Social Gospel did tend to horizontalize religion, so to speak, by emphasizing political activity and the application of effort to solving “social problems” in this world, rather than the sanctification of the individual soul, as the highest expression of religion.
Walter Rauschenbusch, perhaps the most influential promoter of the Social Gospel, argued that it had been only through later accretions to the original, undefiled Gospel message that Christianity had developed into a dogmatic system in the first place. In his seminal Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), he claimed that the Christian faith had originally been completely non-dogmatic. Belief in the immortality of the soul, he said, was a later addition to the Faith, having no foundation in the Old Testament or in the authentic teaching of Christ.
Rauschenbusch also joined a trend current in his day to identify the purpose of religious belief or moral endeavor with the regeneration of society rather than with the working out of individual salvation. “The Kingdom of God is a collective conception involving the whole social life of man,” he wrote. “It is not a matter of saving human atoms, but of saving the social organism. It is not a matter of getting individuals into heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into harmony with heaven.” Indeed “in its original purity” Christianity insisted simply on “right relations to men as the expression of religion.”
No wonder that in 1917, a writer for the Catholic World could remark that “Christianity, as represented by the ablest of its Protestant advocates, is today in this country little more than a sentiment, a system of social service, of ethical philosophy, of philanthropic enterprise…. Its professions of humanitarian service and sacrifice are no longer illumined by the radiance of faith in the mysteries of the Godhead or in the authority and authenticity of revealed truth. Its sacred symbols have been transmuted into mere types of earthly virtues.”
In their day the Social Gospelers were only the best known architects of a new or radically revised religion. In the early twentieth century Harvard University President Charles Eliot also advocated a new religious creed, free of the oppressive dogmas of the past, to which modern man could give his wholehearted allegiance. He outlined the basis of his new religion (which he insisted was in essence that of Jes us Christ) in an important article that originally appeared in the Harvard Theological Quarterly and would be reprinted in full in many American newspapers. The new religion would abandon what he considered such outmoded mythologies as the Fall, the Redemption, a heavenly paradise and the divinity of Christ. In place of the personal God of traditional Christianity he would substitute a “sleepless, active energy and will” that could be recognized “chiefly in the wonderful energies of sound, light, and electricity.” This new Christianity, moreover, “will not be based on authority either spiritual or temporal,” these also being accretions from the Church’s dogmatic and authoritarian past.
As Eliot saw it, it was liberal Protestantism that best exemplified the “renewed Christianity” he sought. Unlike the Catholic Church and the more authoritarian of the Reformed elements, he argued, these churches have “definitely abandoned the official creeds and dogmas of the past, all ecclesiasticism, and almost all symbolism and ritualism. Their membership, modest in number and little disposed to proselytism, consists exclusively of persons who propose to be free, simple, and candid in their religious thought, and in all expressions of that thought.” Eliot was confident that the new idea he was outlining would prove to be “the religion of the future.”
American Catholics were less sure. “President Eliot is back from his voyage of exploration into the future,” America magazine announced dryly in 1909. His creed, the magazine insisted, was laughable. He all but denied sin – “a fact as plain as potatoes,” Chesterton had said – as well as Revelation and man’s need for a Redeemer. His religion was the “worship of humanity.” And for all the saccharine promises Eliot attached to the adoption of this new religion, America remained firmly persuaded that “if Dr. Eliot’s doctrines are ever taken seriously, the world will be little better than hell.” (“We trust Dr. Eliot is not exhausted by his efforts,” said another writer for America. “Next year would be dull indeed without another new religion.”)
A lesser proposal emerged from the pen of Lake Forest College’s Professor Henry W. Wright, and received no more sympathetic a response from America. His was yet another effort to make of religion a vehicle for social, rather than individual, perfection –“apparently oblivious,” Fr. Edward Murphy noted, “that Christianity has always aimed at both.” Professor Wright’s religion was one in which modern man, having at last come of age, would no longer beseech God for supernatural help but would use the tools of modern science to satisfy his needs. “Modern man,” he said, “secures his own natural existence and well-being not by bargaining for divine protection against natural ills but by gaining mastery over natural forces through his own experimental science, inventive skill and technical proficiency. He does not rely upon divine Providence to protect him from a shipwreck at sea; he makes a compass, constructs a steamship, invents the wireless telegraph.” The monastic life, likewise, he expressly condemned and repudiated. “With regard, secondly, to the spiritual goods whose acquisition spiritual religion pretends to ensure, modern man has learned that these are attained not by individuals who withdraw from worldly pursuits and devote themselves to supernatural concerns, but by those who avail themselves most successfully of the spiritual resources of their fellow men, as these are developed through personal association and cooperation.” It was, in effect, a religion of human self-sufficiency.
Social Consciousness
In 1918, an organization called the National Institution for Moral Instruction awarded $5,000 to William J. Hutchins, a professor at Oberlin College, for his code of morals. The code began, oddly enough, with an exhortation “to be physically fit,” and ended by declaring loyalty to humanity to be the highest law. It was in response to such proposals that the Catholic World observed at the time, “Social consciousness, civic welfare, economic justice, service to humanity, universal democracy, the brotherhood of man, the gospel of service – these are the pet phrases of the new deliverance; but in all the cant and jargon of this current philosophy, the mind and soul are called to contemplate no higher source of authority, no more reliable test of fundamental truth, than the subjective standards erected by human reason and to be enforced by human agencies.”
Can such man-made codes make us good? Aristotle himself conceded regretfully that his great ethical treatise would in itself do nothing to encourage men to do good or shun evil. John Henry Cardinal Newman had famously warned, “Quarry the granite rock with a razor, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.” Writing in the Catholic Educational Review in 1914, Sister Mary Ruth of Wisconsin’s Sisters of St. Dominic put the matter this way:
Even perceiving adequately the dignity of human nature, and even sensitive to the feelings of reverence and awe in the contemplation of the high principles of truth and justice and magnanimity, yet what will stand one in the hour of moral crisis when the question arises, Why ought I do right even at my own cost? The only satisfactory answer, the only answer of driving power is the answer that the Catholic Church teaches her children, “I owe this service to God, my Creator.”
To be sure, the natural man is not an utter savage, for the natural moral law, St. Paul tells us, is written on our hearts. The data of conscience tell us that we ought not do certain things, and it is only with very great effort that human beings can even partially suppress the strong inner testimony against the rightness of, say, theft or murder. But it is not easy to make sense of this testimony if we do not admit God into our understanding. For as natural-law theorist J. Budziszewski recently observed, “If there is no moral Lawgiver, how can there be a moral Law?” There is an additional consideration as well: if a blind evolution is taken for granted (as it so often is by atheists), whereby man was created by a random process that did not have him in mind, the testimony of his conscience is no less random or arbitrary than anything else in the universe. As Budziszewski puts it, we might just as well “have turned out like guppies, which eat their young. For this and other reasons, I do not think we can be good without God.”
Remaining in the Church—the New Strategy
Although we hear a great deal today about the need to “update” Catholicism or Christianity, we do not hear nearly as much talk of creating new religions as people did a century or two ago. It is not that a massive change of heart has occurred among religious innovators; only their strategy is different. Instead of calling for the direct overthrow of Catholicism, they have chosen instead to insinuate their way into the structures of the Church, with the intent of working toward the kinds of changes in the traditional faith that would move it in the direction of the outcome that Comte, Mill, and others have long desired. This approach, it seems, holds greater promise of success.
Writing in America magazine in 1986, Rosemary Radford Ruether, one of the most radical theologians who still calls herself Catholic, acknowledged in a rare moment of candor why she and her comrades remained within the official precincts of the Church instead of withdrawing altogether from an institution they obviously detest. It was a deliberately chosen strategy. Ruether counseled allies of the “spiritual revolution” of which she is a part to remember that “unless we manage to insert what we are doing…back into…main institutional vehicles of ministry and community…it will have no lasting impact.” Leftists should, therefore, “stay in the Church and use whatever parts of it they can get their hands on,” and in that way they “will have far more impact, both on the Church and on the world…than they could possibly gain if they separated from it.”
St. Pius X Warned the World
Pope St. Pius X once warned of “a great movement of apostasy being organized in every country for the establishment of a one-world Church which shall have neither dogmas nor hierarchy; neither discipline for the mind nor curb for the passions….” The “religion of humanity” is a substantial part of the great movement of apostasy that the Pope identified. In this new religion, man will in effect worship himself. “When man is conceived as the ultimate source of moral order,” writes Dr. Raeder, “when humanity is conceived as the ultimate object of service or reverence, when the only god that may be real is so limited and enfeebled as to become practically irrelevant,[1] the human ‘servants of Humanity’ become, in effect if not in explicit pronouncement, God. There is no source of appeal beyond the dictates of their judgment.”
It isn’t that those who would refashion religion in the direction of “humanity” simply want to see good deeds done and the less fortunate cared for – after all, no force in history has done more good in that area than the Catholic Church. It is precisely as St. Pius X said: they want to give free rein to the passions, and wish to be free from the reproach of those who believe in absolute standards that transcend man’s whims. In practice, the religion of humanity would serve to sanctify man’s complete liberation from all external authority. We’ve already had a taste of that “liberation,” and the results are all around us: ruined lives, divorce, suicide, abortion – to say nothing of depression, alienation, atomization, isolation, and pathologies too numerous to name.
“It is not a ‘new religion,’ a ‘new Christianity’ that we need,” the official organ of the Paulist Fathers tried to explain in 1918, “but a new efflorescence of faith and hope and love in the age-old Church of Christ.”
Human liberation and self-worship, say the false prophets of the religion of humanity, are the path to Utopia. But we know better. It was not for nothing that the poet said,
He who in fields Elysian would dwell
Does but extend the boundaries of Hell.
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