THE ROOT OF ALL RELIGION
by ALVIN BOYD KUHN, Ph. D.
"According to body it is an animal, but according to intel-
lect, a god."--Plato
"Suffer me to be food to the wild beasts; for I am the
wheat of God; and I shall be ground by the teeth of the
wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ."
--The Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans.
"His mind was made like the mind of an animal and his
dwelling was with the beasts."--Daniel V, 21.
THE ROOT OF ALL RELIGION
No age since the third century of the Christian era stood in more
imperative need of a clarification of the nature and meaning of that
element in human life called religion than does the present epoch. It
appears even now that nothing but such a clarification can save it as an institutionalized expression from hurrying disaster. From the
intimations of events now occurring it would seem as if the radical
economic parties would sweep the world into a socialized governmental
enterprise, and everybody knows that the temper of this movement is
bitterly, vengefully hostile to religion. Its spirit has been envenomed against religion because Marx, in a moment of "class-conscious" theorizing, taking sheer plausibility for a "scientific" deduction of logic, put out a short, sharp sentence that stung the minds of his following into unrelenting enmity to religion. Said he, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." Religion, he asserted, has been utilized by the possessing class as a subtle psychological device to facilitate immensely the troublesome task of keeping the proletariat in docile mood, submissive and content under a hard economic lot. The preachment that heaven would compensate for the hardships of earth made police and militia considerably less necessary. Religion was a most useful adjunct to capitalistic control. And all too certainly religion has been exploited in a way to give substance to the specious figment of this charge. The sponsors of religion have themselves largely to blame if a crude embitterment has taken root in the mind of the masses. For this particularly vicious by-product of the economic struggle might have been avoided if all parties concerned had known the true place of religion in this mortal life of ours. It is likely a truism that humans seeking an end will turn to advantage any influence or instrumentality that comes
to hand in exigency. But this is not for a moment to lend itself to one or another motive. As to ethical character, things are neutral; they become good or bad as employed by good or bad mortals, or for beneficent or injurious purposes. The populace is all-advised, on sheer logical grounds, to crucify religion because, forsooth, the rich have slyly turned it to the easing of their social mastery. It is legitimate to condemn the motive and the tactic; but it is not for a moment consistent with the boasted "scientific" rationale of the radical program to exterminate religion either in ignorance or contempt of its true functional value. Wherever the left-wing parties have won control, they have persecuted religion and taught atheism in the schools. This is fatuous; it is madness. Radical revolutions always go too far; they destroy valuable things to get rid of the dirt that may have collected upon them! Religion is established largely to conserve important values; and radicalism is against what is conservative. But a right conservatism is as necessary as a right radicalism, if only to conserve what radicalism wins!
Stabilization is always necessary, yet one that is plastic to new
adjustments. A golden mean must ever come out of the clash of arrant
radicalism with decadent conservatism, both of which extremes are
equally stubborn and equally wrong. Every settlement must be a
compromise.
Yet it seems to even a superficial view that nothing could be more
absurd and more ominous than the radical presupposition that religion
can be destroyed by a fiat of government. Had there been a clear
understanding of what religion basically is, such an overweening
presumption could never have taken form to betray otherwise well-meaning zealots. Trimmed of all abstruse verbiage the fundamental definition of religion is just man's psychological reaction to the universe of life, in which he finds himself. By psychological is meant intellectual and emotional, sensual and spiritual, the experiences of the psyche or conscious faculty in man. The whole reaction of man, the psychic being, to life is his religion. Intellectually, what a man thinks of life is his philosophy; but when the philosophic content of his thought works over into his emotional realm and becomes suffused with the emotions of loyalty, sacrifice, devotion and high allegiance, it is then his religion. Etymologically it is that influence which "binds" him "back" (Latin, re, back, and ligo, to bind.) to that which is most deeply fundamental in him, his deific self; a power or disposition which, amidst the events of a world that is ever changing, links him to an order of permanent and essential being that is the abiding heart of the universe. It is well that this etymological sense of the word be clarified, for there have been definitions that have widely missed the mark of true meaning. One current rendering has it, a "binding back" to the purely conservative, a tying to traditionalism. After all, religion is what its age-long theological interpretation has represented it to be--man's spiritual relation to God, that is, to the power that links him to the orders of life. But theology has rendered this true definition practically impotent, has falsified and distorted the reference, and eventually the meaning, by localizing the God in the case in the cosmic heavens instead of in man himself. This diversion of thought and aspiration from operable deity within to ineffable, incomprehensible and inaccessible deity without, has effected the sad miscarriage of all religion, which has been the direst catastrophe of all history. It has come close to causing the abortion of all cultural effort.
Through the decay and loss of primal relevance religion in later
centuries has been emasculated to the status and character of a mere
aspect of psychology. It has degenerated from robust practique to pious sentimentalism. It is sheer disposition to devoutness, to
sanctimoniousness. At times it is hardly even that, becoming just
dilettante aesthetics. Indeed Santayana, the Harvard philosopher,
concedes that this is all that it should presume to be. With many it
becomes the expression of quite irrational, maudlin, eccentric and
ignoble impulses of human nature. In this respect it has presented for
centuries a most ungainly picture, an exhibition of our nature at its
weakest. One needs only to point to its known ecclesiastical record to
confirm this statement. It is religion that has bred the most bitter
wars, the most arrant bigotry, the cruelest persecution, the foulest
forms of man's inhumanity to man that history narrates. While at the
same time it has given play to some of the most shining forms of loyalty to high things, devotion to noble causes and sublime sacrifice for lofty principles, its influence in history has been of debatable value. As a result a large segment of the intelligent portion of mankind, especially in the West, has definitely repudiated it as a beneficent cultural force. Theology, which ranked in ancient days as the Kingly Science, is now reduced to so sorry a state of neglect that even its own professors, the ministers, are no longer genuinely interested in it. An eminent metropolitan pastor recently declared in a sermon that theology would in fifteen years be as obsolete as Grecian mythology, and said that he had turned his religious effort in the direction of social service.
Yet in spite of its derelict predicament religion continues to exert
upon the mind of the age a tremendous weight of influence out of all
proportion to its slender appeal to rationalism. This power is drawn
from the inherent force and sway of traditionalism in common nature.
Tradition is not itself rational. Its habitudes are frequently in
contravention of logic. It rests upon the deeper mystical
susceptibilities of the human psyche in the social mass. Superstition
grows upon the fertile soil of uncritical mysticism, abetted by
priestcraft. So religion presides still at all social functions having
vital reference to life. The Bible still casts its lugubrious shadow
over christenings, weddings, funerals, stalks abroad in the courts, the schools, and on every solemn occasion. To an extent of which the
individual is little aware, Bible phrases still dominate the daily mass consciousness. Children are still indoctrinated with the statements of a meaningless orthodoxy and the formulae of catechetical instruction.
Religion thus occupies a most ambiguous position; neglected and flouted, yet in the exercise of its traditional power; discredited as irrational, yet dominant over the collective mind; almost totally uncomprehended even by its purveyors, yet forced upon each succeeding generation of children as the very bread of life; holding its place by the sheer force of custom, yet at last seriously menaced with extinction by economically determined radicals.
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