Those Who Come Back
I
IT is interesting to note the number of intellectual people who of late have been returning to religion. Alfred Noyes, Middleton Murry, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Elliott Coleman, Ross Hoffman, Arnold Lunn, Aldous Huxley, Gilbert Chesterton, Jacques Maritain, Henry A. Wallace, Ralph Adams Cram, William Orton, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Paul Elmer More, Heywood Broun (to name only a few) — these differ widely in interests; but they all possess good minds, are educated and ‘modern,’ and have come from something that has varied between indifference and a scornful skepticism to a thoughtful and sincere religious devotion. Their published works may be read with interest and profit by anyone concerned with trends in contemporary thought; with some of them I have had the advantage of repeated conversation, and five of those named have been good enough to call me friend.
Even more interesting, perhaps, is that host of others who have gone through the same process of religious development but, for various good reasons, have not become articulate about it. There are, for instance, to my own small knowledge, thirty-one such persons among the scholars teaching and pursuing research in what is generally esteemed our leading American university, all of whom have journeyed from a lack of interest in religion, and in the case of some of them from an advertised unbelief, to a conviction and practice as definite and as devout as that of any of the better-known figures whose names have been mentioned. In a second great university, I know of twenty-nine such savants; in a third, almost as many; on the staff of one of our leading colleges for women are at least ten of them, and at least nine on the staff of another. There are doubtless many more of similar mind in these same institutions (I can speak only of those about whom I happen myself to know); and in the over seven hundred American homes of the higher learning there must quite literally be some thousands of such men and women. Casual contacts, too, with people of the learned professions outside the universities — with lawyers, economic experts, doctors, and so on — keep revealing scores who have of late become, or are fast becoming, reinterested in religion, and that in no merely casual or academic fashion.
For some time I have been trying to find out, from such of this way of thinking as are willing to talk of their faith, something of the path they have followed. Information about the matter would seem of general interest. In particular, what they have to say surely can throw light upon effectiveness, or lack of it, in the technique of our churches, and upon the relationship of their message to the need of the modernly educated. This paper is the result of a reëxamination of many case records, and tries to sum up what has been revealed in the books and articles written by converts of intellectual reputation, and in long talks with them. In it I shall try to generalize from what they themselves say it is that has impelled to the finding of a renewed faith. I am commissioned by none of them, nor by any group of them, to act as spokesman; but what is written below is based on such a number of cases as insures, I think, against any gross misrepresentation.
II
It is interesting to note certain aspects of religion which have failed to attract, and sometimes definitely have retarded, their renewed interest. These have had to be deliberately overlooked, even forgiven, by some of those who at length have resumed a religious affiliation and practice. In other cases, while there has been no positive repulsion, there has certainly been little of allurement. Two of these elements may well be noted before one goes on to consider what it is that does draw people of this sort back to belief and worship.
It seems quite plain that the hearty fellowship of the usual congregation — its social good times, its friendly handshakes and welcoming smiles — has small appeal for the man of intelligence. He is no snob and is, more often than not, a friendly soul; but he is not looking for social comradeship when he goes to church — at least if one may judge from what he writes and says and, even more significant, from what he fails to mention. When one asks about the matter, one often gets the reply that modern communities are so complex that ecclesiastical bonhomie seems unreal and forced (a bad thing when one draws near to God). Friendly churches, it is insisted, are almost always ‘class’ churches and give an impression that conformity to social type is desired rather more fervently than such an adoration as will make caste and class preposterous. ‘It does help a good deal,’ says a wellknown woman novelist, ‘if I may be allowed to be anonymous in the house of God.’ The returned pilgrims of whom we are thinking are not apt to be vocal either, or even visible, in church clubs, societies, sodalities, guilds, ‘ladies’ aids’ or ‘auxiliaries’; while if you find one of them on a vestry or board of elders, or a delegate to a church convention, you may be sure that a sense of duty rather than desire has been the cause of it.
Nor is this sort of person greatly impressed by that other very human accompaniment. of visible religion, the beating of the big bass drum on behalf of denominational enterprises. He normally refuses to take in a church paper, on the ground that these are for the most part little more than the trade journals of a secularized business, not much occupied either with things of the mind or with concerns of the spirit. Church drives, every-member campaigns, forward movements and the like, leave him cold. These promotional devices have for him no lure, while the carefully manufactured enthusiasm visible at conventions, synods, conferences, seems to him pathetically imitative of methods used for the stimulation of secular enterprises. Even of ‘Missions’ he is suspicious, usually because on behalf of the same there is likely to be invoked almost every argument and inducement except a spiritual one.
In short, there are many thoughtful non-churchgoers, people deeply concerned about spiritual things, who resent ‘organized religion’ because it seems to them too patently organized and too timidly religious. A lady who is the leading spirit in one of New York’s more Intellectual social circles said, one day this summer, ‘The purpose of organizing religion seems to be to keep the clergy and their flocks from ever committing themselves. In a day of world emergency, that is, to say the least, a bit unfortunate.’ ‘The human gets in the way of the divine in most of the churches,’ writes a well-known bacteriologist. ‘It was only when I had come desperately to need and desire God that I was able to overlook the thrusting assertiveness of the Church as a going concern.’ A young woman who does excellent copy-writing for an advertising company, a Vassar graduate, writes: ‘Religion and the Church to me, as to many of my friends, are not only unconnected but antithetical. Why? Because most parsons seem to regard the Church as more important than God; and I am quite sure that almost all vestrymen make that curious mistake.’ A medical man from Ohio remarks, ‘I wish one could go to worship and not have to listen to the clergyman. A man in Holy Orders should speak as a voice for God, or else keep silent. Our rector is quite all right during the prayers; but when it comes to the sermon, he takes on the manner of a polite but determined book agent. And I am afraid that what he is out to sell is not God, but rather the denominational enterprise. I do not mind much, now that at last I am back home and at peace with God; but in those days when I was going through my interneship, beginning to practise medicine, and trying to find myself as a human being, the dear man was more of a nuisance than a help.’
III
Again, the person of intelligence is not much likely to come back to God because of conviction that religion is a necessity for the preservation of the political or economic status quo. He is usually informed enough to know that the great geniuses of religion — Moses, the prophets, the saint s, most of all Jesus Christ — have released and, if taken seriously, continue to release forces which, quite as often as not, are socially disruptive and revolutionary. He is aware, too, that religion has functioned effectively under empires, dictatorships, oligarchies, democracies, tyrannies, and what not else in the way of political system, and that the Church has watched and evaluated the operation of almost every conceivable sort of economic scheme (except the Single Tax). He usually has a sense of humor strong enough to make him realize the absurdity of calling in the Church to buttress social arrangements. If a given civilization is in fact decent, fair, just, fraternal, it will not need the Church to prop it up; if it is none of those things, it would be blasphemous to seek to preserve it by way of religion. And if this man of intelligence who is groping religiously happens to look into the Gospels, which he is just as likely as not to do, he finds that, in so far as one may judge from the record, Jesus Christ was little concerned with matters economic and political, and refused to become involved in controversy about them. Jesus seems to have believed that if one could get the folks to take God’s commandments seriously — the commandments to love Him completely and one’s neighbor as one’s self—all the social evils would speedily be corrected; and that until those commandments were recognized as of obligation, there would be no decent Society. Jesus seems also to have been sure that the privileged classes and the equally carnal mob between them are as likely as not to do those in who try to obey God. He saw from the beginning of His ministry that such a fate would be His own. That was not to be resented. Obedience in the face of a non-obedient Society was the only effective technique for social reform. One need not mind too terribly, since by being willing to get ‘liquidated’ one would release the power of God for the healing of the nations.
The intelligent man is apt to have a fairly good understanding that this actually was, and presumably still is, the attitude of Jesus to Society; to perceive what happens, according to the saints, to people who insist on regarding the community sub specie œternitatis. In consequence, he is not much impressed by those who urge him to be religious for the sake of preserving America, or the British Empire, or the German Reich, or the embattled clans of Dahomey, each or even all of them as is. The man of intelligence may be quite prepared to believe that ‘apart from a return to God there can be no stable Society’; but he knows quite well that it is not for the sake of the latter that a man of perception seeks the former. Society is a means, God is an end; not the other way about. He may, indeed, after he has been converted, come at last to a state of mind where he can charitably tolerate the nationalistic prophet or the high ecclesiastic who is forever pointing with pride and viewing with alarm; he may even in moments of national excitement become in his devotions as excited as anyone; but as long as he still remains outside the fold he is not attracted to religious enthusiasm by a clerical echoing of patriotic slogans. ‘I must have Religion for a better reason than as a social insurance policy.’ So has said one of America’s best historians. There are no end of his brethren who say ‘Amen’ to that.
IV
Once we perceive, then, as we shall if we listen to those who have come back, that it is not likely to be the social side of religion, in either the larger or the smaller sense of the word ‘social,’ which draws those of intelligence from indifference to a vital faith in God; once we understand, too, that the devices of ecclesiasticism are hurdles, to be jumped with difficulty, then we are in a position to ask what that is, of disillusionment and spiritual need, which does in fact impel men and women to resume the spiritual quest.
The thing which leads to a renewed religion seems almost always to be a desire to be freed from intolerable pressure, not a pressure exerted by external circumstance, but rather one arising from interior maladjustment. No amount of secular knowledge, no acquiring of technical skills, no distraction or amusement, no pursuit of ambition, has served to free these people from a sense of being under a duress which grows the more intense the longer they go on.
When they find that nothing else can free them, then at last they look to God, and ask the Church to help them to that liberation which from time immemorial God has given to souls in similar bondage. These whose religion has been for a long time merely conventional, or dormant, or even something flatly to be rejected, turn to the God of their fathers, asking for rescue from a thralldom to this world, hoping for salvation. They are usually little concerned with being delivered from a hell which may be awaiting them after they are dead; rather, they seek to escape an inner damnation here and now.
V
First, there are those who seek to escape lack of a sense of meaning, such as commonly results from too close an absorption in scientific pursuits.
The agnosticism which prevails today is not the facile sort of skepticism common at the turn of the century. That had its doubts only about a polite theological abstraction. The newer agnosticism suspects that man is unable of himself to discover anything about purpose, the purpose of the universe or the purpose of himself within that universe. He may learn any number of those facts which are revealed by scientific observation, he may arrange those facts ever so accurately; but there is nothing in all that which shows the why of anything, or of everything. The realization of this inadequacy in modern man’s approach to knowledge is devastating to many thoughtful people. They insistently go on asking ‘Why?’ They are sure that unless one may discover an objective toward which the universe is moving, and toward which they themselves deliberately may move, life is not worth the living. They are not content to lapse into animality. They find no sufficient joy merely in satisfaction of the hungers for food, drink, play, rest, and sex, no matter how much these hungers are commended to them in high-sounding literary language. They will not, they find they cannot, abdicate from a humanity the sole distinguishing feature of which is the search to know the reason for things.
Convinced at last that meaning is to be found neither by drifting day by day, immersed in inconsequential phenomena, nor by scientific research, they seek meaning elsewhere. Impelled by a hunger for purpose, yet recognizing man’s hopeless limitations in discovering the same, these unhappy souls, rent by inner conflict, do what vast numbers of similar intellectuals have done in all the ages past. They cry aloud for a God who can reveal to them what they must know, yet cannot ascertain. Driven by this pressing need, they turn to the long record of man’s spiritual yearnings, his religious searchings; to the cults and creeds and codes which reflect those aspirations. They seek meaning in terms of service rendered to an ultimate Intelligence, confident that in the Supreme One all may live with purpose, convinced that in adoration of Him-who-reveals-Himself lies the answer to the otherwise insoluble riddle. Such of them as examine anew into Christianity, a Christianity which perhaps was nominally theirs in earlier years, perceive that the essence of that religion is a faith that in Jesus the Ultimate Person for man’s salvation has appeared in terms of humanity, sharing its limitations but revealing, despite those limitations, all of God that man can hope to understand.
When they get that far, they come back, with a sense of inner certainty that to know God is life eternal. Religion ceases for them to be a minor decorative art and becomes an interpretative necessity. In the light of God, they find that they are able to remain sane in a mad world, and to function with courage and serenity. Though there be those who think such people obscurantists, they themselves are sure that they alone see clearly; nor do they think that in thus gaining insight of divine purpose they have denied one truth which man has discovered, or blinked one fact.
VI
Secondly, there are those who return to religion to escape the pressure of possessions.
Modern life is cluttered up with things. We are so occupied in designing them, manufacturing them, selling them, owning them, protecting them, using them up, discarding them, destroying them, that we have mighty little time left for the doing of anything else. Most people seem fairly content thus to restrict activity and to accept as adequate measure for a satisfactory standard of living a large number of gadgets and a certain amount of amusement, chiefly mechanical. In this they are encouraged by a continuous barrage of meretricious advertising. But, strange as it may seem to the multitude, there are those whose dearest wish it is to break away from servitude to all this smothering plenty and to come at spiritual independence.
To get that desired release is not so simply done as might at first be supposed. Would I flee away to the happy cloister of a university? I find that former sanctuary of the spirit turned into a polytechnic school, a place wherein contemplation is subservient to research and metaphysics is an intrusion. In a fit of revolt, I may indeed smash my wireless set to bits; but those of my neighbors blare away, half-heard, and I find it not easy to avoid a sneaking suspicion that I ought, like my brother, to be listening to this, that, or the other program of practical progress. Should I determine to give away my earthly goods, whither shall I go? To be a vagrant in a world where concrete goods are almost all that matters is not to escape that world, but only to defy it. In defiance is small peace.
No, if I would live serene in this overstaffed age, I must not run away. Indeed, I cannot run away. I must stay on where I am and learn, without change of physical habitat, to live in terms of the spirit. I must be in the world, yet not of the world. Realization of that difficult necessity moves in the minds of more and more of our contemporaries.
This longing to live above material things can be decisive. ‘I could not live, I think,’ writes one of the world’s most harassed statesmen, ‘ in a world I know to be carried on largely in terms of a struggle for possessions, if I could not go to Mass. I assist several times a week. To adore God is to escape, for a moment at least, into a realm of nobler things than most men dream of. You ask how it was that I became a Christian in my middle years. It was the need for worship, for release thereby from noise and things, which made me search and find. I adore God; and then some of me, the best of me, lives all day long in Heaven.’
VII
Thirdly, there are those who resume the practice of religion in a revolt against the tyranny of force.
Man left to himself, these perceive, is not only a greedy beast, but cruel. In constant quest of wealth, and with an unquenchable lust to dominate, more and more he throws off the mask of benevolence, discards even lip service to an honorable fraternity, and makes a frank appeal to arms. As in the days of Christ, so now, the kings of the earth are they that lord it over their fellows, while those who enjoy special privilege are called benefactors. Aggressors rule, while would-be aggressors wait a turn of fortune; and the only defense men trust in is one cut from the same harsh goods as the aggression. A world thus occupied by ravening wolves, some attacking in packs and the rest defending in packs, the tools of competition only refinements of tooth and claw, seems to many a man of sensitivity a world so chaotic as to imperil sanity. It may be that such a man can see no way to extricate himself from complicity in carnage. He may grimly acquiesce. Or it may be that he accepts the horrors of his time as penalty for a human sin in the guilt for which he is himself involved. But such a tragic turmoil surely cannot be the rightful end of man. Wherein lies salvation from this madness — salvation for himself, for his children, for humanity as a whole?
Suddenly before such a one appears the figure of Jesus Christ, complete antithesis of violence and yet possessor of a strength beside which iron-hearted tyrants and embattled democrats alike seem soft as putty. It is not always easy for the war-embittered to hear what Jesus may be saying as He looks at us, who know not the things which belong to our peace. Above the turmoil, however, Jesus does speak with a new vividness to many a one in these days, from half-forgotten memory of early religious training, from chance perusal of the Gospels, sometimes in moments of mystical understanding. ‘You shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. Be not frightened. Though this be come to pass, the end is not yet. When you see these things, lift up your heads, for your redemption draws nigh.’ Once more the crowd cries, ‘Away with this Man! No king for us but Cæsar!’ — and Jesus says never a word. Or it may be that what is heard is ‘Peace I give unto you; but not as the world gives, give I unto you.’ He who hears such things begins again to understand that, though men destroy one another, though the heavens and the earth pass, there remains that which does not pass, a love too strong for inhumanity to kill. When men and women grew sick of violence, back in the Dark Ages, it was to God they fled, and served Him in the houses of religion. From thence they came forth to remake a world which brutality had wellnigh destroyed. Some were dragged from monastery and altar to martyrdom, not without fruit. It was a God of peace these served; and by that God they made the peace again. It is not hard to understand all that, as we look into the past. It ought not to be impossibly difficult to see that today the more the violence, the more is sure to be the revival of true faith.
VIII
A fourth impetus to renewed religion is a desire thereby to escape the pressure of self-consciousness.
There can be little doubt in the mind of any candid observer of contemporary life and thought that most impulsions today lend to produce in man an introspection dangerous to psychic health. Constantly one is being urged to remember himself, to improve himself, to develop himself, to express himself— all these in terms of here and now. Our educational system urges this, in season and out of season, and so do the other agencies which mould common opinion. The person of intelligence, like everyone else, feels the supposed necessity; and yet at the same time, because he is no fool, he is apt to realize quite clearly that, in terms of here and now, this selfexpressionism is a futile folly, that all earthly careers are of necessity frustrated careers, that death destroys accomplishment and buries each man’s mundane fame in swift oblivion. While perhaps unable to think out the nature of his dilemma, he nevertheless feels that something is very wrong in his pursuits. There comes only too often, from realization of this dilemma, a morbid resentment, a constant irritation, even a fundamental despair; but there may result, instead, and frequently does result, a search for some great cause in service of which one may lose one’s self.
The desire for self-release has had a great deal to do with the rise of those political pseudo-religions whose rival claims now threaten civilization. The rank and file of human beings, bored beyond endurance by too long having lived in a self-expressive world, a world wherein each must act, or try to act, as a little god, have sought and to some extent found, in nationalistic, secularistic patriotism, a program in the advancement of which they may lose themselves and so find that most necessary of freedoms, freedom from self. The masses have felt the impulse of a fundamental discontent with life lived selfishly and have been led, sometimes into wickedness and more often into folly, by plausible prophets who have promised liberating self-oblation in an attempted realization of some totalitarian Paradise.
Such a solution to the problem of how to escape from one’s self, however, is not satisfactory to those who are reasonably well-read in history and have a competent knowledge of human behavior. They understand quite well the defect inherent in the nationalistic pseudoreligions. Man’s greed and man’s desire to coerce have always been strong enough, still are strong enough, soon to bring to ruin every such secularistic social structure. The attempt to ‘build Jerusalem amid these dark Satanic mills’ is a holy and necessary venture; but for all that, ‘here have we no continuing city.’ The vision of the fathers fades into complacency in the children; and that in turn means corruption of the children’s children. Those who come to that conclusion see plainly that, while Paradise is something to be striven for on earth, it is to be attained only beyond earth. This proximate pessimism impels them toward a passionate search for the ultimate optimism inherent in a supernatural religion. Their search for joy in terms other-worldly does not, in point of fact, render them indifferent to the sufferings of a maladjusted society. Quite commonly they are found in the forefront of every battle for social righteousness; but notwithstanding, the hope in terms of which they live and work is a hope laid up for them in Heaven. They put not their trust in princes, nor in any child of man. They seek to lose themselves in the comradeship of the saints and holy ones, their Master He whose word can never pass away.
IX
Revolt against an unhealthy domination by this transient world, then, is what is behind the return of many of our intellectual leaders to religious faith and practice. They seek relief from pressures which originate in a secularist obsession: the pressure of an ignorance of purpose inevitable if one conceives of knowledge merely in scientific terms; the pressure of possessions; the pressure of material force; the pressure of such self-consciousness as makes men and women cry out for something greater than themselves, in service of which they may gladly live and bravely die. Religion for these (as for all men in every age, for that matter) is an escape device; but not, they insist, one by which they seek to hide from Reality in a dream world. They conceive of it, rather, as a method of refuge in Reality from phenomena incomprehensible, terrifying, destructive, except one learn to see them in the light of That-which-is, of Him-who-knows.