[ p. 76 ]
THE wholesale murder, torture, persecution and oppression we are witnessing in the middle of the twentieth century proves the complete bankruptcy of Christianity as a civilizing force, its failure as an instrument to tame instinctive human passions and to transform man from an animal into a rational social being.
The revival of barbarism and the wholesale practice of mass murder all over the world cannot be regarded as the work of a few godless, sadistic Gestapo men and some fanatic believers in Shintoism. It is being practiced by many churchgoing men of many nationalities.
Millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood, tens of millions have been robbed, deported and enslaved by Christians, descendants of families belonging for centuries to the Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic and Protestant churches. Cruelties, horrible and inhuman beyond imagination, have been committed by countless men, not only German and Japanese, but Spanish, Italian, Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian, French, Serbian, Croatian and Russian. And these deeds, surpassing in ferocity and bloodthirstiness anything hitherto recorded in Western history, have been tolerated, and therefore tacitly admitted, [ p. 77 ] by each and every organized Christian religion.
There is no intention here to accuse or to pass judgment upon any of the organized religions for tolerating these outbreaks of prehistoric, atavistic animalism in man. But the very fact that such a radical reversion has occurred proves the utter inadequacy of the methods followed by the Christian religions to influence and mold human character and to male man follow, not his own brutal instincts but something in the nature of moral principles.
It cannot be denied that Christianity has failed to penetrate the soul of man, to take root in human character. It has succeeded only in creating a fragile veneer of ethical conduct, a thin crust of civilization which has been blasted away and blown to pieces by the volcanic social eruptions of the twentieth century.
For a certain time there was some justification for the belief that the Judaeo-Christian principles were triumphing through their effective ritualism and the mystical presentation of their dogmas, which filled simple, primitive men with enough awe and fear to induce them to follow the teachings of Christianity, not because they understood them and wanted them but because they feared the Uncertain and the Unknown. But today, since modern science has destroyed or made ridiculous most of the age-old superstitions and venerated symbols—the necessary and useful media for the propagation of ideals centuries ago—the ideals alone are powerless to direct and regulate human conduct in society.
We have to recognize that the Ten Commandments, [ p. 78 ] the moral teachings of the prophets, of Christ, the evangelists and the Apostles, cannot be made a reality in this world of enlightenment, science, technical progress and communications by using methods devised centuries ago by the founders of religions, according to the circumstances of their time methods which are wholly ineffective today. It in no way derogates from the great work and the good intentions of the religions, nor is it anything to be ashamed of if we realize and admit that man, to be transformed from the beast he is to a responsible member of a civilized society, needs methods more effective than prayer, sermons and ritual.
Man can become a conscious and constructive social being only if society imposes upon him certain principles in the form of a legal order.
History demonstrates indisputably that there is only one method to make man accept moral principles and standards of social conduct. That method is: Law.
Peace among men and a civilized society—which are one and the same thing—are imaginable only within a legal order equipped with institutions to give effect to principles and norms in the form of law, with adequate power to apply those laws and to enforce them with equal vigor against all who violate them.
This self-evident truth—supported by the entire history of mankind—can hardly be the subject of debate any longer.
Just as prayer, sermons and ritual are inadequate to impose upon mankind a social conduct based on [ p. 79 ] principles, so pledges, declarations and promises are inadequate to achieve the same purpose.
Throughout the entire history of all known civilizations, only one method has ever succeeded in creating a social order within which man had security from murder, larceny, cheating and other crimes, and had freedom to think, to speak and to worship.
That method is Law.
And integrated social relations regulated by law—which is peace—have been possible only within social units of indivisible sovereignty, with one single source of law, irrespective of the size, territory, population, race, religion and degree of complexity of such social units. It has never been possible between such sovereign social units, even if they were composed of populations of the same race, the same religion, the same language, the same culture, the same degree of civilization.
The failure of Christianity as a civilizing force of society is an incalculable tragedy.
Two thousand years is time enough to judge the efficacy of a method, no matter how valuable the doctrine. During these twenty centuries, it has seemed at times that Christianity had at last succeeded in taming the beast in man, in controlling and directing destructive human impulses and characteristics.
But since the Christian churches have deviated from their universal mission and have evolved into national organizations supporting the pagan, tribal instincts of nationalism everywhere, we see how weak was the hold of Christianity upon the Western world. For worldly interests they have abandoned their moral [ p. 80 ] teachings and have capitulated before the volcanic instincts of men, who are bound to destroy each other, unless restricted by universal law.
What was divine and civilizing in Christianity was its monotheism, its universalism. The doctrine which teaches that all men are created equal in the sight of God and are ruled by one God, with one law over all men, was the one really revolutionary idea in human history.
Unfortunately, organized Christianity developed into a more and more dogmatic, totalitarian hierarchy and the reaction to it led first to schism, then to widespread sectarianism. Thus the ideal of universal law has degenerated on one side into more and more centralized absolutism, and on the other into more and more widely separated sects and denominations. At the moment modern nations began to crystallize and national feeling in the Western world began to prevail over Christian feeling, the Christian churches, already divided among themselves, split into a number of new sects, each supporting the rising ideal of the nation.
Nationalism soon became identified with Christianity and in every country nationalist policy was recognized as Christian policy, in opposition to liberal and socialist tendencies.
Since the abandonment of universalism by the Christian churches—Catholic as well as Protestant—they have diverged from the original fundamental doctrine of Christianity to which they adhere no longer except in name. In thousands of churches today, Catholic priests and Protestant preachers of all denominations are praying for the glory of their own [ p. 81 ] nationals and for the downfall of others, even if they belong to the same church. This is indeed in violent contradiction to the highest religious ideal mankind ever produced—universal Christianity.
A universal moral principle is neither universal nor moral, nor is it a principle if it is valid only within segregated groups of people. 'TThou shalt not kill" cannot mean that it is a crime to kill a man of one’s own nationality, but that it is a virtue—to be blessed by all Christian churches—to kill a man of the same faith, who happens to be technically the citizen or subject of another nation-state. Such an interpretation of universal moral principles is revolting.
The same development can be observed in the second great monotheistic creed, in Islam. The great unity which had been maintained by the Koran for so many centuries among peoples of different stock, from the Adas to the Himalaya Mountains, has been visibly splitting up into nationalist groups within which allegiance to the new nationalist ideal is more powerful than -loyalty to the old universal teachings of Mohammed.
There is Pan-Turkism or Pan-Turanism, aimed at the union of all branches of the Turkish race living in the region extending from the Dardanelles to the Tigris and Euphrates.
To the south, the rising Pan-Arab movement is advocating the federation of all the Arab tribes into one nation.
Farther to the east—in India—the believers in Islam are inflamed by a strong Indian national feeling, expressed in the slogan: “I am an Indian first, a Muslim afterwards.”
[ p. 82 ]
And among the Mohammedan populations of the Soviet Union there burns a passionate Soviet nationalism.
Not only Christianity and Islam with their vast numbers of believers are being completely absorbed and dominated by neopagan nationalism. Even the originators of monotheism, even the Jews, have forgotten the fundamental teaching of their religion: universalism.
They seem no longer to remember that the One and Almighty God first revealed Himself to them because He chose them for a special mission, to spread the doctrine of the oneness of the Supreme Lawgiver, the universal validity of monotheism among the people of the world. They too, just like the followers of other monotheistic creeds, have become abject idolaters of the new polytheism—nationalism.
With glowing passion they desire nothing more than to worship their own national idol, to have their own nation-state. No amount of persecution and suffering can justify such abandonment of a world mission, such total desertion of universalism for nationalism, another name for the very tribalism which is the origin of all their misfortunes and miseries.
It is of utmost importance for the future of mankind to realize the apostasy and failure of all three of the monotheistic world religions and their domination by disruptive and destructive nationalism, as without the deep influence of the monotheistic outlook of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, human freedom in society—democracy—could never have been instituted and cannot survive.
[ p. 83 ]
Democracy, political freedom, the political rights of the individual, the equality of man before the law—all the things we have in mind when talking about democracy—are the products of Greek philosophy and Judaeo-Christian ethics. Democracy and political independence as we conceive them today are essentially the fruits of Western civilization. The roots of democratic ideals, of course, are much deeper. Village communities in India were run on a democratic basis centuries before the Greek cities. Meng-tse in China expressed views similar to Jefferson’s long before the Christian Era. But the organization of powerful nations in centralized democratic states is something entirely new in human history, and it is the product of universal monotheism. For Aristotle a democratic state was not conceivable with more than ten thousand inhabitants. Fifteen centuries of Judaeo-Christian-Islamic teaching about man created in the image of God, about the equality of man before God, were needed to forge the ideology of modern political democracy.
The free thinkers of the eighteenth century, who were among the pioneers of modern political democracy, revolted, not against the moral teaching of monotheism, but against the immoral practices and superstitions of the churches as national, human institutions. In fact, those free thinkers, in spite of the anathema cast upon them by the organized churches, were the most faithful disciples of the monotheistic conception since the prophets of Israel and the Apostles of Christ
There have been and there are other civilizations. [ p. 84 ] Among them the two most important are the Chinese and the Indian. But those great Asiatic civilizations are based on religious ideals, on notions of the relationship of man to man and man to God, entirely different from ours. Neither the Chinese nor the Indian peoples have ever had, nor have they ever yearned for the political and social system we in the Occident call democracy.
To us, there is something wrong and unjust about inequality and poverty. Our political struggles and aspirations tend to limit, if not abolish, social injustice, to create more goods and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Having made men more or less equal before the law and given them equal political rights, we seek to equalize their material conditions also. At least, that is the motivating ideal, however far we may be from achieving it.
In India, China, Japan—throughout the Orient where more than half the human race lives—inequalities are not regarded as a social injustice. Indeed, their whole system of religious thought is a direct justification of poverty, social inequality and the caste system.
How could democracy exist among the believers in Shintoism, which teaches that the earthly rulers themselves are gods? A creed having countless gods, in which every household deifies its ancestors, in which the greater gods preside over the empire and the lesser gods over towns and hamlets and which teaches that the emperor, an absolute monarch, is a god himself and the direct descendant of the sun-goddess, obviously precludes any reforms in the inherited struc ture of that society.
[ p. 85 ]
In even more striking contrast to democratic society are the great Asiatic religions, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Hinduism. These creeds, in which hundreds of millions of people dogmatically believe, are simultaneously religious and social institutions. Their two basic doctrines are:
A polytheistic pantheism, with an endless number of gods.
Metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls or reincarnation.
The entire social fabric of six to eight hundred million people is woven from these doctrines which dominate the everyday life and validate the morality of nearly half the human race. For them only one reality exists—Brahma—an absolute, all embracing spirit, the original cause and ultimate goal of all individual souls. This faith teaches that the soul is immortal, that each soul goes through endless reincarnations, and that no one can change, or has even the right to seek a change in his present condition of existence. Any desire for betterment in earthly conditions is a sin. Only through piety can a man strive to improve his lot, not in the present life but in future incarnations. The unbelievable poverty, abject misery and sub-animal existence of the sixty million untouchables in India, for instance, cannot be altered, since they are believed to be suffering in this life the just punishment for sins committed in previous incarnations.
Such a creed naturally goes hand in hand with gross superstitions, the worship of hosts of godlings, ghosts, spirits, demons and mystic objects of every kind. Approximately [ p. 86 ] four-fifths of the people of southern India, while commonly acknowledging the spiritual guidance of the Brahmans, worship local village deities with animal sacrifices and primitive rites.
The entire social structure reflects these religious ideas. One of the cardinal principles of society is racialism, the preservation and purity of descent. It is an aristocratic, not an egalitarian society. According to the prevailing religious principles, the society recognizes, utilizes and explains the inequalities of individuals and groups of individuals without making any attempt to remedy them.
It would be an affront to the great Asiatic peoples to criticize their traditions and their faith. Nothing is more remote from our intentions. But an analysis of the relationship between religious doctrines and principles of society demonstrates that the form of society at which the Western world is aiming is closely connected with the basic teachings of monotheism. Without its influence, modem democracy is unthinkable.
It is therefore of vital importance, from the point of view of the future of democratic institutions, human liberty and further progress of Western civilization, that the monotheistic religions recognize the incompatibility of nationalism with tteir basic doctrine, and the mortal danger presented to our immediate future by national disintegration and national sectarianism in the Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox and Islamic religions.
Today, nearly two centuries after Thomas Paine wrote The Age of Reason, his utterance is more to [ p. 87 ] the point than ever: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”
Human society can be saved only by universalism. Unless the Christian churches return to this central doctrine of their religion and make it the central doctrine of their practice, they will vanish before the irresistible power of a new religion of universalism, which is bound to arise from the ruin and suffering caused by the impending collapse of the era of nationalism.