Mencken on Machen on Liberalism

The American journalist and commentator H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) was commonly referred to as “the sage of Baltimore”. Even today, his biting one-liners are still widely quoted.  He is perhaps best remembered for his witty coverage of the “Scopes Monkey Trial” and for his spirited opposition to Prohibition.  A committed atheist, Mencken was no friend of religion and frequently wrote disparagingly about its followers.  Here, for instance is part of what he wrote in the American Mercury in March 1930.

No, there is nothing notably dignified about religious ideas. They run, rather, to a peculiarly puerile and tedious kind of nonsense. At their best, they are borrowed from metaphysicians, which is to say, from men who devote their lives to proving that twice two is not always or necessarily four. At their worst, they smell of spiritualism and fortune telling. Nor is there any visible virtue in the men who merchant them professionally. Few theologians know anything that is worth knowing, even about theology, and not many of them are honest.

For this reason it is surprising, to say the least, that in early 1937 he wrote an obituary for the Rev J. Gresham Machen, in the Baltimore Evening Sun which was full of praise for the man.  Machen was an American Presbyterian theologian and Professor of New Testament at Princeton Seminary between 1906 and 1929.  He wrote many books and articles but perhaps his most famous was Christianity and Liberalism, first published in 1923.  In this book he specifically targeted the modernist movement within American Presbyterianism for preferring to fight their battles in what he termed “a condition of low visibility”.  He was here referring to their reluctance to employ clear-cut definitions in religious matters and to fully face the logical implications of religious views.  And he knew very well why there was such reluctance: “May it not discourage contribution to mission boards? May it not hinder the progress of consolidation, and produce a poor showing in columns of Church statistics”?

But he knew, equally well, where such a position would lead his church:

The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, regardless of their meanings, or shrinks from “controversial” matters, will never stand amid the shocks of life. In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight. In the sphere of religion, in particular, the present time is a time of conflict; the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology. This modern non-redemptive religion is called “modernism” or “liberalism.” Both names are unsatisfactory; the latter, in particular, is question-begging. The movement designated as “liberalism” is regarded as “liberal” only by its friends; to its opponents it seems to involve a narrow ignoring of many relevant facts.

This was a bold stance by Machen, and it made him very unpopular. He became more and more isolated from his liberalising brethren.  In Mencken’s words he was unable “to square the disingenuous evasions of Modernism with the fundamentals of Christian doctrine”.  Eventually it led to his founding of his own seminary, the Westminster Theological Seminary, and of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.  History has, of course, proved Machen to be essentially correct in his diagnosis.  Most of the Protestant communions are now in a state of disarray on doctrinal matters and their flocks have become ever smaller, divided up as they are into “a thousand jarring sects”. 

Of course, Mencken’s praise for Machen’s stance had nothing to do with religious belief per se.  As Mencken says in his obituary column: “I stand much more chance of being converted to spiritualism, to Christian Science or even to the New Deal than to Calvinism, which occupies a place, in my cabinet of private horrors, but little removed from that of cannibalism”.  Rather it was a question of consistency and of accepting the dictates of reason once a particular set of primary assumptions were taken.  And one of the primary assumptions of Christianity is the notion of Holy Writ as God’s Word.  As Mencken says of Machen:

Mencken did not share the primary assumptions of Christianity but he was more than prepared to defend those who did so, provided they went about the business in a consistent and logical way.  This was to his great credit, for here was the same famous newspaper columnist who had described the religious followers of William Jennings Bryan as “the simian faithful of Appalachia”.  Moreover, he made it quite explicit in his obituary to Machen that his own position was that of a “friendly neutral”.  However much he had lambasted religious believers in the past, his target was the inconsistency they had shown in their various stances.  He did not challenge their basic beliefs because, as he well knew, they were not amenable to refutation via the standard sort of human reasoning.  They were prior to reason:

It is my belief, as a friendly neutral in all such high and ghostly matters, that the body of doctrine known as Modernism is completely incompatible, not only with anything rationally describable as Christianity, but also with anything deserving to pass as religion in general. Religion, if it is to retain any genuine significance, can never be reduced to a series of sweet attitudes, possible to anyone not actually in jail for felony. It is, on the contrary, a corpus of powerful and profound convictions, many of them not open to logical analysis. Its inherent improbabilities are not sources of weakness to it, but of strength. It is potent in a man in proportion as he is willing to reject all overt evidences, and accept its fundamental postulates, however unprovable they may be by secular means, as massive and incontrovertible facts. (my emphasis)

These postulates, at least in the Western world, have been challenged in recent years on many grounds, and in consequence there has been a considerable decline in religious belief. There was a time, two or three centuries ago, when the overwhelming majority of educated men were believers, but that is apparently true no longer. Indeed, it is my impression that at least two-thirds of them are now frank skeptics. But it is one thing to reject religion altogether, and quite another thing to try to save it by pumping out of it all its essential substance, leaving it in the equivocal position of a sort of pseudo-science, comparable to graphology, “education,” or osteopathy.

Let us now return to the reasons behind the upsurge in modernist ideas within the churches.  In the first place, as Machen points out, there were concerns that the churches were becoming irrelevant in the modern world, and as a result, were losing followers.  They needed updating.  Traditionally, it had always been the case that the task was to modify the world so that it better conformed to the Christian ideal.  Now it was a case of modifying the ideal so that it conformed to the world. And increasingly, that world is merely a world of sensory appetites.  Even before the time of Christ, this was not the way we viewed things.  For Plato and Socrates and for the early Greek tradition in general, there was always a certain opposition between the material and the spiritual.  Mere sensory existence stifled the powers of the intellect.

 In this whole matter of faith and reason, there is a curious contrast between the modern purveyors of science-as-religion (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and others) and the modernisers of religion.  In the case of science, at least as it is popularly represented, there is a corpus of dogma which is sacred and cannot, under any circumstances, be questioned. You can think of this in the same way that our ancestors thought of key religious doctrines. Contrariwise, for the modernists in religious matters, no dogma is set in concrete and we must re-examine everything in the light of ‘progress’.  This is exactly opposite to the way that it should be.  If I were, in this magazine or anywhere else, to voice my doubts concerning the veracity of say, Darwinian Theory, there would be an immediate outcry and many indignant letters to the editor.  It is an article of scientific faith.  And yet, the whole edifice of science and progress in science rests totally upon our willingness to question everything.  This is why scientific theories are called theories.  There was once a time when the geocentric universe was held to be just as factual as we now hold Darwinian evolutionary theory to be factual. It was Karl Popper who advanced the idea of the need for ‘falsifiability’ in science.  In other words, if a scientific theory is such that no possible set of data, no possible theoretical difficulty, can call it into question, then it is not a scientific theory at all but an article of faith.

And so, we have a curious reversal in the nature of our beliefs.  In the case of science, what we now regard as ‘scientific facts’ are held as articles of faith and any attempt to question them draws immediate criticism. They are the sacred and infrangible dogmas of modernity On the other hand, articles of religious faith are now regarded as little more than hypotheses – all are able to be modified or re-interpreted according to the needs of the day. Think of Bishop Robinson and Honest to God or, perhaps, of the theology of Bultmann.

To these charges, the modernists will simply claim that they have no wish to alter the ‘basics’ of Christianity, merely the accumulations of doctrine and dogmas that have crept in over the centuries.  They wish to return to the purity of the original Christian message – a message of simple love and forgiveness.  Very soon, though, they find that such abstract notions need to be rendered useable in the real world and to do so, we are continually called to make judgements. This was the experience of the Church Fathers in the early centuries of Christianity and it continues to this day.  These judgements, if they are to be anything more than mere subjective assessments (or, perhaps, emotive judgements as per A.J. Ayer and the Positivist school), need guidelines based on something that sits above mere human subjectivity. This is why a great body of doctrine and dogma built up over the centuries.  And so it is that amongst a great many modern clerics of the various Christian creeds, you tend to find an embarrassed silence on issues such as euthanasia, abortion, surrogacy, and so on.  They are between a rock and a hard place, just as Machen’s critics were.  And Mencken was quick to draw attention to this:

That, it seems to me, is what the Modernists have done, no doubt with the best intentions in the world. They have tried to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion, and yet preserve a generally pious cast of mind. It is a vain enterprise. What they have left, once they have achieved their imprudent scavenging, is hardly more than a row of hollow platitudes, as empty as [of] psychological force and effect as so many nursery rhymes. They may be good people and they may even be contented and happy, but they are no more religious than Dr. Einstein. Religion is something else again –in Henrik Ibsen’s phrase, something far more deep-down-diving and mudupbringing, Dr. Machen tried to impress that obvious fact upon his fellow adherents of the Geneva Mohammed. He failed – but he was undoubtedly right.

For those who are not prepared to see the issues directly in terms of religious belief, there is another way of presenting the matter, and no-one has done it better than Phillip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic. He puts the matter this way:

A culture survives principally, I think, by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood – with that understanding of which explicit belief and precise knowledge of externals would show outwardly like the tip of an iceberg. Spiritualizers of religion (and precisians of science) failed to take into account the degree of intimacy with which this comprehensive interior understanding was cognate with historic institutions, binding even the ignorant of a culture to a great chain of meaning.

Rieff casts his arguments in the language of sociology but it is clear that he is referring, in the above quote, to religious belief. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, his main target is the Freudians and their successors. Their secular therapies of analysis and ‘release’ which supposedly unburden the individual from the oppressive weight of human existence in a contingent universe, are utterly powerless when it comes to the provision of some sense of community – of belonging. Moreover, as Rieff points out elsewhere in his book, that sense of belonging to some wider whole provides the only means of reconciling the individual against the sheer terror of an indifferent universe.  In this regard, the current level of suicide, particularly youth suicide, as well as the massive use of anti-depressive drugs, is very sobering indeed.

It is the particular value of rules and ‘interdicts’ as cohesive forces, binding the individual to a shared culture and its institutions, which Rieff stresses. It is these institutions which, historically, saved us from the “destructive illusions of uniqueness and separateness”. Here it is useful to recall the social philosophy of J.S. Mill and his insistence, contra Rieff, that the individual should be subject only to such rules as will prevent him or her from harming others.  The possibility of other restraints on conduct as having a positive role in society is simply not considered. In fact, the whole history of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought in this area is one of indifference or antagonism towards traditional moral rules. Even religious believers like Kant wish to place morality on a scientific, rather than a religious footing. 

And yet it is these very rules and ‘interdicts’, these very doctrines and dogmas, which the modernists seek to modify or neutralize in the name of “bringing the Church into the 21st Century”, or some such.  They fail to understand that what Rieff calls “the renunciatory mode” is essentially a positive and not a negative asceticism and its purpose is “aimed fundamentally at a liberation of the highest powers of personality from blockage by the automatism of the lower drives”.  Indeed, the religious modernists are themselves now best thought of as psychological therapists.  Their religious message of relief from ‘medieval laws’ and clerical hierarchies is exactly parallel to the Freudian or post-Freudian analytical attitude. Their purpose is to unburden us from the sense of sin and from commitments of all sorts, to free us as individuals, and to give us what Rieff calls “a manipulative sense of well-being”. This, he says, is the unreligion of the age. In a much-quoted one-liner, Rieff explains that “Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.”

Just as liberalism in religious matters is ultimately self-defeating, so is political liberalism.  This point has been made by commentators as varied as Michael Polyani (Meaning), Leszek Kolakowski (The Self-Poisoning of the Open Society), and Malcolm Muggeridge (The Great Liberal Death Wish), to name just three. At bottom, these two aspects of human existence – the religious and the political – are inescapably linked together, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively.  At the moment we are seeing the playing out of the last phase of a negative link between the two.  The remaining rump of traditional belief in the various Christian communions, but especially in Catholicism, is being relentlessly pursued by the political liberals in the name of ‘inclusiveness’, ‘equality’, and other related nostrums. Our age, as Polyani says, “is racked by the fanaticism of unbelievers”.

It’s not that traditional religion is being destroyed, rather it is being cunningly drained of all vitality.  Indeed, the outward edifice will remain and will appear to offer “business as usual”.  With brilliant insight, Rieff presaged that future, the future of what he terms ‘psychological man’, and which has become our reality:

In the emergent culture, a wider range of people will have ‘spiritual’ concerns and engage in ‘spiritual’ pursuits.  There will be more singing and more listening.  People will continue to genuflect and read the Bible … but no prophet will denounce the rich attire or stop the dancing.  There will be more theatre, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and draw its curtains.

… The wisdom of the next social order, as I imagine it, would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men … but rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life. … All governments will be just, so long as they secure that consoling plenitude of option in which modern satisfaction really consists.  In this way the emergent culture could drive the value problem clean out of the social system and, limiting it to a form of philosophical entertainment in lieu of edifying preachment, could successfully conclude the exercise for which politics is the name. … Psychological man, is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority … so long as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy of abundance. … Psychological man in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use.

You can recognize, in Rieff’s vision of the future, the exact philosophical position of the late Richard Rorty, the philosophical spokesman for modern, secular liberalism in America.  He was once asked whether his anti-metaphysical program of ‘self-creation’ could work in the absence of some unifying, metaphysical base – in other words, whether a wholly secular and subjective culture could produce enough of a civic community to protect democratic society against collapse.  This was his short answer:

I think the answer is [yes] only if there is enough money around.  That is, if there is economic expansion and the hope of further equality of opportunity for members of the society, then I think a civic community does not need the churches and it can get along with the poets and the scientists.  …… I suspect the churches are going to stage a comeback as the money decreases.  I shall regret both the shortage of money and the return of the churches.

If you check the available short biographies of H.L. Mencken on the internet, you will find that he had quite a soft spot for Nietzsche.  The commentators regard this as a very negative thing, but I tend to disagree.  Like the present-day philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, I see Nietzsche as the “canary in the mine”; that is to say, his particular genius was to accurately portray the aftermath of the death of God.  To be sure, his mad vision of the Übermensch and his depiction of Christianity as “the slave morality” is thoroughly distasteful, but he was quite right to point out that once Divine Authority is removed from the scene, mere human schemes of moral philosophy are very laughable matters. Why should anyone feel compelled to abide by their strictures? This, of course is precisely the point made, albeit in a different way, by Rieff.  I think Mencken had some sense of this too.  He had little time for American liberal democracy as an ultimate ideal, and for the great drive towards that sort of equality which abhors the very idea of any form of hierarchical order:

Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free. 

He may have scoffed at religion, but he scoffed even harder at that which purported to take its place. And, perhaps, we have reached that place in his imagined cycle of things where the libertarians train their guns on traditional religious belief and issue the old threat: “Either you become more democratic and freer like us, or we will use force”.