The Religion of America

By BRO. JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, NEW YORK

THE BUILDER OCTOBER 1922

America belongs to the soul as much as to the body, and therefore, like Olympus in the Homeric poems, is rightly
found in the geography of the spiritual world.  It would be better, perhaps, if we learned to think of it in this wise oftener than we do - better for America as well as for ourselves, and that in ways the most practical.  At any rate such is the theme of the author of this beautiful essay, and he has won such fame as an interpreter of the religious implications of the American ideas as gives his words great weight.  Readers of THE BUILDER will he interested to know that Brother Newton has recently produced a brilliant book entitled "Preaching in London"; it is published by The George H. Doran Company, 244 Madison Avenue, New York.  In due time it will be reviewed in the Library Department.


RELIGION is a universal and elemental power in human life, and to limit its scope by restrictive adjectives would seem, at first glance, to be self-contradictory.  For this reason, the idea of an American religion borders on inconsistency.  Since all souls are alike genetically, and the divine life flows into all similarly; since human life pulsates to the same great needs, the same great faiths, the same great hopes, why speak of the religion of one nation as if it were unique? Is not the religious sentiment a supreme revelation of the essential unity of humanity, and the ultimate basis of brotherhood?

Exactly, but the very fact that religion is the creative impulse of humanity promises variety of form, of accent and expression.  While humanity is one, in the economy of progress a distinctive mission and message is assigned to each great race, for the fulfilment of which it is held accountable before the bar of history.  Naturally, in the working out of that destiny the impulse common to the race is given form, colour and characteristic expression by the social, political and intellectual environment in which it develops.  Thus the religion of Greece with its myriad gods, albeit springing from the same impulse as that of Egypt, is yet different.  And the modern man looks with a new wonder upon the various costumes in which the religious sentiment has appeared in different ages and nations, and rejoices in its variegated life as adding infinitely to its picturesque reality and philosophic interest.

By the same token, no one can read the story of mankind aright unless he sees that our human life has its basis and inspiration in the primary intuition of kinship with God.  The state, not less than the church, science equally with theology, have their roots in this fundamental reality.  At the center of human life is the altar of faith and prayer, and from it the arts and sciences spread out, fanwise, along all the avenues of culture.  The temples which crowned the hills of Athens were works of art, dreams come true in stone; but they were primarily tributes to the gods - the artistic genius finding its inspiration and motif in religious faith.  Until we lay firm hold of the truth of the essential religiousness of human life, we have no clue to its meaning and evolution.  So and only so may anyone ever hope to interpret the eager, aspiring, prophetic life of America, whose ruling ideas and consecrating ideals have their authority and appeal by virtue of an underlying religious conception of life and the world.

For, it becomes increasingly manifest that this republic of ours - this melting-pot of all nations an races - has its own unique and animating spirit, its mission, and its destiny to fulfill.  Just as to the Greeks we owe art and philosophy, to the Hebrews the profoundest religion, to the Romans law and organization, and to the Anglo-Saxons laws that are self-created from the sense of justice in the people; just so this nation has a distinct contribution to make to the wealth of human ideals. America is not an accident.  It is not a fortuitous agglomeration of exiles and emigrants.  Nor is it a mere experiment to test an abstract dogma of state.  It is the natural development of a distinct life - an inward life of visions, passions, and hopes embodying itself in outward laws, customs, institution ways of thinking and ways of doing things - a mighty spiritual fact which may well detain us to inquire into its meaning.  Because we are carving a new image in the pantheon of history it behooves us to ask whether or not from this teeming, multitudinous life there is not emerging an interpretation of religion distinctively and characteristically American.  In a passage of singular elevation both of language and of thought, Hegel explains why he did not consider America in his Philosophy of History, written in 1823:

"America is the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world's history shall reveal itself.  It is the land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe.  It is for America to abandon the ground on which hitherto the history of the world has developed itself.  What has taken place in the new world up to the present time is only an echo of the old world - the expression of a foreign life; and as a land of the future, it has no interest for us here, for, as regards history, our concern must be with that which has been and that which is."

Written by a great - thinker who studied the history of the world as an unfolding of the divine life of man, and who searched every age for the footprints of God, those words are truly memorable.  They are a recognition of the unique and important mission of our republic, and its unescapable responsibility in the arena of universal history.  Much has happened since Hegel wrote, and the drama of our national destiny, as so far unfolded, is a fulfilment of his prophecy, as witness these words wherein one also of our own poets has set that history to music:

"This is the new world's Gospel: Be ye men!
Try well the legends of the children's time;
Ye are a chosen people, God has led
Your steps across the desert of the deep
As now across the desert of the shore;
Mountains are cleft before you as the sea
Before the wandering tribes of Israel's sons;
Still onward rolls the thunderous caravan,
Its coming printed on the western sky
A cloud by day, by night a pillar of flame;
Your prophets are a hundred to one
Of them of old who cried, 'Thus saith the Lord';
They told of cities that should fall in heaps,
But yours of mightier cities that shall rise
Where yet the lowly fishers spread their nets
The tree of knowledge in your garden grows,
Not single, but at every humble door."


THE RELIGIOUS QUALITY OF AMERICA

What, then, is the quality of the religious America as it has revealed itself in our national life? Socrates was right when he said that the real religion of Greece was not to be found in its temples. Emerson made a like remark with respect to the religion of England. Just so, much of the theology taught among us, even today, was transplanted to our shores from lands and times alien to our own, and, if taken literally, it would be incompatible with our fundamental national principles.  It was the product of minds whose only idea of the state was that of an absolute monarchy, a shadow of vanished empires, a reminiscence of ages when the serfdom of the people and the despotism of constituted authorities were established conditions. Its idea of God, of man, of salvation are such as would naturally occur to the subjects of a monarchy, and this may be one reason why they hardly touch the actual life of men in our land.  Fortunately our fathers kept
their theology and their politics apart, seemingly un-aware of the conflict between them.  If Puritanism crystallized in grotesque forms about the idea of conscience, the genius of the Cavaliers was individualism. Out of these apparently antagonistic ideals, nurtured each upon its own soil within our national domain, has come that life which is destined to embody the religious spirit in a form peculiar to America.  So that, if we would know the theology of America, to say nothing of its religion, we must go further than to the creeds of our churches, and find it in the life of the people, their temper, spirit and character.

Obviously, if we are to know the religion of America we must seek it in the Spirit of America, and what may that spirit be? Here we find an unusual diversity of judgment, both among native and foreign students, but they fall into two general classes.  There are those who tell us that we are a crude, sordid folk, sodden in materialism, and others who are equally sure that we are a race of incurable idealists.  Let us hasten to admit that both classes of our critics are right, and that it is precisely this blending of self-interest with other-selfness, this robust realism working on a basis of the ideal, seeking to make tangible the unbrought grace of life and its finer values, which constitutes the chief glory of our nation.  What idealism alone leads to and ends in, India shows us.  What its opposite results in, some think they see in the unimaginative, scientific efficiency of Germany.  These two must be held together, that so our materialism may incarnate our idealism, and our idealism consecrate and transfigure our materialism.

Because this is so, because our national spirit has this dual aspect, it is a blunder to leave either element out of account in the interpretation of our history.  Historians are apt to emphasize the purely material causes of our national growth, interpreting it as a matter of chance, of geographical environment, or, as is now the fashion, of economic necessity.  Thus we find the grand traits of New England character attributed to the harsh climate, to sterile soil, to hostile conditions, while the Revolution and the Anti-Slavery movements are held to have been primarily commercial in their motives.  It is not true.  While no one can deny the influence of geography and industries, it is little short of blasphemy to overlook those deeper causes those glowing sentiments that have touched the hearts and fired the souls of our people.  America is a land of commercial opportunity, but our hearts are not in our ledgers and our aspirations are not expressed in profits.  What really rules this nation is a passionate attachment to the ideals of freedom and fraternity; and the soul of our people finds voice, not in the record of bank clearings, but in the far-flung visions of our national poets and heroes.

Stephen Graham, having followed the Russian pilgrimage to the Holy City, came with the poor emigrants to America, and tells us that it was a journey from the most mystical of all lands to the most material.  And yet, if we take Tolstoi as the typical man of Russia, of its strength and gentleness, and its strange lights and shadows, and place him alongside Lincoln, the most typical man of America, who will say that America is not also a land of mysticism? Indeed, when Lincoln fell fifty years ago, it was Tolstoi who said, "He was a Christ in miniature." To say that America is idealistic is only another way of saying that it is instinctively and intensely religious; that our national life is rooted in spiritual reality; and this profound religiousness has touched our history to finer issues, turning an almanac of prices into an Epic of Humanity - nay, into a chapter in the very biography of God.

Consider now the religious meaning of the basic ideas and aspirations of our American life.  Before there was an American republic, thinkers in other lands had wrought out the gospel of liberty, equality, and fraternity as a speculative thesis; but our fathers proceeded from theory to practice, and that, too, with an unshakable faith in human nature.  Holding that government must be by the people and of the people, they ceased theorizing and brought forth on this continent a nation dedicated to the truth that man has as inalienable right to be free-trusting the free man to guard his freedom and to find in his freedom the solution of whatever problems may arise.  That is to say, they reversed the theological teaching of ages, and risked the fate of our nation on faith in the essential goodness of human nature and its kinship with God! Surely he is blind who does not see how radical is the religious meaning of this first principle of our American theology.  America is a symbol of confidence in human nature; it assumes the inherent divinity and sacredness of man, and our history has justified that faith.

A HIDEOUS DOGMA

Since this is a government of the people, the hideous dogma of the state as an abstract entity, a collective fiction, leading a life of its own, above and beyond that of the men who compose it - the frightful dogma which makes the state a kind of mortal God who can do no wrong, an irresponsible Moloch whose necessity is law, and to which liberty and right are to be sacrificed - has no place in America! Thank God we know nothing of the atheism that the state must do what it has to do, law or no law, right or no right, and that reasons of state justify anything, no matter how infernal! No, we are the state, and if our nation is guilty of a crime, each of us is guilty, in his degree, of that crime.  America, by the very genius of its national faith, repudiates the political infamy of Machiavelli and all his ilk, holding the moral law to be as binding upon the state as it is upon the life of the individual man.  In other words, our fathers took God into account and had respect for His eternal moral order, when they founded this republic, basing it, as they did, upon a religious conception of life and the world.

Foreign critics have often pointed out how visionary and unworkable such a principle is: nevertheless it works.  To be sure, it has its inconveniences at times.  As Gerrit Smith used to say, living in an autocracy is like taking a voyage on a great ocean liner, and sailing smoothly over the sea.  Its appointments are perfect, its service delightful, but we have nothing to do with the running of it.  Whereas, living in a republic is like riding on a raft.  It is less comfortable, our feet are wet half the time, and we have a lot of trouble - but we run the raft! Carl Schurz, in his talks with Bismarck, put it in another way.  In a monarchy, he said, details are well handled but the general tendency is wrong. In a republic the details may be muddled, but the general trend and direction are right, and he thought it better to be right in great matters even if we handle the details of national life unskilfully, than to be efficient in minor matters and wrong fundamentally.

Always, a new idea of man implies and involves a new conception of God.  It was natural for the men who bowed low when the glittering chariot of Caesar swept along the streets of Rome to think of God as an omnipotent Emperor, ruling the world with an arbitrary and irresponsible almightiness.  For men who live in this land of the free such a conception of God is a caricature.  The citizens of a republic do not believe that God is an infinite autocrat, nor do they bow down to divine despotism; they worship in the presence of an Eternal Father, who is always and everywhere accessible to the humblest man who lifts his heart in prayer.  Republican principles necessarily involve faith in the Fatherhood of God.  The logic of the American idea leads to faith in a Divine Love universal and impartial, all-encompassing and everlasting.  Mayhap we find here a hint why so many men, like Lincoln and Hay, have lived outside the church, not because they were irreligious, but because the theology of the church is not in accord with the theology of the republic.

Also, America, itself a realized vision, is another name for Brotherhood.  By a process of assimilation we have admitted men from all the nations of the earth into our national fraternity, extending to them the right of equal suffrage and citizenship.  They walk with us along our avenues of trade; they sit with us in our legislative halls; they worship with us in our temples. Americans all, each race brings some rich gift of enterprise, idealism, and tradition, and all are loyal to our genius of liberty under wise and just laws many races without rancour, many faiths without feud.  How many of us here today could repeat the words of John Hay:

"When I look to the springs from which my blood descends, the first ancestors I ever heard of were a Scotchman who was half English and a German woman who was half French.  Of my more immediate progenitors, my mother was from New England and my father from the South.  In this bewilderment of origin and experience, I can only put on the aspect of deep humility in any gathering of favourite sons, and confess that I am nothing but an American."

Thus we are giving an actual illustration of the Brotherhood of Man - an illustration that is also a prophecy.  Here the genius of America is one with the teachings of all true religion, since the spirit of fraternity is the essence of both - having its springs in Love, its attainment in Sacrifice, and its mission in Service. May this spirit grow and flourish to the confounding of all inhumanity! America knows nothing of a Slavic race, nothing of a Teutonic race, nothing of a Saxon race, but only the Human race, one in origin and destiny, as it must be one in a great fellowship of sympathy and service.  No wonder the religious spirit of America is victoriously optimistic.  As James Bryce said, American patriotism is itself a religion, in its confidence in the ultimate triumph of its principle, and in its conviction that this nation has a mission as an evangelist of liberty and fraternity among men - as truly as the Hebrew had a mission of righteousness to the ends of the earth.  Of the influence of this spirit upon theology, a great Frenchman has said:

"In a country where everything succeeds, where at the feast of life there is room for all, where every man sits by his fireside in peace, believes what seems true to him, and worships God in every way his heart loves best, it must be difficult to conceive of a heaven with a narrow gateway and a salvation limited to a few.  The American is therefore naturally an optimist."

Such is the religious spirit as it has revealed itself in this land, coloured by the genius of republic, and the social, industrial and political conditions under which our nation has grown - a faith profound and fruitful, hearty, wholesome, joyous, facing the future with a soul of adventure, often beshadowed but never eclipsed, sometimes retarded but never defeated.  If it is revolutionary, it is also redeeming, lifting humanity out of despotism into liberty, demanding the right of every man to stretch his arms and his soul, to seek that truth by which no man was ever injured, and to look up from the lap of Mother Earth into the face of God the Father, and climb "upward through law and faith to Love." It is a great and simple faith in God and man, in the law of right and the golden rule of love; it is religion of the future, vital with the vitality of the universe, the spirit of God moving in the heart of a great people - Emmanuel!

"Not in dumb resignation
We lift our hands on high;
Not like the nerveless fatalist
Content to trust and die.

Our faith springs like the Eagle
Who soars to meet the sun,
And cries exulting unto Thee, 
O Lord, Thy will be done.

Thy will! It bids the weak be strong,
It bids the strong be just;
No lip to fawn, no hand to beg,
No brow to seek the dust.

Wherever man oppresses man
Beneath Thy liberal sun,
O Lord, be there Thine arm made bare,
Thy righteous will be done!"

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