Upton Sinclair - The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition

U >> Upton Sinclair >> The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition

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And mind you, it isn't as if I could save myself and you could save
yourself; we are all in the same canoe, and we all go overboard
together. You, perhaps, have a son who is drafted into the trenches in
winter-time, and drowned in blood and mud, because in Europe the
Catholic party supported militarism, and kept aristocratic criminals
in control of states. Or you find yourself involved in a marital
tragedy, and in order to free yourself from unendurable misery, you
are obliged to go to law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul,
the Roman bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a
means of gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry
than to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; and so of course
those who think him a voice of God can form no conception of the
dignity and grace of love, and if you want sound and wholesome
sex-conventions, you will be as apt to find them among the Ashantees
or the Kamchadals as among the followers of the Apostle to the
Gentiles.

You go to a so-called "divorce-court," which is dominated by this
Christian taboo, and exists for the purpose of barring you from a
second chance at the gratification of your unclean animal desire. You
are not permitted to tell your own story, for that would be
"collusion;" you listen while your intimate friends recite the pitiful
and shameful details of your domestic misfortune, under the
cross-questioning of lawyers who have suppressed for the time whatever
decent instincts they may possess, and follow blindly the details of a
prescribed procedure, at the cost of all sincerity, humanity and
truth. The next morning you find that the privacy guaranteed you by
law has been taken from you by corrupt court officials, who have sold
copies of the testimony to the newspapers, so that all the intimate
details of where you slept and where your wife slept and what you saw
your wife doing have been thrown out to journalistic jackals, who
scream with glee as they rend the carcass of your dead love. And in
the end, perhaps, you find that you have gone through this horror for
nothing--the august court with its Roman Catholic judge throws out
your petition, its suspicions having been excited by the fact that
when you discovered your domestic tragedy, you sought to behave like a
civilized person, with pity and self-restraint, instead of like a
sultan in Turkey, or a basso in an Italian grand opera.

#Birth Control#

I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by
minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated curse to
the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which might be used
to slay the monsters of disease and vice--but these weapons are not
allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be mentioned. Consider
the misery which is piling itself up in the slums of our great
cities--the degenerate, the defective, the insane, who are multiplying
as never before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and
painless method of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they can
not reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this
operation, and so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There
exists a simple, entirely harmless, and practically costless method of
preventing conception, which would enable us to check the blind and
futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods instead of as
animals. Consider the festering mass of misery in the slums of our
great cities; consider the millions of terrified, poverty-hounded
women, bearing one half-nurtured infant after another, struggling
desperately to feed and care for them, and seeing them drop into the
grave as fast as they are born--until finally the mother, worn out
with the Sisyphean labor, gives up and follows her misbegotten
offspring. Consider how many women, in their agony and despair,
make use of the methods of the primitive savage, to escape from
Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr. Wm. J. Robinson has estimated
that in the United States alone there are a million abortions
every year; and consider that all this hideous mass of suffering--a
bloody European war going on continually, unheeded by any newspaper
correspondent--might be avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing
formula, which we are not permitted to give! The Federation of
Catholic Societies have placed a law upon the statute-books of the
nation, and of all the states as well; the whole power of police and
courts and jails is at the service of religious bigots, and a young
girl is sent to prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose
for telling poverty-ridden slum-women how to keep from becoming
pregnant!

And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world, the judges and
district attorneys, the commissioners of correction and doctors who
perpetrated this infamy under, a so-called "reform" administration in
New York City--and what do you find? The first thing you find is that
they themselves, one and all, practice birth-control with their wives
or their mistresses. The second thing you find is that the
statute-books are crowded with other laws which they make no pretense
of enforcing; for example, the law which forbids the saloons to be
open on Sunday--which law they take the liberty of understanding to
mean that the saloons shall not have their front doors open on Sunday.
You will find that they are not at all afraid of the religious taboos;
they are afraid of the religious vote--and even more they are afraid
of the campaign contributions of sweat-shop manufacturers and
landlords, who cannot see what would become of prosperity if the women
of the slums were to cease to breed. So once more we discover the wolf
in sheep's clothing, the trader, making use of Tradition-worship;
hiding behind the skirts of devout old maiden aunts and grandmothers,
who repeat the instructions which God gave to Adam and Eve, "Be
fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." As if God were as
blind as a Fifth Avenue preacher, and could see no difference between
the Garden of Eden, full of all fruits that grow and all creatures
that run and fly and swim, and a modern East Side tenement-room, with
an oil stove and no windows and no water-closet, and the price of
cabbage seven cents a pound!

#Sheep#

There are more than a hundred thousand Protestant churches in America.
They own more than a billion dollars' worth of property, and in the
West and South they dominate the intellectual life of the country. I
do not wish to be unfair in what I say of them. They are far more
democratic than the Catholic Church; they fight valiantly against the
liquor traffic and those forms of graft which are obvious, or directly
derived from vice. There are among their clergy many men who are
honestly seeking light, and trying to make their institutions a factor
for progress. But they are caught in the spirit of Lutheran
scholasticism, narrow and ignorant, dogmatic and jealous; and they
cannot help it, because they are pledged by their creeds and
foundations to Tradition-worship; they have to believe certain things
because their ancestors believed them, they have to act in certain
ways, because of certain facts which existed in the world three
thousand years ago, but which now are known only to historians.

You are familiar with the habit of a herd of sheep to follow the
example of their leader; if this leader leaps over a stick, all the
rest will leap when they come to that spot, even though the stick may
have been taken away in the meantime. The scientist explains this
seeming-foolishness by the fact that sheep once lived in high
mountains, and fled from their enemies in swiftly rushing herds; when
the leader leaped across an abyss, the others had to leap, without
waiting to see in the dust and confusion. Now there are no mountains
and no enemies, but the sheep still jump. And in exactly the same way
the tailor still sews buttons at the back of your dress-coat, because
a couple of hundred years age all gentlemen wore swords; in the same
way our railroad builders make cars narrow and uncomfortable and
liable to overturn, because a hundred years ago all cars were hauled
by mules. In the same way the Orthodox Hebrew will eat no pork, in
spite of the fact that the microscope affords him complete protection
against disease; the orthodox Catholic will not eat meat on Friday,
because he thinks Jesus was crucified on that day; the orthodox
Anglican will not marry his deceased wife's sister, because of
something he reads in Leviticus; the orthodox Baptist requires total
immersion in a climate quite different from that of Palestine; the
orthodox Methodist refuses to enjoy fresh air and exercise on the
Sabbath.

In ancient Judea, you see, the people lived an open-air life, tending
sheep and working the fields; so it was an excellent thing for them to
rest from labor one day of the week, and to gather in temples to hear
the reading of the best literature of their time. But nowadays the
city slave spends his week-days shut up in an office, poring over a
ledger, or in a sweat-shop, chained to a sewing-machine. Obviously,
therefore, the thing to do on the seventh day is to lure him into the
open air, and persuade him to run and play. But do we do that, we
human sheep? We write ancient Hebrew laws upon our modern
statute-books, and if the city slave goes into a vacant lot and tries
to play base-ball, we send a policeman and take him to jail, and next
morning he is fined five dollars, and probably loses his job.

In the city where I live, a city supposed to be free and enlightened,
but in reality heavily burdened with churches, there are tennis courts
built and paid for out of public funds, my own included; yet I cannot
use these tennis courts on Sunday, because of the ancient Hebrew
taboo. My mail is not delivered to me, the swimming pool in the park
is closed to me, the library is closed nearly all day. If I enquire
about it, I am told that it is desirable that city employees should
have one day's rest a week; but when I ask why it might not be
possible to relay the employees, so that they might all have one, or
even two days' rest a week, and still give the public their rights on
Sunday, there is no answer. But I know the answer, having probed our
politics of hypocrisy. There is a "church vote" at which all
politicians tremble; there are clergymen, humanly jealous when their
peculiar graft is threatened, and hoping that if the law enforces a
general boredom, the public may be more disposed to endure the boredom
of sermons.

In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday; but moving
pictures having come into being since the days of Puritan rule, the
picture-shows are free to keep open. The law permits "sacred
concerts"--which, under the benevolent sway of Tammany, has come to
mean any sort of vaudeville; so what we have is a free rein to the
imbecilities of "Mutt & Jeff" and the obscenities of Anna Held and
Gaby Deslys--while we bar the greatest moralists of our times, such as
Ibsen and Brieux.

I speak with some crossness of this Sabbath taboo, because of an
experience which once befell me. In the second decade of this century
of enlightenment and progress, in our free American democracy, whose
constitution proclaims religious toleration, and forbids the
establishment by the state of any form of worship, I was made to serve
a sentence of eighteen hours in the state prison of Delaware for
playing a game of tennis on the Sabbath. I was duly arrested upon a
warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate, duly clad in a prison
costume, duly set to work upon a stone-pile, duly locked up over night
in a steel-barred cell full of vermin--in a building housing some five
hundred wretches, black and white, thirty of them serving life-terms
under circumstances which never permitted them a breath of fresh air
nor a glimpse of the sunshine or the sky. They had no exercise court
to their prison, and the inmates were not permitted to speak to one
another, but ate their meals in dead silence, and walked back to their
cells with folded arms, and had their only occupation working for a
sweat-shop contractor; this on the outskirts of the pious city of
Wilmington, with no less than ninety-one churches! The writer was
informed that he would return to this institution regularly every week
unless he abandoned his godless habit of playing tennis on a private
club court on Sunday; he only escaped the painful punishment by making
the discovery that at the Wilmington Country Club it was the custom of
the leading officials of the city and state to play golf every Sunday,
and by threatening to employ detectives and have these mighty ones
arrested and sent to their own prison. Which shows again the
importance of understanding this relationship of Superstition and Big
Business!

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#BOOK SIX#

#The Church of the Quacks#

They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
And how one ought never to think of one's self,
And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking--
My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.

Clough.

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#Tabula Rasa#

Nature has given us a virgin continent, a clean slate upon which to
write what we will. And what are we writing? What is our intellectual
life? I came to the far West, which I had been taught by novelists and
poets to think of as a place of freedom. I came, because I like
freedom; I am staying because I like the climate. I find that what
freedom means in the West is the ability of ignorant and fanatical
persons to start some new, fantastical quirk of scriptural
interpretation, to build a new cult around it, and earn a living out
of it.

My first contact with that sort of thing was when I went to the Battle
Creek Sanitarium to investigate hydrotherapy, and found myself in a
nest of Seventh-day Adventists. Three generations or so ago some odd
character hit upon the discovery that the Christian churches had let
the devil snare them into resting on the first day of the week,
whereas the Bible states distinctly that the Lord "rested on the
seventh day". So here is a million dollar establishment, with a
thousand or two patients and employees, and on Friday at sundown the
silence of death settles upon the place, and stays settled until
sundown of Saturday, when everything comes suddenly to life again, and
there is a little celebration, like Easter or New Year's, with what I
used to call "sterilized dancing"--the men pairing with men and the
women with women.

They are decent and kindly people, and you learn to put up with their
eccentricities; it is really convenient in some ways, because, as not
all the city shares their delusions, there are some stores open every
day of the week. But then you discover that the Sanitarium is training
"medical missionaries" to send to Africa, and is teaching these
supposed-to-be-scientists that evolution is a doctrine of the devil,
and not proven anyhow!

You get the shrewd little doctor who is running this establishment
alone in his office, and he will smile and admit that of course it is
not necessary to take all Bible phrases literally; but you know how it
is--there are different levels of intelligence, and so on. Yes, I know
how it is. You have an institution founded upon a certain dogma, and
run by means of that dogma, and it is hard to change without smashing
things. It is especially convenient when servants and nurses have a
religious upbringing, and do not steal the pocket-books of the
patients. People will come from all over the country, and pay high
prices to stay in such a sanitarium; you can make vegetarians of them,
which you think more important than teaching abstract notions about
their being descended from monkeys. Also you can manufacture
vegetarian foods for them, and build up an enormous business--so
obtaining that Power which is the thing desired of men.

This is but one illustration of a sort of thing of which I could cite
a hundred. The city in which I live is headquarters of another sect,
the "Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene"; primitive Methodists,
Bible-worshippers not content with the King James version, but going
back to the Sinaitic MS. They have a "University", located in one of
the most beautiful spots that Nature ever made; an institution with
seventy-five students. A couple of years ago I happened to meet the
"president," who was a preacher with grease on the ample expanse of
his black broadcloth waistcoat, and a speech full of the commonest
grammatical errors, such as "you was" and "I seen". The past year
witnessed a split, and the founding of a brand new church and
"University"--because one of the preachers insisted upon preaching so
much that the students got no chance to study; also because he sent
home a rich man's daughter whose shirt-waists revealed too much of her
fleshly nature.

And there is an even stranger phenomenon in the locality, taking you
back to the Libyan desert and the time of Thais. A lady friend of
mine, generously blessed with this world's goods, asks me have I seen
the hermit. "Hermit?" I say, and she replies, "Didn't you know there
was a hermit? He lives on a mountain, in a cave, and never has
anything to do with the world. He has no books; he contemplates
spiritually." I picture my friend with her large limousine, a rolling
palace full of ladies, drawing up at the door of this hermit's cave.
"He received you?" I ask. "Yes, he was quite polite." "And what was
your impression of him?" "Oh, how he stank!" I answer that this is the
odor of sanctity, and my friend thinks that I am enormously witty; I
have to explain to her that I am not jesting, but that there are
definite physiological phenomena incidental to the ecstatic life.

#The Book of Mormon#

Or let us take a trip to Salt Lake City, the headquarters of a still
stranger cult.

On the morning of the 22nd of September, 1827, the Angel of the Lord
delivered unto Joseph Smith, Jr., an ignorant farmer-youth in a
"backwoods" part of New York State, some plates which had "the
appearance of gold". As we know from the scriptures, it is the habit
of the Angel of the Lord to appear in unexpected places and to make
miraculous revelations to men in humble walks of life; so, as devout
believers, we hold ourselves in readiness. In this case the plates
were written in "reformed Egyptian"; but the Angel thoughtfully
provided Joseph Smith, Jr., with Urim and Thummim, two magic stones
with which to read the records. They proved to deal with a mystery
which has haunted the minds of Bible students for centuries--the fate
of the "lost ten tribes of Israel", who were now revealed to have been
the ancestors of the American Indians. The Angel told Smith to found a
new religion, and gave him prophecies concerning things in general;
so, on the 6th of April, 1830, in the town of Manchester, N.Y., there
was formally launched the "Church of the Latter Day Saints." Smith
turned over to his followers his translation of the miraculous plates,
called "The Book of Mormon"; obviously genuine, for it read precisely
like the books which we already know are the revealed word of God.
But, on chance that this might not be sufficient, we were offered in
the preface two documents, the "Testimony of Three Witnesses", and the
"Further Testimony of Eight Witnesses". The latter being the shorter,
may be quoted:

Be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues and people,
unto whom this work shall come: That Joseph Smith Jr., the
translator of this work, has shewn unto us the plates of
which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold;
and as many of the leaves as the said Smith hath translated,
we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings
there-on, all of which has the appearance of ancient work
and of curious workmanship. And this we bear record with
words of soberness, that the said Smith has shewn unto us,
for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the
said Smith hath got the plates of which we have spoken. And
we give our names unto the world, to witness that which we
have seen, and we lie not, God bearing witness of it.

Christian Whitmer
Jacob Whitmer
Peter Whitmer, Jr.
John Whitmer
Hiram Page
Joseph Smith, Sr.
Hyrum Smith
Saml. H. Smith

The subsequent career of the Church of the Latter Day Saints bore out
the Angel's prophesies and proved conclusively its divine origin; it
was persecuted as the saints of old were persecuted, and its followers
proceeded to massacre the nearby unbelieving populations, just as the
divinely guided Hebrews had done. Driven from place to place, they
built at Nauvoo, Ill., a beautiful temple, according to plans revealed
in a vision, exactly like Solomon. Finally they settled in Utah, where
they have a magnificent marble tabernacle, and some 300,000 followers.
The United States government, not being entirely Biblical, objected to
their practice of allowing the patriarchs of the tribe to have as many
wives as they could support; the government confiscated the church's
property, and forced it to conceal the practice of polygamy, as is
done by elderly church members in other parts of the country. Recently
the head of the church, who bears the title of "Prophet, Seer and
Revelator", was persuaded to permit an examination of one of its
secret plates, the "Book of Abraham", by egyptologists, who found that
it was ordinary Egyptian hieroglyphics, not "reformed", but containing
prayers to the sun-god. But this will of course make no difference to
the devout followers of Joseph--any more than it has made to devout
Catholics and Episcopalians that German scholars have proven that the
Bible legends and ritual have come from the Babylonians, and that the
four gospels date from the second and third centuries after Christ.

#Holy Rolling#

All over America you will find these weird Bible-cults, some of them
pathetic, some of them dangerous, some of them merely grotesque. Thus,
for example, there was John Alexander Dowie, who founded the
"Christian Catholic Church in Zion" and dressed himself up in scarlet
and purple robes with stars on. Through his Zion City Bank and Zion
City Realty Company he became enormously wealthy; he finally announced
himself as "Elijah the Restorer." I remember as a boy how he brought
his gospel to New York, and P.T. Barnum with Tom Thumb and the white
elephant never made such a sensation. The ridicule of the metropolis
overwhelmed the old prophet, and he died and passed on his robes and
his tabernacle and his bank to his son; straightway, according to the
rule of all religions, the followers fell to quarrelling and splitting
up, and suing one another in the law-courts.

Also there are the "Holy Rollers" and "Holy Jumpers", ghastly sects
which cultivate the religious hysterias, and have spread like a plague
among the women of our lonely prairie farms and desert ranches. The
"Holy Rollers", who call themselves the "Apostolic Church", have a
meeting place here in Pasadena, and any Sunday evening at nine o'clock
you may see the Spirit of the Lord taking possession of the
worshippers, causing moans and shrieks and convulsions; you may see a
woman holding her hands aloft for seventeen minutes by the watch,
making chattering sounds like an ape. This is called "talking in
tongues" and is a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit. If you come
back at eleven in the evening, you will find the entire congregation,
men and women, prostrate on the floor, or hanging over the benches;
and maybe a child moaning in terror, having a devil cast out.

You may be interested, perhaps, to know how to throw yourself into
these convulsions. Here is a paper called "Trust", which is "published
Monthly (D.V.) in the interests of Elim Faith Work and Bible Training
School." Elizabeth Sisson writes on "The Pentecostal Baptism", and
tells the story of her experiences. She "camped on the Word of God,"
she declares.

I went up to Calgary in Canada, and the leader of the
mission told me, "You can go down to the mission and stay
there all day. There is plenty of wood, and you can stay
there all night." I went down, and there was plenty of "let
go" in me. I cried, and prayed all I knew, and got
wonderfully loosed....

Then the Lord said to me, "Now, no more praying!" God told
me it was mine. What was there left for me to pray about. He
spoiled my praying and I took up praising. I praised God
that He who worked in the Upper Room was working the same in
me. I praised, and I praised, and I praised. The devil said
to me, "That's mechanical." I said, "I'll praise You Lord,
and if You want real praise, You'll have to put the wind in
the sails."

That's the way I came through. One morning I was just
getting out of bed, "this gibberish, this jargon" as the
enemy likes to call it, began to come. The Lord said, "Let
it babble!" I let. The babble increased, and by night I was
up to my neck. I let. I still let. That's all. Someone else
does the work, and it does not tire you.

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