Volume II, No. 2 MANAS January 12, 1949

We are not entirely pessimistic as to the future of religion in the United States. It seems to us that there is more spontaneous religion in Americans than the churches take account of, and that in time a free religious spirit will pass the churches by altogether. In the past half-century, much has been accomplished toward equality among the races. It may seem idle to speak of "progress" in race relations when so much more remains to be done, but it is a fact that today, in the United States, there is dawning realization of the essential justice in racial equality. This realization has not been brought about by the churches, but by a general movement toward idealism in which church attitudes, as such, have been virtually irrelevant. In other fields, such as education, there has been a gradual wearing away of formal materialism and a revival of the spirit of Platonic idealism. Symptomatic of another change, although of uncertain significance, has been the swing of the balance of power from capital in the direction of labor. The future, in this great area of human affairs, has a plasticity which means new freedom from the constraints of the past, if there is leadership to use that freedom wisely.

In a word, there are incalculable possibilities for a new kind of religious inspiration in the modern world. We mean a religious inspiration which takes account, first, of the needs of human beings, and allows no doctrinal consideration to stand in the way of serving those needs. This is by no means a soup-kitchen and medical missionary conception of religious activity. It should be evident that the need for soup kitchens is closely related to the acquisitive economics of our society, and religion, if it is real, and not just another brand of system-building economic reform, will have to afford an effective psycho-moral analysis of the acquisitive spirit. It will also have to seek out and to gnaw away at the roots of such customs as those which have made the Christmas season into an appalling travesty of the religious spirit. Such a religion, of course, would avoid like the plague all alliances with business and government. It would recognize as "spiritual" only those free human expressions which are entirely unconnected with any motive but the highest of which man is capable, and it would preserve and promulgate this idea of religion as sacred above all.

We remain convinced that a society in which such a religion could gain adherents would be a society that would never be confronted by the terrible dilemmas which beset our present civilization. Nor do we think that this religion would develop people given to personal isolationism, without the cement of fraternal unity and a generous concord of behavior. It would, instead, lay the foundation for voluntary cooperation, and for free association on the basis of common truths, although truths which have been independently perceived. For it seems to us impossible that there is no core of objective reality behind the facades of personal and group self-deception – impossible, too, that freethinking seekers for knowledge could fail to understand that reality in much the same terms. The consensus of the morally great throughout history is an impressive fact, forming a legitimate basis, we think, for believing that men can agree and live together in peace, without coercion, without enforced rules of irrational tradition, and with their common hopes as guide. It is true that the obstacles in the way of arriving at this ideal are also impressive, and if much be made of them, we have no other reply than Spinoza's, to whose religion, incidentally, we are also greatly attached. At the end of his Ethics, he said:
If the way which I have pointed out . . . seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered. Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.