In the centuries—old debate between science and religion, attention has been devoted almost exclusively to the question of whether or not the statements of religion are in harmony with the statements of science, and one basic fact has tended to be overlooked: that the religious experience is an important and apparently indestructible element in human life, and as such demands serious—and, above all, scientific—study. ERWIN R. GOODNOUGH, professor of the history of religion at Yale University, here proposes the systematic development of a neglected field of knowledge: the free and scientific study of religion.
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Religion provided assertions which civilization in the past accepted as final answers to such basic questions as “Where do I come from?” “Where do I go from here?” “What is it right for me to do?” “Why is this right and that wrong?” “If I don’t do what is right, what will happen to me?” “If I do it what reward may I expect?” Religion also answered the similar, but broader, questions of social origins, destiny, and sanctions. Science, however, when it came along suggested the insufficiency of these religious explanations, and proceeded by factual study (in which the formulas of the past had no place) to give men insights into the nature of the body and of their physical environment such as the old world of belief and dogma never conceived.
But, in spite of science, man is still man, and still feels the need for certainty about social relations and personal destiny—a need whose satisfaction science can only promise after an infinity of time. The majority of people do not feel that they can wait for the truth, and they still continue, even though they may not recognize religious authority, to look for their final values in ways that are recognizably religious. Even in the intellectual world some want to go “back” to some pre-scientific view for finalities, pre-scientific because all authoritarianism is pre-scientific. Most conspicuously, the last twenty-five years has seen mass movements, much of whose dynamic comes from “totalitarian” assertions (often couched in pseudo-scientific language) on the nature and purpose of man, which repudiate the experimental uncertainty which is the life-blood of science, and would purge the laboratories and universities of all those who are uncertain. In the revived interest in traditional religions, in the new lure of fascist and Communist ideologies, the need for and the potencies of “finalities” over man’s mind and behavior are demonstrating themselves again.
Although many individual scientists and literary popularizers of science have renounced religion, there has never been an attack by science on religion: science has simply passed religion by. Science struggled in the old days for freedom to experiment and publish, and won the battle. What happened to the oppressor after he was driven out of their particular territory most scientists did not bother to inquire. Indeed many of them remained devoutly religious after accepted patterns. So much has science ignored religion that with a few exceptions (to be mentioned in a moment) hardly anyone has applied the new methods of factual study to religious experience itself. And so scientists, themselves quite ignorant in these matters, have not recognized that in their new enemies, the totalitarian ideologies which now again threaten to choke them, they only face—in a new uniform—their old enemy, the human craving for certainty in an uncertain world.
What is this craving for certainty? Free inquiry still continues to ignore this central question about religion, and shows no real interest in ascertaining factually the nature of religious experience and its relations to human behavior and social institutions. Failing to do this, we lack a basis for evaluating in any discriminating way religion’s moral, social, and political assets and liabilities, potential and actual, for the individual and for present-day society. This is no academic question for our times, as I have tried to suggest, now that authoritarian finalities, both traditional and new, are very much on the order of the day, challenging not only science, but the development of a truly democratic way of life. Religion, like other human forces, needs to be understood if it is to serve man. And science is man’s way of understanding.
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The suggestion that the field of religion remains essentially untouched by modern scientific scholarship is always greeted with derision by the pundits of the organized religions. It is true that tremendous industry has been put into religious studies, vast publications have come forth, and religious scholars have made themselves as learned as scholars in any other field. This, however, is not the point. The medieval scholastics were just as learned, relatively, as modern religious scholars.
Industry and learning do not guarantee the critical method that is the hallmark of science; if they did, the old rabbis and modem Jesuits, with their colossal erudition, would be the most scientifically critical of us all. The apologists of religious scholarship take a proper pride in the tremendous energy and critical acumen that have gone into modern biblical study, its magnificent technical achievements, the enormous ingenuity of its leaders; and they go on to point out, as a brilliant president of the Society of Biblical Literature recently did, that biblical scholars should be fully as ready as scientists to accept conclusions violating all their prejudices and emotional commitments, whenever the evidence seems to compel such conclusions. I am convinced, however, that few religious scholars have ever had this kind of experience. To be sure, the conscious minds of the majority of biblical scholars are honestly concerned with problems of marshaling, accepting, and rejecting evidence. But somehow whenever a religious study with radical conclusions has appeared it has been almost completely predictable which scholars would accept and which reject it.
Biblical criticism has had little or no effect in producing changes of belief or new attitudes. Rather it was “progress” and “liberalism” that produced biblical criticism. However, this liberal movement did not rest on an essentially scientific attitude that lays aside all hope of certainty. Instead, we had the attempt to use religious tradition or, by selective criticism, scraps of it, to give certainty to that bastard child of 19th century science: the hope of immediate progress to perfection.
Few are aware that the humanism of liberal Christianity had been announced with no historical research at all by the 5th-century Socinians (who followed a few phrases of the young Erasmus), and that it later became the doctrine of the 7th-and 8th-century anti-clericals in England and France. The philosophes rejected authoritarian Christianity, hated the Church, and turned men instead to such a study of man as produced all later democratic and socialist movements. These movements, which by no means constituted scientific evaluations of society, became so generally attractive that they forced themselves upon those who emotionally had still to consider themselves Christians. It was inevitable that such people should begin to study the records of early Christianity so as to convince themselves that the Gospels’ basic message was the promise that Jesus would lead man into the golden age of democracy or socialism. Completely unconscious though they may have been of the fact, the great leaders of this movement—Strauss, Renan, Harnack, and many others—were only using their scholarship to justify a humanistic position which they had accepted quite prior to any scholarly justification from Christian sources.
What I am trying to say is that this great 19th-and early 20th-century flowering of religious scholarship, for all its scientific techniques and its great discoveries of forgotten and important facts, was still essentially medieval. Harnack, no less than Aquinas, was a devoted Christian who felt that the end of his quest, his conclusions about the Wesen des Christentums, as reached on the basis of a study of the original documents, must command his final devotion. This is not the scientific way. The chemist is not convinced that the final truth of chemistry was revealed two thousand years ago, and that it is his job to fight and die for what he persuades himself was the major premise, the Wesen, of that revelation. While emotional prejudices play a definite part in the thinking of every scientist, in so far as a man is a real scientist he fights those prejudices and admits that he sees only through a glass darkly, a glass not of faith but of his faulty perception; and he holds all his knowledge in solution as he continues to seek a newer and deeper knowledge that may show his present knowledge to be quite erroneous. But the religious scholars, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, begin with a God-given roof—or one emotionally given, as you may call it—and all their labor is to get some support under that roof so that it will shelter them in security now and always.
Schools of authoritarian Judaism, like their Christian counterparts, knew no questions except those involved in the detailed interpretation of their own great traditions. If one compares the Halachic tradition of the Orthodox rabbinical schools with Catholic Christianity, and Cabbalistic and Hasidic Judaism with Protestant Christianity, the comparison will show that all four had in common the fact that they lived in an ethical and natural philosophy utterly different from that of the new world, and that all four presented their teachings as final revealed truth.
At just about the same time that the new humanistic ideas of progress and social amelioration through democracy and socialism began to force themselves into Christianity, Moses Mendelssohn and his followers initiated the movement that is represented today in this country by Reform Judaism. The scholarship of this movement, which liked to call itself the “Wissenschaft des Judentums”—“Jewish science”—spread out in a great many directions under masterful minds, but it was essentially dedicated to showing that 19th-century idealism was the Wesen of Judaism, too. Beneath the legal observances was a foundation provided by the Prophets, whose message had been social justice, and a God who would reward the faithful with an ideal society so long as they practiced social justice. Accordingly, the ancient observances of Judaism could be abandoned, and one could still feel that one had not destroyed the religion of one’s fathers, but had fulfilled it. When Reform Jews came to accept Jesus as the proper culmination of the Jewish Prophetic movement, Reform Judaism and liberal Christianity became almost indistinguishable.
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Almost simultaneously with liberal Christianity and Reform Judaism two other types of study were begun that made a much closer approach to scientific study of religious problems. I refer to the opening up of two new fields, the psychology of religion and the history of religion.
The study of the psychology of religion was brilliantly begun in this country by the researches of Starbuck and William James. Both men were largely concerned with the psychology of Christian experience—Protestant experience for the most part—but Leuba, Coe, and Pratt later took data from every religion. However, nothing of importance seems to have come out of this field for the last twenty-five years. Exponents of the two new dominant trends in psychology, Freudianism and the experimental psychology which works largely on the basis of neurology or of a stimulus-response ideology, have either ignored the field or contented themselves with hasty judgments. I know of no important psychologists of any school who are at present making a special study of religion, to get at the foundation of what is perhaps the most important single psychological pattern in human life.
In the field of the history of religion even more important beginnings were made. Men tried to find common elements that would serve as common denominators for the amazingly diversified phenomena produced by the new discipline of anthropology as well as by the systematic study of the historical religions. One tremendous work was begun by Max Mueller and his associates, who tried to make the classics of all great religions available to Western scholars. Many others studied the origin and nature of religion from an evolutionary point of view. In all this activity, of course, false starts were made, but it seems to me much of permanent value was produced. But this scholarly growth has withered, too, under the same blight that in late years has struck all humanistic study—the attitude that values accuracy of detail above the understanding of larger principles, and small conclusions above large ones, because they are safer.
The historical study of religion began as Religionsgeschichte, the history of religion, an attempt to understand religion by studying its tremendously varied manifestations. Unlike the philosophy of religion—which devoted itself to discussing, by a priori methods, the being and nature of God, our power to know him, and the like—the history of religion adopted a thoroughly empirical approach. Its conclusions were often reached too rapidly from insufficient data, but these were toppled or corrected just as rapidly by new data. Yet the blight of pedantic narrowness has spread so steadily that by now our country’s most famous scholar in the field can say—as he did the other day—with considerable satisfaction, that the old collective study of religion has died out entirely: men now study not religion, but religions or a single religion. Today we have facts for their own sake, and a vanishing minimum of theory.
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Perhaps my meaning is becoming clear. In a day when men desperately need guidance in the field of values, religious scholars have largely renounced the effort to produce general value judgments from their studies, and have turned again to blind traditionalism, which holds men to centuries—old phrases, formulas, and rites merely because they are traditional. Or else they embellish tradition with a scholarship whose purpose is not to discover the nature of religion and its possible place in man’s life today, but to demonstrate that the religious ideas and laws of the past are, after all, really respectable in the modem world. So the study of religion, which began so promisingly, has either been given up altogether, as in psychology, or has gone off into confessed futilitarianism—that is, to the discovery of unrelated details—along with the rest of the humanities.
The conclusion to be derived from all this seems inevitable. There is only one course left for those of us who do not want to relapse into traditionalism—or who by their conditioning in the modern world are quite unable to do so but who do recognize the perplexing difficulties placed before us, individually and as a whole, by authoritarian assertions. Seriously and on a large scale, we must begin a study of religion and ethics in which we use, not less, but more scientific method. What needs to be tried, not by scattered individuals (who have always been active), but by organized groups, is a real attempt for the first time in history to be scientific in the study of religion. By scientific, I mean that we gather data not to prove that Jesus, Hosea, Mohammed, or Karl Marx is right—or wrong—but in order to find out what the religious experience of man has come from, where he gets his ideals, and which ideals have worked constructively and which not.
In such a study each man will, of course, have to work in a corner of the field, as do the chemists. Those who are metaphysicians will try to construct a metaphysics out of the empirical sciences, but not to impose one upon them a priori. Those who have an ethical interest, or who are concerned with the solace and inspiration man has traditionally looked for in religion, will try to get the most information they can as to the nature of human ends from the nature of man as a physical, psychological, and social animal.
The basic studies will have to be the two already mentioned: first, the psychology of religion, since, empirically, religion is a psychological experience to be approached from the point of view of individual or of social psychology; and second, the history of religion, in which the data of the religious patterns in all ages and climates, with their effects upon their devotees, are studied.
These two fields would by no means be dealt with in isolation from each other. The history of religion can be no more than a series of disjointed facts unless the facts are placed together on the common ground of human psychology; and the psychology of religion will find in the data of history a body of clinical material that will give meaning and perspective, as nothing else can, to the material collected by contemporary observation within our own civilization.
To these would of course be added the study of anthropology, linguistics, aesthetics, and a number of other studies. Each of these would have to be examined by the best technical methods of the day. But always it is to be hoped that the details would be regarded for their broad importance in the general picture, else all would have been in vain.
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What I am saying can—and probably will—be easily caricatured. To demand that, if some one finds a reference to an unknown mystery religion in Greece or discovers a lost manuscript of Philo, he should at once show the contribution of such a discovery to the scale of human values, would indeed be ridiculous. But I see nothing fantastic in expecting that a study of Egyptian or Hindu religion should in the end produce from the data involved long rip—ened suggestions about the relation of faith and reason—little though such results are now expected from this kind of research.
By means of such studies, I think we might hope really to face some elemental problems at last—such a problem as the one posed by that famous statement of Karl Marx (or one of his followers) which has had so wide a currency in our times, and which is a specter haunting the true scholar in religion, or should be. Is religion an opiate? If some thunder “Yes!” some “No!” it is only on the basis of emotional predilection. The fact is, no one in the world knows enough about religion today to answer the question one way or another in any objective sense. Perhaps it is true that man has the tendency to escape from reality to dreams, and that this is his most tragic weakness. But perhaps it is his greatest strength. Perhaps, as religionists claim, he is not taking refuge in dreams at all, but reaching forward from illusion to reality itself.
A good case can be made by selective use of data for either answer—but what are the facts? How, in terms of this problem, does religion actually work, individually and socially? What kind of behavior does it make for? Despite the fact that the correct answer to this question would, if empirically demonstrated, constitute the most important empirical study of all time, there is today not a single institution or university department of study dedicated to an attempt to answer it or any question like it.
Surely it is useless to try to show that Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, or Islam is the supreme religion of all, if religion itself is only man’s ultimate delusion and distraction. My own hunch, to use a word respectable in science, is that no simple answer will cover the ground; that under certain conditions and circumstances, if religion is an opiate, it may well be that such an opiate is the most desirable thing in the world; and accordingly what we must do is neither deny it obdurately to agonized humanity nor peddle it indiscriminately. What we must do is understand it in order to use it intelligently.
Just as the “truth” of physics never has been and never will be the discovery of any one man—if of any men—so the solution to such a problem as the one above, even if intensively sought by religious scholars all over the world, would surely not be found in a short time or, probably, ever found completely. Indeed, most men will tend to dismiss such a proposal as I am making with the objections: “What will such a study of religion have to teach us for the problems of our day? Of what good would it be to the United Nations or any other of the international bureaus? What we need is directives for today. One might go on with this academic research indefinitely without coming to any final truths to guide men.”
Of course, the same objection might be raised against all the natural sciences. Why pour so much money into the study of physics, chemistry, and the rest, since their experts cannot tell us the real nature of the physical world? Perhaps it is foolish to go on with medical research, since after all these years medical science is still so far from knowing the ultimate secrets of the human body. The obvious answer is that, if the final objectives of the natural sciences have never been achieved, if full understanding is a limit that we approach, apparently, without ever reaching, still the incidental discoveries made en route have transformed the relation of man with nature, and made possible a level of health and comfort that unscientific ages never dreamed of.
Similarly, if groups of scholars could be set upon an empirical and uncommitted study of religion, they would also find their final objective retreating before them infinitely. But I am equally convinced that, just as has occurred in the natural sciences, the incidental discoveries of such research in religion, partial and clumsy as they might later prove, would have revolutionary power in their own realm, in the moral and social life of man, and affect man’s whole sense of relation to his fellows and the universe. In an age that spends billions of dollars to discover means by which to destroy human beings, a few millions could well be spent yearly on a truly objective study of the problems of religion, morals, and human values.
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A truly objective and uncommitted study of religion? I have used these adjectives deliberately because they are scorned by the traditional scholars. In closing, I must say what I mean by them.
I am fully aware of the impossibility of a completely dispassionate approach to any human problem, especially those of religion or morals. No one can possibly be without emotional reaction, negative or positive, to the statement that man lives in a world guided by a personal God who is interested in us individually, and listens sympathetically to each of our prayers. The emotional situation is similar for the claims of individual religions: every Christian, Moslem, or Jew begins with some preconception of superiority. Again, few people can refrain from an emotional yes or no to the proposition that the turning point of the history of man and of all relations between man and the metaphysical world was historically presented by the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. We know that historians as well as all other scholars in the humanities and the social studies—have, and must have, their prejudices.
Some however go from this admission that all individuals are to some degree prejudiced, to the assertion that recognized prejudices are safer than unrecognized ones, and that just as one expects the best history of England to be written by Englishmen, so the best interpretation of Christianity must come from devout Christians. And from that it follows in their minds that the money for studying religion should be left in Christian control, rather than frittered away in an absurd search for an unattainable “unprejudiced” study of religion. Institutional interests in Judaism might well argue to much the same purpose, as no doubt they have.
The deep fallacy in this argument is that it steps so lightly from individual to corporate prejudice. Every economist has his point of view, but when a university department of economics begins (as is often done) to appoint only people with a given predilection in economics, the department is doomed. We do not expect any important contributions to economic theory to come out of economics faculties whose opinions are under close corporate control. But as it happens, Christian and Jewish faculties of theology tend to be corporately controlled, and a person whose conclusions might prove to be awkward to the group is simply not made part of such a faculty.
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We must begin by escaping this corporate Control of religious study if we hope for even a partially unprejudiced study of religion. What we tragically need is a number of groups, either in our greater universities as distinct departments, or as separate institutes, made up of men who will devote themselves to a factual study of religion of the sort I have described. The groups I envisage, while made up of individuals with their antecedent points of view, would as groups be uncommitted, so that the outcome of the study as a whole would be open and free. On only one point would the members of the group have to be in agreement, and that is on the value of free research in religion—just as democracy must allow freedom of speech and action but repress any one who would use that freedom to destroy it for others.
Several such groups should be started because if only one existed its tendency would be to form a new orthodoxy, however sincerely it exercised constant scrutiny to keep itself as varied as possible. One great philosophy department I know is aware that its members think too much alike, and is trying to save itself by finding some one who is opposed to what most of the present members believe. I know of no religious faculty in the world which has ever operated on such a principle. This very fact seems to make it all the more worthwhile to try to create such groups as are here proposed, and not one or two but many.
We could not, of course, hope to form such groups in a moment. Each would have to begin with an anchor man with the kind of ambition and point of view outlined here, who would watch the young men of the nation and gradually find here a psychologist, there a sociologist, there a historian, who would like to join him. It could presumably not be started profitably as an “interdepartmental cooperative,” for the problem is one which is not to be a hobby or side interest to those studying it. Actually it would not take many years to build up a number of brilliant faculties. The wastage among the top five per cent of students in the theological seminaries of Christians and Jews has always been amazing: young men who would have liked to do exactly what I have described, but who have felt that they could not be rabbis or ministers teaching the finalities of any one religion, and so have gone out into quite other fields, and often become the leaders of their new studies. A few years ago in the history department of Yale we canvassed and found that over half of the members had carried their education a long way with the idea of becoming ministers. The older men could hardly be won back to study religion: their minds were now working in other directions (often quite far afield from religion altogether). But in their early years the possibility of such a field of study as is here suggested would have attracted many of them.
I have every confidence that what is proposed here can be done in not too long a time. It must be done if we are not to be swamped by the forces of obscurantism.
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