Religious propaganda

“ Anti-Religious Propaganda.—That this comparatively pacific state of affairs came to an end was the fault, primarily, at least, neither of the theologians nor of the scientists. A different atmosphere gradually began to envelop and to embitter the controversy. Orthodox religion, especially in Catholic countries, came to be associated with political reaction, and the most envenomed onslaughts began to be made upon what seemed to be the chief stronghold of a discredited regime. ”

“ The battle must be fought exactly as the battle of religious toleration was fought. And as in that case, so in this, a decay in the intensity of belief is likely to prove the decisive factor. While men were convinced of the absolute truth of Catholicism or Protestantism, as the case might be, they were willing to persecute on account of them. While men are quite certain of their modern creeds, they will persecute on their behalf. Some element of doubt is essential to the practice, though not to the theory, of toleration. ”

“ Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a growing tendency to persecution, which is not by any means confined to one party. ”

“ Soon I hope to get up a few in other places. We must organise our forces not to make a sect — not on religious matters, but on the secular business part of it. A stirring propaganda must be launched out. ”

“ When, in the name of God, he resists education and science, he blasphemes. When, in the name of God, he opposes freedom of thought and liberty of conscience, he blasphemes. When, in the name of God, he robs, tortures, and kills those who differ from him, he blasphemes. When, in the name of God, he opposes the equal rights of all, he blasphemes. When, in the name of God, he preaches content to the poor and oppressed, flatters the rich and powerful, and makes religious tyranny the handmaiden of political privilege, he blasphemes. ”

“ I am aware that our opponents pretend to respect religion—but the religion of would-be progress is infidelity. Divine revelation, of which the church is the faithful guardian, is rejected with scorn by liberalism. Look at the tone of the press and the style of the literature of the day. You have only to notice the derision and fierceness with which the press daily assails the mysteries and dogmas of religion, the Sovereign Pontiff, the clergy, religious orders, the ultramontanes, and you cannot long remain in the dark concerning the aim and object of progress. ”

“ The habit of considering a man’s religious, moral, and political opinions before appointing him to a post or giving him a job is the modern form of persecution, and it is likely to become quite as efficient as the Inquisition ever was. ”

“ If we were to go back still farther, to the Holy Wars, we should find cities and nations drenched in human blood through religious bigotry and intolerance. Let us thank God that our lot is cast in a more fortunate age, when the light of revelation, rightly interpreted by the aid of Science, points to the Source of all knowledge, all truth, all light. ”

“ In this age of loose thinking and of rapid dissemination of ideas, aggressiveness, supported by active propaganda, characterizes every world-wide movement in government, industry, science and religion. Every doctrine, every theory comes into the open and makes a strong bid for our hearing, for our following. Why should not the true doctrine of Christ assume this new shining armour of sane aggressiveness, come more into the open, and throw down the gauntlet to unbelief and indifference everywhere rampant and openly defiant? ”

“ Having been brought up to read history as a pre-eminent dispensation of mercies and favours to his own race, with a slight push of miracle at the back of it—is it any wonder that, when he applied his gospel to propaganda for the interests of that same race, or went out a missionary to the heathen, it was with a conscientious conviction that a little compulsion was necessary for the saving of souls? ”

“ But there is not; there is nothing even resembling a common religious guiding principle among the Christian nations of the world. There is the lie of Church religion, and not just one but various different ones contending with one another: the Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and so forth; there is the lie of science, again, several different ones contending with one another; there is the lie of politics on both an international and a party level: there are the lies of art, of traditions and customs. ”

“ The things on the other side of the shield—the religious wars, the consecration of error, the strangling of truth, the persecutions, the propagandist massacres, the countless cruelties wrought in the name and on the sanction of the faith—are from this point of view external to its history: things to be set down to the perversity of men. All the good that has happened is to be credited to Christianity; all the bad to human nature. ”

“ The press teems with books and journals, not confessedly infidel, yet working in the interests of infidelity; fanning the passions and exciting the morbid sensibilities of youth; teaching religious indifference under the pleasing garb of liberality; holding up the discipline of the church as hostile to personal freedom; depicting the doctrines and ceremonies of the Christian religion as trammels upon mental activity and intellectual progress; arraying the laity against their pastors ”

“ Meantime the press and public lectures are extensively supplanting the pulpit as organs of moral and religious influence over large portions of the community, while a large part of the most popular speakers and writers avowedly reject the Bible as of any binding authority in deciding moral and religious questions. ”

“ Now, since the human mind is so made that it must have religion, when this middle element of reasonable religious freedom is withdrawn, society vibrates, like a pendulum, between scepticism and superstition; the extreme of superstition reacting to scepticism, and then the barrenness of scepticism reacting again into superstition. When the persecutions in France had succeeded in extinguishing this middle element, then commenced a series of oscillations between religious despotism and atheistic license, which have continued ever since. ”

“ The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question, as sorrowfully as the most liberal members of society lament the unlimited circulation of the false morals issued by certain Religious Tract Societies. Both testify to the interest taken by the public in religion. The love of truth is also shown by the outbreak of heresy in all directions! ”

“ But it is well, meanwhile, to remember that every form of Protestant belief in this country has been freely used, and without bringing upon the writer overcharged denunciations of a sympathetic religious press. Puritans, Quakers, Shakers, Dunkards, shouting Methodists, Hard-Shell Baptists—all have been freely used, neither for attack nor defense, but merely as furnishing material for tales. ”

“ The zeal for propagandism, which characterizes the less tolerant portion of the Protestant sects, makes their ministration on new ground efficient and valuable. The material hell, from which, in good faith, they seek to deliver those who hear them, symbolizes the infinite danger and loss to man of a life passed without the impulses and restraints of religion. A more philosophic statement would be far less tangible to the minds alike of teacher and disciple. Their intervention in communities characterized by a low grade of religious culture is therefore useful, perhaps indispensable. ”

“ While the blood of the martyrs is doubtless the seed of the church, a continuous, general, and relentless persecution can extirpate a religion in a given nation; as the history of the Inquisition abundantly proves. Still more easily can propaganda for the older religion win back its former adherents of the first and second generations. It is not, in general, till a generation has grown up entirely inside a new religion that such a religion is well established. ”

“ The silent propaganda is the spreading of Catholic ideas through the contact of our every day life with those who are not of our own Faith. Willingly or unwillingly we are bound to leave an impression of our belief in the business and social circles into which our life is cast. Our silence and abstention alone often militate against the Church. Let then the purity and spirituality of our lives, the honesty of our commercial relations, the sanctity of our home, bear witness to the sacredness of our religion and to the seriousness of its teachings. ”

“ You are not formed to be the dupe of names and authorities. The defenders of the popular superstition will endeavor to overwhelm you by the multiplied testimony of many illustrious and learned men, who not only admitted the Christian religion, but who were also its most zealous supporters. They will adduce holy divines, great philosophers, powerful reasoners, fathers of the church, and learned interpreters, who have successively advocated the system. ”

“ The spirit of apostacy has stripped and shorn true religion of all its luscious and beautiful fruit, and left nothing scarcely but the naked withered hulk of false spirituality. Religion has been taught, by protestant dissenters, as a science almost wholly abstracted from civil government—from political, social, and domestic institutions, and also from the useful and fine arts. ”

“ It must be confessed, that many of the good effects, of which Religion is productive to political societies, would be produced even by a false Religion, which should prescribe good morals, and should be able to enforce its precepts by sufficient sanctions. ”

“ A course such as I have suggested, is much more likely to bring about a better understanding and preparation towards any possible fusion. On the other hand, the present propaganda of active theological aggression and political indifference, is bound to make the breach wider than ever with the ultimate certainty of disruption. ”

“ And it is a significant historical fact, that great minds in all religious nations have wholly or partially outgrown and abandoned the current and popular religions of the country. It is only moral cowards, or the ignorant and uninformed, who throw themselves into the lap of the Church, and depend upon the priest to pilot them to heaven. ”

“ Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardour of a religious sentiment, and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult. ”

“ The charge that the Church relies upon duplicity in the propagation of her doctrines, and shuns enlightened investigation, is contrary to reason and fact. Deceit and fraud in the perpetuation of any religion must end in failure. A system of religion, ethics, or philosophy, to attract and hold the attention of men, must be sincere in doctrine and honest in propaganda. That the Church employs deceptive methods; that she has one doctrine for the priesthood and another for the people; that she teaches one set of principles to her members in Zion, and another to the world, is not true. ”

“ Those, then, who try to depreciate the influence of the clergy, and to bring their teaching into contempt, or to set themselves up as independent judges of the morality and right of all questions relating to politics and society, are false prophets, boasting of their liberty, appealing to pride, worshipping themselves in place of God, and flattering the passions of others. They are ravening wolves, destroying the spirit of religion and the souls of men, and leading their victims to anarchy, riot, and bloodshed. ”

“ If we find an active propaganda here, it cannot be because the spread of a ritual or faith is an inherent characteristic. On the contrary, in normal circumstances there seems to be no reason why one community should change its gods or forms of worship for those of another. ”

“ All laws defining and punishing blasphemy—making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men.
70. Government Secular
Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. ”

“ Yet I was told by resident European missionaries that their converts had had nothing whatever, directly or indirectly, to do with this proceeding; it had been carried out solely by the young local literati, who had shown themselves as absolutely impervious to the Christian propaganda as they were contemptuous of the puerile superstitions of the masses. But it will be a long time yet before the essential rites and observances connected with the cult of ancestors begin to suffer from the inroads either of Rationalism or of Christianity. ”

“ Thus the minds of the rising generation, who were engaged in favour of the catholic persuasion, during the166 frightful period of its long denunciation, by stolen, secluded and unfinished displays of its spirit and form, contemplated its return with animated elation, or beheld its approach, unimpressed with those doubts or prejudices which religious, as well as secular competitions, very frequently excite ”

“ Church members never use the word imagination in speaking of their belief and their religion. Do they mean to say that they believe without creating the image of their belief? If so then what they call the power that understands is really the power of imagination. The fact is that religious beliefs are founded in deception and the leaders deceive the people into them. ”