WAR AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

Abstract

Religion is the response of the individual to God. War is the violent regimentation of persons to win a particular goal. The two are completely antithetical. Historically, the pressure of the State to regiment the individual for war has been largely responsible for the development of the Church from its simple state as a fellowship of believers into an instrument of power as an ecclesiastical system. It then either becomes the chief ally in the regimentation of the State, or else it tends equally to disregard spiritual religion in its resistance to the State. Eventually, we shall find that religion as a spiritual experience, and war as a philosophy of control, cannot live in the same world. We are nearing that point now. The disregard of conscience and of the rights of personality by the Russian Czarist regime supported by the ecclesiastical institution of the Church is the soil out of which proud atheism sprang forth in Russia. Both the Roman and the Protestant churches in Europe have largely developed an ecclesiastical system to aid and abet the power of the State, particularly in Italy and in Germany. The church now finds the State unable to see the significance of the Church except as the servant of the State. Only as here and there small groups of free spirits largely disregard ecclesiastical structures and obey God rather than man is spiritual religion kept alive. Mystical sects have sprung up within the Roman Church, and brotherhoods and sisterhoods of free spirits within the Protestant groups, who preserve the golden thread of the life of God in the spirit of man, in a world dominated by a belief in violence. And as the efforts of the State to control economic, social, and political life become more dominant, the dangers to religion increase. This can easily be seen in Japan and in China today. Who shall say that we are escaping from it in the United States? We are at that moment in the history of political life when the technical machinery of production and distribution of goods requires a more highly organized system of regulation. We cannot operate the machinery of modern civilization without controls; but unless those controls are used from the point of view of the development of spiritual values instead of for the purpose of achieving political or economic dominance, religious freedom will be lost. The struggle going on between management and workers at the present time is of the utmost significance for religion. If the philosophy of violence prevails, if the principle is maintained of an inherent and inevitable conflict of rights, and if religion admits the latter and retreats simply to the chamber of spiritual admonition, religious liberty is gone. On the other hand, if the motivation of the relation between management and worker can be, in both groups, technical efficiency and a desire to see the widest possible spread of benefits from goods produced; if competition can be not for the control of individuals but for the release of their capacities—then religious liberty and religion itself will thrive. Again, it should be asserted that modern civilization cannot escape organization and controls, but richness of life and the free play of spirit can come only as the essential nature of human beings is recognized.