government permits the decline of the church, the family, and morality
without basically endangering the stability of the state. In our time the
strength of the state has united with the several forces listed above to relax
faith and morals, and to allow paganism to resume its natural sway.
Probably our excesses will bring another reaction; moral disorder may
generate a religious revival; atheists may again (as in France after the
debacle of 1870) send their children to Catholic schools to give them the
discipline of religious belief. Hear the appeal of the agnostic Renan [Renan,
Ernest (1823-92)] in 1866:
Let us enjoy the liberty of the sons of God, but let us take care lest we
become accomplices in the diminution of virtue which would menace
society if Christianity were to grow weak. What should we do without
it?… If Rationalism wishes to govern the world without regard to the
religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is
there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder.
Does history warrant Renan’s conclusion that religion is necessary to
morality–that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that
lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes, and wars?
Joseph de Maistre [Maistre, Comte Joseph de (1753-1821)] answered: “I do
not know what the heart of a rascal may be; I know what is in the heart of
an honest man; it is horrible.”
There is no significant example in
history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life
without the aid of religion. France, the United States, and some other
nations have divorced their governments from all churches, but they have
had the help of religion in keeping social order. Only a few Communist
states have not merely dissociated themselves from religion but have
repudiated its aid; and perhaps the apparent and provisional success of this
experiment in Russia owes much to the temporary acceptance of
Communism as the religion (or, as skeptics would say, the opium) of the
people, replacing the church as the vendor of comfort and hope. If the
socialist regime should fail in its efforts to destroy relative poverty among
