The Profits of Religion

An Essay in Economic Interpretation

Upton Sinclair

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504026109
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Institutions & Organizations

An eye-opening condemnation of the economic sins of organized religion Throughout his adult life Upton Sinclair was an unapologetic idealist and a tireless crusader for the rights of the common man. In this powerful and scrupulously researched critique, he argues that organized religion is a gargantuan moneymaking operation in collusion with industry in their shared quest to strike down dissent while bleeding profits from the millions in their thrall. Sinclair catalogs how spirituality, "the most fundamental of the soul's impulses, " is used as a tool for exploitation by unsavory clerical organizations. He specifically details the hypocrisy and self-serving, parasitic nature of churches in the West, from the entrenched fortresses of ancient Christianity to the "nonconforming" Protestant sects to the cultist "new religions" that came into vogue in the early twentieth century. A controversial, impassioned broadside, The Profits of Religion is Upton Sinclair at his most provocative and persuasive. This ebook has been authorized by the estate of Upton Sinclair.

BOOK TWO

The Church of Good Society

The House of Mammon his priesthood stands alert

By mysteries attended, by dusk and splendors girt,

Knowing, for faiths departed, his own shall still endure,

And they be found his chosen, untroubled, solemn, sure.

Within the House of Mammon the golden altar lifts

Where dragon-lamps are shrouded as costly incense drifts—

A dust of old ideals, now fragrant from the coals,

To tell of hopes long-ended, to tell the death of souls.

Sterling.

The Rain Makers

I BEGIN WITH THE CHURCH of Good Society, because it happens to be the Church in which I was brought up. Heading this statement, some of my readers suspected me of snobbish pride. I search my heart; yes, it brings a hidden thrill that as far back as I can remember I knew this atmosphere of urbanity, that twice every Sunday those melodious and hypnotizing incantations were chanted in my childish ears! I take up the book of ritual, done in aristocratic black leather with gold lettering, and the old worn volume brings me strange stirrings of recollected awe. But I endeavor to repress these vestigial emotions and to see the volume—not as a message from God to Good Society, but as a landmark of man’s age-long struggle against myth and dogma used as a source of income and a shield to privilege.

In the beginning, of course, the priest and the magician ruled the field. But today, as I examine this “Book of Common Prayer,” I discover that there is at least one spot out of which he has been cleared entirely; there appears no prayer to planets to stand still, or to comets to go away. The “Church of Good Society” has discovered astronomy! But if any astronomer attributes this to his instruments with their marvelous accuracy, let him at least stop to consider my “economic interpretation” of the phenomenon—the fact that the heavenly bodies affect the destinies of mankind so little that there has not been sufficient emolument to justify the priest in holding on to his job as astrologer.

But when you come to the field of meteorology, what a difference! Has any utmost precision of barometer been able to drive the priest out of his prerogatives as rainmaker? Not even in the most civilized of countries; not in that most decorous and dignified of institutions, the Protestant Episcopal Church of America! I study with care the passage wherein the clergyman appears as controller of the fate of crops. I note a chastened caution of phraseology; the church will not repeat the experience of the sorcerer’s apprentice, who set the demons to bringing water, and then could not make them stop! The spell invokes “moderate rain and showers”; and as an additional precaution there is a counter-spell against “excessive rains and floods”: the weather-faucet being thus under exact control.

I turn the pages of this “Book of Common Prayer,” and note the remnants of magic which it contains. There are not many of the emergencies of life with which the priest is not authorized to deal; not many natural phenomena for which he may not claim the credit. And in case anything should have been overlooked, there is a blanket order upon Providence: “Graciously hear us, that those evils which the craft or subtilty of the devil or man worketh against us, be brought to nought!” I am reminded of the idea which haunted my childhood, reading fairy-stories about the hero who was allowed three wishes that would come true. I could never understand why the hero did not settle the matter once for all—by wishing that everything he wished might come true!

Most of these incantations are harmless, and some are amiable; but now and then you come upon one which is sinister in its implications. The volume before me happens to be of the Church of England, which is even more forthright in its confronting of the Great Magic. Many years ago I remember talking with an English army officer, asking how he could feel sure of his soldiers in case of labor strikes; did it never occur to him that the men had relatives among the workers, and might some time refuse to shoot them? His answer was that he was aware of it, the military had worked out its technique with care. He would never think of ordering his men to fire upon a mob in cold blood; he would first start the spell of discipline to work, he would march them round the block, and get them in the swing, get their blood moving to military music; then, when he gave the order, in they would go. I have never forgotten the gesture, the animation with which he illustrated their going—I could hear the grunting of bayonets in the flesh of men. The social system prevailing in England has made necessary the perfecting of such military technique; also, you discover, English piety has made necessary the providing of a religious sanction for it. After the job has been done and the bayonets have been wiped clean, the company is marched to church, and the officer kneels in his family pew, and the privates kneel with the parlor-maids, and the clergyman raises his hands to heaven and intones: “We bless thy Holy Name, that it hath pleased Thee to appease the seditious tumults which have been lately raised up among us!”

And sometimes the clergyman does more than bless the killers—he even takes part in their bloody work. In the Home Office Records of the British Government I read (vol. 40, page 17) how certain miners were on strike against low wages and the “truck” system, and the Vicar of Abergavenny put himself at the head of the yeomanry and the Greys. He wrote the Home Office a lively account of his military operations. All that remained was to apprehend certain of the strikers, “and then I shall be able to return to my Clerical duties.” Later he wrote of the “sinister influences” which kept the miners from returning to their work, and how he had put half a dozen of the most obstinate in prison.

The Babylonian Fire-god

SO WE COME TO THE most important of the functions of the tribal god, as an ally in war, an inspirer to martial valour. When in ancient Babylonia you wished to overcome your enemies, you went to the shrine of the Fire-god, and with awful rites the priest pronounced incantations, which have been preserved on bricks and handed down for the use of modern churches. “Pronounce in a whisper, and have a bronze image therewith,” commands the ancient text, and runs on for many strophes in this fashion:

Let them die, but let me live!

Let them be put under a ban, but let me prosper!

Let them perish, but let me increase!

Let them become weak, but let me wax strong!

O, fire-god, mighty, exalted among the gods,

Thou art the god, thou art my lord, etc.

This was in heathen Babylon, some three thousand years ago. Since then, the world has moved on—

Three thousand years of war and peace and glory,

Of hope and work and deeds and golden schemes,

Of mighty voices raised in song and story,

Of huge inventions and of splendid dreams—

And in one of the world’s leading nations the people stand up and bare their heads, and sing to their god to save their king and punish those who oppose him—

O Lord our God, arise,

Scatter his enemies,

And make them fall;

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On him our hopes we fix,

God save us all.

Recently, I understand, it has become the custom to omit this stanza from the English national anthem; but it is clear that this is because of its crudity of expression, not because of objection to the idea of praying to a god to assist one nation and injure others; for the same sentiment is expressed again and again in the most carefully edited of prayer-books:

Abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices.

Defend us, Thy humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies.

Strengthen him (the King) that he may vanquish and overcome all his enemies.

There is none other that fighteth for us, but only Thou, O God.

Prayers such as these are pronounced in every so-called civilized nation today. Behind every battle-line in Europe you may see the priests of the Babylonian Fire-god with their bronze images and their ancient incantations; you may see magic spells being wrought, magic standards sanctified, magic bread eaten and magic wine drunk, fetishes blessed and hoodoos lifted, eternity ransacked to find means of inciting soldiers to the mood where they will “go in.” Throughout all civilization, the phobias and manias of war have thrown the people back into the toils of the priest, and that church which forced Galileo to recant under threat of torture, and had Ferrer shot beneath the walls of the fortress of Montjuich, is rejoicing in a “rebirth of religion.”

The Medicine-men

ANDREW D. WHITE TELLS US that

It was noted that in the 14th century, after the great plague, the Black Death, had passed, an immensely increased proportion of the landed and personal property of every European country was in the hands of the Church. Well did a great ecclesiastic remark that “pestilences are the harvests of the ministers of God.”

And so naturally the clergy hold on to their prerogative as banishers of epidemics. Who knows what day the Lord may see fit to rebuke the upstart teachers of impious and atheistical inoculation, and scourge the people back into His fold as in the good old days of Moses and Aaron? Viscount Amberley, in his immensely learned and half-suppressed work, “The Analysis of Religious Belief,” quotes some missionaries to the Fiji islanders, concerning the ideas of these benighted heathen on the subject of a pestilence. It was the work of a “disease-maker,” who was burning images of the people with incantations; so they blew horns to frighten this disease-maker from his spells. The missionaries undertook to explain the true cause of the affliction—and thereby revealed that they stood upon the same intellectual level as the heathen they were supposed to instruct! It appeared that the natives had been at war with their neighbors, and the missionaries had commanded them to desist; they had refused to obey, and God had sent the epidemic as punishment for savage presumption!

And on precisely this same Fijian level stands the “Book of Common Prayer” of our most decorous and cultured of churches. I remember as a little child lying on a bed of sickness, occasioned by the prevalence in our home of the Southern custom of hot bread three times a day; and there came an amiable clerical gentleman and recited the service proper to such pastoral calls: “Take therefore in good part the visitation of the Lord!” And again, when my mother was ill, I remember how the clergyman read out in church a prayer for her, specifying all sickness, “in mind, body or estate.” I was thinking only of my mother, and the meaning of these words passed over my childish head; I did not realize that the elderly plutocrat in black broadcloth who knelt in the pew in front of me was invoking the aid of the Almighty so that his tenements might bring in their rentals promptly; so that his little “flyer” in cotton might prove successful; so that the children in his mills might work with greater speed.

Somebody asked Voltaire if you could kill a cow by incantations, and he answered, “Yes, if you use a little strychnine with it.” And that would seem to be the attitude of the present-day Anglican church-member; he calls in the best physician he knows, he makes sure that his plumbing is sound, and after that he thinks it can do no harm to let the Lord have a chance. It makes the women happy, and after all, there are a lot of things we don’t yet know about the world. So he repairs to the family pew, and recites over the venerable prayers, and contributes his mite to the maintenance of an institution which, fourteen Sundays every year, proclaims the terrifying menaces of the Athanasian Creed:

Whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick faith. Which faith, except one do keep whole and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.

For the benefit of the uninitiated reader, it may be explained that the “Catholick faith” here referred to is not the Roman Catholic, but that of the Church of England and the Protestant Episcopal Church of America. This creed of the ancient Alexandrian lays down the truth with grim and menacing precision—forty-four paragraphs of metaphysical minutiae, closing with the final doom: “This is the Catholick faith: which except a man believe faithfully, he canno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• OFFERTORY
• INTRODUCTORY
• BOOK ONE
• BOOK TWO
• BOOK THREE
• BOOK FOUR
• BOOK FIVE
• BOOK SIX
• BOOK SEVEN
• About the Author
• Copyright