Reading these essays, I’m now fitting some memories of my grandmother’s personality into a wider perspective, and some things are becoming clear: the lifelong activism for social justice, civil rights, temperance, the co-operative movement; why she grew impatient with the church services at Mt. Olivet…
The Faith Of An Unrepentant Liberal
A sermon by A. Powell Davies, 1946
Never was the need for faith as desperate as now; and never was
it more essential that belief be genuine. We cannot face the
future empty-hearted; we cannot face it with an untrue creed.
Yet it is one of the perversities of the modern world’s most
crucial hour that many who could find and share the faith we need
devote themselves to its obstruction.
In the age of opportunity and peril that confronts us, only
disaster can be harvested from false beliefs. The religions of
the creeds are obsolescent; they have no will to face reality;
the basis of their claims expired with yesterday; to what is now
required they are irrelevant; the authority of myth and miracle
is over. Surely it should be clear at last that all the
compromises of religion must be ended. The world is much too
dangerous for anything but truth.
Only this can now avail us; that we leave the childhood of
the race behind and come to spiritual maturity.
Yet there are those so frightened by the future, and at the
same time so fettered by the past, that even today, while we race
with catastrophe, they call upon their hearers to repudiate the
only faith and purpose that could save them, and be dedicated to
a dying system of belief. “Come Back!” they cry. “Back to the
ancient worship and the ancient ways! Back to the supernatural!
Back to a helpless and imploring piety! Back to dependency!”
Back to everything, in fact, which proved too weak and false to
hinder or prevent two deadly, world-engulfing wars.
“But hear us!” they plead. “See what has happened! Modern
man has overreached himself. Doom is at hand. Freedom at last
is faced with retribution… Ah! if only the ancient faith had
never been forsaken! If only men had gone on being obedient to
the jealous God who brooks no trespass on his own authority! If
only they had left the secrets of the universe in the keeping of
Divine Providence, the mastery of nature in the hands of the
Almighty One. But no, mankind has wickedly persisted in its
great apostasy. It has followed after the devices and desires of
its own heart; it has quenched its thirst for knowledge at the
bitter cisterns of its own contriving; it has surrendered to a
sacrilegious urge for infinite discovery and multifold invention;
and now, the Sodom of science and the Gomorrah of rational belief
are calling down fire from heaven to consume them! God has
decreed destruction! Only a prompt return to the traditional
faith, a contrite and abject submission to authoritarian
doctrines can possibly avail us.”
Thus runs the claim of the defeated, the challenge of the
voice of yesterday. And with this conclusion: that we must now
give up, renounce and utterly abhor the mortal sin of liberalism,
especially in religion, for it is liberalism which has thus
deluded and misled us. It caused us to put our trust in the free
exertions of our own minds instead of in the dogmas of the long-
established churches; it encouraged us to look for progress
rather than salvation from unchangeable depravity, to place
reliance in the growth of goodness instead of praying for
separation from the evil of a hopeless and desponding world.
Yes, it was liberalism which forswore the supernatural and
forsook the ancient revelation; it was liberalism which fostered
science, liberalism which placed the stamp of its approval on the
quest for never-ending new discovery, liberalism which brought us
to our present impasse and liberalism which will bring us to our
final ruin and complete disaster, if we let it.
Now, before we consider this rather strenuous accusation –
and of course, only the emphasis is new: the charge itself is
almost venerable — it may be well to seek some definitions.
People who do not like liberalism call everything liberal which
they do not like. Until they are found out, this naturally gives
them a tactical advantage, for they can simply add up all the
evils of the modern age, and all the unsolved problems, and lay
them at the door of liberalism. Until we had liberalism, they
say, we did not have these evils; nor did we have these problems;
and so, quite clearly, the liberals are to blame. It is amazing
how seldom this non sequitur is noticed and exposed. Even
liberals, for some strange reason, are at times inveigled by it.
They do not see that their accusers are adroitly covering up
their own deficiencies, their own confusion. Not only covering
them up, but infecting liberals with them. That is why I say we
had better seek some definitions.
What, let us ask, is liberalism? Let us admit at once that
it is not an easy thing to define. This is not because it is
vague but because it is comprehensive. Definition always limits
a word — it is essential that it should — but some words, by
their nature, are difficult to limit. Especially is this true of
the word liberal. For there is a sense in which liberalism is
and always has been the very contradiction of limitation. Yet I
think we can define it fairly closely, and much more accurately
than our opponents wish.
The common denominator of all liberalism is devotion to
liberty. The two words, of course, come from the same root.
Liberalism is that which liberates. Its object is to loosen
bondage, whether of the mind or of the person, whether of
individuals or societies, and its motivation is the faith that
human life can only reach its fullest stature through continuous
liberation — through the struggle to be free.
It is from this that every kind of liberal purpose has been
born. Political liberals have sought to emancipate themselves
and all others from servitude to ancient and oppressive systems,
from inferior citizenship, from subjugation to the will of
overlords, believing that that society is best where all are most
free to participate in ruling it, in making its laws, in deciding
the directions it shall take. This kind of liberalism is called
democracy and it is far from easy to maintain. Yet, we who have
seen its alternatives in action are very sure that liberal
democracy is a political achievement that we are far from ready
to lose.
Educational liberals have believed that access to human
knowledge and the privilege of participating in increasing it are
natural human rights and should be universal. They have thought
that the wisdom of the past, while it should be respected and
discerningly transmitted, should never be a bondage, a fetter to
the mind. They have resisted all attempts to mold opinion
through dogmatic teachings. And certainly, we who have seen this
attitude scorned and forsaken and whole nations propagandized in
the name of unity and mass efficiency — we who have seen the
minds of peoples maimed and crippled, and the truth that could
have saved them perverted and distorted — can have no wish to
see an end to liberal principles of education.
In religion, the liberal stood for the unhindered use of
the free mind in arriving at conviction. Truth he declared to be
more holy than any creed, more sacred than even the most
sanctified of dogmas. He refused to accept authoritarian
“revelations” which contradicted the revelation he found in his
own experience. He was prepared to be submissive to doctrines
and respectful to theologies only if they could justify
themselves in the forum of unsheltered truth. He searched the
Scriptures to determine their actual range of application, their
intrinsic authority and their dependability; he demanded of
churches and hierarchies that they demonstrate their usefulness
and prove their worth; he called every religious belief which
could not be justified by evidence or reason a speculation, and
every tenet which was contradicted by the force of fact a
superstition. And he proposed to proclaim abroad all new
discoveries, no matter what the consequence to vested interests
and established institutions. Not only mind but conscience must
be free. Otherwise, it was less a conscience than it should be.
Freedom, therefore — increasing freedom throughout the
entire scope of human life — has been the watchword of
liberalism. No matter what the ancient systems of authority
attempted to dictate, the liberal has claimed the freedom to
explore anew; to accept what evidence and reason justify; to
strike out into the unknown — carrying the torch of truth
anywhere and everywhere that truth might go. This has meant,
just as the accusers say, that liberals have always accepted the
scientific attitude and have labored to extend it. They have
wanted a full development of the whole field of human knowledge,
and the conquest of ignorance and superstition everywhere. To
achieve this, they have preached the open mind and, so far as
they were faithful to their precepts, have practiced it. They
have also preached the possibility of endless progress, the power
of man to share the shaping of his destiny; and they have
instituted and encouraged all such changes and reforms as might
be likely to contribute to a saner, happier, better world.
It is of this, today, that liberals stand accused. They
emphasized the virtue and the promise in the life of man instead
of focusing their thought upon his helplessness beneath the rule
of evil; and they tried to make a better world in place of
leaving it to false, fallacious hopes of Providential
intervention. They did not pray that God would save them from
themselves through some impossible, miraculous “salvation.” They
prayed that God would save them in and through themselves while
working out their own salvation.
As one such liberal, I glory in the accusation. I am a
liberal without apology, a liberal without misgivings, a liberal
without regret. I am an unrepentant liberal. So far as I am
sorry for anything, it is not because I am a liberal, but that I
am not more liberal than I am. Of this I am certain: that no
return to false beliefs or authoritarian folklore can avail us in
the world tomorrow — any more than in the recent past. Their
day is over. Only the free mind can possess the future. Lives
in bondage to the supernatural fantasies will never find the
courage or the strength.
And now, having defined liberalism and declared my own
allegiance to it, let me proceed to deal with the confusion in
the accusation made against it. For what traditionalists always
love to do is to try to make liberals accountable not only for
the outlook and the purposes which are truly theirs, but for the
degree to which that outlook has not prevailed and the extent to
which those purposes are not accomplished. They also try to
blame the liberals for the actual emergence of the problems which
the modern age must face. In neither case is the imputation
justified or the indictment really scrupulous or honest.
From the beginning, liberals have found themselves in
opposition to the guardians of established institutions and
beliefs. It is natural that these custodians of depleted symbols
and vacated sepulchers should feel alarmed. They saw what
freedom might entail. Their fright, of course, was genuine. So
was their bondage to the past. They were afraid of new,
uncharted areas of experience; the world was growing much too
wide. In agoraphobic panic, they crowded closer to their ancient
prisons, shouting their warnings to the world to join them and be
sheltered from a universe that grew too big. “Come back,” they
cried, “and wear the old familiar fetters. The liberals mislead
you. You are not able to be free.”
It is not to be expected,
therefore, that liberalism would have the benefit of fair
appraisal from those who have feared and distrusted it, or that
cause and consequence could have an honest exposition from those
whose only refuge is their own retreat. To maintain their
standpoint, they had to distort what challenged it — distort it
and confuse it. Confusion was indeed essential; and to feed
their illusion of security they had to spread confusion; and then
present their obsolescent doctrines as the only antidote. Small
wonder that the modern age despairs of finding what it might
believe!
What are the facts? The first fact is that the problems of
the modern age are no more caused by liberalism than by anything
else. They emerge with liberalism through the growth of man
towards a further measure of fulfillment. They are brought about
because in history no particular cycle can be permanent: each
age, in reaching its completion, is superseded by a new one.
They are caused by innovating factors entering into human life,
produced by all the people in the world; and from the impulse
dwelling in the heart of life itself which urges living creatures
onward.
What it was, ultimately, which brought about a revolution in
our methods for obtaining knowledge, followed by an outflow of
applied discovery and technical invention — what, in short, is
finally responsible for modern science and technology — no
historian really knows. Events can be described — I know that -
- step by step and stage by stage, but nobody can say just why
they first began to happen when they did, or what at last
controlled them. Nobody can say it, that is, except in terms of
a rational belief that life itself is enterprising and its very
nature innovating and adventurous. This, of course, is what the
liberal faith declares.
But let us continue. As they mounted
up, the sum of these events, these new inventions, these new
discoveries, produced enormous problems — social problems,
political problems, international problems. Liberals did not
invent these problems. Liberals, in fact, being themselves in
part the product of the changes brought about, but not discordant
with them, pointed out the way to solve them, whereas
traditionalists merely wept because the problems had emerged at
all.
Liberals no more than conservatives produced the need that
human beings increase their mental range and moral stature if
they hoped to meet the challenge of the epoch into which humanity
had entered. The fact was — and is — that increased mental
range and improved moral stature are essential, liberals or no
liberals. But only the liberal way, the way of unbinding the
mind and unfettering the spirit can possibly produce the mental,
moral level which can meet these indispensable requirements.
Nor did liberals make the evil which persists in human
nature. It is this evil, this reluctance, this perverseness,
which has impeded progress. It is this same evil which now
threatens ruin and disaster. Not the evil in the hearts of any
one category amongst us, but the evil in the hearts of all of us.
It is against this evil, together with the ignorance and
prejudice which reinforce it, that liberalism has contended.
Knowing that without enlightenment, without fidelity to actual
fact and honest truth, without man’s own exertions and his
fullest, furthermost endeavors, this evil would never be
overcome, liberalism forsook the false beliefs in supernatural
interventions and salvations — interventions which never took
place and salvations which left man just as badly off as he was
before — and sought the guidance of the God who thinks through
human thoughts and speaks through human consciences, the God who
works through human striving and fulfills his purpose in man’s
own laborious toil. That all men have not yet accepted this
approach is not the fault of liberals, and that all liberals have
not lived up to its standards is not the fault of liberalism.
To solve the problems of the modern world we need both
better liberals and more widespread liberalism. Certainly such
problems will never be resolved by those who in their outlook and
belief remain enslaved by doctrines which are false. Realities
will never yield to creeds which draw their nurture and support
from ignorance and have to be protected from the naked light of
truth. These are the creedal systems which accept support and
shelter from reactionary tyrannies; which, at their worst,
preserve their institutions by a partnership with despotism and
corruption. Theirs are the patterns of belief which cloud
intelligence and siphon off the moral energies for want of which
humanity is insufficient to the claims upon it, being left
disabled and enfeebled. While, therefore, liberalism did not
produce the problems of the modern world, it is the simple truth
that only liberalism, lifted to the level of the present need,
can ever hope to solve them.
And it is this which traditionalists have hindered and
impeded. In the effort to maintain their institutions, their
importance, their authority, and because they could not face
reality, they have obstructed vital progress and held back the
march of man to spiritual maturity.
If science today has placed in human hands immense
potentialities for ruin and destruction, the peril is not because
we have become too scientific, but because our science is
restricted. We have put too little science into sociology, too
little of its method into national and international affairs, too
little into politics. The fault is not in science, but in
resistance to its method; and in the insufficient spread of it.
Let us dispel the lies conclusively; let us require ourselves and
all mankind to face the truth; the peril does not come from
technological developments or scientific disciplines; it comes
from ignorance and evil, from prejudice and false opinion, from
delusive hopes and narrow aims; and these are the things which
liberalism has sought to remedy.
Let us make clear another fact. The world to which
traditionalists would like us to return was never such a world as
they describe. It was a world of famine and disease, a world of
many cruelties and few humanities, a world of arrogant and
avaricious hierarchies, of tyranny and oppression, of ignorance
and fear, of toil and tears. It is the world which tyrants and
authoritarians have been trying to revive, no matter what the
cost in blood and agony; and the world which every decent man and
woman, for several centuries, has been trying to leave behind.
Nor are these modern prophets of retreat at all consistent.
They do not take the consequences of their own assumptions. They
want the benefits of recent progress without accepting honestly
its implications. I have heard of few traditionalists who would
impugn the scientific method when it comes to being cured by
penicillin, or who disdain the opportunities offered by the
technological advancement embodied in a broadcasting station.
No, they are more than willing to let science save their lives,
even though they fulminate against it in their pulpits. Science
never seems to overreach itself in reaching their bedsides, but
only when it undermines their creeds. If it looks as though
providence is calling them to heaven, whereas penicillin would
keep them a little longer on the earth, they show an instant and
unswerving preference for the pagan benefits of penicillin. They
do not want to die under a medieval doctor but they are willing
that mankind risk its future with a medieval faith.
If wicked science and ingenious invention provides the radio to take their
voices to a million homes, they find that God permits it. Yet
the same scientific approach, the same quest for knowledge, the
same fidelity to provable, experimental fact is in the radio and
penicillin as in the modern knowledge that upsets the creeds or
in the power to split the atom. Indeed, the fundamentalist
believer who puts on spectacles to read the Athanasian Creed is
demonstrating scientific laws of optics, which, if he thought
about them, would make the creed a waste of time to bother with.
For the principles embodied in the spectacles must lead
infallibly to those by which we know the composition of the
elements or measure distances between the stars. There is no
turning back, even if we wished to turn back. There is no living
outside of this age, even for traditionalists.
I say, again, let us have done with confusion. The
liberating faith is the only possible faith for the world into
which we are moving. It makes problems more difficult only for
those who resist and obstruct the truth. It demands the
impossible only from those who have lost the will to win a full
humanity, who have let the inner sources of all honest faith
decay and lost their courage.
There is a religion that says Freedom! Freedom from
ignorance and false belief. Freedom from spurious claims and
bitter prejudices. Freedom to seek the truth, both old and new,
and freedom to follow it. Freedom from the hates and greeds that
divide mankind and spill the blood of every generation. Freedom
for honest thought. Freedom for equal justice, freedom to seek
the true, the good and the beautiful with minds unimpaired by
cramping dogmas and spirits uncrippled by abject dependence.
There is a religion that adds to Freedom, Universal
Brotherhood! — a religion that says mankind is not divided –
except by ignorance and prejudice and hate — that sees mankind
as naturally one and waiting to be spiritually united; a religion
which proclaims an end to creedal reservations and exclusions –
and declares a brotherhood unbounded! a religion that knows that
we shall never find the fullness of the wonder and the glory of
life until we are tall enough in moral stature to deserve it;
that we shall never have hearts big enough for the love we call
the love of God until we have made them big enough for the world-
wide love of man.
Only this faith in freedom linked with universal brotherhood
can be enough to save the world and then rebuild it. All lesser
faiths are dwindling and collapsing — or running for protection
to brutality and tyranny. They will be swept away or ridden to
their doom by fierce fanaticisms to which they yield in
desperation. Only this faith, this free and universal faith, is
now possible; only this faith is powerful. Only this faith can
march with truth; only this faith can liberate us from the fear
and ignorance of the past or set us free towards the future; the
faith that begins in individual freedom of belief and goes out to
the limitless, building throughout the world the Free and
Universal Church.
I am an unrepentant liberal. If the gods of yesterday are
dying, I am willing that they die. For there is a God who never
dies, the one and only living God whose face is ever set towards
tomorrow. And for those who follow where God leads, the winds of
morning are already blowing, and however long the night may
linger, the day of triumph is in sight.
