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Religion: Will Civilization Survive?

3 minute read
TIME

“Some people will think I’m a Bolshevik; others will think I’m anticapitalist.

But I’m anti-socialist too.” The Rev. Dr. Vigo Auguste Demant, 56, Canon of Christ Church in Oxford, thus predicted the public reaction to his series of eight 40-minute lectures over the BBC’s uncompromisingly highbrow Third Program. Last week, as the series ended, Canon Demant had made such a hit that the BBC was planning to put him on its middlebrow Home Service next fall.

What Canon Demant had said over the air he had already said to students at Oxford University, where last year he became Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology. Calling his treatise Religion and the Decline of Capitalism, anticapitalist, anti-socialist Demant set out to diagnose the basic troubles of the time.

No Apron Strings. The essence of capitalism, says Demant, is “the predominance of market relationships over the greater part of the social field.” The free market of capitalism pinned a “For Sale” sign on more & more aspects of human life, he feels; the process reached a “climax of social destructiveness when the three foundations of society, which are not by their nature commodities’, [were] treated as if they were—namely, labor, land and money.”

In reaction against such social destructiveness, says Demant, the modern world is turning from capitalism toward various kinds of collectivism. In its religious implications, this reaction is as fatal as the disease it would cure.

Capitalism, according to Demant, had a kind of theology all its own. “Capitalism was part of the whole movement known as liberalism … It was this liberalism which dispensed with ‘the sacred’ as a real element in existence and gave the ‘secular’ all the religious valuations previously accorded to the divine realm . . .”

Capitalism, substituting contracts for the natural ties that had linked people together in church-centered communities, rose triumphant on the wave of “freedom . . . from the apron strings of Mother Theology.” Though it was destructive, says Demant, capitalism seemed to be successful for a century or so, because it was still riding upon an earlier period’s religious structure and sense of community.

No Other Hope? The “state principle” which more & more societies are substituting for capitalism, Demant believes, is doomed to failure; the healing of society must take place on a level far deeper than either socialist politics or capitalist economics. Rivalry between capitalism and collectivism “is bound to be a kind of war of the pseudo-religions.”

How, then, will society be saved? Says Demant: “We may say that one condition of the survival of a civilization is that men shall not believe only in that. Civilization begins to decay when men will not admit the possibility of its death … If they have no other hope or stay when a culture crumbles, every move to restore it seems but to hasten the crumbling .

“The question true leadership should be asking is: Does this or that development strengthen man where he is, or does it just make more demands on him while undercutting his point of support? This is primarily the question the Christian mind should always be framing, for it thinks in terms of depth and not of extension—where it has not been seduced by a world demanding moral oil for its creaking machinery.” Unless modern man comes to see things in proper dimension—”the dimension in which men are related to God” —then “we shall join up a lot of bankrupt businesses, hoping that the sum will show a credit balance.”

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