Book Review: The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation, by Upton Sinclair

While it is the last of the books I have reviewed for this blog, The Profits of Religion (1917) was actually the first of the books of what became the "Dead Hand" series that Upton Sinclair published.

As the play on words that is the title of Sinclair's book makes clear, he regarded organized religion as a racket--and has been pretty much the same racket all over the world, since the dawn of recorded history. This has, of course, all been said over the years many, many times, but in an era in which it is generally the right that gets to have it say before a wide audience on this subject as on virtually all others so that the "New Atheists" dominate what passes for "rationalist" criticism of religion within the mainstream, Sinclair's coming at the matter of religion from a very different standpoint can by itself distinguish him from those other writers on the subject one is likely to encounter today. Beginning with a surreal and symbolic vision of a field of people trying to, literally, lift themselves up by their bootstraps toward the sky under the tutelage of priests, as the Wholesale Pickpockets Association takes advantage of their distraction to do what its name indicates to be the main activity of its members, Sinclair tells us explicitly in Profits that his "thesis is the effect of fixed dogma in producing mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by Economic Exploitation"--an effect he traces from the prehistoric past to the present day. That is to say, if prehistoric peoples' incapacity to tell the difference between reality, dream and fancy as they strove to explain the often perplexing and frightening world in which they lived gave an emergent priestly caste the chance to build "a mighty fortress of Graft" upon the foundation of their fear ("Confess your own ignorance and your own impotence, abandon yourself utterly, and then we, the sacred Caste, the Keepers of the Holy Secrets, will secure you pardon and respite "), those particular grifters were through history partners, and at that junior partners, to other and increasingly bigger criminals--helping keep the slaves, serfs and commoners subdued and exploited by more "worldly" rulers, be they lords of war or lords of capital, by upholding the cruelest features of the social order by way of promises of prosperity and salvation, threats of damnation and hellfire, the hand-waving of ritual, the stultification of the mind with obscurantism, and of course, in the case of those who failed to respond to the standard operating procedures, persecution of the heretic unto death, as they made of human life a swamp of oppression and hypocrisy.

The New Atheists, for the most part, would not dare such criticism of course, more inclined to laugh at the poor when they get taken in by the grifters, and rather less prone to acknowledge a relationship like Billy and John's. Moreover, rather than promoting xenophobic and often blatantly racist intolerance, Sinclair concerns himself above all with religion in the mainstream of Western life, and above all American society--with, of the seven "books" comprising Profits, after he has got through laying out the essentials of the racket and their origins in the first book ("The Church of the Conquerors"), Sinclair devoting three to the more established Protestant churches (numbers two, four and five, "The Church of Good Society," "The Church of the Slavers," "The Church of the Merchants"), and still another to more novel American institutions (number six, "The Church of the Quacks"). It is in keeping with this spirit that if Sinclair has something to say of the Lutheran Church of America's then-wartime enemy, Germany, he has rather more to say of the established church of its ally and mother country (and root and cousin of Sinclair's own absolutely mainline Episcopalian Church), England's Anglican Church; that if he devotes a whole book (number three, "The Church of the Servant-Girls") to Catholicism abroad and at home in a time when anti-Catholicism was a significant prejudice in American life, he at least endeavors to be clear that, unlike the nativists of his own time to whom he is anxious to give no aid and comfort, he is criticizing the institution of the Church and the policies explicitly laid down by its undisputed authorities, rather than persecuting people of Catholic background; and that when referencing other religions from ancient Mesopotamia to the present-day South Seas, his concern all the way through is with showing the universality of the pattern he describes, rather than mocking, let alone demonizing, the "Other" or "exotic."

It is also the case that if Sinclair pulls no punches in attacking "actually existing" organized religion, Sinclair also tells us that he wrote his book "in the direct line of the Christian tradition" and "for the cause of Jesus" as "a man who was brought up in the Church, and loved it with all his heart and soul, and was driven out by the formalists and hypocrites in high places," "thinks of Jesus more frequently and with more devotion than he thinks of any other man that lives or has ever lived on earth," and "has but one purpose in all that he says and does, to bring into reality the dream that Jesus dreamed of peace on earth and good will toward men," with the contrast with the outlook of his friend H.G. Wells helpful in grasping his attitude. Where Wells, in that underappreciated book that drew the threads of his life's work together, The Shape of Things to Come, pictured the world's churches falling into neglect for irrelevance and eventually being "cleared away like dead leaves" save for a "few-score beautiful chapels, churches and cathedrals" preserved for their artistic and historical interest (and the same happening with the houses of worship of every other religion)--what good the religions had ever stood for advanced by other institutions, in other ways in the era of the "World State"--Sinclair anticipated in his seventh and last book ("The Church of the Social Revolution") the modernization of religion saving the churches, which he saw as still fulfilling real and enduring human needs. Social progress, Sinclair declared in the chapter "The Church Redeemed," "will abolish poverty and parasitism . . . make temptations fewer, and the soul's path through life much easier," but would "not remove the necessity of struggle for individual virtue"--only raising the struggle to a higher level on which human beings would find "newer and higher types of virtue"--while humans would "more than ever" desire to gather "in beautiful places to voice their love of life and of one another," and do so the better in "places swept clean of superstition and tyranny." Indeed, Sinclair held that just "[a]s the Reformation compelled the Catholic Church to cleanse itself and abolish the grossest of its abuses," so the Catholic Church, and every other such institution, would also be "compel[led] . . . to repudiate its defense of parasitism and exploitation," and himself made so bold as to "record the prophecy that by the year 1950 all Catholic authorities will be denying that the Church ever opposed . . . true Socialism" the same way that those Authorities had already come to "deny that the Church ever . . . burned men for teaching that the earth moves around the sun," or "sold the right to commit crime."

Of course, Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) lived to see that as of 1950 no such thing had come about, or even come close to happening--and had he also lived for the fifty-six years between his passing and our day he would have found himself still waiting for such denials (indeed, seen Popes celebrated for their role as Anti-Communist Cold Warriors). Just as was the case with the institutions he criticized for their corruption what he saw wrong with organized religion proved far more enduring than he expected in those hopeful times, which has translated to another unpleasant irony--just as was the case with his other works of nonfiction, the reader may find Sinclair's concerns and arguments all too contemporary precisely because the world simply did not move forward, the issues and conflicts of his time still the issues and conflicts of ours, so much so that some speak of the twentieth century as unfinished.

These days that lack of resolution, which ever more gives the lie to the smug claims that history as a whole was finished at the twentieth century's chronological end, seems ever more the story of our times--not least as we feel ourselves living through another edition of the interwar era, amid long depression, the resurgence of fascism, and renewed threats of world war.