H.L. Mencken on Religion

Rating:
Summary: A Great American Writer Takes on a Favorite Target
Review: H. L. Mencken was not on a campaign against religion: "I have never consciously tried to convert anyone to anything," he wrote. Perhaps not, but conversions must have happened as readers sought his columns in the _Baltimore Evening Sun_, the _Smart Set_, and the _American Mercury_. He didn't write mostly on religion, of course, excoriating Americans for their general stupidity in many spheres. But his critiques of religion have been collected in _H. L. Mencken on Religion_ (Prometheus Books), edited by S. T. Joshi, and they are a stimulating, wide-ranging attack on various aspects of a particular foe. Fundamentalist Christians especially will find much offensive here, for they are Mencken's particular game, although Catholics, Methodists, Christian Scientists, spiritualists, and other more moderate sects come into scorn in their turn. If Mencken were alive today, how he would spring into attacks upon the Raelians, the TV spiritualists, the New Agers, and of course the fundamentalist Christians who are still thriving. To read these essays is to be reminded of how relatively mild such criticism has now become.

Of course Mencken was misanthropic, and of course he was bigoted. He was careful to express disdain of his own character, often saying that in studying religious ideas, he found "soothing proof that there are men left who are even worse asses than I am." One of his essays is even called "Confessions of a Theological Moron," in which he admits that unlike most of the people on the planet, he has no religious feeling whatsoever and that no sense of any divine personality enters into his thinking. "As for the impulse to worship, it is as foreign to my nature as the impulse to run for Congress." But he also made clear that he was "... anything but a militant atheist and haven't the slightest objection to church-going, so long as it is honest." He thought power grabs by religion dishonest; in his own time, he lambasted religious support of prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, Sunday marketing laws, and divorce restrictions. "The whole history of the church, as everyone knows, is a history of schemes to put down heresy by force." Mencken was present for much of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, or the trial of (as he repeatedly names him) "the infidel Scopes," and his columns are reprinted here. He does not come out and say it, but he favored the wall between church and state as a means of not just separating but of protecting each side from the other.

The wit and erudition displayed in these essays is a real treasure, and ought to be for believers and infidels alike. Get out your dictionary; you will read here of the roar of the catamount, the boons and usufructs of modern medicine, the pothers of the newspapers, and the head wiskinski of the wowsers. As an epilogue, here is the famous, funny, and oddly moving "Memorial Service" seeking the gravesite of the thousands of gods people have believed in, "... many of them mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament." The long list, including Baal, Pluto, Odin, and Huitzilopochtli, is composed of gods "...of civilized peoples - worshipped and believed in by millions. All were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal. And all are dead." Mencken is dead, too, but his thoughts as retained in this invigorating collection ought to last far longer that Huitzilopochtli himself managed.

Rating:
Summary: A Great American Writer Takes on a Favorite Target
Review: H. L. Mencken was not on a campaign against religion: "I have never consciously tried to convert anyone to anything," he wrote. Perhaps not, but conversions must have happened as readers sought his columns in the _Baltimore Evening Sun_, the _Smart Set_, and the _American Mercury_. He didn't write mostly on religion, of course, excoriating Americans for their general stupidity in many spheres. But his critiques of religion have been collected in _H. L. Mencken on Religion_ (Prometheus Books), edited by S. T. Joshi, and they are a stimulating, wide-ranging attack on various aspects of a particular foe. Fundamentalist Christians especially will find much offensive here, for they are Mencken's particular game, although Catholics, Methodists, Christian Scientists, spiritualists, and other more moderate sects come into scorn in their turn. If Mencken were alive today, how he would spring into attacks upon the Raelians, the TV spiritualists, the New Agers, and of course the fundamentalist Christians who are still thriving. To read these essays is to be reminded of how relatively mild such criticism has now become.

Of course Mencken was misanthropic, and of course he was bigoted. He was careful to express disdain of his own character, often saying that in studying religious ideas, he found "soothing proof that there are men left who are even worse asses than I am." One of his essays is even called "Confessions of a Theological Moron," in which he admits that unlike most of the people on the planet, he has no religious feeling whatsoever and that no sense of any divine personality enters into his thinking. "As for the impulse to worship, it is as foreign to my nature as the impulse to run for Congress." But he also made clear that he was "... anything but a militant atheist and haven't the slightest objection to church-going, so long as it is honest." He thought power grabs by religion dishonest; in his own time, he lambasted religious support of prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, Sunday marketing laws, and divorce restrictions. "The whole history of the church, as everyone knows, is a history of schemes to put down heresy by force." Mencken was present for much of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, or the trial of (as he repeatedly names him) "the infidel Scopes," and his columns are reprinted here. He does not come out and say it, but he favored the wall between church and state as a means of not just separating but of protecting each side from the other.

The wit and erudition displayed in these essays is a real treasure, and ought to be for believers and infidels alike. Get out your dictionary; you will read here of the roar of the catamount, the boons and usufructs of modern medicine, the pothers of the newspapers, and the head wiskinski of the wowsers. As an epilogue, here is the famous, funny, and oddly moving "Memorial Service" seeking the gravesite of the thousands of gods people have believed in, "... many of them mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament." The long list, including Baal, Pluto, Odin, and Huitzilopochtli, is composed of gods "...of civilized peoples - worshipped and believed in by millions. All were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal. And all are dead." Mencken is dead, too, but his thoughts as retained in this invigorating collection ought to last far longer that Huitzilopochtli himself managed.

Rating:
Summary: A highly quotable Mencken collection
Review: Skip the introduction; editor Joshi strays from the topic by questioning Mencken's "fanatical loathing" of Roosevelt, while ignoring similar diatribes he wrote against Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. Page 133 of Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work provides Mencken's rebuttal: "....in all my life I don't recall ever writing in praise of a sitting President. Finding virtues in successful politicians seemed to me to be the function of their swarms of willing pediculae; it was the business of a journalist, as I conceived it, to stand in a permanent Opposition."

Joshi also states that the Baptists aren't behind the Ku Klux Klan. Well, of course not. Nor does the Mormon Church support polygamists, nor the Catholic hierarchy condone killing abortion doctors. But Klan members, polygamists, and doctor-killers are far more pious than their mainstream counterparts. Such activities are where extreme devotion eventually leads.

Besides, the book's title accurately describes its contents. Any additional information can be squeezed onto the dust jacket. Mencken needs no stinking introduction.

Nor does he need my analysis. Despite the introduction, this is now my favorite posthumous Mencken collection. The following quotes are some of the reasons why:

"....men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."

"That medicine saves to-day thousands who must have died yesterday is a fact of small significance, for most of them will leave no more marks upon the history of the race than so many June bugs; but that all of us have been persuaded thereby to turn from priests and magicians when we are ill to doctors and nurses -- that is a fact of massive and permanent importance. It benefits everybody worthy of being called human at all. It rids the thinking of mankind of immense accumulations of intellectual garbage."

"This doctrine of the goodness of God, it seems to me, is no more, at bottom, than an evidence of arrested intellectual development. It does not fit into what we know of the nature and operations of the cosmos today; it is a survival from a day of universal ignorance."

"The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world. The minute a new one is launched, in whatever field, some imbecile of a theologian is certain to fall upon it, seeking to put it down. The most effective way to defend it, of course, would be to fall upon the theologian, for the only really workable defense, in polemics as in war, is a vigorous offensive. But the convention that I have mentioned frowns upon that device as indecent, and so theologians continue their assault upon sense without much resistance, and the enlightenment is unpleasantly delayed.

"There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly."

"No combat set in this world ever grows more furious and extravagant than a combat between Christians. They seem to have a special talent for hatred, almost a vocation."

"Puritanism, in its essence, was sheer brutality; there was absolutely no beauty in it, and very little decency. It revolved around the fear of Hell, and nothing else. In late years there have been many defenses of the Puritans on the ground that, for all the rigors of their theology, they yet lived more or less normal lives, and were not unacquainted with the sempiternal arts of thieving, forestalling, fighting, wine-bibbing and fornication. But all that this comes to is the confession that many of them were hypocrites. Granted. So are many of their heirs and assigns today."

"The Fundamentalist prayer is not an inner experience; it is a means to objective ends. He prays precisely as more worldly Puritans complain to the police. He expects action, and is disappointed and dismayed if it does not follow. The mind of this Fundamentalist is extremely literal -- indeed, the most literal mind ever encountered on this earth. He doubts nothing in the Bible, not even the typographical errors."

"The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism."

"To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it -- to admit this, as the more famous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse."

"The evangelical churches, in fact, are rapidly becoming public nuisances. Neglecting almost altogether their old concern about individual salvation, they have converted themselves into vast engines for harassing and oppressing persons who dissent from their naive and often preposterous theology. No one hears of them saving souls any more; they seem to devote their whole energies to getting bodies into jail."

"....theologians make a mess of everything they touch, including even religion."

"There was a day when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter to-day?"

Rating:
Summary: A highly quotable Mencken collection
Review: Skip the introduction; editor Joshi strays from the topic by questioning Mencken's "fanatical loathing" of Roosevelt, while ignoring similar diatribes he wrote against Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. Page 133 of Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work provides Mencken's rebuttal: "....in all my life I don't recall ever writing in praise of a sitting President. Finding virtues in successful politicians seemed to me to be the function of their swarms of willing pediculae; it was the business of a journalist, as I conceived it, to stand in a permanent Opposition."

Joshi also states that the Baptists aren't behind the Ku Klux Klan. Well, of course not. Nor does the Mormon Church support polygamists, nor the Catholic hierarchy condone killing abortion doctors. But Klan members, polygamists, and doctor-killers are far more pious than their mainstream counterparts. Such activities are where extreme devotion eventually leads.

Besides, the book's title accurately describes its contents. Any additional information can be squeezed onto the dust jacket. Mencken needs no stinking introduction.

Nor does he need my analysis. Despite the introduction, this is now my favorite posthumous Mencken collection. The following quotes are some of the reasons why:

"....men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."

"That medicine saves to-day thousands who must have died yesterday is a fact of small significance, for most of them will leave no more marks upon the history of the race than so many June bugs; but that all of us have been persuaded thereby to turn from priests and magicians when we are ill to doctors and nurses -- that is a fact of massive and permanent importance. It benefits everybody worthy of being called human at all. It rids the thinking of mankind of immense accumulations of intellectual garbage."

"This doctrine of the goodness of God, it seems to me, is no more, at bottom, than an evidence of arrested intellectual development. It does not fit into what we know of the nature and operations of the cosmos today; it is a survival from a day of universal ignorance."

"The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world. The minute a new one is launched, in whatever field, some imbecile of a theologian is certain to fall upon it, seeking to put it down. The most effective way to defend it, of course, would be to fall upon the theologian, for the only really workable defense, in polemics as in war, is a vigorous offensive. But the convention that I have mentioned frowns upon that device as indecent, and so theologians continue their assault upon sense without much resistance, and the enlightenment is unpleasantly delayed.

"There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly."

"No combat set in this world ever grows more furious and extravagant than a combat between Christians. They seem to have a special talent for hatred, almost a vocation."

"Puritanism, in its essence, was sheer brutality; there was absolutely no beauty in it, and very little decency. It revolved around the fear of Hell, and nothing else. In late years there have been many defenses of the Puritans on the ground that, for all the rigors of their theology, they yet lived more or less normal lives, and were not unacquainted with the sempiternal arts of thieving, forestalling, fighting, wine-bibbing and fornication. But all that this comes to is the confession that many of them were hypocrites. Granted. So are many of their heirs and assigns today."

"The Fundamentalist prayer is not an inner experience; it is a means to objective ends. He prays precisely as more worldly Puritans complain to the police. He expects action, and is disappointed and dismayed if it does not follow. The mind of this Fundamentalist is extremely literal -- indeed, the most literal mind ever encountered on this earth. He doubts nothing in the Bible, not even the typographical errors."

"The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism."

"To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it -- to admit this, as the more famous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse."

"The evangelical churches, in fact, are rapidly becoming public nuisances. Neglecting almost altogether their old concern about individual salvation, they have converted themselves into vast engines for harassing and oppressing persons who dissent from their naive and often preposterous theology. No one hears of them saving souls any more; they seem to devote their whole energies to getting bodies into jail."

"....theologians make a mess of everything they touch, including even religion."

"There was a day when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter to-day?"

Rating:
Summary: Now More Than Ever...
Review: What can I say? The brilliant editorialist H. L. Mencken, gone for almost half a century, shines again in vintage newspaper columns that are just as relevant now as ever. In this day and age, almost 80 years after Scopes, when it's barely legal to teach actual science in Kansas classrooms, Mencken shows what intelligent folks have known about him all along: that he was decades ahead of his time. What would he have had to say about the Taliban? Or about so-called "Creation Science" ? Or about science textbook "disclaimers" in Mississippi schools, Trinity Broadcasting, the "Left Behind" series, and the Psychic Network? We'll never know, but we can guess! Buy this indispensable collection for your neighborhood Fundamentalist. He could use it! I'd give it 6 stars if they'd let me. Henry, where are you now that we really need you?