H.L. Mencken on Religion by Mencken H. L. & S. T. Joshi

Author:Mencken, H. L. & S. T. Joshi [Mencken, H. L.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Prometheus Books - A
Published: 2010-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

IV

Obviously, this is an intelligent attitude. Equally obviously, it is one that the evangelical brethren cannot take without making their position absurd. For weal or for woe, they are committed absolutely to the literal accuracy of the Bible; they base their whole theology upon it. Once they admit, even by inference, that there may be a single error in Genesis, they open the way to an almost complete destruction of that theology. So they are forced to take up the present challenge boldly, and to prepare for a battle to the death. If, when and as they attempt a compromise, they admit defeat.

Thus there is nothing unnatural in their effort to protect their position by extra-theological means—for example, by calling in the law to put down their opponents. All Christians, when one of their essential dogmas seems to be menaced, turn instinctively to the same device. The whole history of the church, as everyone knows, is a history of schemes to put down heresy by force. Unluckily, those schemes do not work as well as they did in former ages. The heretic, in the course of time, has learned how to protect himself—even how to take the offensive. He refuses to go docilely to the stake. Instead, he yells, struggles, makes a frightful pother, bites his executioner. The church begins to learn that it is usually safest to let him go.

The Ku Klux Klergy, unfortunately for their cause, have not yet mastered that plain fact. Intellectually, they are still medieval. They believe that the devices which worked in the year 1300 will still work in 1925. As a life-long opponent of their pretensions I can only report that their fidelity to this belief fills me with agreeable sentiments. I rejoice that they have forced the fighting, and plan to do it in the open. My prediction is that, when the peanut shells are swept up at last and the hot-dog men go home, millions of honest minds in this great republic, hitherto uncontaminated by the slightest doubt, will have learned to regard parts of Genesis as they now regard the history of Andrew Gump.2

[Baltimore Evening Sun, June 15, 1925]

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