The Protestant Era by Paul Tillich III. Religion and Ethics
Chapter 11: The Protestant Principle and the Proletarian Situation
III. The Failure of Historical Protestantism in the Face of the Proletarian Situation
its importance for Protestantism.
III. The Failure of Historical Protestantism in the Face of the Proletarian Situation
It is the historical fate of Protestantism that it has been driven in a direction which, although understandable in the frame of world history, does not express the possibilities of the Protestant principle and may prove ultimately disastrous. This is especially true of the contact between Protestantism and the proletarian situation. We shall not analyze all the causes of this
development but shall rather point out those aspects in which the antiproletarian tendency in Protestantism is most evident.
In the first place we should mention the hardening into dogma which the Protestant principle has undergone in the orthodox period, whereby it has been petrified into a system of doctrine that raises an unconditioned claim to truth. The effect of this development upon the religion and theology of Protestantism is familiar and has been the subject of extensive research. From the point of view of the Protestant principle, it is clear that in this trend a basic element of the
principle has been abandoned. It was claimed that man has objective possession of a truth that is identical with the content and letter of an inspired Scripture. The Scripture is in the hands of the church and its theological experts, and it can be used like an untouchable, unfailing, and
completely sufficient document of what is true. The critical power of the Protestant principle against any papal authority, be it that of a living man or that of a written paper, was forgotten. A quasi-sacramental dignity was attributed not only to the biblical text but also to the "pure
doctrine" as expressed in the Protestant creeds and the official teaching of the church. A truth beyond the biblical truth—for instance, philosophy—is not wanted. The Protestant doctrine is not subjected to the criticism of the Protestant principle.
As a result of this, the Protestant message in its orthodox form is wholly unsuited to reach the proletariat. Even the middle classes have become inwardly estranged from the teaching of the church—in some cases radically so, in others in a compromising way. But, owing to their educational advantages and their familiarity with history, they have had and still have at least
the possibility of understanding it or of sympathetic insight into it, and in many cases even of taking it up again. They have often had a real or a feigned respect for the achievements of the past. But it is quite otherwise with the proletarian masses. They have no sense of a historical background; they have neither the capacity nor the desire to understand the achievements of the past or to acquire a sympathetic insight into them; they stand in the most dire need and in the expectation of something new; and they have access only to those concepts that are rooted in the modern industrial world and to those ideas which interpret their needs and justify their anticipations. But, since Protestantism, as a result of its orthodox seclusion, has been unable to interpret these needs and anticipations, its message has remained unintelligible to the masses, even in its most simple and reduced form. A change is possible only if Protestantism,
rediscovering its own principle, recognizes that truth transcends all human fixation, even the letters of a sacred book.
Pietism is another factor that is of great significance for the understanding of the relation between Protestantism and the proletariat. Religion as an affair of the purely inner life isolates the individual and limits the relation between God and the world to the relation between God and the soul. The result of this is that the problems of worldly activity do not come within the scope of religion. The inner life, rather than the social sphere, is the place where God and man may enter into relation with each other. There is, so to speak, a direct line reaching upward from every individual. The Kingdom of God is the heavenly realm which the individual soul hopes to reach. Thus the forward-looking eschatological fervor of primitive Christianity is paralyzed, and the world-transforming aspect of the idea of the Kingdom of God disappears. The social sphere is viewed as a place of probation for the individual, but activity in the world as such does not have an intrinsic significance for the ultimate goal. It is obvious that this attitude could only intensify the gap between Protestantism and the proletariat; for it is characteristic of the
proletariat that its fervor is directed forward, creating a will to change the world. This is by no means an accidental, capricious tendency. It is rather a necessity inextricably bound up with the class struggle. In the face of the social situation of the proletariat, individual piety has only relative significance and even becomes unimportant. This holds even for questions like those of individual destiny, individual guilt, and even individual death. However effective the
presentation of such questions may be, it is very hard to turn the eyes of the proletariat from the forward to the upward direction. Every attempt of this kind is felt as an attempt to divert
attention from the political fight and as such is resisted.
The liberal interpretation of the Protestant principle is in accord with the proletarian outlook in so far as it is based on the autonomous attitude which is natural for proletarian thinking. The rigor of the scientific method in its historical research assures to theological liberalism the interest of educated humanists as well as the esteem of the proletariat (in so far as the latter comes into touch with these questions at all).
And yet this type of Protestantism has not become an effective way of bringing together
Protestantism and the proletariat. So long as liberalism remains bound to the humanistic ideal of
personality, it cannot influence the masses. The ideal of the religious personality is unsuited for the thinking of the proletariat. Protestantism in all its forms has emphasized the conscious religious personality, his intellectual understanding and his moral decisions. It has become a
"theology of consciousness" in analogy to the Cartesian philosophy of consciousness. Even religious feeling, as emphasized by pietism and romanticism, remained in the sphere of
consciousness. This had a double consequence. The personality was cut off from the vital basis of its existence. Religion was reserved for the conscious center of man. The subconscious levels remained untouched, empty, or suppressed, while the conscious side was overburdened with the continuous ultimate decisions it had to make. It is not by chance that in Protestant countries the breakdown of the conscious personality has occurred on such a large scale that the
psychoanalytic return to the unconscious became a social necessity. A religion that does not appeal to the subconscious basis of all decisions is untenable in the long run and can never become a religion for the masses. The other consequence of the emphasis on the "religious personality" is the isolation of the religious individual. It was especially the Calvinistic type of Protestantism that worked in this direction, alienating the masses who need supra-individual symbols and institutions. Catholicism was much more able to satisfy this need and,
consequently, to keep proletarian masses under its sway. But more successful than both the Christian churches was Marxism, whose most important function was to give the despairing, chaotic, empty masses of early capitalism symbols that grasped their unconscious as well as their consciousness, institutions that conquered the atomistic solitude of the individual within the mass, and a myth that created faith, hope, and a fighting community. Protestantism, in order to continue this trend in the future mass society, must transform itself in this point more than in any other one.
With the disappearance of the Catholic hierarchy, Protestantism had to depend upon worldly
"hierarchies" for its realization. Luther’s decision in connection with the Peasants’ Revolt made it a permanent necessity for Lutheranism to depend upon absolutism and to repudiate
democratic revolutionary tendencies. Among the Calvinists matters developed quite differently.
Very early there came about an alliance of Protestantism, which was fighting for its existence, with the middle classes, who were struggling for their economic independence. In this way there arose, on Lutheran soil, the connection of Protestantism with the patriarchal form of social life and on Reformed soil its connection with the capitalist-liberal form of society. The former is more characteristic of central Europe and the latter of western Europe and America. But in both forms it produced an antagonism to the proletariat. This was due to the fact that after the breakdown of the episcopal power the churches of the Reformation became dependent either on the absolute state and the political groups that controlled it or on the dominant forces in the bourgeois society. This was unavoidable, but it made an appreciation of the revolutionary proletariat by the Protestant churches practically impossible.
It is extremely difficult for most of the exponents of the Protestant churches to detect this
sociological conditioning. They imagine that official or private declarations of neutrality will be sufficient to make the church and the groups supporting the church really neutral; they fail to
recognize the power of those social realities that exercise an influence quite contrary to what people may think or wish; these social realities, consciously or unconsciously, condition action as well as thought. The old claim, for example, that the churches have taken a neutral attitude toward the farm-labor problem was pure ideology, a definitely "false consciousness." Every aspect of the farm laborer’s life showed him that this claim was not true and that the church was on the side of the landowners. It was, therefore, only a short step to the complete estrangement of the farm laborers from the church after they became an urban proletariat. The opportunity that arose for German Protestantism after World War I to become detached from the state has not been utilized up to the present. Lutheranism has maintained its old connection with the groups that were in control in the pre-war monarchy. The church has even supported the
conservative opposition to a state in which the proletariat had gained certain positions of power.
The only change that has occurred is the rise of religious socialism, which, on the whole, has been tolerated by the Protestant churches, albeit with more or less hostility. The religious socialists have set for themselves the goal of freeing Protestantism from the sociological attachments resulting from its antiproletarian past.
Connected with all this is Protestantism’s almost complete surrender to the nationalistic
ideology. Only when the pagan basis of nationalism was openly expressed by various groups in recent years did a slight reaction against "the myth of the nation" appear. Yet the old bonds between church and national state are still so strong that Protestantism mostly sides with those groups that have made the name "nationalist" into a party slogan. Only rarely has it been
recognized by Protestant leaders to what an extent the name "national" has become an ideology, that is, a conscious or unconscious concealment of the drive for power of certain economic and political pressure groups. This almost unqualified support of the "nationalist" ideology by the Protestant churches obstructs the coming-together of the church and the proletariat.
One basic demand upon Protestantism arises from what has been said above. Protestantism under the stress of the proletarian situation must decide for the Protestant principle as against historical Protestantism. The demand should not be made that Protestants subscribe
unconditionally to socialism; rather the demand should be that Protestantism subject all its decisions and activities to the criterion of the Protestant principle in the face of the disturbing and transforming reality of the proletarian situation. Protestantism should take socialism seriously as an expression of the proletarian situation. Not that every individual Protestant should become a socialist, but the individual Protestant should realize that against his will he transforms Protestantism, Christianity, and religion into an ideology; that he serves the "man- made God" of his social group, class, or nation, when he does not take seriously the reality of the proletarian situation as decisive for the future development of Protestantism. The proletarian situation is not something optional to which attention may or may not be given. It is rather the point at which history itself has posed the question to Protestantism, whether it will identify itself with the traditional forms in which it has been realized, or whether it will accept the challenge that confronts it in the situation of the proletarian masses and that calls in question a large part of its present-day life and thought.
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