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The Bulwark by Theodore
Dreiser is the story of a good man’s lifelong struggles against insincerity and
materialism. Dreiser himself wasn’t such a man, for he was bitter,
manipulative, physically threatening, and a user of women around whom it was
said that no female was safe. Yet, his writings portray a deep and sympathetic understanding of people, women no less than men, and the realism with which he wrote represented a new direction in American literature. As with many writers of depth, I was curious about Dreiser’s religious beliefs, and I found that they
were similar to my own:
“Dreiser
said he was nearly destroyed by reading Spencer, who, as he emphasized, ‘took
every shred of belief away from me; showed me that I was a chemical atom in a
swirl of unknown forces…’ Although Dreiser used Spencer’s idea to justify his
late and often cruel and selfish actions, Spencer, as well as Huxley,
embittered him. It was as if he resented forevermore having to give up
comforting beliefs, to face the reality of a world that offered no excuse for
viciousness.”*
I
believe that science offers a better explanation for viciousness than religion,
and that the fundamentalist religion in which I grew up was itself vicious in
its eagerness to see everyone but its own members rot in hell, but then the
fanatical Catholicism of Dreiser’s childhood was no better. Even so, there lay
in it the assurance that there existed a deity who gave to life an
ordained meaning and the promise of a better life after death. Along with our
shared disillusionment with religion, I also share with Dreiser a high regard
for the Quaker faith, a Quaker being the main character of The Bulwark. I haven’t found any
indication that Dreiser ever attended a Quaker meeting (as their churches are
called), but I did, and his book made me nostalgic.
I
first went in 1990 with my friend Walt who was the kind of atheist who likes to
tell of realizing that religion was bullshit by the time he was seven, and of losing respect for his parents and other elders for being so
stupid as to fall for it. He never wavered in his unbelief or in his contempt for religion, and
he ridiculed me when I did. He first attended the Eugene meeting with a
girlfriend and, unlike her, became a Quaker. Joining most churches is easy. You
can sometimes do it on the spot as in my first church, the Church of Christ, which
makes haste to baptize people because it believes they will go to hell if they
die unbaptized. It’s even easier and faster to become a Unitarian because all
you have to do is to sign your name. At the other end are Catholics and Episcopalians with
their requirement that an applicant attend classes for months. Quakers are even
more restrictive in that they require a candidate to attend meeting for an indeterminate period, and
then ask to be considered for
membership.
Walt,
to my knowledge, was only the second atheist to join the Quaker meeting. Helen
Park, one of the members, wrote the following about the lack of importance
that she placed upon whether one believed in God: “There is indeed One that
speaks to my condition, but that One may not announce a name or even speak a
word; it may reveal itself as Light, or inner peace, or compassion for humanity.”
So it was that the Quakers—the local ones anyway—admitted people according to their
values rather than their vocabulary. Many atheists would refuse to join a values-centered organization in which anyone
used the word God, and only the Unitarian Church universally welcomes atheists,
so I thought well of Walt for joining the Quakers and well of them for letting
him.
I
attended for about a year, although I never considered joining, there being too
much that I didn’t like. Sitting in silence in pews that were arranged in an
inward facing square bored me; I found decision-making by consensus excruciating
because trivial decisions sometimes went unresolved for months; and too many
Quakers struck me as stubborn and distant. Some of them seemed to weigh every
word they spoke, and it made them appear stilted if not secretive. I also found
that not every Quaker was as tolerant as Helen Park. One said to me six months
into our friendship, “You’re too sensitive and intelligent to be a real atheist.” She meant it as a
compliment, as when a racist tells a black person, “You’re too smart not to
have some white blood in you,” and I
never forgave her.
What
I did like about the meeting was being there with Walt and attending an
occasional class. I ended up on the “religious education committee” that
sponsored these classes, and we decided to hold a nine-month Bible study. The
decision wasn’t easy because few people had an interest in the Bible, and the
feminists on the committee strongly opposed studying a book that had inspired
so much oppression. By way of compromise, we decided that, rather than study
the Bible itself, we would study a book about it. We chose A Guide to Understanding the Bible by religious liberal Harry
Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), the first minister at Manhattan’s infamous—to most
Christians—Riverside Church. The book being out of print, we had to await the
publisher’s permission to Xerox copies. There being few people involved and no
money exchanged, I would guess that most churches would have Xeroxed the book
without asking, but Quakers are unerring—some might say rigid—in doing what
they think is right.
I
quit attending the Quaker meeting partly because Walt and I had a falling-out
(one of several over our 27-year friendship), but mostly because I was bored by
the main service. For those who don’t know, in a traditional Quaker meeting,
everyone sits silently until someone feels “led” to speak. There are no songs,
no prayers, no sermons, nothing but a silence that is rarely interrupted, and in
which one’s own meditations are interrupted when someone does speak. Sometimes,
those who talked made interesting points, but I don’t remember them. What I do
remember are the queries by which the meeting and its members were to
periodically examine themselves in regard to particular values. I give but a
small example:
On simplicity
Do I keep my
life uncluttered with things and activities, avoiding commitments beyond my
strength and light?
Do I recognize
when I have enough?
On social
responsibility
Am I mindful of
how my lifestyle and my investments can contribute to the improvement of the
human condition, or to the exploitation of others?
How do I
respond and support one who acts out of one clear leading when I am under the
weight of another?
On peace
Do I treat
conflict as an opportunity for growth, and address it with careful attention?
Do I look for
ways to reaffirm in action and attitude my love for the one with whom I am in
conflict?
On stewardship
of the environment
Do I act as a
faithful steward of the environment in the use and disposal of hazardous
substances?
Do I choose with
care the use of technology and devices that truly simplify and add quality to
my life without adding an undue burden to essential resources?
On integrity
and simplicity
Do I manage my
commitments so that over commitment, worry, and stress do not diminish my
integrity?
Am I careful to
speak truth as I know it and am I open to truth spoken to me?
Such
queries absolutely wrecked me, because I interpreted the absence of anything
remotely similar in other churches to say volumes about how little those churches
cared about being good people as opposed to being people who could parrot what they believed to be good dogma. I understood that all they really cared about was my salvation, my relationship with Christ, seeing my loved ones in heaven, having my
God help me find a job or even a
parking place. Here, for the first time, I had discovered a group of people who
took ethical behavior seriously enough to examine its implications; people who had
the courage to stand against the dominant social mores as well as against a
government that could take their property and throw them into prison; people
who believed that religion should mean something more than a cheap ticket to
heaven and a place to socialize.
I
attended during the U.S. backed war in Nicaragua, and found that the Quakers were
supportive of the illegal harboring of refugees, which I think some of the
local ones probably did. Others were tax resisters who were unwilling to
finance militarism by paying their federal income tax. While most churches are
busy upholding the status quo (whatever that means in a given area, e.g.
slavery in some, emancipation in others), Quakers have served on the front
lines of every movement that opposes war or supports human rights and welfare,
yet there are only 87,000 of them in America compared to 40-million Catholics
and 16-million Baptists. Even the tiny Episcopal Church is enormous by
comparison with its two-million members, and just one mega church in Houston
holds half as many people as there are Quakers in America. I would be astounded if the
members of any of these other churches are ever encouraged to ponder the morality of
paying taxes, using insecticides, or buying a new car versus a used one.
As
I wrote three posts ago, I don’t care if people believe in God. For one thing,
the term is so imprecise as to be meaningless of itself, but my main reason is
that it’s not what people say but what they do that matters. Unfortunately, I’ve rarely
seen organized churches do good. The American Friends Service Committee is the
only church-related organization to have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Many secular groups have won, and many religious individuals have won, so one
would assume that a mega church with a budget of $80-million could easily win, but if
not, then surely a denomination with 40-million members in America alone, so
why haven’t they?
The Bulwark is exceptional
among Dreiser’s books, the moreso because he was a cynic, a determinist, a
practical atheist (sometimes he sounded atheistic, other times deistic), and a Communist.
Why, then, in his last months, did he end the life of his last great character,
Solon Barnes, with the words, “If thee does not turn to the Inner Light, then where will
thee go?” I’m sure I don’t know, but I suspect. Having read nothing in three
biographies that made me think he was softening toward traditional theism or
even liberal theism, I can only guess that he had reference to some other Inner
Light, love, perhaps, because what is love but light, and of what does light consist
but of a love that brightens a person’s face during the hours that he or she is
possessed by it? If I had ever known anyone who was able to hold to love
consistently, I would have remembered that person, but its rarity notwithstanding, love
remains chief among virtues, and where it is found, many of the rest follow.
At least this is how I see things, but as to
whether love was what Dreiser meant, I can only speculate based upon what I
know of him and upon what I know of how the Quakers of my acquaintance defined Inner Light, e.g. “...that One may...reveal itself as Light, or inner peace, or compassion for humanity.” As for what I know about Dreiser, I’ll limit myself to my best evidence. The Bulwark took twenty
years to finish, and the changes it underwent during those years seemed to
reflect the growth of its often autobiographical author, a man famous for the compassion he expressed in his writing. Just as Solon Barnes was rigid, so was Dreiser in real life, but age can soften a person, so it is
my guess that as the old and dying author wrote about his old
and dying character, he was writing about himself. At least, I like to think so.
* from Theodore Dreiser by James Lundquist.
