20
PARTISAN REVIEW
not
the freedom of disbelief.
The state could no longer be regarded
as neutral to religion. Education would have to be purged of all
freethinkers to prevent them from examining the "truths" of reli–
gion as critically as the truths of other branches of knowleage.
This conclusion is implicit in the recent writing of Professor
Hocking. The new orthodoxy would find new ways to implement
its sway over the minds and allegiances of citizens. Whatever
methods it employed would require the contraction,
if
not the
proscription, of the scientific temper in order to diminish the
hazards of belief. The social · usefulness of ideas to those who
possessed power, and their comfort and consolation to those who
did not, would become the criteria of accepted truth. The Protes–
tant Reformation would ha:ve succumbed to the Counter-Reforma–
tion whose secular form already prevails in totalitarian Europe.
Democracy and the Hebraic-Christian Tradition
These new currents of Protestantism which profess sincere
acceptance of present day democracy employ arguments whose
force is drawn from a key assumption.
It
asserts that modem
democracy has been derived from, and can only be justified by,
the theological dogmas of Hebraic-Christianity according to which
all men are created by God and equal before Him. This assump–
tion is the common ground of unity of all religious and meta–
physical rationalizations of democracy. It is the rallying point
of the much publicized Conference on Science, Philosophy and
Religion in their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, whose
pronouncements indicate that it has officially accepted Maritain's
Catholic conception of a pluralistic, hierarchially organied cul–
ture, crowned by religion, as "the cornerstone on which human
civilization must be erected in our day." Scientific inquiry has
a place in it: it will meet the "need for men to attain that in–
creased measure of knowledge, which, according to Francis Bacon,
brings men back to God." This Hebraic-Christian philosophy of
democracy and culture is presented to a world in which a false
conception of scientific knowledge has made it "peculiarly re–
sistant to the teachings of religion....
"*
It can be briefly demonstrated that the derivation of modem
democracy from the dogma that all men are created by God and
•All quotations from the official statement of the Third Annual Conference, New
York Times, September l, 1942.
