RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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energy,-they can be squared with any solution. And according to the
testimony of the great mystics, the most authentic religious experi–
ence is beyond concern with good and evil, right and wrong.
There is something ironical in the plea made by the professional
misunderstanders of pragmatism (a philosophy which in Peirce and
Dewey is an explication of the logic and ethics of scientific method),
for a revival of religion as a bulwark against totalitarianism. When
they argue that unless men worship God, they will worship either
Hitler or Stalin-whose divinity has just been proclaimed in one of
the satellite countries, they are themselves lapsing into the vicious
kind of pragmatism they attribute to others. The argument presents
alternatives that are certainly not exhaustive, and may not be ex–
clusive. Even if valid, it would be relevant not to the truth of a state–
ment about God's existence but only to the truth of the statement
that belief in Him, whether He actually exists or not, has certain
desirable effects of a social and psychological kind. But the argument
is not valid.
At the present juncture of world history it is true that what is
most precious in human experience is threatened on a global scale
not by authoritarian religions, which have been chastened by their
sufferings at the hands of their secular rivals, but by the fearful ex–
pansion of Stalinism and its total and absolute terror. What we need
as a rallying cry is freedom, not salvation. A man can choose to save
his soul and count the world well lost for it: and one man's salva–
tion is another's superstition. A sure way to lose the struggle for a
democratic world is to permit the Pope to take the lead in a cru–
sade against Bolshevism. The struggle of the unfettered intelligence
against institutional orthodoxy must continue despite the fact that
conflicting orthodoxies,
in
the interest of their own religious free–
dom, find themselves allied for the moment against the super-ortho–
doxy that will brook no dissent, not even that of silence.
Just as
it
is fatal to conduct the international struggle against
Stalinism in the name of capitalism-Stalinism can more easily come
to terms with moribund capitalism than with democratic socialism–
so with the slogans of the parochial religions of the West which the
majority of mankind does not accept. What can unite Christian and
non-Christian alike in a common struggle for freedom is only the
pluralistic philosophy of democracy. For whatever its program for a
