338
PARTISAN REVI EW
tural matters, the religious man often finds himself closer to
secular opinion than to his own church. Individual piety, in the live,
active sense, not only fails to inspire the religious community as a
whole enough to affect civil affairs in a decisive way, it is no longer
the source of a general moral or religious awakening, and in public
life is itself guided by secular movements or reactions.
Whatever some preachers may say from the pulpit, the churches
know that religion alone is unable to create a moral order or make
politics more ethical. It needs for this order the support of a temporal
power. But in winning that temporal support, religion cannot apply
the purest morality. This holds not only for Catholic but also for
Protestant moral aims. A great student of religious history, Ernst
Troeltsch, wrote a booklet in 1904 on the subject of Political Ethics
and Christianity that should be pondered by those who see in religion
a potential curb on the immorality of state power. He believed that
only a powerful state could fulfill its ethical Christian duties. But
such a state has first to be created; and when the state is on the make
or is fighting for its existence, Troeltsch thought the Christian prin–
ciples could be suspended; when it has become all-powerful and
stable, the State should relax and be moral and Christian once more
-a remarkable parody of the Marxist withering away of the State.
There is nothing here to embarrass a Stalin or a Franco.
The religions that stand for an absolute morality and yet wish
to shape the civil order are thus driven to a kind of moral relativism
which their spokesmen constantly say is ruining morality. They too
are bound to the lesser evil and will approve atomic bombing, if it is:
necessary for victory in war. Religion as human is tainted with
original sin.
H they hold strictly to their principles, the religious will find
themselves opposed to the state power and to the whole order of
practical relationships, ideas and habits on which that power rests.
They must either withdraw from action into a private, marginal
world, guarding the integrity of their conviction by reducing to a
minimum the encounters with the evil world, or they must engage
this world in a permanent struggle, to re-shape it according to their
vision of the good. They become martyrs then or revolutionists, with
all that this word entails in the way of ruthlessness and compromise
with principle for the sake of the ultimate end . And in that heroic
