Universal Religion Is Impossible

I must recognize, finally, a steadily deepening sense within me that there is something unnatural, unhealthy, unbecoming, and indeed something shameful and ominous about our having taken our religion, or even professing and trying to take it, from Jesus. For a people’s religion should come out of its own blood. It should be its own innermost soul made manifest, the elevation before its eyes of its own hopes and dreams, and of the lessons it has learned through its own immemorial experience. Only when this is so will the living instinct of the people say Amen to the command of its seers, and willingly bend to their bidding. And only so will they stand or fall, as they ought, by what intrinsically they are. 

This means that such a thing as a universal religion is an utter impossibility. The first business of any religion is to see to it that the people who believe in it survive, and not only survive but come to flower and to fulfillment. And so long as great blocks of human beings continue to be so widely and deeply different as they are now, in their needs and in what seems to them true and beautiful, high and low, and worthy and worthwhile, it is inconceivable that any one religion can prove acceptable or wholesome for them all. This only becomes the more certain when one realizes that these differences in peoples commonly reflect the differences in their habitat, to which they are tied, and are registered in their very physical and mental constitution. 

It takes only the reading of such a book as Professor Hans F.K. Guenther’s The Religious Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans to make one realize that in the long run no people can flourish, or even long maintain itself, unless it lives with and by a religion that forms according to its own nature and to the ways of working of its own mind and soul. He opens one’s eyes also to the fact that Christianity, basically, is not in accord with the instincts, values and traditions that have found expression in Aryan man’s various religions, over a period of thousands of years, from the Indus to the Atlantic. And surely this is understandable enough. For it is at once obvious, if we but stop to think about it, that to us Jesus was an alien. Granted, that more can be made than I at first supposed possible, of the argument that by race Jesus was a gentile, and even that he may have been sprung from the same. In any case, no matter how blue his eyes or fair his skin, it is universally conceded, so far as I am aware, that by religion at least Jesus was a Jew, and therefore in his religion oriental. And it is with the effect upon us of his religion that we are here solely concerned. There is justice in the common pronouncement that he was the culmination of the Jewish prophets…

Of course, it will be pointed out, rightly enough, that all this amalgam of Jesus and Paul, in the course of centuries, became heavily encrusted and more or less deeply permeated with Aryan additions—a theology, a theocracy, an art, and eventually a Nordic feudalism. But at the bottom and heart of it all was the Jew—the instinct and nature and need of a breed of men that the Nordic felt alien to himself, and inferior to himself too. And what was all this philosophy, and art, social arrangement and organization, but the Nordic’s subconscious acknowledgement of the lack he felt in the Jew’s outlook on life and the world, and an effort to round out a view of the universe that would relieve this sense of lack, and, in keeping with this, to build social institutions in which he could feel both more at home and more secure? 

But the structure as a whole was never fully integrated. As we shall see when I come to my concluding chapter on race, Jew and gentile, perhaps, most of all, Jew and Nordic gentile, belong to two different worlds. And never the twain shall meet. Never shall the two understand each other. Whatever of the Jew, therefore, got into Christianity, whether from Jesus or from Paul, is shot through with the substance and feeling of the religious experience of a race very different from the race that has chiefly made European civilization. These last, whether they came from ancient India, Persia, Greece and Rome, or from northern Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Britain or Scandinavia, have been predominantly Teutonic, Indo-European, or in any case, gentile. Christianity, therefore and inevitably, has been a contradiction among us. This alone is enough to account for the fact that it has been a religion that we have professed but rarely practiced. Or even worse, when we have practiced it, it often has been to our hurt. For it does not fit us. 

–William Gayley Simpson “Which Way Western Man”