Shut out from his ordinary pleasures and vices, constrained to fight for, or at least to cheer long, loud, and conspicuously for the revolutionary state in its struggle with foreign and civil foes, exposed to privation and suffering from scarcity attendant on war and the inevitable inefficiencies of the new government, urged to the “height of revolutionary circumstances” on every hand, in press, theater, pulpit, rostrum, mass demonstration, above all inescapably caught in the common and very exhausting nervous excitement which marks the crisis period, John Jones sooner or later finds these strains insupportable, and gets ready to welcome anyone who can throw the extremists out. Perhaps no one of these strains would be in itself unbearable, though it does seem likely that there is a kind of saturation point in large-scale, obsessive political propaganda after which such propaganda actually backfires. We may hope to learn more in this respect from contemporary German and Russian experience. At any rate, the converging series of pressures outlined above seems clearly to have put too great a strain on the outsider in our revolutions.
_III. The Terror and the Insider: The Religious Parallel_
To the insider, to the true believer, the revolution appears as a very different thing in this crisis period, though one may guess that for some of the less ardent insiders much of what has been said about the outsiders begins, after a while, to hold true also. The revolution begins to take too much out of him, and he begins to have his hesitations and his doubts, to be bored with the endless ceremonies, deputations, committees, tribunals, militia work, and the other chores necessary to achieve the reign of virtue on earth. He, too, becomes an outsider. But the true faithful stay to the end, to the block, the guillotine, the firing-squad, or exile.
Now to this insider it would seem that the service of the revolution supplies many of the satisfactions commonly supplied by what we call religion. This analogy with religion has been frequently made. It has been applied, not only to the English revolution where its fitness is undisputed, but also to the French and Russian revolutions. Since both Jacobins and Bolsheviks were violently hostile to Christianity and boasted themselves atheists or at least deists, this analogy has given a great deal of offense both to Christians and to their enemies. For the Marxist in particular the assertion that his behavior has similarities with the behavior of men under the acknowledged influence of religion is like a red rag to a bull. Nor is the Marxist wholly unjustified in his anger, for the glib phrase, “Oh, the Communists are just another fanatical sect,” is frequently thrown out by shallow conservatives as at once a reproach and a dismissal. Actually, to judge from past experience, it would seem that large numbers of men can be brought to do certain very important things of the kind the Communists want to have done only under the influence of what we call religion; that is, some pattern of more or less similar sentiments, moral aspirations, and ritualistic practices. Marxism as a religion has already got a great deal done; Marxism as a “scientific theory” alone would hardly have got beyond the covers of _Das Kapital_ and the learned journals.
But the dispute sketched above is endless, and we are not rash enough to suppose we can settle it. Those who use the term “religion” in this connection seem to us to be trying to describe a phenomenon of the world of sense-experience, one that needs to be integrated with other phenomena of revolutions. It is certainly true, however, that this use apparently arouses in many persons emotions unfavorable to the continued objective study of the subject. Anyone who could suggest a neutral term as effectively pointing to the same phenomena as does the term “religion” would be performing a great service for sociology. No such term at present existing, we shall have to continue to use the word “religion.” We must insist that this word does not refer necessarily and exclusively to a formally theistic cult like Christianity; and above all, that it does not necessarily imply belief in the “supernatural.” We take it that in the present analysis the important thing about a religious belief is that under its influence men work very hard and excitedly in common to achieve here or somewhere an ideal, a pattern of life not at the moment universally--or even largely--achieved. Religion attempts to close in favor of the best of human hopes the gap between what men are and what men would like to be; at least in its young and active phase, it will not for a moment admit that such a gap can long exist.
To discern the element of religion in the behavior of the ardent extremist is not to deny the existence of economic motives. Indeed, at this stage some of the most acute phases of the struggle among classes are to be noticed, and form one of the uniformities we can clearly consider established. Whatever the place of economic class struggles in the days just before the revolution--and in our four revolutions it takes varied forms by no means adequately summed up in phrases such as “feudal nobility,” “middle class,” and “proletariat”--once the revolution gets going these class struggles have at least one phase common in all four societies. The property of many, if not most, of those openly and stubbornly identified with the beaten parties is confiscated for the benefit of the successful parties, identified as “the people.” Furthermore, as the different moderate groups are defeated their property, too, is commonly confiscated in the same way.
In the English revolution the Royalists lost a large part of their property, mostly in land; and though lay Presbyterians were not as a rule subjected to confiscation of property unless they were actively on the wrong side in politics, there was a great deal of easing Presbyterians and other unacceptable ecclesiastics out of their livings. Laurence Washington, a clergyman, the father of the John of Virginia, and a direct ancestor of George, was “plundered” as the phrase went in 1643, cause he was said to have said that the parliamentary army had more papists in it than there were around the King. That is to say, he was deprived of his living. We need hardly be reminded that Loyalist property was confiscated during the American revolution. Indeed the late J. F. Jameson concludes that in a quiet way--quiet at least for revolutions--the American revolution effected in its whole course a very sensible democratization, or spreading into smaller units, of ownership of property in this country. Both in France and in Russia the revolutions saw the confiscation primarily of land, but even in France to some extent also of capital, and their redistribution. We need not go into detail here on these agrarian problems. Sufficient to state that many of those who came to the top in the crisis period, both leaders and followers, had good reason to hope that by staying on top their economic status would be consistently better than it had been. This is true regardless of what theories and ideals, laissez-faire or Socialism, were appealed to as guiding the new distribution.
But though we must recognize the economic motive, as we recognize the drive to centralization to repel attacks from within and without, our picture is incomplete until we consider those elements unavoidably called religious. Partly because the economic and political elements are in their conventional sense familiar to most people nowadays, partly because these religious elements appear to be among the most important variables in the situation, we are here emphasizing them. They seem to be among the most important variables because their presence in an acute form gives a different and much more pervasive tone to the political and economic elements of struggle, which frequently occur by themselves in very similar form and even somewhat similar intensity in situations we do not commonly label revolutionary. It is also true that in the growth of Wesleyan Methodism in eighteenth-century England, for instance, in times not to be called revolutionary, one finds actively religious behavior among large numbers of people, behavior in many ways like that we are going to analyze in our revolutionary insider. But Wesleyanism was politically conservative on the whole, and not directed at a given social and political system. The whole point, indeed, of the three revolutions we are about to analyze is that religious enthusiasms, organization, ritual and ideas appear inextricably bound up with economic and political aims.
The insiders in all three of our complete revolutions, and indeed to a certain extent in the fourth, the American revolution, seem to have wished to put into life here on earth some of the order, the discipline, the contempt for the easy vices, which the Calvinist sought to put there. Indeed our first revolution, the English, is commonly labeled the Calvinist or Puritan revolution. Here we may expect a protest from the Communists, an indignant assertion that Marx put such Christian weaknesses as a desire to subdue the flesh well behind him, that his followers are all for an abundance of food and drink, and the other good things of this world for everybody. We shall return to that question in a moment. In the meantime we can begin to see some lurking ascetic tendency in Communism if we reflect on how indignant good Communists would be over the slogan “wine, women, and song for everybody.”