Religious Revivals – Torrey & Sunday, 1/1909

Republished from Lucifer the Light Bearer’s later iteration

And now that the poor and suffering masses—and those who live in daily fear of future want and suffering for themselves
and families—find themselves duped by their political leaders, now that they have learned by one more bitter experience
that men elected to office look after their own selfish interests alone, and instead of representing the average voter simply
represent themselves and the privileged classes, the wealthy corporations that put up the money to carry the election—
seeing all this for the hundredth time perhaps, many of these cruelly disappointed voters turn to the church, turn to religion,
for consolation and hope. Always, in times of general failure of the wage-earners to find employment at wages that insure
bread, clothing and shelter, has it been noted that the churches are filled and that religious revivals flourish. Accordingly,
here in Los Angeles Evangelist Torrey, a few weeks ago, closed one of the most successful of these periodic religious
awakenings. Thousands were “converted” and joined the various churches called “Evangelical.” And now another famous
“revivalist” is here, Reverend Billy Sunday, who, the papers say, has lately “converted” four thousand persons in Spokane,
Washington, not a large city. Looking for causes, as well as results, of these social phenomena called revivals, we very
naturally ask, where does the money come from that, in pinching times of poverty, can hire expensive evangelists to
come from distant cities, and to pay their salaries and other expenses of these revival meetings. For, if reports be correct,
“Rev.” Torrey required a guaranty of two thousand dollars before he would agree to come and preach a few weeks to
the “City of the Angels,” and presumably, Reverend Billy Sunday is equally alive to the financial aspects of his winter’s
campaign. From time immemorial it has been known that the rich merchants and other successful men of business
subscribe and pay liberally to the expense fund of such meetings. Why should they do this? While I would impugn the
motives of no man, some of us are so organized that we cannot avoid looking for the hidden springs, the underlying
causes, of all phenomena, including human conduct.

Among probable causes why business men, city officials, public teachers, etc., subscribe and pay money for the support
of these revival meetings are the following: First, as a direct bid for customers to their business houses, or for popularity
at the next civic or political election, and to avoid a boycott from the church element. Another and still more powerful reason
for giving money to the church and especially to popular revivalists is the desire for an antidote to or for the doctrines
of such agitators as Eugene V. Debs, Peter Kropotkin, Clarence Darrow, William D. Haywood, Emma Goldman, W. L.
Garrison, Ernest Crosby, and others, whether known as Single-Taxers, Socialists, or Anarchists, and, more especially
desire for an antidote against the teachings of such agitators as Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, Lois Waisbrocker,
Dr. Juliet H. Severance, Robert B. Kerr, Hulda P. Loomis and others who like them are now advocating a radical change
in the home life, in the conjugal or marital laws and customs of “Christendom.” All the aforesaid popular and respectable
business men know full well that triumph of Socialism, of Anarchism, and especially the triumph of Free Motherhood,
would ring the death-knell of rent (landlordism), of interest (money-lordism) and of speculative and economic profits,
and they know that if these were gone then there would be no room for millionaire capitalists and exploiters of labor;
no place for and no need of political parties or political bosses; no demand for soldiers to fight for more territory and
more markets for the benefit of millionaire trusts; no need of high-salaried functionaries to keep the producing classes
in their places as serfs of the lords of transportation, lords of the factory, the land and mine, the great land-lords or other
parasites that now live in ease and splendor at the expense of the stupid, spiritless and abjectly submissive serfs. They
know that the serf class would in time be bred out of existence. Yes, the successful men of business and all those who
hope in future to become successful men of business; also the office-holders and all who hope sometime to become office
-holders—all these have good reason to welcome the evangelist who comes preaching the gospel of submission to the
“powers that be”; submission to an alleged Supreme ruler that “doeth all things well,” and who will reward his faithful
followers in the next world for all the hardships and privations to which they have been unjustly subjected while here.

Yes, these “curbstone” supporters of Christian theology, while often laughing in their sleeves at the absurdity of the whole
thing—to say nothing of the immorality, the horrible injustice of the “plan of salvation by faith” in the blood of the son of a
revengeful, blood-loving deity!—these successful money-getters and place-holders feel themselves obliged to welcome
and pay the perambulating preachers of the gospel of fear, and the more sensational, more lurid, this gospel the better.
Hence, the well-known fact that a preacher without a hell to scare people into the church can never get up a revival such
as those engineered by Torrey, “Billy” Sunday, Moody and Sankey, and men of that stamp. And now lest any reader should
think me a “scoffer” against all religion, or one unduly prejudiced against Christianity and its alleged founders, I wish
to say in all kindness and candor that personally I have no feelings of hatred or revenge towards those who honestly
believe and preach the “gospel of Christ and him crucified.” I was myself brought up in that faith and for years tried
hard to convince myself and others of its substantial truth and of the superiority of its moral code. I was not expelled
from the communion of the church of my parents, though doubtless I would have been had I not voluntarily left it. It
is by no means a pleasant task to tell what I now believe to be the simple truth concerning organized religion and
the men who are diverting millions of the hard earnings of the wage-workers every year to the support of what to me
is a false, demoralizing religious system, an exceedingly false and reactionary system of human ethics; one that is
uncompromisingly opposed to all change, especially to all change, all progress, in the marital, the conjugal life of
human beings, upon which change, as many of us see it, depends all hope of progress or improvement of the race.
So long as the masses of people allow themselves to be hypnotized into the belief that things will be made even in
the next world, and especially, so long as women, the mothers of the race, allow themselves to be hypnotized into the
belief that they will be rewarded and blessed in heaven for all their sacrifices here in behalf of religion and of marriage
as taught by the church, just so long will it be practically impossible to give to the upcoming race a better heredity,
a better heritage of mind or body, than that possessed by the generations now living.