H. L. Mencken’s Religious Beliefs

As for religion, I am quite devoid of it.  Never, in my adult life, have I experienced anything that could be plausibly called a religious impulse.  My father and grandfather were agnostics before me and, although I was sent to Sunday School as a boy and exposed to the Christian theology, I was never taught to believe it.  My father thought that I should learn what it was, but it apparently never occurred to him that I would accept it.  He was a good psychologist.  What I got in Sunday School – beside a wide acquaintance with Christian hymnology – was, simply, a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian god preposterous.  Since that time, I have read a great deal in theology – perhaps much more than the average clergyman – but I have never discovered any reason to change my mind.

The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems, to me, to be debasing rather than ennobling.  It involves grovelling before a Deity who, if He really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected.  I see little evidence, in this world, of the so-called goodness of God.  On the contrary, it seems to me that, on the strength of His daily acts, He must be set down a most cruel, stupid, and villainous fellow.  I can say this with a clear conscience, for He has treated me very well – in fact, with vast politeness.  But, I can’t help thinking of His barbaric torture of most of the rest of humanity.  I simply can’t imagine revering the God of war and politics, theology and cancer.

I do not believe in immortality and have no desire for it.  The belief in it issues from the puerile egos of inferior men.  In its Christian form, it is little more than a device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on this earth.  What the meaning of human life may be, I don’t know: I incline to suspect that it has none.  All I know about it is that, to me at least, it is very amusing, while it lasts.  Even its troubles, indeed, can be amusing.  Moreover, they tend to foster the human qualities that I admire most – courage, and its analogues.  The noblest man, I think, is that one who fights God and triumphs over Him.  I have had little of this to do.  When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.  No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever. – an extract from a letter H. L. Mencken wrote to Will Durant in 1931.  The letter was published in On the Meaning of Life, edited by Will Durant (New York: Ray Long and Richard R. Smith, 1932).

In 1931, Will Durant asked various public figures to contribute their opinions on the meaning of life, as they understood it.  Their responses were published in the volume documented above.

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) was a journalist, literary and social critic, and author.

Will Durant (1885-1981) was a historian of Western Civilization and author.

 

John Witherspoon, Grammarian

As the Revolution drew on, the English discovered varieties of offensiveness on this side of the ocean that greatly transcended the philological, and I can find no record of any denunciation of Americanisms during the heat of the struggle itself.  When, on July 20, 1778, a committee appointed by the Continental Congress to arrange for the “publick reception of the sieur Gerard, minister plenipotentiary of his most christian majesty,” brought in a report recommending that “all replies or answers” to him should be “in the language of the United States,” no notice of the contumacy seems to have been taken in the Motherland.  But, a few months before Cornwallis was finally brought to heel at Yorktown, the subject was resumed and, this time, the attack came from a Briton living in America, and otherwise ardently pro-American.  He was John Witherspoon (1723-1794), a Scottish clergyman who had come out in 1769 to be president of Princeton in partibus infidelium.

Witherspoon took to politics when the war closed his college, and was elected a member of the New Jersey constitutional convention.  In a little while, he was promoted to the Continental Congress, and in it he sat for six years as its only member in holy orders.  He signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, and was a member of the Board of War throughout the Revolution.  But, though his devotion to the American cause was, thus, beyond question, he was pained by the American language and when, in 1781, he was invited to contribute a series of papers to the Philadelphia Journal and Weekly Advertiser of Philadelphia, he seized the opportunity to denounce it, albeit in the politic terms proper to the time.  Beginning with the disarming admission that “the vulgar in America speak much better than the vulgar in England, for a very obvious reason, viz., that, being more unsettled and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities, either in accent or phraseology,” he proceeded to argue that Americans of education showed a lamentable looseness in their “public and solemn discourses.”

“I have heard in this country, in the senate, at the bar, and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties, and vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain.”

From: The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 4th edition; corrected, enlarged, and rewritten; by H. L. Mencken (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936 [1919]), pp. 4-5.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), a native of Baltimore, Maryland who lived there his entire life, was a journalist on the Baltimore Sun for many years, and was a prolific author and editor.  He was also a legendary curmudgeon.  The American Language, consisting of the original publication (quoted above) followed by two supplements which were, each, as large as the original volume (1945, 1948) was his magnum opus.