Why Atheists Should Read H. L. Mencken

Why Atheists Should Read H. L. Mencken December 8, 2016

Mencken has lessons to teach all Americans (which expands potentially the market for my new book, featured in this podcast)

Better than me talking about Mencken are Mencken’s own words about religion. Who of the New Atheists could ever claim to have attended Sunday school and learned all the gospel hymns of late nineteenth-century Protestantism the way Mencken did:

My favorite song was “Are You Ready for the Judgment Day?” a gay and even rollicking tune with a saving hint of brimstone. We grouped it, in fact, with such dolce but unexhilarating things as “In the Sweet By-and-By” and “God Be With You Till We Meet Again” – pretty stuff, to be sure, but sadly lacking in bite and zowie. The runner up for “Are You Ready?” was “I Went Down the Rock to Hide My Face,” another hymn with a very lively swing to it, and after “the Rock” come “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” “Throw Out the Lifeline,” “At the Cross,” “Draw Me Nearer, Nearer, Nearer, Blessed Lord,” “What A Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Where Shall We Spend in Eternity?” . . . and “Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Revive Us Again.” . . . It was not until I transferred to another Sunday-school that I came to know such lugubrious horrors as “There Is A Fountain Filled with Blood.” The Methodists avoided everything of that kind. They surely did not neglect Hell in their preaching, but when they lifted up their voices in song they liked to pretend that they were booked to escape it.

Having nibbled at the bait of singing gospel songs, Mencken went on to learn the rudiments of Christianity:

I can’t remember the time when I did not know that Moses wrote the Ten Commandments with a chisel and wore a long beard; that Noah built an ark like one we had in our Christmas garden, and filled it with animals which, to this day, I always think of as wooden, with a leg or two missing; that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar (I heard it as cellar) of table salt; that the Tower of Babel was twice as high as the Baltimore shot tower; that Abraham greatly pleased Jahveh by the strange device of offering to butcher and roast his own son, and that Leviticus was the father of Deuteronomy.

That kind of exposure to Christianity, even if he made fun of it (laughing with more than laughing at), likely explains why Mencken took religion seriously and why he considered Treatise on the Gods (1930) his most important book. In the introduction he explained that people who wrote about religion fell into one of two classes, “those who are fanatical, and believe in it too much,” and “those who hate it, and abuse it too much.” Mencken claimed that he belonged to neither group since he was an “amiable” skeptic, someone “quite devoid of the religious impulse.” But that did not mean that Mencken was out to discredit religion or its adherents necessarily:

. . . no matter what may be said against [religion] on evidential grounds, it must be manifest that [it has] conditioned the thinking of mankind since the infancy of the race. . . . Thus [it deserves] examination in a fair and scientific spirit. . . . dismissing the thing itself as a mere aberration is a proceeding that is far more lofty than sensible. What has been so powerful in its effects upon human history deserves sober study, whether it be an aberration or not.

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