The Reduction of Religion to Morality

Abstract

In another book, The Retreat to Commitment, I treated a version of our third possibility: that religion is reducible to morality.¹ There I argued that one such position —represented by what was known as Protestant liberalism —was quite convincing for a long period during the nineteenth century, but that it was decisively undermined by biblical exegesis as well as by philosophical and social criticism during the early decades of the twentieth century. I have just referred to this position as a version of our third possibility, and the qualifier should be taken seriously. For one thing, it is doubtful that Protestant liberalism did ever achieve a full reduction of religion to morality. For another, the defeat of Protestant liberalism was carried out within a Christian framework. That no reduction of religion to morality could be carried out within Christianity by no means implies that there is no religion which may not be reducible to morality. Confucianism is a possible candidate example of such a reduction.

Thus, in Victorian England, we find that the apostles of progress, having swept their churches clean of sacraments, altars, priests and pulpits, leaving nothing save a bare structure of ethical assertions, returned to curtained, cushioned, upholstered homes in which every sort of buried sexual superstition, traditionalist tyranny and emotional cant served as covering for dirty unswept corners and nameless secular filth.

Quentin Bell: Bloomsbury (p. 28)¹