Next up on the essays shelf:
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
Here Mencken takes on two of his favorite topics: women and religion, specifically the Christian religion. His views on religion veer into contempt, although he (like many of his kind) seems to understand the religious impulse on a deeper level than even those who practice it. He can see the appeal, particularly in the Catholic church, because the Catholic church is devoted to aesthetics in a way other religions scorn. But the belief part of it just doesn’t work for him. His essays on religion we’ll get to, but here he discusses what the Christian religion has done to women, how it has trapped them in between two diametrically opposite (supposedly) roles: the virgin and the whore. This was a deliberate choice, he suggests (and I believe it was deliberate as well). Mencken seems to think, despite all of his chauvinism, that women are superior to men in almost every way. He doesn’t give a shit if they can’t dig a ditch as well (and let’s just leave our modern outrage aside and focus on his larger point). He thinks that most of the endeavors of men are stupid and imbecilic. Women are RIGHT to refuse to excel at such balderdash. Over and over again, Mencken suggests that men are the romantics, the ones who believe all kinds of sentimental nonsense (about themselves and about others). Men are willing to be fools. They are lambs to the slaughter. Women, perhaps because of their secondary class citizen status (already changing at the time Mencken was writing all of this) have no time for all that romantic nonsense. They are cold-hearted, clear-eyed, and never believe in the fanciful surface of things. They perceive the substance underlying, they perceive the truth. Men know this about women, and therefore have set up elaborate religious structures to keep them in their place. Because we can’t have women running around showing us up left and right, can we?
Mencken’s views on religion is one of the main reasons why current-day conservatives are reluctant to claim him. Mencken makes fun of all of the things they hold dear. And yet many of his views (on capital punishment and other things) are right up their alley – in fact, he is more radical (and openly so) than they would dare to be. He’s damn near Taliban-esque in some of his thoughts on crime and punishment. But the current-day conservatives are devoted to an anti-intellectual stance, and that is pure evil to Mencken, who despised the anti-intellectual streak in American life (which goes back to our beginnings) – and went after it, hard.
I love those who are a mixed bag. Who do not “fit”. Our political life is so polarized (although polarization has been a part of our national life since the first real presidential election in 1800, the most rancorous to date. Those who think we’re rude to each other NOW, as opposed to the glorious good old days when we lived in harmony, are part of the problem. You are part of the anti-intellectual problem. You do not know your own history. You prefer fantasy to reality.)
So. Here’s Mencken, on women and Christianity. This essay dates from 1918.
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
The glad tidings preached by Christ were obviously highly favorable to women. He lifted them to equality before the Lord when their very possession of souls was still doubted by the majority of rival theologians. Moreover, He esteemed them socially and set value upon their sagacity, and one of the most disdained of their sex, a lady formerly in public life, was amongst his regular advisers. Mariolatry is thus by no means the invention of the medieval popes, as Protestant theologians would have us believe. On the contrary, it is plainly discernible in the Four Gospels. What the medieval popes actually invented (or, to be precise, reinvented, for they simply borrowed the elements of it from St. Paul) was the doctrine of women’s inferiority, the precise opposite of the thing credited to them. Committed, for sound reasons of discipline, to the celibacy of the clergy, they had to support it by depicting all traffic with women in the light of a hazardous and ignominious business.
The result was the deliberate organization and development of the theory of female triviality, lack of responsibility and general looseness of mind. Women became a sort of devil, but without the admired intelligence of the regular demons. The appearance of women saints, however, offered a constant and embarrassing criticism of this idiotic doctrine. If occasional women were fit to sit upon the right hand of God – and they were often proving it, and forcing the church to acknowledge it – then surely all women could not be as bad as the theologians made them out. There thus arose the concept of the angelic woman, the natural vestal; we see her at full length in the romances of medieval chivalry. What emerged in the end was a double doctrine, first that women were devils and secondly that they were angels. This preposterous dualism has merged into a compromise dogma in modern times. By that dogma it is held, on the one hand, that women are unintelligent and immoral, and on the other hand, that they are free from all those weaknesses of the flesh which distinguish men. This, roughly speaking, is the notion of the average male numskull today.
Christianity has thus both libeled women and flattered them, but with the weight always on the side of the libel. It is therefore, at bottom, their enemy, as the religion one Christ, now wholly extinct, was their friend. And as they gradually throw off the shackles that have bound them for a thousand years they show appreciation of the fact. Women, indeed, are not naturally religious, and they are growing less and less religious as year chases year. Their ordinary devotion has little if any pious exaltation in it; it is a routine practice, forced on them by the masculine notion that an appearance of holiness is proper to their lowly station, and a masculine feeling that church-going somehow keeps them in order, and out of doings that would be less reassuring. When they exhibit any genuine religious fervor, its sexual character is usually so obvious that even the majority of men are cognizant of it. Women never go flocking ecstatically to a church in which the agent of God in the pulpit is an elderly asthmatic with a watchful wife. When one finds them driven to frenzies by the merits of the saints, and weeping over the sorrows of the heathen, and rushing out to haul the whole vicinage up to grace, and spending hours on their knees in hysterical abasement before the heavenly throne, it is quite safe to assume, even without an actual visit, that the ecclesiastic who has worked the miracle is a fair and toothsome fellow, and a good deal more aphrodisiacal than learned.
Women, in fact, are indifferent Christians in the primitive sense, just as they are in the antagonistic modern sense, and particularly on the side of ethics. If they actually accept the renunciations commanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in an effort to flout their substance under cover of their appearance. No woman is really humble; she is merely polite. No woman, with a free choice before her, chooses self-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that direction is a spectacular and preferably bogus martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek.
