Strength and a Weakness

The End of Economic Man [another Drucker book] was perhaps least fashionable for its time in its respect for religion and in the attention it paid to the Christian churches. Insofar as contemporary political analysis paid attention at all, it considered religion an outmoded relic and the churches ineffectual reactionaries. Stalin’s famous outburst: “How many divisions has the Pope?” shocked only the way a four-letter word shocks in the Victorian drawing room; it said bluntly what most people knew very well but covered up by polite circumlocution.   My book, however, has a chapter, “The Failure of the Christian Churches,” which argues that the churches could have been expected to succeed, could have been expected to provide the new foundation. In this chapter, the Christian churches are seen as the one potential counterforce and the one available political sanctuary. The contemporaries, thirty years ago, still children of [..] nineteenth-century anti-clericalism, tended to ignore the Christian dissenters—from Kierkegaard to the worker-priests of France—as isolated romantics, hopelessly out of touch with reality. The End of Economic Man was, to my knowledge, the first book that perceived them the way we tend to perceive them now, that is, as hard-headed realists addressing themselves to the true problems of modern society. This enabled the book to foreshadow both the emergence of Christian-Democratic parties that have been so prominent a feature of post-war Europe, and the “aggiornamento” of the Catholic Church under Pope John.

But The End of Economic Man also reached the conclusion that the churches could not, after all, furnish the basis for European society and European politics. They had to fail, though not for the reasons for which the contemporaries tended to ignore them. Religion could indeed offer an answer to the despair of the individual and to his existential agony. But it could not offer an answer to the despair of the masses. I am afraid that this conclusion still holds today. Western Man—indeed today Man altogether—is not ready to renounce this world. Indeed he still looks for secular salvation, if he expects salvation at all. Churches, especially Christian churches, can (and should) preach a “social gospel.” But they cannot (and should not) substitute politics for Grace, and social science for Redemption. Religion, the critic of any society, cannot accept any society or even any social program, without abandoning its true Kingdom, that of a Soul alone with its God. Therein lies both the strength of the churches as the conscience of society and their incurable weakness as political and social forces in society.