Damning Words: the Life and Religious Times of HL Mencken by DG Hart, Eerdmans, £18.99
Henry Louis Mencken worked hard to poke fun at religion. The best gags came when Mencken was in epigrammatic mood. “The Christian,” he wrote, was “one who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.”
All too often, Mencken’s faith-bashing invective lacked substance and he came across, as Darryl Hart puts it, as “one part village atheist and one part town drunk”. Sometimes, though, a depth can be discerned in Mencken’s religious musings.
Hart argues that his subject “devoted far more time to religious beliefs, practices and institutions than someone who was simply antagonistic might reasonably spend”. Mencken was “also much more conversant with Christian theology and the niceties of Church polity and liturgy than someone might expect of a person only interested in stripping the altars bare”. By turns Mencken was bemused and irked by Christianity, but he took it seriously.
It’s not difficult to locate moments when Mencken’s critiques were rooted in the assumption that faith stymied fun. He worried that religion risked turning life into an “orderly and tedious march … with all the hands trooping up the celestial gangplank in a lockstep”.
Christian moralising infuriated Mencken, especially when it came to the cause of Prohibition, and he blamed America’s Puritan past for polluting the nation’s intellectual and artistic groundwater. Writers, he argued, had been so busy trying to please God that they had failed to develop an authentic aesthetic. Even Mark Twain, whom Mencken adored in his youth, was charged with “Puritan smugness and cocksureness”.
Simply ignoring religion was not an option for Mencken, however, since “everywhere he turned, [he] could not help running into Christian assumptions and expressions”.
In order to sustain his role as pundit, Mencken was obliged to become an astute observer of the fault lines within the American Protestant tradition – not least the fundamentalist-modernist squabbles that defined the era. Moreover, some of his most noteworthy journalistic forays (the Scopes evolution trial of 1925 and legal tussles over censorship) were shaped by engagement with the syndics of doctrinal orthodoxy.
Was there, though, some sympathy or even common ground beneath the bluster? Mencken lacked faith himself, had little patience for the pomp of organised religion and seems to have regarded those who went in for such pursuits as his intellectual inferiors. And yet Hart keenly notes that Mencken’s sense of human folly and frailty places him towards the Augustinian end of the ethical spectrum. Sin was not simply an ailment to be cured by instruction; it was an unavoidable aspect of human nature.
The net result is that Mencken, as portrayed by Hart, sometimes provided a useful outsider’s perspective on the nitty gritty of American religion. At the very least, Mencken had the good grace to be even-handed in his denunciations. He was committed to “offending everyone” and “could ridicule secular notions of salvation and progress as much as Christian varieties”.
Mencken was often a man of dubious or despicable opinions but he was always impossible to ignore. As Walter Lippmann, quoted approvingly by Hart, once wrote: “this Holy Terror from Baltimore … calls you a swine and an imbecile” but he also “increases your will to live”.
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