“THE RELIGION OF MARK TWAIN”
A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday, October 2, 2005
All
It is my job today to explain, as best
I can, the religion of a man who spent a good portion of his professional and
personal life vilifying religion, using humor to belittle and besmirch the
legacy of human religions. He is a noted
author who described himself as a writer whose pen was “warmed up in Hell.” Perhaps more than any other subject, Mark Twain
held religion up to ridicule in his humor.
So please wish me well on this task I face today. It turns out, though, that it’s not quite as
tough a call as I at first thought.
Mark Twain has developed a reputation
since his death as one of
But his critique of religion was
consistent throughout his life, and the later writings were only different in
degree, not in kind. Throughout his
life, he aimed his humorous pen like a weapon at what he saw as sham and
hypocrisy in traditional religions. It
is easy to compile a list of his quotations on (and against) religion. I’ll give just a few here, coming from across
his career, with more scattered throughout the sermon.
“The Bible has noble poetry in it. . . . and some good morals and a wealth of
obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.”
“The fear of Satan and Hell made ninety-nine
Christians, where love of God and Heaven landed one.” (Phipps, p.123)
“Man is a marvelous curiosity. . . . He thinks he is the Creator’s pet. He even believes the Creator loves him, has a
passion for him, sits up nights to admire him, yes and watch over him and keep
him out of trouble. He prays to (the
Creator) and thinks He listens. Isn’t
that quaint?”
“I have a religion – but you will call it
blasphemy. I believe is that there is a
God for the rich man, but none for the poor.”
“It ain’t the parts of the Bible I can’t understand
that bother me. It is the parts that I
do understand.”
“Sacred cows make the best hamburger.”
No one can question Twain’s place in
the halls of American literature. He is
a giant, and, by some estimates, perhaps the greatest so far. Ernest Hemingway declared that “All American
literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” His
literary achievements and recognition remain almost unequalled in our history,
and he may have been better known around the world than any other American author
In reviewing Twain’s critique of
religion, it must be remembered, first of all, that his stock in trade was
humor, and in writing humor his favorite style was a skilled use of
exaggeration and hyperbole. It should
also be remembered that humor has been used for ages as an effective way of
exposing fraud and hypocrisy, which was Twain’s major agenda. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay on “The
Comic,” might as well have been identifying Mark Twain when he made this
observation:
“The religious sentiment is the most real and earnest
thing in nature. Therefore, the oldest
gibe of literature is the ridicule of false religion.”
And that is precisely what Twain aimed
to do with his “pen warmed up in Hell”: to ridicule what he perceived to be
“false” religion, which became, in his mind, far too popular among a gullible
public, manipulated for self-aggrandizement by hucksters and con artists, and
dangerous to the health of a free nation.
First, let me offer just a brief
review of the highlights of his life and career. Twain’s background carries some of the
mystique of Abe Lincoln – born in insignificance in the heartland, if not the
backwoods, of
His father became a legal justice in
town, though never very prominent. He
didn’t have much interest in church, and died before Mark became a teenager –
leaving the family thereafter on the edge of poverty. Twain was particularly close to his mother
throughout his life, and she was a devoted member of the Presbyterian Church in
Though no one much noticed at the
time, in hindsight the presence of slavery was probably the single most
important cultural fact to affect both society and church in those days. Mark’s family even owned a slave from time to
time. Presbyterians were divided on the
subject, mostly divided between North and South, like the country, and when the
national church finally declared itself against slavery, many Southern
churches, like the one in
Mark’s mother, Jane, generally sided
with the more liberal faction in he church, though she went along with the
majority. Twain described her as
tolerant and open-minded, and those qualities seemed to stick with him far more
than some of the competing qualities he learned at church.
It is well known that as a young adult
he achieved his ambition of becoming a steamboat pilot on the
His heart was set at an early age
toward adventure. At the beginning of
the Civil War, he joined the Missouri National Guard, but his tenure only
lasted two weeks.
They visited
After returning from his adventures in the West, he
went to
“Mr. Beecher has done more than any other man,
perhaps, to inspire religion with the progressive spirit of the nineteenth
century, and make it keep step with the march of intellectual
achievement.”
Twain admitted several times over his life that he
wanted to become a minister. In a letter
to his brother and sister, he put it this way:
“I never had but two powerful ambitions in my
life. One was to be a (steamboat) pilot,
and the other a preacher of the gospel.
I accomplished the one and failed in the other, because I could not
supply myself with the necessary stock in trade, i.e. religion.”
In 1867, the
The trip was exciting and productive, and Twain was
able to write not only about the exotic places he visited, but also his
experiences with the passengers, whom he called “pilgrims.” He made close personal ties with some of the
passengers, but others on this church-sponsored trip he found to be
distastefully pious about their religion.
One of them he described as “a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old
iceberg that looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.” He was most offended by the self-righteous religious
lectures of the ship’s Captain, Charles Duncan.
After a prayer meeting led by Captain Duncan, Twain wrote that “if heaven
was to be populated with
The excursion was extensive, and the pilgrims visited
Back home, Twain moved to Elmira, New York to settle,
and there he met and fell in love with Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a
wealthy and prominent and very liberal town leader and businessman, Jervis
Langdon.
Langdon was an avid abolitionist
before the war, when he offered his home as a harbor for runaway slaves, one of
whom was Frederick Douglass, who remained friends with the Langdons
thereafter. Langdon was an active
Presbyterian, but when he moved to
The minister of
Twain proposed to Olivia, whom
everyone called “Livy,” after only knowing her for two weeks. She rejected his proposal for six months, but
eventually agreed. Twain offered to
Livy’s father a list of six references from distinguished names whom he had
known in
But Jervis Langdon made his own
judgment of character, and gave his blessing.
Until Jervis’ death a few years later, he and Mark seemed to have a close,
almost father/son, relationship.
His marriage to Olivia Langdon began a
life-long love affair, and Livy became not only his greatest support, but
perhaps also the most trusted critic of his writing. Over his life, Mark Twain would use satire
and wit to make fun of seemingly almost every cultural idol imaginable – from
religion to capitalism to politics – but he never turned his aim toward
ridiculing marriage, a topic that was an easy target for many other
humorists. Their mutual respect as a
couple was apparent to all. They would
end up having three daughters and a son.
The son died in infancy, and two daughters died as adults before his own
death. His family life was filled with
great joy and deep anguish.
Twain was warmly accepted into the
Langdon family, and in Elmira he began associating with the liberal circles,
many of whom were liberal clergy, that would continue throughout his life.
Twain considered himself Presbyterian throughout his
life, though not a very good one, and never formally became a church member. He had directly experienced revivals and
hell-and-brimstone preaching, but he preferred what he considered to be the
more dignified church services. Here is
how he described it:
“We (Presbyterians) sit silent and grave (at church)
while the minister is preaching. . . .
No frenzy, no fanaticism, no skirmishing; everything perfectly
serene. You never see any of us
Presbyterians getting in a sweat about religion and trying to massacre the
neighbors.”
When he later settled down in Hartford, Connecticut
with his wife to raise a family, he attended regularly the Asylum
Congregational Church, and its minister, Joseph Twichell, became his closest
personal friend through the rest of his life.
He maintained close friendships with many of the liberal clergy of New
England, though much of his harshest humor was reserved for that
profession.
He would spend most of the remainder of his life with
Hartford as his home-base, though he became one of the most widely traveled
Americans of his time. He crossed the
Atlantic more than twenty times in his life, and became one of the most famous
Americans abroad. Near the end of his
life, Oxford University in England granted him an honorary doctorate. He lived abroad – two years in Vienna, for
example, cumulatively several years in England, and extended time in Florence,
Italy. In 1891, his world was shaken
when the publishing company where he had made heavy investments went bankrupt,
and Twain lost almost all of his money.
To recoup the loss, he planned an around-the-world lecture tour, taking
his family along, with stops that included Hawaii, Australia, India, South
Africa, and England. This trip would
become the basis for another travel book, Following
the Equator. After so many travels,
Twain once observed, “I have filled the post – with some credit, I trust – of
self-appointed Ambassador-at-Large of the U.S. of America – without
salary.”
It is clear from what I have reported
so far that Mark Twain frequently targeted traditional religions for ridicule
in his writings. From this, it has often
been assumed that he was a sort of infidel, irreligious or even
anti-religious. This common
interpretation is a mistake. Twain
wasn’t hesitant to call himself a religious man, but he had no desire at all to
identify with the standard understanding of religion in our country. For him religion was primarily ethical, much
as Jesus taught, and the finer points of creed and theology were too often a
destructive distraction from what religion should be in making people act more
humanely toward each other. As one
biographer, John Hays, put it:
“(His) animus was not so much against religion as it
was against the institutions that controlled the religious spirit. His virulent attacks are upon the hypocrites
who appropriate the language of religion to achieve an irreligious end. . . . “
In 1902, at the age of 67, Twain
returned to Hannibal, Missouri, where he was welcomed as a town treasure. When visiting the Baptist church, the
minister invited him to speak, “not to preach,” the pastor said, “but to say a
few words.” Here is part of what he
said:
“What I say will be preaching. I am a preacher. We are all preachers. If we do not preach by words, we preach by
deeds. . . . Words perish, print burns
up, men die, but our preaching lives on.
Washington died in 1799, more than a hundred years ago, but his
preaching survives, and to every person that is striving for liberty, his life
is a sermon. My mother lies buried out
there in our beautiful cemetery overlooking the Mississippi, but at this age of
mine, she still cheers me. Her preaching
lives and goes on with me. Let us see
that our preaching is of the right sort, so that it will influence for good the
lives of those who remain, when we shall be silent in our graves.”
This may be a good synopsis of his
perspective on religion. Words and
theologies were meaningless – the only thing that counts, the only religion
that has any integrity, is found in our deeds, in how we live our lives.
From this standard, perhaps the best
way to understand the religion of Mark Twain is to look more at his life than
his writings, to see what he stood for.
This approach proves to be quite fruitful, for indeed throughout his
life Mark Twain was devoted to many causes.
The core of Mark Twain’s religion was a profound moral passion for
justice in society. His lobbied for and
sponsored and contributed money to countless causes over the years. He voice carried an intense advocacy for
human rights, in the United States and around the world. And it was clear to him that in American
society, the greatest threat to human rights was racial prejudice. And, not incidentally, racial prejudice was
too often aided and abetted by religion.
It took him a while to get there, but he never
faltered. He was raised in a slave
state, and his parents owned slaves from time to time. As a youth and young adult, the layers of
prejudice were too heavy. But when he
moved East, especially under the influence of his wife’s family and the church
led by Thomas Beecher, he looked in horror on the racism he was familiar with
as a child.
His most well-known book of all, Huckleberry Finn, has in the last fifty
years or so come under the critical eye of our society, uncomfortable with its
seemingly stereotyped images of African-Americans. No one can doubt, though, that in that book
Huck’s companion, the fugitive slave Jim, is the most admirable of all the
characters. The most pivotal moment in
the book is when Huck faces a moral dilemma of whether to protect Jim from
being captured. He could only protect
Jim by lying to his captors, and Huck learned in church that lying is a sin
that would condemn him to Hell for all eternity. The church did not consider slavery a sin at
all, so lying wasn’t justified for that reason.
Huck’s decision was agonizing for him,
but in the end he decided that if the price for saving his friend Jim was
eternity in hell for lying, he was willing to pay it. And so he protected Jim, never questioning
that in doing so he was damning his own soul to perdition. His respect for Jim was that deep.
In post-Civil War America, Twain found
many opportunities to support better race relations. He was an enthusiastic supporter and friend
to Booker T. Washington. He loved the
African-American spiritual hymns he had heard slaves singing when he was a
child. When he heard the Jubilee Singers
of the predominantly black school Fisk University, he was excited, and helped
sponsor their tours around the United States and Europe.
He became acquainted with Warner
McGuinn, one of the first black students to enroll in Yale Law School. When he found out McGuinn had financial
problems, Twain anonymously subsidized his education. In writing to the school’s dean, Twain
said.
“I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white
student. . . . But I do not feel so
about the other color. We have ground
the manhood out of them, and the shame is ours, not theirs, and we should pay
for it.”
McGuinn graduated with honors, became
a prominent attorney in Baltimore, and a mentor to a young Thurgood
Marshall.
There were other issues of human
rights that inspired his passion. He was
shocked at the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants he observed in California,
and of the widespread mistreatment of Jews in Europe, and he wrote scathingly
about these injustices. In his mature
years, he was a vocal supporter of women’s rights and the suffrage movement,
and offered personal support to a number of women aspiring to professional
status. In particular, he befriended
Helen Keller, and maintained a close relationship for many years. Helen Keller spoke of their friendship,
saying,
“He entered into my limited world with enthusiasm just
as he might have explored Mars.
Blindness was an adventure that kindled his curiosity. He treated me not as a freak, but as a
handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties.”
Another area that raised his concern
was the increasing gap between rich and poor, and the seeming greed of American
businessmen. This era became known as
the age of the “Robber Barron,” and Twain wrote strong words about what he
identified as the so-called “Christian Ethics” of the snobbish upper elite, and
putting his opinions into a book he called The
Gilded Age. Closely tied to this
concern was his disdain for political corruption. In a Fourth of July speech in England, he
spoke of the politics in this country, saying:
“I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have
some legislatures (in America) that bring higher prices than any in the
world.”
He once had occasion to make a public
introduction for his Congressman from New York, Joseph Hawley. He introduced the Congressman saying,
“He is a member of my church. . . . I have watched him many a time, as the
contribution box went by, and I never saw him take anything out of it. Would that we had more such men in
politics.”
He was particularly appalled by the
marriage of politics, money and church.
He objected when the federal government began engraving the phrase “In
God We Trust” on our currency. He
suggested a more honest motto should say this:
“Within Certain Judicious Limitations We Trust in God.” But he knew the protest was to no avail, and
he finally conceded: ‘It sounds well –
In God We Trust. I don’t believe it
would sound any better if it were true.”
His world travels also got him
involved in human rights issues all over the globe, writing in opposition to monarchies
and especially imperialism. He decried
the European empires, and warned that the United States was edging toward a
similar imperialistic arrogance. He was
one of the most vocal opponents of the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, which
to his mind was entirely for corporate profit.
I believe Mark Twain was right about
one thing. We can either define a
person’s religion in terms of deeds, or we can define it in terms of
theological belief. But there is no
question that a person’s life is a much more accurate measure of religion than their
theological speculations. If we use the
measure of deeds rather than creeds, Mark Twain’s life was far closer to the
teachings of Jesus than many, if not most, orthodox believers. One biographer, Philip Foner, studied
especially Twain’s commitment to causes for social justice, and concluded with
these words about his religion:
“Twain was deeply interested in the relationship of
institutionalized religion to man and society, particularly in reconciling Christian
ethics and the social structures of his own day. . . . A sincere, courageous, vital, realistic,
dynamic religion for him meant one which would inspire people to create a
better world. He urged all churches, as
a major step toward this goal, to tear from Christianity all the camouflage of
self-deception, hollow sham and hypocrisy, to strip it of the ornamentation of
the ages and return to the original sound principles of Jesus Christ – the
ethics of humanity.”
“Mark Twain exhibited a burning hatred of all forms of
intolerance, tyrrany and injustice, an abhorrence of cant and pretension, a
passion for human freedom, a fierce pride in human dignity, a love for people
and for life, a frank and open contempt for the mean, the cruel, the selfish,
the small and petty.”
In terms of theological beliefs, Twain
was very much out of the mainstream, there is no doubt. While hiking in Europe with his close friend
and minister Joseph Twichell, Twain spoke of his doubts about traditional
Christian doctrine and the Bible. His
comments avoided the typical Twain biting humor. He told his friend,
“I don’t believe one word of your Bible was inspired
by God any more than any other book. I
believe it is entirely the work of man from beginning to end – atonement and
all. The problem of life and death and
eternity and the true conception of God is a bigger thing than is contained in
that book.”
Mark Twain’s religion was to forsake
theological speculations in favor of ethical living with integrity. He held deep respect for Jesus and his
teachings, but he could never bring himself even close to the traditional
Christian view of Jesus as a divine Savior of humankind. At one point he wrote, “As concerns Christ,
there are some uncertainties, but for our solace we know one thing for sure –
he was not a Christian.”
I could continue going down the list
of traditional religious tenets to show that his opinions were always
non-traditional and skeptical – whether it be the Bible or the Trinity or
Heaven-and-Hell or the doctrine of atonement.
But I will end with a summary given by Albert Bigelow Paine, who was
Twain’s companion for the last years of his life, after his wife died, and who
Twain chose as his executer to edit his autobiography after his death. In a 1912 biography, Paine had this to say
about Twain’s religion:
“Mark Twain’s religion was a faith too wide for
doctrines – a benevolence too limitless for creeds. From the beginning he strove against
oppression, sham, and evil in every form.
He despised meanness; he resented with every drop of blood in him
anything that savored of persecution or a curtailment of human liberties. It was a religion identified with his daily
life and his work. He lived as he wrote,
and he wrote as he believed. His
favorite weapon was humor – good-humor – with logic behind it. A sort of glorified truth, it was truth
wearing a smile of gentleness, hence all the more quickly heeded.”
©
Bruce Clear 2005
READING from Mark Twain
Published in “Mark
Twain: A Biography” (1912) by Albert Bigalow Paine
(NOTE: Paine was Twain’s choice to edit his
autobiography after his death, and had Paine stay with him during his last
years. Paine found this unpublished and
undated manuscript by Twain among the papers he left behind. They were first published in Paine’s
biography of Twain):
I
believe in God the Almighty.
I
do not believe He has ever sent a message to man by anybody, or delivered one
to him by word of mouth, or made Himself visible to mortal eyes at any time in
any place.
I
believe that the Old and New Testaments were imagined and written by man, and
that no line in them was authorized by God, much less inspired by Him.
I
think the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His
works: I perceive that they are
manifested toward me in this life; the logical conclusion is that they will be
manifested toward me in the life to come, should there be one.
I
do not believe in special providences. I
believe that the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws: If one man’s family is swept away by a
pestilence and another man’s spared, it is only the law working; God is not
interfering in that small matter, either against the one man or in favor of the
other.
I
cannot see how eternal punishment hereafter could accomplish any good end;
therefore I am not able to believe in it.
To chasten a man in order to perfect him might be reasonable enough; to
annihilate him when he shall have proved himself incapable of reaching
perfection might be reasonable enough; but to roast him forever for the mere
satisfaction of seeing him roast would not be reasonable – even the atrocious
God imagined by the Hebrews would tire of the spectacle eventually.
There
may be a hereafter and there may not be.
I am wholly indifferent about it.
If I am appointed to live again I feel sure it will be for some more
sane and useful purpose than to flounder about for ages in a lake of fire and
brimstone for having violated a confusion of ill-defined and contradictory
rules said (but not evidenced) to be of divine institution. If annihilation is to follow death I shall
not be aware of the annihilation, and therefore shall not care a straw about
it.
I
believe that the world’s moral laws are the outcome of the world’s
experience. It needed no God to come
down out of heaven to tell men that murder and theft and the other immoralities
were bad, both for the individual who commits them and for society which
suffers from them.
If
I break all these moral laws I cannot see how I injure God by it, for He is
beyond the reach of injury from me – I could as easily injure a planet by
throwing mud at it. It seems to me that
my misconduct could only injure me and other men. I cannot benefit God by obeying these moral
laws – I could as easily benefit the planet by withholding my mud. (Let these sentences be read in the light of
the fact that I believe I have received moral laws only from man – none
whatever from God.) Consequently I do
not see why I should be either punished or rewarded hereafter for the deeds I
do here.