Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

Major Barbara 135
gibbet, while Christianity teaches the vanity of punishment and revenge.
Logically, the two points of view are hopelessly irreconcilable, so that you
would think that the division between them would form a major split dividing
the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Not so. It is a tribute to the powers
of hypocrisy and muddled thinking that one can easily find members of
the two camps sitting side by side in the same pew, listening to a sermon in
which both of these contradictory notions are wholeheartedly endorsed.
The reason the two are inconsistent is transparent. Salvation through the
cross is the theory that two wrongs make a right carried to its most extravagant
extreme. Evil must be balanced by evil, and the evil represented
by the sins of humanity is so great that it can be wiped out only by the
greatest imaginable wickedness: the torture and murder of God. The doctrine
of atonement is thus deprived even of its only reasonable excuse:
deterrence. God becomes humanity’s whipping boy, but since the atonement
was paid ere our own sins were possible, we need not even worry lest
our sin bring pain to another; the sin has been paid for in advance and in
full. It could be cynically argued that since God made man to sin, it is only
right that God should be punished for it, but this is not what the Crosstians
have in mind. The Christian doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount, in contrast,
is (at least as Shaw understands it) a flat rejection of expiation as an
attempt to cancel wickedness with more wickedness. The one belief is
founded on the endorsement of atonement as solidly as the other is on its
rejection. Barbara and the Salvation Army are in agreement here: they
accept the injunction to judge not; they return good for evil, kindness for
cruelty, and a helping hand for battering blows. They celebrate the life and
teachings of Christ rather than His torment and execution.
There is a difference between Barbara and the others on this question,
but it is subtle and largely latent—latent, that is, until Undershaft adds the
catalyst that makes it manifest. On one level Undershaft’s actions are
plain: he wants to win Barbara over to Perivale St. Andrews, and the first
step is to win her away from the Salvation Army. But how did he know his
method would be effective? This question is not often asked. Most assume
that he shows his daughter that the Salvation Army, because it is financially
dependent on the likes of Bodger and Undershaft, is inescapably corrupt,
but Shaw explicitly rejects this interpretation in his preface. Authors
can be wrong about their own works, of course, but they at least deserve a
hearing, and Shaw is emphatic on this point: he repudiates the notion that
the Salvation Army “reduced itself to absurdity or hypocrisy” by accepting
the donation of a distiller and a cannon founder. He condemns as idola-