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

138 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
mystery. If anything, he has become more enigmatic: Why, short of maliciousness,
has he done this? He robs her of her faith, but what does he offer
in return but cynicism and pessimism? Undershaft challenges his daughter
to seek a new and better faith when she sees that the old one has failed.
Like Barbara, we would be glad for a better one, but can see only a worse.
Does he want to break her spirit? To destroy the very qualities that had
drawn him to her? Everything he has said suggests that he believes her
particular religious inspiration allies her naturally with him, and not the
Salvation Army; he wants Barbara because of her unique religion. The
faiths of daughter and father become one in the final scene.
Father and Daughter
Barbara’s attention is directed toward Bill Walker rather than her father in
the second act, and Undershaft does battle with Cusins rather than his
daughter in the third. This curious indirectness is the consequence of the
point that Shaw makes: that there is no real conflict between father and
daughter, that they are two sides of one coin, two manifestations of the
same spirit. The apparent conflict between the two is a misunderstanding,
the result of Barbara’s youth and inexperience. In this parable, Barbara
stands for religion, spirit, and morality; her father for matter, wealth, and
destructive power. The third act brings them together by showing that the
barrier between them is only a wall of lies erected to protect weak and
sensitive consciences from reality. There is a genuine conflict in the play,
however: a conflict between ideas. Barbara and Undershaft are on the same
side. Theirs is the camp that views the world as one, not divided into good
and evil. Their world has no scoundrels or good men, only children of the
same Father: or in Shavian terms, different expressions of the Life Force.
We see one side of that unity in the second act and another in the third.
The reason that Shaw needs Bill Walker to provide a subject for Barbara’s
soul-saving skills is that, while they are effective and greatly needed in this
soul-destroying world of ours, they would be useless against her father.
They are not too weak; they are simply redundant. Retribution, atonement
and repayment are the bricks and mortar with which Bill Walker, like most
of us, builds walls of evasion around his soul; Barbara saves it by tearing
down the walls. Bill is not allowed to escape from his conscience with
money or pain. Andrew Undershaft does not attempt to avoid his soul; he
takes pride in standing up and facing it. He refuses to spend money on
“hospitals, cathedrals, and other receptacles for conscience money,” and
puts his spare cash instead into research on bombs and bullets (3: 89). His