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

The Will and Its Responsibilities 51
Trinity, he banished the very Persons of the Trinity who have traditionally
made the Christian religion attractive (“Revolutionist’s Handbook”
2:742). The Father, who can always be trusted to make all hurts well no
matter how bad things seem, is as firmly expelled as the Son, in His role as
Divine Whipping Boy. Only the Spirit is left: inchoate, imperfect, and immanent.
That last attribute makes the others particularly terrifying, a fact
that Shaw seems alone in understanding. He told the Cambridge Heretics
that we must “drive into the heads of men the full consciousness of moral
responsibility that comes to men with the knowledge that there never will
be a God unless we make one” (Religious Speeches 35). That is a sobering
responsibility. Not only can we not run to Daddy to save us from the terrors
of the dark, or wash away our manifold sins in the blood of His Son,
but we are given the awesome task of creating—no, becoming—God. Imperfect,
we must create perfection, without guidance from One who knows
the way or absolution for our failures. This is not a religion for cowards or
comfort seekers.
Shaw’s religion is simple. Unfortunately, as with other aspects of his
beliefs, the core of his “faith” has become confused with the elaborations
he provided as examples and illustrations, rather than as fundamental tenets.
For him the will was a simple fact of nature. It exists. It is a causal
agent, different from and superior to the purely mechanical forces which
the physicists understand. To deny this, as the materialists did (and do),
was to talk nonsense. His “faith” consisted in the belief that this will is a
fundamental and progressive force leading the universe toward something
we cannot begin really to understand but which we can reasonably call
Godhead. The Life Force is only the will conceived as a general vital force
that animates all life. It is not appropriate to speak of the Life Force as
something that manifests itself in Ann Whitefield but not Violet Robinson,
in Father Keegan but not Tom Broadbent. We all incarnate the Life
Force. Some are closer to its goal than others, but Shaw always cautioned
us not to be too confident that we know who they are. In Back to Methuselah,
when the seed of the Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas is sown, few
would guess the soil in which it comes to flourish. Shaw even suggested
that he himself might be one of the utter failures (Pref. Farfetched Fables
7:386). It is incorrect, if common, to talk of Joan, Caesar, Undershaft, King
Magnus, and similarly dynamic characters as Shavian Superwomen and
Supermen. The Superman does not exist. We do not even know what he
will be like; the Life Force does not know either, or we would not be muddling
along in this disastrously inadequate manner.