A Gospel of Shawianity

The bibliography below lists Bernard Shaw's pronouncements on religion and related topics, followed by numerous commentaries on those views. A self-proclaimed atheist, Shaw nonetheless expressed his ideas on religion, ritual, and belief continually and at some length in his plays, prefaces, and speeches, where Protestantism, Catholicism, Christian Science, Fundamentalism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and many other faiths are critiqued—and, for the most part, found wanting—as are the concepts of sin and punishment, atonement and salvation, crucifixion and resurrection, as well as the Church, the Bible ("a jumble of savage superstitions"), the Ten Commandments ("unsuited and inadequate to modern needs"), and the Book of Common Prayer ("saturated with blood sacrifice beyond all possible revision"). Very few religions earned Shaw's respect—Quakerism is a rare exception—and he found it impossible to embrace most of their precepts. "At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world," he wrote in 1906.

"I preferred to call myself an Atheist," Shaw recalled in 1949, the year before his death at age ninety-four, "because belief in God then meant belief in the old tribal idol called Jehovah." What was unpalatable for Shaw was the easy rationalization that "the vengeance of a terribly angry god can be bought off by a vicarious and hideously cruel blood sacrifice." He denounced the doctrine of Atonement as "the old idea that in some way or other you could always get rid of your guilt and your responsibility by seizing on some innocent victim and destroying it—sacrificing it, as it was said. Whether that victim was a goat, as in the sacrifice which Abraham substituted for the sacrifice of his own son, or whether, as it afterwards came to be, it was the sacrifice of a man [Christ], still the idea was the same—the notion that in some way or other you could get rid of your guilt or your sin by shifting it on to innocent shoulders." Atonement through sacrifice, fundamental to many religions, was for Shaw an unacceptable shirking of personal responsibility.

And yet, because "it is very important we should have a religion of some kind," Shaw duly invented one. He called his personal credo the Life Force: "a miracle and a mystery, … an evolutionary appetite … [that] proceeds by trial and error and creates the problem of evil by its unsuccessful experiments and its mistakes." "There is no God as yet achieved," he told an audience in 1907, "but there is that force at work making God, struggling through us to become an actual organized existence." He enjoined them to "stand up and say, 'I am God and here is God, not as yet completed, but still advancing towards completion, just in so much as I am working for the purpose of the universe, working for the good of the whole of society and the whole world, instead of merely looking after my personal ends.'" In short, Shaw believed that "we are experiments in the direction of making God."

In addition to comments about religion scattered throughout his writings, Shaw wrote a number of full-length works on religious themes that dramatize many of his fundamental "religious" ideas and beliefs: Major Barbara (1905), The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (1909), Androcles and the Lion (1912)—with its thirty-seven-thousand-word "Preface on the Prospects of Christianity"—Saint Joan (1924), The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), and On the Rocks (1933), which includes a dialogue between Pilate and Jesus. That Shaw abandoned the idea of including a volume titled Religion and Religions in an edition of his collected works suggests the daunting magnitude of such a project.

In 1895, Shaw told bookseller Frederick Evans, "I want to write a big book of devotion for modern people, bringing all the truths latent in the old religious dogmas into contact with real life—a gospel of Shawianity." Perhaps among the many works listed below, readers will discover The Gospel According to GBS.¹