The Religious Speeches of Bernard Shaw

When Bernard Shaw abandoned Ireland in 1876 to join his mother and sister in London, he stepped unknowingly into the geographical center of a religious-intellectual turbulence almost without precedent. Moving for thirty years in the midst of the melee of Secularists, Humanitarians, Ethicalists, New Lifers, Zeteticists, Spiritualists, Comtist Positivists, and Theosophists, to mention a few, he steadfastly maintained his atheism and refused to align himself with any one group. Then in 1906, in a speech, "The Religion of the British Empire," given at London's City Temple, he emerged with what could properly be called a religion, and a fairly systematized one at that.

This speech is one of eleven on religion given by Shaw in the years from 1906 to 1937 and brought together for the first time in this book. Gathered from old newspapers, magazines, and, in one case, a phonograph record, they present more effectively than any study of his religious thought yet published Shaw's ideas on the nature of the evolving God and the function of religion in modern life.

Such speeches as "The Religion of the Future" and "Modern Religion" reveal not so much the witty and entertaining Shaw as the profound Shaw with a deeply felt message for modern man. Going beyond an effective statement of human moral and social responsibilities, this message approaches the status of an original theology.

In these eleven speeches, Shaw emerges not only as a vigorous and witty critic of established religion but also as a profound believer in a religion of his own, based on his concept of creative evolution and the life-force. The editor's introduction and the foreword describe the cultural atmosphere of the late nineteenth century, when Shaw's religious philosophy took shape, and relate his doctrines to his plays.