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A utopian radical
Modern Age, Wntr-Spring, 2004 by Barry Alan Shain
What does demand further explanation, in a work exalting candor, is Mill's belief that he needed to keep his views on Christianity concealed. Here again, Hamburger's remarkable scholarship convincingly demonstrates that Mill believed that he must not reveal in his published works his true thoughts, so amply displayed in letters and essays read by a close circle of friends. Mill feared social ostracism and possibly criminal prosecution, to be sure, but more importantly he wanted to retain his readership. If books were capable of instigating revolutionary action, to do so they must be read. Mill realized that if he were to write openly about his utopianism and his hatred of Christianity, he might well be relegated to the trash heap of history, upon which most written works eventually land. He wanted to be read because he wanted to guide future intellectuals in their efforts to replace the culture of stunted and dwarfed human beings dedicated to "miserable individuality" with that of true individuality and fellow-feeling. In the words of Harriet, she and Mill wanted their words to serve as pemmican to the cultural warriors of the future. To do so required circumspection concerning Christianity.
With such care, Mill believed that he could, rather like Nietzsche, become the teacher of a new morality of the future. But unlike Nietzsche, his teaching was to be of men loving men. As Hamburger characterizes the religion of humanity, "it held up duty as an ideal and sought to fundamentally change motives and habits to generate widespread altruism ... the goal was to discourage selfishness by making private motives coincide with the public good." Mill, writing in his Diary, describes the basic outline of this religion as
universal moral education making the happiness and dignity of this collective body the central point to which all things are to trend and by which all are to be estimated, instead of the pleasure of an unseen and merely imaginary Power; the imagination at the same time being fed from youth with representations of all noble things felt and acted greater to come: there is no worthy office of a religion which this system of cultivation does not seem adequate to fulfill.... Now this is merely supposing that the religion of humanity obtained as firm a hold on mankind, and as great a power of shaping their usages, their institutions, and their education, as other religions have in many cases possessed.
Mill thus saw himself as something of a mid-wife helping give birth to a world beyond the transitional one in which he lived, a new "organic" world in which love of self and love of other would form almost an identity. All that was demanded, without gulag or executions, was the extermination of institutionalized Christianity and its replacement by the religion of man. This new religion, however, was one that Mill understood to "'be a development of [Chris]tianity, properly understood.'"
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