Kant’s Book 4 is on “counterfeit service” or “religion and priestcraft.” In this book, Kant launches a critique of cultic religion. He is not condemning cult and ritual per se, but says that it must not be construed as divine service. The statutory laws that govern religious cult, and the officials that direct the cult, are defensible “provided that these officials direct their teaching and order to that final end (a public religious faith).”
Kant begins with a distinction between revealed and natural religion; this distinction classifies religion according to origin and “inner possibility.” Religion is natural when “I must first know that something is duty because I can acknowledge it as a divine command,” while in revealed religion the priority of duty and divine command is reversed. Anyone who takes the demands of natural religion as morally necessary duties is a rationalist.
When religions are classified instead according to their “external communication,” natural religion is what everyone can learn by reason, while “learned religion” is a religion that comes only by means of scholarship. This classification is more useful than the first, since it distinguishes between religions according to their suitability as universal religions. Natural religion might be also revealed – that is, the revelation contains what human beings could have arrived at on their own, but revelation speeds up the process. In this case, religion is “objectively a natural one, though subjectively one-revealed.” He then proceeds to test the New Testament according to this scheme: Though clearly purporting to be a revealed religion, is it also natural – that is, in keeping with universally accessible norms of morality?
Christianity passes the test pretty well. It contains statutes and teachers, of course, but the statutes are proclaimed as means for establishing the true church, and thus the church founded on these statutes is itself the true church. Jesus especially passes the test. He is not the founder of religion – which has always been there engraven on our hearts – but rather the founder of the true church. He insists that only pure moral dispositions can be pleasing to God; just like Reason. He summarizes His moral instruction in terms of a single universal rule to do one’s duty without thought of reward: “Do your duty from no other incentive except the unmediated appreciation of duty itself.” Jesus gives us a complete, and completely pure, religion, and we can overlook is appeal to Moses as historical accident.
He then takes up Christianity as a learned religion. As a learned faith, Christianity rests on history and revelation and has statutes. But Christianity does not demand unconditional and unquestioned faith in revealed propositions. When dogma and cult and other statutory requirements are raised to the level of saving faith, Christianity becomes servile and is not true faith. Putting revealed faith ahead of rational faith, and conditioning the latter by the former, leads to counterfeit service and a counterfeit church. This has unfortunately happened in the various Judaizing tendencies that have appeared periodically in Christian history. This is all delusional: It is a “delision of religion” if one makes statutory faith “the supreme condition of divine good pleasure toward human beings.”
From this, Kant analyzes the religious delusion from several angles. This can arise from a false anthropomorphism, which turns God into a God whom we can influence, preeminently through sacrifice, which demonstrates to God our eagerness to serve Him. Such acts have no moral value in themselves, and to attribute moral value to them is to attribute the value of the end to a particular act.
Kant again returns to the problem of satisfaction, which haunts the entire treatise. How can we be acceptable to God when we are deficient in so many ways? The church falls into delusion when it claims to know how God makes up for our lack of obedience. Once a church goes beyond the limits of reason and claims competence where it has none, there is no limit to the delusion and superstition that can follow. Religious delusion also arises from our desire to locate heavenly influence in the field of perception, which can only lead to enthusiasm. Natural means cannot have moral effects; this is Kant’s leading principle here.
Religious delusion that leads to counterfeit service is bad enough, but Kant is more appalled by the establishment of a “regime” of delusion in priestly religions. Priestly religion treats non-moral actions as service to God, and claims that the natural can in fact effect the moral. One problem here is that we can’t know what kinds of service are pleasing to God. We know by reason that moral service is directly pleasing. When we go beyond that, whose to say which wages He appreciates and which He rejects? (Revelation can’t tell us, since revelation is conditioned by reason.)
Kant here introduces the concept of “fetishism,” which he defines as an effort to perform actions “that in themselves contain nothing well-pleasing to God as means for gaining God’s unmediated favor, and therewith the fulfillment of his wishes,” which represents a “delusion of possessing an art of achieving a supernatural effect through entirely natural means.” Anyone who transforms rational striving for good conduct into fetishism renders counterfeit service and not true religion. This is a form of slavery. The only path of “true enlightenment” consists in doing God’s will for the sake of duty, and only this is free service and not a form of slavery.
Priestcraft is “the constitution of a church to the extent that a fetish-service is the rule.” And this happens wherever historical faith is the ground and rational faith conditioned by it. If articles of faith are included in the constitution of the church – articles of faith as opposed to articles of religion – then priestcraft cannot help but follow. And this priestly regime cannot help but take the form, finally, of tyranny, as the “church finally rules the state, not indeed through force, but through influence over minds.” The key to free, pure, true religion is the question of whether rational conditions statutory or the opposite.
In the general remark that ends Kant’s treatise, he treats four “observances of duty,” traditional “means of grace” that he reinterprets in a non-delusional, non-fetishistic fasion. Prayer is the duty of “establishing this good firmly within us”; church going is for the purpose of propagating true faith “through public assemblies”; pure religion is transmitted to new members through a rite of membership, baptism; and communion is a public form for maintaining the fellowship of the ethical community. If any of these acts are seen as means of grace, propitiatory acts, of any such thing, they become fetishes.