Irregular Religions Essay -- Social Issues, Poverty

Perhaps the strongest basis for one critics belief that Major Barbara had an utter want of the religious sense comes from the piety and adopted religion of Andrew Undershaft. An armorer, Undershaft founded his creed on the belief that honor, justice, truth, and mercy are graces and luxuries of a rich, strong, and safe life (93). To Undershaft, social problems such as sloth and inebriation rump be traced back to poverty, for a mans first duty, to which every other consideration should sacrificed, is not to be poor (15). Shaw makes this point distinctly in the plays preface, and argues his own cynical views through the mouth of Undershaft. Shaw explains through Undershaft that poverty is the worst of all crimes (142). The impoverished poison the country morally and physically they force those not poor to do away with their own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear that the poor should rise against the wealthy and drag the wealthy down into their abyss (142). Life has proven to Undershaft that money is a divinity on Earth money allowed him to raise his family comfortably despite the less-than-reputable source from which he obtained it (namely, war). Because his faith of money and gunpowder is unconventional in its generally strict focus on the economic aspects of life, the faith leaves little room for the traditional spiritualism and morality of religion. Undershaft admits that he would not have the income of a poor man for all his conscience (88). In Undershafts religion, typical morality that is, earning money in a respectable way, believing death and demise are abominations, and seeing God as that which rules the world has no place. Undershaft takes advantage of the ... ...ara has learned from the Army, a starving man will say anything to get the bread, furthering Crosstianity or else than absolving his soul (142). While Shaw respects the Salvation Armys intentions in trying to rid the country of poverty, he believes only a revolution can destroy it completely and that the Armys attempt to save people individually is ultimately futile. The Army is not saving their souls rather, it forces them to sin by deceit to gain food. Barbara comes to this understanding at the end of the play, and by it she is converted again to the saving of souls, this time through the raising of hell to heaven and of man to God essentially, by bringing goodness and spirituality into her fathers factory of death (152). Through her strength and spirituality Barbara finds hope and reaffirms the true, if unconventional, Christianity she practices.