“Why do the heathen so furiously rage together: and why do the people imagine a vain thing?”
(THE 2ND PSALM)
Among the favorite arguments of the irreligious—one that they almost invariably advance in the opening offensive of their attacks on faith—is this: that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily conflicts about religion. By saying this, the irreligious hope to establish that religion is of itself a cause of conflict. This is a crude factual misunderstanding. Some conflicts fought in the name of religion are specifically religious. Many others are not, or cannot be so simply classified. The only general lesson that can be drawn from these differing wars is that man is inclined to make war on man when he thinks it will gain him power or wealth or land. Atheistic polemicists would reject the crudity and falsity of this argument in seconds if they met it anywhere else. In fact, they tend to apply it only in selective cases, because atheists are most often supporters of the political left, and some wars that are caused by religion are sustained by factions and groups with whom the left sympathizes. Consider a few examples.
The Thirty Years War (1618 – 48), when much of Europe tore itself to pieces in a conflict between Roman Catholicism and the Reformed Faith, might reasonably be described as a War of Religion. So might the English Civil War, in which radical Calvinists sought to overthrow monarchist Episcopalians, even though both regarded themselves as Protestants. Quarrels about the nature and origin of authority are bound to be religious, but I do not know of any other modern war in which one side’s cavalry sang Psalms as they charged, while the other side’s troops took Holy Communion as they prepared for battle. These are clearly conflicts about religion.
By contrast, it is perfectly obvious (for instance) that the recent conflict in Northern Ireland, described as being between Protestants and Catholics, was not about the Real Presence of Christ or the validity of the Feast of Corpus Christi or even the authority of the Bishop of Rome. It was a classic tribal war, over the ownership and control of territory, in which the much-decayed faiths of the people involved served as both badge and shorthand for a battle that disgusted the most faithful and enthused the least religious. The processions and funerals of each side were dominated by secular symbols—black berets and combat fatigues—not by holy images or the godly singing of mighty psalms.
The same could perhaps be said of the war between Christian and Muslim in Lebanon, where both sides trample on their own scriptures in the cruelty they inflict on each other, yet it is also the case that here Sunni and Shia Muslims overcome deep religious differences for a shared political objective. This would tend to suggest that they are united more by a political distaste for their common enemy than by religious feeling.
But what of the unending confrontation between Israel and the Muslim world? Militant secularists tend to downplay the religious element of this battle, even though in this case there is little doubt that the real issue is Islam’s utter refusal to cede any ground that it has once conquered. The question is not whether Jews may live in the Middle East. They are welcome to do so as heavily taxed, powerless, and humiliated second-class citizens in Muslim states, as laid down by the Pact of Umar, which deals with the treatment of “Peoples of the Book” in Muslim nations and is inaccurately described as “tolerant” by many liberal commentators. The question is whether they can maintain a specifically Jewish state on territory recaptured from Islam, a force that tries never to retreat from what it has once conquered (and that still yearns for the lost lands of Spain).
There are several comparable disputes about lost territory and expulsion—from the displaced Aborigines of Australia to the Germans driven from their ancestral homes in the millions under the Potsdam Agreement in the 1940s and the gigantic and blood-soaked forced migrations of Hindus and Muslims during the India-Pakistan partition of 1947. In that last case, the partition and expulsions were not brought about by a Hindu victory over Islam, but the result of the campaign among Indian Muslims for a state of their own, a sort of Muslim Israel.
None of these sad stories has the same everlasting and insoluble quality as the expulsion of Arabs from Palestine in 1948. None of the German refugees from Poland, the Czech Lands, or East Prussia in 1945 – 47 still dwells in a refugee camp, nor do the many Jews expelled from the Arab and Muslim world after the foundation of Israel; whereas the camps for those Arabs expelled from Israel in 1948 are now much bigger than they were then, and their inhabitants are kept where they are and prevented from improving their living conditions, mainly for propaganda reasons. What is more, while the Muslim impulse against Israel is profoundly religious, Israel is in almost all ways a secular state, founded by irreligious, socialist non-Jewish Jews and actively disliked as blasphemous by many of the most Orthodox Jews. Its easily evaded marriage laws—one of the few religious things about its legal system—are misleadingly cited by critics as evidence that Israel is a theocracy, when it is nothing of the kind.
The strangest thing of all is that the European secular left (with few exceptions) disapproves strongly of Israel and often denounces it inaccurately as religiously intolerant; yet it seldom if ever characterizes the Muslim coalition against Israel as theocratic or reactionary. Why is this? In general, the Western secular left (as did for many years the Soviet Union) has sympathized with the Islamic campaign against Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war turned that country from a surrounded and endangered island of beleaguered territory into a colonial power occupying large amounts of territory inhabited by Arabs. One of the greatest problems for leftists recently converted to neo-conservative support for the war in Iraq and for bombing Iran is that they suddenly find themselves alongside Israel, a country they have despised for decades because they regard it as a survival of the colonial era.
The Left’s hostility to Christianity is actually specific, because Christianity is the religion of their own homes and homeland, the form in which they have encountered—and generally disliked and resented—the power of God in their own lives. Islam, for most of the Left’s time on earth, has been an exotic and distant creed, never taught to them as a living faith and never likely to be their own or to require their obedience. Therefore the Left can sympathize with it as the enemy of their Christian monoculture and as an anti-colonial and therefore “progressive” force. Some Marxist leftists in Britain have taken this to its logical conclusion and have formed alliances with British Muslims despite the Muslims’ highly conservative attitudes toward women and homosexuals. Others prefer to live in a state of unresolved doublethink.
This position is becoming harder and harder to maintain as Islam grows in power and reach, and as it becomes a major religious force in many nations of Europe, where so many “progressives” live. The growing dalliance of radicals with anti-Islamic neo-conservatism is one consequence. But it is an awkward fit, despite the utopian atheism that is common among such neo-conservatives. As much as they dislike Islam’s role as the intolerant censor of novels and cartoonists, as the enemy of feminism, and as a harsh voice of sexual conservatism, the western liberal Left have spent too long as Islam’s ally against Israel, or as defenders of mass immigration by Muslims into European countries, to be wholly convincing on this point. Meanwhile, neo-conservatism’s overheated suspicion of Islam contrasts quite ludicrously with its dogmatic support for mass immigration, the so-called “free movement of labor,” and its relaxed view of multiculturalism. If there is a Muslim threat in the Western world, it comes much more from the fast-expanding Islamic populations there than from terrorism. The neo-conservative position is only sustainable because neo-conservatism’s main base is in the USA, where most immigration is Latin American and multiculturalism means speaking Spanish. If Mexicans were Muslims and spoke Arabic or Urdu, things would be very different.
Then there is Afghanistan, where the nominally Christian West, having once mobilized warrior Islam against the Soviet Union (which was the ally of the Arabs in their war against Israel), now fights a furious war against warrior Islam. Islam in its turn has repaid past American help with terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. Amusingly, it was the USSR that once claimed to be liberating the women of Afghanistan from the tyranny of Islam, a task it had successfully achieved in its own Central Asian empire. Now it is the “West,” which tried so hard to drive the USSR out of Afghanistan, that says its troops must remain there…to protect Afghan women from the tyranny of Islam. Is this a war caused by religion, or by human folly?
Interestingly, in news reports on the recent (1991-95) conflict in Yugoslavia—which might have been described as between Christian and Muslim—the terms Serb, Croat, and Bosnian were generally used to describe the combatants, rather than Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim. Most Western commentators were consistently more sympathetic to the Bosnians than to other groups, but not because they were Muslims. It was mainly because they idealized Bosnia’s allegedly multi-ethnic state as a model for the borderless globalism that they hope to see introduced everywhere in their imagined utopia.
Yet, in other times this was not so. Balkan Muslims were the undoubted villains in the days of the Bulgarian Horrors, which stirred the liberal-minded people of Britain against the Turks in the nineteenth century. Their part in the twentieth-century race wars was not honorable either. When the German SS recruited a division from among Bosnian Muslims, it was their Islamic hostility to Jews that appealed most of all to the National Socialists. At that time the Serbs, now the official villains of the conflict, were the principal allies of the “West” on the Balkan Peninsula.
Those who blame religion for wars tend to do so only when it suits them to do so, and without paying much attention to the details. In this debate, they generally mean “Christianity” when they say religion. Christianity is their actual target. They may now denounce Islam as fervently as they wish and flaunt their courage in doing so, but the secular left’s true relationship with Islam is equivocal, especially over the issue of Israel and over multiculturalism in previously Christian states. And Islam is entirely uncowed and undented by the New Atheism or by neo-conservatism. It is, in general, proof against any secular weapon and is less impressed than many think by Western wealth, military power, or political liberty. Islam is, in fact, likely to be the main long-term beneficiary of the collapse of Christianity in Europe, at least, where Islam is already a sizeable minority faith through immigration and population growth. Islam will be well placed to benefit from any future revival of religious feeling in countries where Christianity is rapidly losing both its following and its position.
The current intellectual assault on God in Europe and North America is in fact a specific attack on Christianity—the faith that stubbornly persists in the morality, laws, and government of the major Western countries. Despite the self-conscious militancy of some of the anti-theists against Islam, they rarely encounter organized Islam in their own countries, are sensibly wary of challenging Islam on its own ground, and seldom debate with Muslim spokesmen (who are not interested in discussing an issue they believe to be closed). Their hostility to Islam as a “threat to our way of life” is a result of their late realization that it might, if it became powerful, menace the license in sexual and other matters that their cause has won, thanks to the weakness of Christianity in its former domains. The God they fight is the Christian God, because he is their own God, as I explain above. But what is it that they have against the Christian God?
God is the leftists’ chief rival. Christian belief, by subjecting all men to divine authority and by asserting in the words “My kingdom is not of this world” that the ideal society does not exist in this life, is the most coherent and potent obstacle to secular utopianism. Christ’s reproof of Judas—“the poor always ye have with you”—when Judas complains that precious ointment could have been sold to feed the poor rather than applied to Jesus’ feet (see John 12:1 – 8 KJV), is also a stumbling-block and an annoyance to world reformers. By putting such socialistic thoughts in the mouth of the despised traitor-to-be Judas, and by stating so baldly the truth known to all conservatives that poverty cannot be eradicated, the Bible angers and frustrates those who believe that the pursuit of a perfect society justifies the quest for absolute power.
The concepts of sin, of conscience, of eternal life, and of divine justice under an unalterable law are the ultimate defense against the utopian’s belief that ends justify means and that morality is relative. These concepts are safeguards against the worship of human power. Now, that conflict is made sharper still by the alliance between political utopianism and the new cult of the unrestrained self, unleashed into the Western world by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, by Alfred Kinsey and Herbert Marcuse, promoted by the self-pitying anthems of rock music, and encouraged by the enormous power of “progressive” education in which so many cultural revolutionaries work. The last of these—by refusing to teach the previously accepted canon of literature, history, and philosophy, by attempting to turn Christianity into a museum-piece, and by abandoning the concept of authority—has left advanced societies entirely disarmed against intellectual assaults they could once have repulsed with ease. These influences were the real driving force of the 1960s social, sexual, and moral revolution that now seeks to destroy the last remaining restraints on its victory.
There is a general belief in the West that Marxist revolution came to a bitter and conclusive end with the fall of the Soviet Union and the European Communist regimes in 1989-91. On the contrary, the New Left were released from painful bonds by this collapse. No longer were they burdened with the failure of the Soviet experiment, which could always be used to argue against them. They were free at last from the identification of radical politics with the Kremlin enemy, which kept them out of political power in the Western democracies.
While they were relieved by the collapse of the decrepit Soviet Union, many radicals retain a regard for the impulses that began it. We now view the 1917 Russian Revolution as an unmitigated failure, soaked in blood and buried in infamy. But a surprising number of modern liberal leftists retain a sentimental belief in its initial goodness and would in its early years have identified with it. They do not believe its failure was inevitable or a result of its nature, and in many cases they wish it had succeeded.
The existence of Trotskyism as a strong force among Western intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Europe, is interesting evidence of this, since Trotskyism is essentially a deluded pretence that the Bolshevik Revolution might have succeeded in other hands than Stalin’s. Many of those who took essentially Trotskyist positions in those years went on to become influential in politics, the academy, journalism, the law, and the arts in the years that followed. It is therefore important to recognize two things—that the Russian Revolution was an earlier version of the modern revolt against God; and that today’s anti-Christian revolutionaries would very much prefer to disown the apostolic succession that leads from Lenin and Stalin to them, preferring to identify with the slain heretic and martyr of Stalin, Leon Trotsky. This view is only sustainable because Trotsky, a bloodthirsty enthusiast for repression in his short years of power, was a failure who was never able to demonstrate in practice that he was at least as evil as Stalin. Thanks to this belief, Stalin can be treated as if he were an aberration, and any suggestion that his regime’s savagery was connected with its atheism must be vigorously denied. Serious historians of the Russian Revolution (notably Richard Pipes) and biographers of Trotsky (notably Robert Service) make nonsense of the claim that Trotsky in power would have been preferable to or greatly different from Stalin.
More importantly for this debate, the record shows that an actual systematic hatred for Christianity was central to the Soviet regime, flowing directly from its materialist philosophy and pursued at some cost and with some difficulty (as I shall shortly show). But first, a short diversion is necessary to deal with the problem of National Socialist Germany. In that country, the Christian churches largely, but not entirely, failed in their duty of opposition. Yet an essentially secular and anti-Christian regime, more pagan than atheist, was preparing their destruction in any case. The undoubted National Socialist loathing of Christianity tells us more about that faith than do the actions of the leaders of the churches.
I am (as I explain at greater length in a later chapter) baffled and frustrated by the strange insistence of my anti-theist brother that the cruelty of Communist anti-theist regimes does not reflect badly on his case and on his cause. It unquestionably does. Soviet Communism is organically linked to atheism, materialist rationalism, and most of the other causes the New Atheists support. It used the same language, treasured the same hopes, and appealed to the same constituency as atheism does today. When its crimes were still unknown, or concealed, it attracted the support of the liberal intelligentsia who were then, and are even more now, opposed to religion.
My brother and his allies, who can now confidently classify the Soviet regime as “Stalinist” and so evade any responsibility for it, must ask themselves with ruthless honesty what they would have thought and said about it at the time, before such escape routes were open. They must ask themselves which questionable causes and regimes they have made excuses for in this age, and consider the possibility that utopianism is dangerous precisely because its supporters are so convinced that they are themselves good.
Even after its evils became widely known, the same liberal intelligentsia continued in many cases to sympathize with the USSR and defend it against conservative and Christian critics. Soviet power was—as it was intended to be—the opposite of faith in God. It was faith in the greatness of humanity and in the perfectibility of human society. The atheists cannot honestly disown it, and it is because they know this in their hearts that they panic and babble when confronted with the problem. Nothing else can explain the absurd denials they issue.
But what of the USSR’s loathly opposite, the Hitlerian Third Reich? I am not going to argue here that the Nazi state was an atheist state, because I do not believe the matter is so simple, and I do not wish to rely on easy arguments, caricature my opponents, or smear them by association. The relation between National Socialism and the churches, in Hitler’s twelve years in power, was often awkward but not always hostile. To begin with, the Nazis needed at least the neutrality of the Christian middle classes. Had they had time, they would have come into ever-greater conflict with believers. Clearly, the Hitler Youth and the general propaganda of National Socialism were increasing rivals to family and church—meetings of Nazi youth deliberately timed to clash with church services and festivals, messages of sexual promiscuity and rebellion against parental authority contrary to Christian teaching. In this, the youth movements of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were startlingly similar. Any ideological or revolutionary state must alienate the young from their pre-revolutionary parents if it hopes to survive into future generations. But in Germany it never lasted long enough to demonstrate this fully. And while it gathered its power, the Christian religion did not fight as fiercely or as bravely as it ought to have done.
The behavior of the churches toward National Socialism was variable, as the behavior of men and women always is when they are frightened or confused. There were total fawning, surrenders, and revolting attempts to create a Nazified Christianity in which the Jewish heritage of the faith was expunged and denied. There were acts of great courage by Christians of all faiths. There were rather more moments of shameful compromise and also of miserable persecution. What is the significance of this? Does it reveal that Christianity as a religion sympathized with the National Socilalists? Hardly. Does it reveal that Christians often failed in their duty? Undoubtedly. What is missing is some sort of organic connection linking the Nazis with Christianity, or vice versa. I have no doubt that those on the political and cultural left seek such a connection precisely because they wish to defend themselves against their own concern that there is an organic connection between their cause and that of Stalinist Communism, the connection which above all they wish to deny.