“Behold, they speak with their mouth, and swords are in their lips.”
(THE 59TH PSALM)
Let us now dispose of the claim made by my brother Christopher, which I tried to challenge during our debate in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on April 3, 2008, that “Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with religion, as seek to replace it.”1 First, an interesting reflection on the title of his book in the USA, where “God” was rendered as “god” on the cover and title page—different from the British edition. In Decree Number 176 of the Revolutionary Government, issued in 1917, a number of spelling reforms were introduced by law, including the abolition of several letters in the Cyrillic alphabet. The decree also stated that the word god should henceforth be used without a capital “G.”
The coincidence in instinct, taste, and thought between my brother and the Bolsheviks and their sympathizers is striking and undeniable. I wish he would talk about it more. As an ex-Trotskyist myself, I have watched and listened in frustration as others, who do not know how and what revolutionaries think, fail to press the key questions. Christopher remains equivocal about Leon Trotsky. He recently nominated this blood-encrusted putschist conspirator and apostle of revolutionary terror as his subject for an edition of the BBC’s radio series “Great Lives,” in which the guest argues for the greatness of a chosen individual. During a recent TV encounter with Robert Service, Trotsky’s biographer,2 Christopher interestingly praised Trotsky for his “moral courage.” It is doubtful (see p. 158) if Trotsky could himself have accepted this compliment. In both these broadcasts, the issue of whether Trotsky’s unvaryingly repressive instincts and actions cancel out his skills as polemicist and journalist—and ought to deny him greatness—was not fully resolved.
Christopher has also said, “One of Lenin’s great achievements, in my opinion, is to create a secular Russia.”3 Alas, the interviewer does not seem to have inquired what Lenin’s other “great achievements” were, or if he did, the answers have not been recorded. Nor was there any discussion about the methods Lenin used to achieve this end. Lenin certainly did create a secular Russia, but how does this accord with my brother’s claim that the Communists also sought to replace religion, not to negate it?
Many Russians of my acquaintance would not use the words “great” or “achievement” to describe any of this bloodthirsty, duplicitous, and spiteful tyrant’s actions, unless treason in collusion with a foreign enemy, destruction, desecration, persecution, murder, and extreme pitilessness can be described as achievements, or the creation and consolidation of the world’s most effective and ruthless repressive apparatus can be presented as “great.” But we cannot all be of one mind, and unless there is an absolute standard of good and evil, I suppose we have to suspend judgment on the broken eggs (and the broken lives) until we can be sure that there will be no omelet. And even then, we may be indulgent on the grounds that the omelet might have been a good one, if only it had not been for so many events beyond the cook’s control.
Or so I have often heard it argued, in various Marxist-Leninist covens whose devotees have gone on to be model citizens in the Politically Correct state. I happen to think that there is an absolute standard of good and evil, so I would have to lament over the broken eggs even if there were an omelet instead of a bloody mess.
It would be crude and false to identify my brother as some kind of fellow traveler of the Bolshevik regime. He has more sense than to be such a thing. And that, emphatically, is not my charge. Yet, is there perhaps a vestigial sympathy with the great experiment and a far-from-vestigial loathing for those things it extirpated—monarchy, tradition, patriotism, and faith?
In the encounter with Robert Service mentioned above, my brother speaks of the (undoubted) wickedness of the White counter-revolutionary armies. He suggests that the 1905 Russian Revolution might have produced happier results had socialism triumphed then. But Russia in 1905 was one of the most rapidly growing industrial countries in human history, acquiring a middle class and seeking energetically to reform itself. It was precisely this development of a giant rival in the East that Imperial Germany—which instigated and financed Lenin’s putsch—feared. If the 1914 war had never happened, Russia might have become happy, prosperous, and free, peacefully and without cataclysm. The Communists only came to power because of the demoralization of war and because they were hired by the Kaiser’s General Staff to get Russia out of the war.
We have to wonder if some sentimental belief that socialism might have succeeded under other leadership still lingers in my brother’s mind. Trotskyism is, at bottom, the self-delusion that it could all have turned out otherwise under a more intelligent, literate leader. There is no actual evidence for this at all—and plenty to the contrary. It is pure wish-fulfillment. I say this as a former Trotskyist, who managed to delude himself in this way for some years.4 It is a mechanism for avoiding the unwanted truth that socialism failed not because it was badly led or unlucky, but because it was wrong. And it is a means for avoiding the further conclusion—even more frightening—that it failed because it sought to render unto Caesar the things that belong to God.
Does my brother yearn for an alternative history in which socialism succeeded, “hoping it might be so” like the disillusioned Thomas Hardy in The Oxen, yearning for belief in the old story that the animals kneel on Christmas Eve? In 1920, when the nature of the Soviet regime was as yet not fully clear and its supposed glories were not yet drowned in blood, many prominent atheist intellectuals were impressed with the rationalism and science-worship of the new state.
Bertrand Russell wrote rather candidly in 1920 that he had gone to Russia “believing himself to be a Communist”—but after meeting Lenin and Trotsky he had the sense to say that “contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not only of communism, but of every creed so firmly held that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.”5
But others, especially the English Fabians, were not so easily put off and liked what they saw. Recall the way Beatrice and Sidney Webb so interestingly put it: “It is exactly the explicit denial of the intervention of any God, or indeed of any will other than human will in the universe, that has attracted to Soviet Communism, the sympathies of many intellectuals, and especially of scientists in civilised countries.”
Is it perhaps this ambiguity toward the great Bolshevik experiment that makes my brother unwilling to look the anti-theism of the Communists in the face and recognize it as his kin? Is it perhaps this unwillingness that impels him to maintain that one of the most anti-theist states in history was in fact itself a form of theism? Let us go further.
My brother argues that the personality cult of the Stalinists was itself a religion:
The solemn elevation of infallible leaders who were a source of endless bounty and blessing; the permanent search for heretics and schismatics; the mummification of dead leaders as icons and relics; the lurid show trials that elicited incredible confessions by means of torture…none of this was very difficult to interpret in traditional terms.6
This is an elegant evasion of the point. Had their only concern been a need for a belief system that prostrated itself before them, the Bolsheviks did in fact have to handle the body known as the “Living Church” (see chap. 13). This group of collaborationists was composed of priests and bishops who were more than ready to place Orthodox Christianity at the disposal of the Council of People’s Commissars. But after having served the Bolsheviks by splitting and weakening the Orthodox Church, the leaders of the Living Church were arrested (and presumably murdered in prison, since no more was heard of them) in the early 1930s. The same thing happened to their Jewish equivalents, the “Yevseksiy” (Jewish sections of the Communist Party). These were wound up in 1929, their functionaries purged in 1937. In this case it is recorded that their chairman, Semyon Dimanshtein, was shot in captivity.
The rulers of the cowed and submissive church during Stalin’s wartime relaxation (and afterward) were also placemen of the regime, penetrated by the secret police and pitifully willing to abase themselves in return for survival. But they were called on for help only when the state was in such peril from the armies of Hitler that it had to evacuate its capital to Kuibyshev (and the mummy of Lenin to Tyumen) in 1941. Visitors to Moscow can still see the monument marking the Germans’ farthest advance into the city outskirts, a line of gigantic Dragons’ Teeth in what is now the suburb of Khimki, shockingly close to Red Square. Stalin genuinely and rightly feared defeat and humiliating death. Without that terror, he would never have called on the church.
Many of the clergy and church members, having been the slaves of the Tsars, would no doubt have been ready to make terms with the new government if they had been given the chance to do so. I noted earlier that among the leaders of the Living Church were creatures of this sort. Their discreditable record during the old regime (which I for one make no attempt to deny) showed that they were corruptible. Such a concordat would have been considerably easier and quicker than the course the Bolsheviks did in fact adopt. But no such thing took place. Instead—under the Carthaginian peace of Brest-Litovsk, during civil war, during the unsuccessful invasion of Poland and the defeat that resulted, during the great famines, and even during their death-grapple with the Third Reich—the Communist authorities continued to try to stop the teaching of the Gospels to children, to mock and harry the celebration of Christmas, and to drive the very idea of God out of the national mind. They may, from time to time, have been happy for the people to revere the dead Lenin or the living Stalin, but it was not central to their propaganda. In my time in Moscow, when Marxism-Leninism had run down like an unwound clock and was barely functioning, the mummy of Lenin was no more than a tourist curiosity. The local cinema bore poet-playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky’s famous pseudo-religious slogan, “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!” although I do not think anyone took the second two declarations literally or even metaphorically.
But never at any stage were the Communist authorities willing to allow children in their care to revere Christ born, Christ crucified, and Christ risen. And they never relented from their ultimate aim of installing a wholly materialist, scientistic consciousness in the minds of the people under their rule.
Intelligent revolutionaries are always most interested in the young. They know that the ideas and characters of mature adults are generally fully formed and cannot easily be changed, though they can be expensively and painfully terrified, suborned, and cajoled into acting against those ideas. But they also know that, if they can control the schools and the youth movements, they can stamp out unwelcome beliefs in a generation or two.
Adolf Hitler at one stage told his opponents that they might rage at him if they wished but he did not care, because their children would, in a few years, be his and not theirs. “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I say calmly, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.’”7 Stalin and Mussolini similarly took a great deal of trouble over the young. There were things they did not want them to know or to hear.
It is notable that my brother’s work and that of Richard Dawkins8 coincide closely on one striking point. My brother devotes a chapter to the question “Is religion child abuse?” Amid a multitude of fulminations about circumcision, masturbation, and frightening children with stories of hell, he lets slip what I suspect is his actual point: “If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.” This is perfectly true, as is his earlier statement that “the obsession with children, and with rigid control over their upbringing, has been part of every system of absolute authority.” There is a revealing assumption buried in these statements and also in the opening part of the chapter, in which he says, “We can be sure that religion has always hoped to practise upon the unformed and undefended minds of the young, and has gone to great lengths to make sure of this privilege by making alliances with secular powers in the material world.” Does he realize that he is here describing Soviet Communism?
There is something tellingly odd and incomplete about this statement. Religion is most generally introduced to children, not by the state but by their own parents, who love them and believe that faith will benefit them.9 This most certainly happened before there were any schools even in advanced countries. In Britain, the churches created schools (where attendance was voluntary) before the state did, and the political battle between state and church over who should control these schools continues to this day. In the USA, the public schools were set up in many cases as a secular “American” counter to Roman Catholic parochial schools. The American home schooling movement exists mainly because parents, not churches, and certainly not the state, desire a religious upbringing for their young that the state is not willing to provide.
Therefore, in two of the freest countries of the world, the claim that the church has sought to keep the privilege of education by making alliances with the secular power is much less than the whole truth. In totalitarian states, by contrast, either the church has been forced into such arrangements through Concordats and suffered as a result, or it has been brusquely ordered from the schools and loaded with restrictions designed to undermine domestic religion and indeed attack the family itself.
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins still allows the deity his initial capital letter, but he too has a lengthy section on “Physical and Mental Abuse.”10 He recounts how “in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.” Dawkins has repeated these sentiments on several other occasions. For instance, he declared on the “Sunday Edition,” a British TV program, “What I really object to is—and I think it’s actually abusive to children—is to take a tiny child and say ‘You are a Christian child or you are a Muslim child.’ I think it is wicked if children are told ‘You are a member of such and such a faith simply because your parents are.’”
The word abuse used here by both Richard Dawkins and my brother is far stronger than it first seems to be. In modern Britain and slightly less so in the USA, an accusation of “child abuse” is devastating to the accused. It is almost universally assumed to be true. Juries and the media are instantly prejudiced against the defendant before any evidence has been heard. To suggest that any person so charged may be innocent is to risk being accused of abuse oneself. It has been suggested to me by several correspondents that the charge has often been used by women in divorce cases in order to secure custody of the children, because it is so effective in achieving this, in that it instantly turns the balance against the accused man.
To use the expression “child abuse” in this context—of religious education by parents or teachers—is to equate such education with a universally hated crime. Such language prepares the way for intolerance and, quite possibly, legal restrictions on the ability of parents to pass on their faith to their children, just as they are increasingly restricted in disciplining them. If Professor Dawkins genuinely believes what he said to the Dublin audience, then he should logically believe that “bringing the child up Catholic” should be a criminal offense attracting a long term of imprisonment and public disgrace. If he does not mean this, what does he mean by the use of such wildly inflated language, and what is he trying to achieve by it?
And what is my brother doing, coincidentally asking “Is Religion Child Abuse?” in his competing anti-theist volume? Interestingly, he does not really answer his own inquiry. The chapter, promising a bold answer to a bold question, never delivers what it seems to offer. It drains away into some ramblings on the subject of evolution, circumcision, masturbation, and the actual sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests. I will not be trapped into defending them; their actions were atrocious, particularly because of who and what they were, and the Roman Catholic Church has been feeble in dealing with them. But it can hardly be claimed that they were the only people ever to abuse children sexually or cover it up, or that they were in any way following the dictates of their church. In fact, most of this abuse involves homosexual assaults on pubescent boys, of the kind (not remotely connected with religion) that occurred at my private school. This fact is neglected at least partly because it is no longer respectable to disapprove of homosexuality as such, and many homosexual liberationists campaign for ever-lower ages of consent—which would bring such offenses perilously close to being legal, especially given the feebleness with which the current age of consent is policed. Yet the church is simultaneously criticized by its foes for being against homosexual acts and for failing to act strongly enough against such acts, committed against its own code, by a minority of its own priests. There is a whiff of having it both ways here.
State-run homes for children have no doubt had their share of sexual abuse, but this has never been used as an argument against the existence of the state, nor would it be a very good argument if it were.
The use of this claim that religious instruction is a form of child abuse in an argument for atheism is propaganda, not reason. It is, as John Henry Newman once said of Charles Kingsley, “poisoning the wells.” We read to the young, show them beautiful things, introduce them to good manners, warn them against dangers, teach them their letters and multiplication tables, and make them learn poetry by heart, precisely because they are most impressionable in childhood—and therefore best able to learn these things then, in many cases long before they can possibly understand why they matter. In the same way, we warn them against various dangers that they cannot possibly understand. It is also true, as I think most observant parents know, that children are much more interested in the universe and the fundamental questions of existence than are adults.
So this is the moment at which we try to pass on to them our deepest beliefs, and the moment when they are most likely to receive them. As Philip Pullman has rightly said,” ‘Once upon a time…’ is always a more effective instructor than ‘Thou Shalt Not…,’” so we do this most effectively with stories. But if we ourselves believe—and are asked by our own children what we believe—we will tell them, and they will instantly know if we mean it and also know how much it matters to us. They will learn from this that belief is a good thing. We will also try to find schools that will at the very least not undermine the morals and faith of the home. And for this, we are to be called abusers of children? This has the stench of totalitarian slander, paving the road to suppression and persecution.
By contrast, I say unequivocally that if a man wishes to bring his child up as an atheist, he should be absolutely free to do so. I am confident enough of the rightness of Christianity to believe that such a child may well learn later (though with more difficulty than he deserves) that he has been misled. But it is ridiculous to pretend that it is a neutral act to inform an infant that the heavens are empty, that the universe is founded on chaos rather than love, and that his grandparents, on dying, have ceased altogether to exist. I personally think it wrong to tell children such things, because I believe them to be false and wrong and roads to misery of various kinds. But in a free country, parents should be able to do so. In return, I ask for the same consideration for religious parents.
However, the new anti-theism is emphatically not just an opinion seeking its place in a plural society. It is a dogmatic tyranny in the making. I can see no purpose in the suggestion that religion is itself child abuse, apart from an attempt by atheists to create the atmosphere in which religious instruction of children can be regulated and perhaps prevented by law.
This is not speculation on my part. Professor Dawkins is surprisingly explicit about his own intolerance. He returned to the same theme in an article entitled “Religion’s Real Child Abuse.”11 In this he provided a strong clue to his own convictions when he enthusiastically advertised an astonishing lecture delivered by a man he plainly regards with approval. Dawkins writes:
“What shall we tell the children?” is a superb polemic on how religions abuse the minds of children, by the distinguished psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. It was originally delivered as a lecture in aid of Amnesty International, and has now been reissued as a chapter of his book, The Mind Made Flesh, just published by Oxford University Press. It is also available on the worldwide web and I strongly recommend it.12 Humphrey argues that, in the same way as Amnesty works tirelessly to free political prisoners the world over, we should work to free the children of the world from the religions which, with parental approval, damage minds too young to understand what is happening to them. He is right, and the same lesson should inform our discussions of the current paedophile brouhaha. Priestly groping of child bodies is disgusting. But it may be less harmful in the long run than priestly subversion of child minds.
Turning to Mr. Humphrey’s lecture, we find the standard introduction always given by those who demand a restriction on freedom of speech. That is, he proclaims his strong support for freedom of speech, except in this one little case:
Freedom of speech is too precious a freedom to be meddled with. And however painful some of its consequences may sometimes be for some people, we should still as a matter of principle resist putting curbs on it. By all means we should try to make up for the harm that other people’s words do, but not by censoring the words as such.
And, since I am so sure of this in general, and since I’d expect most of you to be so too, I shall probably shock you when I say it is the purpose of my lecture tonight to argue in one particular area just the opposite. To argue, in short, in favour of censorship, against freedom of expression, and to do so moreover in an area of life that has traditionally been regarded as sacrosanct.
I am talking about moral and religious education. And especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed—even expected—to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong. Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas—no matter who these other people are.
Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith. In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon. That’s the negative side of what I want to say. But there will be a positive side as well. If children have a right to be protected from false ideas, they have too a right to be succoured by the truth. And we as a society have a duty to provide it. Therefore we should feel as much obliged to pass on to our children the best scientific and philosophical understanding of the natural world—to teach, for example, the truths of evolution and cosmology, or the methods.13
Like all repressive arguments advanced by supposedly liberal minds, this one is repellently slippery. Note how moral and religious education are immediately characterized as dogma and superstition, dismissed automatically as “narrow.” Note how Bible literalism is assumed and then equated with astrology. Note how a few words later this is bracketed with the knocking out of teeth and imprisonment in a dungeon. Note the assertion that those ideas he disapproves are “false.”
Further on in the same diatribe come the other confusions so beloved of the anti-theist front. Before we know where we are, the guilt-by-association smear has been deployed once again and we are on to female genital mutilation and alleged censorship:
Let’s suppose indeed that this is a lecture about female circumcision. And the issue is not whether anyone should be permitted to deny a girl knowledge of Darwin, but whether anyone should be permitted to deny her the uses of a clitoris. And now here I am suggesting that it is a girl’s right to be left intact, that parents have no right to mutilate their daughters to suit their own socio-sexual agenda, and that we as a society ought to prevent it. What’s more, to make the positive case as well, that every girl should actually be encouraged to find out how best to use to her own advantage the intact body she was born with.
First, the suggestion seems to be that religious people support genital mutilation. Then such mutilation is equated with denials of the knowledge of Darwin—which Christians do not seek to bring about smear upon smear upon smear.
I cannot reproduce the whole monstrous thing here (it is readily available through two clicks of a computer mouse), but I feel I should reproduce Humphrey’s attempt to counter the doubts that some of his audience might have.
“Let me catch the question from the back of the hall, which I imagine goes something like this: “How’d you like it if some Big Brother were to insist on your children being taught his beliefs? How’d you like it if I tried to impose my personal ideology on your little girl?” I have the answer: that teaching science isn’t like that, it’s not about teaching someone else’s beliefs, it’s about encouraging the child to exercise her powers of understanding to arrive at her own beliefs.”14
So there. His belief, as my brother also insists, is not a belief. He is not Big Brother. That is some other person. How can we know? It is just the blindingly obvious truth. So why can’t you see it, you unteachable moron? Which has been the starting point of the secret policeman and the Inquisition merchant (see, I’m against the Spanish Inquisition, too, as any English school-boy reared on tales of Drake and Raleigh and Grenville must be) down all the centuries.
Which brings me neatly back to the Soviet state, which also crushed liberty of thought in the name of enlightenment. In answering the question, “Why did the Soviet state not compromise with religion?” I must also challenge the linked idea that the worship of human power is identical to the worship of almighty God. This is often stated by my brother, who claims that North Korea’s leader worship is identical to religion, except that “at least you can die in North Korea.” How does it differ? Quite fundamentally.
Roger Scruton, commenting on Maximilien Robespierre’s bizarre Festival of the Supreme Being, remarked that the “supreme Being” seemed to be conveniently similar to Robes-pierre’s idea of the Revolution in its character and demands—whereas the Christian is “answerable for his soul to God and to no earthly master.”15 Edmund Burke similarly once said that one who truly feared God (admittedly quite a difficult thing to do) feared nothing and nobody else. At least you can get to heaven from a North Korean labor camp or torture chamber. You may also be able to arrive in hell from a North Korean palace. And if you believe that, then the Great Leader has no power to control you. According to the believer, God’s commandments and requirements exist outside time and cannot be amended even by Kim Il Sung. If we love the thing that God commands and desire the things he promises, then we too can live outside time and beyond the reach of Stalin, Kim, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, or the rest—as their dungeons prove.
Even unbelievers have to recognize that God, whether he exists or not, predates earthly dictators and tends to survive them. God’s laws and Christian morals do the same. If God is not dethroned and his laws not revoked, he represents an important rival to the despot’s authority, living in millions of hearts. If he cannot be driven out of hearts, total control by the state is impossible. This may seem trivial to us in our secularized societies still benefiting from the freedoms that flowed from centuries of Christianity. We have forgotten how we arrived at our civilized state. Religion has retreated to far fringes of daily life, and death, its great ally, is hidden behind screens. But it was certainly not so for the Russian revolutionaries or Western European Marxists, who recognized early on that there would be no equivalent of the Bolshevik takeover in Germany, France, Italy, or Britain—because the peoples of the European continent, well-informed about revolution, were too much in love with Christianity, liberty, and legality to believe in any utopia.
Robespierre disagreed with his fellow revolutionaries about how to replace the church, and it is arguable that they murdered him in case he began to think that he was himself God. By doing so, they murdered the French Revolution, since Robespierre embodied the state. Thus the state, being all-powerful and vested in him, could not survive his death. But Robespierre, being mortal, did not rise again, nor did the French Revolution, which has been worshiped in theory and ignored in practice ever since by Frenchmen who know only too well what “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” really mean in practice. The more ordinary Jacobins—especially Jacques Hebert and Joseph Fouche—wanted to extirpate religion while they reinvented the world as a kingdom of decimalized reason, in which everything could be divided by the number of toes a man has, and in which God did not exist because he could not be divided by ten or charted by an astrolabe. Both Hebert and Fouche demonstrated in bloody practice that they believed that laws were dead, humans were mammals rather than made in the image of God (and so expendable), and man was in a state of nature where he could do what he liked in the name of the revolution.
It is clear from the history of Soviet persecution of Christianity that the Bolsheviks were extirpators too. Stalin was certainly a new Tsar, in that he was all-powerful and the foundation of the state. But he could not be a new God, because the revolution had deliberately killed God and made any other deity impossible—thoroughly and intentionally. So when Stalin died in 1953, that state had nothing but force and fear, sausage, vodka, medals, and wartime patriotism to keep it alive. And when the force failed and the fear weakened, and the sausage and the vodka ran out, and nobody wanted medals any more, that state died. Since its failure, attempts to rebuild it as a proper civil society have failed. There are many reasons for its descent into crude autocracy, its continuing reliance on the Lenin cult, and the prevalence of organized crime, drunken disorder, universal dishonesty, cultural decay, devastated family life, and corruption. But one of the most important must be the absence of conscience and self-restraint among even its educated people, and the vacuum where the rule of law ought to be.
The League of the Militant Godless had done their work too well. In the names of reason, science, and liberty they had proved, rather effectively, that good societies need God to survive and that when you have murdered him, starved him, silenced him, denied him to the children, and erased his festivals and his memory, you have a gap that cannot indefinitely be filled by any human, nor anything made by human hands.
Must we discover this all over again? I fear so. A new and intolerant utopianism seeks to drive the remaining traces of Christianity from the laws and constitutions of Europe and North America. This time, it does so mainly in the cause of personal liberation, born in the 1960s cultural revolution, and now inflamed into special rage by any suggestion that the sexual urge should be restrained by moral limits or that it should have any necessary connection with procreation. This utopianism relies for human goodness on doctrines of human rights derived from human desires and—like all such codes—full of conflicts between the differing rights of different groups. These must then be policed by an ever more powerful state. A new elite, wealthy and comfortable beyond the fantasies of any previous generation, abandons penal codes (especially against the possession of narcotics) and abolishes marital fidelity so as to license its own comfortable, padded indulgence, and it therefore permits the same freedoms to the poor, who suffer far more from this dangerous liberty than do the rich.
Inevitably, it is the Christian churches who are the last strongholds of resistance to this change. Yet they are historically weak, themselves infiltrated by secular liberalism, full of uncertainty and diffidence. The overthrow of Christian education is a real possibility in our generation. The removal of Christianity from broadcasting and public ceremonies is almost complete. Expressions of Christian opinion or prayer in public premises can be punished in Britain under new codes that enjoin a post-Christian code of “equality and diversity” on all public servants. Secularists are equating the teaching of religion with child abuse and laying the foundations for it to be restricted by law. Britain’s next monarch is likely to be crowned in a multi-faith ceremony whose main significance will be that it will be the first Coronation not to be explicitly Christian in more than a thousand years. The Rage against God is loose and is preparing to strip the remaining altars when it is strong enough.
1God Is Not Great (New York: Twelve, 2007), 246.
2Uncommon Knowledge, “National Review Online” (August 2009), http:// tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge. See Service, Trotsky: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 2009).
3In a PBS interview for the “Heaven on Earth” series, 2005.
4A description of my departure from this view can be found in my 2009 book The Broken Compass.
5The Nation (July 31, 1920).
6God Is Not Great (New York: Twelve, 2007), 246.
7From a speech on November 6, 1933.
8The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006).
9It is interesting that this was not the case in either Christopher’s childhood or mine, in which religion was always associated with school and authority rather than with our home.
10Page 315.
11Published on “RichardDawkins.net” on May 15, 2006.
12I recommend it as well, but for different reasons.
13The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 291.
14Ibid., 316.
15The Times, London, 10 July, 1989. See www.alor.org/Britain/…and www .vanguardnewsnetwork.com/letters/100304letters.htm.