This dismal period made talk of victory seem especially hollow in a country that was still damaged and exhausted by six years of total war. It brought home to those who had not yet understood it the great decline of the country as an economic and political power. The church, associated with discredited authority and supplanted by an increasingly social (as opposed to individual) conscience and social gospel, went into accelerated decline as the pre-war generations of habitual worshipers slowly died away. At around this time, the great missions of Billy Graham to Britain laid the foundations of a new evangelism that has in recent years become a major force in the English church. And the Roman Catholic Church, with its comparatively uncompromising position, seduced many thoughtful English Christians from the increasingly relativistic and agnostic established Church of England. But that established church itself lost authority and, though still present in every corner of England, spoke to and for fewer and fewer people.
It was the 1940s revolutionary period of nationalization, rationing, and growing state power that gave George Orwell the imaginative background for 1984, his novel about a perpetual socialist future of oppression, regimentation, and shortage. It was coupled with one of the most thorough-going attempts to introduce a socialist state ever attempted in a free country with the rule of law and an elected Parliament. The Labour government elected in 1945, with a huge Parliamentary majority, had many of the characteristics of a revolution, nationalizing private property and centralizing state power, greatly increasing the direct role of government in the national life in a way never before attempted in peacetime (though familiar from the recent war).
Many of that government’s measures were popular, not least the creation of a National Health Service, which made most doctors employees of the state but gave the poor guaranteed free medical treatment. Many of these changes had their roots in English and Scottish radicalism, not in Marxism or Communism, and were inspired by Christian sentiments. The wartime Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, had considered himself a Christian Socialist, and much of the Church of England believed that the 1945 Labour government was enacting Christian legislation and turning the country into an ideal Christian society. One effect of this was that the church relinquished control of many of its secondary schools to the state (a mistake the Roman Catholics did not make), in return for the promise of a daily act of Christian worship in all schools—a promise that would be extensively broken within a few decades.
A commitment to social welfare at home and liberal anticolonialism abroad became, in many cases, an acceptable substitute for Christian faith. It is very much so today.
Britain began a long and rather strange era in which it was simultaneously conservative and socialist. Many of its institutions, customs, and traditions were conservative in character, but its government was egalitarian and radical. The conservative elements in the country were strengthened artificially by the outbreak of the Cold War, which identified the more extreme forms of socialism with the national enemy in Moscow. Thus the political conflict between growing secular egalitarianism and the remaining fortresses of Christian conservatism was left unresolved for decades. During this time, the weakness of Christianity among the people and in the schools grew, and cultural revolution of all kinds (described in my 1999 book, The Abolition of Britain) continued at all levels.
During the 1960s Christianity was slowly, by gradual degrees, driven into the margins even when religious matters were under discussion. A new generation of teachers, many of them not themselves Christian in any serious way, did not wish to obey the law requiring a daily act of Christian worship in state schools. A revolutionary reorganization of these schools in the 1960s and 1970s, combined with an official decision to widen the recruitment of teachers, coincided with the cultural revolution of the same period. At around the same time, Britain began to absorb (or in many cases fail to absorb) large numbers of migrants from the Indian subcontinent who were not Christian.
On the grounds of good manners, many teachers and local government authorities felt unable to continue to behave as if Christianity were the national religion. It is difficult to tell whether this was motivated in all or most cases by a kindly tactfulness, an attempt at tolerance, or a disguised desire to weaken Christianity, which found multiculturalism a convenient excuse. This led over time to absurd paradoxes such as the existence in some parts of England of “Church of England” primary schools whose pupils are almost exclusively Muslim, thanks to the transformation of those areas by migrant populations. A belief in multiculturalism, promoted by those who disliked the Christian, patriotic monoculture of the country, became common among educationalists and among teachers themselves.
The very idea that Christianity could and should be taught as a belief that the teacher and pupils both shared became increasingly hard to sustain. If it was taught at all, Christianity was explained as something that other people might believe, but that listeners were not expected to embrace themselves. The headquarters of the BBC, the national broadcasting service, is dedicated to Almighty God and adorned with a scriptural exhortation to pursue “whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are true and of good report” (quaecunque pulchra sunt et sincera, quaecunque bonae famae). Yet in recent years BBC announcers began to say of Easter not that it celebrated the Resurrection of Christ but that on this day “Christians celebrate their belief in the resurrection of Christ,” or similar neutral formulations.
Had Britain not until recently been a specifically Christian country, these changes would not be so striking. The transition from official Christianity to official religious neutrality has been cautious and gradual and, as such things often are, noticed only by the more committed. It remains incomplete, but the process is clearly visible to the observant. On the main radio channel, a daily Christian service is transmitted but only on the little-used Long-Wave frequency. The confident evangelism of “Lift Up Your Hearts” has been supplanted by a “Thought for the Day,” in which Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus—and the occasional Christian—communicate vapid thoughts on general subjects. The singing of an Easter hymn on the morning of Easter Day appears to have been quietly discontinued. There are religious programs, but often these take the form of a neutral or hostile discussion of religious current affairs, featuring long items about Roman Catholic priests abusing children or Anglican arguments about homosexuality. Alternatively, they show gatherings of elderly people singing hymns. Recently the corporation appointed a Muslim as its head of religious broadcasting.
These things have happened, not because of the rage against religion in Britain (though such a rage is increasingly common among the intelligentsia for reasons I shall come to), but because the British establishment has ceased to be Christian and has inherited a society with Christian forms and traditions. It does not know what to do with them or how to replace them. Into this confusion and emptiness the new militant secularists now seek to bring an aggressive atheism.
Part 2
Addressing The Three Failed Arguments of Atheism
CHAPTER 9
“Are Conflicts Fought in the Name of Religion Conflicts about Religion?”
“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.
Conflicts between European Christians
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.
Conflicts between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Middle East
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?
Conflicts between Christians and Muslims in the Balkans
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 u
sed 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 Rage Against God Page 10