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.
The Undeniable Link between Atheism and Anti-Theist Regimes
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.
Christianity and the Third Reich
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 Nat
ional 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.
CHAPTER 10
“Is it Possible to Determine What Is Right and What Is Wrong without God?”
“I will run the way of thy commandments when thou hast set my heart at liberty.”
(THE 119TH PSALM)
The second atheist problem is the unbelievers’ assertion that it is possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God. They have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute, a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter. On this misunderstanding is based my brother Christopher’s supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person and not done by a Godless one. Like all such questions, this contains another question—what is good, and who is to decide what is good?
Left to themselves, human beings can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities, the mass deportation—accompanied by slaughter, disease, and starvation—of inconvenient people, and the mass murder of the unborn. I have heard people who believe themselves to be good defend all these things and convince themselves as well as others. Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigor.
I have done both of these things myself. The Second World War, in which the good side committed dreadful crimes and the bad side worse ones, is a constant source of such confusion. And, as it is so often used as a model for new interventionist wars, it continues to influence the actions and fates of millions. Anyone who speaks the unpleasant truth about that war, and especially about the bombing of civilians, is met to this day with rage and resentment, just as is anyone who draws attention to the unpleasant truth about abortion (the one act of violence that British television refuses to show).
It is plain even from these few recent examples that for a moral code to be effective, the code must be attributed to, and vested in, a non-human source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself. If that non-human source can be shown to be false, then the moral code that it endorses cannot be absolute. It will become a matter of choice, or have to be kept in place by the threat of force, or a mixture of both, like any other code of human invention.
In their attempt to argue that effective and binding codes can be developed without a deity, atheists often mistake inferior codes of “common decency” for absolute moral systems. The Golden Rule, or doing as you would be done by, is such a code. But the fact that people can arrive at the Golden Rule without religion does not mean that they can arrive at the Christian moral code without religion. Christianity requires much more and, above all, does not expect to see charity returned. To “love thy neighbor as thyself” is a far greater and more complicated obligation, requiring a positive effort to seek the good of others, often in secret, sometimes at great cost, and always without reward. Its most powerful expression is summed up in the words “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13 KJV). The huge differences that can be observed between Christian societies and all others, even in the twilit afterglow of Christianity, originate in this specific injunction.
It is striking that in his dismissal of a need for absolute theistic morality, my brother Christopher states that “the order to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself is too extreme and too strenuous to be obeyed”1 Humans, he says, “are not so constituted as to care for others as much as themselves.” This is demonstrably untrue and can be shown to be untrue—first, through the unshakeable devotion of mothers to their children; through thousands of examples of doctors and nurses risking (and undergoing) infection and death in the course of caring for others; in the uncounted cases of husbands caring for sick, incontinent, and demented wives (and vice versa) at their lives’ ends; through the heartrending deeds of courage on the battlefield, of men actually laying down their lives for others. We all know that these things happen. If we are honest, they make us uncomfortable because we are not sure that we could do such things, though we know them to be right and admirable.
In a society where the absolute code has been jettisoned and we have all become adept at making excuses for shirking such duties, selflessness of this kind will become less common, nursing less dedicated, wives more inclined to leave their babbling husbands in care homes to be looked after impersonally by paid strangers and perhaps encouraged gently down the slope of death, and soldiers readier to save themselves while their comrades lie in pain within reach of the enemy. And there will always be a worldly relativist on hand (as there already is at every marriage break-up and every abortion clinic and increasingly by the bedside of the old and sick) to say that this is only sensible, to urge that we do the easy thing, and to say that it is right to do so.
Christianity is without doubt difficult and taxing, and all of us fail to emulate the perfection of Christ himself. But we are far better for trying than for not trying, and we know that there is forgiveness available for honest failure. My brother’s suggestion that we are urged to be superhuman “on pain of death and torture” reveals a misunderstanding both of the nature of the commandments and of the extent of forgiveness. There is also some excuse-making involved. The difficult is being described as superhuman. Yes, there is fear in the Christian constitution, as there must be in any system of law and justice. I should be dismayed if deliberate, unrepentant wickedness did not lead to retribution of some kind. But there is far more love offered for those who honestly attempt to follow the law, and unbounded forgiveness for all who seek it—even those who have most vigorously defamed the faith and then embrace it just before the darkness falls. And that is why, while it is perfectly possible for convinced atheists to do absolutely good deeds at great cost to themselves—not least because God so very much wishes them to—it is rather more likely that believing Christians will do such things. And when it comes to the millions of small and tedious good deeds that are needed for a society to function with charity, honesty, and kindness, a shortage of believing Christians will lead to that society’s decay.
We can live at a low level of cooperation by mutual consideration. But as soon as we move beyond subsistence and the smallest units, problems arise that cannot be resolved by mutual decency. Some people grow richer, some are stronger, some acquire weapons. Power comes into being at a very early stage in human society. So do greed, competition for scarce resources, and wars with other groups. Mutual benefit ceases to offer any k
ind of guide to behavior. Who is to say, in a city ruled by a single powerful and ruthless family from an impregnable fortress, that the strongest man is not also always right? In fact, the Godless principle that the strongest is always right has been openly declared as recently as the twentieth century in Mussolini’s Italy and operated in practice in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and many other states.
In wars, men are repeatedly asked to undertake acts of self-less courage that they will not themselves survive. Men are expected to be responsible for the women who bear their children, for as long as they live. Women in return are expected to be faithful to those men. For economies to develop, men must be trusted to guard valuables that are not their own. Again and again, for civilization to exist and advance, human creatures are required to do things that they would not do “naturally” as mammals. Marriage is unnatural. Building for the future is unnatural. The practice of medicine is unnatural. The deferment of immediate gratification for a greater reward is unnatural. Charity is unnatural. Education is unnatural. Literacy is unnatural, as is the passing on of lore and history from one generation to another. The Beaver may be able to build a dam, but it has always been the same dam, and it will always be the same dam. Only mankind can advance from making huts out of branches to building the Parthenon (and only mankind can fall back from the Parthenon to shacks and caves).
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