Mankind’s immense artistic talent is visible in the paintings on the walls of the Cro-Magnon caves of Lascaux. The sublime heights to which that talent can rise in the midst of a great Christian civilization can be seen in the works of the Italian and Flemish masters. The debasement of that talent by the rejection of the very springs and origin of civilization can likewise be seen in much of the work of modern artists.
Christian societies as a whole are “unnatural,” requiring a host of actions that cannot be based on self-interest, however enlightened, or even on mutual obligation. Meanwhile, the more civilized a society is, the more power is available within it. Power cannot be destroyed, only divided and distributed. It may shatter into an anarchic war of all against all. Or it may solidify into a tyranny. Or it may be resolved into a free society governed by universally acknowledged laws. But on what basis can this be done? What agency can be used to place law above force? A law that does not stand above brute force and have some sort of power that can overcome brute force will not survive for long. How are inconvenient obligations, those of the banker and the messenger and the merchant, to be made binding? How are the young to be made to accept the authority of parents and teachers, once they are physically strong enough to ignore them, but too inexperienced in life to know the value of peace and learning?
The answer, from a very early stage, is that such contracts were made binding by solemn promises sworn in the name of Almighty God and, as Abraham Lincoln used to say of his Presidential Oath, “registered in heaven.” These oaths called into every contract an external power—one whose awful vengeance no man could escape if he defied it, and which he would be utterly ashamed to break. As Sir Thomas More explains in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, when a man swears an oath, “He’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again.”
In their utter reverence for oaths, men of More’s era were in my view as superior to us as the builders of Chartres Cathedral were to the builders of shopping malls. Our ancestors’ undisturbed faith gave them a far closer, healthier relation to the truth—and so to beauty—than we have. Without a belief in God and the soul, where is the oath? Without the oath, where is the obligation or the pressure to fulfill it? Where is the law that even kings must obey? Where is Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, or the Bill of Rights, all of which arose out of attempts to rule by lawless tyranny? Where is the lifelong fidelity of husband and wife? Where is the safety of the innocent child growing in the womb? Where, in the end, is the safety of any of us from those currently bigger and stronger than we are?
And how striking it is that such oaths were used to make us better, not worse, and that the higher power, the magnetic north of moral truth, found an invariable answer in the urgings of conscience. These things are far higher than the mutuality and “human solidarity” on which atheists must rely for morality—because they specifically deny the existence of any other origin for it.
This is not, alas, an argument for or against the existence of God, though it might just be an argument for the existence of good, with humankind left wondering how to discover what is good and what good is. It simply states the price that may sooner or later have to be paid for presuming that God does not exist and then removing him from human affairs.
It also sets out the important benefit that can be obtained by placing God at the heart of a society. I should have thought that those who are serious about their unbelief would be relieved by this logic and glad to concede it. If they know, or are reasonably certain, that there is no ultimate authority and no judgment issuing from some unalterable law, they are instantly quite extraordinarily free. But this freedom is as available to monsters and power-seekers as it is to advanced intellectuals dwelling in comfortable suburbs. And that leads to the state of affairs correctly summed up by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who in 1933 proclaimed from among the lovely towers and groves of the university at Freiburg-im-Breisgau that “The Führer, and he alone, is the present and future law of Germany.” Alas, he was absolutely right, and Adolf Hitler himself had to be destroyed before that law could be canceled.
If atheists or anti-theists have the good fortune to live in a society still governed by religious belief, or even its afterglow, they may feel free from absolute moral bonds, while those around them are not. This is a tremendous liberation for anyone who is even slightly selfish. And what clever person is not imaginatively and cunningly selfish?
Oddly enough, very few atheists are as delighted by this prospect as they ought to be. At least they are not delighted openly or in public. Could this be because they really do not grasp this astonishingly simple point, based as it is on their own insistence that the most plausible external source of law and morality does not exist? Why create such a difficulty for themselves at all? Might it be because they fear that, by admitting their delight at the non-existence of good and evil, they are revealing something of their motives for their belief? Could it be that the last thing on earth they wish to acknowledge is that they have motives for their belief, since by doing so they would open up their flanks to attack?
One interesting answer to this question of “why do atheists want there to be no God?” comes from Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University and no friend of religion. In his book The Last Word, Nagel writes,2
Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a true and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable. The thought that the relation between the mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous.
Nagel then says:
I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.
In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.
According to Professor Nagel, who has no ulterior motive for saying so, this fear has produced some poor science among his fellow unbelievers:
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind.
And he even notes in an important aside a problem that many Christians, who are also physicists, have observed:
There might still be thought to be a religious threat in the existence of the laws of physics themselves, and indeed the existence of anything at all—but it seems to be less alarming to most atheists.
This is the sort of argument I personally long to hear from atheists—one that recognizes the possible attractions to the intelligent mind of the religious explanation rather than denouncing all religious belief as stupid. Nagel, disappointingly, has little to say about the precise source of the fear he describes. Why would anyone fear the idea of God? I can think of many reasons, myself, usually concerned with the annoying and lingering possibility of divine punishment for unexpiated wrongdoing. But we must not m
ention this in the twenty-first century. In a footnote, Nagel says he
won’t attempt to speculate about the Oedipal and other sources of either this desire or its opposite. (About the latter there has already been considerable speculation—Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, for example.) I am curious, however, whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God—anyone who, whatever his actual belief about the matter, doesn’t particularly want either one of the answers to be correct (though of course he might want to know which answer was correct).
I would counter, as a believer, that I most definitely have motives for my belief. I believe in God and the Christian religion at least partly because it suits me to do so. I prefer to believe that I live in an ordered universe with a purpose that I can at least partly discover. I derive my ideas of what is absolutely true and what is absolutely right from this source. I need these ideas many times each day. How else can I function as a parent, as a citizen, as a reporter? I should be desolated if it could ever be proved that theism is false. But I am human, fallen and flawed, so I am slippery about this faith (which has a reasonably good effect on me when I try hard to follow it, but can be a great nuisance to me when I wish to follow the devices and desires of my own heart).
From time to time I also try to wriggle out of the laws to which I have sworn obedience. I then reject parts of the teaching of my faith, those parts that condemn what I want to think or say or do. I can usually find clever and ingenious arguments for doing this. I invariably do so because it suits me personally. In this, I am doing exactly what the atheist does, only not to the same extent, because I do not actively wish for disorder and meaninglessness, and I recognize that if I pull down the pillars of the moral universe, I too will be crushed when the roof falls. So I follow my failure with regret and hope for forgiveness (yet again). This is an argument for the belief that humanity is imperfect and fallen, not a condemnation of faith or of God. And in all my experience of life, I have seldom seen a more powerful argument for the fallen nature of man, and his inability to achieve perfection, than those countries in which man set himself up to replace God with the state.
* * *
1God Is Not Great (New York: Twelve, 2007), 213.
2New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
CHAPTER 11
“Are Atheist States Not Actually Atheist?”
“Take heed, ye unwise among the people: O ye fools, when will ye understand?”
(THE 94TH PSALM)
Let us examine the strange problem of the Atheist states, which a ruthlessly honest Godless person must surely admit as a difficulty. After all, intelligent Christians must—if they are candid—accept that faith has often led to cruel violence and intolerant persecution. They may say, as I would, that this was because humans often misunderstand or misuse the teachings of the religions they follow. This is not because they are religious, but because Man is not great.
Atheists, in return, ought equally to concede that Godless regimes and movements have given birth to terrible persecutions and massacres. They do not do so, in my view, because in these cases the slaughter is not the result of a misunderstanding or excessive zeal. Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood. This is a far greater problem for the atheist than it is for the Christian, because the atheist uses this argument to try to demonstrate that religion specifically makes things worse than they otherwise would be. On the contrary, it demonstrates that our ability to be savage to our own kind cannot be wholly prevented by religion. More important still, Atheist states have a consistent tendency to commit mass murders in the name of the greater good.
It is difficult to claim that Christianity has learned nothing from its past cruelty or that such cruelty is written in its laws or prescribed by its beliefs. When did Christians last burn, strangle, or imprison each other for alleged errors of faith? By contrast, those who reject God’s absolute authority, preferring their own, are far more ready to persecute than Christians have been and have grown more included to do so over time. Each revolutionary generation reliably repeats the savagery. The Bolsheviks knew all about the French revolutionary terror, but that did not stop them having their own. The Chinese Communists knew all about Stalin’s intentional famine and five-year-plans, but they repeated the barbarity with the Great Leap Forward. The Khmer Rouge were not ignorant of their revolutionary forerunners, yet they repeated the evil worse than before. The supposedly enlightened revolution of Fidel Castro resorted swiftly to torture and arbitrary imprisonment and to the lawless purging and murder even of Castro’s old comrades such as Huber Matos. By comparison, where now do we see Christian churches or factions persecuting each other as they did in the Reformation or Counter-Reformation? Nowhere. The delusion of revolutionary progress, and the ruthlessness it justifies, survives any amount of experience. This suggests that terror and slaughter are inherent in utopian materialist revolutionary movements. There will be another of these episodes along soon. What, then, do we gain by rejecting God and worshiping ourselves instead?
But atheists cannot bear to look their faith’s faults full in the face. They cannot even admit that their dogmatic insistence that there is no God is in fact a faith, though they cannot possibly know if they are right. Their belief, apparently, is not even a belief. And so the escape clauses come thick and fast. If atheism in practice appears at any point to have had bad consequences, that is because it took on the character of religion. So this murder, that massacre, that purge just do not count. If religious people do good things with good consequences, that is because they are really atheists without knowing it.
We are told by my brother, for example, that Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was in fact a religious state. In the mouth of any other person, serving a cause other than the comfortable West’s rejection of self-restraint and divine law, such thin, self-serving stuff would produce scorn and mockery from the anti-religion advocates. As I show in a later chapter, the specifically anti-religious (and more specifically, anti-Christian) character of the Soviet system under Stalin makes such a claim nonsensical. To say that Stalin used many of the outward forms of religion is perfectly reasonable and true. But to claim that the outward forms are more important than the inward character is plainly false. It is precisely the inward character—submission to an earthly authority instead of an eternal authority—that makes all the difference.
The Humanist Cult in Stalin’s Russia and Kim Il Sung’s North Korea
Stalin’s system resembled religion in one important way. Stalin, who had been schooled in a seminary, wished to be worshiped—despite the fact that he was a man and not God. Kim Il Sung (brought up as a Protestant and an accomplished church organist) sought the same goal. Both men understood very well the power of religion over the human mind. Both deliberately chose not to use religion to sustain their regimes, as the Russian tsars had sought to do; they chose a far more difficult course. They hated faith in God so much that they instead destroyed it and supplanted it with a humanist cult that vested all power in themselves and that—unlike true religion—was bound to die.
In North Korea this did not involve as much destruction as in Russia, since Christianity was not so well-established there and ancient traditions, rather than a deity, tend to prevail. There is no war on these traditions as such, and especially not on ancestor-worship, since it does not conflict with the regime, but marches merrily alongside it.
By great good fortune I have witnessed, on a beautiful autumn morning, what seemed to be the entire population of Pyongyang streaming out of the city on bicycles and in buses, for the ancient Korean harvest festival of Chuseok, which involves (among other things) eating rice-cakes in the shape of the crescent moon and holding picnics amid the hilltop graves of your forefathers. No attempt was being made to suppress this survival, and in fact the people had worked the previous Sunday, by government order, so as to take the correct day off for the feast, a date governed by the moon rather than by the state. There was no m
enace in this prehistoric pagan rite to the authority of the Dear and Great Leaders. Why not? Because even if millions of people took part in it, it did not challenge the authority of State, Party, or Leader. No alternative allegiance was required. By contrast, a single secret celebration of Christian Holy Communion, involving three or four people honestly pledging themselves to be ruled by a rival authority, would—if discovered—have been suppressed with all the fury and venom the state could muster.
Stalin and Kim made human idols of themselves because they believed—as utopian idealists always do—in the ultimate goodness of themselves and the unchallengeable rightness of their decisions. There was no higher power, and so there could be no higher law. If people disagreed with them, it was because those people were in some way defective—insane, malignant, or mercenary. The rulers could not tolerate actual religion because they could not tolerate any rival authority or any rival source—or judge—of goodness, rectitude, and justice.
Modern revolutionaries frequently make a point of openly and specifically rejecting the very idea of absolute, unalterable goodness outside time and space. Bela Kun, whose Hungarian Soviet Republic mimicked Lenin’s Russian original, proclaimed that none of his acts were either moral or immoral. The only test of his state was whether it benefited the Proletariat. And he was the judge of that. George Lukacs, a Commissar for Culture and Education in Kun’s mercifully brief government, is credibly said once to have advised a comrade (Ilona Duczynska): “Communist ethics make it the highest duty to accept the necessity of acting wickedly. This is the greatest sacrifice the revolution asks from us. The conviction of the true Communist is that evil transforms itself into good through the dialectics of historical evolution.” The same shifty Lukacs continues to this day to attract admirers among radical intellectuals. It is important to grasp that the Marxist moral worldview has no lower limit and that its most charming, civilized, and tasteful adherents all necessarily share the same lack of scruple—Jesuits with no fear of hellfire. This sort of belief is not just the thinking of a small-town bully such as Stalin. The charming, witty, well-educated, and still-admired Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, in his 1921 book Theory of Historical Materialism, viewed ethics as useless, fetishistic survivals of old class standards. He compared the proletariat to a carpenter.
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