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?
Sentimental for Socialism?
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.
The Personality Cult of the Stalinists versus the Living Church
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, Chr
ist 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.
Is Religion Child Abuse?
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.
The Rage Against God Page 16