I am of the school of thought that atheism is a belief. It is either a positive belief in a negative statement or a negative belief in a positive statement, which essentially amount to the same thing.
I believe that God does not exist.
or
I do not believe that God exists.
I am not one of those who claims that it is merely a lack of belief in a god. Many atheists claim this about themselves, and I think the reason why is because they think it protects them from theistic attacks on them that may seek to claim that they have a belief system. One can have a simple belief without it being a part of a larger philosophical system.
This is why organising atheists is like herding cats – atheism is merely a claim about the existence of God. It says nothing about morality, politics, science or anything else. You have to do a lot more philosophy to derive conclusions about those things.
Let me explain my position in referring to Ernest Nagel (reprinted in Critiques of God, edited by Peter A. Angeles, Prometheus Books, 1997):
I shall understand by “atheism” a critique and a denial of the major claims of all varieties of theism… atheism is not to be identified with sheer unbelief… Thus, a child who has received no religious instruction and has never heard about God, is not an atheist – for he is not denying any theistic claims. Similarly in the case of an adult who, if he has withdrawn from the faith of his father without reflection or because of frank indifference to any theological issue, is also not an atheist – for such an adult is not challenging theism and not professing any views on the subject.
This is often defined as strong or positive atheism – the explicit affirmation that gods do not exist. In coming on to sites and forums like this, most commentators are making that explicit affirmation.
However, many philosophers disagree, holding to a weak or negative definition of atheism. Goerge Smith in his 1979 Atheism: The Case Against God, p.14, stated:
The man who is unacquainted with theism is an atheist because he does not believe in a god. This category would also include the child with the conceptual capacity to grasp the issues involved, but who is still unaware of those issues. The fact that this child does not believe in god qualifies him as an atheist.
I disagree with this as mentioned above, but the point is clear – there is disagreement on the definition of atheism – it is not universal. If one would refuse to hold a belief on the proposition ‘God exists’, one would be adopting a position of a Pyrrhonian Skeptic. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) states,
To deny something is merely to assent to its negation. Since the Pyrrhonians took assent, i.e., the pro-attitude required for knowledge, to involve a kind of certainty that the matter had been finally and fully resolved, they did not assent to what they took to be non-evident propositions…. The Pyrrhonians would not assent to non-evident propositions.
This is the extreme agnostic position, if you will, whereby the Pyrrhonians would refuse to make a declaration either way on a truth proposition. Uber-skepticism, no less.
Why I think most atheists are not actually weak/negative atheists is that if you asked them “Do you believe in God?” they would answer a simple “No, I believe there is no god”, which is to say they hold a belief. They do not say “I’m sorry, I cannot answer that question because I actually lack any belief in that area of philosophy”. Getting on the internet and arguing to toss over the existence of God or gods reflects something more than a mere lack of a belief. It is a positive, affirmative set of actions that usually end up in significant arguments. It is rare, if ever, that atheists end up these arguments by declaring “Well, I cannot adhere to any affirmative claim; I cannot assent to any definite claim!” No, many atheists rather robustly declare that there is no god. So I think that for most atheists who I come across, positive atheism best describes their position.
Michael Martin, for example, would classify the agnostic as an atheist in point of fact that negative atheism is actually agnosticism (The Cambridge Companion to Atheism Glossary – negative atheism: absence of belief in any god or gods. More narrowly conceived, it is the absence of belief in the theistic God.) He sets out the following passage (p.1):
If you look up “atheism” in a dictionary, you will find it defined as the belief that there is no God. Certainly, many people understand “atheism” in this way. Yet this is not what the term means if one considers it from the point of view of its Greek roots. In Greek “a” means “without” or “not,” and “theos” means “god.”1 From this standpoint, an atheist is someone without a belief in God; he or she need not be someone who believes that God does not exist.2 Still, there is a popular dictionary meaning of “atheism” according to which an atheist is not simply one who holds no belief in the existence of a God or gods but is one who believes that there is no God or gods. This dictionary use of the term should not be overlooked. To avoid confusion, let us call it positive atheism and let us call the type of atheism derived from the original Greek roots negative atheism.
Some eliminativists even declare that the terms should not exist (such as Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation). Many atheists dislike the positive atheism definition of atheism because, as mentioned earlier, as a “belief” (in a proposition) it gets hijacked by theists and turned into a belief system and then a religion. This should not be allowed as an intellectual move. A belief in the proposition that BMWs are better than Fords is not a belief system and not a religion. Just because the proposition is about God does not make it a religion.
Whether you adhere to strong or weak atheism is, in some sense, irrelevant. Neither are belief systems, and neither give any indication as to any other philosophy involved in a worldview. Atheists disagree WILDLY over morality, from moral nihilism through relativism to subjectivism, virtue ethics, deontology and consequentialism, and so on: the disagreements are huge. To claim atheism is a religion is insane. Atheists believe totally different things about everything in the world, since they are not bound to believe anything by the proposition that God does not exist, accept propositions that might depend on that premise.
Disclaimer: I, like many of you, am an agnostic-atheist and so the answer is neither. Or is it? Because this question can be applied to me, too. Let me elucidate…
In general terms, for religious people, what is the direction of causality?
A few things to note first here; firstly, politics is a subset of morality (individual morality writ large). Secondly, we could see “belief in God” as Moral System (MS) A. So we could have, in a more abstract sense, Does MSA drive one’s politics or vice versa? In this way, you could apply this equally to the atheist who still has a moral value system – let’s call it MSB – so we could ask whether MSB drives one’s politics or whether politics drives one’s MSB.
And then we realise there could be an issue since, if politics is morality, then we are somewhat saying: Does one’s moral value system drive one’s moral value system (politics) or…
Oh dear.
So we could have a problem as to whether this question is even coherent in both cases. However, if we step it back to the God question, we can see that belief in God isn’t just a moral proclamation, there is a lot more both dressing and core belief to the system. Religion distills down to morality in some sense. The opposite is definitely the case for atheism or nonreligiosity where you have to do a lot more philosophy and psychology to get from atheism to a moral value system.
It’s also worth looking into what a political paradigm might be: left-right, authoritarian-libertarian and so on. I won’t bog this article down with discussion on this, though it is obviously pertinent.
Taking all of this preamble into account, let’s see how we get on.
To give some stimulus, we can bring into play the finding that authoritarian parents favour a judgemental, angry Old Testament Yahweh-God and liberal parents favour a lovey-dovey New Testament Jesus-God. What is the direction of causality? As one paper states:
The results suggested that parenting styles relate to how one comes to interpret the Bible and worship style and that gender also relates to worship style. The authoritarian and authoritative parenting styles related more and the permissive parenting style the least to a literal approach to biblical interpretation and to a structured worship style.
Sadly, the paper admits to not looking into the direction of causality. Another paper finds:
Following four parenting styles (authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved) included in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this project uses secondary data analysis to look at which parenting style leads to the most religiosity in young adulthood. We find that adolescent children who perceive their parents as authoritative show a greater degree of religiosity as a young adult.
Parenting (moral/political) style influences religiosity of the child.
Zuckerman, Galen and Pasquale in their excellent book The Nonreligious[UK](p. 193-4):
Individuals’ views on childbearing may be a reliable indicator of political ideology and, as such, also reflect the authoritarian continuum.… Those who value traits in children such as obedience, respect, and good manners over independence, self-reliance, and curiosity also tend to show authoritarian political views. In essence, strong authoritarians view humans as essentially flawed and in need of strong social control (lest they “get out of hand”), whereas low authoritarians see individuals as essentially benevolent, requiring minimal control and greater freedom and autonomy. In general surveys, secular (and Jewish) Americans score significantly lower on authoritarian childrearing views than do other major religious groups. This suggests that the non-authoritarian sociopolitical views of the nonreligious, shared with the liberally religious, could be seen as a manifestation of this underlying trait.
I must emphasise that Zuckerman et al (whom I will heavily quote) include a host of footnotes to substantiate their claims that I will not be able to list here, but I do strongly advise people to read their superb book.
Michele F. Margolis, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, just published a powerful new book that helps to clarify this issue. She demonstrated that the connection between politics and religion cuts across party lines, operating differently on Republicans and Democrats. From Politics to the Pews is an important work for anyone who wants to think deeply about these issues, though its implications are disturbing. According to Margolis, we are increasingly likely to allow our party identification to determine our religious affiliation.
The idea that something as personal and presumably important as our religious practices and identities could be determined by our political preferences may initially seem implausible, but Margolis reminds readers that political identities are solidified at a critical time in most people’s religious lives. Young adulthood, the age at which our party identifications tend to congeal, is also when our religious identities are most vulnerable.
On average, people from all religious traditions see a significant drop-off in religious activity during their young adult years and do not typically return to high levels of religious involvement until they form families of their own. Young adulthood is also when many of us are most passionate about partisan politics and become likely to surround ourselves with copartisans. Our social networks become partisan echo chambers.
Although both Republicans and Democrats from religious households decrease their religious activities in the first years of adulthood, they show different rates of return. As the earlier research suggested, Democrats are less likely to return to their religious fold; the opposite is true for Republicans. In both cases, it appears that party identification is the reason….
It is distressing to think that our preference for Team Red or Team Blue determines our answers to life’s deepest questions. From a religious person’s perspective, it may seem bizarre and foolhardy to abandon your faith (and presumably endanger your soul) because of which box you check in November. On the other hand, it is no less superficial to go to church because doing so signifies your status as a good Republican.
So far, from this, we are definitely seeing an authoritarian parenting style and character correlating with higher religiosity, and it looks like the style is causally active in leading people (back) to faith, at least more often than with liberals.
Looking at this from the nonreligious perspective (where claims of the nonreligious allow us to conclude things about the religious), Zuckerman et al state (all quotes p. 190-6):
It should now be apparent that nonreligious worldviews transcend individual issues. And as mentioned earlier, it is often difficult to determine whether a view on any given issue exists because an individual is secular or nonreligious. Another possibility is that broad tendencies – such as liberalism – develop prior to any religious/nonreligious views, and thus the social view is endorsed by seculars may not actually be causally related to any underlying nonreligious reason. [My emphasis.]
This is where, unsurprisingly, we will get onto talking about political psychology and the work of Jonathan Haidt and others. Zuckerman et al continue:
We now turn to some of the core cognitive, personality, developmental, and moral characteristics discussed in the preceding chapters to see whether they help to explain the social and political views of the nonreligious. In chapter 8, the “individualising” moral factors based on Haidt’s five dimensions, such as empathy and fairness, were said to be more characteristic of secular individuals, whereas “binding morality” factors, such as an emphasis on purity, in-group concerns, and authority, were shown to be relatively more common in religious individuals. As we discussed, Haidt found that liberals’ individualising morality emphasizes an “ethics of autonomy,” which holds that morality allows people to act in accordance with personal freedom – as long as others are not harmed and the consequences are fair for everyone. In the case of a given social or political issue, such as gay rights, secular individuals support gay rights and gay marriage because they see the issue as one of fairness and are not swayed by appeals to moral purity, traditionalism, or is scriptural authority. Thus, the political views of seculars may be related to an underlying worldview that encompasses moral and sociopolitical elements.
I can’t begin to tell you how much this personally speaks to me as a nonreligious liberal. Here, we start getting onto early moral development that should continue to shed light on our core question (whether applied to the Christian as hinted in the article title or the nonreligious individual as subsequently expressed):
It is widely assumed that a given individual’s social, political worldview is held together by “team loyalty” that drives individuals’ stance on a range of issues. However, this still raises the question of what ultimately determines which team we identify as “ours.” There is increasing evidence that our worldviews are broadly influenced by early-developing moral dispositions and basic-level personality traits that precede exposure to specific religious or political information. In one study, participants’ positions on the moral foundations (based on Haidt’s conceptualization), particularly moral purity (i.e., perceived importance of cleanliness, sanctity and avoidance of symbolic violations), predicted judgements about “culture war” issues over and above other factors, including ideology, religious attendance, and interest in politics. Despite the rhetoric on issues such as abortion, euthanasia and stem cell research being dominated by arguments about (potential) harm, in this study, moral disapproval of these issues was better predicted by individuals moral sensitivity to purity than by their stance on harmfulness. Thus, it may not be the absence of religious belief among seculars that motivates their ideology, but rather lower moral sensitivity to issues of sanctity, self-transcendence, and self-control. [My emphasis.]
It’s probably worth including here one of my favourite videos where David Pisaro talks about how disgust sensitivity shapes political and moral judgement – how physiology and psychology causally affect what we think is rational moral and political judgement:
Please watch it – it is fascinating; in it, he discusses the direction of causality going from physiological to conscious “rational”.
Direction of causality
So, again, we are seeing political decision (qua “politics” qua religious belief/adherence) being underwritten by political psychology, which is itself underwritten by childhood moral development and parenting, as well as psychological conditioning and genetics. And, yes, we could have a whole free will debate here.
Zuckerman et al continue:
We return briefly to a similar pattern, mentioned in more detail in chapter 6, that cognitive and personality-related traits underlie and contributes to not only sociopolitical views, but also a secular worldview. In that chapter, we saw that personality dimensions of the “Big Five,” such as Openness to Experience, distinguish secular from religious individuals, as well as separating those who view religion literally from those who see it symbolically. Openness is also relevant to political ideology, tending to be higher among liberals and conservatives. Thus, some of the familiar patterns, such as nonreligious support for liberal political candidates, a rejection of moral traditionalism, and support the disadvantaged are collectively related to underlying personality dispositions, such as greater Openness (as well as lower Conscientiousness). This is relevant to the developnennt of secularity over one’s life span (covered in Chapter 5) or rejection of a religious worldview (i.e., apostassy) because, in many cases, core characteristics such as personality and temperemnt precede religiosity. There is evidence thst temperament characteristics beginning in early childhood (obviously prior to an articulation of mature sociopolitical worldviews are predictive of later political views. Youths with personality traits such as high Openness become less religious over time, whereas those with high Conscientiousness in adolescence are likely to increase in religiosity in yong adulthood. To put it colloquially, this suggests that people are secular and politically liberal becausse of their temperament and personality, rather than being liberal because they are secular. [My emphasis.]
People, religious or not, won’t like to hear this because it takes away personal, rational agency from one’s political worldview and “decision-making”.
Dogmatism and complexity of thought
Dogmatism is also a trait that correlates more with conservatives, with “political liberals tend to be lower in dogmatism and higher in open-mindedness (or tolerance for ambiguity) than conservatives.”:
One occasionally hears in popular discourse, a stereotype that atheists are similar to religious fundamentalists in that they are rigid and inflexible in their views. However, the nonreligious, even atheists, tended to score very low on measures of dogmatism.
This is a very common accusation I hear levelled at atheists. Zuckerman et al continue by discussing multiple views and complexity of thought:
There are other core psychological characteristics that appear to underlie and contribute to both religious and political views, including those relevant to cognition. For instance, we saw in chapter 6, that the less religious tend to exhibit higher integrative complexity of thought (i.e., ability to integrate multiple perspectives). In the political domain, liberals also show less of a need for certainty, order, structure, and closure than do Conservatives, who tend to be lower in integrative complexity of thought and desire clear structure and certainty. Such general cognitive preferences, it has been hypothesized, influence individuals’ religious views – or lack thereof. Religious dogmatism and Conservative morality may themselves be understood as attempts to provide clear and unambiguous responses in an attempt to manage uncertainty. Similarly, conservatives tend to be more sensitive to negative or threatening stimulate such as viewing the world is more dangerous place, or being more motivated by fear, relative to liberals. According to these theories of political psychology, general sociopolitical worldviews, including secularity, based on very basic, core elements of cognitive functioning.
This is where it is worth referring back to David Pisaro in his TED talk above, such that:
…it has been found that those who believe the world is a dangerous place tend to develop binding reality (e.g., based on in-group, purity, and authority concerns), and this in turn leads to a conservative political orientation. Many people, whether or not they were raised religiously or secularly, may find a certain worldview more compelling as a result of the psychological preferences. Further, as is the case with religiosity, there is also evidence of a substantial inherited component to political orientation, and this genetic variation in political orientation is itself mediated by personality traits. According to such theories, religiosity may be part of a cluster of traits that also include social (but not economic) conservatism and authoritarianism, reflecting an underlying “Traditional Moral Values Triad.” This may at least partially explain why individuals come to different religious and metaphysical conclusions despite contrary environmental influences; individuals’ early cognitive preferences place them on a “trajectory” of later religious and political worldviews. [My emphasis.]
Conclusion
Although the work of Zuckerman et al is looking at how nonreligious people come to their political and moral conclusions, we can draw inferences about religious people by looking at the antithesis of what is being claimed. The importance of the in-group, tradition and purity, as well as a low level of Openness to Experience, is something that helps to define conservatives. So where we see liberals and the nonreligious, as is often seen on the comment threads here, having ‘higher level of tolerance of minorities, disadvantaged groups and even those considered “social deviants”‘, for religious conservatives, we have lower levels of tolerance for such groups. You only had to compare the acceptance speeches of Trump and Pence in 2016 to Biden and Harris in 2020, to get a sense of this. Biden and Harris were appealing to unity in a greatly diverse nation, including mention or inference to different races, ethnicities, religions, the disabled, LGBTQ, and so on:
And to all those who supported us: I am proud of the campaign we built and ran. I am proud of the coalition we put together, the broadest and most diverse in history.
Democrats, Republicans and independents. Progressives, moderates and conservatives. Young and old. Urban, suburban and rural. Gay, straight, transgender. White. Latino. Asian. Native American….
The American story is about the slow, yet steady widening of opportunity. Make no mistake: Too many dreams have been deferred for too long. We must make the promise of the country real for everybody – no matter their race, their ethnicity, their faith, their identity, or their disability.
Can you imagine Trump ever saying something like this, or Ted Cruz, or Michelle Bachmann? Steve Bannon? Stephen Miller?
But before conservatives accuse me of painting liberals as being morally superior and so inclusively woke, the question we started with is essentially where the causal influence comes from. The work of psychologists appears to take specific sociopolitical views and link them to underlying core characteristics. So the question becomes, where do these underlying core characteristics come from? The answer seems to be that this is genetics, biology and parenting (early environment), where childhood and adolescent moral development informs later moral and political stances.
Yes, people can change their minds. But changing one’s mind is an incredibly complex procedure, and when it concerns really big ideas, can take a long time, and a large number of variables.
I would wager that your underlying core characteristics inform what type of religion you later take on, but that these characteristics can themselves be caused in part by strong parental religiosity and parental moral characteristics/parenting.
The title, remember, was: Does Belief in God Drive One’s Politics or Politics Drive One’s Belief in God?
The answer, then, is neither – your underlying core characteristics drive both – though, later on in your life, both drive each other coextensively, as I will explain quickly.
Once one takes on a religion that fits in with one’s moral framework, we often see a spiral effect. I talked about this with regard to whether reading certain newspapers/sources informs your moral/political position or whether your moral/political position informs the sort of newspaper that you read.
This study tests a model of reinforcing spirals in the context of global warming, using a 2-wave, within-subjects panel survey with a representative sample of Americans. Results show that, within waves, conservative media use is negatively related to global warming belief certainty and support for mitigation policies, while nonconservative media use is positively associated with belief certainty and policy support. In addition, the results show that consuming conservative or nonconservative media at Wave 1 makes people more likely to consume those same media at Wave 2, partly as an indirect result of the media’s effects on global warming belief certainty and policy preferences. Wave 2 media use, in turn, further strengthens audiences’ global warming belief certainty and policy preferences.
If you then transfer this into the context of core traits, religiosity and politics, you can see a similar spiral effect being prevalent in driving one to greater conservatism and religiosity, or on the other hand, to greater liberalism and non-religiosity.
Hence, political polarisation.
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I have talked often before about the semantics involved in belief or lack of belief or nonbelief in God or gods. I am a strong/positive atheist: that we hold a positive belief (as atheists) that God does not exist. Or, indeed, the negative belief concerning the proposition that God exists.
I claim that, in most cases, atheists are actively claiming that God does not exist. It is my opinion that we are doing this consistently when we sit on the Internet and argue the toss over whether God exists or not, concluding that God does not exist. This belief, for atheists, and in my opinion, is a positive or strong belief in a proposition concerning God’s existence.
Many atheists hold to weak/negative atheism, a claim that can be summed up in the phrase “a lack of belief in God or gods”. Personally, I think that this is a very common tactic for atheists to use because they are very wary about using the term “belief” in any kind of conversation about atheism and religion because they think that this then allows theists to claim that atheists have a belief akin to a religious belief. That atheism is, therefore, some kind of religion. This, to me, is complete twaddle and theists who do this should be shown short shrift.
Indeed, this is exactly what the video below illustrates. The video is from Qualia Soup. I don’t think he makes videos any more, but his videos are very good (his brother continues to make them). However, having said this, I disagree with this video because he makes exactly the sort of claim that I have just talked about.
In fact, what he spends much of the video elaborating upon is the idea of “ignosticism”, which is the belief that “the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the word god has no coherent and unambiguous definition. It may also be described as the theological position that other theological positions assume too much about the concept of god.”
I think when Qualia Soup (QS) attacks the counter position that if atheism was to be defined as a lack of belief in gods then rocks and dogs are atheist too, he misses the mark and deems this is a puerile argument. I’m not so sure.
Which brings me nicely onto the question of whether babies are born as atheists or not. Again, I disagree with QS on this. My personal opinion is that babies are agnostic because this is based predominantly on knowledge. To me, as I have mentioned, atheism is about a belief and if something or someone can’t hold a belief, then they cannot be called an atheist. If the position is defined by a lack of belief, then rocks, dogs and babies can be defined as atheist.
Does this argument have any meaningful ramification? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. But, that said, I think it is useful to be is clear in our beliefs and our terms as possible in order to build up philosophical arguments and frameworks and so I want to be as honest as possible with what I believe and why.
This has come up in conversation on the last thread, and being in second day of my Russian chemo, I thought I’d repost for your delectation:
This post was one of my most popular pieces on my previous blog, and I have, over time, revised it slightly to make it even tighter, reacting to previous comments on the last version of this piece. I have tried to be detailed enough for it to be fairly comprehensive, though it could be more detailed; then again, it could be shorter and more digestible. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
For Hitchens and co, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Never mind that tyrants devoid of religion such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot perpetrated the worst atrocities in history. As H. Allen Orr, professor of biology at the University of Rochester, observed, the 20th century was an experiment in secularism that produced secular evil, responsible for the unprecedented murder of more than 100 million. (Abramovich, 2009)
Yes, here it is again, the ubiquitous claim that atheism = Stalin/Pol Pot = moral atrocities. This is a complex one, so hang around. It is commonly claimed by Christians, and I had a debate about this on the Unbelievable forum on Facebook recently with many who did, that secular atheism was responsible for the atrocities of the twentieth century perpetrated by the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot (Mao Zedong is often thrown in for good measure). This raises several questions:
Were these people atheists?
If so, was their atheism causally instrumental in these people carrying out such atrocities?
Are these atrocities different in any particular and important way to those carried out by religious predecessors?
I am going to look at all of these points and show that atheism is not the cause of such atrocities. It might be worth considering that, at the time of writing this some time ago here in the UK, the Prime Minister was atheist (see my comment below this article for defence of this), the Deputy was atheist and the shadow leader was most certainly an atheist and we have not yet committed any huge atrocities under their command (these MPs are now in different positions)! That said, the last religious leader we had (Tony Blair) went, at the behest of his US (Christian) counterpart, George W. Bush, on a Crusade into the Middle East in what many call an illegal war. Go figure.
Looking first at question number 1), were these people atheists? The Hitler question has been answered by many people more knowledgeable on the subject than me. Suffice it to say, in simple terms, no, he wasn’t. Yes, there was Gott mit uns on army belts, and Hitler cosied up to religious institutions, probably more for his own political ends. Importantly, atheists were persecuted. As wiki states:
In Germany during the Nazi era, a 1933 decree stated that “No National Socialist may suffer detriment… on the ground that he does not make any religious profession at all”.[15] However, the regime strongly opposed “godless communism”,[16][17] and most of Germany’s atheist and largely left-wing freethought organizations were banned the same year; some right-wing groups were tolerated by the Nazis until the mid-1930s.[18][19] During negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of April 26, 1933 Hitler stated that “Secular schools can never be tolerated” because of their irreligious tendencies.[20]
In one speech he stated:
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”
Hitler (a baptised Catholic who was never ex-communicated) flirted with assorted deistic paganistic ideas of Christianity and religion, all of which basically amounts to not being an atheist in any recognisable way.
In a speech in 1922, he stated:
“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice. …And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited.”
Now, we can argue about context and whatnot, but what is clear is that Hitler was far from being clearly an atheist who committed atrocities in the name of atheism, or because he was an atheist. Furthermore, Hitler’s views appeared to change over his lifetime and years in power, so saying Hitler was X is to be overly simplistic. To say “Hitler was a Christian” is actually to say “Hitler was a Christian at point t” without actually declaring that point. People change their minds and Hitler transformed, as we all do, over his life. To say Hitler was Christian, non-Christian, pagan etc. is too simplistic. It can be especially difficult to tease out what he really believed because, like all successful politicians, he used ideas, organisations, movements and power structures to his own advantage, to increase his own power base and appeal. Teasing apart what he declares in public from what he actually, privately believes is also difficult and takes some second-guessing, perhaps.
As Austin Cline writes in showing that the Nazi party itself was certainly not atheistic:
The NSDAP Party Program stated: “We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without owing itself to a particular confession….”
Positive Christianity adhered to basic orthodox doctrines and asserted that Christianity must make a practical, positive difference in people’s lives. It’s difficult to maintain that Nazi ideology was atheistic when it explicitly endorsed and promoted Christianity in the party platform.
So despite what Hitler’s personal views were, Nazi Germany was never an atheistic nation, and it takes more than one man to enact all of those atrocities. This is hugely important. Wherever Hitler sat along that religious continuum at any given point, the eventual horrors of Nazi Germany were enacted with the collusion of the Catholic Church, Protestant structures and the people of Germany themselves, overwhelmingly religious as they were.
On the causality of the Holocaust:
With regard to the Holocaust, whose causal roots are undoubtedly complex, one can be sure that Christian anti-Semitism played a part, as it had done throughout Europe for centuries in various Semitic discriminations. The discrimination against Jews and homosexuals has long been the pastime of conservative Christians rather than of left-leaning atheists – you only have to look at the notions espoused by Martin Luther in the time of the Reformation – see Von den Juden und iren Lugen (On the Jews and Their Lies).
Hitler’s biographer John Toland explains Catholicism’s influence on the Holocaust. He says of Hitler: “Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god. . ..”
Even after World War II, Catholic assistance to the Nazis continued. The Vatican aided the escape of more Nazis than any other governmental or private entity. Christopher Hitchens adds: “It was the Vatican itself, with its ability to provide passports, documents, money, and contacts, which organized the escape network and also the necessary shelter and succor at the other end.”
Gerald Darring gives a good synopsis of the role played by the Catholic church in Germany, and how the structures and people supported much of what went on and turned deaf ears to the atrocities:
Throughout the 1930s, as attacks on the Jews increased, a few individual priests voiced objections[1] but the church itself, through its leaders, said next to nothing.[2] At the time of the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, Cardinal Bertram told the archbishops that the church should not comment on “measures directed against an interest group which has no very close bond with the church,” and besides, he added, “the Press, which is overwhelmingly in Jewish hands, has remained consistently silent about the persecution of Catholics in various countries.”[3] Cardinal Faulhaber told the Bavarian bishops that the Catholic Church had more important things to be concerned with, and besides, the Jews could help themselves. The morning after the November 1938 nationwide pogrom in which hundreds of synagogues had been burned and destroyed, about 20,000 Jews had been arrested and 36 Jews were killed, and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were pillaged, Provost Lichtenberg of Berlin publicly offered prayers for the persecuted Jews, but the bishops of Germany said nothing at all.
Once the killing of Jews began in earnest in 1941, the German bishops had access to fairly accurate information about the plans and the carrying out of those plans in the form of the “final solution.” In many cases German bishops turned a deaf ear to reports about the killings taking place, but they agonized over whether they should speak out in opposition to them. A draft letter of opposition was drafted in 1943 by Margarete Sommer, the bishops’ consultant on Jewish affairs, and it may have passed, in the opinion of Michael Phayer, if it had not been for the opposition of Cardinal Adolph Bertram, who was ex-officio titular head of the German episcopacy as the bishop of Breslau.[4]
Here are some embarrassing examples for the Catholic church:
—Archbishop Konrad Gröber of Freiburg joined the S.S. in 1933 as a “promoting member,” and had to be forced to relinquish his membership in 1938 (Lewy, 45-46).
—The papal nuncio’s monsignor-secretary was a member of the Nazi party.[15]
—A Nazi official reported in 1934 that when Cardinal Faulhaber came for a meeting, he entered and left giving a “flawless Hitler salute conforming to the rules” (Lewy, 382, note 131).
—Bishop Wilhelm Berning frequently signed his letters to the authorities, “Heil Hitler.” On a visit to one of the concentration camps, he spoke to the prisoners about the “obligation enjoined by faith to obedience and loyalty to nation and government,” he shared a glass of beer with the guards, and then he uttered a “threefold Sieg Heil to Führer and Fatherland” (Tinnemann, 68).
—The Augsburg diocesan newspaper declared in April 1941 that “the person of the Führer contains the strength, greatness and future of the German people.”[16]
—All of the bishops of Germany ordered that church bells be rung on the occasion of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday in April 1939 (Lewy, 221).
—Prominent Catholic theologian Karl Adam wrote that, since the Jews had increased their influence in German economics, art, scholarship and literature, the Nazi action against the Jews was a painful necessity for German survival (Lewy, 279). According to Adam, Jesus was not a pure Jew because he came from Galilee, where there was much intermarriage with Gentiles, and “Jesus’ mother Mary had no physical or moral connection with those ugly dispositions and forces which we condemn in full blooded Jews.”[17]
—About 150 priests were active members of the Nazi party and “distorted their own perception of Catholicism to accommodate their love, faith and trust in National Socialism.”[18]
It must be remembered that there were also people who bucked the trend, particularly later on. Again, more details can be found here. For some fascinating details of the actions of Protestants and their churches in Nazi Germany, see this damning article (admittedly by a Catholic) about Protestant collusion.
So I think we can safely put to bed this idea that the Nazis were, in any clear and causal manner, atheists; and we can conclude that Christians did not help matters in any institutional way, and pinning atheism on Hitler is highly problematic, if not downright wrong.
Let us now look to whether Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists.
By contrast to all this, the Soviet Union was undeniably an atheist state, and the same applies to Maoist China and to Pol Pot’s fanatical Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s. That does not, however, show that the atrocities committed by these totalitarian dictatorships were the result of atheist beliefs, carried out in the name of atheism, or caused primarily by the atheistic aspects of the relevant forms of communism. In all of these cases, the situation was more complex – as, to be fair, also applies to some of the persecutions and atrocities in which religious movements, organizations, and leaders have been deeply implicated over the centuries.
It is pretty clear that the two leaders were atheists. But Hitler and Stalin had moustaches. It does not follow that moustaches were an important causal factor in the atrocities committed by them or under their tenure. Commonality is not causation. As wiki states of Stalin:
Raised in the Georgian Orthodox faith, Stalin became an atheist. He followed the position that religion was an opiate that needed to be removed in order to construct the ideal communist society. His government promoted atheism through special atheistic education in schools, anti-religious propaganda, the antireligious work of public institutions (Society of the Godless), discriminatory laws, and a terror campaign against religious believers.
As for Pol Pot, things are a little less obvious. One oft-cited quote by Christians appears to be that Prince Norodom Sihanouk once said of Pol Pot:
“Pol Pot does not believe in God but he thinks that heaven, destiny, wants him to guide Cambodia in the way he thinks it the best for Cambodia, that is to say, the worst. Pol Pot is mad, you know, like Hitler.”
But I cannot find the source of this quote. Either way, it shows some pretty incongruous views, and shows that he seemed to have been mad qua irrational, and believed in forces outside of himself such as destiny and heaven. In A. Gregor’s Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History (p. 246), the author states of Pol Pot (Sar):
Ample evidence survives that throughout his life, Sar harbored hate, in equal measure, of both Colonialists and his Vietnamese neighbors, both of whom he forever saw as a threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Cambodia. In the course of his political evolution–whatever his real or imputed ideological commitments–that never was to change. It can be argued that by the time he reached early maturity, Sar–whatever else he was–was a political and cultural nationalist. Before their disappearance into history, the Red Khmer, the revolutionaries led by Sar as Pol Pot, maintained that their purpose had always been to “defend and forever maintain their nation, people, and race. Whatever else they claimed to be, the Khmers Rouges gave ample testimony of being reactive nationalists–with all that the notion implies.
It is pretty clear from this that Pol Pot had a powerful political agenda at play, where politics is something which can replace religion. In fact, in the book just quoted from, there are chapter titles as follows: Leninism: Revolution as Religion; Fascism: The State as Religion; and National Socialism: Race as Religion. These chapters show there is far more to the matrix of causality at play here than a simple lack of belief in a deity.
When looking at texts which analyse the causality of genocides, in particular, the atrocities of Pol Pot, I found the following to be the case (this is quoted from my facebook discussion):
It’s interesting that in Kiernan’s book “The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer” which looks in depth at Pol Pot’s murderous regime, the word atheism/t does not appear in the whole book, God only twice, insignificantly (one in a quote about Siva, another in a direct quote that is not relevant here). Fawthrop and Jarvis’ book “Getting Away with Genocide?: Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal” has no mention of the word atheism/t either. The same for Andeeopouloos’ “Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions”.
In answer to question 2), then, I challenge that atheism is at all properly the cause of such atrocities. Of Pol Pot, William Vollmann writes, in talking of a British journalist’s approach to the genocide of Cambodia (Vollmann is reviewing Philip Short’s biography of Pol Pot):
In other words, he seems to say, what Pol Pot did was hardly beyond the Cambodian ordinary. ”Every atrocity the Khmers Rouges ever committed, and many they did not, can be found depicted on the stone friezes of Angkor . . . or, in more recent times, in the conduct of the Issaraks,” the anti-French insurgents…
This is perhaps a little generous because there was no doubt an awful lot more politics going on, with a strong communist agenda. Vollmann continues:
Perhaps the problem is that Pol Pot was mediocre in almost every sphere: a failed technical student, an uninspired military leader who wasted the lives of his troops in badly planned offensives and ignored emergencies, a misguided ruler. In sum, Pol Pot would exert little claim on our attention were it not for the fact that millions died through his cruelty and incompetence. In ”Brother Number One,” Chandler admits defeat at the outset: ”I was able to build up a consistent, but rather two-dimensional picture. . . . As a person, he defies analysis.”
Vollmann’s analysis seems to point to the complexity of understanding such a man. In a paper looking at the psychological characteristics of a commandant of a torture and death camp in Cambodia, Paul Wilson observes:
This finding lends weight to the view that an individuals’ involvement in genocide and other related crimes is best understood as a complex interaction between the situation people find themselves in during times of war or civil conflict and their personality characteristics.
“It’s atheism wot did it” doesn’t really cut the mustard. That said, communism, an incredibly strong political drive and drive for power, and sustaining that power, is certainly integral to what went on. This simplistic attitude is summed up nicely in Renee Nabors’ piece (“Genocidal Triviality: An Analysis of the Perpetrators of the Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide”):
A common myth about the Holocaust and the Cambodian Genocide, authored for its convenience and political correctness, is that the perpetrators, aside from the high command, were either coerced or brainwashed. A grave but crucial reality of the genocides, however, lies in their origins. The common German citizen committed genocide; the ordinary Cambodian sustained the murder of 2 million. By choosing not to understand genocide, we compromise our ability to prevent it….
To understand how the tragedy of the Cambodian genocide came to be, it is important to note the ideology and political culture that defined the country at the time. Pol Pot believed wholeheartedly in Maoist thought, from which he derived his ideas about forced egalitarianism, cutting ties from the outside world, and destroying anciently rooted culture. He was at best, however, a mediocre student of Mao.… Furthermore, he failed to learn from Mao Zedong that the consequence of mass social experimentation was utter chaos. The fact that Cambodia’s “Brother Number One” understood only superficially the ideology on which he based his revolution is significant. It shows that the typical farmer’s boy Khmer Rouge soldier did not join because he thought highly of Marx, nor because he considered Pol Pot to be particularly brilliant, but because it was something to grasp on to. Pol Pot was not the end, but rather the means by which a desperate and fractionalized people sought a better life….
…The ability of Pol Pot, in four years, to create an obscure and unfounded deadly good versus evil fantasy and still maintain a strong cult-of-personality and international apathy is incomparably disturbing.
It is interesting to note that, again, Nabors’ fascinating piece makes no mention of God, or a lack thereof. Atheism is not on the table, it plays no defining role.
And much the same can be said of Stalin, where “enemies of the people” were killed or made to do forced labour. It was not because Stalin did not believe in God. And here I will answer question 3) fairly frankly. I am an atheist for all intents and purposes) and yet I stand starkly against such genocide. Why? Because a lack of belief in God (or a positive claim that God does not exist) does not define my politics, nor my morality. Atheists comprise a growing proportion of the world’s population, and yet they also adhere to the myriad of different politics and moralities that the world has to offer. Whilst one could say that, on balance, atheists are perhaps more liberal (socially) than religionists, one cannot claim that people’s atheism causes them to commit particular acts. I contend that people’s politics are more core to their beliefs, being based much on in-group / out-group psychology and intuitive desires, such that atheism or theism take a second place in an internal hierarchy within most.
As Blackford claims:
Sorting out the roles played by religious or antireligious beliefs, as opposed to such things as worldly ambition and lust for glory, is often a nontrivial task, and we should be careful before adopting simplistic narratives. In the case of twentieth-century communist regimes, much of the death toll – perhaps most of it – arose from utterly ruthless attempts to eff
Young Stalin
ect economic transformations on a near-apocalyptic scale….
While all this is a horrible indictment of the Soviet leadership and perhaps the ideology that the leaders embraced, little of it relates to atheism as such. Indeed, the Soviet Union did not have a uniformly antagonistic relationship to religion, and the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church supported the regime’s military initiatives, such as suppression of the uprising in Hungary, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan (Baggini, 2003, p. 88).
Both Stalin and Pol Pot sought to create a utopia through social and economic reform and engineering on a gargantuan scale. Blackford’s chapter on this very myth is forceful, and he sums up the misguided approach with aplomb:
While we do not doubt that religious people were often targeted as enemies of all these regimes’ grandiose plans, this was usually because churches and other religious authorities (such as those related to Confucian tradition in China) were seen as actual or potential sources of resistance. Once again, the Soviet authorities were not always on bad terms with the Orthodox Church, and the aim of these communist regimes was to suppress any opposition, from whatever source, while carrying out massive transformations of their countries’ economic bases. There was plenty of fanaticism involved, but mainly about holding onto power and engaging in mass-scale forms of social engineering – whether agricultural collectivization, forced urbanization, or, as in the case of Pol Pot’s ‘‘Democratic Kampuchea,’’ forced deurbanization and abandonment of learning and technology.
None of this follows from mere atheism, and instead far more comprehensive political and economic ideologies were relied upon. These bear little resemblance to the views of most thinkers in the rationalist tradition that dates back to ancient Greece, and they are remote from anything found in the thinking of high-profile atheists involved in current debates – ‘‘celebrity atheists,’’ to use Abramovich’s trivializing expression – who tend to be political liberals and pluralists. Indeed, con- temporary atheists tend to oppose comprehensive, apocalyptic ideologies such as Nazism, Stalinism, and Pol Pot’s agrarian socialism, partly because these imitate so many of the features of monotheistic religion – aspects of religion that contributed historically to pogroms, witch hunts, and inquisitions.
So in conclusion, I think that theists who posit atheism as a necessary or defining causal factor in these atrocities is doing a disservice to history, politics and rational thought. It is evident that this prima facie approach to understanding what caused such genocide and atrocity is very naive, at best. That the experts in the relevant fields fail to see atheism as not even a, let alone the, driving factor is telling.
It may be worth referring to the work of Eric Hoffer in understanding what drives adherents of mass movements to terrible things, as summed up here by Ed Babinski.
But what does this say about atheists’ claims of religious causality with regard to supposedly religiously driven atrocity, be it the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades, or even modern-day Islamic extremism? Well, for a start, one must treat each historical event on a case by case basis, and one must be careful not to commit hypocrisy, for sure.
There is, though, a huge difference; that being that there is no defining ‘holy book’ or text which seeks to dictate what atheists should or shouldn’t do as some divine diktat. This is crucial. One can hardly call atheism into causal importance when all atheism states is that there is no god. Yet the Qu’ran states,
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.” Qur’an9:29
and
“Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great.” Qur’an4:34
Or perhaps it is worth considering some Yahwistic commands (from the Leviticus entry in the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible):
If you refuse to kill someone who gives his seed to Molech, God set his face against you and your family.20:4-5
“For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.” Couldn’t we try spanking first? 20:9
If a man has sex with his father’s wife, kill them both. 20:11
If a man “lies” with his daughter-in-law, then both must be killed. 20:12
If a man has sex with another man, kill them both. 20:13
If you “lie” with your wife and your mother-in-law (now that sounds fun!), then all three of you must be burned to death. 20:14
If a man or woman “lie with a beast” both the person and the poor animal are to be killed. 20:15-16
People with “familiar spirits” (witches, fortune tellers, etc.) are to be stoned to death. 20:27
A priest’s daughter who “plays the whore” is to be burned to death. 21:9
Granted, we all know the horrible verses and commands in the Bible, so you get the point. Suffice it to say that there is some solid divine benchmarking for some seriously dubious behaviour. On the other hand, “There is no god” tells you nothing. It dictates, commands, decrees and countenances not.
Rather than criticise atheists in their own way, it might pay to make sure their own religious tracts are not telling them to do terrible things. After all, the Bible was used to countenance slavery for 2,000 years. There literally is no counterpart for the Bible to atheists. We cannot be told to do something in such terms. Yes, there are probably, undoubtedly, more complex reasons as to why the Aztecs died at the hands of the Spanish conquistadores, probably less complex reasons for the Crusades and the Inquisition. One must remember that if such events are to be compared with such heinous ‘atheistic’ crimes of genocide, then a fair comparison must be made, and this must be one of intention. In other words, you cannot compare such events in real terms. Atheistic Stalin killed millions because he had the instruments and infrastructure to do so. But was his intention any different to, say, a Christian Crusader king? If the Crusader had weapons of mass destruction and transportation devices at his fingertips, would he have caused much greater destruction? Of course. Populations were also much smaller, so given less ability and smaller numbers of people in real terms, of course, earlier religious atrocities seemed less repugnant. And so the questions should be:
Were the intentions any different?
What proportion of the target was killed?
Was religion causally crucial?
If the context was changed to a more modern era, would there have been much more widespread destruction?
Yet I have shown, I hope, that atheism wasn’t a central causal factor in the genocides of the twentieth century anyway; moreover, one could argue that religion did play an important causal role in many atrocities throughout history. Causality is notoriously difficult to assign to events, as I have set out in my piece “Have I killed someone?” and we are often far too naive in how we apply that sort of determination. Daniel Dennett, in his book Freedom Evolves, expresses the difficulty in understanding the different types of causes, in looking at a French Foreign Legion thought experiment, as well as looking at the causality for the Dow Jones falling or First World War (pp. 70-89). These things are multifaceted and wondering what would be necessary causes requires knowing about possible worlds in which they didn’t occur. Take atheism away from these people, ceteris paribus, and would such horrors have happened? Are there aspects or personality traits which caused both atheism and other things which went on to manifest themselves in wartime atrocities?
In this way, it is easy to scapegoat humans on account of singular ideas and factors. Life ain’t that simple. Things are complex; why people do things is a complex thing to tease apart. And, essentially, humans can be right bastards. Quite often the most obvious thing can be the overriding cause: humanity. Lust and greed for power, resources, and a distorted idea of utopia. Status, aggression, anger, alpha male: all these things that evolution has dealt humanity (predominantly men in this context, as women aren’t so warlike and bloodthirsty) can be called into causal efficacy and blamed for the continual warmongering throughout history. It’s bleak, but potentially accurate, and it might even get atheism and religion off the hook. I said might.
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This post was one of my most popular pieces on my previous blog, and I have, over time, revised it slightly to make it even tighter, reacting to previous comments on the last version of this piece. I have tried to be detailed enough for it to be fairly comprehensive, though it could be more detailed; then again, it could be shorter and more digestible. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
For Hitchens and co, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Never mind that tyrants devoid of religion such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot perpetrated the worst atrocities in history. As H. Allen Orr, professor of biology at the University of Rochester, observed, the 20th century was an experiment in secularism that produced secular evil, responsible for the unprecedented murder of more than 100 million. (Abramovich, 2009)
Yes, here it is again, the ubiquitous claim that atheism = Stalin/Pol Pot = moral atrocities. This is a complex one, so hang around. It is commonly claimed by Christians, and I had a debate about this on the Unbelievable forum on facebook recently with many who did, that secular atheism was responsible for the atrocities of the twentieth century perpetrated by the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot (Mao Zedong is often thrown in for good measure). This raises several questions:
Were these people atheists?
If so, was their atheism causally instrumental in these people carrying out such atrocities?
Are these atrocities different in any particular and important way to those carried out by religious predecessors?
I am going to look at all of these points and show that atheism is not the cause of such atrocities. It might be worth considering that, at the time of writing this some time ago here in the UK, the Prime Minister was atheist (see my comment below this article for defence of this), the Deputy was atheist and the shadow leader was most certainly an atheist and we have not yet committed any huge atrocities under their command (these MPs are now in different positions)! That said, the last religious leader we had (Tony Blair) went, at the behest of his US (Christian) counterpart, George W. Bush, on a Crusade into the Middle East in what many call an illegal war. Go figure.
Looking first at question number 1), were these people atheists? The Hitler question has been answered by many people more knowledgeable on the subject than me. Suffice it to say, in simple terms, no, he wasn’t. Yes, there was Gott mit uns on army belts, and Hitler cozied up to religious institutions, probably more for his own political ends. Importantly, atheists were persecuted. As wiki states:
In Germany during the Nazi era, a 1933 decree stated that “No National Socialist may suffer detriment… on the ground that he does not make any religious profession at all”.[15] However, the regime strongly opposed “godless communism”,[16][17] and most of Germany’s atheist and largely left-wing freethought organizations were banned the same year; some right-wing groups were tolerated by the Nazis until the mid-1930s.[18][19] During negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of April 26, 1933 Hitler stated that “Secular schools can never be tolerated” because of their irreligious tendencies.[20]
In one speech he stated:
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”
Hitler (a baptised Catholic who was never ex-communicated) flirted with assorted deistic paganistic ideas of Christianity and religion, all of which basically amounts to not being an atheist in any recognisable way.
In a speech in 1922, he stated:
“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice. …And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited.”
Now, we can argue about context and whatnot, but what is clear is that Hitler was far from being clearly an atheist who committed atrocities in the name of atheism, or because he was an atheist. Furthermore, Hitler’s views appeared to change over his lifetime and years in power, so saying Hitler was X is to be overly simplistic. To say “Hitler was a Christian” is actually to say “Hitler was a Christian at point t” without actually declaring that point. People change their minds and Hitler transformed, as we all do, over his life. To say Hitler was Christian, non-Christian, pagan etc. is too simplistic. It can be especially difficult to tease out what he really believed because, like all successful politicians, he used ideas, organisations, movements and power structures to his own advantage, to increase his own power base and appeal. Teasing apart what he declares in public from what he actually, privately believes is also difficult and takes some second guessing, perhaps.
As Austin Cline writes in showing that the Nazi party itself was certainly not atheistic:
The NSDAP Party Program stated: “We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without owing itself to a particular confession….”
Positive Christianity adhered to basic orthodox doctrines and asserted that Christianity must make a practical, positive difference in people’s lives. It’s difficult to maintain that Nazi ideology was atheistic when it explicitly endorsed and promoted Christianity in the party platform.
So despite what Hitler’s personal views were, Nazi Germany was never an atheistic nation, and it takes more than one man to enact all of those atrocities. This is hugely important. Wherever Hitler sat along that religious continuum at any given point, the eventual horrors of Nazi Germany were enacted with the collusion of the Catholic Church, Protestant structures and the people of Germany themselves, overwhelmingly religious as they were.
On the causality of the Holocaust:
With regard to the Holocaust, whose causal roots are undoubtedly complex, one can be sure that Christian anti-Semitism played a part, as it had done throughout Europe for centuries in various Semitic discriminations. The discrimination against Jews and homosexuals has long been the pastime of conservative Christians rather than of left-leaning atheists – you only have to look at the notions espoused by Martin Luther in the time of the Reformation – see Von den Juden und iren Lugen (On the Jews and Their Lies).
Hitler’s biographer John Toland explains Catholicism’s influence on the Holocaust. He says of Hitler: “Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god. . ..”
Even after World War II, Catholic assistance to the Nazis continued. The Vatican aided the escape of more Nazis than any other governmental or private entity. Christopher Hitchens adds: “It was the Vatican itself, with its ability to provide passports, documents, money, and contacts, which organized the escape network and also the necessary shelter and succor at the other end.”
Gerald Darring gives a good synopsis of the role played by the Catholic church in Germany, and how the structures and people supported much of what went on and turned deaf ears to the atrocities:
Throughout the 1930s, as attacks on the Jews increased, a few individual priests voiced objections[1] but the church itself, through its leaders, said next to nothing.[2] At the time of the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, Cardinal Bertram told the archbishops that the church should not comment on “measures directed against an interest group which has no very close bond with the church,” and besides, he added, “the Press, which is overwhelmingly in Jewish hands, has remained consistently silent about the persecution of Catholics in various countries.”[3] Cardinal Faulhaber told the Bavarian bishops that the Catholic Church had more important things to be concerned with, and besides, the Jews could help themselves. The morning after the November 1938 nationwide pogrom in which hundreds of synagogues had been burned and destroyed, about 20,000 Jews had been arrested and 36 Jews were killed, and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were pillaged, Provost Lichtenberg of Berlin publicly offered prayers for the persecuted Jews, but the bishops of Germany said nothing at all.
Once the killing of Jews began in earnest in 1941, the German bishops had access to fairly accurate information about the plans and the carrying out of those plans in the form of the “final solution.” In many cases German bishops turned a deaf ear to reports about the killings taking place, but they agonized over whether they should speak out in opposition to them. A draft letter of opposition was drafted in 1943 by Margarete Sommer, the bishops’ consultant on Jewish affairs, and it may have passed, in the opinion of Michael Phayer, if it had not been for the opposition of Cardinal Adolph Bertram, who was ex-officio titular head of the German episcopacy as the bishop of Breslau.[4]
Here are some embarrassing examples for the Catholic church:
—Archbishop Konrad Gröber of Freiburg joined the S.S. in 1933 as a “promoting member,” and had to be forced to relinquish his membership in 1938 (Lewy, 45-46).
—The papal nuncio’s monsignor-secretary was a member of the Nazi party.[15]
—A Nazi official reported in 1934 that when Cardinal Faulhaber came for a meeting, he entered and left giving a “flawless Hitler salute conforming to the rules” (Lewy, 382, note 131).
—Bishop Wilhelm Berning frequently signed his letters to the authorities, “Heil Hitler.” On a visit to one of the concentration camps, he spoke to the prisoners about the “obligation enjoined by faith to obedience and loyalty to nation and government,” he shared a glass of beer with the guards, and then he uttered a “threefold Sieg Heil to Führer and Fatherland” (Tinnemann, 68).
—The Augsburg diocesan newspaper declared in April 1941 that “the person of the Führer contains the strength, greatness and future of the German people.”[16]
—All of the bishops of Germany ordered that church bells be rung on the occasion of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday in April 1939 (Lewy, 221).
—Prominent Catholic theologian Karl Adam wrote that, since the Jews had increased their influence in German economics, art, scholarship and literature, the Nazi action against the Jews was a painful necessity for German survival (Lewy, 279). According to Adam, Jesus was not a pure Jew because he came from Galilee, where there was much intermarriage with Gentiles, and “Jesus’ mother Mary had no physical or moral connection with those ugly dispositions and forces which we condemn in full blooded Jews.”[17]
—About 150 priests were active members of the Nazi party and “distorted their own perception of Catholicism to accommodate their love, faith and trust in National Socialism.”[18]
It must be remembered that there was also people who bucked the trend, particularly later on. Again, more details can be found here. For some fascinating details of the actions of Protestants and their churches in Nazi Germany, see this damning article (admittedly by a Catholic) about Protestant collusion.
So I think we can safely put to bed this idea that the Nazis were, in any clear and causal manner, atheists; and we can conclude that Christians did not help matters in any institutional way, ,and pinning atheism on Hitler is highly problematic, if not downright wrong.
Let us now look to whether Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists.
By contrast to all this, the Soviet Union was undeniably an atheist state, and the same applies to Maoist China and to Pol Pot’s fanatical Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s. That does not, however, show that the atrocities committed by these totalitarian dictatorships were the result of atheist beliefs, carried out in the name of atheism, or caused primarily by the atheistic aspects of the relevant forms of communism. In all of these cases, the situation was more complex – as, to be fair, also applies to some of the persecutions and atrocities in which religious movements, organizations, and leaders have been deeply implicated over the centuries.
It is pretty clear that the two leaders were atheists. But Hitler and Stalin had moustaches. It does not follow that moustaches were an important causal factor in the atrocities committed by them or under their tenure. Commonality is not causation. As wiki states of Stalin:
Raised in the Georgian Orthodox faith, Stalin became an atheist. He followed the position that religion was an opiate that needed to be removed in order to construct the ideal communist society. His government promoted atheism through special atheistic education in schools, anti-religious propaganda, the antireligious work of public institutions (Society of the Godless), discriminatory laws, and a terror campaign against religious believers.
As for Pol Pot, things are a little less obvious. One oft-cited quote by Christians appears to be that Prince Norodom Sihanouk once said of Pol Pot:
“Pol Pot does not believe in God but he thinks that heaven, destiny, wants him to guide Cambodia in the way he thinks it the best for Cambodia, that is to say, the worst. Pol Pot is mad, you know, like Hitler.”
But I cannot find the source of this quote. Either way, it shows some pretty incongruous views, and shows that he seemed to have been mad qua irrational, and believed in forces outside of himself such as destiny and heaven. In A. Gregor’s Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History (p. 246), the author states of Pol Pot (Sar):
Ample evidence survives that throughout his life, Sar harbored hate, in equal measure, of both Colonialists and his Vietnamese neighbors, both of whom he forever saw as a threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Cambodia. In the course of his political evolution–whatever his real or imputed ideological commitments–that never was to change. It can be argued that by the time he reached early maturity, Sar–whatever else he was–was a political and cultural nationalist. Before their disappearance into history, the Red Khmer, the revolutionaries led by Sar as Pol Pot, maintained that their purpose had always been to “defend and forever maintain their nation, people, and race. Whatever else they claimed to be, the Khmers Rouges gave ample testimony of being reactive nationalists–with all that the notion implies.
It is pretty clear from this that Pol Pot had a powerful political agenda at play, where politics is something which can replace religion. In fact, in the book just quoted from, there are chapter titles as follows: Leninism: Revolution as Religion; Fascism: The State as Religion; and National Socialism: Race as Religion. These chapters show there is far more to the matrix of causality at play here than a simple lack of belief in a deity.
When looking at texts which analyse the causality of genocides, in particular the atrocities of Pol Pot, I found the following to be the case (this is quoted from my facebook discussion):
It’s interesting that in Kiernan’s book “The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer” which looks in depth at Pol Pot’s murderous regime, the word atheism/t does not appear in the whole book, God only twice, insignificantly (one in a quote about Siva, another in a direct quote that is not relevant here). Fawthrop and Jarvis’ book “Getting Away with Genocide?: Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal” has no mention of the word atheism/t either. The same for Andeeopouloos’ “Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions”.
In answer to question 2), then, I challenge that atheism is at all properly the cause of such atrocities. Of Pol Pot, William Vollmann writes, in talking of a British journalist’s approach to the genocide of Cambodia (Vollmann is reviewing Philip Short’s biography of Pol Pot):
In other words, he seems to say, what Pol Pot did was hardly beyond the Cambodian ordinary. ”Every atrocity the Khmers Rouges ever committed, and many they did not, can be found depicted on the stone friezes of Angkor . . . or, in more recent times, in the conduct of the Issaraks,” the anti-French insurgents…
This is perhaps a little generous because there was no doubt an awful lot more politics going on, with a strong communist agenda. Vollmann continues:
Perhaps the problem is that Pol Pot was mediocre in almost every sphere: a failed technical student, an uninspired military leader who wasted the lives of his troops in badly planned offensives and ignored emergencies, a misguided ruler. In sum, Pol Pot would exert little claim on our attention were it not for the fact that millions died through his cruelty and incompetence. In ”Brother Number One,” Chandler admits defeat at the outset: ”I was able to build up a consistent, but rather two-dimensional picture. . . . As a person, he defies analysis.”
Vollmann’s analysis seems to point to the complexity of understanding such a man. In a paper looking at the psychological characteristics of a commandant of a torture and death camp in Cambodia, Paul Wilson observes:
This finding lends weight to the view that an individuals’ involvement in genocide and other related crimes is best understood as a complex interaction between the situation people find themselves in during times of war or civil conflict and their personality characteristics.
“It’s atheism wot did it” doesn’t really cut the mustard. That said, communism, an incredibly strong political drive and drive for power, and sustaining that power, is certainly integral to what went on. This simplistic attitude is summed up nicely in Renee Nabors’ piece (“Genocidal Triviality: An Analysis of the Perpetrators of the Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide”):
A common myth about the Holocaust and the Cambodian Genocide, authored for its convenience and political correctness, is that the perpetrators, aside from the high command, were either coerced or brainwashed. A grave but crucial reality of the genocides, however, lies in their origins. The common German citizen committed genocide; the ordinary Cambodian sustained the murder of 2 million. By choosing not to understand genocide, we compromise our ability to prevent it….
To understand how the tragedy of the Cambodian genocide came to be, it is important to note the ideology and political culture that defined the country at the time. Pol Pot believed wholeheartedly in Maoist thought, from which he derived his ideas about forced egalitarianism, cutting ties from the outside world, and destroying anciently rooted culture. He was at best, however, a mediocre student of Mao.… Furthermore, he failed to learn from Mao Zedong that the consequence of mass social experimentation was utter chaos. The fact that Cambodia’s “Brother Number One” understood only superficially the ideology on which he based his revolution is significant. It shows that the typical farmer’s boy Khmer Rouge soldier did not join because he thought highly of Marx, nor because he considered Pol Pot to be particularly brilliant, but because it was something to grasp on to. Pol Pot was not the end, but rather the means by which a desperate and fractionalized people sought a better life….
…The ability of Pol Pot, in four years, to create an obscure and unfounded deadly good versus evil fantasy and still maintain a strong cult-of-personality and international apathy is incomparably disturbing.
It is interesting to note that, again, Nabors’ fascinating piece makes no mention of God, or a lack thereof. Atheism is not on the table, it plays no defining role.
And much the same can be said of Stalin, where “enemies of the people” were killed or made to do forced labour. It was not because Stalin did not believe in God. And here I will answer question 3) fairly frankly. I am an atheist for all intents and purposes) and yet I stand starkly against such genocide. Why? Because a lack of belief in God (or a positive claim that God does not exist) does not define my politics, nor my morality. Atheists comprise a growing proportion of the world’s population, and yet they also adhere to the myriad of different politics and moralities that the world has to offer. Whilst one could say that, on balance, atheists are perhaps more liberal (socially) than religionists, one cannot claim that people’s atheism causes them to commit particular acts. I contend that people’s politics are more core to their beliefs, being based much on in-group / out-group psychology and intuitive desires, such that atheism or theism take a second place in an internal hierarchy within most.
As Blackford claims:
Sorting out the roles played by religious or antireligious beliefs, as opposed to such things as worldly ambition and lust for glory, is often a nontrivial task, and we should be careful before adopting simplistic narratives. In the case of twentieth-century communist regimes, much of the death toll – perhaps most of it – arose from utterly ruthless attempts to effect economic transformations on a near-apocalyptic scale….
While all this is a horrible indictment of the Soviet leadership and perhaps the ideology that the leaders embraced, little of it relates to atheism as such. Indeed, the Soviet Union did not have a uniformly antagonistic relationship to religion, and the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church supported the regime’s military initiatives, such as suppression of the uprising in Hungary, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan (Baggini, 2003, p. 88).
A young Stalin
Both Stalin and Pol Pot sought to create a utopia through social and economic reform and engineering on a gargantuan scale. Blackford’s chapter on this very myth is forceful, and he sums up the misguided approach with aplomb:
While we do not doubt that religious people were often targeted as enemies of all these regimes’ grandiose plans, this was usually because churches and other religious authorities (such as those related to Confucian tradition in China) were seen as actual or potential sources of resistance. Once again, the Soviet authorities were not always on bad terms with the Orthodox Church, and the aim of these communist regimes was to suppress any opposition, from whatever source, while carrying out massive transformations of their countries’ economic bases. There was plenty of fanaticism involved, but mainly about holding onto power and engaging in mass-scale forms of social engineering – whether agricultural collectivization, forced urbanization, or, as in the case of Pol Pot’s ‘‘Democratic Kampuchea,’’ forced deurbanization and abandonment of learning and technology.
None of this follows from mere atheism, and instead far more comprehensive political and economic ideologies were relied upon. These bear little resemblance to the views of most thinkers in the rationalist tradition that dates back to ancient Greece, and they are remote from anything found in the thinking of high-profile atheists involved in current debates – ‘‘celebrity atheists,’’ to use Abramovich’s trivializing expression – who tend to be political liberals and pluralists. Indeed, con- temporary atheists tend to oppose comprehensive, apocalyptic ideologies such as Nazism, Stalinism, and Pol Pot’s agrarian socialism, partly because these imitate so many of the features of monotheistic religion – aspects of religion that contributed historically to pogroms, witch hunts, and inquisitions.
So in conclusion, I think that theists who posit atheism as a necessary or defining causal factor in these atrocities is doing a disservice to history, politics and rational thought. It is evident that this prima facie approach to understanding what caused such genocide and atrocity is very naive, at best. That the experts in the relevant fields fail to see atheism as not even a, let alone the, driving factor is telling.
It may be worth referring to the work of Eric Hoffer in understanding what drives adherents of mass movements to terrible things, as summed up here by Ed Babinski.
But what does this say about atheists’ claims of religious causality with regard to supposedly religiously driven atrocity, be it the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades, or even modern day Islamic extremism? Well, for a start, one must treat each historical event on a case by case basis, and one must be careful not to commit hypocrisy, for sure.
There is, though, a huge difference; that being that there is no defining ‘holy book’ or text which seeks to dictate what atheists should or shouldn’t do as some divine diktat. This is crucial. One can hardly call atheism into causal importance when all atheism states is that there is no god. Yet the Qu’ran states,
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.” Qur’an9:29
and
“Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great.” Qur’an4:34
Or perhaps it is worth considering some Yahwistic commands (from the Leviticus entry in the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible):
If you refuse to kill someone who gives his seed to Molech, God set his face against you and your family.20:4-5
“For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.” Couldn’t we try spanking first? 20:9
If a man has sex with his father’s wife, kill them both. 20:11
If a man “lies” with his daughter-in-law, then both must be killed. 20:12
If a man has sex with another man, kill them both. 20:13
If you “lie” with your wife and your mother-in-law (now that sounds fun!), then all three of you must be burned to death. 20:14
If a man or woman “lie with a beast” both the person and the poor animal are to be killed. 20:15-16
People with “familiar spirits” (witches, fortune tellers, etc.) are to be stoned to death. 20:27
A priest’s daughter who “plays the whore” is to be burned to death. 21:9
Granted, we all know the horrible verses and commands in the Bible, so you get the point. Suffice it to say that there is some solid divine benchmarking for some seriously dubious behaviour. On the other hand, “There is no god” tells you nothing. It dictates, commands, decrees and countenances not.
Rather than criticise atheists in their own way, it might pay to make sure their own religious tracts are not telling them to do terrible things. After all, the Bible was used to countenance slavery for 2,000 years. There literally is no counterpart for the Bible to atheists. We cannot be told to do something in such terms. Yes, there are probably, undoubtedly, more complex reasons as to why the Aztecs died at the hands of the Spanish conquistadores, probably less complex reasons for the Crusades and the Inquisition. One must remember that if such events are to be compared with such heinous ‘atheistic’ crimes of genocide, then a fair comparison must be made, and this must be one of intention. In other words, you cannot compare such events in real terms. Atheistic Stalin killed millions because he had the instruments and infrastructure to do so. But was his intention any different to, say, a Christian Crusader king? If the Crusader had weapons of mass destruction and transportation devices at his fingertips, would he have caused much greater destruction? Of course. Populations were also much smaller, so given less ability and smaller numbers of people in real terms, of course earlier religious atrocities seemed less repugnant. And so the questions should be:
Were the intentions any different?
What proportion of the target were killed?
Was religion causally crucial?
If the context was changed to a more modern era, would there have been much more widespread destruction?
Yet I have shown, I hope, that atheism wasn’t a central causal factor in the genocides of the twentieth century anyway; moreover, one could argue that religion did play an important causal role in many atrocities throughout history. Causality is notoriously difficult to assign to events, as I have set out in my piece “Have I killed someone?” and we are often far too naive in how we apply that sort of determination. Daniel Dennett, in his book Freedom Evolves, expresses the difficulty in understanding the different types of causes, in looking at a French Foreign Legion thought experiment, as well as looking at the causality for the Dow Jones falling or First World War (pp. 70-89). These things are multifaceted and wondering what would be necessary causes requires knowing about possible worlds in which they didn’t occur. Take atheism away from these people, ceteris paribus, and would such horrors have happened? Are there aspects or personality traits which caused both atheism and other things which went on to manifest themselves in wartime atrocities?
In this way, it is easy to scapegoat humans on account of singular ideas and factors. Life ain’t that simple. Things are complex; why people do things is a complex thing to tease apart. And, essentially, humans can be right bastards. Quite often the most obvious thing can be the overriding cause: humanity. Lust and greed for power, resources, and a distorted idea of utopia. Status, aggression, anger, alpha male: all these things that evolution has dealt humanity (predominantly men in this context, as women aren’t so warlike and bloodthirsty) can be called into causal efficacy and blamed for the continual warmongering throughout history. It’s bleak, but potentially accurate, and it might even get atheism and religion off the hook. I said might.
[An updated version of this article can be found here.]
For Hitchens and co, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Never mind that tyrants devoid of religion such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot perpetrated the worst atrocities in history. As H. Allen Orr, professor of biology at the University of Rochester, observed, the 20th century was an experiment in secularism that produced secular evil, responsible for the unprecedented murder of more than 100 million. (Abramovich, 2009)
Yes, here it is again, the ubiquitous claim that atheism = Stalin/Pol Pot = moral atrocities. This is a complex one, so hang around. It is commonly claimed by Christians, and I had a debate about this on the Unbelievable forum on facebook recently with many who did, that secular atheism was responsible for the atrocities of the twentieth century perpetrated by the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot (Mao Zedong is often thrown in for good measure). This raises several questions:
Were these people atheists?
If so, was their atheism causally instrumental in these people carrying out such atrocities?
Are these atrocities different in any particular and important way to those carried out by religious predecessors?
I am going to look at all of these points and show that atheism is not the cause of such atrocities. It might be worth considering that, at the time of writing here in the UK, the Prime Minister is atheist, the Deputy is atheist and the shadow leader is most certainly an atheist and we have not yet committed any huge atrocities under their command! That said, the last religious leader we had (Tony Blair) went, at the behest of his US (Christian) counterpart, George W. Bush, on a Crusade into the Middle East in what many call an illegal war. Go figure.
Looking first at question number 1), were these people atheists? The Hitler question has been answered by many people more knowledgeable on the subject than me. Suffice it to say, in simple terms, no, he wasn’t. Yes, there was Gott mit uns on army belts, and Hitler cozied up to religious institutions, probably more for his own political ends. Importantly, atheists were persecuted. As wiki states:
In Germany during the Nazi era, a 1933 decree stated that “No National Socialist may suffer detriment… on the ground that he does not make any religious profession at all”.[15] However, the regime strongly opposed “godless communism”,[16][17] and most of Germany’s atheist and largely left-wing freethought organizations were banned the same year; some right-wing groups were tolerated by the Nazis until the mid-1930s.[18][19] During negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of April 26, 1933 Hitler stated that “Secular schools can never be tolerated” because of their irreligious tendencies.[20]
In one speech he stated:
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”
Hitler (a baptised Catholic who was never ex-communicated) flirted with assorted deistic paganistic ideas of Christianity and religion, all of which basically amounts to not being an atheist in any recognisable way.
In a speech in 1922, he stated:
“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice. …And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited.”
Now, we can argue about context and whatnot, but what is clear is that Hitler was far from being clearly an atheist who committed atrocities in the name of atheism, or because he was an atheist. Furthermore, Hitler’s views appeared to change over his lifetime and years in power, so saying Hitler was X is to be overly simplistic. As Austin Cline writes in showing that the Nazi party itself was certainly not atheistic:
The NSDAP Party Program stated: “We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without owing itself to a particular confession….”
Positive Christianity adhered to basic orthodox doctrines and asserted that Christianity must make a practical, positive difference in people’s lives. It’s difficult to maintain that Nazi ideology was atheistic when it explicitly endorsed and promoted Christianity in the party platform.
So despite what Hitler’s personal views were, Nazi Germany was never an atheistic nation, and it takes more than one man to enact all of those atrocities.
With regard to the Holocaust, whose causal roots re undoubtedly complex, one can be sure that Christian anti-Semitism played a part, as it had done throughout Europe for centuries in various Semitic discriminations. The discrimination against Jews and homosexuals has long been the pastime of conservative Christians rather than of left-leaning atheists – you only have to look at the notions espoused by Martin Luther in the time of the Reformation – see Von den Juden und iren Lugen (On the Jews and Their Lies).
Hitler’s biographer John Toland explains Catholicism’s influence on the Holocaust. He says of Hitler: “Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god. . ..”
Even after World War II, Catholic assistance to the Nazis continued. The Vatican aided the escape of more Nazis than any other governmental or private entity. Christopher Hitchens adds: “It was the Vatican itself, with its ability to provide passports, documents, money, and contacts, which organized the escape network and also the necessary shelter and succor at the other end.”
So I think we can safely put to bed this idea that the Nazis were, in any clear and causal manner, atheists; and we can conclude that Christians did not help matters in any institutional way.
Let us now look to whether Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists.
By contrast to all this, the Soviet Union was undeniably an atheist state, and the same applies to Maoist China and to Pol Pot’s fanatical Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s. That does not, however, show that the atrocities committed by these totalitarian dictatorships were the result of atheist beliefs, carried out in the name of atheism, or caused primarily by the atheistic aspects of the relevant forms of communism. In all of these cases, the situation was more complex – as, to be fair, also applies to some of the persecutions and atrocities in which religious movements, organizations, and leaders have been deeply implicated over the centuries.
It is pretty clear that the two leaders were atheists. But Hitler and Stalin had moustaches. It does not follow that moustaches were an important causal factor in the atrocities committed by them or under their tenure. Commonality is not causation. As wiki states of Stalin:
Raised in the Georgian Orthodox faith, Stalin became an atheist. He followed the position that religion was an opiate that needed to be removed in order to construct the ideal communist society. His government promoted atheism through special atheistic education in schools, anti-religious propaganda, the antireligious work of public institutions (Society of the Godless), discriminatory laws, and a terror campaign against religious believers.
As for Pol Pot, things are a little less obvious. One oft-cited quote by Christians appears to be that Prince Norodom Sihanouk once said of Pol Pot:
“Pol Pot does not believe in God but he thinks that heaven, destiny, wants him to guide Cambodia in the way he thinks it the best for Cambodia, that is to say, the worst. Pol Pot is mad, you know, like Hitler.”
But I cannot find the source of this quote. Either way, it shows some pretty incongruous views, and shows that he seemed to have been mad qua irrational, and believed in forces outside of himself such as destiny and heaven. In A. Gregor’s Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History (p. 246), the author states of Pol Pot (Sar):
Ample evidence survives that throughout his life, Sar harbored hate, in equal measure, of both Colonialists and his Vietnamese neighbors, both of whom he forever saw as a threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Cambodia. In the course of his political evolution–whatever his real or imputed ideological commitments–that never was to change. It can be argued that by the time he reached early maturity, Sar–whatever else he was–was a political and cultural nationalist. Before their disappearance into history, the Red Khmer, the revolutionaries led by Sar as Pol Pot, maintained that their purpose had always been to “defend and forever maintain their nation, people, and race. Whatever else they claimed to be, the Khmers Rouges gave ample testimony of being reactive nationalists–with all that the notion implies.
It is pretty clear from this that Pol Pot had a powerful political agenda at play, where politics is something which can replace religion. In fact, in the book just quoted from, there are chapter titles as follows: Leninism: Revolution as Religion; Fascism: The State as Religion; and National Socialism: Race as Religion. These chapters show there is far more to the matrix of causality at play here than a simple lack of belief in a deity.
When looking at texts which analyse the causality of genocides, in particular the atrocities of Pol Pot, I found the following to be the case (this is quoted from my facebook discussion):
It’s interesting that in Kiernan’s book “The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer” which looks in depth at Pol Pot’s murderous regime, the word atheism/t does not appear in the whole book, God only twice, insignificantly (one in a quote about Siva, another in a direct quote that is not relevant here). Fawthrop and Jarvis’ book “Getting Away with Genocide?: Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal” has no mention of the word atheism/t either. The same for Andeeopouloos’ “Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions”.
In answer to question 2), then, I challenge that atheism is at all properly the cause of such atrocities. Of Pol Pot, William Vollmann writes, in talking of a British journalist’s approach to the genocide of Cambodia (Vollmann is reviewing Philip Short’s biography of Pol Pot):
In other words, he seems to say, what Pol Pot did was hardly beyond the Cambodian ordinary. ”Every atrocity the Khmers Rouges ever committed, and many they did not, can be found depicted on the stone friezes of Angkor . . . or, in more recent times, in the conduct of the Issaraks,” the anti-French insurgents…
This is perhaps a little generous because there was no doubt an awful lot more politics going on, with a strong communist agenda. Vollmann continues:
Perhaps the problem is that Pol Pot was mediocre in almost every sphere: a failed technical student, an uninspired military leader who wasted the lives of his troops in badly planned offensives and ignored emergencies, a misguided ruler. In sum, Pol Pot would exert little claim on our attention were it not for the fact that millions died through his cruelty and incompetence. In ”Brother Number One,” Chandler admits defeat at the outset: ”I was able to build up a consistent, but rather two-dimensional picture. . . . As a person, he defies analysis.”
Vollmann’s analysis seems to point to the complexity of understanding such a man. In a paper looking at the psychological characteristics of a commandant of a torture and death camp in Cambodia, Paul Wilson observes:
This finding lends weight to the view that an individuals’ involvement in genocide and other related crimes is best understood as a complex interaction between the situation people find themselves in during times of war or civil conflict and their personality characteristics.
“It’s atheism wot did it” doesn’t really cut the mustard. That said, communism, an incredibly strong political drive and drive for power, and sustaining that power, is certainly integral to what went on. This simplistic attitude is summed up nicely in Renee Nabors’ piece (“Genocidal Triviality: An Analysis of the Perpetrators of the Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide”):
A common myth about the Holocaust and the Cambodian Genocide, authored for its convenience and political correctness, is that the perpetrators, aside from the high command, were either coerced or brainwashed. A grave but crucial reality of the genocides, however, lies in their origins. The common German citizen committed genocide; the ordinary Cambodian sustained the murder of 2 million. By choosing not to understand genocide, we compromise our ability to prevent it….
To understand how the tragedy of the Cambodian genocide came to be, it is important to note the ideology and political culture that defined the country at the time. Pol Pot believed wholeheartedly in Maoist thought, from which he derived his ideas about forced egalitarianism, cutting ties from the outside world, and destroying anciently rooted culture. He was at best, however, a mediocre student of Mao.… Furthermore, he failed to learn from Mao Zedong that the consequence of mass social experimentation was utter chaos. The fact that Cambodia’s “Brother Number One” understood only superficially the ideology on which he based his revolution is significant. It shows that the typical farmer’s boy Khmer Rouge soldier did not join because he thought highly of Marx, nor because he considered Pol Pot to be particularly brilliant, but because it was something to grasp on to. Pol Pot was not the end, but rather the means by which a desperate and fractionalized people sought a better life….
…The ability of Pol Pot, in four years, to create an obscure and unfounded deadly good versus evil fantasy and still maintain a strong cult-of-personality and international apathy is incomparably disturbing.
It is interesting to note that, again, Nabors’ fascinating piece makes no mention of God, or a lack thereof. Atheism is not on the table, it plays no defining role.
And much the same can be said of Stalin, where “enemies of the people” were killed or made to do forced labour. It was not because Stalin did not believe in God. And here I will answer question 3) fairly frankly. I am an atheist for all intents and purposes) and yet I stand starkly against such genocide. Why? Because a lack of belief in God (or a positive claim that God does not exist) does not define my politics, nor my morality. Atheists comprise a growing proportion of the world’s population, and yet they also adhere to the myriad of different politics and moralities that the world has to offer. Whilst one could say that, on balance, atheists are perhaps more liberal (socially) than religionists, one cannot claim that people’s atheism causes them to commit particular acts. I contend that people’s politics are more core to their beliefs, being based much on in-group / out-group psychology and intuitive desires, such that atheism or theism take a second place in an internal hierarchy within most.
As Blackford claims:
Sorting out the roles played by religious or antireligious beliefs, as opposed to such things as worldly ambition and lust for glory, is often a nontrivial task, and we should be careful before adopting simplistic narratives. In the case of twentieth-century communist regimes, much of the death toll – perhaps most of it – arose from utterly ruthless attempts to effect economic transformations on a near-apocalyptic scale….
While all this is a horrible indictment of the Soviet leadership and perhaps the ideology that the leaders embraced, little of it relates to atheism as such. Indeed, the Soviet Union did not have a uniformly antagonistic relationship to religion, and the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church supported the regime’s military initiatives, such as suppression of the uprising in Hungary, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan (Baggini, 2003, p. 88).
A young Stalin
Both Stalin and Pol Pot sought to create a utopia through social and economic reform and engineering on a gargantuan scale. Blackford’s chapter on this very myth is forceful, and he sums up the misguided approach with aplomb:
While we do not doubt that religious people were often targeted as enemies of all these regimes’ grandiose plans, this was usually because churches and other religious authorities (such as those related to Confucian tradition in China) were seen as actual or potential sources of resistance. Once again, the Soviet authorities were not always on bad terms with the Orthodox Church, and the aim of these communist regimes was to suppress any opposition, from whatever source, while carrying out massive transformations of their countries’ economic bases. There was plenty of fanaticism involved, but mainly about holding onto power and engaging in mass-scale forms of social engineering – whether agricultural collectivization, forced urbanization, or, as in the case of Pol Pot’s ‘‘Democratic Kampuchea,’’ forced deurbanization and abandonment of learning and technology.
None of this follows from mere atheism, and instead far more comprehensive political and economic ideologies were relied upon. These bear little resemblance to the views of most thinkers in the rationalist tradition that dates back to ancient Greece, and they are remote from anything found in the thinking of high-profile atheists involved in current debates – ‘‘celebrity atheists,’’ to use Abramovich’s trivializing expression – who tend to be political liberals and pluralists. Indeed, con- temporary atheists tend to oppose comprehensive, apocalyptic ideologies such as Nazism, Stalinism, and Pol Pot’s agrarian socialism, partly because these imitate so many of the features of monotheistic religion – aspects of religion that contributed historically to pogroms, witch hunts, and inquisitions.
So in conclusion, I think that theists who posit atheism as a necessary or defining causal factor in these atrocities is doing a disservice to history, politics and rational thought. It is evident that this prima facie approach to understanding what caused such genocide and atrocity is very naive, at best. That the experts in the relevant fields fail to see atheism as not even a, let alone the, driving factor is telling.
But what does this say about atheists’ claims of religious causality with regard to supposedly religiously driven atrocity, be it the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades, or even modern day Islamic extremism? Well, for a start, one must treat each historical event on a case by case basis, and one must be careful not to commit hypocrisy, for sure.
There is, though, a huge difference; that being that there is no defining ‘holy book’ or text which seeks to dictate what atheists should or shouldn’t do as some divine diktat. This is crucial. One can hardly call atheism into causal importance when all atheism states is that there is no god. Yet the Qu’ran states,
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.” Qur’an9:29
and
“Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great.” Qur’an4:34
Or perhaps it is worth considering some Yahwistic commands (from the Leviticus entry in the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible):
If you refuse to kill someone who gives his seed to Molech, God set his face against you and your family.20:4-5
“For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.” Couldn’t we try spanking first? 20:9
If a man has sex with his father’s wife, kill them both. 20:11
If a man “lies” with his daughter-in-law, then both must be killed. 20:12
If a man has sex with another man, kill them both. 20:13
If you “lie” with your wife and your mother-in-law (now that sounds fun!), then all three of you must be burned to death. 20:14
If a man or woman “lie with a beast” both the person and the poor animal are to be killed. 20:15-16
People with “familiar spirits” (witches, fortune tellers, etc.) are to be stoned to death. 20:27
A priest’s daughter who “plays the whore” is to be burned to death. 21:9
Granted, we all know the horrible verses and commands in the Bible, so you get the point. Suffice it to say that there is some solid divine benchmarking for some seriously dubious behaviour. On the other hand, “There is no god” tells you nothing. It dictates, commands, decrees and countenances not.
Rather than criticise atheists in their own way, it might pay to make sure their own religious tracts are not telling them to do terrible things. After all, the Bible was used to countenance slavery for 2,000 years. There literally is no counterpart for the Bible to atheists. We cannot be told to do something in such terms. Yes, there are probably, undoubtedly, more complex reasons as to why the Aztecs died at the hands of the Spanish conquistadores, probably less complex reasons for the Crusades and the Inquisition. One must remember that if such events are to be compared with such heinous ‘atheistic’ crimes of genocide, then a fair comparison must be made, and this must be one of intention. In other words, you cannot compare such events in real terms. Atheistic Stalin killed millions because he had the instruments and infrastructure to do so. But was his intention any different to, say, a Christian Crusader king? If the Crusader had weapons of mass destruction and transportation devices at his fingertips, would he have caused much greater destruction? Of course. Populations were also much smaller, so given less ability and smaller numbers of people in real terms, of course earlier religious atrocities seemed less repugnant. And so the questions should be:
Were the intentions any different?
What proportion of the target were killed?
Was religion causally crucial?
If the context was changed to a more modern era, would there have been much more widespread destruction?
Yet I have shown, I hope, that atheism wasn’t a central causal factor in the genocides of the twentieth century anyway; moreover, one could argue that religion did play an important causal role in many atrocities throughout history.
However, it is easy to scapegoat humans on account of singular ideas and factors. Life ain’t that simple. Things are complex; why people do things is a complex thing to tease apart. And, essentially, humans can be right bastards. Quite often the most obvious thing can be the overriding cause: humanity. Lust and greed for power, resources, and a distorted idea of utopia. It’s bleak, but potentially accurate, and it might even get atheism and religion off the hook. I said might.
A Tippling Philosopher
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