Christ, Marx, and the Liberation of Slaves

I have received some pushback on my previous article, which argued that Karl Marx was, indeed, largely to blame for the horrors of communism.  A young philosopher named Eric DeJardin wrote a rebuttal on my Facebook page, which I will answer later.  But first, let me respond to a second and closely-related challenge he issued:  

DM: "And my demonstration of how Marx was to blame for the Gulag, which enslaved tens of millions, remains untouched."

ED: "I responded to it pretty extensively on your FB page. We're in the middle of discussing it, so it's not exactly 'untouched.'  Anyway, by your own criteria a better case can be made for holding Christianity responsible for slavery in Christian nations than can be made for holding Marx responsible for atrocities in Marxist nations.  Heck, we can point to texts plainly supporting slavery in the Bible while, as you have admitted, you can't even say that Marx would have supported what was done in his name." (emphasis mine)

My mistake.  Eric did try to rebut my arguments.  Good for him.  This is a better forum for more in-depth discussions, so I intend to answer his arguments here.  (Though one gets the feeling, with Marx and these young philosophers, that pushing them away from Marx, is like trying to talk Juliet into keeping from Romeo, after she has been smitten by Cupid's arrow.)

But first, let's tackle Eric's claim that by my six criteria for historical causation, given in that article, Christianity is more responsible for slavery than Marx is for communist atrocities.  The evidence points overwhelmingly in the opposite direction, I will argue.  

I. Judging Christianity and Marxism, Half a Dozen Criteria

1. Precedence.  "First, A must precede B, to cause it . . ."

"Christianity cannot be blamed for the general phenomena of inquisitions, or credited for the institution of marriage, since people were abusing others, marrying, or doing both at the same time, long before the first noel range out . . . 

"What belongs to our species as a whole cannot be credited to or blamed on any particular belief system . . . "

Nothing about slavery in Christian countries was unusual, except its ending.  Human beings had been enslaving one another since the dawn of time.  And the particular forms slavery took in Christian countries (including chattel slavery) were not unusual, either.  So by the criterion of precedence, it is hard to say Christianity caused slavery -- though easy to argue that it caused the abolition of slavery.  Slaves had often been set free before Christianity, but abolition movements were unusual.  (One finds hints of them here or there, such as under the rebel Wang Mang who temporarily overthrew the Han Dyansty.)      

Communism combined common and original elements, as I said: 

"KKK-like secret societies, and scapegoating, are common in world history, especially in the wake of a cataclysmic conflict like the Civil War.  So neither Christ nor Marx could have invented scapegoating or secret societies as a whole, but could have inspired or influenced the form a particular such phenomenon took . . . 

"Some other aspects of communism-in-practice were also common: dictatorship, mass murder, scapegoating, mass human bondage (when technology allowed).  But other parts of the system were fairly unusual.  Communes were established in most communist states.  They were not the first communes in history, but they were unusual in being established on a top-down basis, and the extreme to which, say, the Maoists and Kmer Rouge took them.  The attempt to put the proletariat in charge (or intellectuals in the name of the proletariat) was also unusual.  Attacks on one religion or other are not unique, but wholesale destruction represented a stark break from the past.  Rule by the communist party, and party organization from the top down to the village, school, and platoon levels, did not I think have close parallels in prior Russian or Chinese societies."  

So the Criterion of Precedence does not encourage us to blame Christ for slavery.  But it is easy to see how Marx's teaching may. in theory, have caused many of the evils of communism.  

2. Proximity.  "Second, like magnetism, the closer you stand, the harder a social influencer pulls.  Mohammed preached against idols, and before his death, Mecca had been cleared of them.  Marx advocated revolution, and seventy years later, the October Revolution erupted.  Most often, we are influenced by teachings we see lived out around us.  A hurricane spawned near Africa may break on Cape Cod, but only when warm water lies between source and destination.  Similarly, an ancient scripture may build great force over millennia, but only when the “warm water” of a practicing community of believers keeps it going . . . Proximity matters."

Early Christians did not, so far as I know, bring about any upsurge in slave-trading, or in slave ownership.  Indeed, in another post on this site, "Abolition of Slavery: The Early Years," I describe opposition to slavery in the Early Church.  And a reader cited a letter (which I have now verified) telling how St. Augustine's congregation liberated 120 slaves, a common sort of thing for them to do, Augustine implies:  

"About four months before I wrote this letter, a crowd of people collected from different regions, but particularly from Numidia, were brought here by Galatian merchants to be transported from the shores of Hippo (It is only, or at least mainly, the Galatians who are so eager to engage in this form of commerce). However, a faithful Christian was at hand, who was aware of our practice of performing acts of mercy in such cases; and he brought the news to the church. Immediately, about 120 people were set free by us (though I was absent at the time), some from the ship which they had to board, others from a place where they had been hidden before being put on board. We discovered that barely five or six of these had been sold by their parents. On hearing about the misfortunes that had led the rest of them to the Galatians, via their abductors and kidnappers, hardly one of us could restrain their tears." 

So there is no positive link between early Christianity and an increase in slavery: on the contrary, some push-back already occurred, including from the greatest early Christian thinker after St. Paul, and from others whom I cite, like Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Patrick.  

By contrast, as mentioned, revolution followed Marx within decades.  And after revolution, communes, abolition of private property, attacks on "religion," Dictatorship of the (alleged) Proletariat, secret police, mass arrests, and all the rest.  Not all of this was unique to communism (Point One), but much of it was highly unusual in European history, as was widely recognized at the time. 

So by the Criterion of Proximity, too, Marx can be credibly blamed for the Gulag, but Christ cannot reasonably be blamed for any increase in slavery.  (Which did not, it seems, occur for 1500 years.)    

3. "Third, duration.  Sometimes a religion is quickly accepted, but its deeper implications take generations to sink in." 

I should have made a distinction with this criterion, which is in some conflict with Criterion Two.  If the agents of social change gain great political power, change is often instituted quickly.  For instance, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young overthrew American tradition within their community, and instituted polygamy from the top down.  Chairman Mao overthrew the "Four Olds" and Confucian traditions within three decades.  However, both reforms proved short-lived: Mormon polygamy, because the larger American culture refused to admit Utah until they banned it, Maoism, because in later years, the Chinese Communist Party began to find Confucius useful.  (Though some reforms stuck, for instance, few Chinese now burn incense to ancestors.)  

I would argue that abolition of slavery was one of those "deeper implications" that took a while to sink in among Christians.  It was not imposed top-down when Christians finally took power, centuries after Christ.  But as shown above, and in the rest of that article, the anti-slave logic of the Gospel began having an effect early on through thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa and even (in a less sweeping manner) St. Augustine, an effect which grew, though there was often push-back, due to various forms of self-interest.  

Because Marxists gained dictatorial power, the effect of their thinking revealed itself early on, when zeal was still fiery, and then began to die down.  Early social experiments tended to be far infused with radical ideology, early in the revolutionary periods in Russia, China, Peru, Vietnam, and Cambodia.  Then reality began to set in.  People became exhausted by revolutionary fervor, and old ways reasserted themselves.  

Read The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, for an account of how that process played out in   

North Vietnam.  

4. An active ingredient.  "Fourth, something in the alleged cause should explain its supposed effect.  If Islam is blamed for encouraging prepubescent marriages, one should find something in the life of Mohammed or early Muslim teaching that encourages or allows men to marry young girls.  (Such as records of his consummating marriage to the nine-year-old Aisha.)  If Christianity is credited for saving girls from foot-binding in China, that claim will be strengthened if we find Jesus or the apostles helping women in analogous ways in the New Testament . . . "

Eric addresses this important criterion by claiming that the Bible clearly justifies slavery, while Marx opposed it.  (Forgetting, perhaps, that my argument against Marx does not particularly focus on slavery, though yes, his followers did resurrect it on a massive scale, for fairly predictable reasons.)  

So this is a key criterion, which I will focus on a little more than the others.  (But don't worry, I will be brief -- a thorough treatment would take a book!)   

In that previous article, I pointed to many "active ingredients" in Marx's personality and teaching which led to the Gulag and other horrors.  I need not repeat or explain them all again here.      

What does the Bible say about slavery?  Many think that the Bible is all over the map on the subject.  I wrote: 

"Perhaps religious texts are mere Rorschach ink blot tests: Mother Theresa and the Grand Inquisitor read the same Bible, then depending on their character or upbringing, reach opposite conclusions about how to treat folks.  Yet as novelist Tom Wolfe noted in The Kingdom of Speech, from Mohammed to Marx, history demonstrates the power of words to shape society.  A linguistic artist himself, Wolfe recognized Jesus as one of five men whose words have cut most deeply . . . " 

As for words that cut deeply, note how Jesus' sayings struck: (a) A black slave in a pre-Civil War novel; (b) a white traveler in the same novel; (c) the author, and (d) Americans outside the South.  

Uncle Tom's Bible

Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is often credited with helping form an anti-slavery consensus in the North before the Civil War, surprised me when I first read it.  I knew several men in Harriet's family were famous preachers and Bible teachers, and vocally opposed slavery.  (I had even spoken in a forum at Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, where one brother served as pastor.)  But I didn't know that the novel was actually a kind of theological debate and a Bible study, not just a story.  

In Chapter 12, for instance, two white Christians on a boat on the Mississippi which is transporting slaves cross swords over slavery, as onlookers take the side that suits their interests: 

A. “It’s undoubtedly the intention of Providence that the African race should be servants,—kept in a low condition,” said a grave-looking gentleman in black, a clergyman, seated by the cabin door. “‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be,’ the scripture says.” 

"I say, stranger, is that ar what that text means?” said a tall man, standing by.

“'Undoubtedly. It pleased Providence, for some inscrutable reason, to doom the race to bondage, ages ago; and we must not set up our opinion against that.'

“'Well, then, we’ll all go ahead and buy up niggers,' said the man, “if that’s the way of Providence,—won’t we, Squire?'”

Here a preacher, obviously part of the Establishment, cites an obscure Old Testament passage which actually has nothing to do with slavery, to justify what the South wished to see justified.  Then slave-traders echo that reasoning to justify their lucrative line of work.  (Which they would have gone on doing without such help, or found other ideological support for.)  

Then a young man, whom Beecher may model on one of her brothers, or her theology-teaching husband, responds:

B. "A tall, slender young man, with a face expressive of great feeling and intelligence, here broke in, and repeated the words, 'All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.’ I suppose,” he added, “that is scripture, as much as ‘Cursed be Canaan.’”

Beecher is greatly understating her point, as she no doubt intends readers to recognize.  (Thus the satirical, "Is that ar what the text means?" Followed by the glib, "Undoubtedly.")  

"Do unto others" are the words of Christ himself.  And they obviously apply to the pitiful case described onboard, of an old lady whose only remaining child is snatched from her arms and sold to another owner.  (While the first passage is, again, not about slavery at all.)  Beecher knows that the words of Jesus trump a mis-cited and irrelevant Old Testament passage. She then satirically goads her readers not to be hardened to such evil for the sake of national unity, even: 

"The trader had arrived at that stage of Christian and political perfection which has been recommended by some preachers and politicians of the north, lately, in which he had completely overcome every humane weakness and prejudice.  His heart was exactly where yours, sir, and mine could be brought, with proper effort and cultivation. The wild look of anguish and utter despair that the woman cast on him might have disturbed one less practiced; but he was used to it. He had seen that same look hundreds of times. You can get used to such things, too, my friend; and it is the great object of recent efforts to make our whole northern community used to them, for the glory of the Union."

This passage satires how Scripture is abused to justify what Beecher shows it cannot justify.  Later in the same chapter, Beecher shows her hand more clearly, through the Christ-figure of Uncle Tom himself: 

C. "Tom had watched the whole transaction from first to last, and had a perfect understanding of its results. To him, it looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he had not learned to generalize, and to take enlarged views. If he had only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity, he might have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade; a trade which is the vital support of an institution which an American divine tells us has “no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life.” But Tom, as we see, being a poor, ignorant fellow, whose reading had been confined entirely to the New Testament, could not comfort and solace himself with views like these."

Beecher's point is that a hardened, establishment preacher, motivated by social standing, money, or national interest, can indeed find warrant for slavery in the Old Testament, even if he has to twist things a little.  And some verses, taken out of the full context of Scripture, may help even more.  But Christians are supposed to look to Christ for their example, and interpret Scripture through him.  And no one with any sense could read the New Testament -- not just this one verse, but hardly any of it -- and deny that the practices of American slavery were the opposite of what Christ taught and modeled -- and his disciples. 

For Augustine's animus against slave traders is explicitly affirmed in the New Testament, and would apply to those on that boat in Uncle Tom's Cabin, if the preacher were courageous enough to tell the truth:  

"We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers . . . "

There is nothing in the New Testament to explain any upsurge in slave-trading under the Christian watch, which would in fact not occur for more than a millennia, and then only after the Muslim slave trade had primed that pump for centuries.  

Eric cites the verse that instructs slaves to obey their masters, not to kill them.  And really, would Christianity be Christianity, if it instructed people to kill their bosses?  Hierarchy is part of life, and must be observed, within the bounds of Christian law.  But Eric omits this following set of instructions: 

"And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him."

This is pretty revolutionary, in itself.  Masters should treat slaves "in the same way" as slaves treat masters?  And not only don't beat them, but don't even threaten them?  What's to keep them from running away, then?  

And slavery is not, a la Aristotle, a fundamental marker of human character.  We are all equal before God, who is the real boss.  

I already showed that there are many "active ingredients" in the life and teachings of Marx that explain the evils of communism: Marx's violent, arrogant character, his self-worship, his justification of class violence, his naivete about human nature, his over-generalizations, his absurd prophecies, his talk about the "dictatorship of the proletariat," his refusal to admit error, his hatred of God, etc.  

So by the fourth criterion, too, Marx can very reasonably be blamed for tyranny.  But Christ should be credited for the liberation of slaves, which began earlier than most people realize, and is still not complete.  

I might add that as a young missionary, I was inspired to try to liberate sex slaves in Asia, by passages in the Old Testament.    

5. Energetic motion. "Fifth, causation is also clearer if change moves uphill against so powerful an element in human nature.  Why would any man sleep with more than one woman?  The answer is too obvious, to most men, to need stating.  Lust and philandering need no explanation, nor do rape, conquest, polygamy, or enslavement of the weak . . . It takes moral energy to move society uphill against the gravitational resistance of political power."

This criterion, too, helps explain why Marx was in fact to blame for the Gulag.  Just to take one instance: common ownership of property, which led to so many millions of deaths and so much misery in China, was emphatically not normal for Chinese. They had to be forced into it, by Marxist ideologues.  The communes moved radically against human nature, and thus demonstrate ideological causation. 

By contrast, as noted, it has been normal since the dawn of time for the powerful to exploit the weak, including by enslaving them.  This requires no explanation by itself.  Chesterton, indeed, said early in the 20th Century that enslavement was very human, and could be expected again.  Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler would soon prove him a prophet.  

Of course, it did take some ideological energy to upset what had become European norms against slavery by that time, and Marx and Hitler did provide that energy.  But having established a dictatorship, demonized whole classes, and destroyed the economy by communizing property, mass slavery became a fairly natural expedient.  You have to blame someone for your mistakes!  (When did Marx ever accept blame?)  You have to make someone do the work once incentive is gone!  

Slavery was ubiquitous in the world in which Christianity first appeared.  Half of ancient residents of Athens were slaves.  If anything, early Christianity began fitfully to apply some brakes to human enslavement. 

So by this criterion, too, Eric has things backwards.  Marx's life and teachings help explain the radical, often anti-human, policies of his followers, which fairly quickly led into the old grooves of tyranny and slavery.  But Christ's disciples acted against human nature and interest to free slaves against opposition, then bring about abolition or effective near-abolition of slavery.  (The first time during the "Dark Ages.")       

   

6.  Citations.  "Finally, if reformers cite or allude to a text while instituting reform, that may indeed point to the source of their inspiration."

As I showed, Marx' disciples did cite Marx extensively, and translate and print his works, to justify and explain their actions. 

Yes, as mentioned above, Christians who wished to justify slavery also looked for, and found, verses which helped them do so.  Some of those citations were, no doubt, stronger than the one Stowe quoted.  

But I agree with Stowe, as did Wilberforce, and as did northerner abolitionists who were inspired by Scripture to risk their lives (against interest and Nature) to liberate slaves.  Read honestly, as Uncle Tom did, it is impossible to justify slavery from the life and teachings of Jesus, which are for Christians the heart of the Bible, from which all else must be interpreted.  Not just that one verse, but the tone and implications of the entire New Testament, and a deeper understanding of the Old, set world civilization up for what in fact occurred: a worldwide abolition movement, led by pious Christians like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom.    

So five of the six historical criteria I mentioned clearly show why Marx's teachings and example led to so much misery, so quickly, under the lead of his radical disciples.  Solzhenitsyn points out that some of the "losers," like Trotsky, were if anything worse!  The other criteria is ambivalent, and analyzed carefully, also indicts Marx.  But Jesus liberated slaves, he did not capture or mistreat them.  

Evil Christianity, Again

I respond to five familiar points from a poster on Unbelievable: 

* 1. "Christianity perpetuated slavery for centuries."

Slavery didn't need to be "perpetuated:" it was a money-making operation.  Slavery existed in most ancient civilizations and continues today in some Muslim countries.  It was Christianity that inspired the world-wide liberation of slaves, however.  

The poster could more accurately have said, 

"While the teachings and example of Jesus inspired some early Christians to express doubts about slavery, and undermined the cruelty and ruthlessness which is needed to treat other humans as mere instruments at every turn, slavery didn't die out for several centuries after Christianity took power, and was then revived with a vengeance by people who ignored imprecations against slave-trading (including in the Bible), until zealous Bible-thumpers let a world-wide movement against the institution."

Hmmm.  I do see the beauty of the poster's version, from a skeptical point of view. 

* 2. "Christianity held women back for centuries. Women gained rights despite what the Bible says. Women had to fight Bible thumpers to gain their rights."

Again one needs to tweak this claim slightly to bring it more into accord with the facts.  Let's see, maybe something like this: 

"Women have been placed in a subservient position in most civilizations at most times, as can be seen in much of the literature of the Middle East: Sumer, Egypt, Greece, Rome.  Indeed, one can barely find a heroic personality in any Egyptian literature.  All this changed dramatically with the Old Testament, which features dozens of heroic women, giving sage advice, engaging in enterprise, even leading armies and nations.  An even greater revolution occurred with the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, who treated women with startling, unprecedented compassion and respect, healing, protecting, praising, saving from death.  Nothing transformed the status of women around the world over the next two thousand years more than Jesus' life and teaching, liberating billions of women around the world."

"However, some post-Christian thinkers, both feminists and anti-feminists, proved that men (and women) are still mad about sex, and undermined this revolution of love at every turn with their daft ideas, from Schopenhauer to Mill to De Beauvoir.  The battle still rages on."

"300 page book to follow proving every point above and much more in copious detail."  

 

I can see this poster and I are going to agree a lot!  Like, one should treat women nicely!  I hope he does that.  Most modern young men need to learn from Jesus how to treat women.  

3. "Atheism has done a lot of good by promoting free thinking as opposed the Christian anti-science/magical thinking."

Just a few adjustments here: 

"Aside from the perhaps 95% of atheists who have been enamored of God-hating cultists like Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kims I, II and III, Ho, Pott, Ayn Rand, Sigmund Fraud, etc, etc, and practically destroyed human civilization a few year ago, along with killing tens of millions of people.  Other than that, LOTS of good.  And don't hang out in an elevator with a New Atheist.  

"As for "free thinking," I haven't noticed many atheists yet who seem free to engage in that activity in a very open manner, but I have come across two or three, who seem 'not far from the Kingdom' at times, however." 

* (4) "There is no quality about atheism that led despots to murder millions of people. There are other reasons why those regimes were so deadly."

Slight tweaking again:

"Marx and Engels said communism 'abolishes all religion, all morality, all eternal truth.'  As David Aikman proved in his doctoral dissertation on Atheism in the Marxist tradition, the relationship between rejection of God (whether or not one calls it atheism) and death and destruction was intimate, deep, and multi-variant.  As I showed in Jesus and the Religions of Man, however, self-worship in atheism was ultimately only one pernicious form of idolatry that flows across religious boundaries.  It was not merely that atheists rejected God which led to mayhem: it was that they crowned themselves gods in his place, as atheists so often do today as well."  

But we agree on the poster's second sentence.  Atheism was a deeply important factor in all that death and destruction, but it wasn't the only factor, and in some ways, disbelief in God might even have been a front.   

* (5) "The happiest, most successful countries in the world today have high atheist populations."

I answered this argument briefly in my debate with Phil Zuckerman.  (Zuckerman is the Pitzer College sociologist who has popularized it.)  I also answered it in detail on this site.  

First of all, surveys that claim Scandinavia is the happiest part of the world are usually rather slippery: they don't actually measure happiness, but other social goods.  

Second, Scandinavians themselves say their moral values come from the Gospel: Zuckerman himself often cites them saying that. 

Third, the Bible predicts that when things go well, people will fall away.  Jesus predicts it.  Why should Jesus being right again, be an argument against Jesus?

Fourth, Zuckerman worries about the future of post-Christian Scandinavia, because of too few babies.  (And maybe too many Muslim immigrants.)

Fifth, Scandinavian-Americans are more religious and also seem pretty well-off.  

Sixth, secularism didn't make Scandinavia prosperous.  It became prosperous first, then secularized.  

Our friend the poster managed to overlook a few facts, it seems!

But I expect all of these facts will have little effect on the consciousness of this poster.  Like many atheists, he praises "free thinking," but does not seem free to recognize how the Gospel of Jesus revolutionized life on this planet, even though he is no doubt its beneficiary in many ways.     

"Don't Blame Atheism for Stalin!" Why Michael Sherlock is wrong

"Jesus made me do it!"

The New Atheism has a lasting grudge against history.  Sometimes that grudge is expressed overtly by atheists who try to diminish the discipline ("history is bunk") in comparison with science, to which the New Atheism falls collectively prostrate.  (Or to an idol on whom the label "Science" has been pinned.)  But as even so radical an atheist as Richard Carrier pointed out, in the end science is mostly a province of history, since knowledge obtained through experiments or other observation is in the end knowledge of events that happened in the past.

But the New Atheism burst onto the public consciousness in the wake of 9/11, when western intellectuals like Richard Dawkins sought to tar the Christian faith with the same brush with which they more plausibly painted Islam.  (Though Dawkins now admits that Christianity has reformed, in the kindly afterglow of the Enlightenment, so the greater problem at the moment is an unreconstructed Islam.)

The reason the New Atheism arose at just that moment, I think, is because a new generation of ignorant young skeptics had been taught the purported evils of the Christian past, but left ignorant of the far greater evils that radical atheism (and Islam) had much more recently visited upon the world.  They are like the rabbit in the Chronicle of Narnia that sits next to a great waterfall (of blood), yet hears the drop of a pin a hundred miles away.  Often the brainwashing inflicted upon our children involved  straightforward historical falsehoods.  The New Atheism probably couldn't have arisen in 1989, just after the Wall had come down: the world would have laughed.  But give public school teachers a couple decades, and such ignorance of history that an outspoken socialist like Bernie Sanders could gain traction in a major party without a word of explanation or apology, and the New Atheism can appeal to a generation that knows nothing of the Gulag Archipelago or the most basic facts about "socialism in practice."  (Here in China we are surrounded by propaganda about the goodness of socialism: they felt the Bern when Bernie was still a baby!)

Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris relentlessly reminded readers of the Inquisition, which happened most of a millenium ago, but talked about "Joseph Stalin" as a mere apologetic "debating point"  (as Dawkins put it) that needs to be refuted.  Christopher Hitchens also tried to shrug off the fact that atheists had just murdered a hundred million innocent people a few decades before, in his popular book god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  These gentlemen argued that atheism had nothing whatsoever to do with the crimes of Stalin.  (Who alone they mentioned, being apparently ignorant of the fact that Stalin was merely one of many cruel communist dictators.)  Some New Atheists have even dared suggest that Christianity was to blame for Stalin's crimes, because he attended a religious school as a young man.

In The Truth Behind the New Atheism, I responded, in part:

"This isn't just a 'debating point' to me.  I researched faith and communism under Donald Treadgold, a leading historian of Marxism-Leninism.  I've eaten meals with people who lost loved ones or spent decades in prison for their faith . . . Stalin wasn't the only atheist of modern times.  Nor did he emerge from a vacuum."  

And so as an historian -- which none of these gentlemen can claim to be -- I answered their counter-arguments over several pages. David Aikman also focused on this issue in his response to the New Atheism.

I'm not going to defend my arguments in that book, or my more thorough explanation for "Why Marx Went Wrong" in my earlier Jesus and the Religions of Man, in this post.  So far as I know, no one with any relevant knowledge or credentials has ever challenged my arguments.

But as the New Atheism continues its free-fall into historical ignorance, new expressions of the bigotry that follows in the train of that ignorance arise, as winter follows autumn.  In this post, I will answer one of those expressions, by an Australian grad student named Michael Sherlock.  Michael is worth answering not because he is knowledgeable or a skilled logician -- his talent lies in purple prose more than reasoning, in history least of all -- but because he has written a lively post on this subject which some silly fools seem to take seriously.

The article is called "The Atheist Atrocities Fallacy -- Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot."

Sherlock begins with a lively three-paragraph rant against apologists who make the argument he wants to refute.  (Without, of course, addressing my rebuttal of the first crop of New Atheists, nor that by other historians like Dr. Aikman.)  Half his paper (7 1/2 pages of my printout) then argues that Adolf Hitler was a Christian, not an atheist.  Sherlock devotes a little more than two pages to asserting that while Stalin was a "confirmed atheist," Christianity, not atheism, was to blame for his crimes.  He devotes a bit less space to showing that Pol Pot was a Buddhist, not an atheist, and his atrocities "parallel" and should be blamed on Theraveda Buddhsim.   Then he "clinches" his argument by describing five fallacies that we apologists allegedly commit in blaming atheism for these crimes, before ending with an appeal to the Problem of Pain which he deems clever.

Sherlock's article is a target-rich environment.   Let us start with the introduction, then examine his claims about Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler, in that order.   We won't need to say much about Hitler, since the subject (like the man) has been done to death, and most informed Christians don't claim Hitler was an atheist, anyway.  But this paper represents many common confusions, on all levels.  While the writing is lively and skillful, the thinking is muddled.  And the paper shows just how desperately modern atheists need to begin making peace with history, before that is what their movement rightly becomes.  (After becoming a laughing stock.)


Opening Rant and its Problems

"Religious apologists, particularly those of the Christian variety, are big fans of what I have dubbed, the atheist atrocities fallacy.  Christians commonly employ this fallacy to shield their egos from the harsh reality of the brutality of their own religion,(1) by utilizing a most absurd form of the tu quoque (“you too”) fallacy, mingled with numerous other logical fallacies and historical inaccuracies.  Despite the fact that the atheist atrocities fallacy has already been thoroughly exposed by Hitchens and other great thinkers (2), it continues to circulate amongst the desperate believers of a religion in its death throes (3).  Should an atheist present a believer with the crimes committed by the Holy See of the Inquisition(s) (4), the Crusaders (5) and other faith-wielding misanthropes (6), they will often hear the reply; “Well, what about Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler? They were atheists, and they killed millions!”" (7) 

#1 Whereas atheists shield their eyes from the painful truth that the Gospel has liberated billions of people, and cultures around the world, changing our planet for the better.  No one who has yet to read at least a large proportion of these books and articles should even try to deny it.  

#2 Christopher Hitchens was a "great thinker?"  I concede he was a pithy journalist who thought for himself and wrote entertaining and sometimes insightful screeds.  But he was not a historian, nor a scholar of the religion that he attacked.  His views about communism are no match for those of scholars who know something about the movement.  Hitchens didn't lay a finger on my argument, nor those of David Aikman, Michael Burleigh, Donald Treadgold, or for that matter the views of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who summed up what he saw as the core problem of Marxism by saying, "Men have forgotten God."  

However "bright" Hitchens may have been, insights based on inadequate knowledge most often lead one into error. 

#3 Christianity is not in its "death throes."  There are more followers of Jesus today than at any time in the past.  As the church has declined across one crowded peninsula, it has spread rapidly through the world's most populated and second most-populated continents, and even broken out finally in some strongholds of Islam.

#4  The Inquisition?  Small potatoes.  Joseph Stalin used to kill about as many innocent people before lunch some days, as all the inquisitors combined, killed over several centuries.

#5 The Crusaders are why we are writing in English, not Arabic, and using computers, not toilet paper in outhouses behind mud huts, so our masters don't see and whip us, or take our children away to serve as slaves.  I don't apologize for the fact that the West finally responded to four hundred years of Muslim imperialism: I am grateful.  (While, of course, recognizing the sins of some Crusaders, including both pogroms and at least one outbreak of cannibalism.)

#6 "Faith-wielding misanthropes?"  Sherlock apparently refers here to the myth, taken on blind faith by all New Atheists worthy of the name, that Christian "faith" is meant to be irrational.

#7 One does not "often" hear the claim that Adolf Hitler was an atheist, at least not from informed Christians.  This is not entirely a straw man, but most Christians who write on the subject seem to know better, as most educated atheists know better than to call Hitler a Christian.

"Given the obstinate nature of religious faith and the willful ignorance it cultivates in the mind of the believer, (8) I am quite certain that this article will not be the final nail in this rancid and rotting coffin.(9)  Having said this, I do hope it will contribute to the arsenal required by those who value reason, facts and evidence (10), in their struggle against the fallacies perpetually flaunted by those who do not value the truth above their own egocentric delusions, delusions inspired by an unquenchable thirst for security, no matter how frighteningly false its foundation." (11)

"Before addressing the primary weaknesses of the atheist atrocities fallacy itself, I would like to attend to each of these three homicidal stooges (12); Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler, who are constantly trotted out to defend a religious worldview. (13) I will lend Hitler the most time, as the claim that he was an atheist represents a most egregious violation of the truth." (14)

(8) Sherlock here confirms my suspicion mentioned above that he buys into the ignorant New Atheist doctrine that Christianity recommends "blind faith."  We refuted that error in True Reason, and indeed I already refuted it in Jesus and the Religions of Man and The Truth Behind the New Atheism.  It is what Larry Hurtado calls a "zombie argument."

(9) "Rancid and rotting coffin."  Nice alliteration.  But coffins, being made of wood, rot without becoming rancid -- it is the corpse inside that gives offense to the nostrils as it decomposes, like rank historical cliches such as the "Blind Faith Meme."

(10) Because, of course, Christians like Augustine, Aquinas, Occam, Kepler, Pascal, Newton, Descartes, Locke, and the whole pious crowd that largely invented modern science, placed no value whatever on "reason, facts and evidence."  It is hard to decide whether the Trumpian self-praise or the gratuitous implicit slur against so many of the world's greatest thinkers is the more obnoxious and ridiculous over-generalization, here.

(11) Let me again give Sherlock credit at this point for cadence and alliteration, however falsely the affected facts may be fixed onto the face of genuine and verifiable phenomena.   He alliterates like a southern preacher, though as you see, the letter "f" comes easy.

(12) Stooges?  In what sense?  Whatever else one may say of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler, all three do seem to have been fully in command of their horrid movements.

(13) These villains are trotted out to attack an atheistic worldview, not so much to defend a so-called religious one.

(14) It is suspicious that Sherlock focuses so intensely on Hitler, since the man is seldom called an atheist. (I have never done so.)  It is also suspicious that Sherlock fails to mention Mao Zedong, who may have killed more innocent people than any of the others (he ruled a larger country).  Not to mention Marx or Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Khrushchev, Beria, Brezhnev, Ho Chi Minh, the ever-lovable Kim clan in North Korea, Enver Hofha, Abimael Guzman, the Castros, or the rest of the bloody crew that ruled Eastern Europe.  But more on the chasms in Sherlock's historical consciousness later.

So Michael packs fourteen errors into three short opening paragraphs, some of them egregious.  Way to go, Sherlock.  But he's only getting warmed up.

Now let's look at the three examples Sherlock attempts to refute.


Was Pol Pot a Buddhist?

Sherlock thinks so:

"Pol Pot, possibly not even an atheist, but almost certainly a Buddhist, believed in the teachings of the Buddha, no matter how perverted his interpretations may or may not have been . . . Not only was Pol Pot a Theravada Buddhist, but the soil in which his atrocities were sewn was also very Buddhist.

"In Alexander Laban Hinton’s book, ‘Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide,’ Hinton drew attention to the role that the belief in karma played in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, particularly with regards to the cementation of a docilely accepted social hierarchy, not too dissimilar from Stalin’s ready-made Russian religious tyranny, as well as highlighting the Buddhist origins of Pol Pot’s ideological initiatives.

"Hinton remarks:

"This [Pol Pot’s regime’s] line of thinking about revolutionary consciousness directly parallels Buddhist thought, with the “Party line” and “collective stand” being substituted for dhamma…One could certainly push this argument further , contending that the Khmer Rouge attempted to assume the monk’s traditional role as moral instructor (teaching their new brand of “mindfulness”) and that DK regime’s glorification of asceticism, detachment, the elimination of attachment and desire, renunciation (of material goods and personal behaviors, sentiments, and attitudes), and purity paralleled prominent Buddhist themes…  [30]

"I have only presented a small snippet of the available evidence that points to religion’s role in Pol Pot’s crimes, and there is not one single piece of solid evidence that Pol Pot was an atheist, so let us once and for all dispense with that speculative piece of religious propaganda."

The fact that Sherlock thinks he has presented any evidence at all that Pol Pot was a Buddhist in these paragraphs, ought to embarrass the Australian teachers who educated him.  (Whereas the "work" of Raphael Lataster ought to make the whole continent cringe: Sherlock can, at least, write.)  "Pol Pot was a Theraveda Buddhist" is a mere assertion, not "evidence."  The fact that communist Cambodia accepted a hierarchy is not evidence that it was "really" Buddhist, either -- after all, the alternative to listening to party bosses was death.  Wolves are not Theraveda Buddhists, I don't think, yet they also accept hierarchy: that's part of our biological hard-drive, not the unique feature of one religion.  That one can find further parallels between Kmer Rouge thought and Theraveda Buddhistm, such as the concept of "consciousness" (not unique to Asian Marxism, or Marxism at all -- Jung mentioned the idea, did he not?), or that the Kmer Rouge retained teachers (who doesn't?), or even asceticism (here America is the outlier, in having cast this perennial and universal notion aside so completely), is not evidence that Pol Pot was a Buddhist, either.  Military service BY DEFINITION involves renunciation of pleasures.  (And notice that Hinton offers four or five synonyms for asceticism --"detachment" as well as "the elimination of attachment," for instance, as if the two didn't mean the same thing -- apparently hoping the reader will mistake semantically varied repetition for a cup of evidence that runneth over.) 

But Sherlock gives not the faintest hint of any real evidence that Pol Pot was a Buddhist who "believed in the teachings of the Buddha," in all this.   Not one word from Pol Pot about the Four Noble Truths, about the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment, about reincarnation, about the Buddhas -- not a word.  

In fact, Pol Pot was a communist and an atheist.  He may have taken up a few of the cultural trappings of Buddhism, which had after all been the dominant faith of his country for many centuries.  But as Loyola professor of Religious Studies Catherine Wessinger notes (my emphasis):

"Democratic Kampuchea was officially an atheist state, and the persecution of religion by the Kmer Rouge was matched in severity only by the persecution of religion in the communist states of Albania and North Korea, so there were not any direct historical continuities of Buddhism into the Democratic Kampuchea era."  

Or as the Asian Studies Center at Michigan State University explains:

 It is estimated that of more than 65,000 monks and nuns living in 1969, less than 3000 survived the civil war and genocide of the 1970's. Estimates of the death toll during the Khmer Rouge Regime are that about 1.7 million people (of a 1975 population of 7 million) were killed or died of starvation. Buddhism was a special target of the Khmer Rouge; in addition to killing the monks and nuns, most of the 3,369 temples in existence in 1970 were destroyed, as were Christian churches and Islamic mosques. Monastery buildings which were not destroyed were used for storage, prisons, or torture chambers. By 1979, Buddhism in Cambodia was virtually destroyed.

What do you think?  Murdering someone is often considered good evidence that one does not like that man or woman, isn't it?  If you close all the Buddhist temples and kill nineteen out of twenty monks, can't that be taken as solid evidence that Pol Pot was something other than a believing Buddhist?  Maybe even that he disliked Buddhism?  Or is that crazy talk?

But no, Sherlock tells us, against all this, that Pol Pot was a zealous Theraveda Buddhist.  The sheer historical ignorance it takes to make that claim about the founder of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who learned his ideology from communists in Paris, was supported by Mao's China, murdered 95% of the Buddhist monks in his country, and destroyed the religion to which he allegedly belonged, without offering a speck of anything but the most subjective and vague evidence ("parallelmania") to support it, is astounding.

Meanwhile, the name Mao Zedong is not so much as mentioned in Sherlock's article.  But Mao invented and perfected the innovative doctrine of encircling the cities with the countryside.  During the Cultural Revolution (which started in 1966), Mao persecuted teachers, and sent young people out of the cities to work in the farms.  That's exactly the strategy that the Kmer Rouge followed, only with even greater violence.  Coincidence?  Sherlock does not even raise the question.  It is as if he had never heard of Chairman Mao.  (Whose mother, let me add, was a Mahayana, not Theraveda Buddhist.  But what her son become, was probably more her husband's fault, by Mao's own account.   And that of Mao Zedong himself, who was an atheist.)


Was Joseph Stalin an (honorary) Christian?  

Sherlock's attempt to protect atheism from the bad name of Joseph Stalin is just as ridiculous.  Since errors fly thick and fast here, let me revert to my earlier form of quoting his remarks at length, while marking points for rebuttal below.

"Of these three characters, Stalin was the only confirmed atheist, yet Hitchens thoroughly dealt with the religious nature of Stalin’s dictatorship in a manner that has left religious apologists without sufficient reply.(1)  Notwithstanding the fact that Stalin was raised as a Christian under the religious influence of his mother, who enrolled him in seminary school (2), and that Stalin later took it upon himself to study for the priesthood (3), as Hitchens and others have pointed out, Stalin merely stepped into a ready-made religious tyranny (4), constructed by the Russian Orthodox Church and paved with the teachings of St. Paul (5).

Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves.                                           Romans 13:1-2

(1) Since Sherlock shows no sign of having read my, or Aikman's, rebuttal, "apologists can't reply to Hitchen's smashing of their lame position" is just an empty boast.  

(2) Christians provided the only available education.  "Stalin went to a Christian school, so Christianity is to blame for Stalinism" involves some pretty grotesque historical shortcuts.  Should we then blame Secular Humanists for Fred Phelps, since he apparently went to public schools at times?  Christian teachers have educated billions, without making all their students Christians.     

(3) Stalin was given a scholarship, but became an atheist as a first-year student.  (Paul Vitz suggests his poor relationship with his drunken father might have had something to do with that.)

(4) "Stalin stepped into a ready-made religious tyranny?"  Baloney.  The Bolsheviks completely remade society, from the top down.  Old institutions were abolished, as clean a sweep as the world had seldom seen.  Leninism, then Stalinism, were vastly more cruel than late Tsarist Russia, as Solzhenitsyn, for one, often pointed out in his examination of how prisoners were treated.  In fact, late Tsarist Russia had been liberalizing for some time: the Bolsheviks' competitors were far more liberal than they were, and Peter Stolypin instituted needed reforms that showed real promise, in a period in which Russia was modernizing quickly.  The period before World War I was one of rapid economic progress and an artistic golden age.    

And in that era, said Solzhenitsyn:

"By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened."

The Bolsheviks used the sickle of Enlightenment materialism to cut the blossom of a developing Russian culture, and the hammer of Marxist ruthlessness to pound the garden in which it grew into a parking lot for Uncle Joe's tank.  Far from "stepping into" ready-made "religious tyranny," Stalin actually took over from Vladimir Lenin, an ardent atheist bigot who had already murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people.  Sherlock never even mentions Lenin either, strangely enough.  The sheer historical ignorance of the man, or his willingness to take remarkable historical shortcuts, is astounding.  

(5) Stalin learned political subservience from St. Paul?  This is a bizarre claim, indeed.   Joseph Stalin became a political revolutionary in seminary, read Lenin, then sought to overthrow all existing social and political structures through violent revolution.  That means shooting, stabbing, or bombing the authorities.  And St. Paul is to blame for that, because he told Christians to obey the government and pay taxes?  Sherlock does not seem to realize that after Joseph Stalin studied in seminary, he became an atheist and a COMMUNIST REVOLUTIONARY. 

Of course, as I explain in Jesus and the Religions of Man, once a revolution occurs, power-hungry revolutionaries will come to desire obedient subjects.  That is a constant of human history: one can find the same trend in ancient Greece.  Read Polybius, for instance.  Or George Orwell's Animal Farm.  

So was Christianity to blame for the fact that the Russians submitted to an atheistic regime?  If you want to try that line, then how about crediting Christianity in America for resisting communism so vigorously?  (Which it did.)

In fact, Christianity inspired resistance to Marxist revolution and oppression around the world.  (Which is probably one reason the present crop of communists in China is so anti-Christian.)  Lech Walensa, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pope John Paul II were just three of the heroes who helped overthrow communist tyranny.  It was atheists in America (like Joy Davidman, who would become C. S. Lewis' wife!) who converted to communism, far more often than Christians.  In fact, to this day, some four fifths of atheists in the world were tutored in unbelief by obediently listening to top-down communist propaganda.  (One meets them all around China -- many of my students!)

So if Sherlock's claim refers to Joseph Stalin, it is bizarre.  If it refers to Russian peasants, it is historically uninformed and ignores far too many facts.   

We trek on through the thicket of errors, a well-greased and sharpened machete now stationed permanently in our right hands.  

"Such teachings were the inspirational well from which the Russian Orthodox Church drew their justifications to support this new Tsar, causing the more sensible fringe of the Church to flee to the United States in contravention of St. Paul’s teachings.(6)

"Here then, the central premise of Hitchens’ argument is worthy of reiteration.  Had Stalin inherited a purely rational secular edifice,(7) one established upon the ethos espoused by the likes of Lucretius, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Einstein (8) and other free thinking and rational secularists, then the apologist’s argument would hold slightly more weight, but such wasn’t the case.  Stalin merely tore the existing religious labels off the Christian Inquisition,(9) the enforcement of Christian orthodoxy, the Crusades, the praising of the priesthood, (10) messianism, and Edenic ideas of a terrestrial religious-styled utopia,(11) and re-branded them with the red of communism.  Had this Christian machine not been in place, then it is more than likely Stalin wouldn’t have had the vehicle he needed to succeed in causing so much suffering in the name of his godless religion (12), Communism.

(6) St. Paul told Russians not to emigrate to the US?  What version of the Bible is Sherlock reading?  Oddly, though, Samuel Adams found in those same Scriptures abundant justification to help establish the US: the highly religious country that proved the "fortress of democracy" and freedom in the 20th Century, again and again.  

(7) Sherlock is conflating ideas ("secular") with values ("rational").  This is a hidden form of the True Scotsman fallacy.  The Soviets were "irrational" (from Sherlock's point of view), so they don't count as pure secularists.  But Sherlock argues that atheism does not come with values attached.  That's a sword that cuts both ways: if it allows atheism to escape all culpability for crimes, it also denies atheism credit for good works.  

(8) Einstein wasn't old enough to influence the Russian Revolution, so the wish that Stalin had learned from Einstein is a little odd.  Also, his friends asked Einstein to condemn Stalin's genocide, but he usually seemed reluctant to do so in very forceful terms, unlike Hitler's genocide.  

(9) "Stalin merely tore the existing religious labels off the Christian inquisition?"  What nonsense.  The inquisition occurred in France and Spain, most of a millennia earlier, and didn't resemble communist persecutions except in the fact that they were persecutions.  (Which occur in every society.)  This is just hand-waving assertion, without any real attempt to support a historical claim with historical evidence and a logical train of reasoning. 

(10) Joseph Stalin praised the priesthood?  He joined the communist party, which was Lenin's instrument of oppression and control that killed and imprisoned priests.  The communists were not monks, or much like them.  And if we're going to talk about the communist party, shouldn't we at least mention Vladimir Lenin, who established it?   

(11) Marx wanted to set up an earthly paradise, or at least a "dictatorship of the proletariat."  By contrast, Jesus said "My kingdom is not of this world."  Marx, in his focus on the City of Man, was a disciple of Plato, not Jesus. 

(12) "Godless religion?"  Isn't that a contradiction in terms?  I thought religion was to be defined as involving belief in supernatural beings or gods?  Actually Sherlock doesn't define religion.  Perhaps that is because sometimes, he needs it to mean "belief in supernatural gods."  At other times, as here, he needs it to mean "strongly held fundamental beliefs about reality, whatever they may be," or as Paul Tillich called it, an "ultimate concern."  

I prefer this latter definition, precisely because of the kind of shell game that atheists like Sherlock try to play.  Communism insisted that there is no God in heaven.  But socially, communist ideology and leaders often played roles similar to those played by Messiahs, gurus and divinities, and the ideologies they inspired.  In short, Sherlock is guilty of equivocation, of playing on two meanings of "religion" to confuse his readers.  On the usual atheist definition of religion, "godless religion" is a contradiction in terms.  But if our goal is to somehow blame religion for an atheist mass movement, then we expand the meaning of the word "religion" so that it can justify so patently bizarre an accusation.  

"To quote Hitchens:

"For Joseph Stalin, who had trained to be a priest in a seminary in Georgia, the whole thing was ultimately a question of power. (12) “How many divisions,” he famously and stupidly inquired, “has the pope?” (The true answer to his boorish sarcasm was, “More than you think.”) Stalin then pedantically repeated the papal routine of making science conform to dogma (13), by insisting that the shaman and charlatan Trofim Lysenko had disclosed the key to genetics and promised extra harvests of specially inspired vegetables. (Millions of innocents died of gnawing internal pain as a consequence of this “revelation.”) This Caesar unto whom all things were dutifully rendered took care, as his regime became a more nationalist and statist one, to maintain at least a puppet church (14) that could attach its traditional appeal to his. 

(13) Speaking of power, it's odd that the name of Friedrich Nietzsche never comes up in Sherlocks' exposition, either.  Hasn't he heard of that famous atheist, either?  Nietzsche famously blamed Christianity for being too weak, for not busting skulls with sufficient vigor.  

Jesus was famous for giving up power, and dying on the cross.  Nietzsche hated that weakness.  So to whom should we trace Stalin's attitude, if we don't ascribe it to human nature?  

Marx and Engels (two other key historical figures whom Sherlock oddly never mentions) wrote that communism "abolishes all morality," as well as "all religion."  This connection between abolishing religion and morality, then, is not one which Christians impose on the communists, it is one the communists very deliberately and emphatically made themselves.     

(14) Science under the popes was, in fact, generally remarkable free, despite a few obvious contrary examples.  (Which is why we always hear of Galileo's spell of house arrest.)  For a more balanced view, see, for instance, James Hannam's The Genesis of Science, or Allan Chapman's Slaying the Dragons: Destroying Myths in the History of Science and Faith.

(15) Stalin didn't "maintain" the Church, he constrained it, by theft, murder, torture, mass enslavement, propaganda, and persecution.  The Church didn't need Stalin's help!  But after Hitler invaded, Stalin realized he might need the help of the Church, and backed off temporarily.  

How perverse to portray a lull in persecution as if it demonstrated the guilt of the harassed, tortured, and murdered victims who welcomed that lull!  (Not that there were no genuine quislings, of course -- Wurmbrand writes incisively on that.)

So Was Atheism to Blame for Stalin? 
Sherlock is adamant in denying any relationship between the tens of millions of murders committed in or by the Soviet Union, and the atheist component of the official communist ideology.  In fact, RELIGION (here meaning "supernatural" religion) was to blame!   

"Hitchens was not alone in seeing the parallels between Russia’s old supernatural religion and its new secular one.

"In Emilio Gentile’s ‘Politics as Religion,’ Gentile describes the sacralizing of Stalin’s regime in the following words:

"The sacralization of the party opened the way to the sacralization of Stalin when he became the supreme leader.  After 1929, the political religion of Russia mainly concentrated on the deification of Stalin, who until his death in 1953 dominated the party and Soviet system like a tyrannical and merciless deity. 

"That vast and seemingly bottomless “reservoir of religious credulity,” as Hitchens so eloquently phrased it, which served to subdue the servile Soviets for hundreds of years beneath the yoke of an equally brutal supernatural religion, was the very fountain of boundless unthinking acquiescence that Stalin, having adorned himself in the Tsar’s clothes, utilized to send countless innocent Russians to their deaths.  Where would Stalin have found such docile servitude, servitude that fed the flames of his secular religious tyranny, had Lucretius, Thomas Paine, Albert Einstein or Thomas Jefferson bestowed upon these poor religious Russians, their intellectual legacy?  To answer in a word, nowhere."

Being historically ignorant, and not apparently having read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (though this is hard to believe of Hitchens), these gentlemen are apparently unaware of the rich vein of  "Enlightenment" thinking that permeated the Russian intelligentsia long before Vladimir Lenin and others brought the holy books of Marx and Engels to Russia.   To this day, in a Chinese textbook my students use, the Chinese communists present their beliefs as a fusion of Greek humanism, western Enlightenment thought, and parallel Chinese strands of post-religious Enlightenment thinking, as I showed in this First Things article.  

Thomas Jefferson was not an atheist, why does Sherlock bring him up?  Neither were Einstein or Paine.  Sherlock appears to be conflating "atheism" with "liberal democratic thinking," here, which is part of his variation on the No True Scotsman theme, smuggling in moral values he associates with atheism, and denying the atheist labels to those who fall short of those values.  

But the confusion Sherlock maintains about the impact of atheism becomes "clear" when he brings up Stalin again in the "logical fallacies" section of his piece. 

"False Analogy Fallacy

"This fallacy depends upon the existence of an often minor analogous factor, in this case, the belief in god versus a lack of belief in god, god being the analogous component, and extrapolating from this minor analogy, conditions that are alleged to affect both positions, when the truth of the matter happens to be, the two (religion and atheism) are not analogous at all. [34]

"For apologists to overcome the existence of this fallacy, they must show that atheism is a religion, but the very definition of atheism circumvents any such attempt.  Atheism, although encompassing varying degrees of disbelief, is not a system of beliefs, but an unsystematic absence of god-belief, that is all.  It has no doctrines, traditions and most importantly, no beliefs.  Unless there is some secret atheist bible from which Stalin drew inspiration for his crimes, there is absolutely no reason to suggest that his lack of belief in a supernatural deity had anything to do with his messianic and maniacal behavior."

The problems and contradictions here are many: but also the opportunity to finally understand what "religion" is, and how it relates to "atheism." 

(1) Sherlock has just been telling us that Stalinism was a "godless religion."  Has he forgotten?  Because now, when convenient, he seems to think there are no godless religions.  

(2) Most dictionaries do not define atheism as an "unsystematic absence of god-belief."  Many more properly define atheism as the positive rejection of belief in God.  (Not gods, which may be merely ghosts, spirits or proto-Marvel superheroes.)  And it is hard to see how atheism could be merely an absence of belief.  Babies are not "atheists" in any normal sense of the word.  Rocks are not atheists.  People who have never thought about the subject are not atheists.  

(3) Even a lack of belief can be deadly, though.  If an airplane pilot lacks a belief in gravity, all hands may perish.  So Sherlock's argument fails.  It may well be that Stalin lacked some key belief -- "communism abolishes all morality, all religion" -- which resulted in or encouraged his cruel acts.  How hard is that to understand?  And again, it wasn't just Stalin who tortured, murdered, and destroyed priceless works of human heritage: the Communist Holocaust was a cross-cultural, several generational collaborative effort in mayhem.

(4) In fact, as Richard Wurmbrand relates, communist torturers and jailers often goaded Christians with the absence of God.  As even George Orwell's anti-hero, Big Brother's little torturing brother, O'Brien, says to Winston Smith in the torture chamber: "Do you believe in God?"  ("No.")  "Then what will stop us?"  For O'Brien, the absence of God was highly significant -- as Dostoevsky put it, "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."  That was precisely O'Brien's logic, and that of Wurmbrand's tormentors.

(5) In a sense it is true that atheism in itself has no "doctrines, traditions or beliefs," aside from "There is no God."  In the same way, theism has no "doctrines, traditions or beliefs" aside from "There is a God."  Religions (in Tillich's sense) are developed systems of belief and practice in which theism or atheism may be a single element.  Therefore Communism, Secular Humanism, and Christianity, may all be seen as religions.  One can compare atheism to theism, or Communism or Secular Humanism to Christianity.  One cannot compare atheism per se to Christianity, not because atheism does not impact how people act for good or evil (it does, as atheists often testify!), but because it is only one element in more developed religions or (if you don't like that word) ideologies. 

(6) What is truly shocking, and bizarre, in Sherlock's comments here, is this strange sentence, which displays no hint of historical understanding whatsoever:

"Unless there is some secret atheist bible from which Stalin drew inspiration for his crimes, there is absolutely no reason to suggest that his lack of belief in a supernatural deity had anything to do with his messianic and maniacal behavior."

"Secret atheist Bible?"   How can anyone who dares write on the subject, fail at this point to even mention the vast cataract of published secular propaganda that formed, informed, and transformed the Marxist-Leninist movement around the world, including in Russia?  Communism was an Enlightenment project.  As David Aikman shows in consummate detail, Karl Marx was deeply inspired by the stories of Faust and Prometheus, as interpreted for modern Europeans, for instance by the English poet, Percy Shelley.  Marx even quoted Prometheus, "In a word, I detest all gods!"

Secret atheist Bible?  Well no, there was not one atheist Bible, any more than there is just one theist holy book.  But the Enlightenment movement was a highly bookish one, and it could not be any clearer (Aikman shows this in great detail) that early communism drew inspiration from numerous strains of Enlightenment writing -- Feurbach, Hegel, Bauer, Tylor, and so on.  (Marx was also influenced by seedy friends he met at the University of Berlin, and Engels of course by Marx.)  

That the communists' virulent rejection of God "had to do with" their "maniacal behavior" is, again, crystal clear from their own writings.  It is not a Christian apologist who linked "communism abolishes all religion" to "communism abolishes all morality" -- these assertions lie smack dab in the center of the most famous communist book ever written, The Communist Manifesto, penned by Marx and Engels.  

Is it really so absurd to suppose Joseph Stalin read that book, and was influenced by it?  

What is absurd is that Sherlock does not seem to have heard of the book, or its authors.  

True, as I showed nineteen years ago in Jesus and the Religions of Man (in a chapter that the historian Dr. Donald Treadgold, founder of the Slavic Review, read and affirmed), communist morality was complex and self-contradictory.  I argued that communism did not only fail to actually abolish morality, in truth it instituted not one but three separate new moral systems.  My argument in that book describes the reality of communist experience, and the contradictions between Marxism and human experience pretty well, I think.  (The book has gotten great reviews.)  

The Hitchens-Sherlock take on the same subject strikes me as ill-informed, adolescent, apologetic twaddle.  If one goes by this article, Sherlock has, apparently, never heard of Karl Marx, still less The Communist Manifesto.  Nor has the term "dialectical materialism" passed his ears.  Of course he has not witnessed the "graveyards and transports" of Christians who died having "cast a light like a candle" around them in the Gulag, as Solzhentisyn put it.  (Having met such Christians, it was in the Gulag that Solzhenitsyn turned back to Christ.  I have eaten with some who endured those tortures, too.)  

Sherlock thinks, or wants to believe, that Joseph Stalin was some sort of anomaly, an aberration, who having gone to a seminary, somehow imbibed both revolutionary fervor and the doctrine of political quiessence in the face of tyranny at one and the same time, from Saint Paul.  (Whose teachings, in fact, he rejected in his first year, and which talk a lot about love.)  He wants to think that atheism must always be held innocent, because it is a mere absence of belief, which can never harm anyone ("I'm not a killer, I merely lack a belief in maintaining life?"), but that at the same time Stalin's real fault was he didn't read "atheists" like Jefferson, Einstein and Paine.  (Who were not atheists, actually.)  Sherlock has never heard, it seems, of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Castro, the Kims, Hofha, Guzman, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, or Xi Jinping, nor of the French Revolution, or the Marxists in Mexico.  

I refuted much of this nonsense in Jesus and the Religions of Man in 2000, already.  This is why being an apologist provides life-long job security: so many who say they care deeply about facts and evidence, never seem to learn them.  So the hydra presents new and ever-more silly faces to the Christian knight, and the job of chopping them off never ends.  

I was going to end by debunking Sherlock's false claims about Hitler (no, he was not a Christian, nor an atheist, though he was deeply influenced by atheist thinkers), but I've run out of both time and, I suspect, the reader's patience. 

A poster below notes that Richard Weikart is coming out with a book on Hitler's religion later this year.  Good news!  Weikart is an historian who teaches at California State, and has studied this issue for many years.  I expect his book will help settle the matter. (Later note: he kindly sent me a copy, and yes, it rather does.)  

But let me also note how weak Sherlock's main argument on Hitler's supposed faith is.  (Aside from the fact that he again excludes contrary evidence, no doubt because he has not read enough to know of it.)   

"X says Y, so Y" is an Argument from Authority.  Some arguments from authority are strong, many are weak.  Generally speaking, "X says he believes Y" is a fairly strong argument from authority.  If a man doesn't know what he really believes, then who does?   And we generally do people the courtesy of accepting their self-descriptions (even, absurdly, "I am a woman!" to a person whose plumbing is male).  

But when "X=Adolf Hitler," the argument "X says Y, so Y" loses its force, to put it mildly.  Hitler was known to OCCASIONALLY disassemble for political reasons.  And certainly, Hitler had strong motive to lie about being a Christian, running for office in a political climate in which the communists had pretty much cornered the market on atheists (many of whom, in the Germany of the time, were Jews).  (Weikart describes Hitler's political calculations, and how they differed from those of more radical, or less patient, anti-Christians in his movement.)  That Hitler WAS lying, is obvious, if you read Mein Kampf and the story of the Third Reich in general, as told for instance by Michael Burleigh in Sacred Causes.  He despised Christianity: forgiving enemies, for instance, was just not his cup of tea.  It is also possible that Hitler only had a vague notion of what Christianity was. 

Michael Sherlock is a talented ranter.  If only he would desert the ranks of New Atheists who are waging war upon History, and then begin to straighten out the kinks in his logic, he might learn a few things, and ultimately come to believe something worth ranting about.