Since the horrors of 11 September 2001 (9/11), the London Tube and bus bombings of 7 July 2005, and other Islamic jihadi mass murders, many atheists and secularists have come to argue that such atrocities provide clinching evidence that religion is by its nature tribal, backward, and capable of appalling sectarian brutality. And going further back in time, the more historically aware atheists like to point out that Christianity had its own bloodbath in the Catholic versus Protestant “wars of religion” that followed the Reformation. And they also like to trot out the collective guilt Christians ought to feel for the awful Crusades in the twelfth century: horrible, unwashed, cross-wielding thugs stampeding into the sophisticated peace-loving Middle East! (On the other hand, they rarely bother to look into why the Crusades occurred in the first place. And while it is true that relations were not good between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Byzantine churches, had not the fanatical Caliph Hakim begun to slaughter Christian pilgrims and destroy customarily permitted churches, had not the militant Seljuk Turks then seized Jerusalem from its current Christian-pilgrimage-tolerant Arab rulers in 1071, and had not decades of diplomatic negotiation failed to reopen the routes, then Pope Urban II would never have needed in 1095 to preach a Crusade in the first place.)
But either way, this is all grist to the mill for the proponents of the myth that religion is inherently violent, and that not until religion has been banned or ridiculed out of existence will the world know true and lasting peace. This cloud-cuckoo-land analysis, however, misses certain rather important facts, starting with “How do you define a religion?” Christianity naturally comes top on the villain list, not only because of its formative influence upon Western civilization, but because it is, as we saw in Chapter 1, the only religion the atheists and secularists can openly and publicly mock and attack without fear of legal, social, or physical reprisals – at least, in present-day Great Britain.
Yet if you define a religion as a passionate loyalty to a collective group interest which provides meaning and purpose while often serving no obvious survival advantages, where do you draw the boundaries? After all, insisting that a religion must include worship of a divine being is a bit arbitrary. Why not worship abstract concepts, such as triumph or victory as some Greeks and Romans did?
Take football as an example, a secular religion to those who eat, sleep, and live “the beautiful game”. Could one not think of the supporters as a committed laity, the team as priests who manipulate the “magic”, the stadium as the church, the goalposts as the altar, the ball as a sacred object that must be defended from rival “priests” (the opposing side), the winning goal as an ecstatic sacrament, sending the faithful into raptures of delight, and heaven as your team coming top of the League and winning the Cup Final, to give a kind of earthly bliss. Football even possesses a powerful evangelical aspect, in so far as the leading teams, with their vast commercial infrastructures, aim to win over the loyalty and the cash of rival team supporters. And what happens when you are faced with nasty, chanting heretics – supporters of a successful rival team who won’t be “converted”? Why, you punch the living daylights out of them, of course!
And this is only one of a variety of worldly pursuits that can take on a religious dimension. Even avid gardeners and dog or budgerigar breeders can become fiendishly competitive: knobbling each other’s prize blooms or marrows, or surreptitiously opening a rival’s cage door on the night before a crucial show. Human beings don’t need God as an excuse to be nasty to each other, for conflict is “in the genes”.
And when you come to religions proper, i.e. transcendent divine belief systems, they vary enormously not only in how they respond to violence, but also in how they evangelize. Some religions are predominantly contemplative, and try, within the limits of human frailty, to spread peace, inner calm, and love among all people. Others were born of the sword, and are propagated by the sword, though even they, in some cases, still nurture inner contemplative traditions within themselves. Christianity has always tackled the seemingly Herculean task of turning natural brutes into angels by recognizing that even the vilest brute is a child of God, and that the grace and love of Christ can transform the grossest base metal into the finest gold. A thing which spiritual alchemists such as St Paul, St Ignatius Loyola, George Herbert, John Newton, General William Booth, and many others both recognized and even achieved over the centuries. Yet despite the fleshly limitations of its followers, and their tendency to lapse into nastiness, Christendom has always possessed the courage to face up to its own inner demons, and try to do better next time. And to aspire, in each generation, to be a channel for the love of God, and to strive against all apparent odds to make the world a better, fairer, and kinder place, in spite of our often brutish instincts. But it is really a form of “running repair”, for while we mortals can be transformed by the Holy Spirit as individuals, the next generation is always a fresh challenge.
Yet if religion per se is inherently trouble-causing, let us now look at what atheism and secularism have achieved in the last couple of centuries since Revolutionary France became the first country to “liberate” its people from Christian tyranny.
Things began fine and rosy in July 1789, when young English idealists such as William Wordsworth proclaimed the joy of witnessing a new, free world being born in France. For most of the early “Revolutionaries” were essentially honest, educated, public-spirited French gentlemen who wanted to give their country a stable, balanced, liberal political constitution such as they saw in operation in England. But it did not stay like that for long, as the liberal honeymoon, as we saw in Chapter 3, had begun to spiral into ideological brutality by 1792. Soon, the liberal gentlemen had either fled or perished, as the guillotine became the real symbol of “liberty”.
And subsequent efforts to frame or change a society in accordance with secular atheist principles did no better. The late nineteenth-century German and other anarchists saw terrorism and murder as legitimate political techniques, while the apotheosis of Marxist dialectical materialism after 1917 drew part of its inspiration from secular “social science” and part from a virulent anti-Christian current. Russia under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao after 1948, and other satellite Marxist regimes in Eastern Europe or the Far East all acted in accordance with goals and doctrines which were perceived as “scientific”, “rational”, and as delivering mankind from bondage to outdated religious beliefs. And all rapidly became brutal and repressive beyond description!
How, therefore, can religion, and Christianity in particular, be accused of causing the world’s troubles when on the key occasions when secular atheists have gained absolute control of governments and nations, as in France in 1791, Russia in 1917, and China in 1948, they have acted with such consummate barbarity? (Nazism, while equally anti-Christian and equally savage, was in some ways less of a social science philosophy and more of a pagan cult, seeking part of its inspiration from Nordic mythology, although it did attempt to use eugenic “science” to justify the Master Race’s right to rule and to annihilate other human groups.)
Arguably, what makes such barbarity more likely in secular social systems is an absence of those moral brakes – the prospect of judgment after death – which can, hopefully, make a Christian think twice before committing an atrocity. A secular dictator, on the other hand, with only his own ego to answer to, can quite literally get away with murder, at least until a coup d’état sees him off.
“What a cheek”, I hear the honest unbeliever say, “to assume that only people who believe in God are moral!” And I entirely agree, for there are countless secularists who are honest, humane, and fair-minded, as we all know from daily experience. Likewise, my critics will validly argue, what about those well-run, just, and prosperous modern-day countries where religion plays no formal part in public life – France, Sweden, and Finland, for example? And others, with secular constitutions, yet with overwhelmingly Christian populations, such as the USA or Poland?
I would be so bold as to argue, however, that modern secular states take many of their moral values, sense of public justice, and most of all, equal human rights, from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Some time ago, a Christian friend who sits in Parliament told me of a debate on religion and the state, in which a secularist atheist said that he disliked religion (Christianity), and wanted a just society where the poor were helped, people had value and their rights were respected, the sick were cured, and strangers and victims of persecution found comfort. My friend said he responded by telling the atheist that he had just unknowingly cited some of the key principles contained in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount!
Even when such ideals have been filtered through secular “Enlightenment” or socialist values, and their spiritual origins stripped away and even strenuously denied, the Christian principles remain. And although Thomas Hobbes put his finger on an important point when he said, as we saw in Chapter 2, that being nice to each other is really no more than a charade to protect our skins and beguile and disarm potential aggressors, we must not forget the hundreds of biblical quotations in Leviathan (1651), which indicate how deeply this Wiltshire parson’s son was steeped in Christianity, in spite of his mechanistic outrageousness.
Nor should we forget that when seventy years of Soviet communism came to an end after 1990, many Russians and East Europeans in formerly occupied countries could not run away from the state “religion” of atheism quickly enough, as churches suddenly filled, new ones were built, and incoming Western missionaries found ready listeners. The dullness, drabness, and brutal oppressiveness of state-enforced atheism had utterly failed to win hearts and minds.
And while the dogs of war may never be far below our collective human skin, be it in the army of a Christian nation or in a rampaging crowd of football hooligans, I would humbly suggest that Christian teaching and conscience at least still provides the strongest leash with which the beast in all of us just might be brought to heel.