Is The Position Of Atheism Growing Stronger?/Chapter III

by Joseph McCabe

The chief basis of Atheism is the teaching of science, and we now see that that foundation is firmer than ever. Tens of thousands of times in the last 10 years people have been assured that there was a change of heart in the scientific world and that what Atheists and Materialists had claimed to be their strongest basis was ruined. We have found this a statement that can escape the charge of unveracity only on the supposition that the religious writers who made it never study facts. In spite of all the frantic appeals and subtle cajolery of prelates and their rich supporters, who have often serious influence on universities, the proportion of men of science who believe in God has fallen. We speak on the ground of the most positive evidence when we say that only about one in 10 of the more distinguished men of science now believe in a personal God and that the majority of these believers belong to those branches of science which least of all equip a man to pass a critical judgment on the subject; and I may add, both from the published names and published confessions of belief, that most of these scientific Theists are men of the departing generation. The younger men, especially in anthropology, psychology, physiology, ethics, sociology, paleontology, and biology, have seen the progress of research in the last 20 years afford a massive and entirely consistent confirmation of the position of the Atheist and Materialist. Our basis is sound. Science may almost be called atheistic; and there is no higher authority in the modern world upon which the people may rest their faith.

Hence God's apostles and publicity-agents strike a new note. We will later notice the miserable sophistry that tries to persuade people that if they have a "sense of God" or a religious intuition or instinct that assures them of his existence, they need no proof. This is, we shall see, whether it is said by Sir Arthur Eddington (a dreamy Quaker in the non-scientific half of his brain) or by some vapid Modernist preacher, as crude, in the light of modern psychology, as is the belief in a flat earth. The new note which I have here in mind is a sort of perversion or prostitution of pragmatism or humanism: a theory which, with all respect to its authors, is apt to lead to such consequences. Distrust rational arguments, is the new appeal, for man is no mere logical machine. His interests and emotions are the things that matter in shaping his opinions. If these demand God, pay no attention to the syllogisms of the Atheist. Smile at the philosophers who tell you that they are agreed that all the old arguments for the existence of God from the order and beauty and power of nature are as illogical as the arguments of the old alchemists. We are all sociologists, all practical men, today. Mix up a lot of discredited history, some warm rhetoric about the world's troubles, and a little pulpit-verbiage, and you can prove that if God did not exist we should have to invent him. A Father Coughlin (with his economic guides behind the curtain) becomes the savior of the race. A Canadian bible-teacher, Aberhardt, switches in a year from lessons on Moses and Jezebel to the economic control of a province. And so on. God is found to be vital to our civilization.

1. The Religious Instinct Exploded

These pleas of the rights of the religious instincts and the sociological value of the God-idea we will consider in themselves in later numbers. Here, in taking Russia as the first country in which there has been a phenomenal growth of Atheism, I would point out that its experience completely discredits all these new arguments for the God-idea. That is the next point in that triumph of Atheism which the reactionaries have to use blackjacks, automatics, and concentration-camps or jails to check. Those of us who study these things candidly always knew that this theological sociology was nonsense. The history it appeals to is a clotted mass of untruth, our world has moved at least in the direction of real civilization in exact proportion as it has rejected the theocratic idea, and no statesman in the world today has any more idea of getting inspiration from religion than has that one respectable dictator of our time, the skeptical President of the Turkish Republic. Yet in most countries the press and preachers talk so unctuously about religion and reconstruction that the millions are fooled. No wonder they hated and libeled Russia! For the news is spreading, and is triumphing even over reactionary opposition that Russia is doing the finest and soundest reconstructive work of our time, and it is doing this, not only without God, but on a basis of militant Atheism. It smothers the plea that we must "cooperate with God," the pretense that there is any social wisdom in popes or parsons. It furnishes a massive and magnificent proof of what Shelley more than a hundred years ago called "The Necessity of Atheism."

Further, the success of Soviet Russia as deeply discredits the psychological as it does the sociological argument for the God-idea. Here were 160,000,000 people who had been for ages, apart from a small educated minority, as deeply rooted in religion, according to the religious view, as the peasants of Ireland or Mexico; and in less than 20 years half of them toss aside religion as cheerfully as one discards one's overcoat on the first day of spring. The same thing was seen in France in the third year of the Revolution, and the facility with which half of the French people gave up their creed in a year, not under pressure of but in spite of the wishes of Danton and Robespierre, discredited the instinct- argument long ago. In every country today, in fact, as I showed in another book, the Churches are not ministering to a craving on the part of the people, as this theory of an ineradicable religious instinct requires, but are confessing the absence of such craving by appealing to quite other instincts. To tell New York, Paris or London, that the general character of its people, five-sixths of whom do not want to hear anything about religion, is lacking in fine elements which flourish in the character of folk in Georgia or Oklahoma is too silly to be an insult. Yet that is what preachers imply.

We will consider the psychology of the theory later, but an ounce of fact is worth a ton of reasoning. And what has happened in Russia is a very massive and instructive fact. Not only in towns but in village after village, once the truth about Christianity and the people was impressed upon, the villagers, they as a body, except a few of the older folk, cashiered their priest and turned the church into a library or a nursery. It was proved at once that their "devotion to religion," as it had been called, was simply a traditional practice protected by ignorance of the truth. But we will first determine the real character of the movement and then ascertain its size.

2. The Myth of Persecution

As soon as this disturbing fact of the rejection of all religion by tens of millions of Russians broke through the clerical embargo on truth, the cry was raised that it was not a voluntary change of allegiance. Let me point out at once that, even if this were true, it would not in the least lessen the force of the argument against the sociological plea for God. For it is just these leading men who are supposed to have persecuted religion that have made the Russian civilization what it is today. They would themselves be the fast to recognize the cooperative work of the mass of the people, but, plainly, it is the planning and directive work of men like Stalin and Litvinov that has had the chief share. They are Atheists to a man—or woman. The thousands of officers who link them with the labor of the people are all aggressive Atheists. The millions of members of the Communist party, who are the backbone of the workers in the task of reconstruction, are all Atheists. Until the 18th Century the leaders of every civilization in Europe, apart from Spain and Sicily in the Middle Ages, were Christians. We know what sort of civilization they created and maintained. From the 18th Century onward there was an increasing leaven of skepticism in the brain of the state; and there was an increasing, improvement of its features. But in Russia we now have a homogeneously atheistic body of men and women doing all the directive work of the state, and the result is beginning to extort admiration from the most reluctant writers. Even the ass has spoken, and the prophet ceases to curse. With an irony that shows only that nothing is too wild to say in the religious world, preachers who a few years ago represented the Russian leaders and officials as sadistic gorillas, from the taint of whose ideas other nations must be preserved even at the cost of war, now tell their followers that the Russians have invented a new religion!

What their idealism is and how far it has already been realized we shall fully consider in the eighth and tenth numbers of this series. And the cry of persecution has already so far declined that we need not say much about it. As early as January 23, 1918, the attitude of the new state toward religion was defined in constitutional decrees, and one clause was:

"Every citizen is at liberty to practice any religion or none at all. All penalties attaching to the practice of any creed whatever, or to the non-practicing of any creed, are abolished."

That law was never altered, but in the year of the invasion of Russia by White and foreign armies large numbers of the priests (especially Catholic priests, who are for the most part Poles) intrigued with the invaders and in many ways made the task of the Soviet government more difficult. Any man who has any doubt about this should read their own confessions as quoted in Dr. Sherwood Eddy's pamphlet, 'The Soviet War on Religion,' In 1923 the Patriarch of the Russian Church said in an address to his followers:

"We recognize our offense before the Soviet government, namely, our many passive and active anti-Soviet activities recounted in the charge laid against us in the Supreme Court."

The All-Russian Church Assembly in 1923 said:

"From the summer of 1917 onward the responsible leaders of the Church took up a definite counter-revolutionary attitude."

On November 5, 1927, a group of Catholic priests in the Ukraine published a letter in which they said:

"We have been guilty more than once of yielding to the temptation of political activity, frequently establishing relations with the agents of the Polish bourgeoisie and the Polish capitalist state."

A Catholic priest and protopresbyter, Nicholas Tolstoy, wrote a letter in a Kharkov paper in February, 1929, to say that, while he remained a Catholic, he renounced the priesthood on this ground:

"The Roman Catholic priesthood embodies all the hatred of the capitalist West to the Workers' government."

He said that priests in the Ukraine had for 10 years "acted as propagandists of Polish imperialism ... in full touch with Poland and with the blessing of the Vatican." In fine, the Anglo-Russian Catholic lady, Miss Almedingen, whose 'Catholic Church in Russia' gives a tearful story of persecution of priests in 1922—though the facts she honestly tells are mild as milk in comparison with the fiery mendacity written by priests in America—admits that the charges against these priests "were of course true from a Soviet standpoint" (p. 96). The lady could hardly expect the Soviet courts to judge delinquent priests from the Vatican standpoint!

Let me recall to the mind of the reader that at the very time when a few priests were being shot—Miss Almedingen gives only one such case—or imprisoned in Russia hundreds of Socialists and Communists were being murdered in Italy, and the Pope was preparing to accept the red hand of Mussolini and was blessing the regime of tyranny and cruelty in Poland. You will have read all this in the 'Appeal to Reason,' The Catholic attitude was cynical in the extreme, and the Pope richly deserves the world-opprobrium he has now drawn upon himself by his trimming over Ethiopia. As to the charge that the Soviet authorities brought about the mass-movement to Atheism by any sort of compulsion, the heads of the religious bodies in Russia repeatedly repudiated it. In 1928, while rabbis in New York were praying Jehovah and his Wall Street servants to punish the Russian Communists, 31 Russian-Jewish rabbis published a letter in which they said:

"The Jews living in the U.S.S.R. have received complete and absolute equality. There is not a single government in the world which has done as much for the Jewish people, persecuted for ages, as the Soviet government."

On February 14, 1930, the Acting Patriarch, the Metropolitan of Saratov, the Archbishop of Khutinsk, and the bishop of Orekhovo Zueva signed a statement repudiating all the stories of atrocities published in England and America in that year and declaring:

"There has never been, nor is there, any persecution of religion in the U.S.S.R."

We need not go further. The cry has died away—because there is no longer the least hope of intervention in Russia.

3. The Extent of Russian Atheism

Similar lies were told about the League of Militant Atheists which was represented as an instrument of the government for the destruction of Churches and the degrading of the minds of the people with cartoons and caricatures. The League is, and has always been, a voluntary association with a few million members for the education of the people in Atheism. It has no power to close or destroy churches, and none have been alienated or destroyed except at the demand of the great majority of the worshipers or, in a very few cases, to meet specific civic requirements. As to the caricatures, they were at least true and in better taste than some of the novels and even positive statements made about Russia. The Pope still mumbles as if the wild rumor that the Communists advocated Common ownership of women had not been exploded years ago.

I am not here to describe life in Russia—we shall see it later—but I would recommend any religious lady who shudders at the description given her of Russian character to reflect on this fact, which I take from the current issue of the highly respectable and conservative British Observer. It says that "Tolstoy's following in Russia has kept steady pace with the phenomenal growth of the number of Soviet readers." In 1917 only 26,000 copies of his works were published: in 1933 more than half a million. In 1935 "nearly a million" volumes of his works will be published, and that will bring the total published since the Revolution to nearly 12,000,000. And Tolstoy would be described even by parsons as one of the most spiritual and anti-sensual writers. Probably we shall next hear that Russia menaces the world with a mania for asceticism.

How many Atheists are there amongst the 160,000,000 people of the U.S.S.R.? The head of the League, Yaroslavsky, whom Dr. Sherwood Eddy calls a man of "transparent honesty and earnestness of character," said in August, 1932, that the most that could be claimed by the Church was that 100,000,000 Russians were still religious. There were then 5,500,000 members of the League of Militant Atheists: 40 percent of the Trade Unionists were Atheists: and not less than 10,000,000 workers on the collective farms were Atheists. That—a total of at least 60,000,000 Atheists—was the careful estimate of the chief expert in 1932. But the movement has spread very rapidly since that time. The collective farms, with their educational and atheistic atmosphere, have enormously increased, and the work in the towns has so far progressed that the League of Militant Atheists has recently decided to relax its efforts and leave it mainly to the schools and literature to complete' the work. Even in 1932, Yaroslavsky said, more than half the children of Russia were Atheists, and of the 5,500,000 members of the League nearly one-third were women. In carrying out its Five Year Plan the League had risen from 400,000 to 5,500,000 members, and the young Atheists' Association had risen from 10,000 to about 2,000,000. Moreover, nearly 25,000,000 children were being educated in the entirely atheistic government schools.

It is temperate to conclude that with three further years of this zealous propaganda the Atheists must now be in a majority or must number something like 100,000,000, but for the purpose of this work I count only 80,000,000. The towns are over-whelmingly atheistic. Walter Duranty observed in 1931 that of the former 1,600 churches of Moscow "only a scanty few" were left open, and these sufficed even at Easter for "the small but faithful remnant:" "Religion is dying in Moscow," he said. In villages that still had churches, he reported to the New York Times, 70 percent of the people were content with civic marriage and registering of births and deaths. Describing the destruction of one of the most venerated churches in Moscow, on which there had been tearful and shuddering comments in religious and many other papers, Duranty reported that there was no excitement in Moscow. "New Russia does not care," he said; "its past is dead, and it is glad." Next year a more intensive campaign of aggressive Atheism was inaugurated and the work proceeded with great success. Another correspondent who will certainly not be accused of bias in favor of either Atheism or Communism, Cummings of the London News-Chronicle, visited Russia in 1935. He paid a remarkable tribute to the work that was being done, and he gave the gist of conversations he had with the people about religion. The younger, he said, have finished with religion: only some of the old folk cling to it.

Since exact figures are not obtainable, it is unnecessary to multiply these quotations. Correspondents like Duranty and Cummings, who know Russia and are recognized as impartial witnesses on such a matter as religion, all tell the same story. In the towns religion is "dead": that is to say, all but a small minority, estimated in Moscow at less than 10 percent, are Atheists. Tourists who go there with the belief that the government has forcibly suppressed religion write home ecstatically about the "crowds of worshippers" they saw in a church here and there, and professional religious correspondents beat up reports of an apostle in one place or another who promises a religious revival. But Atheism steadily and rapidly grows. The dense mass of the illiterate peasantry who were the most refractory to Atheism are being educated so rapidly that in provinces where 98 percent were illiterate 15 years ago, now 98 percent can read; and they do read. The agricultural trouble is practically over, and the collective farms have triumphed. All the children of the nation are being educated in schools in which the entire curriculum and all the teachers are atheistic and materialistic; while Russia already surpasses Germany, France, and Great Britain in the proportion of youths and girls who receive higher (and always atheistic) education. In 20 years the number of those who have ceased to be Christians and become Atheists in Russia alone is well over 50,000,000 and nearer 100,000,000; and the majority of the remainder are old folk who will die out or the very backward peoples of Asiatic Russia who are already being educated out of their superstitions. But, as I said at the start, I am not going to put even the full legitimate weight on my evidence. Let us say that beyond question. 80,000,000 Russians, or one half, and the younger half of the population, are now Atheists.