Is The Position Of Atheism Growing Stronger?/Chapter V

by Joseph McCabe

The similarity of cultural and clerical conditions in America and Great Britain and the absence of any large atheistic political party justify me in considering both apart from the condition of continental Europe. There we have an extraordinary situation. In nearly half of Europe, apart from European Russia, Atheism is proscribed and persecuted. It is regarded as a symptom if not a cause of political views. Hence not even the most resolute sophist will ask us to measure Atheism in Fascist countries today by expressions of it. We must measure its growth in the last period in which Atheists had freedom of expression, and this will provide us with some formidable statistics. In other countries we must proceed much as we have done in regard to America, though in some of them, even in small countries, we have official registers of professions of Atheism which must surprise those who are not on the alert for such matters.

1. The Triumph in Germany

German statistics of religion show only the complete worthlessness of the kind of "religious statistics" that are still published annually in works of reference and included in encyclopedias which pride themselves on their accuracy. They take from the official annual, the 'Statisches Jahrbuch,' the statement, represented as based upon the declarations of the people themselves, that as late as 1933 the Germans were 62.7 percent Protestant (40,000,000) and 32.5 percent Catholic (21,000,000). None are put in the category of "no religion." Yet in the preceding year the Catholics, who have their own political (Center) party and are rigorously bound to vote for its candidates, cast only 12 percent instead of 32 percent of the total votes! I have elsewhere explained that these neglected figures really provide the key to the situation in Germany today. Roman Catholicism is in ruins. It has in about 10 years lost more than 10,000,000 of its working- class adherents and can therefore be treated by Hitler as an almost negligible factor in the political situation. We are expected to be patient and polite while Catholic publications in America boast of a few tens of thousands of converts snatched from other Churches and deny this enormous loss of millions in Germany by giving that country the conventional figure of 20,000,000 followers of the Vatican.

Until about 20 years ago Germany was in much the same condition as regards religion as America and Great Britain. In the cities at least four-fifths of the people never attend church- services of any sort, and the "best sellers" amongst the thoughtful reading public were Atheists like Nietzsche and Haeckel. It was said during the war that half the soldiers had Nietzsche in their bags and half the Bible. The one very important difference was that Socialism counted millions of followers amongst the workers, and it was preponderantly or quite generally atheistic. Its great leaders had all been, and in fact were 20 years ago, outspoken Atheists. The Russian Revolution gave an impetus to Communism, and between 1923 and 1933 it spread so widely that the fear of its capturing Germany was made the pretext for the propagation of Fascism (as Nazism really is) and the burning, of the Reichstag by the Nazis to secure their triumph.

This strength of the Communists and Socialists at the last free elections in 1932 gives us an exact indication of the minimum number of Atheists in Germany. I say minimum because just the same proportion of Atheists were found in the middle class as in other advanced countries. The Communists were solidly and aggressively atheistic, and, though there had been attempts to get rid of the old aggressive Atheism of the Socialists, no Catholic could belong to the party, and, if any Protestants or other Theists did, their number was far more than counterbalanced by the millions of Atheists in the middle class and the non-Socialist working class. The Nazis themselves are, as their treatment of both Churches plainly shows, very largely Atheists. We may therefore take the number of Communists and Socialists as at least a minimum indication of the growth of Atheism.

We find that, while the Catholics polled 4,230,644 votes at the last free election (November, 1932), the Communists cast 5,980,540 votes and the Socialists 7,251,752. Had it not been for their unhappy mutual hostility they would now, or in a few years, be the majority in Germany. Together they obtained 13,232,292 out of a national total of 35,148,470 votes, or nearly 40 percent of the whole. Here we have plain indication that by 1932 at least 40 percent of the people of Germany, or about 24,000,000 men, women, and children, had become Atheists. I have already said that for some years the Socialist body has not been homogeneously atheistic, but the bitter denunciation of the body by Catholic and other Church authorities has prevented it from attracting any large number of religious voters. These are negligible in comparison with the vast number of Atheists in the middle class and the ranks of the Nazi movement itself. At least 30,000,000 of the 65,000,000 people of Germany are now Atheists in the proper sense of the word.

2. France, Spain, and Italy

France is the classic land of Atheism in Europe. In spite of long periods of political reaction at various times in the 19th Century the French nation never returned with deep and genuine attachment to the Roman religion which it spontaneously deserted from about 1792 to 1800 (when Napoleon reimposed it). The year 1880 fairly marks the final defeat of Roman Catholicism and the complete secularization of the life of the country. The annexation of hundreds of thousands of Catholic Alsatians and Lorrainers added to the strength of the Church in 1919, and the dread of the Pope's influence in those disaffected provinces has in the last 16 years moderated the anti-clerical note. But, as I have elsewhere shown, even French Catholic writers do not claim that there are more than 6,000,000 "practicing Catholics" in the country; and I need only remark that I am myself, in theology, the kind of person they call a non-practicing Catholic, to show how absurd the distinction is. I have proved that there are only about 5,000,000 Catholics and less than a million Protestants in the population of 40,000,000.

The religious belief or unbelief of the 34,000,000 who, though they may often get the priest to bury their dead and baptize their children—a matter of custom—are cynically opposed to all Churches and all attempts to found a theistic or spiritualist religion, can hardly be in serious doubt. To the enormous majority of them religion means only one thing, Catholicism, and they have rejected it. No people so thoroughly appreciate jokes at the expense of religion and its petit bon Dieu (good little God) as the French do. The atheistic note is predominant in every town, and the 10,000,000 Radical-Socialist, Socialist, and Communist organized workers are solidly atheistic. Add a large proportion of the non- Socialist but republican workers and nearly the whole of the middle class, and you see that considerably more than half the population is atheistic. We can safely say that there is a minimum of 20,000,000 Atheists in France.

In Italy there are at present no aggressive Atheists and there is little open expression of Atheism. It was part of the bargain with the Pope that critics of religion should be imprisoned. The law, it is true, cannot be strictly applied, for Atheists formed a large part of the Fascist movement which bore Mussolini, who seems still to be an Atheist, to power. We must, however, take the situation as it was before Mussolini passed his infamous laws for the restriction of liberty. In 1908 I proved in my 'Decay of the Church of Rome' that already at least 6,000,000 Italians had quitted the Church. Higher teaching was mainly in the hands of Atheists, and popular and rather caustic atheistic weeklies had a circulation of more than a million amongst the workers. From that date the Socialist movement, which in Italy is atheistic and bitterly condemned by the Church, rapidly advanced. At the election of 1919, the last entirely free election, it secured 1,840,593 out of a national total of 3,500,000 votes. Atheistic Socialism and Communism had won the immense majority of the town-workers and a very large part of the peasants. But I have thoroughly examined the situation in the 'Appeal to Reason' (No. 1) and will merely quote my conclusion that there were at least 10,000,000 Atheists in Italy. Thousands are dead or in jail but persecution has changed no opinions.

In the same quarterly I have examined the religious situation in Spain and shown that it corresponds closely to that of Italy. Until the Catholic intriguer Gil Robles and the treacherous Lerroux took advantage of the quarrels of Socialists and Communists to destroy the power of both, they had been for some years the dominant party in the government. What splendid work their atheistic leaders did we shall see later. Even today so powerful is the anti-Roman sentiment in the towns that the masterful Robles has been checked for more than a year in his attempts to restore the full power of Church and monarchy. At all events, the results of both municipal and general elections showed to the end of 1933 that the Socialists, Communists, and other atheistic bodies controlled half the voters. Anti-clericals generally had 255 out of the 463 deputies to the Cortes. In Latin countries anti-clerical generally means Atheist. God is to them the God of the Catholic Church. Except in cultivated circles there is virtually no literature urging people to believe in any other sort of God, and the popular press does not, as in America, keep up the pretense that ours is a Christian civilization under the presidency of a deity. Protestantism they disdain, and by "religion" they almost invariably mean the Roman creed. In such circumstances it is temperate to conclude that of the 55,000,000 anti-clericals of France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal at least 40,000,000 have no belief in God.

3. In the Smaller Countries

It is enough for my purpose in this essay to indicate the existence of the larger bodies of Atheists, which run to millions or tens of millions, so I need not examine every country in Europe. In fact, there are few cases in which it is possible to use exact statistics as a base, but there are several such cases, and they are very significant. Census reports are apt to be, as I have shown in the case of Germany, quite ridiculous, but wherever in a Census a body of men and women write down that they have "no religion" we may certainly take these as the more definite or aggressive Atheists of that country. On the other hand, the smallness in some cases of the number of those who so describe themselves is not in the least a proof of the scantiness of Atheists. In Sweden and Norway, for instance, the number is negligible, yet one has only to reflect that in those countries the Socialists are so powerful that they are sometimes described as Socialist states; and any person who imagines that the immense body of Swedish Socialists and Communists, who together number more than a million adults in a population of 6,000,000 are religious is very far astray.

Whatever be the routine of demanding one's religious description in Norway and Sweden, there is complete liberty in Czechoslovakia and Holland, and the result is interesting. In Czechoslovakia, the 14,000,000 people of which are so predominantly agricultural that there are only six cities with more than 50,000 people, no less than 854,638 adults reported themselves at the Census of 1931 as of "no religion." It would be a desperate apologist who would try to persuade us that "no religion" means simply no Church. The Freethought movement is stronger in Czechoslovakia, where the atheistic President Masaryk has for decades been the chief popular idol, than in any other country in Europe. In July of last year (1935) there was a demonstration in the great square at Prague by 40,000 Atheists. This body grew up independently of the anti-clericalism of Socialists and Communists, who now number 1,700,000 adult voters. Doubtless many of these figure also in the statistics of Freethinkers, but it is clear that there must be, counting their families (generally) with the adults, 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 Atheists in the small country.

Holland, with a population of only 8,000,000, returned no less than 1,144,393 men and women as of "no religion" at the Census of 1930. We are thus fortunate in having precise statistics in a few cases, and these give us some clue to the situation in other countries. Denmark, for instance, is certainly not behind Holland in the growth of advanced opinions. Belgium has a million Socialists and Communists, Poland half a million, even Bulgaria about 200,000. Austria had, until Dollfuss and the religious criminal Starhemberg brought out their artillery, a formidable body of 1,578,000 Socialists and Communists, and the massacre of some hundreds has not induced the remainder to become convinced that there is a God in the heavens. The only prayer they say is probably that which Catholic neighbors in Bavaria mutter under their Nazi authorities:

Lieber Herrgott, mach mich stumm,
Dass Ich nicht in Dochau Kumm.

Which may be translated: "Dear God, make me dumb so that I won't give myself away." Thus even if we suppose that little more than a tenth of the population of these smaller countries of Europe are Atheists, it adds some 10,000,000 to our total; and I have given precise evidence that in many of them the number of Atheists is nearer one-fifth than one-tenth.