A little more than a century after Joseph Smith fell victim to the violence and mania that he

had helped to unleash, another prophetic voice was raised in the United States. A young black

pastor named Dr. Martin Luther King began to preach that his people—the descendants of the

very slavery that Joseph Smith and all other Christian churches had so warmly approved

should be free. It is quite impossible even for an atheist like myself to read his sermons or watch

recordings of his speeches without profound emotion of the sort that can sometimes bring

genuine tears. Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written in response to a group of white

Christian clerics who had urged him to show restraint and “patience”—in other words, to know

his place—is a model of polemic. Icily polite and generous-minded, it still breathes with an

unquenchable conviction that the filthy injustice of racism must be borne no longer.

Taylor Branch’s magnificent three-volume biography of Dr. King is successively titled Parting

the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge. And the rhetoric with which King addressed his

followers was designed to evoke the very story that they all knew best—the one that begins

when Moses first tells Pharoah to “Let my people go.” In speech after speech he inspired the

oppressed, and exhorted and shamed their oppressors. Slowly, the embarrassed religious

leadership of the country moved to his side. Rabbi Abraham Heschel asked, “Where in America

today do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign

that God has not forsaken the United States of America.”

Most eerie of all, if we follow the Mosaic narrative, was the sermon that King gave on the last

night of his life. His work of transforming public opinion and shifting the stubborn Kennedy and

Johnson administrations was almost done, and he was in Memphis, Tennessee, to support a long

and bitter strike by the city’s ground-down garbage collectors, on whose placards appeared the

simple words “I Am a Man.” In the pulpit at Mason Temple, he reviewed the protracted struggle

of the past years and then very suddenly said, “But it doesn’t matter with me now.” There was

silence until he went on. “Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody I

would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just

want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I

have seen the Promised Land. And I may not get there with you, but I want you to know, tonight,

that we as a people will get to the Promised Land!” Nobody who was there that night has ever

forgotten it, and I daresay the same can be said for anyone who views the film that was so

fortunately taken of that transcendent moment. The next best way of experiencing this feeling

at second hand is to listen to how Nina Simone sang, that same terrible week, “The King of Love

Is Dead.” The entire drama has the capacity to unite elements of Moses on Mount Nebo with the

agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. The effect is scarcely diminished even when we discover

that this was one of his favorite sermons, and one that he had delivered several times before,

and into which he could slip as occasion demanded.

But the examples King gave from the books of Moses were, fortunately for all of us,

metaphors and allegories. His most imperative preaching was that of nonviolence. In his versionof the story, there are no savage punishments and genocidal bloodlettings. Nor are there cruel

commandments about the stoning of children and the burning of witches. His persecuted and

despised people were not promised the territory of others, nor were they incited to carry out the

pillage and murder of other tribes. In the face of endless provocation and brutality, King

beseeched his followers to become what they for a while truly became; the moral tutors of

America and of the world beyond its shores. He in effect forgave his murderer in advance: the

one detail that would have made his last public words flawless and perfect would have been an

actual declaration to that effect. But the difference between him and the “prophets of Israel”

could not possibly have been more marked. If the population had been raised from its mother’s

knee to hear the story of Xenophon’s Anabasis, and the long wearying dangerous journey of the

Greeks to their triumphant view of the sea, that allegory might have done just as well. As it was,

though, the “Good Book” was the only point of reference that everybody had in common.

Christian reformism arose originally from the ability of its advocates to contrast the Old

Testament with the New. The cobbled-together ancient Jewish books had an ill-tempered and

implacable and bloody and provincial god, who was probably more frightening when he was in a

good mood (the classic attribute of the dictator). Whereas the cobbled-together books of the

last two thousand years contained handholds for the hopeful, and references to meekness,

forgiveness, lambs and sheep, and so forth. This distinction is more apparent than real, since it is

only in the reported observations of Jesus that we find any mention of hell and eternal

punishment. The god of Moses would brusquely call for other tribes, including his favorite one,

to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims

he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny.

Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing

and torturing the dead. First presaged by the rantings of John the Baptist, the son of god is

revealed as one who, if his milder words are not accepted straightaway, will condemn the

inattentive to everlasting fire. This has provided texts for clerical sadists ever since, and

features very lip-smackingly in the tirades of Islam. At no point did Dr. King—who was once

photographed in a bookstore waiting calmly for a physician while the knife of a maniac was

sticking straight out of his chest—even hint that those who injured and reviled him were to be

threatened with any revenge or punishment, in this world or the next, save the consequences of

their own brute selfishness and stupidity. And he even phrased that appeal more courteously

than, in my humble opinion, its targets deserved. In no real as opposed to nominal sense, then,

was he a Christian.

This does not in the least diminish his standing as a great preacher, any more than does the

fact that he was a mammal like the rest of us, and probably plagiarized his doctoral

dissertation, and had a notorious fondness for booze and for women a good deal younger than

his wife. He spent the remainder of his last evening in orgiastic dissipation, for which I don’t

blame him. (These things, which of course disturb the faithful, are rather encouraging in that

they show that a high moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.)

But if his example is to be deployed, as it often is, to show that religion has an uplifting and

liberating effect, then let us examine the wider claim.

Taking the memorable story of black America as our instance, we should find, first, that the

enslaved were not captives of some Pharoah but of several Christian states and societies that

for many years operated a triangular “trade” between the west coast of Africa, the eastern

seaboard of North America, and the capitals of Europe. This huge and terrible industry was

blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. (Its

counterpart, the slave trade in the Mediterranean and North Africa, was explicitly endorsed by,

and carried out in the name of, Islam.) In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites

and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.Thomas Jefferson, ruminating on the way that slavery corrupted and brutalized the masters as

well as exploited and tortured the slaves, wrote, “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect

that God is just.” This was a statement as incoherent as it is memorable: given the marvel of a

god who was also just there would be, in the long term, nothing much to tremble about. At any

rate, the Almighty managed to tolerate the situation while several generations were born and

died under the lash, and until slavery became less profitable, and even the British Empire began

to get rid of it.

This was the spur for the revival of abolitionism. It sometimes took a Christian form, most

notably in the case of William Lloyd Garrison, the great orator and founder of the Liberator. Mr.

Garrison was a splendid man by any standards, but it is probably fortunate that all of his early

religious advice was not followed. He based his initial claim on the dangerous verse from St. Paul

that calls on the faithful to “come out, and be separated” (this is also the theological basis of Ian

Paisley’s fundamentalist and bigoted Presbyterianism in Northern Ireland). In Garrison’s view,

the Union and the United States Constitution were “a covenant with death” and ought both to be

destroyed: it was in effect he who called for secession before the Confederates did. (In later life

he discovered the work of Thomas Paine and became less of a preacher and a more effective

abolitionist, as well as an early supporter of female suffrage.) It was the escaped slave

Frederick Douglass, author of the stirring and mordant Autobiography, who eschewed

apocalyptic language and demanded instead that the United States live up to the universalist

promises contained in its Declaration and its Constitution. The lionlike John Brown, who also

began as a fearsome and pitiless Calvinist, did the same. Later in life, he had Paine’s works in his

camp and admitted freethinkers to his tiny but epoch-changing army, and even produced and

printed a new “Declaration,” modeled on that of 1776, on behalf of the enslaved. This was in

practice a much more revolutionary as well as a more realistic demand, and prepared the way

as Lincoln admitted—for the Emancipation Proclamation. Douglass was somewhat ambivalent

about religion, noting in his Autiobiography that the most devout Christians made the most

savage slaveholders. The obvious truth of this was underlined when secession really did come

and the Confederacy adopted the Latin motto “Deo Vindice” or, in effect, “God on Our Side.” As

Lincoln pointed out in his highly ambivalent second inaugural address, both sides in the quarrel

made that claim, at least in their pulpits, just as both were addicted to loud, confident

quotations from holy writ.

Lincoln himself was hesitant to claim authority in this manner. In fact, at one point he

famously said that such invocations of the divine were wrong, because it was rather a matter of

trying to be on god’s side. Pressed to issue an immediate Emancipation Proclamation at a

gathering of Christians in Chicago, he continued to see both sides of the argument as endorsed

by faith, and said that “these are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be

granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation.” This was neatly evasive, yet when he finally

did nerve himself to issue the Proclamation he told the remaining waverers that he had

promised himself to do so—on condition that god gave victory to the Union forces at Antietam.

On that day, the largest ever number of deaths on United States soil was recorded. So it is

possible that Lincoln wanted somehow to sanctify and justify that appalling carnage. This would

be a noble enough thing, until one reflects that, on the same logic, the same carnage decided

the other way would have postponed the freeing of the slaves! As he also said, “The rebel

soldiers are praying with a great deal more earnestness, I fear, than our own troops, and

expecting God to favor their side; for one of our soldiers, who had been taken prisoner, said that

he met with nothing so discouraging as the evident sincerity of those he was among in their

prayers.” One more bit of battlefield luck for the gray uniforms at Antietam and the president

might have become worried that god had deserted the antislavery cause altogether.

We do not know Lincoln’s private religious beliefs. He was fond of references to AlmightyGod, but he never joined any church and his early candidacies were much opposed by

clergymen. His friend Herndon knew that he had read Paine and Volney and other freethinkers

very closely and formed the opinion that he was privately an outright unbeliever. This seems

improbable. However, it would also be inaccurate to say that he was a Christian. Much evidence

supports the view that he was a tormented skeptic with a tendency to deism. Whatever may be

the case, the very most that can be said for religion in the grave matter of abolition is that after

many hundreds of years, and having both imposed and postponed the issue until self-interest

had led to a horrifying war, it finally managed to undo some small part of the damage and

misery that it had inflicted in the first place.

The same can be said of the King epoch. The southern churches returned to their old ways

after Reconstruction, and blessed the new institutions of segregation and discrimination. It was

not until after the Second World War and the spread of decolonization and human rights that

the cry for emancipation was raised again. In response, it was again very forcefully asserted (on

American soil, in the second half of the twentieth century) that the discrepant descendants of

Noah were not intended by god to be mixed. This barbaric stupidity had real-world

consequences. The late Senator Eugene McCarthy told me that he had once urged Senator Pat

Robertson—father of the present television prophet—to support some mild civil rights

legislation. “I’d sure like to help the colored,” came the response, “but the Bible says I can’t.” The

entire self-definition of “the South” was that it was white, and Christian. This is exactly what gave

Dr. King his moral leverage, because he could outpreach the rednecks. But the heavy burden

would never have been laid upon him if religiosity had not been so deeply entrenched to begin

with. As Taylor Branch shows, many of King’s inner circle and entourage were secular

Communists and socialists who had been manuring the ground for a civil rights movement for

several decades and helping train brave volunteers like Mrs. Rosa Parks for a careful strategy

of mass civil disobedience, and these “atheistic” associations were to be used against King all

the time, especially from the pulpit. Indeed, one result of his campaign was to generate the

“backlash” of white right-wing Christianity which is still such a potent force below the Mason

Dixon line.

When Dr. King’s namesake nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517 and

later announced at Worms, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” he set a standard for intellectual

and moral courage. But Martin Luther, who started his religious life being terribly frightened by

a near-miss lightning strike, went on to become a bigot and a persecutor in his own right, railing

murderously against Jews, screaming about demons, and calling on the German principalities to

stamp on the rebellious poor. When Dr. King took a stand on the steps of Mr. Lincoln’s memorial

and changed history, he too adopted a position that had effectively been forced upon him. But

he did so as a profound humanist and nobody could ever use his name to justify oppression or

cruelty. He endures for that reason, and his legacy has very little to do with his professed

theology. No supernatural force was required to make the case against racism.

Anybody, therefore, who uses the King legacy to justify the role of religion in public life must

accept all the corollaries of what they seem to be implying. Even a glance at the whole record

will show, first, that person for person, American freethinkers and agnostics and atheists come

out the best. The chance that someone’s secular or freethinking opinion would cause him or her

to denounce the whole injustice was extremely high. The chance that someone’s religious belief

would cause him or her to take a stand against slavery and racism was statistically quite small.

But the chance that someone’s religious belief would cause him or her to uphold slavery and

racism was statistically extremely high, and the latter fact helps us to understand why the

victory of simple justice took so long to bring about.

As far as I am aware, there is no country in the world today where slavery is still practiced

where the justification of it is not derived from the Koran. This returns us to the retort delivered,in the very early days of the Republic, to Thomas Jefferson. A slaveholder, Jefferson had called

on the ambassador of Tripoli in London to ask him by what right he and his fellow Barbary

potentates presumed to capture and sell American crews and passengers from ships using the

Strait of Gibraltar. (It is now estimated that between 1530 and 1780 more than one and a quarter

million Europeans were carried off in this way.) As Jefferson reported to Congress:

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was

written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were

sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them whenever they could be

found and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners.

Ambassador Abdrahaman went on to mention the requisite price of ransom, the price of

protection from kidnapping, and last but not least his own personal commission in these

proceedings. (Religion once again betrays its man-made conveniences.) As it happens, he was

quite right in what he said about the Koran. The eighth sura, revealed at Medina, deals at some

length with the justified spoils of war and dwells continually on the further postmortem

“torments of fire” that await those who are defeated by the believers. It was this very sura that

was to be used only two centuries later by Saddam Hussein to justify his mass murder and

dispossession of the people of Kurdistan.

ANOTHER GRAND HISTORICAL EPISODE—the emancipation of India from colonial rule—is often

portrayed as though it involved a connection between religious belief and ethical outcomes. As

with the heroic battle of Dr. King, the real story tends to show that something like the opposite is

the case.

After the critical weakening of the British Empire by the First World War, and most

particularly after the notorious massacre of Indian protestors at the city of Amritsar in April

1919, it became apparent even to the then controllers of the subcontinent that rule from London

would come to an end sooner rather than later. It was no longer a matter of “if” but of “when.”

Had this not been the case, a campaign of peaceful disobedience would have stood no chance.

Thus Mohandas K. Gandhi (sometimes known as “the Mahatma” in respect for his standing as a

Hindu elder) was in a sense pushing at an open door. There is no dishonor in that, but it is

exactly his religious convictions that make his legacy a dubious rather than a saintly one. To

state the matter shortly: he wanted India to revert to a village-dominated and primitive

“spiritual” society, he made power-sharing with Muslims much harder, and he was quite

prepared to make hypocritical use of violence when he thought it might suit him.

The whole question of Indian independence was interleaved with the question of unity: would

the former British Raj be reborn as the same country, with the same borders and territorial

integrity, and yet still be called India? To this, a certain rugged faction of Muslims answered

“no.” Under British rule they had enjoyed some protection as a very large minority, not to say a

privileged one, and they were not willing to exchange this state of affairs for becoming a large

minority in a Hindu-dominated state. Thus the sheer fact that the main force for independenc

—the Congress Party—was dominated by a conspicuous Hindu made conciliation very difficult. It

could be argued, and indeed I would argue, that Muslim intransigence would have played a

destructive role in any case. But the task of persuading ordinary Muslims to leave Congress and

to join with the partitionist “Muslim League” was made much easier by Gandhi’s talk of Hinduism

and by the long ostentatious hours he spent in cultish practices and in tending his spinning

wheel.

This wheel—which still appears as the symbol on the Indian Congress Party flag—was the

emblem of Gandhi’s rejection of modernity. He took to dressing in rags of his own manufacture,

and sandals, and to carrying a staff, and expressing hostility to machinery and technology. He

rhapsodized about the Indian village, where the millennial rhythms of animals and crops would

determine how human life was lived. Millions of people would have mindlessly starved to deathif his advice had been followed, and would have continued to worship cows (cleverly

denominated by the priests as “sacred” so that the poor ignorant people would not kill and eat

their only capital during times of drought and famine). Gandhi deserves credit for his criticism

of the inhuman Hindu system of caste, whereby lower orders of humanity were condemned to

an ostracism and contempt that was in some ways even more absolute and cruel than slavery.

But at just the moment when what India most needed was a modern secular nationalist leader,

it got a fakir and guru instead. The crux of this unwelcome realization came in 1942, when the

Imperial Japanese Army had conquered Malaya and Burma and was on the frontiers of India

itself. Believing (wrongly) that this spelled the end of the Raj, Gandhi chose this moment to

boycott the political process and issue his notorious call for the British to “Quit India.” He added

that they should leave it “To God or to Anarchy,” which in the circumstances would have meant

much the same thing. Those who naively credit Gandhi with a conscientious or consistent

pacifism might wish to ask if this did not amount to letting the Japanese imperialists do his

fighting for him.

Among the many bad consequences of the Gandhi/Congress decision to withdraw from

negotiations was the opening it gave to Muslim League adherents to “stay on” in the state

ministries which they controlled, and thus to enhance their bargaining positions when the

moment for independence arrived shortly thereafter. Their insistence that independence take

the form of mutilation and amputation, with western Punjab and eastern Bengal hacked away

from the national body, became unstoppable. The hideous consequences endure to this day,

with further Muslim-on-Muslim bloodbaths in Bangladesh in 1971, the rise of an aggressive Hindu

nationalist party, and a confrontation in Kashmir that is still the likeliest provocation for a

thermonuclear war.

There was always an alternative, in the form of the secular position taken by Nehru and

Rajagopalachari, who would have traded a British promise of immediate postwar independence

for a common alliance, on the part of both India and Britain, against fascism. In the event, it was

in fact Nehru and not Gandhi who led his country to independence, even at the awful price of

partition. For decades, a solid brotherhood between British and Indian secularists and leftists

had laid out the case for, and won the argument for, the liberation of India. There was never

any need for an obscurantist religious figure to impose his ego on the process and both retard

and distort it. The whole case was complete without that assumption. One wishes every day that

Martin Luther King had lived on and continued to lend his presence and his wisdom to American

politics. For “the Mahatma,” who was murdered by members of a fanatical Hindu sect for not

being devout enough, one wishes that he could have lived if only to see what damage he had

wrought (and is relieved that he did not live to implement his ludicrous spinning-wheel program).

THE ARGUMENT THAT RELIGIOUS BELIEF improves people, or that it helps to civilize society, is one

that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case. Very well, they

seem to say, we cease to insist on the Exodus (say), or the Virgin Birth or even the Resurrection,

or the “night flight” from Mecca to Jerusalem. But where would people be without faith? Would

they not abandon themselves to every kind of license and selfishness? Is it not true, as G. K.

Chesterton once famously said, that if people cease to believe in god, they do not believe in

nothing but in anything?

The first thing to be said is that virtuous behavior by a believer is no proof at all of—indeed is

not even an argument for—the truth of his belief. I might, just for the sake of argument, act

more charitably if I believed that Lord Buddha was born from a slit in his mother’s side. But

would not this make my charitable impulse dependent upon something rather tenuous? By the

same token, I do not say that if I catch a Buddhist priest stealing all the offerings left by the

simple folk at his temple, Buddhism is thereby discredited. And we forget in any case how

contingent all this is. Of the thousands of possible desert religions there were, as with themillions of potential species there were, one branch happened to take root and grow. Passing

through its Jewish mutations to its Christian form, it was eventually adopted for political

reasons by the Emperor Constantine, and made into an official faith with—eventually—a

codified and enforceable form of its many chaotic and contradictory books. As for Islam, it

became the ideology of a highly successful conquest that was adopted by successful ruling

dynasties, codified and set down in its turn, and promulgated as the law of the land. One or two

military victories the other way—as with Lincoln at Antietam—and we in the West would not be

the hostages of village disputes that took place in Judaea and Arabia before any serious

records were kept. We could have become the votaries of another belief altogether—perhaps a

Hindu or an Aztec or a Confucian one—in which case we should still be told that, strictly true or

not, it nonetheless helped teach the children the difference between right and wrong. In other

words, to believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas

to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.

I once watched the late Professor A. J. Ayer, the distinguished author of Language, Truth and

Logic and a celebrated humanist, debate with a certain Bishop Butler. The chairman was the

philosopher Bryan Magee. The exchange proceeded politely enough until the bishop, hearing

Ayer assert that he saw no evidence at all for the existence of any god, broke in to say, “Then I

cannot see why you do not lead a life of unbridled immorality.”

At this point “Freddie,” as his friends knew him, abandoned his normal suave urbanity and

exclaimed, “I must say that I think that is a perfectly monstrous insinuation.” Now, Freddie had

certainly broken most commandments respecting the sexual code as adumbrated from Sinai.

He was, in a way, justly famous for this. But he was an excellent teacher, a loving parent, and a

man who spent much of his spare time pressing for human rights and free speech. To say that

his life was an immoral one would be a travesty of the truth.

From the many writers who exemplify the same point in a different way, I shall select Evelyn

Waugh, who was of the same faith as Bishop Butler, and who did his best in his fiction to argue

for the operations of divine grace. In his novel Brideshead Revisited he makes a very acute

observation. The two protagonists, Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder, the first of whom is heir

to an old Catholic nobility, are visited by Father Phipps, who believes that all young men must be

passionately interested in cricket. When disabused of this notion, he looks at Charles “with the

expression I have seen since in the religious, of innocent wonder that those who expose

themselves to the dangers of the world should avail themselves so little of its varied solace.”

Thus I rescrutinize Bishop Butler’s question. Was he in fact not telling Ayer, in his own naive

way, that if freed from the restraints of doctrine he himself would choose to lead “a life of

unbridled immorality”? One naturally hopes not. But much empirical evidence exists to reinforce

the suggestion. When priests go bad, they go very bad indeed, and commit crimes that would

make the average sinner pale. One might prefer to attribute this to sexual repression than to the

actual doctrines preached, but then one of the actual doctrines preached is sexual repression

Thus the connection is unavoidable, and a litany of folkloric jokes have been told by all lay

members of the church ever since religion began.

Waugh’s own life was far more stained by offenses against chastity and sobriety than was

the life of Ayer (only it seemed to bring less happiness to the former than to the latter), and in

consequence he was often asked how he reconciled his private conduct with his public beliefs.

His reply has become celebrated: he asked his friends to imagine how much worse he would be

if he were not a Catholic. For a believer in original sin this might have served as a turning of the

tables, but any examination of Waugh’s actual life shows that its most wicked elements arose

precisely from his faith. Never mind the sad excesses of drunkenness and marital infidelity: he

once sent a wedding telegram to a divorced and now remarried friend telling her that her

nuptial night would increase the loneliness of Calvary and add to the spittle on the face ofChrist. He supported fascist movements in Spain and Croatia, and Mussolini’s foul invasion of

Abyssinia, because they enjoyed the support of the Vatican, and he wrote in 1944 that only the

Third Reich now stood between Europe and barbarism. These deformities in one of my most

beloved authors arose not in spite of his faith, but because of it. No doubt there were private

acts of charity and contrition, but these could equally well have been performed by a person of

no faith at all. To look no further than the United States, the great Colonel Robert Ingersoll, who

was the nation’s leading advocate of unbelief until his death in 1899, maddened his opponents

because he was a person of immense generosity, a loving and constant husband and father, a

gallant officer, and the possessor of what Thomas Edison with pardonable exaggeration called

“all the attributes of a perfect man.”

In my own recent life in Washington, I have been bombarded with obscene and menacing

phone calls from Muslims, promising to punish my family because I do not support a campaign

of lies and hatred and violence against democratic Denmark. But when my wife accidentally left

a large amount of cash on the backseat of a taxi, the Sudanese cab driver went to a good deal

of trouble and expense to work out whose property this was, and to drive all the way to my

home to return it untouched. When I made the vulgar mistake of offering him 10 percent of the

money, he made it quietly but firmly plain that he expected no recompense for performing his

Islamic duty. Which of these two versions of faith is the one to rely upon?

The question is in some ways ultimately undecidable. I would prefer to have Evelyn Waugh’s

shelf of writing just as it is, and to appreciate that one cannot have the novels without the

torments and evils of its author. And if all Muslims conducted themselves like the man who gave

up more than a week’s salary in order to do the right thing, I could be quite indifferent to the

weird exhortations of the Koran. If I search my own life for instances of good or fine behavior I

am not overwhelmed by an excess of choice. I did once, shivering with fear, take off my flak

jacket in Sarajevo and lend it to an even more frightened woman who I was helping escort to a

place of safety (I am not the only one who has been an atheist in a foxhole). I felt at the time

that it was the least I could do for her, as well as the most. The people shelling and sniping were

Serbian Christians, but then, so was she.

In northern Uganda in late 2005, I sat in a center for the rehabilitation of kidnapped and

enslaved children in the land of the Acholi people who live on the northern side of the Nile. The

listless, vacant, hardened little boys (and some girls) were all around me. Their stories were

distressingly similar. They had been seized, at the age of anything from eight to thirteen, from

their schools or homes by a stone-faced militia that was itself originally made up of abducted

children. Marched into the bush, they were “initiated” into the force by one (or two) of two

methods. They either had to take part in a murder themselves, in order to feel “dirtied up” and

implicated, or they had to submit to a prolonged and savage whipping, often of up to three

hundred strokes. (“Children who have felt cruelty,” said one of the elders of the Acholi people,

“know very well how to inflict it.”) The misery inflicted by this army of wretches turned zombies

was almost beyond computation. It had razed villages, created a vast refugee population,

committed hideous crimes such as mutilation and disemboweling, and (in a special touch of evil)

had continued to kidnap children so that the Acholi were wary of taking strong

countermeasures lest they kill or injure one of their “own.”

The name of the militia was the “Lord’s Resistance Army” (LRA), and it was led by a man

named Joseph Kony, a passionate former altar boy who wanted to subject the area to the rule

of the Ten Commandments. He baptized by oil and water, held fierce ceremonies of punishment

and purification, and insured his followers against death. His was a fanatical preachment of

Christianity. As it happened, the rehabilitation center in which I was sitting was also run by a

fundamentalist Christian organization. Having been out into the bush and seen the work of the

LRA, I fell to talking with the man who tried to repair the damage. How did he know, I asked him,which of them was the truest believer? Any secular or state-run outfit could be doing what he

was doing—fitting prosthetic limbs and providing shelter and “counseling”—but in order to be

Joseph Kony one had to have real faith.

To my surprise, he did not dismiss my question. It was true, he said, that Kony’s authority

arose in part from his background in a priestly Christian family. It was also true that people

were apt to believe he could work miracles, by appealing to the spirit world and promising his

acolytes that they were death-proof. Even some of those who had run away would still swear

that they had seen wonders performed by the man. All that a missionary could do was to try

and show people a different face of Christianity.

I was impressed by this man’s frankness. There were some other defenses that he might

have offered. Joseph Kony is obviously far away from the Christian “mainstream.” For one thing,

his paymasters and armorers are the cynical Muslims of the Sudanese regime, who use him to

make trouble for the government of Uganda, which has in turn supported rebel groups in Sudan.

In an apparent reward for this support, Kony at one stage began denouncing the keeping and

eating of pigs, which, unless he has become a fundamentalist Jew in his old age, suggests a

payoff to his bosses. These Sudanese murderers, in their turn, have for years been conducting a

war of extermination not just against the Christians and animists of southern Sudan, but against

the non-Arab Muslims of Darfur province. Islam may officially make no distinction between

races and nations, but the slaughterers in Darfur are Arab Muslims and their victims are African

Muslims. The “Lord’s Resistance Army” is nothing but a Christian Khmer Rouge sideshow in this

more general horror.

An even more graphic example is afforded by the case of Rwanda, which in 1994 gave the

world a new synonym for genocide and sadism. This former Belgian possession is the most

Christian country in Africa, boasting the highest percentage of churches per head of population,

with 65 percent of Rwandans professing Roman Catholicism and another 15 percent adhering to

various Protestant sects. The words “per head” took on a macabre ring in 1992, when at a given

signal the racist militias of “Hutu Power,” incited by state and church, fell upon their Tutsi

neighbors and slaughtered them en masse.

This was no atavistic spasm of bloodletting but a coldly rehearsed African version of the

Final Solution, which had been in preparation for some time. The early warning of it came in

1987 when a Catholic visionary with the deceptively folksy name of Little Pebbles began to boast

of hearing voices and seeing visions, these deriving from the Virgin Mary. The said voices and

visions were distressingly bloody, predicting massacre and apocalypse but also—as if in

compensation—the return of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday, 1992. Apparitions of Mary on a

hilltop named Kibeho were investigated by the Catholic Church and announced to be reliable.

The wife of the Rwandan president, Agathe Habyarimana, was specially entranced by these

visions and maintained a close relationship with the bishop of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. This

man, Monsignor Vincent Nsengiyumva, was also a central-committee member of President

Habyarimana’s single ruling party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development, or

NRMD. This party, together with other organs of state, was fond of rounding up any women of

whom it disapproved as “prostitutes” and of encouraging Catholic activists to trash any stores

that sold contraceptives. Over time, the word spread that prophecy would be fulfilled and that

the “cockroaches”—the Tutsi minority—would soon get what was coming to them.

When the apocalyptic year of 1994 actually hit, and the premeditated and coordinated

massacres began, many frightened Tutsi and dissident Hutu were unwise enough to try and take

refuge in churches. This made life considerably easier for the interahamwe, or government and

military death squads, who knew where to find them and who could rely on priests and nuns to

point out the locations. (This is why so many of the mass-grave sites that have been

photographed are on consecrated ground, and it is also why several clergymen and nuns are inthe dock at the ongoing Rwandan genocide trials.) The notorious Father Wenceslas

Munyeshyaka, for example, a leading figure at the Kigali Cathedral of Sainte Famille, was

smuggled out of the country with the assistance of French priests, but he has since been

charged with genocide, with providing lists of civilians to the interahamwe, and with the rape of

young refugee women. He is by no means the only cleric to have faced similar charges. Lest it

be thought that he was merely a “rogue” priest, we have the word of another member of the

Rwandan hierarchy, the bishop of Gikongoro, otherwise known as Monsignor Augustin Misago.

To quote one careful account of these atrocious events:

Bishop Misago was often described as a Hutu Power sympathizer; he had been publicly

accused of barring Tutsis from places of refuge, criticizing fellow members of the clergy

who helped “cockroaches,” and asking a Vatican emissary who visited Rwanda in June 1994

to tell the Pope “to find a place for Tutsi priests because the Rwandan people do not want

them anymore.” What’s more, on May 4 of that year, shortly before the last Marian

apparition at Kibeho, the bishop appeared there himself with a team of policemen and told

a group of ninety Tutsi schoolchildren, who were being held in preparation for slaughter,

not to worry, because the police would protect them. Three days later, the police helped to

massacre eighty-two of the children.

Schoolchildren “held in preparation for slaughter”...Perhaps you remember the pope’s

denunciation of this ineffaceable crime, and of the complicity of his church in it? Or perhaps you

do not, since no such comment was ever made. Paul Rusesabagina, the hero of Hotel Rwanda,

remembers Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka referring even to his own Tutsi mother as a

“cockroach.” But this did not prevent him, before his arrest in France, from being allowed by the

French church to resume his “pastoral duties.” As for Bishop Misago, there were those in the

postwar Rwandan Ministry of Justice who felt that he should be charged as well. But, as one of

the officials of the Ministry phrased it: “The Vatican is too strong, and too unapologetic, for us to

go taking on bishops. Haven’t you heard of infallibility?”

At a minimum, this makes it impossible to argue that religion causes people to behave in a

more kindly or civilized manner. The worse the offender, the more devout he turns out to be. It

can be added that some of the most dedicated relief workers are also believers (though as it

happens the best ones I have met are secularists who were not trying to proselytize for any

faith). But the chance that a person committing the crimes was “faith-based” was almost 100

percent, while the chances that a person of faith was on the side of humanity and decency were

about as good as the odds of a coin flip. Extend this back into history, and the odds become

more like those of an astrological prediction that just happens to come true. This is because

religions could never have got started, let alone thrived, unless for the influence of men as

fanatical as Moses or Muhammad or Joseph Kony, while charity and relief work, while they may

appeal to tenderhearted believers, are the inheritors of modernism and the Enlightenment.

Before that, religion was spread not by example but as an auxiliary to the more old-fashioned

methods of holy war and imperialism.

I was a guarded admirer of the late Pope John Paul II, who by any human standards was a

brave and serious person capable of displaying both moral and physical courage. He helped the

anti-Nazi resistance in his native country as a young man, and in later life did much to assist its

emancipation from Soviet rule. His papacy was in some ways shockingly conservative and

authoritarian, but showed itself open to science and inquiry (except when the AIDS virus was

under discussion) and even in its dogma about abortion made some concessions to a “life ethic”

which, for example, began to teach that capital punishment was almost always wrong. On his

death, Pope John Paul was praised among other things for the number of apologies he had

made. These did not include, as they should have done, an atonement for the million or so put

to the sword in Rwanda. However, they did include an apology to the Jews for the centuries ofChristian anti-Semitism, an apology to the Muslim world for the Crusades, an apology to Eastern

Orthodox Christians for the many persecutions that Rome had inflicted upon them, too, and

some general contrition about the Inquisition as well. This seemed to say that the church had

mainly been wrong and often criminal in the past, but was now purged of its sin by confession

and quite ready to be infallible all over again.