I f I cannot definitively prove that the usefulness of religion is in the past, and that its

foundational books are transparent fables, and that it is a man-made imposition, and that it has

been an enemy of science and inquiry, and that it has subsisted largely on lies and fears, and

been the accomplice of ignorance and guilt as well as of slavery, genocide, racism, and tyranny,

I can most certainly claim that religion is now fully aware of these criticisms. It is also fully aware

of the ever-mounting evidence, concerning the origins of the cosmos and the origin of species,

which consign it to marginality if not to irrelevance. I have tried to deal with most faith-based

objections as they occur in the unfolding argument, but there is one remaining argument that

one may not avoid.

When the worst has been said about the Inquisition and the witch trials and the Crusades

and the Islamic imperial conquests and the horrors of the Old Testament, is it not true that

secular and atheist regimes have committed crimes and massacres that are, in the scale of

things, at least as bad if not worse? And does not the corollary hold, that men freed from

religious awe will act in the most unbridled and abandoned manner? Dostoyevsky in his

Brothers Karamazov was extremely critical of religion (and lived under a despotism that was

sanctified by the church) and he also represented his character Smerdyakov as a vain and

credulous and stupid figure, but Smerdyakov’s maxim, that “if there is no God there is no

morality,” understandably resonates with those who look back on the Russian Revolution

through the prism of the twentieth century.

One could go further and say that secular totalitarianism has actually provided us with the

summa of human evil. The examples most in common use—those of the Hitler and Stalin

regimes—show us with terrible clarity what can happen when men usurp the role of gods. When I

consult with my secular and atheist friends, I find that this has become the most common and

frequent objection that they encounter from religious audiences. The point deserves a detailed

reply.

To begin with a slightly inexpensive observation, it is interesting to find that people of faith

now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists. One

might hope that religion had retained more sense of its dignity than that. I would not say that

the ranks of secularism and atheism are exactly crammed with Communists or fascists, but it

can be granted for the sake of argument that, just as secularists and atheists have withstood

clerical and theocratic tyrannies, so religious believers have resisted pagan and materialistic

ones. But this would only be to split the difference.

The word “totalitarian” was probably first used by the dissident Marxist Victor Serge, who

had become appalled by the harvest of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. It was popularized by the

secular Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, who had fled the hell of the Third Reich and who

wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is a useful term, because it separates “ordinary” forms odespotism—those which merely exact obedience from their subjects—from the absolutist

systems which demand that citizens become wholly subjects and surrender their private lives

and personalities entirely to the state, or to the supreme leader.

If we accept that latter definition, then the first point to be made is likewise an easy one. For

most of human history, the idea of the total or absolute state was intimately bound up with

religion. A baron or king might compel you to pay taxes or serve in his army, and he would

usually arrange to have priests on hand to remind you that this was your duty, but the truly

frightening despotisms were those which also wanted the contents of your heart and your head.

Whether we examine the oriental monarchies of China or India or Persia, or the empires of the

Aztec or the Incas, or the medieval courts of Spain and Russia and France, it is almost

unvaryingly that we find that these dictators were also gods, or the heads of churches. More

than mere obedience was owed them: any criticism of them was profane by definition, and

millions of people lived and died in pure fear of a ruler who could select you for a sacrifice, or

condemn you to eternal punishment, on a whim. The slightest infringement—of a holy day, or a

holy object, or an ordinance about sex or food or caste—could bring calamity. The totalitarian

principle, which is often represented as “systematic,” is also closely bound up with caprice. The

rules might change or be extended at any moment, and the rulers had the advantage of

knowing that their subjects could never be sure if they were obeying the latest law or not. We

now value the few exceptions from antiquity—such as Periclean Athens with all its deformities

precisely because there were a few moments when humanity did not live in permanent terror of

a Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar or Darius whose least word was holy law.

This was even true when the divine right of despots began to give way to versions of

modernity. The idea of a utopian state on earth, perhaps modeled on some heavenly ideal, is

very hard to efface and has led people to commit terrible crimes in the name of the ideal. One

of the very first attempts to create such an ideal Edenic society, patterned on the scheme of

human equality, was the totalitarian socialist state established by the Jesuit missionaries in

Paraguay. It managed to combine the maximum of egalitarianism with the maximum of

unfreedom, and could only be kept going by the maximum of fear. This ought to have been a

warning to those who sought to perfect the human species. Yet the object of perfecting the

species—which is the very root and source of the totalitarian impulse—is in essence a religious

one.

George Orwell, the ascetic unbeliever whose novels gave us an ineradicable picture of what

life in a totalitarian state might truly feel like, was in no doubt about this. “From the totalitarian

point of view,” he wrote in “The Prevention of Literature” in 1946, “history is something to be

created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in

order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.” (You will notice that he wrote this in

a year when, having fought for more than a decade against fascism, he was turning his guns

even more on the sympathizers of Communism.)

In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or

carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the

subjection of others. What is a totalitarian system if not one where the abject glorification of the

perfect leader is matched by the surrender of all privacy and individuality, especially in matters

sexual, and in denunciation and punishment—“for their own good”—of those who transgress?

The sexual element is probably decisive, in that the dullest mind can grasp what Nathaniel

Hawthorne captured in The Scarlet Letter: the deep connection between repression and

perversion.

In the early history of mankind, the totalitarian principle was the regnant one. The state

religion supplied a complete and “total” answer to all questions, from one’s position in the social

hierarchy to the rules governing diet and sex. Slave or not, the human was property, and theclerisy was the reinforcement of absolutism. Orwell’s most imaginative projection of the

totalitarian idea—the offense of “thoughtcrime”—was a commonplace. An impure thought, let

alone a heretical one, could lead to your being flayed alive. To be accused of demonic

possession or contact with the Evil One was to be convicted of it. Orwell’s first realization of the

hellishness of this came to him early in life, when he was enclosed in a hermetic school run by

Christian sadists in which it was not possible to know when you had broken the rules. Whatever

you did, and however many precautions you took, the sins of which you were unaware could

always be made to find you out.

It was possible to leave that awful school (traumatized for life, as millions of children have

been) but it is not possible, in the religious totalitarian vision, to escape this world of original sin

and guilt and pain. An infinity of punishment awaits you even after you die. According to the

really extreme religious totalitarians, such as John Calvin, who borrowed his awful doctrine from

Augustine, an infinity of punishment can be awaiting you even before you are born. Long ago it

was written which souls would be chosen or “elected” when the time came to divide the sheep

from the goats. No appeal against this primordial sentence is possible, and no good works or

professions of faith can save one who has not been fortunate enough to be picked. Calvin’s

Geneva was a prototypical totalitarian state, and Calvin himself a sadist and torturer and killer,

who burned Servetus (one of the great thinkers and questioners of the day) while the man was

still alive. The lesser wretchedness induced in Calvin’s followers, compelled to waste their lives

worrying if they had been “elected” or not, is well caught in George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and in an

old English plebeian satire against the other sects, from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Plymouth

Brethren, who dare to claim that they are of the elect, and that they alone know the exact

number of those who will be plucked from the burning:

We are the pure and chosen few, and all the rest are damned.

There’s room enough in hell for you—we don’t want heaven crammed.

I had an innocuous but weak-spirited uncle whose life was ruined and made miserable in just

this way. Calvin may seem like a far-off figure to us, but those who used to grab and use power

in his name are still among us and go by the softer names of Presbyterians and Baptists. The

urge to ban and censor books, silence dissenters, condemn outsiders, invade the private sphere,

and invoke an exclusive salvation is the very essence of the totalitarian. The fatalism of Islam,

which believes that all is arranged by Allah in advance, has some points of resemblance in its

utter denial of human autonomy and liberty, as well as in its arrogant and insufferable belief

that its faith already contains everything that anyone might ever need to know.

Thus, when the great antitotalitarian anthology of the twentieth century came to be

published in 1950, its two editors realized that it could only have one possible name. They called

it The God That Failed. I slightly knew and sometimes worked for one of these two men—the

British socialist Richard Crossman. As he wrote in his introduction to the book:

For the intellectual, material comforts are relatively unimportant; what he cares about

most is spiritual freedom. The strength of the Catholic Church has always been that it

demands the sacrifice of that freedom uncompromisingly, and condemns spiritual pride as

a deadly sin. The Communist novice, subjecting his soul to the canon law of the Kremlin, felt

something of the release which Catholicism also brings to the intellectual, wearied and

worried by the privilege of freedom.

The only book that had warned of all this in advance, a full thirty years earlier, was a small

but brilliant volume published in 1919 and entitled The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. Long

before Arthur Koestler and Richard Crossman had begun to survey the wreckage in retrospect,

the whole disaster was being predicted in terms that still command admiration for their

prescience. The mordant analyst of the new religion was Bertrand Russell, whose atheism made

him more far-seeing than many naive “Christian socialists” who claimed to detect in Russia thebeginnings of a new paradise on earth. He was also more far-seeing than the Anglican Christian

establishment in his native England, whose newspaper of record the London Times took the

view that the Russian Revolution could be explained by The Protocols of the Learned Elders of

Zion. This revolting fabrication by Russian Orthodox secret policemen was republished by Eyre

and Spottiswoode, the official printers to the Church of England.

GIVEN ITS OWN RECORD of succumbing to, and of promulgating, dictatorship on earth and

absolute control in the life to come, how did religion confront the “secular” totalitarians of our

time? One should first consider, in order, fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.

Fascism—the precursor and model of National Socialism—was a movement that believed in

an organic and corporate society, presided over by a leader or guide. (The “fasces”—symbol of

the “lictors” or enforcers of ancient Rome—were a bundle of rods, tied around an axe, that

stood for unity and authority.) Arising out of the misery and humiliation of the First World War,

fascist movements were in favor of the defense of traditional values against Bolshevism, and

upheld nationalism and piety. It is probably not a coincidence that they arose first and most

excitedly in Catholic countries, and it is certainly not a coincidence that the Catholic Church was

generally sympathetic to fascism as an idea. Not only did the church regard Communism as a

lethal foe, but it also saw its old Jewish enemy in the most senior ranks of Lenin’s party. Benito

Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him,

known as the Lateran Pact of 1929. Under the terms of this deal, Catholicism became the only

recognized religion in Italy, with monopoly powers over matters such as birth, marriage, death,

and education, and in return urged its followers to vote for Mussolini’s party. Pope Pius XI

described Il Duce (“the leader”) as “a man sent by providence.”

Elections were not to be a feature of Italian life for very long, but the church nonetheless

brought about the dissolution of lay Catholic centrist parties and helped sponsor a pseudoparty

called “Catholic Action” which was emulated in several countries. Across southern Europe, the

church was a reliable ally in the instatement of fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal, and Croatia.

General Franco in Spain was allowed to call his invasion of the country, and his destruction of its

elected republic, by the honorific title La Cruzada, or “the crusade.” The Vatican either

supported or refused to criticize Mussolini’s operatic attempt to re-create a pastiche of the

Roman Empire by his invasions of Libya, Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia), and Albania: these

territories being populated either by non-Christians or by the wrong kind of Eastern Christian.

Mussolini even gave, as one of his justifications for the use of poison gas and other gruesome

measures in Abyssinia, the persistence of its inhabitants in the heresy of Monophysitism: an

incorrect dogma of the Incarnation that had been condemned by Pope Leo and the Council of

Chalcedon in 451.

In central and eastern Europe the picture was hardly better. The extreme right-wing military

coup in Hungary, led by Admiral Horthy, was warmly endorsed by the church, as were similar

fascistic movements in Slovakia and Austria. (The Nazi puppet regime in Slovakia was actually

led by a man in holy orders named Father Tiso.) The cardinal of Austria proclaimed his

enthusiasm at Hitler’s takeover of his country at the time of the Anschluss.

In France, the extreme right adopted the slogan of “Better Hitler than Blum”—in other words,

better to have a German racist dictator than an elected French socialist Jew. Catholic fascist

organizations such as Charles Maurras’s Action Française and the Croix de Feu campaigned

violently against French democracy and made no bones about their grievance, which was the

way in which France had been going downhill since the acquittal of the Jewish captain Alfred

Dreyfus in 1899. When the German conquest of France arrived, these forces eagerly

collaborated in the rounding up and murder of French Jews, as well as in the deportation to

forced labor of a huge number of other Frenchmen. The Vichy regime conceded to clericalism

by wiping the slogan of 1789—“Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite”—off the national currency andreplacing it with the Christian ideal motto of “Famille, Travail, Patrie.” Even in a country like

England, where fascist sympathies were far less prevalent, they still managed to get an

audience in respectable circles by the agency of Catholic intellectuals such as T. S. Eliot and

Evelyn Waugh.

In neighboring Ireland, the Blue Shirt movement of General O’Duffy (which sent volunteers to

fight for Franco in Spain) was little more than a dependency of the Catholic Church. As late as

April 1945, on the news of the death of Hitler, President Eamon de Valera put on his top hat,

called for the state coach, and went to the German embassy in Dublin to offer his official

condolences. Attitudes like this meant that several Catholic-dominated states, from Ireland to

Spain to Portugal, were ineligible to join the United Nations when it was first founded. The

church has made efforts to apologize for all this, but its complicity with fascism is an

ineffaceable mark on its history, and was not a short-term or a hasty commitment so much as a

working alliance which did not break down until after the fascist period had itself passed into

history.

The case of the church’s surrender to German National Socialism is considerably more

complicated but not very much more elevating. Despite sharing two important principles with

Hitler’s movement—those of anti-Semitism and anti-Communism—the Vatican could see that

Nazism represented a challenge to itself as well. In the first place, it was a quasi-pagan

phenomenon which in the long run sought to replace Christianity with pseudo-Nordic blood rites

and sinister race myths, based upon the fantasy of Aryan superiority. In the second place, it

advocated an exterminationist attitude to the unwell, the unfit, and the insane, and began quite

early on to apply this policy not to Jews but to Germans. To the credit of the church, it must be

said that its German pulpits denounced this hideous eugenic culling from a very early date.

But if ethical principle had been the guide, the Vatican would not have had to spend the next

fifty years vainly trying to account for, or apologize for, its contemptible passivity and inaction.

“Passivity” and “inaction,” in fact, may be the wrong choice of words here. To decide to do

nothing is itself a policy and a decision, and it is unfortunately easy to record and explain the

church’s alignment in terms of a real-politik that sought, not the defeat of Nazism, but an

accommodation with it.

The very first diplomatic accord undertaken by Hitler’s government was consummated on

July 8, 1933, a few months after the seizure of power, and took the form of a treaty with the

Vatican. In return for unchallenged control of the education of Catholic children in Germany, the

dropping of Nazi propaganda against the abuses inflicted in Catholic schools and orphanages,

and the concession of other privileges to the church, the Holy See instructed the Catholic Center

Party to disband, and brusquely ordered Catholics to abstain from any political activity on any

subject that the regime chose to define as off-limits. At the first meeting of his cabinet after this

capitulation was signed, Hitler announced that these new circumstances would be “especially

significant in the struggle against international Jewry.” He was not wrong about this. In fact, he

could have been excused for disbelieving his own luck. The twenty-three million Catholics living

in the Third Reich, many of whom had shown great individual courage in resisting the rise of

Nazism, had been gutted and gelded as a political force. Their own Holy Father had in effect

told them to render everything unto the worst Caesar in human history. From then on, parish

records were made available to the Nazi state in order to establish who was and who was not

“racially pure” enough to survive endless persecution under the Nuremberg laws.

Not the least appalling consequence of this moral surrender was the parallel moral collapse

of the German Protestants, who sought to preempt a special status for Catholics by publishing

their own accommodation with the führer. None of the Protestant churches, however, went as

far as the Catholic hierarchy in ordering an annual celebration for Hitler’s birthday on April 20.

On this auspicious date, on papal instructions, the cardinal of Berlin regularly transmitted“warmest congratulations to the führer in the name of the bishops and dioceses in Germany,”

these plaudits to be accompanied by “the fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are

sending to heaven on their altars.” The order was obeyed, and faithfully carried out.

To be fair, this disgraceful tradition was not inaugurated until 1939, in which year there was a

change of papacy. And to be fair again, Pope Pius XI had always harbored the most profound

misgivings about the Hitler system and its evident capacity for radical evil. (During Hitler’s first

visit to Rome, for example, the Holy Father rather ostentatiously took himself out of town to the

papal retreat at Castelgandolfo.) However, this ailing and weak pope was continually

outpointed, throughout the 1930s, by his secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli. We have good

reason to think that at least one papal encyclical, expressing at least a modicum of concern

about the maltreatment of Europe’s Jews, was readied by His Holiness but suppressed by

Pacelli, who had another strategy in mind. We now know Pacelli as Pope Pius XII, who succeeded

to the office after the death of his former superior in February 1939. Four days after his election

by the College of Cardinals, His Holiness composed the following letter to Berlin:

To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Reich! Here at the

beginning of Our Pontificate We wish to assure you that We remain devoted to the spiritual

welfare of the German people entrusted to your leadership.... During the many years We

spent in Germany, We did all in Our power to establish harmonious relations between

Church and State. Now that the responsibilities of Our pastoral function have increased Our

opportunities, how much more ardently do We pray to reach that goal. May the prosperity

of the German people and their progress in every domain come, with God’s help, to fruition!

Within six years of this evil and fatuous message, the once prosperous and civilized people of

Germany could gaze around themselves and see hardly one brick piled upon another, as the

godless Red Army swept toward Berlin. But I mention this conjuncture for another reason.

Believers are supposed to hold that the pope is the vicar of Christ on earth, and the keeper of

the keys of Saint Peter. They are of course free to believe this, and to believe that god decides

when to end the tenure of one pope or (more important) to inaugurate the tenure of another.

This would involve believing in the death of an anti-Nazi pope, and the accession of a pro-Nazi

one, as a matter of divine will, a few months before Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the opening

of the Second World War. Studying that war, one can perhaps accept that 25 percent of the SS

were practicing Catholics and that no Catholic was ever even threatened with excommunication

for participating in war crimes. (Joseph Goebbels was excommunicated, but that was earlier on,

and he had after all brought it on himself for the offense of marrying a Protestant.) Human

beings and institutions are imperfect, to be sure. But there could be no clearer or more vivid

proof that holy institutions are man-made.

The collusion continued even after the war, as wanted Nazi criminals were spirited to South

America by the infamous “rat line.” It was the Vatican itself, with its ability to provide passports,

documents, money, and contacts, which organized the escape network and also the necessary

shelter and succor at the other end. Bad as this was in itself, it also involved another

collaboration with extreme-right dictatorships in the Southern Hemisphere, many of them

organized on the fascist model. Fugitive torturers and murderers like Klaus Barbie often found

themselves second careers as servants of these regimes, which until they began to collapse in

the last decades of the twentieth century had also enjoyed a steady relationship of support

from the local Catholic clergy. The connection of the church to fascism and Nazism actually

outlasted the Third Reich itself.

Many Christians gave their lives to protect their fellow creatures in this midnight of the

century, but the chance that they did so on orders from any priesthood is statistically almost

negligible. This is why we revere the memory of the very few believers, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer

and Martin Niemoller, who acted in accordance only with the dictates of conscience. The papacytook until the 1980s to find a candidate for sainthood in the context of the “final solution,” and

even then could only identify a rather ambivalent priest who—after a long record of political

anti-Semitism in Poland—had apparently behaved nobly in Auschwitz. An earlier nominee—a

simple Austrian named Franz Jagerstatter—was unfortunately unqualified. He had indeed

refused to join Hitler’s army on the grounds that he was under higher orders to love his

neighbor, but while in prison facing execution had been visited by his confessors who told him

that he ought to be obeying the law. The secular left in Europe comes far better out of the anti

Nazi struggle than that, even if many of its adherents believed that there was a worker’s

paradise beyond the Ural Mountains.

It is often forgotten that the Axis triad included another member—the Empire of Japan

which had not only a religious person as its head of state, but an actual deity. If the appalling

heresy of believing that Emperor Hirohito was god was ever denounced from any German or

Italian pulpit or by any prelate, I have been unable to discover the fact. In the sacred name of

this ridiculously overrated mammal, huge areas of China and Indochina and the Pacific were

plundered and enslaved. In his name, too, millions of indoctrinated Japanese were martyred

and sacrificed. So imposing and hysterical was the cult of this god-king that it was believed that

the whole Japanese people might resort to suicide if his person was threatened at the end of

the war. It was accordingly decided that he could “stay on,” but that he would henceforward

have to claim to be an emperor only, and perhaps somewhat divine, but not strictly speaking a

god. This deference to the strength of religious opinion must involve the admission that faith

and worship can make people behave very badly indeed.

THUS, THOSE WHO INVOKE “SECULAR” TYRANNY in contrast to religion are hoping that we will forget

two things: the connection between the Christian churches and fascism, and the capitulation of

the churches to National Socialism. This is not just my assertion: it has been admitted by the

religious authorities themselves. Their poor conscience on the point is illustrated by a piece of

bad faith that one still has to combat. On religious Web sites and in religious propaganda, you

may come across a statement purportedly made by Albert Einstein in 1940:

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came to Germany, I looked to the

universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the

cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the

great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed

their love of freedom; but they, like the universities were silenced in a few short weeks....

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I

never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and

admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for

intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised

I now praise unreservedly.

Originally printed in Time magazine (without any verifiable attribution), this supposed

statement was once cited in a national broadcast by the famous American Catholic spokesman

and cleric Fulton Sheen, and remains in circulation. As the analyst William Waterhouse has

pointed out, it does not sound like Einstein at all. Its rhetoric is too florid, for one thing. It makes

no mention of the persecution of the Jews. And it makes the cool and careful Einstein look silly,

in that he claims to have once “despised” something in which he also “never had any special

interest.” There is another difficulty, in that the statement never appears in any anthology of

Einstein’s written or spoken remarks. Eventually, Waterhouse was able to find an unpublished

letter in the Einstein Archives in Jerusalem, in which the old man in 1947 complained of having

once made a remark praising some German “churchmen” (not “churches”) which had since been

exaggerated beyond all recognition.

Anyone wanting to know what Einstein did say in the early days of Hitler’s barbarism caneasily look him up. For example:

I hope that healthy conditions will soon supervene in Germany and that in future her great

men like Kant and Goethe will not merely be commemorated from time to time but that the

principles which they taught will also prevail in public life and in the general consciousness.

It is quite clear from this that he put his “faith,” as always, in the Enlightenment tradition.

Those who seek to misrepresent the man who gave us an alternative theory of the cosmos (as

well as those who remained silent or worse while his fellow Jews were being deported and

destroyed) betray the prickings of their bad consciences.

TURNING TO SOVIET AND CHINESE STALINISM, with its exorbitant cult of personality and depraved

indifference to human life and human rights, one cannot expect to find too much overlap with

preexisting religions. For one thing, the Russian Orthodox Church had been the main prop of the

czarist autocracy, while the czar himself was regarded as the formal head of the faith and

something a little more than merely human. In China, the Christian churches were

overwhelmingly identified with the foreign “concessions” extracted by imperial powers, which

were among the principal causes of the revolution in the first place. This is not to explain or

excuse the killing of priests and nuns and the desecration of churches—any more than one

should excuse the burning of churches and the murder of clergy in Spain during the struggle of

the Spanish republic against Catholic fascism—but the long association of religion with corrupt

secular power has meant that most nations have to go through at least one anticlerical phase,

from Henry VIII through Cromwell to the French Revolution to the Risorgimento, and in the

conditions of warfare and collapse that obtained in Russia and China these interludes were

exceptionally brutal ones. (I might add, though, that no serious Christian ought to hope for the

restoration of religion as it was in either country: the church in Russia was the protector of

serfdom and the author of anti-Jewish pogroms, and in China the missionary and the tight

fisted trader and concessionaire were partners in crime.)

Lenin and Trotsky were certainly convinced atheists who believed that illusions in religion

could be destroyed by acts of policy and that in the meantime the obscenely rich holdings of

the church could be seized and nationalized. In the Bolshevik ranks, as among the Jacobins of

1792, there were also those who saw the revolution as a sort of alternative religion, with

connections to myths of redemption and messianism. For Joseph Stalin, who had trained to be a

priest in a seminary in Georgia, the whole thing was ultimately a question of power. “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, 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 that could attach its traditional

appeal to his. This was especially true during the Second World War, when the “Internationale”

was dropped as the Russian anthem and replaced by the sort of hymnal propaganda that had

defeated Bonaparte in 1812 (this at a time when “volunteers” from several European fascist

states were invading Russian territory under the holy banner of a crusade against “godless”

Communism). In a much-neglected passage of Animal Farm, Orwell allowed Moses the raven,

long the croaking advocate of a heaven beyond the skies, to return to the farm and preach to

the more credulous creatures after Napoleon had vanquished Snowball. His analogy to Stalin’s

manipulation of the Russian Orthodox Church was, as ever, quite exact. (The postwar Polish

Stalinists had recourse to much the same tactic, legalizing a Catholic front organization called

Pax Christi and giving it seats in the Warsaw parliament, much to the delight of fellow-traveling

Catholic Communists such as Graham Greene.) Antireligious propaganda in the Soviet Union wasof the most banal materialist sort: a shrine to Lenin often had stained glass while in the official

museum of atheism there was testimony offered by a Russian astronaut, who had seen no god

in outer space. This idiocy expressed at least as much contempt for the gullible yokels as any

wonder-working icon. As the great laureate of Poland, Czeslaw Milosz, phrased it in his

antitotalitarian classic The Captive Mind, first published in 1953:

I have known many Christians—Poles, Frenchmen, Spaniards—who were strict Stalinists in

the field of politics but who retained certain inner reservations, believing God would make

corrections once the bloody sentences of the all-mighties of History were carried out. They

pushed their reasoning rather far. They argue that history develops according to

immutable laws that exist by the will of God; one of these laws is the class struggle; the

twentieth century marks the victory of the proletariat, which is led in its struggle by the

Communist Party; Stalin, the leader of the Communist Party, fulfils the law of history, or in

other words acts by the will of God, therefore one must obey him. Mankind can be renewed

only on the Russian pattern; that is why no Christian can oppose the one—cruel, it is true

idea which will create a new kind of man over the entire planet. Such reasoning is often

used by clerics who are Party tools. “Christ is a new man. The new man is the Soviet man.

Therefore Christ is a Soviet man!” said Justinian Marina, the Rumanian patriarch.

Men like Marina were hateful and pathetic no doubt, and hateful and pathetic

simultaneously, but this is no worse in principle than the numberless pacts made between

church and empire, church and monarchy, church and fascism, and church and state, all of them

justified by the need of the faithful to make temporal alliances for the sake of “higher” goals,

while rendering unto Caesar (the word from which “czar” is derived) even if he is “godless.”

A political scientist or anthropologist would have little difficulty in recognizing what the

editors and contributors of The God That Failed put into such immortal secular prose:

Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood

were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it. The solemn elevation of

infallible leaders who were a source of endless bounty and blessing; the permanent search for

heretics and schismatics; the mummification of dead leaders as icons and relics; the lurid show

trials that elicited incredible confessions by means of torture...none of this was very difficult to

interpret in traditional terms. Nor was the hysteria during times of plague and famine, when the

authorities unleashed a mad search for any culprit but the real one. (The great Doris Lessing

once told me that she left the Communist Party when she discovered that Stalin’s inquisitors had

plundered the museums of Russian Orthodoxy and czarism and reemployed the old instruments

of torture.) Nor was the ceaseless invocation of a “Radiant Future,” the arrival of which would

one day justify all crimes and dissolve all petty doubts. “Extra ecclesiam, nulla salus,” as the

older faith used to say. “Within the revolution anything,” as Fidel Castro was fond of remarking.

“Outside the revolution—nothing.” Indeed, within Castro’s periphery there evolved a bizarre

mutation known oxymoronically as “liberation theology,” where priests and even some bishops

adopted “alternative” liturgies enshrining the ludicrous notion that Jesus of Nazareth was really

a dues-paying socialist. For a combination of good and bad reasons (Archbishop Romero of El

Salvador was a man of courage and principle, in the way that some Nicaraguan “base

community” clerics were not), the papacy put this down as a heresy. Would that it could have

condemned fascism and Nazism in the same unhesitating and unambiguous tones.

In a very few cases, such as Albania, Communism tried to extirpate religion completely and

to proclaim an entirely atheist state. This only led to even more extreme cults of mediocre

human beings, such as the dictator Enver Hoxha, and to secret baptisms and ceremonies that

proved the utter alienation of the common people from the regime. There is nothing in modern

secular argument that even hints at any ban on religious observance. Sigmund Freud was quite

correct to describe the religious impulse, in The Future of an Illusion, as essentially ineradicableuntil or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish

thinking. Neither contingency seems very probable. All that the totalitarians have demonstrated

is that the religious impulse—the need to worship—can take even more monstrous forms if it is

repressed. This might not necessarily be a compliment to our worshipping tendency.

In the early months of this century, I made a visit to North Korea. Here, contained within a

hermetic quadrilateral of territory enclosed either by sea or by near-impenetrable frontiers, is a

land entirely given over to adulation. Every waking moment of the citizen—the subject—is

consecrated to praise of the Supreme Being and his Father. Every schoolroom resounds with it,

every film and opera and play is devoted to it, every radio and television transmission is given

up to it.

So are all books and magazines and newspaper articles, all sporting events and all

workplaces. I used to wonder what it would be like to have to sing everlasting praises, and now I

know. Nor is the devil forgotten: the unsleeping evil of outsiders and unbelievers is warded off

with a perpetual vigilance, which includes daily moments of ritual in the workplace in which

hatred of the “other” is inculcated. The North Korean state was born at about the same time

that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father of

the state, Kim Il Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he could make it work in

practice. Yet even Orwell did not dare to have it said that “Big Brother’s” birth was attended by

miraculous signs and portents—such as birds hailing the glorious event by singing in human

words. Nor did the Inner Party of Airstrip One/Oceania spend billions of scarce dollars, at a time

of horrific famine, to prove that the ludicrous mammal Kim Il Sung and his pathetic mammal

son, Kim Jong Il, were two incarnations of the same person. (In this version of the Arian heresy

so much condemned by Athanasius, North Korea is unique in having a dead man as head of

state: Kim Jong Il is the head of the party and the army but the presidency is held in perpetuity

by his deceased father, which makes the country a necrocracy or mausolocracy as well as a

regime that is only one figure short of a Trinity.) The afterlife is not mentioned in North Korea,

because the idea of a defection in any direction is very strongly discouraged, but as against that

it is not claimed that the two Kims will continue to dominate you after you are dead. Students of

the subject can easily see that what we have in North Korea is not so much an extreme form of

Communism—the term is hardly mentioned amid the storms of ecstatic dedication—as a

debased yet refined form of Confucianism and ancestor worship.

When I left North Korea, which I did with a sense of mingled relief, outrage, and pity so

strong that I can still summon it, I was leaving a totalitarian state and also a religious one. I have

since talked with many of the brave people who are trying to undermine this atrocious system

from within and without. Let me admit at once that some of the bravest of these resisters are

fundamentalist Christian anti-Communists. One of these courageous men gave an interview not

long ago in which he was honest enough to say that he had a difficult time preaching the idea of

a savior to the half-starved and terrified few who had managed to escape their prison-state.

The whole idea of an infallible and all-powerful redeemer, they said, struck them as a bit too

familiar. A bowl of rice and some exposure to some wider culture, and a little relief from the

hideous din of compulsory enthusiasm, would be the most they could ask for, for now. Those

who are fortunate enough to get as far as South Korea, or the United States, may find

themselves confronted with yet another Messiah. The jailbird and tax evader Sun Myung Moon,

undisputed head of the “Unification Church” and major contributor to the extreme right in the

United States, is one of the patrons of the “intelligent design” racket. A leading figure of this so

called movement, and a man who never fails to award his god-man guru his proper name of

“Father,” is Jonathan Wells, the author of a laughable antievolutionist diatribe entitled The Icons

of Evolution. As Wells himself touchingly put it, “Father’s words, my studies, and my prayers

convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellowUnificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me

(along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I

welcomed the opportunity to do battle.” Mr. Wells’s book is unlikely even to rate a footnote in

the history of piffle, but having seen “fatherhood” at work in both of the two Koreas, I have an

idea of what the “Burned-Over District” of up-state New York must have looked and felt like

when the believers had everything their own way.

Religion even at its meekest has to admit that what it is proposing is a “total” solution, in

which faith must be to some extent blind, and in which all aspects of the private and public life

must be submitted to a permanent higher supervision. This constant surveillance and continual

subjection, usually reinforced by fear in the shape of infinite vengeance, does not invariably

bring out the best mammalian characteristics. It is certainly true that emancipation from

religion does not always produce the best mammal either. To take two salient examples: one of

the greatest and most enlightening scientists of the twentieth century, J. D. Bernal, was an

abject votary of Stalin and wasted much of his life defending the crimes of his leader. H. L.

Mencken, one of the best satirists of religion, was too keen on Nietzsche and advocated a form

of “social Darwinism” which included eugenics and a contempt for the weak and sick. He also

had a soft spot for Adolf Hitler and wrote an unpardonably indulgent review of Mein Kampf.

Humanism has many crimes for which to apologize. But it can apologize for them, and also

correct them, in its own terms and without having to shake or challenge the basis of any

unalterable system of belief. Totalitarian systems, whatever outward form they may take, are

fundamentalist and, as we would now say, “faith-based.”

In her magisterial examination of the totalitarian phenomenon, Hannah Arendt was not

merely being a tribalist when she gave a special place to anti-Semitism. The idea that a group

of people—whether defined as a nation or as a religion—could be condemned for all time and

without the possibility of an appeal was (and is) essentially a totalitarian one. It is horribly

fascinating that Hitler began by being a propagator of this deranged prejudice, and that Stalin

ended by being both a victim and an advocate of it. But the virus was kept alive for centuries by

religion. Saint Augustine positively relished the myth of the Wandering Jew, and the exile of the

Jews in general, as a proof of divine justice. The Orthodox Jews are not blameless here. By

claiming to be “chosen” in a special exclusive covenant with the Almighty, they invited hatred

and suspicion and evinced their own form of racism. However, it was the secular Jews above all

who were and are hated by the totalitarians, so no question of “blaming the victim” need arise.

The Jesuit order, right up until the twentieth century, refused by statute to admit a man unless

he could prove that he had no “Jewish blood” for several generations. The Vatican preached

that all Jews inherited the responsibility for deicide. The French church aroused the mob against

Dreyfus and “the intellectuals.” Islam has never forgiven “the Jews” for encountering

Muhammad and deciding that he was not the authentic messenger. For emphasizing tribe and

dynasty and racial provenance in its holy books, religion must accept the responsibility for

transmitting one of mankind’s most primitive illusions down through the generations.

The connection between religion, racism, and totalitarianism is also to be found in the other

most hateful dictatorship of the twentieth century: the vile system of apartheid in South Africa.

This was not just the ideology of a Dutch-speaking tribe bent on extorting forced labor from

peoples of a different shade of pigmentation, it was also a form of Calvinism in practice. The

Dutch Reformed Church preached as a dogma that black and white were biblically forbidden to

mix, let alone to coexist in terms of equality. Racism is totalitarian by definition: it marks the

victim in perpetuity and denies him, or her, the right to even a rag of dignity or privacy, even the

elemental right to make love or marry or produce children with a loved one of the “wrong” tribe,

without having love nullified by law...And this was the life of millions living in the “Christian West”

in our own time. The ruling National Party, which was also heavily infected with anti-Semitismand had taken the Nazi side in the Second World War, relied on the ravings of the pulpit to

justify its own blood myth of a Boer “Exodus” that awarded it exclusive rights in a “promised

land.” As a result, an Afrikaner permutation of Zionism created a backward and despotic state,

in which the rights of all other peoples were abolished and in which eventually the survival of

Afrikaners themselves was threatened by corruption, chaos, and brutality. At that point the

bovine elders of the church had a revelation which allowed the gradual abandonment of

apartheid. But this can never permit forgiveness for the evil that religion did while it felt strong

enough to do so. It is to the credit of many secular Christians and Jews, and many atheist and

agnostic militants of the African National Congress, that South African society was saved from

complete barbarism and implosion.

The last century saw many other improvisations on the old idea of a dictatorship that could

take care of more than merely secular or everyday problems. These ranged from the mildly

offensive and insulting—the Greek Orthdox Church baptized the usurping military junta of 1967,

with its eyeshades and steel helmets, as “a Greece for Christian Greeks”—to the all-enslaving

“Angka” of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which sought its authority in prehistoric temples and

legends. (Their sometime friend and sometime rival, the aforementioned King Sihanouk, who

took a playboy’s refuge under the protection of the Chinese Stalinists, was also adept at being a

god-king when it suited him.) In between lies the shah of Iran, who claimed to be “the shadow of

god” as well as “the light of the Aryans,” and who repressed the secular opposition and took

extreme care to be represented as the guardian of the Shiite shrines. His megalomania was

succeeded by one of its close cousins, the Khomeinist heresy of the velayet-i-faqui, or total

societal control by mullahs (who also display their deceased leader as their founder, and assert

that his holy words can never be rescinded). At the very extreme edge can be found the

primeval puritanism of the Taliban, which devoted itself to discovering new things to forbid

(everything from music to recycled paper, which might contain a tiny fleck of pulp from a

discarded Koran) and new methods of punishment (the burial alive of homosexuals). The

alternative to these grotesque phenomena is not the chimera of secular dictatorship, but the

defense of secular pluralism and of the right not to believe or be compelled to believe. This

defense has now become an urgent and inescapable responsibility: a matter of survival.