The Embarrassing Intolerance of Atheism
9
POSTMODERNITY: ATHEISM AND RADICAL CULTURAL CHANGE
IN 1972, STEPHEN Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed a theory of biological evolution that has since come to be known as punctuated equilibrium. This holds that most evolution occurs in short bursts, interspersed with long periods of stability. Gould and Eldredge attacked the idea that organisms continually change, adapting by small degrees to fit their environment. Where Charles Darwin had viewed evolution as a slow, continuous process, without sudden jumps, Gould and Eldredge noted that the fossils of organisms found in successive geological strata indicated long intervals in which nothing changed (hence “equilibrium”), “punctuated” by short, revolutionary transitions, in which species became extinct and were replaced by wholly new forms. New species appear in large numbers over short periods, perhaps because of dramatic events such as asteroid impacts. Gould—perhaps the most influential and best-known evolutionary biologist since Charles Darwin—was widely criticized by more conventional Darwinists, who dubbed his theory “evolution by jerks.”
The relevance of this to our discussion? A culture also undergoes change—sometimes slowly over many years, sometimes with such speed that the settled assumptions of generations are overthrown, even inverted, within a single generation. After periods of relative stability, massive change can take place, often without much warning that this is about to happen. What was entirely plausible in one cultural context now becomes seen as eccentric, possibly even irrational. The same belief may appear as the accepted wisdom of the age at one point, and fifty years later be regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned and outdated. Our story in this chapter concerns two massive cultural upheavals, one at the dawn of the golden age of atheism, the other at its closing.
The first such upheaval is the rise of modernity—a confident, ebullient movement, convinced of the supreme ability of human reason to understand the world and hence to master and control it. There was no longer any need for a God to confirm or underwrite a settled and stable order of moral values, social relations, or rules of thought. All could be established with certainty and universality through human reason. Atheism was the religious belief of choice for this movement, in that it resonated profoundly with its presuppositions and goals. It is no accident that the rise of atheism in the West is so closely tied to that of modernity; they are as two sides of the same coin.
Yet the excesses, failures, and ultimately the uninhabitability of modernity led to a loss of enthusiasm for its goals, and eventually a complete inversion of many of its leading ideas. Far from providing eternal and universal truths of reason, by which humanity might live in peace and stability, modernity found itself implicated as the perhaps unwitting accomplice of Nazism and Stalinism. Certainty, once prized as the goal of true knowledge, now came to be seen as the grounds for coercing belief. Reacting against the simplistic overstatements of the Enlightenment, postmodernity has stressed the limits to human knowledge, and encouraged a toleration of those who diverge from the “one size fits all” philosophy of modernity. The world in which we live is now seen as a place in which nothing is certain, nothing is guaranteed, and nothing is unquestionably given.
In this new outlook, the best we can hope for is to know partially rather than totally. The Enlightenment stereotype of the all-knowing mind has been replaced by the image of the searcher, questing for truth as she journeys through an ambivalent and complex world, where simple answers are likely to be wrong answers. Atheism, as a totalizing system, is ill at ease in such a world, whose growing openness to the spiritual aspects of life has led to a resurgence of interest in religion and the realm of the transcendent. The symbiosis between atheism and modernity has proved to be the Achilles’ heel of the movement. The decline, then death, of modernity has robbed its partner of its self-evident plausibility and appeal. While all religions have been affected in some way by the rise of postmodernity, its most significant casualty has been atheism itself. The established religion of modernity suddenly found itself relegated to the sidelines, increasingly to be viewed more as a curiosity than as a serious cultural option.
Why is this point of relevance? One of the most striking features of Nietzsche’s account of the “death of God” is that this rests on a cultural perception. God has not been argued out of existence; a cultural mood developed, which tended to see God as something of an irrelevance, and relegated him to the sidelines. Yet culture is not static; it continues to change. What if a new cultural shift took place, rekindling interest in the spiritual and reacting against the very ideas that once made atheism such an attractive option? For that, in a nutshell, is what many observers consider to have happened in the last few decades, as modernity faltered, uncertain of its own values, and unwillingly gave way to postmodernity.
The importance of this major cultural transition naturally leads us to consider the matter in more detail. We begin with the dawn of the modern era in the West.
THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY
At some point around 1750, a massive cultural shift began in the West, as the movement that we know know as modernity came into being. The new movement dawned slowly, its illuminating rays taking longer to penetrate some of the darker corners of the West than others. Yet there was no doubt as to what was happening. An older way of looking at the world, of understanding the place of humanity in the universe, was dying. In its place, a new outlook was coming to birth. It is easy to point to landmarks defining this transition to modernity, such as the American and French Revolutions, following in quick succession. Its fundamental themes were clear: humanity was already fully in possession of the resource it needed to master the world—reason.
It is no historical accident that the reemergence of atheism as a serious intellectual option dates from the dawn of modernity. Atheism is the religion of the autonomous and rational human being, who believes that reason is able to uncover and express the deepest truths of the universe, from the mechanics of the rising of the sun to the nature and final destiny of humanity. There is a single, universal rationality, which human beings are able to identify and uncover through the appropriate use of rational reflection and scientific experimentation. A unified, coherent worldview could be created from the fragmentation that defines existence. It was a powerful, self-confident, and aggressive worldview. Possessed of a boundless confidence, it proclaimed that the world could be fully understood and subsequently mastered. Barriers to this understanding and conquest could be swept aside as irrational, reactionary, and pointless.
The modernist emphasis on the explicability of the world led to an impatience with what was seen as intellectual pussyfooting. There was only one correct, rational way of viewing the world; the important thing was to identify that privileged position, from which everything could be seen in its proper perspective—and kept there. The right use of reason permitted the intelligent human being to rise above the world and see everything from this unique and omnicompetent vantage point.
Atheism was perfectly suited to this rational and logical worldview. It was the established religion of modernity. There was no God. But from the privileged vantage point of modernity, it was possible to see why some very sad and misguided people should believe that there was—and how others, more worryingly, could use religion as a means of exploiting and oppressing such naive fools. The theories of Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud both explained the origins of the human illusion of God and allowed the idea to be controlled. Atheism did not give permission or create free space to believe in God—a belief that it regarded as irrational, reactionary, or just plain mad. The believer was thus relegated to the category of the subnormal or the subversive—both of which were threats to modernity, and hence demanded to be controlled. Soviet-style communism, having thus explained the origins of religion on ideological grounds, was able to control this irrationality—for example, through the education process and the use of psychiatric hospitals, both of which allowed those who stepped out of line with modernist orthodoxy to be controlled and neutralized.
A leading theme of modernity was its emphasis on uniformity. The Other was relentlessly reduced to the Same. There was only one right way of seeing things; once this had been determined, it was to be enforced. To observe everything from the privileged vantage point of modernity is to master everything and subjugate anything that is regarded as a menace. The threat to human existence caused by the unpredictability and chaos of the natural order and the irrationality of human affairs would thus be eliminated, giving way to paradise—an ordered and structured world in which humanity could dwell without anxieties. Yet this emphasis upon uniformity and control demanded the suppression of differences and diversity. The place of religions could be firmly controlled, assigning each a strictly limited space within which it could exist—but exist only as a prisoner. The space allocated was not the vast open plains of public accessibility, but the confines of a prison cell.
In 1791 the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed an architectural innovation designed to make prisons safe and humane. He envisioned a prison space constructed as a circular array of inward-pointing cells. Solid walls between the cells would prevent any communication between prisoners, and a small window in the back of the cell would let in light. At the center of this ring of cells, Bentham proposed to place an observation tower with special shutters to prevent the prisoners from seeing the guards. This panopticon was designed as an “all-seeing place” to permit complete observation of every prisoner. Its ultimate goal was to control the prisoners through both isolation and the possibility of constant surveillance.
The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault seized upon this idea of a controlling space and applied it as a metaphor for the oppressive control of modernity and its complete failure to respect difference and diversity.
Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another.
Applied to matters of religion, Foucault’s critique of modernity leads to the recognition that atheism saw itself as the panopticon, the vantage point from which religion could be viewed and mastered. Marx argued that religion arose from social conditions; the control of religion could then be brought about by appropriate social engineering. Freud argued that it came about through the dark recesses of the human unconscious; control of religion could then be achieved through manipulating mental processes. Religion could be isolated, restricted to a safe space, and then allowed to die— or, in the case of some more aggressive modernist proposals, eliminated through violence. As Foucault points out, infections were best controlled by a series of limits on individual freedom and movement, followed by more radical measures to eliminate them from the community once they had been brought under control. Modernity treated religion as an outbreak of madness— occasionally socially acceptable, but invariably a cause for concern.
By 1950, modernism found itself in such serious tension with the human experience of life that its credibility was stretched to the breaking point. Paradise was postponed to the point where it became increasingly clear that it was little more than a visionary utopia. Instead of admitting its own failure to deliver what it promised, modernity kept deferring and delaying the arrival of its utopia. Paradise was always around the next corner. The vision may remain living for some; nevertheless, it stands in the midst of a landscape scarred by the debris of its failures. Perhaps the most visionary critique of modernism is credited to the German Marxist writer Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), who saw the rise of Nazism in the 1930s as a telling sign of the futility of modernism. Benjamin viewed the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 as a devastating indicator of the failure of Marxism, and, unable to live with the despair of this realization, or perhaps fearing imprisonment by the Vichy authorities in France, committed suicide shortly afterward. For Benjamin, it was as if modernity had created a world within which he could not bear to live.
Modernism’s great break with the past and declaration of its intention to begin all over again once seemed novel and exciting. Yet as the rise of Nazism and Stalinism in the 1930s made clear, breaking with tradition just meant breaking with civilization and all its inbuilt safeguards against totalitarianism. The modernist tendency toward the enforcement of universalization and uniformity can be seen particularly well in the field of architecture. The ideology of design associated with modernism is based, at least in part, on the International Style, founded in the 1920s and 1930s by Walter Gropius and others. The movement was committed to simple, functionally efficient design without ornament, the use of concrete, steel, and glass, and a particular use of the rectangle and straight line. To those who conceived it in the 1920s, this style would be liberating; in reality it proved to be deeply oppressive. The utter tedium of Stalinist city planning demoralized those who lived in such modern cities. To its growing body of critics, modernism had fathered a meaningless uniformity and uniform meaninglessness. The design of Nazi concentration camps, such as Auschwitz and Birkenau, showed the modernist concern for functional efficiency and its prioritization of rectangles and straight lines at its worst. The neatly arranged rows of rectangular huts came to symbolize the oppression of both Nazism and the architectural style it favored.
By the end of the Second World War, the social, moral, and intellectual failings of modernity were all too obvious. Western culture was shaken by a new series of convulsions, as the settled assumptions of modernity were cast aside, to be replaced by a new way of thinking and seeing the world—postmodernity.
THE POSTMODERN RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY
Postmodernity is a complex, perhaps ultimately undefinable notion (in that “definition” implies limitation, something to which most postmodern writers take exception). Nevertheless, a number of common themes can be identified within the movement. Pehaps the most important of these is the rejection of modernism’s quest for objective, essentially knowable truth and beauty; its belief that a totality and unity can still be found within the fragmented world we inhabit, so that the world can be known, understood, and mastered through rational and scientific means. Postmodernity has reacted against such notions, for two major reasons: first, that it was untenable philosophically, and second, that it encouraged the rise of intolerance and lack of respect for the Other.
Neither modernity nor postmodernity is to be regarded as “right”; each represents a cultural mood, the latter heavily determined by the perceived failings of the former. Where Enlightenment writers believed that it was possible to lay down some fundamental axioms and proceed to erect a major philosophical system upon them, postmodern writers point to the failure of this entire project. The notion of a self-grounding philosophy has become seriously unfashionable, and every attempt to propagate one today is greeted with suspicion on account of its pretensions to totalization. Where modernism spoke of rationality in the singular—for there is only one legitimate way of thinking—postmodern writers recognized a variety of rationalities, insisting that philosophical adjudication between them was not possible. As Os Guinness points out in a penetrating account of recent trends:
Where modernism was a manifesto of human self-confidence and self-congratulation, postmodernism is a confession of modesty, if not despair. There is no truth; only truths. There is no grand reason; only reasons. There is no privileged civilization (or culture, belief, norm and style); only a multiplicity of cultures, beliefs, norms and styles. There is no universal justice; only interests and the competition of interest groups. There is no grand narrative of human progress; only countless stories of where people and their cultures are now. There is no simple reality or any grand objectivity of universal, detached knowledge; only a ceaseless representation of everything in terms of everything else.
There is no privileged standpoint from which everything else can be seen. There is no “metanarrative”—a grand, overaching scheme of things that offers a totalizing view of reality. As Terry Eagleton points out, this underlies postmodernity’s vigorous rejection of “one size fits all” philosophies, which refuse to tolerate dissent, difference, or divergence from their preconceived norms.
Post-modernism signals the end of such “metanarratives” whose secretly terroristic function was to ground and legitimate the illusion of a “universal” human history. We are now in the process of awakening from the nightmare of modernity, with its manipulative reason and fetish of the totality, into the laid-back pluralism of the post-modern, that heterogeneous range of life-styles and language games which has renounced the nostalgic urge to totalize and legitimate itself . . . Science and philosophy must jettison their grandiose metaphysical claims and view themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives.
This leads to a growing respect and tolerance for differences and a principled rejection of the modernist reduction of the Other to the Same. As Jean-François Lyotard declared, postmodernism “refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.” Local and partial insights are to be welcomed and respected, in contrast to the suspicion with which totalizing claims are to be treated.
Although many postmodern writers identify themselves as atheists, two important points must be made immediately. First, the postmodern rejection of the possibility of a “God’s-eye” standpoint does not for one moment entail the rejection of God. While postmodernity is quite clear that humanity does not occupy the position of God—assuming that such a position would allow a total account of reality—this does not for one moment imply or entail that there is no God. Postmodernity affirms a philosophical modesty, noting limits to our knowledge; it does not—and, indeed, cannot—make declarations concerning what exists and what does not exist. But second, and perhaps more importantly, postmodernity seriously undermines the plausibility of atheism—for reasons that we shall explore in what follows.
ATHEISM AND THE CHALLENGE OF POSTMODERNITY
Postmodernism is a cultural mood that celebrates diversity and seeks to undermine those who offer rigid, restrictive, and oppressive views of the world. Modernism—which tried to reduce everything to a uniform set of ideas—is excoriated by postmodern writers as a form of intellectual Stalinism, a refusal to permit diversity in our readings of the world. Postmodernity celebrates diversity of belief, seeing any attempt to coerce individuals to accept the viewpoints of another as being oppressive.
At first sight, the postmodern enterprise might seem to work in atheism’s favor. Many postmodern writers are, after all, atheists (at least in the sense of not actively believing in God). The very idea of deconstruction seems to suggest that the idea of God ought to be eliminated from Western culture as a power play on the part of the churches and others with vested interests in its survival. Yet this is not how the leading postmodern writer Jacques Derrida would wish the concept to be interpreted. The issue is about openness and a willingness to respect the Other: “Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness to the other.”
Derrida describes the liberating consequences of postmodernity in terms of the image of “decentering.” According to Derrida, modern Western thought is based on the idea of a center—an origin, a truth, an ideal form, a fixed point, an “immovable mover,” God, which is the ultimate guarantor of meaning. This excessive use of the image of the center, according to Derrida, leads to a systematic attempt to exclude by ignoring, repressing, or marginalizing others. Derrida notes the importance of the notion of a center in the fostering of oppression by the West, arguing that on its basis, the great Western powers have attempted to fashion the world to resemble the theoretical structure of their ethnocentrism, often using violence. Unwilling to tolerate difference or divergence, they have sought to eliminate it, forcing the periphery to conform to the center—for example, during the periods of European colonial rule, German control over Europe during the Second World War, and American hegemony during the Vietnam War. In each instance, the representatives of Western culture, on the basis of a misplaced confidence concerning the ethically imperative nature of their beliefs and practices, attempted to deny and ultimately destroy beliefs and practices that deviated from their own, either by suppressing them completely or assimilating them to culturally acceptable alternatives. This attempt to totalize the center through a universal definition of what it means to be a human must be subjected to a radical deconstructive critique as a necessary precondition to the elimination of oppression.
The implications of this for any religious worldview can hardly be overlooked. Oppression arises through a refusal to tolerate alternatives, leading to their suppression. Atheism may have begun as a liberating attempt to “decenter” Western culture from the oppression of the state churches of Europe. Yet instead of following that process of decentering through to its legitimate conclusion, atheism merely proposed an alternative center. By positing a view of humanity that necessarily denied the existence of God as a precondition of authentic human existence, atheism once more sought to totalize the center by proposing a single, universal definition of what it means to be a human that deliberately excluded and marginalized those who did not accept this severely limiting definition.
Atheism is obliged to define the Other either as the idea of God itself or as those who believe in God—a category that embraces the vast majority of the inhabitants of planet earth. The Other is therefore reduced to the Same—a process we can see in the critiques of religion mounted by Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud. Each argues that the Other (God) is simply another instance of the Same (such as social and economic forces). While these three writers have different understandings of what the Same might be, they share a common reductionist methodology that insists that God can be completely and conveniently reduced to their categories. While these approaches are completely consistent with the outlook of modernity, postmodernity’s emphasis on the necessity of respect for the Other radically calls their propriety into question. A lack of respect for the Other, it is argued, ultimately leads to an unacceptable repression of the Other.
While there are indeed some atheists who are respectful of religious belief, the dominant tone within the movement is rather more strident. Belief in God is evil, and must be eliminated. In his Lowell Lecture, given at Harvard University on April 20, 1992, Gore Vidal argued that monotheism was the source of America’s many evils.
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal—God is the Omnipotent Father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good.
Setting to one side the slightly hysterical overstatements that make this lecture such entertaining reading (well, when did accurately reported facts make good reading?), its darker side cannot be overlooked. Vidal argues for “all-out war on the monotheists.” Parallels with such demands can be found elsewhere, especially in the writings of Richard Dawkins, who calls for the eradication of faith as the world’s greatest evil. Yet the twentieth century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.
This mention of coercive means of eliciting support for atheism brings us to what is now recognized as one of the most disturbing aspects of the history of atheism in the twentieth century—its violence.
THE EMBARRASSING INTOLERANCE OF ATHEISM
The confident secularist predictions of the demise of religion are things of the past. So if religion will not lie down and die of its own accord, can it be eliminated by other means? Yes, it can—provided the norms of civilization are totally disregarded. For the only alternative is the eradication of religion by force. The forcible suppression of religion is one of the most troubling aspects of atheism—especially to those of a postmodern inclination, for whom tolerance is the supreme social and personal virtue. Modern Western society prizes tolerance and has limited patience with those who demand the elimination of beliefs— or, even worse, believers.
Those who speak of the elimination of religion—for example, by comparing it to a malignant infection that must be eradicated—often fail to ask, let alone explain, how this elimination is to take place. What happens if people rather like religion, and refuse to abandon it?
Atheists often speak about the eradication of religion as if this would be a painless, even pleasant process. Perhaps they are not unlike naive carnivores, who believe that animals conveniently lie down at an appropriate moment and die painlessly so that they may be eaten by appreciative humans. The naive atheist seems to believe that a sophisticated seminar in godlessness is all that is required to eliminate religion, showing a grateful people that they can be liberated from an oppressive and debilitating illusion. The reality of the situation is bloody, messy, and brutal: the eradication of faith tends to involve firing squads and gas chambers.
The myth of the painless eradication of religion is still found in Philip Pullman’s recent Dark Materials trilogy (1998–2000), which posits a universe oppressed by a malevolent and apparently senile deity. The only way in which the sadistic brutality of the “kingdom of God” can be ended is by overthrowing this divinity and establishing a “republic of heaven.” The death of God demands that we cease to speak of a kingdom of God; in its place we must substitute the “republic of heaven”—a phrase that ends the final volume of Pullman’s trilogy. The God who dies, according to Pullman, is the God who burns heretics and hangs witches. He will not be mourned.
It is a fascinating and intriguing story. Yet the reader is left with an awkward, enduring, and perturbing question. Is that really where everything ends? It’s like reading Animal Farm no further than the bit where the animals have evicted the nasty humans and established their own republic with its catchy slogan “four legs good; two legs bad.” But the story simply doesn’t stop there. What about poor old Boxer, the nice old horse who was sent off to the glue factory? In Orwell’s narrative, Boxer represents the oppressed peasants, in whose name the revolution took place, who were initially manipulated by their new masters and subsequently ended up being just as oppressed as under the old system.
The Russian Revolution did not end with the oppressed peasants expelling the czar, taking over the land, and living happily ever after. A new elite took over, who then proceeded to oppress the peasants, although in a creatively different manner. Stalin’s liquidation squads took care of those more obstinate peasants who were unwise enough to resist forcible collectivization. And then there were the purges of those who got in the way of the new world order. As Martin Amis points out in his brilliant recent study of Stalin, Koba the Dread, Westerners just didn’t want to know about the violent excesses of this psychopath. Pullman has secured closure at the literary level—but is this really where the story can be said to end? In one sense, it has only begun.
If atheism saw itself simply as one (ir)religious option among many, there would not be a problem. Atheism, however, has a disturbing tendency to see itself as the only true faith, and demands that everyone conform to its beliefs. Yet Soviet atheism is the true religious philosophy of modernity—a totalizing worldview which demanded that all else give way to its claims. As the history of the atheist state makes clear, this inevitably sets an agenda for repression and oppression. A worldview that was once acclaimed as a liberator thus became an oppressor, requiring in turn to be overthrown.
It was relatively easy to overlook the dark side of atheism in the heyday of Western liberalism. Reports of terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres in the Soviet Union were once easily dismissed as the propaganda of reactionaries and political conservatives. Truth, however, has a habit of emerging. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 did more than allow inhabitants of the Soviet bloc access to the West; it also paved the way for Western scholars to inspect the archives of the Soviet Union and its allies. What was found was shocking. The opening of the Soviet archives led to revelations that ended any notion that atheism was a gracious, gentle, and generous worldview. The Black Book of Communism, based on those archives, created a sensation when first published in France in 1997, not least because it implied that French communism—still a potent force in national life—was tainted with the crimes and excesses of Lenin and Stalin. Where, many of its irate readers asked, were the Nuremberg trials of communism? Communism was a “tragedy of planetary dimensions” with a grand total of victims variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million—far in excess of those murdured under Nazism.
With the publication of this volume, any meaningful talk in the West about atheism as a liberator came to an abrupt end. The authors adopted Ignazio Silone’s maxim that “revolutions, like trees, should be judged by their fruit.” Communism promised liberation from the illusion of religion; it ended up with a body count exceeding anything previously known in history. In a powerful and compelling analysis, The Black Book demonstrated how exclusion leads inexorably to extermination. When religion is declared to be an enemy, the outcome is as inevitable as it is criminal.
Terror involves a double mutation. The adversary is first labeled an enemy, and then declared a criminal, which leads to his exclusion from society. Exclusion very quickly turns into extermination. [The] idea [of a purified humanity] is used to prop up a forcible unification—of the Party, of society, of the entire empire—and to weed out anyone who fails to fit into the new world. After a relatively short period, society passes from the logic of political struggle to the process of exclusion, then to the ideology of elimination, and finally to the extermination of impure elements. At the end of the line there are crimes against humanity.
A demand to eliminate deficient beliefs leads to an obsession with power as the means by which that elimination can proceed. Again, as The Black Book pointed out, the imposition of a theory became an end in itself, leading to a mind-set that could not tolerate, nor even conceive of, alternative belief systems.
Why should maintaining power have been so important that it justified all means and led to the abandonment of the most elementary moral principles? The answer must be that it was the only way for Lenin to put his ideas into practice and “build socialism.” The real motivation for the terror thus becomes apparent: it stemmed from Leninist ideology and the utopian will to apply to society a doctrine totally out of step with reality . . . In a desperate attempt to hold onto power, the Bolsheviks made terror an everyday part of their policies, seeking to remodel society in the image of their theory, and to silence those who, either through their actions or by their very social, economic, or intellectual existence, pointed to the gaping holes in the theory. Once in power, the Bolsheviks made Utopia an extremely bloody business.
The appeal of atheism to generations lay in its offer of liberation. It promised to liberate the enslaved and exploited masses from their cruel oppression by the state and church. Yet wherever atheism became the establishment, it demonstrated a ruthlessness and lack of toleration that destroyed its credentials as a liberator. The Promethean liberator had turned nasty.
Prometheus, according to Greek mythology, stole fire from the gods so that humanity might benefit from its warmth. Humanity had been trapped, and was powerless to change its situation or improve itself. Without fire, it could not create tools that would allow it to assert its control over the world. By stealing the fire of the gods, Prometheus had empowered humanity, enabling it to achieve a destiny that the gods feared and sought to prevent. It was little wonder that modernity saw Prometheus as a figure of liberation, pointing to the need and ability of humankind to break free from the repressive stranglehold of the gods and achieve its own destiny.
Yet there is a second part to the Greek myth, studiously overlooked by the apologists of the Enlightenment. The gods retaliated when Prometheus stole their fire and gave it to humanity. Zeus sent Pandora to Prometheus’s brother, Epimethius, bearing a jar (not a box, incidentally) that she was instructed not to open. Pandora could not resist the temptation and removed the lid, allowing various calamities to escape and invade the world. Enlightenment writers are generally a little coy about this aspect of the Prometheus myth, which seems to imply that the human attempt to possess the powers of the gods will end with the unleashing of forces that could not have been foreseen, with disastrous results. But its implications for atheism are obvious.
Atheism presented itself as a liberator, destroying the myth of the gods and thus enabling humanity to step outside the arbitrary limits placed upon it by religious bigots. Religion stopped people from doing things that were fun, useful, and productive. Abolishing the idea of God eradicated these arbitrary limits. Yet, as Dostoyevsky foresaw, the elimination of God led to new heights of moral brutality and political violence in Stalinism and Nazism. The opening of Pandora’s jar turned out to bring just as much woe as joy.
The particular appeal of atheism to generations of religiously alienated people was that it was different. Where religions oppressed, atheism liberated. The first step to authentic human existence was to throw out the outdated and destructive idea of God. By 1997, with the publication of The Black Book, this view had become untenable. Atheism was just as bad as any other religion. Its distinctive claim had been irreversibly discredited. No longer could anyone take the suggestion that atheism was the liberator of humanity with any seriousness. The archives of the Soviet Union told a very different story, which made harrowing reading.
Of the many criticisms that can be directed against the world’s religions, the most serious is their history of violence and oppression. Yet this is not a criticism that can be made with integrity by atheists, precisely because their own recent history contains too much cruelty, oppression, and violence at the hands of those determined to rid the world of religions. To those who stand outside the religious debate altogether, atheists and their opponents seem equally tainted.
One of the more disturbing patterns of history is that movements that began as liberators end up becoming oppressors in their own right. It is as if the abused seems historically predetermined to become an abuser. A movement that promised intellectual liberation ended up being seen as an institutionalized oppressor. Had atheism itself, many wonder, now fallen victim to this baleful pattern of inversion? And does this account for its gradual eclipse? After the violence and intolerance of institutionalized atheism had become public knowledge, it became a matter of public necessity to confine these untamed passions in a private space. Atheism was a legitimate view for consenting individuals; it could not, however, be allowed to be the ideology of the public arena.
Postmodernity “reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable” (Jean-François Lyotard). It encourages toleration and excoriates those who, by actions or beliefs, seek to marginalize, oppress, or dominate. Michel Foucault’s sustained assault on the notion of “objective truth” rests on his belief that those who claim possession of such truth use it to dominate others, forcing them to fall in line with their views or be excluded. As is well known, this critique of such a notion has major implications for religions such as Christianity and Islam. Yet atheism is also affected—perhaps even more so. For postmodernity is intolerant of any totalizing worldview, precisely because of its propensity to oppress those who resist it.
As the history of the twentieth century makes clear, atheists can be just as nasty, prejudiced, stupid, and backward as their religious counterparts. In retrospect, this was only to be expected. After all, atheists are human beings, like everyone else, and their refusal to believe in God or any other spiritual force makes them no better and no worse than anyone else. Yet many expected that atheism would morally elevate its followers. It was much easier to believe this in the nineteenth century, when atheism held the moral high ground, never having been exposed to the corrupting influences of power and government. When atheists kept a discreetly low profile, nobody could be bothered to look into their beliefs and lifestyles. But when they launched high-profile social and political campaigns advocating an atheist agenda, people started asking awkward questions. And they began getting disturbing answers.
In what follows, we shall tell the fascinating story of one of the most bizarre figures in recent American religious history, and ask whether it has anything to tell us about the future of atheism.