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Religion |
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The featured article in
this week’s eSkeptic (30 May 2007) is on the Soviet attempt to eradicate
religion by fiat out of the Russian people. The attempt failed utterly. The
historical experiment carries an important lesson for those who study belief
systems in general and religion in particular: you cannot legislate beliefs
and faith. Today’s atheists who are emboldened by Richard Dawkins’
Lennonesque clarion call to “imagine no religion” should read this article
(and the book on which it is based) carefully, and then try to imagine
another solution to the problems caused by religious extremists, for as
another evolutionary biologist — Edward O. Wilson — cautioned us in his
Pulitzer Prize-winning book, On Human Nature:
Skeptics continue to nourish the belief that science and learning will
banish religion, which they consider to be no more than a tissue of
illusions… Today, scientists and other scholars, organized into learned
groups such as the American Humanist Society and Institute on Religion in an
Age of Science, support little magazines distributed by subscription and
organize campaigns to discredit Christian fundamentalism, astrology, and
Immanuel Velikovsky. Their crisply logical salvos, endorsed by whole
arrogances of Nobel Laureates, pass like steel-jacketed bullets through fog.
There is, indeed, something deeply elemental about the power of belief.
— Michael Shermer
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An Elemental Impulse
Religion is so Powerful that Even Soviet Antireligious Policy
Failed
by Paul Gabel
30 May 2007
The separation of church and state was so construed by the state that the
churches themselves and everything that hung in them, was installed in them,
and painted in them belonged to the state, and the only church remaining was
that church which, in accordance with the Scriptures, lay within the heart.
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn
While Vladimir Lenin was languishing in Europe waiting for revolution, he
championed freedom of religious expression in Russia. But when he took power
in November 1917, he reverted to the Marxist imperative of destruction of
all religious faith — whether institutional or psychological. Marxist theory
predicted that the end of class warfare would automatically lead to collapse
of the class-based superstructure of religion, and Leon Trotsky held that
the superstitious Russian muzhik was on the verge of atheism already — all
that was needed for the whole rotting corpse to collapse was a good shove
(like murdering Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon). But Lenin knew that the task
would not be easy.
While the Bolsheviks worked to persuade foreign governments that no
religious persecution existed in Russia, Lenin and the Cheka (secret police)
decided to help Marx’s automatic process along by arresting clergy and
ordering them shot, imprisoned, or exiled, often without trial.
The government spied on priests, censored their sermons, raised their taxes
(as unproductive citizens), and ordered them to live outside the villages
they served. It seized churches and monasteries, and reopened them as
antireligious museums. It abolished religious schools and prohibited
religious education until the age of 18. When a disastrous famine struck the
Volga region between 1921 and 1923, the Bolsheviks used it as an excuse to
confiscate gold, silver, and pearls from the churches — allegedly for famine
relief but actually to line commissars’ pockets — while refusing to sell the
tsar’s crown jewels to buy bread for the starving. The Orthodox Church, the
Catholic Church, and others offered all non-consecrated treasures, but
everything of value was stripped from places of worship.
The Bolsheviks promoted a “progressive” schism within the Orthodox Church
with a panoply of communistic priests — after all, hadn’t Jesus united
Palestine’s working class and ordered the wealthy to offer their riches to
the poor? The government poured so many resources into this Living Church
(in contrast to the Dead Church) that people began calling it the Red
Church. Finally, in 1927 this tactic was abandoned in favor of support for
the newly elected Patriarch Sergei, who submitted to pawn-like status.
Wild pageants erupted in the largest cities, mocking and ridiculing the
Christian celebration of Jesus’s birth. Young, working-class atheists
paraded through the streets carrying effigies of religious leaders of every
faith they could think of. They dressed up as priests, monks, rabbis,
mullahs, and shamans, while fellow demonstrators taunted and mocked them. An
article in Izvestia described some of the characters: God embracing a naked
woman, the Virgin Mary, the pope in a fancy motor car blessing the people, a
monk riding on a coffin full of holy relics, a priest offering to marry
anyone for a price, a Protestant pastor, a Jewish rabbi, a yellow-robed
Buddha, Marduk of Babylon, and a group of devils with long tails and horns
bringing up the rear.
ORDER the book
For centuries monks had been manufacturing “relics” of saints using
cardboard, wax, animal bones, and goat hair. The Bolsheviks discovered these
frauds and filmed them so the people could see how they had been deceived.
The Communist Youth League and the League of the Godless distributed
millions of scientific and antireligious tracts throughout the countryside.
They replaced religious holidays with workers’ holidays — the Day of
Industry for the Feast of Transfiguration, and Harvest Day for the Feast of
the Intercession — as if traditions could be invented. And they organized
festivities on Sundays to lure young people from the churches. Bibles could
no longer be printed or imported. Even the teaching of chess was marshaled
to the cause — emphasis on logic would surely undermine irrational faith.
The Orthodox Church seemed such an easy target. Almost a thousand years old
in Russia, it was a product of pagan and Christian syncretism. The peasants
planted pagan penis figurines in their fields to encourage crop fertility
and paid the local priest to sprinkle Holy Water on their crops to ward off
pests. Their faith was not spiritual but habitual. They worked during the
week, drank and fought on feast days, then confessed their sins and went
back to the same regimen in endless cycles. Most considered priests to be
magicians rather than God’s delegates on Earth. They indulged in what would
seem to Westerners as the silliest of superstitions and seldom prayed for
anything except better weather.
As each day went by with no divine retribution, it seemed to the Bolsheviks
that they were right. If God had created Lenin, He could have uncreated him
with a snap of his omnipotent fingers. And if God truly existed, why had he
not done so? Surely the party had crossed any line that the Almighty might
have drawn to limit the behavior of man. It would seem that they had
exceeded even the transgression of Eve, yet their leaders were neither
banished from Eden, turned into pillars of salt, nor consumed by fire.
Yet on days of ideological frailty they must have felt like the early
Christians waiting daily for the Second Coming that never came. There was
even a church revival during the 1920s as many citizens — especially the
intelligentsia — rediscovered what they had lost. Nikolai Bukharin wrote
words in 1919 that he could just as well have written in 1991, when the
Communist experiment was over:
It has been comparatively easy for the proletarian authority to effect the
separation of the church from the state and of the school from the church,
and these changes have been almost painlessly achieved. It is enormously
more difficult to fight the religious prejudices which are already deeply
rooted in the consciousness of the masses and which cling so stubbornly to
life.1
The Long Run
Religion is like a nail: the harder you hit it, the deeper it goes in. Our
efforts should have been directed toward drawing it out.
— Anatoly Lunacharsky, Commissar of Enlightenment
While the Communists ruled Russia, religion (Christian or otherwise) never
died out. It had its setbacks, to be sure — there were not enough priests,
many churches were closed, and it was dangerous to be too vocal about
religious ideas — but religious emotions had burrowed deeply into the
Russian collective mind.
By 1936 Stalin felt that he had made progress on the antireligious front,
but rumors circulated that about 40 to 45 percent of the population was
still religious. Being well along in the process of wiping out all
conceivable rivals to power, he was in a tolerant mood. Attending a meeting
on the writing of the 1936 Constitution, he commented: “Why should the
clergy be disenfranchised? Not all of them are disloyal.”2 However, the
January 1937 nationwide census revealed a surprising endurance of religious
sentiment; apparently many dared to check the box “believer” as a silent
protest, and many who were indifferent toward religion could not quite bring
themselves to check the box “unbeliever.” Stalin was furious. He could avoid
embarrassment only by refusing to publish exact numbers, though the figure
of 50 million believers leaked out. Another Western source claimed that 57
percent had claimed believer status, which if true would amount to some 80
million persons. These figures were astounding when we consider that
respondents’ names were on the forms!
Why this religious persistence? Communists, obsessed with science,
approached the churches of Russia as if they were a product of some type of
malformed science. They believed that if they could simply educate the
populace in “correct science,” religion would go away. Hence they scratched
along the surface of religion, exposing internal contradictions, revealing
the origin of gods in early man’s fear of natural forces, and ridiculing the
existence of miracles.
Though this method, coming from a lack of appreciation of the deeper
psychological aspects of religion, did have an effect on some individuals,
it could not penetrate very far into the social psychology of the masses.
Robert Casey, writing in 1946, used a different metaphor: “The Soviets
accomplished little more than the pruner who cuts the leaves and surplus
branches from the treetops. The result in the long run was to encourage a
more healthy growth.”3 During the Great Patriotic War of the early 1940s,
Stalin even had to appeal to the people’s faith to keep the country united
against Hitler’s onslaught.
In the early 1960s Nikita Khrushchev, irritated with the lack of
antireligious progress, ordered a new crackdown on the churches and their
clergy. Completely lacking imagination (never a socialist strong point), all
of the same failed tactics were regurgitated to be tried again. Believers
just went underground and waited it out — time was on their side.
Eventually, as post-war standards of living inched upwards, Russians
developed a certain apathy toward the church, but this does not appear to be
a result of Marxist prognostications or Bolshevik tactics — rather it
mirrors the Western European experience of less suffering leading to less
church attendance.
Excuses abounded. In the early days, failures on the antireligious front
were attributed to practical difficulties with implementation: inadequately
trained cadres, poor organization, lazy workers, and communications
problems. Then Soviet apologists pinned the survival of religion on
carryovers from tsarist times. Marx predicted that post-revolutionary life
“would be stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it
had emerged.” This still seemed a reasonable explanation for religious
persistence when Emelyan Yaroslavsky, head of the League of the Godless,
used it in 1923:
The human spirit is characterized by inertia. Although the body already
finds itself in new relations of labor, the mind lags behind in grasping the
new forms. Traditions, legends, have their hold on the brains of the
living.4
Stalin’s contribution to the Marxist excuse factory was his “surrounded by
capitalism” theory, arguing that since the Revolution was supposed to be
international it could not come to fruition while capitalist nations existed
on the Soviet periphery. While the USSR was temporarily a mere enclave of
socialism waiting for ultimate world victory, religion within the country
could be expected to have some life left in it.
The Even Longer Run
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so
painfully as to find someone to worship.
— The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Over tens of thousands of years is such a thing as (collective) life without
religion possible? Did Bolshevism have a chance of wiping this ancient way
of thinking from the map of Russia and the minds of its people? In spite of
their tactical blunders, were there reasons for failure beyond their control
— reasons that less ideologically blinkered leaders could reasonably have
been expected to understand, or at least to notice? Is there an elemental
impulse toward some kind of worship?
The Protestant reformer John Calvin believed there was a semen religionis —
a religious seed common to all humanity that, when expressed, could remain
pure (as in his denomination) or be corrupted (as in Romanism). The German
philosopher Rudolph Otto called this the sensus numinis — an innate sense of
awe and longing for the otherworldly that was the basis of all concepts of
god. Julian Huxley argued that religion is “a function of human nature,” but
Leo Tolstoy upheld a universality of religious experience that had nothing
in common with the forces of nature. It was based, he thought, upon man’s
awareness of his insignificance, his isolation, and his sinfulness.
Modern-day neuroscientists have even found that stimulation of certain
neurons in the temporal/limbic system of the brain can produce intense
sensations of joy and visions of being in the presence of God.5
My personal theory, which is as plausible and unprovable as any other, is
that a religious sense exists as a consequence of the evolutionary process.
Over millions of years hominids with larger brains were favored due to their
improved ability to interact socially, communicate linguistically, and
obtain food. As computational power expanded, these same brains incidentally
acquired the ability to grasp their loneliness in the larger world and to
anticipate their own deaths. Those who could not imagine a purpose for
living turned to less purposeful lives and were marginally less likely to
survive to reproductive age, or even to be interested in reproduction. As
people without purpose were weeded out of the gene pool, increasingly large
percentages of the surviving population were capable of turning their
powerful minds to thoughts of gods, whose “existence” would itself become
the purpose of life. Man became an animal that could no longer “live in a
world it is unable to understand.”6 The neoconservative Irving Kristol
observed:
If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no
community can survive if it is persuaded — or even if it suspects — that its
members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe.7
Perhaps we know too much for our own good.
Another explanation for the universality of religion that I find attractive
imagines religion as a forward extension of the gullibility or
impressionability that a child needs to learn language and culture. The
child must have the capacity to trust that whatever surrounding adults say
is true and useful. It is similar in process to neoteny (the retention of
juvenile features in adult animals). Just as over thousands of years
wolves/dogs were selected by man for retention of their adorable juvenile
features and for obedience, thus retaining them into adulthood, humans’
childish acceptance — providing “answers” to the unknowable — gradually
extended into adulthood in the form of religion. Faith could be simply an
extension of that adaptive trait, with priests (“fathers”) as guides.
Regardless of any anthropological theory of religious origins, the ubiquity
of a religious sense cannot be denied. Writing in the 1930s, the
anthropologist Ruth Benedict concluded:
No matter how exotic a society the traveler has wandered, he still finds the
distinction [between religious and nonreligious] made … And it is universal.
There is no monograph in existence that does not group a certain class of
facts as religion, and there are no records of travelers … that do not
indicate this category.8
Michael Bakunin took up this issue in his 1871 God and the State, where he
pointed out that universality is no more a proof of validity than was the
commonly held belief that the sun revolved around the earth proof that it
did. Writing in the immediate post-Darwinian world, he saw religious
universality as a stage in man’s development from the animals and supported
the study of religion only as a method of supplanting it as the human mind
moved forward. Nonetheless, Bakunin admitted the pervasiveness and necessity
of faith up to modern times. “Nothing,” he wrote, “is as universal or as
ancient as the iniquitous and absurd.”
Nicolas Berdyaev (along with the Grand Inquisitor) asserted that man was by
nature a spiritual being and that “the soul of man cannot live empty of
religion.” Nothing can take from him the urge to venerate and adore
something higher than his mere self. There is an imperative toward the
superhuman.
Universality within societies implies the inherent nature of a behavior or
trait. Of course, what applies to societies does not necessarily apply to
every individual within that society. There is a natural sexual desire that
can (sometimes) be overcome by vows of abstinence; presumably there are
celibate monks and nuns, though I doubt there is one who has never
entertained a sexual fantasy from the day of his or her vows. An evolved
biophilic love of pastoral lands with moving fresh water can be overcome by
an individual’s desire to live in the desert. In the same way individuals
pledged to rationality and humanism can overcome a natural religious
tendency; modern societies contain a significant minority of nonbelievers.
(The Bolsheviks seem to have accomplished it, except for a smattering of “Godbuilders,”
who tried to fashion a new religion out of Communism so they could fill the
gaping spiritual void they, themselves, had created.)
If faith is inherent in the human condition, then the Bolsheviks were doomed
from the start, for their goal was not just the physical destruction of
church buildings or the legal destruction of religious institutions, but the
emptying of minds of even the possibility of religious thought or emotion.
Marx, Engels, and Lenin, of course, rejected the premise of a religious
human nature, arguing that ever since separate social and economic classes
emerged, religion had become nothing but a tool of the ruling class. The
Bolshevik rejection of innateness is what led them on their hopeless quest.
Five years after the Communists lost control of greater Russia — after
decades of antireligious parades, endless propaganda, and cruel persecution
— Russian Orthodoxy still claims (at least nominally) almost 72 percent of
the population and “no religious affiliation” claims less than 19 percent9,
which is roughly the figure in America, where no such antireligious crusade
occurred. That tells us something significant about the religious nature of
our natures.
References
Bukharin, Nikolai and E. Preobrazhensky. 1966. ABC of Communism — A Popular
Explanation of the Program of the Communist Party of Russia. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan, 253.
Timasheff, N.S. 1943. Religion in Soviet Russia, 1917–1942. London:
Religious Book Club, 65.
Casey, Robert Pierce. 1946. Religion in Russia. New York: Harper, 105.
Yaroslavsky, Emelyan. 1990. “Is the Communist Movement Antireligious?” In
William G. Rosenberg, Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural
Revolution in Soviet Russia, Part I. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 242.
Carter, Rita. 1998. Mapping the Mind. Berkeley: University of California,
129.
Quoted in Guthrie, Stewart Elliott. 1993. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory
of Religion. New York: Oxford University, 32.
Quoted in Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human
Nature. New York: Viking, 131.
Quoted in Davis, Nathaniel. 1995. A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary
History of Russian Orthodoxy. San Francisco: Westview, xviii.
Chart, Time, May 27, 1996.
Paul Gabel is the author of And God Created Lenin: Marxism vs. Religion in
Russia, 1917–1929.
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Faith's last gasp
Despite superficial appearances of a resurgence in religious
belief, we are actually witnessing the death throes of faith
by AC Grayling (professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of
London)
Prospect Magazine
Nov 2006
On the basis of apparently incontrovertible evidence, commentators of
various persuasions, among them Eric Kaufmann in the last issue of Prospect,
John Gray, writing recently in the New Statesman, and Damon Linker, author
of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (Doubleday) are convinced that
we are witnessing an upsurge in religious observance and influence.
Kaufmann relies on the weak argument that demographic trends will turn
Europe into a predominantly religious place, John Gray seems to hope that
this will be so, and Damon Linker is convinced that a “theocon” conspiracy
has so successfully captured Washington that the US has become a de facto
theocracy—the home of faith-based politics, faith-based science
(creationism), faith-based medicine ("pro-life"), faith-based foreign policy
(conducting jihad for American/Baptist values) and faith-based attacks on
civil liberties. Add this to the all too obvious fact of political
Islam—Islamism—and the case seems made.
But I see the same evidence as yielding the opposite conclusion. What we are
witnessing is not the resurgence of religion, but its death throes. Two
considerations support this claim. One is that there are close and
instructive historical precedents for what is happening now. The second
comes from an analysis of the nature of contemporary religious politics.
If a given interest group turns up the volume, it is usually reacting to
provocation. We view the Victorian era as a sanctimonious period of
improving movements such as self-help, temperance and university missions to
city slums. But prudishness and do-goodery existed precisely because their
contraries—poverty, drunkenness, godlessness and indecency—were endemic:
some streets of Victorian London swarmed with child prostitutes, and were
too dangerous to walk at night. In the same way, today’s “religious upsurge”
is a reaction to the prevalence of its opposite. In fact, it is a reaction
to defeat, in a war that it cannot win even if it succeeds in a few battles
on the way down.
Here is what is happening. Over the last half-century, sections of the
Muslim world have become increasingly affronted by the globalisation of
western and especially American culture and values, which appears arrogantly
to disdain their traditions. Yet latterly, some of these same sections of
Islam have been emboldened by the victory of warriors of the faith over a
superpower (Afghanistan’s mujahedin over Soviet Russia); the combination
encourages them to assert their opposition to the engulfing encroachment of
western modernity, even by taking up arms.
When a climate of heightened tension such as this prompts activists in one
religious group to become more assertive, to push their way forward in the
public domain to demand more attention, more respect, more public funds
(faith-based schools are one example), other religious groups, not wishing
to be left behind, follow suit. In Britain, Muslim activism has been quickly
mimicked by others—by Sikhs demonstrating about a play, Christian
evangelicals demonstrating about an opera, and all of them leaping on the
funding bandwagon for faith and interfaith initiatives. To placate them,
politicians lend an ear; the media report it; immediately these minorities
of interest have an amplifier for their presence. The effect is that
suddenly it seems as if there are religious devotees everywhere, and the
spurious magnification of their importance further promotes their
confidence. As a result they make some gains, as the faith schools example
shows.
Yet the fact is that only 10 per cent of the British population attend
church, mosque, synagogue or temple every week, and this figure is declining
in all but immigrant communities. This is hardly the stuff of religious
resurgence. Yes, over half the population claim vaguely to believe in
Something, which includes feng shui and crystals, and they may be “C of E”
in the sense of “Christmas and Easter,” but they are functionally secularist
and would be horrified if asked to live according to the letter of (say)
Christian morality: giving all one’s possessions to the poor, taking no
thought for the morrow and so impracticably forth. Not even Christian
clerics follow these injunctions. This picture is repeated everywhere in the
west except the US, and there too the religious base is eroding.
The historical precedent of the counter-Reformation is instructive. For over
a century after Luther nailed his theses to Wittenberg’s church door, Europe
was engulfed in ferocious religious strife, because the church was losing
its hitherto hegemonic grip and had no intention of doing so without a
fight. Millions died, and Catholicism won some battles even as it lost the
war. We are witnessing a repeat today, this time with Islamism resisting the
encroachment of a way of life that threatens it, and as other religious
groups join them in a (strictly temporary, given the exclusivity of faith)
alliance for the cause of religion in general.
As before, the grinding of historical tectonic plates will be painful and
protracted. But the outcome is not in doubt. As private observance, religion
will of course survive among minorities; as a factor in public and
international affairs it is having what might be its last—characteristically
bloody—fling.
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Societies worse off 'when
they have God on their side'
RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing
towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide,
according to research published today.
Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
Times Online
Dec 05
According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only
unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social
problems.
The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to
provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.
It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as
Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than
the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider
Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and
amorality.
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious
belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of
violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The
benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its
“spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the
US may actually contribute to its ills.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic
journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an
exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an
impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate
with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD
infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.
“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing
democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from
the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies
to reach his conclusions.
He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and
teenage pregnancy.
The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy
where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were
the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in
adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout
democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent
and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study
suggested.
Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has,
is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators,
even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”
He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with
other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries.
These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early
mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.
Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina.
He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies
suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. “I suspect
that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of
the Christian states,” he added.
He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the
theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God
scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy
majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious
belief, Mr Paul said.
“The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a
society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe
in a moral creator.
“The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal
disaster is therefore refuted.”
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