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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
by Joseph McCabe
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
GIRARD, KANSAS
1936
By E. Haldeman-Julius
CHAPTER I
THE ODDS AGAINST THE ATHEIST
In my 'Rise and Fall of the Gods' (1931) I traced the weird
and ever-changing belief in Gods from the days of man's infancy to
our own time. I showed that at every period during the 5,000 years
of history when men developed a higher culture Atheism appeared. We
find it in ancient Egypt in spite of the scantiness of the literary
remains and the despotic power of the priests. We see it so
widespread in civilization 2,500 years ago that it takes a
prominent place in history in the form of the Ionian philosophy of
Greece and the ethic of Buddha and Confucius in Asia. Then there is
the high cultural development of the Greek-Roman civilization, and
from 300 B.C. to 300 A.D. we find the thinly veiled Atheism of the
Stoics. Epicureans, and Skeptics accepted by the great majority of
the better-educated. Atheism perishes again with the crass
ignorance and clerical tyranny of the Iron Age, but it spreads
widely in the light of the Arab-Persian civilization, wherever the
fanatics are checked, and at the Renaissance it reappears in
Christendom. The hardening of the religious attitude after the
Reformation again cheeks it, but in the 18th Century it enters upon
a development which has, in spite of murderous clerical tyranny in
some countries, proceeded steadily ever since.
On the strict ground of these historical facts, without taking
account of personal valuations or hopes, I formulated the law that
Atheism grows in proportion to the growth of knowledge and freedom.
No law of history is more consistently revealed in the records. It
follows that the 20th century ought to witness a development of
Atheism immeasurably greater than has ever been known before. Our
knowledge of realities is incomparably greater than the knowledge
of any previous civilization: that knowledge is imparted to the
mass of the people by a machinery of education which is as superior
to that of the Greek-Roman as a giant Cunarder is to an ancient
trireme: and it was understood that the heroic struggle of the last
century had won for the world at large freedom of thought and
expression. We shall now survey the world in an attempt to
determine to what extent Atheism has grown. The task is difficult.
Atheist organizations are so few and poor that there is no approach
to a census of the number of Atheists throughout the world, while
the name itself has been so changed in meaning by religious writers
that a large proportion of the folk who are Atheists do not know it
or are reluctant to admit it. The word is here taken in its
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
legitimate sense, which is supported by most of our leading
dictionaries and invariably accepted by Atheist writers -- the men,
one would say, who ought to know best -- as the proper designation
of any man or woman who has no belief in any being or entity whom
he or she calls God. In dictionary language it means "one who
denies or disbelieves the existence of God."
There is no census of such folk. Even in the few countries
where a religious clause is inserted in the census-papers the
results are, we shall see, apt to be grossly misleading, Except
where Atheism is accepted as the creed of a definite political
organization such as the Communists and, in some countries, the
Socialists, it is so difficult to ascertain its strength in a
community that for the compilation of this essay I have had
practically no assistance from any other writer. Our post graduate
research-students and professors seem at times to be running short
of themes for those valuable monographs an contemporary life that
they give us, but none cares to take up the exact study of one of
the most startling phenomena of our age -- the rapid growth of
Atheism. one knows why. In the circumstances, instead of imitating
the round liberality of a religious organization when it publishes
a statement of its membership, I will use here only such figures,
besides those which are accepted statistics, as are plainly within
the truth. Yet with this cautiousness of procedure I will now prove
the truth of statements I have occasionally made on the matter
which seem to startle many folk and to others seem incredible:
That Atheism has grown in the last 10 years a hundred times
more rapidly than any religion ever grew.
That it is moderate to claim that there are considerably more
than 200,000,000 Atheists today.
That the growth has been checked only by fraudulent
misrepresentations and savage persecution.
That the growth is such that if freedom is again generally
secured in the next 10 years we may justly expect Atheists to be
more numerous than genuine Christians in 20 years.
1. Our Meretricious Churches
But if we would appreciate the full force and implication of
these statements we must consider the difficulties that are put in
the way of the spread of Atheism in all but one or two countries.
In America and England, for instance, one imagines a quite honest
religions person scoffing at my thesis and pointing out that
religion looms larger in public life today than it did in the first
two decades of the present century; that the appeal of its
ministers was never louder and more penetrating. Undoubtedly: but
only because the majority of the community are cynically
indifferent about religion and permit the clergy to usurp a power
out of all proportion to the number of their followers, and because
the discrediting of what are called "religious evidences" and the
rapid disintegration of the Churches themselves have driven the
clergy to adopt new and noisier methods. Not even in the Middle
Ages were Churches so elaborately organized as they are today; and,
since accessions to the Churches from one great churchless body are
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negligible in number in our time, a desperate effort is made to
cheek the streams of secession and to camouflage the social and
Intellectual failure. Religion was a reality when a church just
opened its doors with silent dignity to admit men and women who
felt an urge to worship. The noisier it becomes, with its braying
out upon the ether, its publicity bureaus and camera men, and its
boosting of its social attractions and entertainments, its pushing
to the front at every civic ceremonial or public event, the more
plainly it confesses its failure to appeal to either the intellect
or the emotions of our time. It reveals itself as just a clerical
corporation for the protection of an income of so many hundred
million dollars a year.
The amiable professor or "psychological" essayist who calls
this a superficial view of the religious situation, who asks us to
distinguish between religion and theology or to perceive, as he
more wisely does, the difference between natural and institutional
religion, may be invited to reflect upon one fact. 'The more nearly
any religion or sect of our time approaches his standard of
intellectual resectability, the less successful it is.' It is not
Unitarianism, Modernism, or Theism that attracts the millions who
quit the old Churches, but Bible Religion, Four-Square Gospel,
Spiritualism, Christian Science, etc. The biggest Churches are
still those that are richest in medieval stupidities. The most
successful of them all in restricting its leakage, accumulating
wealth, and usurping the power to bully people who do not belong to
it, is the most medieval of them all. Of the, let. us say,
40,000,000 Christians of America three-fourths are Fundamentalist.
And the Churches hold such millions as they do by purveying to
them a mixed diet of sacred and profane which their Jesus Christ
would have drenched with the dregs of the Aramaic dictionary; by
guarding their untruth with such dupery as I exposed in the last
number; and by allying themselves, in every country where the
alliance is offered, with Political adventurers who purchase their
support by promising to crucify their critics for them. The first
method is too familiar to need much comment. A church is now a
social and recreational center with business methods of advertising
its attractions. There is a foolish sort of person who asks us
whether we suppose there are no longer genuine believers in Jesus
who eagerly go to church to worship and to feel a sense of
communion. Of course we grant the existence of very large bodies of
such people. Whether even these, or how many of them, would retain
their fervor if it were not for the untruth that is given them
instead of science and genuine history is a question. But if the
Churches had only, or mainly, such men and women to deal with, they
would be content with the occasional chicken-supper or concert or
picnic which is a time-honored concomitant of religious fellowship.
They go leagues beyond these things today. They are no longer even
content to have bright, brief, and brotherly services, with suave
and natty floorwalkers at the door to pounce upon strangers.
Typical of the modern procedure is an experience I had in New
York when, after years of nervous misgiving, the late Billy Sunday
made his fatal descent upon the metropolis. Next to me at the end
of the row (on my other side was an Atheist lady-friend) was a very
prosy New Yorker who had just been attracted by the heavily-
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purchased publicity in the press and the report that Sunday's
"personal magnetism" (which turned out to be as synthetic as the
beauty of a manicurist) was worth seeing. But, when it came to
taking the sawdust-trail, one of the ushers pressed my totally
apathetic neighbor so warmly to "go up and shake hands with Dr.
Sunday" that he went. Naturally he -- though he had been plainly
disgusted at Sunday's exhibition of temper at the smallness of the
collections -- was one of the hundreds of converts in the
statistics issued.
But everybody knows the tricks and desperate devices of a
modern city-church: the catchy titles of sermons published in the
press, the professional and often profane soloist, the occasional
invitations to a base-ball player or ocean flier, the cinema, the
wide fringe of social attractions from matrimonial (or other)
possibilities to cheap meals, better trade, political jobbery, or
social connections. The Catholic Church may reject some of these
aids to devotion but it is all the more assiduous in showing in
other ways the social and economic advantages of being a Catholic.
Why, the churchgoers ask, should yon growl about it? We might
almost reply that, on the contrary, we are glad to see it. At the
very least it confesses the failure of the religious appeal.
However, it is enough to note that, clearly, church-going is no
longer evidence of Christian belief, and that it is not simply a
set of doctrinal formularies that we now attack.
2. The Intrigue for Wealth and Power
Much more serious is the use of the new business-organization
of the Churches to prevent free trade in truth. I have said that it
is a law of history that Atheism grows with the growth of
knowledge, and that we have now a marvelous machinery for
transmitting our knowledge to all. But every part of this machinery
-- the school, the public library, the press, the bookstore, the
lecture-room, the radio -- can be used just as effectively for the
dissemination of untruth as of truth, and the Churches, with their
enormous wealth and power, have gained a very pernicious degree of
control over the machinery. They complain of the hostility of
Communists and Socialists, yet they know that today it is essential
to their security that a social-political order in which they can
intrigue for power shall be maintained. With the passing of
Capitalism and large private fortunes they lose not only the
greater part of their wealth and its immunity from taxation, but
the power they now enjoy of controlling education (to a great
extent), securing the service of the press, bullying publishers and
booksellers, censoring public libraries, and -- in comparison with
the Atheist -- monopolizing radio-instruction.
The detailed evidence of this very extensive control of our
educational facilities would fill a volume, but since it is
unquestioned we need not linger. School-education, from the primary
to the university, is jealously watched for anything that it
considered "contrary to the interests of religion": which means
that scientific and historical teaching is eviscerated or
falsified. It is largely owing to the clergy, or the alliance of
the Churches with capitalist governments, that education remains
everywhere outside Russia and Turkey an unstimulating and very
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largely useless communication of facts that are irrelevant to the
purposes of life. There are large cities like Boston where the
Catholic Church notoriously influences education even in the
schools to which it forbids its parents to send their children, but
all the Churches keep an eye on school-manuals and teachers. I have
letters from non-Catholic mothers, and far away from Massachusetts,
telling me how in public high school their daughters have to listen
to the most blatant Catholic propaganda. And this is only the first
stage of their control of education. They have organizations, with
local representatives everywhere, for watching the daily and weekly
papers and threatening to injure the circulation if truths that are
unpalatable to them are published or if good space is not given to
their own utterances and activities. They get the work of reviewing
books and even reading for publishers into the hands of the clergy
or reliable laity. They threaten publishers -- I have seen letters
-- and bully booksellers and librarians. They try to stifle all
criticism, they insist on favors for their subsidized articles and
pamphlets; and they make the ether throb with their ancient and
modern untruths. Even employers are enlisted in the good work.
Looking at life from the angle of social psychology, one finds
it remarkable that so large a majority of the community contrive to
keep clear of the contagion. For, that the constant aim of all this
work is to prevent the dissemination of truth and purvey what is
regarded by the great majority of properly educated persons as
untruth I have proved in scores of works. The grossest historical
untruths, to the advantage of Christianity, are repeated until even
the non-Christian majority imagine them to be unquestioned. The
social services and possibilities of service of the Churches are
flagrantly misrepresented. The truths of science that are essential
to a correct appreciation of life and man are concealed or denied.
The activity of the Churches in America is glowingly announced; the
beneficent action of Atheism in Russia is misrepresented; the
crimes of the Churches in Europe which cooperate with truculent
dictators are never mentioned; and, in particular, the growth of
Atheism is so carefully concealed behind assurances of Church-
progress that people regard a plain statement of it as fantastic
and reckless. History and contemporary life alike are falsely
described, because the truth would be resented by one or other
Church.
For reasons which will be discussed in later essays even this
comprehensive and unceasing miseducation does not make people
return to the Churches, but it has one of the effects that are
sought: it convinces most people that Atheists are a scanty and
rather eccentric body who have no title to be treated in the press
or on the radio with the same respect as Christians, The clergy
attach more importance to that than many people imagine. The critic
they dread above all others is the man with a clean-cut profession
of Atheism, the man who neither in his thoughts nor his speech
admits the slightest shade of mysticism. They care very little
about the professor or the literary man who openly rejects their
doctrines but still talks respectfully about religion and Spiritual
realities and the sacredness of doubt and the open mind. He has,
perhaps, a few hundred high-brow readers, and they, in any case,
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agree with him before they open his book. The clergy will even
permit him to speak on the radio. He generally agrees with them
that Atheists are dogmatic, lacking in good taste, superficial and
anyway a nuisance. So the fiction is sustained and the people are
duped.
3. The Gentle Art of Murder
The third chief method is the modern form of the medieval
habit of invoking the secular arm. It is today cynical. The
Churches were still assuring us that they are today in favor, on
principle, of complete toleration and freedom when they eagerly
grasped every opportunity that was offered them to cooperate in a
policy of intolerance and tyranny. I have just completed a thorough
study of the world-situation in this respect in the Appeal to
Reason and must refer any who have not read it to that series of
books. Here I would point out that, though it happens that these
murderous dictatorships have nearly all been set up in Catholic
countries with the connivance of the Catholic Church, all Churches
in all countries will accept the same alliance if ever it is
offered to them. The Lutheran Church in Germany was, 10 years ago,
teaching the same gentle principles of tolerance, freedom, and
humanity as the Churches are teaching in America. Today the great
body of the Lutheran pastors support the blood-stained tyranny of
the Nazi regime, and the dissentient minority of them quarrel, not
with the truculent tyranny as such, but with its interference in
their affairs. Catholics and Protestants alike are willing to see
Hitler and his brutal lieutenants torture Jews, Communists,
Socialists, Pacifists, and humanitarians generally as long as they
do not attempt to interfere with the doctrinal teaching of the
Churches themselves; just as American Protestants were generally
silent about the criminal aggression of Japan in China because the
Japanese promised to favor the Christian missions and Russian
influence in China was destroying them.
The most positive and the largest figures of bodies of
Atheists that I shall give in the course of this essay are those of
Communist and, in most countries, Socialist bodies. These are
professedly, if not aggressively, atheistic. That is the new
situation which confronts the Churches. It explains the remarkable
adjustment of the Sermon on the Mount to a support of tyranny and
cruelty in Germany, Austria Hungary, Poland, Italy, Spain,
Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Greece. And there is not the
least reason to suppose that if the occasion arose, there would not
be a similar adjustment in every country. Some 200,000,000 people
in Europe today live or suffer under a Fascist tyranny which scorns
every principle of the American social ethic, even as taught by the
Churches, yet all the Churches, with the reserve I gave in the case
of Germany, support the tyranny. The chief pretext for establishing
the tyranny was the growth of Communism and Socialism, and part of
the reward of the Churches in nearly every case was the suppression
of their critics, whether Communist or not. In other words, the
Churches have gone back to medieval methods just as the dictators
they support have. In six of the countries I have named atheistic
Communism and Socialism had in about 20 years won at least
50,000,000 adherents, detaching most of them from the Churches. We
shall see proof of that. Are we asked to believe that the Churches
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were austerely inattentive to that fact when they supported the
dictators? And are we expected to be quite polite when we are
assured that, if atheistic Communism and Socialism came to capture
one-third of the people in America and England also, the Churches
would serenely refuse to have anything to do with a successful
Fascist usurpation?
CHAPTER II
THE ATHEISM OF SCIENTISTS
These preliminary considerations are offered to those who from
a long tradition of rationalist literature are apt to regard the
struggle as one of truth against untruth. If that were the case, it
would be over in a few decades. What has really happened in Russia,
we shall see, proves that. If we could put to the American people
the relevant facts of history and truths of science as freely and
unceasingly as the Churches put their untruths, no one can doubt
the issue. Unfortunately, but very naturally, most people who quit
church-going do not want to hear religion mentioned again. They
switch off the sermon or religious address on the radio and skip
the sermon-page in the paper. Let them get on with it, is the
general sentiment. So atheistic organizations remain small and
poor, opposing ridiculously slender resources and activities to a
clerical organization with 250,000 servants of one kind or other
and an income of a billion dollars a year. One of those literary
men who feel that we aggressive Atheists are "on the wrong line"
asked me how it was that we had such poor results. Like most of his
class, he had not the least idea how enormously Atheism has spread,
but the direct answer is that a few thousand people with almost no
resources do not usually make a spectacular success against a
billion-dollar corporation that controls the general education of
the country.
Let us not fool ourselves with phrases like, Great is Truth
and it will prevail. They knew quite a lot of truth in ancient
Greece, and it was buried for 15 centuries, Yet it is an
inestimable advantage to have the truth on your side, and it is the
first point in the strengthening of the position of the Atheist in
recent years that we have got weighty corroboration of our claim to
possess the truth. Materialistic Atheism -- and any other kind is
so rare, comparatively, that it need not be considered here -- is
the kind of negative position which is, nevertheless, based upon a
massive knowledge of realities. For most Theists nature proves, in
one way or other, the existence of God. And this at once makes
science a rival interpretation of nature and the natural enemy of
religion. It is a mere quibble to insist that science has no
concern whatever with God or spiritual realities, For more than a
century science has been busy giving a natural explanation of
phenomena which religious writers claimed to be inexplicable except
by assuming that there was an infinite spirit in the heavens and a
finite spirit in man. Attempts to shift the basis of Theism we will
consider in later essays, but for at least four-fifths of the
religious folk of America the basis of their belief in God is some
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aspect of nature (beauty, order, the mind, the moral sense, etc.)
which, they say, science will never explain without God and the
soul. Hence the question of the religious beliefs of scientific men
has always had considerable fascination, and I will take this
first.
1. American Men of Science
In the last essay I remarked that to a religions person it
must seem singular that, while he was assured on all sides that
science had ceased to be materialistic and had "created an
atmosphere more favorable to religion," he heard nothing about
conversions of scientific men. Possibly he gathered from the
incessant droning about the beautiful harmony of science and
religion that there was no need for conversions. One of the most
liberal and cultivated preachers of New York said, when certain
skeptical remarks of a scientist of secondary rank were reported to
him: "Yes, the little men of science say these things: the big men
are religious." Less liberal preachers will hardly grant us the
little men. Yet there is no other country in which the opinions of
scientific men about the fundamental propositions of religion --
God and immortality -- are so easily ascertained as they are in
America. Apart from other evidence, Professor Leuba gave very
definite and reliable statistics 20 years ago. That was in the bad
old materialistic days, before the heavenly twins of British
astronomy burst upon the scientific world. Fortunately, Professor
Leuba has covered the ground once more, and we have the most
positive evidence of what has really happened in the American
scientific world while the press and pulpits were rejoicing in the
change of heart of science.
The new analysis is, like all the new facts I here get
together, a triumph for Atheism. Men of science are considerably
more atheistic today than they were 20 years ago. Naturally
Professor Leuba does not call himself an Atheist, and probably very
few of the men whose opinions he gives would admit that title. But
I have explained in what sense I use the word; and, if it be
thought important, I could quote very respectable dictionary
authority for that use. Contrary to a widespread belief, it is the
word "Agnostic" that is loosely used in our generation. It was
coined by Huxley to designate a man who holds that from its own
nature the mind is incapable of answering such questions as whether
there is a God or not. They do not lie merely beyond the range of
science but beyond the range of thought. Why Huxley coined the new
word we need not consider here. He was himself in the accepted
meaning of the word an Atheist. The leading British religious
apologist in his time was Gladstone, and Murray's famous
Dictionary, in defining an Atheist as "one who denies or
disbelieves the existence of a God" -- Funk and Wagnalls Standard
Dictionary and Webster's New International Dictionary give the same
definition -- quote Gladstone using the word in that sense. The
leading Atheist of the time, Bradlaugh, defined his position in the
same sense. And since the word "disbelieve" is in the definition
plainly set in contrast to "deny," it means simply one who has no
belief in God. Huxley certainly had not, and not one of the
thousands of Agnostics I have known (including such well-known
leaders as Sir Leslie Stephen, Professor Sully, Sir E. Ray
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Lankester, E. Clodd, G.J. Holyoake, J.M. Robertson, etc.) or know
had the least doubt whether there was a God or not or considered
themselves precluded by the nature of the mind from valuating the
evidences for Theism.
Therefore, while Professor Leuba distinguishes between
believers, disbelievers, and doubters, I take both the latter
groups as men who are without belief in God and therefore Atheists.
For those, however, who regard the distinction as of any importance
I may say that of the nearly 2,000 men of science who replied to
the question whether they believed in a personal God only 30
percent said Yes; 56 percent said No (disbelievers, and only 14
percent were classed as Doubters (which seems to mean Agnostics).
Religious writers were severely hit by the book, Belief in God and
Immortality, in which Professor Leuba published his results in
1916, and they tried frantically to discredit his procedure. It was
ideally fair, and he repeated it in 1933. Of the 23,000 names in
Cattell's American Men of Science for 1933 he took one-tenth and
sent his questions to them. About 75 percent replied, and there
could not possibly be a fairer test. The only weakness I see is one
that favors the Godly. Cattell's list includes teachers of science
in religious colleges and universities, and we are not prepared to
take these as quite impartial witnesses of the same value as the
others.
But Professor Leuba knows well that the gross results are not
enough, and he classifies his men into Greater and Lesser and into
the four categories of Physicists, Biologist, Sociologists, and
Psychologists. The distinction between Greater and Lesser is taken
from Cattell, and the names that are starred as of special
distinction in his book were selected by leading authorities in
each branch of science. Again, therefore, the procedure is ideally
impartial, and the result adds to the triumph of Atheism and the
rout of preachers who say that it is "only the small men" who are
Atheists. Of the Lesser scientists 35 percent believe in God; of
the Greater only 13 percent. The Atheists are 65 percent of the
Lesser and 87 percent of the Greater. Do not forget that the
believers include an unknown proportion of teachers in religious
institutions.
The further analysis gives just as encouraging results. In the
last number I explained that since evidence for God is not found in
the world of "dead matter" but begins in the world of life and is
supposed to be strongest in the world of mind, the opinion of
physicists is of less value than that of biologists, and much less
value than that of sociologists and psychologists. It fully
confirms what I said when we find that of the physicists 38 percent
(43 percent Lesser and 17 Greater) believe in God: of the
biologists only 27 percent (12 percent Greater): of the
sociologists 24 percent (20 percent Greater and 5 percent Greatest,
according to a further refinement he makes in this case); of the
psychologists only 10 percent, and of the Greater Psychologists
only 2 percent. It does not concern me here and will be reported in
a later number, but it may be useful to say, briefly that while 41
percent of the physicists believe in an immortal soul, only 9
percent of the psychologists (mostly Lesser) believed.
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And the final point is the most encouraging of all. Since
1916, when the earlier results were published, frantic attempts
have been made to secure the names of scientific men for religions
lists. The late Dr. Osborn and Dr. Millikan made one attempt, in
the hope that it would check the Fundamentalist menace to the
teaching of science. It was a dismal failure, only about a dozen
men of science answering the call. The Churches used their
insidious pressure and intrigue, and they got a few university men,
who in some cases were seriously threatened by pressure, to begin
to attend chapel (which means nothing in such institutions) and go
on the lists. Now we get an impartial and scientific test of such
change as there has been in the attitude of science to the God-idea
in the last 20 years. I trust Professor Leuba will not mind if, as
is necessary, I borrow his cold statistical summary of the change
in regard to belief in God.
Henceforward any preacher or writer who claims that the big
men are believers, who quotes "A little learning is a dangerous
thing" or "The fool said in his heart," who tells his people that
it is "the camp-followers of science" who represent its teaching as
materialistic, is guilty of frigid and calculated inaccuracy or has
not read the outstanding piece of documentary evidence.
2. Tests in Great Britain
I have been severely rebuked both by religious writers and
certain scientific men for saying, as they represent, that men of
science are generally Atheists. I have, of course, never said that.
I have always said that the opinion of a scientific man on the
subject might be worth less than that of a truck driver who has
read critical literature about it -- look at the drivel written on
the subject by Millikan, Pupin and Osborn -- but that the success
of their various branches of science in giving us a materialistic
interpretation of reality so impresses them, that four-fifths of
them do not believe in God and not one in 10 is a Christian
believer. It will be understood that I was using the word "men of
science" in the British fashion. We mean men who are prominent in
the service of science, not any college-teacher of physics or
biology. And it seems that, according to this exact British test,
I kept my words, as I usually do, well within the truth. Not 20
percent, but only about 10 percent, of the more distinguished men
of science believe in a personal God.
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The situation is the same in England. Here no straight
questionnaire has been issued, and we have no exact statistics. But
there has in the last 20 years been the same frantic attempt as in
America to induce them to stand out on the side of the angels,
especially since Bishop Barnes was, on the strength of a knowledge
of mathematics, admitted to the higher scientific world. In the
weightiest of scientific periodicals, Nature, there actually
appeared a few years ago an editorial imploring men of science to
see that Atheism led to the "horrors" of the French and the Russian
Revolutions. It was a sordid appeal and from the angle of
historical fact on the level of a parochial magazine. But the
response has been no better than to the Osborn-Millikan appeal in
America. As I showed in the last volume of my 'Rise and Fall of the
Gods,' only a small proportion of British men of science have
gratified the Churches by publishing professions of belief. The
Congresses of the Church of England can no more attract them than
do the Conferences of the Protestant Episcopal Church of America.
No scientific man of any distinction belongs to the Catholic, the
Baptist, or the Methodist Church, and few but certain aged and very
heterodox scientists with a mystic vein associate even with the
Modernists of the Church of England.
That the situation is the same as in America is curiously
shown by a document recently published to prove the opposite. I
referred to one aspect of it in the last number. The British
Christian Evidence Society issued in 1932 a small work, The
Religion of Scientists, which purported to give the answers of
Fellows of the Royal Society to six questions about religion. The
book is, as I said, marked by the customary trickery of the man of
God. It boasts throughout of having received 200 expressions of
opinion and nowhere tells the readers that there are 503 Fellows of
the Royal Society, so that no less than 300 disdained to reply to
it. I am quite certain that Barnes secured a reply from every
religious Fellow. Further, the book grossly deceives the public by
giving them the impression that all the Fellows of the Royal
Society are men of science, if not the cream of British scientists.
The rules of the Society expressly state that candidates are not
necessarily of distinction in science but may be "such that their
election would be of signal benefit to the Society." Hence it
includes five royal princes, who could not tell a seismograph from
a saccharometer, five rich peers, a few ecclesiastics, lawyers,
admirals, statesmen (like Baldwin), and other odds and ends. What
is more important, it includes 47 foreigners, a large number of
colonial professors who are admitted often on imperialist grounds,
and a singularly large number of men with no academic position and,
as far as I can see -- I have read through the entire list -- of no
name whatever in science. Finally, distinction in science for the
purpose of the Society means distinction in applied science
(engineering, agriculture, etc.) as well as pure science.
It is thus easy to see that the Society might yield 100
favorable replies that did not include a single man of science of
any distinction or whose opinion is of the least value. Yet on the
two questions that afford something like a definite test only 47
and 74 respectively replied favorably. The first question of the
six was: Do you credit the existence of a spiritual domain? As I
have already pointed out, the word "spiritual" is now so ambiguous
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
that the fact that 121 (out of 503) replied in the affirmative
means nothing. It is interesting to note that only 24 out of the
121 permitted the publication of their names, and that 80 of them
were engaged in the physical sciences! The second question was even
more ambiguous; Is man in some degree responsible for his acts of
choice? They might as well ask if free will accounted for acts of
free will. It is meaningless that 173 replied Yes, but worthy of
noting that 80 of them were in the physical sciences, and only four
were psychologists or physiologists -- the only men fitted to
judge. The third question was: Is it your opinion that belief in
evolution is compatible with belief in a Creator? The ambiguity of
this will be seen when I say that Bertrand Russell is amongst those
who said yes: also Professor E.B. Bailey, who has taken the chair
for atheistic lectures of mine and made it clear in his letter to
the Society that he did not believe in a Creator. The fourth
question is worse: Do you believe that science negatives the idea
of a personal God as taught by Jesus Christ? It was open to any
atheistic scientist to reply No, since science never discusses God,
yet, significantly, the favorable replies now fell to 103 (mostly
chemists, physicists, and mathematicians), and 26 said yes. It
illustrates the relative morale of Atheists and believers that 25
of the 26 Atheists allowed the publication of their names, and only
67 of the pious 103 gave such permission.
The fifth question was honest enough: Do you believe that the
personalities of men and women exist after the death of their
bodies? The affirmers now fell with a bang to 47 (including, one
psychologist and no physiologist), while 41 said No. So 47 out of
503 -- by no means all scientists -- believe in immortality. It
would have been interesting if the next question had been: Do you
believe in a personal God? But such honesty would have been fatal.
It was: Do you think that the recent remarkable developments in
scientific thought are favorable to religious beliefs? Yet even to
this non-committal question the favorable replies were only 74, and
most of them explained that they meant that the new physics had
discredited Materialism. My book on the subject appeared in England
soon afterwards, and I am told that they would not get even 74
affirmatives today. In short, of 503 Fellows of the Royal Society
only 47 made a definite profession of belief in a fundamental
religious doctrine, and of these eight were physicists, eight
chemists, four botanists, three mathematicians (one a bishop), and
three geologists, but not a single one of England's great
physiologists. The document proves nothing, but suggests that, as
in America, only about one in 10 of the greater men of science
believe in God.
3. Other Countries
For other countries we have no statistics. Professors of
science generally resent such inquisitions, and in many places the
Atheist professor has only too good ground to do so. But we can
easily show that the proportion of atheistic scientists in the more
advanced countries of the world is about the same as in America and
Great Britain. In the first place, nearly all the distinguished
professors of science in France, Russia, and Japan are Atheists,
and this would balance any less proportion of them in other
countries. It would, however, he useless to inquire how many
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scientists are Atheists under the present regime in Germany,
Austria, Italy, and Spain. A large number of atheistic professors
have been dismissed and are in exile. In Italy the university
professors were so far atheistic 22 years ago (1913) that the
Minister of Education sent in their name a public telegram of
congratulation to Ernest Haeckel on his 80th birthday. From Spain
and even Austria the Catholic could get no more scientific support
than from France. The lists of "loyal sons of the Church" who were
also "great scientists" which are given in Catholic literature are
amusing. They suggest that the species became extinct about half a
century age. Just a few living men like Marconi are quoted; and
what Marconi thinks today about religion and what his thoughts are
worth we know not.
In 1931 Mr. Edward H. Cotton published a symposium to which he
gave the meretricious title 'Has Science Discovered God?' He soon
found that the number of American scientists who would help in the
holy work could be counted on one's fingers, so he made the quest
international. Jeans and Eddington spread their familiar plumes in
his columns, and even Julian Huxley, who does not believe in God,
contributed. Dr. Malcolm Bird and even Langdon-Davies were dragged
in to support the angelic doctors, and still the body of men
representing "science" was paltry. So the summons sped to Germany,
and Einstein, who was still there, was invited to respond. But all
that Einstein, who is very emotional and pacific, has said (in a
speech at Berlin in 1933) about his religion is that "the sense of
the mysterious" is "at the root of religion and beauty." On other
occasions he has seemed willing to apply the word God in a
Spinozistic sense to "the power of the universe" -- meaning, of
course, the universe itself -- but he is totally uninterested in
religion except in a humanitarian sense of the word and it does not
matter much what he says.
Dr. Luther Fry has tried another method. In the 'Scientific
Monthly' in 1933 he professed to analyze, the creed of the
distinguished Americans in Who's Who for 1910 and 1930 and find a
positive growth of religion in the 20 years. We know those
"distinguished Americans"; bankers, rich businessmen, clerics,
artists, judges, politicians, etc. Moreover, for some reason best
known to himself Dr. Fry examines only two-thirds of the names for
1910 and all of them for 1930, and he vaguely admits that in the
meantime there was some change in the method of getting the
religious affiliation of the victims. The only religious
significance of the creed-descriptions in 'Who's Who' is that which
Professors Huntingdon and Whitney pointed out. It is the stark
poverty of the Roman Catholic Church in men of distinction. They
have only seven per 100,000 of their members in Who's Who, to the
Unitarians 1,185 per 100,000; and how many of these Catholic
supermen are simply prelates, politicians, businessmen, etc., we
are not told. But the very fact that the intellectually
distinguished amongst the 30,000 men and women in 'Who's Who' so
remarkably prefer to say that their affiliation is Unitarian is
significant enough. Large numbers of Unitarian congregations do not
demand belief in God in their members.
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
CHAPTER III
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SOVIET RUSSIA
The chief basis of Atheism is the teaching of science, and we
now see that that foundation is firmer than ever. Tens of thousands
of times in the last 10 years people have been assured that there
was a change of heart in the scientific world and that what
Atheists and Materialists had claimed to be their strongest basis
was ruined. We have found this a statement that can escape the
charge of unveracity only on the supposition that the religious
writers who made it never study facts. In spite of all the frantic
appeals and subtle cajolery of prelates and their rich supporters,
who have often serious influence on universities, the proportion of
men of science who believe in God has fallen. We speak on the
ground of the most positive evidence when we say that only about
one in 10 of the more distinguished men of science now believe in
a personal God and that the majority of these believers belong to
those branches of science which least of all equip a man to pass a
critical judgment on the subject; and I may add, both from the
published names and published confessions of belief, that most of
these scientific Theists are men of the departing generation. The
younger men, especially in anthropology, psychology, physiology,
ethics, sociology, paleontology, and biology, have seen the
progress of research in the last 20 years afford a massive and
entirely consistent confirmation of the position of the Atheist and
Materialist. Our basis is sound. Science may almost be called
atheistic; and there is no higher authority in the modern world
upon which the people may rest their faith.
Hence God's apostles and publicity-agents strike a new note.
We will later notice the miserable sophistry that tries to persuade
people that if they have a "sense of God" or a religious intuition
or instinct that assures them of his existence, they need no proof.
This is, we shall see, whether it is said by Sir Arthur Eddington
(a dreamy Quaker in the non-scientific half of his brain) or by
some vapid Modernist preacher, as crude, in the light of modern
psychology, as is the belief in a flat earth. The new note which I
have here in mind is a sort of perversion or prostitution of
pragmatism or humanism: a theory which, with all respect to its
authors, is apt to lead to such consequences. Distrust rational
arguments, is the new appeal, for man is no mere logical machine.
His interests and emotions are the things that matter in shaping
his opinions. If these demand God, pay no attention to the
syllogisms of the Atheist. Smile at the philosophers who tell you
that they are agreed that all the old arguments for the existence
of God from the order and beauty and power of nature are as
illogical as the arguments of the old alchemists. We are all
sociologists, all practical men, today. Mix up a lot of discredited
history, some warm rhetoric about the world's troubles, and a
little pulpit-verbiage, and you can prove that if God did not exist
we should have to invent him. A Father Coughlin (with his economic
guides behind the curtain) becomes the savior of the race. A
Canadian bible-teacher, Aberhardt, switches in a year from lessons
on Moses and Jezebel to the economic control of a province. And so
on. God is found to be vital to our civilization.
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
1. The Religious Instinct Exploded
These pleas of the rights of the religious instincts and the
sociological value of the God-idea we will consider in themselves
in later numbers. Here, in taking Russia as the first country in
which there has been a phenomenal growth of Atheism, I would point
out that its experience completely discredits all these new
arguments for the God-idea. That is the next point in that triumph
of Atheism which the reactionaries have to use blackjacks,
automatics, and concentration-camps or jails to check. Those of us
who study these things candidly always knew that this theological
sociology was nonsense. The history it appeals to is a clotted mass
of untruth, our world has moved at least in the direction of real
civilization in exact proportion as it has rejected the theocratic
idea, and no statesman in the world today has any more idea of
getting inspiration from religion than has that one respectable
dictator of our time, the skeptical President of the Turkish
Republic. Yet in most countries the press and preachers talk so
unctuously about religion and reconstruction that the millions are
fooled. No wonder they hated and libeled Russia! For the news is
spreading, and is triumphing even over reactionary opposition that
Russia is doing the finest and soundest reconstructive work of our
time, and it is doing this, not only without God, but on a basis of
militant Atheism. It smothers the plea that we must "cooperate with
God," the pretense that there is any social wisdom in popes or
parsons. It furnishes a massive and magnificent proof of what
Shelley more than a hundred years ago called "The Necessity of
Atheism."
Further, the success of Soviet Russia as deeply discredits the
psychological as it does the sociological argument for the God-
idea. Here were 160,000,000 people who had been for ages, apart
from a small educated minority, as deeply rooted in religion,
according to the religious view, as the peasants of Ireland or
Mexico; and in less than 20 years half of them toss aside religion
as cheerfully as one discards one's overcoat on the first day of
spring. The same thing was seen in France in the third year of the
Revolution, and the facility with which half of the French people
gave up their creed in a year, not under pressure of but in spite
of the wishes of Danton and Robespierre, discredited the instinct-
argument long ago. In every country today, in fact, as I showed in
another book, the Churches are not ministering to a craving on the
part of the people, as this theory of an ineradicable religious
instinct requires, but are confessing the absence of such craving
by appealing to quite other instincts. To tell New York, Paris or
London, that the general character of its people, five-sixths of
whom do not want to hear anything about religion, is lacking in
fine elements which flourish in the character of folk in Georgia or
Oklahoma is too silly to be an insult. Yet that is what preachers
imply.
We will consider the psychology of the theory later, but an
ounce of fact is worth a ton of reasoning. And what has happened in
Russia is a very massive and instructive fact. Not only in towns
but in village after village, once the truth about Christianity and
the people was impressed upon, the villagers, they as a body,
except a few of the older folk, cashiered their priest and turned
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
the church into a library or a nursery. It was proved at once that
their "devotion to religion," as it had been called, was simply a
traditional practice protected by ignorance of the truth. But we
will first determine the real character of the movement and then
ascertain its size.
2. The Myth of Persecution
As soon as this disturbing fact of the rejection of all
religion by tens of millions of Russians broke through the clerical
embargo on truth, the cry was raised that it was not a voluntary
change of allegiance. Let me point out at once that, even if this
were true, it would not in the least lessen the force of the
argument against the sociological plea for God. For it is just
these leading men who are supposed to have persecuted religion that
have made the Russian civilization what it is today. They would
themselves be the fast to recognize the cooperative work of the
mass of the people, but, plainly, it is the planning and directive
work of men like Stalin and Litvinov that has had the chief share.
They are Atheists to a man -- or woman. The thousands of officers
who link them with the labor of the people are all aggressive
Atheists. The millions of members of the Communist party, who are
the backbone of the workers in the task of reconstruction, are all
Atheists. Until the 18th Century the leaders of every civilization
in Europe, apart from Spain and Sicily in the Middle Ages, were
Christians. We know what sort of civilization they created and
maintained. From the 18th Century onward there was an increasing
leaven of skepticism in the brain of the state; and there was an
increasing, improvement of its features. But in Russia we now have
a homogeneously atheistic body of men and women doing all the
directive work of the state, and the result is beginning to extort
admiration from the most reluctant writers. Even the ass has
spoken, and the prophet ceases to curse. With an irony that shows
only that nothing is too wild to say in the religious world,
preachers who a few years ago represented the Russian leaders and
officials as sadistic gorillas, from the taint of whose ideas other
nations must be preserved even at the cost of war, now tell their
followers that the Russians have invented a new religion!
What their idealism is and how far it has already been
realized we shall fully consider in the eighth and tenth numbers of
this series. And the cry of persecution has already so far declined
that we need not say much about it. As early as January 23, 1918,
the attitude of the new state toward religion was defined in
constitutional decrees, and one clause was:
"Every citizen is at liberty to practice any religion or none
at all. All penalties attaching to the practice of any creed
whatever, or to the non-practicing of any creed, are abolished."
That law was never altered, but in the year of the invasion of
Russia by White and foreign armies large numbers of the priests
(especially Catholic priests, who are for the most part Poles)
intrigued with the invaders and in many ways made the task of the
Soviet government more difficult. Any man who has any doubt about
this should read their own confessions as quoted in Dr. Sherwood
Eddy's pamphlet, 'The Soviet War on Religion,' In 1923 the
Patriarch of the Russian Church said in an address to his
followers:
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"We recognize our offense before the Soviet government,
namely, our many passive and active anti-Soviet activities
recounted in the charge laid against us in the Supreme Court."
The All-Russian Church Assembly in 1923 said:
"From the summer of 1917 onward the responsible leaders
of the Church took up a definite counter-revolutionary
attitude."
On November 5, 1927, a group of Catholic priests in the
Ukraine published a letter in which they said:
"We have been guilty more than once of yielding to the
temptation of political activity, frequently establishing
relations with the agents of the Polish bourgeoisie and the
Polish capitalist state."
A Catholic priest and protopresbyter, Nicholas Tolstoy, wrote
a letter in a Kharkov paper in February, 1929, to say that, while
he remained a Catholic, he renounced the priesthood on this ground:
"The Roman Catholic priesthood embodies all the hatred of
the capitalist West to the Workers' government."
He said that priests in the Ukraine had for 10 years "acted as
propagandists of Polish imperialism ... in full touch with Poland
and with the blessing of the Vatican." In fine, the Anglo-Russian
Catholic lady, Miss Almedingen, whose 'Catholic Church in Russia'
gives a tearful story of persecution of priests in 1922 -- though
the facts she honestly tells are mild as milk in comparison with
the fiery mendacity written by priests in America -- admits that
the charges against these priests "were of course true from a
Soviet standpoint" (p. 96). The lady could hardly expect the Soviet
courts to judge delinquent priests from the Vatican standpoint!
Let me recall to the mind of the reader that at the very time
when a few priests were being shot -- Miss Almedingen gives only
one such case -- or imprisoned in Russia hundreds of Socialists and
Communists were being murdered in Italy, and the Pope was preparing
to accept the red hand of Mussolini and was blessing the regime of
tyranny and cruelty in Poland. You will have read all this in the
'Appeal to Reason,' The Catholic attitude was cynical in the
extreme, and the Pope richly deserves the world-opprobrium he has
now drawn upon himself by his trimming over Ethiopia. As to the
charge that the Soviet authorities brought about the mass-movement
to Atheism by any sort of compulsion, the heads of the religious
bodies in Russia repeatedly repudiated it. In 1928, while rabbis in
New York were praying Jehovah and his Wall Street servants to
punish the Russian Communists, 31 Russian-Jewish rabbis published
a letter in which they said:
"The Jews living in the U.S.S.R. have received complete
and absolute equality. There is not a single government in the
world which has done as much for the Jewish people, persecuted
for ages, as the Soviet government."
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
On February 14, 1930, the Acting Patriarch, the Metropolitan
of Saratov, the Archbishop of Khutinsk, and the bishop of Orekhovo
Zueva signed a statement repudating all the stories of atrocities
published in England and America in that year and declaring:
"There has never been, nor is there, any persecution of
religion in the U.S.S.R."
We need not go further. The cry has died away -- because there
is no longer the least hope of intervention in Russia.
3. The Extent of Russian Atheism
Similar lies were told about the League of Militant Atheists
which was represented as an instrument of the government for the
destruction of Churches and the degrading of the minds of the
people with cartoons and caricatures. The League is, and has always
been, a voluntary association with a few million members for the
education of the people in Atheism. It has no power to close or
destroy churches, and none have been alienated or destroyed except
at the demand of the great majority of the worshipers or, in a very
few cases, to meet specific civic requirements. As to the
caricatures, they were at least true and in better taste than some
of the novels and even positive statements made about Russia. The
Pope still mumbles as if the wild rumor that the Communists
advocated Common ownership of women had not been exploded years
ago.
I am not here to describe life in Russia -- we shall see it
later -- but I would recommend any religious lady who shudders at
the description given her of Russian character to reflect on this
fact, which I take from the current issue of the highly respectable
and conservative British Observer. It says that "Tolstoy's
following in Russia has kept steady pace with the phenomenal growth
of the number of Soviet readers." In 1917 only 26,000 copies of his
works were published: in 1933 more than half a million. In 1935
"nearly a million" volumes of his works will be published, and that
will bring the total published since the Revolution to nearly
12,000,000. And Tolstoy would be described even by parsons as one
of the most spiritual and anti-sensual writers. Probably we shall
next hear that Russia menaces the world with a mania for
asceticism.
How many Atheists are there amongst the 160,000,000 people of
the U.S.S.R.? The head of the League, Yaroslavsky, whom Dr.
Sherwood Eddy calls a man of "transparent honesty and earnestness
of character," said in August, 1932, that the most that could be
claimed by the Church was that 100,000,000 Russians were still
religious. There were then 5,500,000 members of the League of
Militant Atheists: 40 percent of the Trade Unionists were Atheists:
and not less than 10,000,000 workers on the collective farms were
Atheists. That -- a total of at least 60,000,000 Atheists -- was
the careful estimate of the chief expert in 1932. But the movement
has spread very rapidly since that time. The collective farms, with
their educational and atheistic atmosphere, have enormously
increased, and the work in the towns has so far progressed that the
League of Militant Atheists has recently decided to relax its
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efforts and leave it mainly to the schools and literature to
complete' the work. Even in 1932, Yaroslavsky said, more than half
the children of Russia were Atheists, and of the 5,500,000 members
of the League nearly one-third were women. In carrying out its Five
Year Plan the League had risen from 400,000 to 5,500,000 members,
and the young Atheists' Association had risen from 10,000 to about
2,000,000. Moreover, nearly 25,000,000 children were being educated
in the entirely atheistic government schools.
It is temperate to conclude that with three further years of
this zealous propaganda the Atheists must now be in a majority or
must number something like 100,000,000, but for the purpose of this
work I count only 80,000,000. The towns are over-whelmingly
atheistic. Walter Duranty observed in 1931 that of the former 1,600
churches of Moscow "only a scanty few" were left open, and these
sufficed even at Easter for "the small but faithful remnant:"
"Religion is dying in Moscow," he said. In villages that still had
churches, he reported to the New York Times, 70 percent of the
people were content with civic marriage and registering of births
and deaths. Describing the destruction of one of the most venerated
churches in Moscow, on which there had been tearful and shuddering
comments in religious and many other papers, Duranty reported that
there was no excitement in Moscow. "New Russia does not care," he
said; "its past is dead, and it is glad." Next year a more
intensive campaign of aggressive Atheism was inaugurated and the
work proceeded with great success. Another correspondent who will
certainly not be accused of bias in favor of either Atheism or
Communism, Cummings of the London News-Chronicle, visited Russia in
1935. He paid a remarkable tribute to the work that was being done,
and he gave the gist of conversations he had with the people about
religion. The younger, he said, have finished with religion: only
some of the old folk cling to it.
Since exact figures are not obtainable, it is unnecessary to
multiply these quotations. Correspondents like Duranty and
Cummings, who know Russia and are recognized as impartial witnesses
on such a matter as religion, all tell the same story. In the towns
religion is "dead": that is to say, all but a small minority,
estimated in Moscow at less than 10 percent, are Atheists. Tourists
who go there with the belief that the government has forcibly
suppressed religion write home ecstatically about the "crowds of
worshippers" they saw in a church here and there, and professional
religious correspondents beat up reports of an apostle in one place
or another who promises a religious revival. But Atheism steadily
and rapidly grows. The dense mass of the illiterate peasantry who
were the most refractory to Atheism are being educated so rapidly
that in provinces where 98 percent were illiterate 15 years ago,
now 98 percent can read; and they do read. The agricultural trouble
is practically over, and the collective farms have triumphed. All
the children of the nation are being educated in schools in which
the entire curriculum and all the teachers are atheistic and
materialistic; while Russia already surpasses Germany, France, and
Great Britain in the proportion of youths and girls who receive
higher (and always atheistic) education. In 20 years the number of
those who have ceased to be Christians and become Atheists in
russia alone is well over 50,000,000 and nearer 100,000,000; and
the majority of the remainder are old folk who will die out or the
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very backward peoples of Asiatic Russia who are already being
educated out of their superstitions. But, as I said at the start,
I am not going to put even the full legitimate weight on my
evidence. Let us say that beyond question. 80,000,000 Russians, or
one half, and the younger half of the population, are now Atheists.
CHAPTER IV
ATHEISM IN AMERICA AND ENGLAND
One of the desperate pleas of those who do not like to see the
world passing away from Christianity is that there is "a
considerable and increasing interest in religion." That is to say,
they bully the press into giving a large space to the activities of
the Churches and use their wealth to put religion on the ether
(radio) and in the topical pictures, and then they ask us to be
impressed. When some scientific man writes a book which seems to be
favorable to religion, they boost its circulation and then flaunt
the figures in our faces. Curiously, they never mention as an
indication of interest in religion the immense circulation of
280,000,000 Little Blue Books. But the best test of the sincerity
of these people is that, as I said, not the least attempt is made
to ascertain even approximately how many in the last 20 years have
passed from Christianity to Atheism, though the figure obviously
runs to tens of millions.
In the very conspicuous case of Russia the religious writer
first says that the change has been brought about by compulsion,
which you easily disprove, and then he objects that the fascination
of some millions of peasants who have just learned to read for new
ideas is unimportant and transitory. Again he completely ignores or
misrepresents Russian experience. We might make a broad distinction
of three intellectual levels in Russia. The highest is that of the
higher officials, technical experts, professors, writers, artists,
and all who have received higher education. No one questions that
the man and women of this category are solidly atheistic. The
second intellectual level is that of the skilled workers, town-
workers generally, officials of third and fourth grade, and youths
and young women who have had secondary or technical education.
These are overwhelmingly, though not so completely, atheistic. The
third level is that of the mass of the peasants, the great majority
of whom were illiterate until a few years ago. And it is in that
category that you find the remaining tens of millions of believers,
and particularly in the remoter provinces where education is most
difficult. To point out a few exceptions to this classification is
polemical trickery. It is the broad truth that matters.
But the chief blunder of these people is to imagine that when
we speak of Atheism in our time we are thinking only, or almost
entirely, of Russia. There are today more Atheists outside Russia
than there are under the Soviet rule, That is what I have now to
show, and we will begin with a consideration of the number of
Atheists in the United States and Great Britain.
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
1. Statistics Made by Holy Men
The government of the United States was persuaded many years
ago to omit from the census-papers the clause that asked a man's
religious "affiliation." The clause itself was deliberately
ambiguous and was intended to enable men and women to say that they
had some sort of connection with a Church, or disliked it less than
others, though they never attended its services. But skepticism
continued to grow, and the clergy persuaded officials that the best
way to ascertain how many Catholics and Protestants there are in
the country is to ask the Churches. It must have tickled the genial
cynicism of our civil servants, but they agreed. How nice and easy
their work would be in the Treasury if they just had to ask a man
what his income is and need not trouble to put any check on his
statement.
As a result, naturally, we get fantastic figures of church-
membership at which the clergy often smile. Dr. McConnell says in
his Christianity, an Interpretation, (p. 229):
"Church statistics are worth less than nothing. It is
probably speaking within bounds to say that not one parish in
10 could find and locate one half the number of members it
reports."
In the circumstances the preciseness of these religious
statistics is an exquisite piece of humor. At the last census we
learned that there were just 54,576,346 Christians in America. It
conveyed an impression -- to some people -- of swarms of priests
and parsons perspiring over their books and meticulously counting
their sheep to the last unit.
I once, in my clerical days, was staying with a priest when,
in my presence and talking to me about it all the time, he made up
his figures for his own clerical authorities. These were not for
publication, and his authorities demanded to know not only how many
Catholics actually attended services but also how many there were
in his parish who were baptized Catholics. He did not know the
first figure within hundreds and the second within thousands but he
reported that there were about 5,000 nominal Catholics in his
parish and about 1,000 real Catholics. This was an exceptionally
bad case for the people were wretchedly poor and the Church was not
so keen as it would be in a comfortable suburb of Boston, but it
illustrates how such statistics are made. At the best they mean
only that a clergyman who keeps a register counts the names of all
who were inscribed in it and not known to him to be dead. What
proportion of them have given up their creed and never came near
his church he has, as a rule, not the least idea.
The inconsistency and other peculiar features of the
statistics give them away to any person who examines them closely.
The Roman Catholics, for instance, counted their numbers in their
Directory as 2,000,000 more than they figured in the Census of
Religions, and their learned representative who was invited to
write on them in the new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica
gave them a further 5,000,000 or so. They claimed even in the
Census of 1926 that during the preceding 10 years they had, as
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
usual, grown even more rapidly than the growth of population, yet
on another page it appeared that, whereas in 1916 they had reported
1,860,000 Sunday School pupils, and the admirable fertility of
Catholic mothers ought to have raised this in 10 years to well over
the 2,000,000 mark, they in 1926 reported only 1,201,000. They
clearly lost nearly a million children of Sunday-School age in 10
years yet boasted of an almost miraculous growth.
In No. 1 of the Appeal to Reason Library I carefully analyzed
the Roman Catholic total for 1928. Different versions of that total
in Catholic publications airily differed from each other by one to
two millions, though each of them was precise to the final unit,
and the 'Christian Century' made a careful estimate, on information
supplied by the Catholic clergy themselves, which was more than
3,000,000 less than the lowest Catholic estimate. I referred my
readers for remarkable disclosures by Catholics to John F. Moores's
work, Will 'America Become Catholic?' He shows that Catholic
writers in some cases nearly doubled figures supplied by the
priests for the purpose of the Census, and that even these latter
figures were shown by Catholic local inquiry to be 30, 40, and in
some cases nearly 50 percent exaggerated. He quotes a Catholic
writer in a Catholic periodical complaining bitterly that the
statistics supplied by the priests are "shockingly suggestive of
either prevarication or down-right stupidity." They are, he says,
"padded" and for the purpose of "deceiving ourselves and others."
In short, I gave ample proof that Catholics in America number at
the most 15,000,000 instead of 22,000,000 people. Any reader who
cares to go back to my article in the Appeal will recognize that
even the figure of 15,000,000 is optimistic.
2. The Sad Reality
I have already quoted Protestant divines making even larger
deductions from their statistics, so we are fully assured that the
figures are very high above the truth. Is it possible to have some
sort of approximate idea how many do belong to the various
Christian bodies? Church going is still the safest test, for the
small number of genuine Christians who never attend any church is
more than offset by the number of those who do attend but do not
accept the creed in any fashion, even in the Modernist
interpretation of it. And the assurances of religious writers and
impartial observers which I have repeatedly quoted make it quite
plain that the number falls enormously short of the figure of
50,000,000 to 60,000,000 which is usually given. In the Catholic
Fortnightly Review for January 1, 1927, it was pointed out that for
one Catholic diocese the Census figure was 21,268 and the Catholic
Directory figure, 39,450, for the same year. But I have made it
quite clear that the Catholic one-third of the supposed total
number of Christians must be reduced by 30 percent, and we may
safely make the same deduction from all the figures.
This would give the real number of church-going folk as about
40,000,000. Seeing that, as I will tell in a moment, the clerical
authorities in Great Britain admit that they hold only one-fifth of
the population, to allow that the Churches in America control one-
third seems too generous. Probably the very much larger proportion
of rural population and the colored folk of the southern states do
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give the American churches a higher percentage than the British:
though in the circumstances it is not a matter to boast about. But
let us not be finicky. Let us give them a round 40,000,000 for all
Churches. When I was running the 'Militant Atheist,' I quoted from
the ordinary press one witness after another declaring from
personal observation and inquiry that nothing like one-third of the
people go to church. But, as I said, let us have a little Christian
charity or generosity.
This leaves at least 80,000,000 Americans who do not attend
church, chapel, or synagogue. Now, how many of these are Atheists?
Well, your guess is almost as good is mine, but let me give you a
few pointers. First, if only 30 percent of the ordinary professors
of science in the universities and higher colleges believe in a
personal God, we suspect that the proportion is not likely to be
higher among their pupils. Professor Leuba made an exact inquiry of
some interest more than 20 years ago. He had a questionnaire
distributed in nine colleges and received 927 replies from students
of 18, 19 and 20 years. It turned out that 56 percent of the young
men believed in a personal God (82 percent of the girls), but we
are not told if any of the colleges were religious or under
religious influence. More instructive was the result of an inquiry
into the belief in immortality in a college of such religious
respectability that even Roman Catholics were found in it. Here
80.3 percent of the freshmen, 76.2 of the sophomores, 60 percent of
the juniors, and 70.1 percent of the seniors believed in
immortality; and the greater amount of belief amongst seniors than
juniors was explained by the fact, which all attested, of the
"intellectual superiority of the junior class." In both
investigations many refused to reply. We see that a very high
proportion lose their beliefs in transit through college. Nearly
half (or 40 percent) of the male students of senior rank became or
were Atheists.
But this was a few years before 1916, or more than 20 years
ago, and it will hardly be questioned that there is much more
skepticism among the men, and especially the young women, today.
Unfortunately we have had no further exact inquiries and can only
conclude that the Christian young men who write to the papers to
say that there was not a single Atheist in their colleges were
either brought up in cotton wool or mean by Atheist what no Atheist
does mean. Taking middle class and working class together it is
impossible to say statistically what proportion of the 80,000,000
non-Christian Americans are Atheists. It would be of considerable
service if Atheists would make careful reports, based upon entirely
impartial personal knowledge and inquiry, what proportion of the
non-church-going people whom they can reach are Atheists. I have
made extensive inquiries of this kind in England, and both in
England and America it is my favorite practice, not to inspect
civic halls and other buildings, but to eat in every variety of
eating-shop and listen to the conversation of the people
everywhere. We must further take into account the tone of the
literature the people read, the plays and talkies and vaudeville
they prefer. In a later number of this series of essays I will
carefully analyze the change that has, in spite of censors, come
over this kind of literature and entertainment, but everybody knows
that the situation today reveals that tens of millions not only
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
want "godless" novels and shows but keenly enjoy any jest about
religion that the censors permit. Certainly one-fourth, probably a
third, of the non-church goers do not believe in God. But I have
better material for judgment in the case of England, where the
situation must be much the same as in America.
3. England Passing to Atheism
First let us get the number of church-going folk in England
and Wales (which have joint statistics). I have repeatedly pointed
out during the last 10 years that the combined Churches, which
every year supply their figures of membership, to such annuals as
the 'Statesman's Year Book' and 'Whitaker's Almanack,' do not claim
even one-fourth of the population of England and Wales; and it is
the same in Scotland, yet, such is the general educational
atmosphere in which we live that I still find a skeptical London
audience surprised when I mention the fact. There is now little
excuse for surprise. In 1934 the heads of the Church of England
appointed a committee to make as severe an inquiry as possible into
these figures, and the published result was that of the 40,000,000
people of England and Wales between 80 and 90 percent do not go to
church. The clergy now put it that they control only one-fifth of
the population;. and this has recently been repeated by Father
Knox, one of the leading Roman Catholic propagandists. It is
therefore an admitted figure that 32,000,000 people in Great
Britain do not belong to any Church or attend any services. The
true figure is probably higher. There are churches within a mile of
my home of which the ministers refuse to marry any who will not
submit and induce their families to submit to baptism first; and so
urgent is the craving of girls for the picturesque church-wedding
that I know of whole families of Atheists who, with sonorous
cursing behind the parson's back, submitted. They, of course, never
entered the church again, but they are on the list of members of
the Church of England. I see all round me people, of the one-tenth
or one-twentieth of church-goers in London, who "affiliate"
avowedly for social reasons.
These people, as I said, offset the number of folk who
genuinely and deliberately believe in God or Christianity yet never
go to church. But what proportion of the 32,000,000 are Atheists?
Inquiries which I have had made into the frame of mind -- that is
what it really comes to -- of dozens of middle-class and working-
class families which do not go to church yet have no connection
with atheistic associations and have never read atheistic
literature report that about half are scornfully atheistic and in
the other half one gets a value frame of mind shading from "I don't
know -- I think there must be something in it" to a definite belief
that there must be a God who "made the world." The real difficulty
in counting Atheists is that between the men and women who
emphatically say they do not believe there is a God -- they
generally refer to the cruelty of life and the hypocrisy of the
clergy and religious people -- and the men and women who promptly
and definitely say they do believe, there are millions who never
think about the subject until they are asked, and they are then apt
to say that "there must be something in it." Without hesitation we
may say that at least a fourth of them, probably a third, have no
belief in God.
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
And this is strongly confirmed by the few attempts that have
been made to elicit their opinions. About a dozen years ago -- I
have lost the cutting and this remarkable experience is never
mentioned in books on religion -- the 'Daily News' urged its
readers to reply to 14 questions about religion. Of the 500,000
readers of the paper, which was the favored daily paper of
Methodists and Baptists, Only 15,168 filled out the questionnaire,
though for two months they were implored to do so, and many
clergymen joined in the request. I do not see how any man, in such
circumstances and in view of the semi-religious character of the
paper, can suggest a reason why a disproportionate number of
Atheists should reply; yet of the 15,000, only 9,991 said that they
believed in a personal God and 2,686 said they did not. By
arrangement the questions were published simultaneously in the
London Nation, a middle-class weekly. Of those who replied in this
case 537 professed belief and 736 rejected the belief. The figures
are so small that we can do no more than draw the broad conclusion
that the proportion of Atheists amongst non-church goers is very,
high, It confirms my moderate estimate that at least a third of
them do not believe in God.
The cultural level is so much the same in England and America
that the admission of the British heads of Churches, that they have
lost four-fifths of the people, suggests a parallel situation in
America. If one accepts that suggestion, the number of non-church
goers in America rises to more than 90,000,000, and at least a
fourth of these have no religious beliefs. The time has gone by for
admitting the frivolous claim that people who never go to church
are really Christians without the church-going habit. In September,
1935, the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral (London), one of the abler
officials of the Church of England, said at a Church conference:
"I do not believe that more than 20 percent of the people
of this country are in any possible sense of the word
Christians."
We have no reason whatever to speak different of the 80,000,000 or
more Americans who never go to church, and one is surely very
generous in entertaining the idea that even one half of them
cherish a pure theistic belief though they never hear a sermon and
few read religious books.
CHAPTER V
THE SPREAD OF ATHEISM IN EUROPE
The similarity of cultural and clerical conditions in America
and Great Britain and the absence of any large atheistic political
party justify me in considering both apart from the condition of
continental Europe. There we have an extraordinary situation. In
nearly half of Europe, apart from European Russia, Atheism is
proscribed and persecuted. It is regarded as a symptom if not a
cause of political views. Hence not even the most resolute sophist
will ask us to measure Atheism in Fascist countries today by
expressions of it. We must measure its growth in the last period in
which Atheists had freedom of expression, and this will provide us
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with some formidable statistics. In other countries we must proceed
much as we have done in regard to America, though in some of them,
even in small countries, we have official registers of professions
of Atheism which must surprise those who are not on the alert for
such matters.
1. The Triumph in Germany
German statistics of religion show only the complete
worthlessness of the kind of "religious statistics" that are still
published annually in works of reference and included in
encyclopedias which pride themselves on their accuracy. They take
from the official annual, the 'Statisches Jahrbuch,' the statement,
represented as based upon the declarations of the people
themselves, that as late as 1933 the Germans were 62.7 percent
Protestant (40,000,000) and 32.5 percent Catholic (21,000,000).
None are put in the category of "no religion." Yet in the preceding
year the Catholics, who have their own political (Center) party and
are rigorously bound to vote for its candidates, cast only 12
percent instead of 32 percent of the total votes! I have elsewhere
explained that these neglected figures really provide the key to
the situation in Germany today. Roman Catholicism is in ruins. It
has in about 10 years lost more than 10,000,000 of its working-
class adherents and can therefore be treated by Hitler as an almost
negligible factor in the political situation. We are expected to be
patient and polite while Catholic publications in America boast of
a few tens of thousands of converts snatched from other Churches
and deny this enormous loss of millions in Germany by giving that
country the conventional figure of 20,000,000 followers of the
Vatican.
Until about 20 years ago Germany was in much the same
condition as regards religion as America and Great Britain. In the
cities at least four-fifths of the people never attend church-
services of any sort, and the "best sellers" amongst the thoughtful
reading public were Atheists like Nietzsche and Haeckel. It was
said during the war that half the soldiers had Nietzsche in their
bags and half the Bible. The one very important difference was that
Socialism counted millions of followers amongst the workers, and it
was preponderantly or quite generally atheistic. Its great leaders
had all been, and in fact were 20 years ago, outspoken Atheists.
The Russian Revolution gave an impetus to Communism, and between
1923 and 1933 it spread so widely that the fear of its capturing
Germany was made the pretext for the propagation of Fascism (as
Nazism really is) and the burning, of the Reichstag by the Nazis to
secure their triumph.
This strength of the Communists and Socialists at the last
free elections in 1932 gives us an exact indication of the minimum
number of Atheists in Germany. I say minimum because just the same
proportion of Atheists were found in the middle class as in other
advanced countries. The Communists were solidly and aggressively
atheistic, and, though there had been attempts to get rid of the
old aggressive Atheism of the Socialists, no Catholic could belong
to the party, and, if any Protestants or other Theists did, their
number was far more than counterbalanced by the millions of
Atheists in the middle class and the non-Socialist working class.
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The Nazis themselves are, as their treatment of both Churches
plainly shows, very largely Atheists. We may therefore take the
number of Communists and Socialists as at least a minimum
indication of the growth of Atheism.
We find that, while the Catholics polled 4,230,644 votes at
the last free election (November, 1932), the Communists cast
5,980,540 votes and the Socialists 7,251,752. Had it not been for
their unhappy mutual hostility they would now, or in a few years,
be the majority in Germany. Together they obtained 13,232,292 out
of a national total of 35,148,470 votes, or nearly 40 percent of
the whole. Here we have plain indication that by 1932 at least 40
percent of the people of Germany, or about 24,000,000 men, women,
and children, had become Atheists. I have already said that for
some years the Socialist body has not been homogeneously atheistic,
but the bitter denunciation of the body by Catholic and other
Church authorities has prevented it from attracting any large
number of religious voters. These are negligible in comparison with
the vast number of Atheists in the middle class and the ranks of
the Nazi movement itself. At least 30,000,000 of the 65,000,000
people of Germany are now Atheists in the proper sense of the word.
2. France, Spain, and Italy
France is the classic land of Atheism in Europe. In spite of
long periods of political reaction at various times in the 19th
Century the French nation never returned with deep and genuine
attachment to the Roman religion which it spontaneously deserted
from about 1792 to 1800 (when Napoleon reimposed it). The year 1880
fairly marks the final defeat of Roman Catholicism and the complete
secularization of the life of the country. The annexation of
hundreds of thousands of Catholic Alsatians and Lorrainers added to
the strength of the Church in 1919, and the dread of the Pope's
influence in those disaffected provinces has in the last 16 years
moderated the anti-clerical note. But, as I have elsewhere shown,
even French Catholic writers do not claim that there are more than
6,000,000 "practicing Catholics" in the country; and I need only
remark that I am myself, in theology, the kind of person they call
a non-practicing Catholic, to show how absurd the distinction is.
I have proved that there are only about 5,000,000 Catholics and
less than a million Protestants in the population of 40,000,000.
The religious belief or unbelief of the 34,000,000 who, though
they may often get the priest to bury their dead and baptize their
children -- a matter of custom -- are cynically opposed to all
Churches and all attempts to found a theistic or spiritualist
religion, can hardly be in serious doubt. To the enormous majority
of them religion means only one thing, Catholicism, and they have
rejected it. No people so thoroughly appreciate jokes at the
expense of religion and its petit bon Dieu (good little God) as the
French do. The atheistic note is predominant in every town, and the
10,000,000 Radical-Socialist, Socialist, and Communist organized
workers are solidly atheistic. Add a large proportion of the non-
Socialist but republican workers and nearly the whole of the middle
class, and you see that considerably more than half the population
is atheistic. We can safely say that there is a minimum of
20,000,000 Atheists in France.
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
In Italy there are at present no aggressive Atheists and there
is little open expression of Atheism. It was part of the bargain
with the Pope that critics of religion should be imprisoned. The
law, it is true, cannot be strictly applied, for Atheists formed a
large part of the Fascist movement which bore Mussolini, who seems
still to be an Atheist, to power. We must, however, take the
situation as it was before Mussolini passed his infamous laws for
the restriction of liberty. In 1908 I proved in my 'Decay of the
Church of Rome' that already at least 6,000,000 Italians had
quitted the Church. Higher teaching was mainly in the hands of
Atheists, and popular and rather caustic atheistic weeklies had a
circulation of more than a million amongst the workers. From that
date the Socialist movement, which in Italy is atheistic and
bitterly condemned by the Church, rapidly advanced. At the election
of 1919, the last entirely free election, it secured 1,840,593 out
of a national total of 3,500,000 votes. Atheistic Socialism and
Communism had won the immense majority of the town-workers and a
very large part of the peasants. But I have thoroughly examined the
situation in the 'Appeal to Reason' (No. 1) and will merely quote
my conclusion that there were at least 10,000,000 Atheists in
Italy. Thousands are dead or in jail but persecution has changed no
opinions.
In the same quarterly I have examined the religious situation
in Spain and shown that it corresponds closely to that of Italy.
Until the Catholic intriguer Gil Robles and the treacherous Lerroux
took advantage of the quarrels of Socialists and Communists to
destroy the power of both, they had been for some years the
dominant party in the government. What splendid work their
atheistic leaders did we shall see later. Even today so powerful is
the anti-Roman sentiment in the towns that the masterful Robles has
been checked for more than a year in his attempts to restore the
full power of Church and monarchy. At all events, the results of
both municipal and general elections showed to the end of 1933 that
the Socialists, Communists, and other atheistic bodies controlled
half the voters. Anti-clericals generally had 255 out of the 463
deputies to the Cortes. In Latin countries anti-clerical generally
means Atheist. God is to them the God of the Catholic Church.
Except in cultivated circles there is virtually no literature
urging people to believe in any other sort of God, and the popular
press does not, as in America, keep up the pretense that ours is a
Christian civilization under the presidency of a deity.
Protestantism they disdain, and by "religion" they almost
invariably mean the Roman creed. In such circumstances it is
temperate to conclude that of the 55,000,000 anti-clericals of
France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal at least 40,000,000 have no
belief in God.
3. In the Smaller Countries
It is enough for my purpose in this essay to indicate the
existence of the larger bodies of Atheists, which run to millions
or tens of millions, so I need not examine every country in Europe.
In fact, there are few cases in which it is possible to use exact
statistics as a base, but there are several such cases, and they
are very significant. Census reports are apt to be, as I have shown
in the case of Germany, quite ridiculous, but wherever in a Census
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a body of men and women write down that they have "no religion" we
may certainly take these as the more definite or aggressive
Atheists of that country. On the other hand, the smallness in some
cases of the number of those who so describe themselves is not in
the least a proof of the scantiness of Atheists. In Sweden and
Norway, for instance, the number is negligible, yet one has only to
reflect that in those countries the Socialists are so powerful that
they are sometimes described as Socialist states; and any person
who imagines that the immense body of Swedish Socialists and
Communists, who together number more than a million adults in a
population of 6,000,000 are religious is very far astray.
Whatever be the routine of demanding one's religious
description in Norway and Sweden, there is complete liberty in
Czechoslovakia and Holland, and the result is interesting. In
Czechoslovakia, the 14,000,000 people of which are so predominantly
agricultural that there are only six cities with more than 50,000
people, no less than 854,638 adults reported themselves at the
Census of 1931 as of "no religion." It would be a desperate
apologist who would try to persuade us that "no religion" means
simply no Church. The Freethought movement is stronger in
Czechoslovakia, where the atheistic President Masaryk has for
decades been the chief popular idol, than in any other country in
Europe. In July of last year (1935) there was a demonstration in
the great square at Prague by 40,000 Atheists. This body grew up
independently of the anti-clericalism of Socialists and Communists,
who now number 1,700,000 adult voters. Doubtless many of these
figure also in the statistics of Freethinkers, but it is clear that
there must be, counting their families (generally) with the adults,
2,000,000 to 3,000,000 Atheists in the small country.
Holland, with a population of only 8,000,000, returned no less
than 1,144,393 men and women as of "no religion" at the Census of
1930. We are thus fortunate in having precise statistics in a few
cases, and these give us some clue to the situation in other
countries. Denmark, for instance, is certainly not behind Holland
in the growth of advanced opinions. Belgium has a million
Socialists and Communists, Poland half a million, even Bulgaria
about 200,000. Austria had, until Dollfuss and the religious
criminal Starhemberg brought out their artillery, a formidable body
of 1,578,000 Socialists and Communists, and the massacre of some
hundreds has not induced the remainder to become convinced that
there is a God in the heavens. The only prayer they say is probably
that which Catholic neighbors in Bavaria mutter under their Nazi
authorities:
Lieber Herrgott, mach mich stumm,
Dass Ich nicht in Dochau Kumm.
Which may be translated: "Dear God, make me dumb so that I won't
give myself away." Thus even if we suppose that little more than a
tenth of the population of these smaller countries of Europe are
Atheists, it adds some 10,000,000 to our total; and I have given
precise evidence that in many of them the number of Atheists is
nearer one-fifth than one-tenth.
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CHAPTER VI
SWEEPING THE WORLD
Let me repeat that the chief basis of my estimate consists of
statistics that cannot be controverted. All Communists in Europe
are Atheists, and from Great Britain, where the old anti-clerical
tradition of Labor has been abandoned for the sake of enlarging the
party, Socialists are with few exceptions Atheists. In Austria,
Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, and Belgium, Socialism is under the
ban of the ruling Church, and religious workers do not adopt it. I
have, however, made allowance for whatever proportion of theistic
workers there may be in the Socialist bodies of Sweden, Norway, and
Switzerland by almost ignoring the very large amount of non-
Socialistic Atheism. These figures we have further checked and
confirmed wherever possible by the explicit professions of unbelief
registered in the Census publications. We have thus found the
historic law of the growth of Atheism fully verified in our own
age. Where there is freedom of expression and a sound system of
education Atheism spreads rapidly. Outside the countries which I
have so far covered we find the people generally in a lamentable
condition of illiteracy, but we have now to see how even amongst
these, in proportion to the dissemination of knowledge, there is a
rapid growth of Atheism.
1. The Spread in Asia
For many years there has been in Moscow a center for the
training of missionaries of Atheism as well as Communism, and
these, spreading over the world as far as South Africa and Latin
America, have met with a far more abundant response than the
missionaries of the Christian faith ever did. Even where the
Communism has not been very widely accepted, the anti-religious
gospel, coinciding with influences that had been at work for many
years, has had remarkable results. One of the most surprising is
the rapid spread of Atheism amongst the African people. It
illustrates the dishonesty with which the interests of the Churches
are promoted that neither press nor writers on religion ever refer
to a fact which seems to people, when you draw their attention to
it, one of the most singular developments of our time from the
religious viewpoint: the fact that in the official publication of
the last Census taken in the Union of South Africa of a total black
population of about 5,000,000 more than half, or 3,062,669, are
described as of no religion. I collected evidence years ago that
skepticism was spreading rapidly amongst the natives through their
contact with Europeans and their cynical experience of the
Christian religion. Here -- the figure will be found in the
'Statesman's Year Book' -- we have a definite proof for one part of
Africa. The movement spreads up the east as far as Egypt and there
is a parallel movement in west Africa. A colored friend with mining
interests far in the interior of west-central Africa, which he knew
well, assured me that if I would accompany him, the chief would
gladly have me give scientific and atheistic talks to his people,
and students in colleges in the coast-provinces have written me in
appreciation of my Little Blue Books. I will not even attempt to
suggest a figure in the case of Africa. It is enough that here is
a development of Atheism, running to millions, which a quarter of
a century ago would have seemed impossible.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
Nor can we suggest even an approximate figure for the millions
of Atheists in Asia. Every reader will remember the alarm of
American missionaries a few years ago when Communists inspired by
Russia took over a whole immense province of China, and the people
burned down Christian chapels and Buddhist or Taoist temples with
equal satisfaction. The No-God Movement spread through the cities
of other parts of China, but I find it impossible to learn what the
situation is in the chaotic China of today. A family of adventurers
in Peking won the support of white nations and the missionaries by
being "converted" to Christianity, and they and the missionaries
are now smoothing the way for the Japanese. We can say only that
the Atheism which has for centuries been the general attitude of
the educated men both in China and Japan is being adopted by
millions of the people as education reaches them and literature in
the modernized Chinese characters is provided.
From China, India (where already a large proportion of the
educated were Atheists), and Asiatic Russia the stream flows in all
directions. French writers find the new thought threatening their
position in the sphere they control and admit; as the English do in
India, that their occupation is only a matter of time, and their
Christian missions will then go up in smoke. An article in the
'Revue des Deux Mondes' (practically a Catholic magazine) in June,
1934, on the situation in Annam admitted that the province was full
of Communism and hatred of the priests. The Viet Nam Con San Dang
(the Communist party of Annam) is so successful that the governor,
Varenne (himself a skeptic), said: "I feel easy only about two
elements -- the missionaries and the soldiers." To describe this
and other Asiatic movements as a seething of the more ignorant
natives, as is often done, is dishonest. The writer of this article
admits that the schools and colleges are the centers of the
ferment, and the teachers are the chief leaders. The movement is,
of course, atheistic. I trust I tell enough to stimulate some
leisured Atheist to make a more thorough and detailed survey of the
world from our viewpoint, but here I have space only for a word
about Turkey. In the 'Militant Atheist' I gave month by month some
account of progress in Turkey under the skeptical President who now
calls himself Kemal Attaturk. Without persecuting or depriving
Mohammedans of their mosques he struck such blows at religion that
travelers in the cities reported a remarkable decrease of mosque-
going. The rapid spread of secular education is extending this
work. It is necessarily slow in the provinces, for as late as 1927
only 9 percent of the people (14,000,000) could read and write. Now
the Soviet authorities are cooperating amicably with Turkey and
progress is faster. Anti-clerical laws continue to appear. Last
summer (June 13, 1935) a new law forbade a minister of any religion
or a nun to wear a religious costume out of doors. Numbers of
religious schools have closed down, and the monks and nuns have
departed. By another law all children of Turkish parents must
receive their primary education in the secular schools of the
Republic. Atheism spreads apace,.
2. The Revolt in Latin America
Most Americans probably plead that domestic affairs have been
sufficiently exacting for the last six years to excuse them from
taking an interest in these movements in remote parts of the globe.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
The excuse hardly applies to Mexico, but here one can imagine a man
pleading that it is as difficult to discover the truth as it was to
learn the truth about Russia a few years ago. I have before me
three articles on Mexico -- probably only three out of dozens --
published in America in the last few months. One appeared (August
24) in the magazine which rather ironically calls itself Liberty:
the magazine which lately allowed E. Price Bell to explain how
pained the Pope is by misrepresentation of his attitude on the
Italo-Ethiopian trouble (and he does not condemn Italy even in
this). The article, 'Untold Secrets of Catholics in Mexico,' which
is all splashed with red ink and full of atrocity-stories, is by
F.V. Williams, who was Al Smith's publicity-manager. The second
article, an interview with a New York businessman, had already
appeared in the New York 'World-Telegram' (June 8) and discredited
all the atrocity stories in advance, "I saw no persecution except
of law-violators," Mr. J. Austin Smith said, after two years in
Mexico, and he "heard more about trouble with the Church in New
York than in Mexico." "The Mexican government is in the saddle to
stay," he said: and, apart from its playful way of preventing
foreigners from exploiting the people, he had nothing but
admiration for it. And the third article, 'The Holy War in Mexico'
(in The Forum), is by a Catholic who throws the entire blame upon
the Catholics of Mexico, with whom he was thoroughly disgusted.
Under his eyes the Catholic rebels, having taken the train in which
he was, committed atrocities on the peons, not caring whether they
were Catholics or not, which smells of savagery. So they have acted
since 1926 and "more often than not the victims of their attacks
were innocent Roman Catholics." This wholly agrees with what I saw
in Mexico in 1926.
But there is no space here to deal with atrocity-stories. We
are concerned with the growth of Atheism and will take up the
behavior of Atheists in a later number. Williams says that the
situation is that 1,500,000 Atheists dominate 14,500,000 Catholics.
We smile when he adds that if the atheistic one-tenth are "allowed"
to continue in power, Mexico will become a Communist country.
Allowed by whom? By Wall Street and Washington, of course.
Notoriously the clergy have for years organized the armed revolt of
the Cristeros -- Williams' own article is full of the fact -- yet
these "nine-tenths" of the nation can do no more than commit
outrages and raids. The Catholic writer in the Forum, Moreno, is
more illuminating. He says that the opening of the campaign against
the Church in 1926 was "accepted by the people with extraordinary
calm" -- I was there and can confirm this -- for the simple reason
that a very large part of the Indians had never been Catholics.
They had remained under the surface pagans, and many Were glad that
they no longer had to pay priests. The truth is that, as I found,
three-fourths of the urban workers were Atheists in 1926 and forced
the middle-class Atheists of the government to take action against
the Church. The rapid extension of schooling to the peons and the
relief from clerical exactions of masses who were never deeply
Christian has given anti-clericalism a solid basis in popular
sentiment. Educated Mexicans are in the large majority Atheists:
the Church may boast that it still has the large majority of the
illiterate.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
32
IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
With less yet very considerable success the movement has
spread from Mexico to every part of Latin America. There the middle
class has for decades been largely skeptical, and the new
development is the rise of a very self-conscious body of workers
who eagerly adopt Communism and Atheism and often have cultivated
men supporting them. The leader of the Apra (Associacion Popular
Revolucionaria Americana) in Peru, once regarded as the last
stronghold of the priests, got 100,000 votes for the Presidency in
1921, and the party has carried several revolts. In Chile, the twin
clerical Republic, an Atheist-Socialist government had power for a
time in 1932. In Brazil and Argentina Atheism spreads equally. Only
the fact that the middle class and wealthy have a common interest
with the clergy in opposing it, on account of its general alliance
with Communism or Socialism, keeps it, in cheek. Trade unions,
missionaries complain, are sometimes so aggressively atheistic that
they will not admit a Christian worker. In 20 years between
10,000,000 and 20,000,000 Atheists have appeared in Latin America.
The Church frantically appeals for violent suppression or, as in
Mexico, bloody revolt, but the movement spreads year by year.
3. The Grand Total and the Future
One of those skeptical writers who, of course, accept no creed
but regard Atheism and Materialism as crude and superficial, Dr.
C.M. Joad, has written lately on "The Return of Dogma." In a
Rationalist magazine he says, dogmatically, that "the intellect of
the contemporary world is being submerged beneath a wave of belief"
and that "the movement of contemporary intellectuals into the Roman
Catholic Church has achieved the dimensions of a stampede." You
possibly have not noticed the stampede in America and think that
maybe it is in England, France, and Germany. Well, the stampede of
"intellectuals" in England consists, it seems, of Chesterton,
Waugh, Lunn, Knox, and Hemingway; in France of Coeteau; and for
Germany he mentions only Hitlerism, which has smashed the Catholic
Church. He reminds me of a similar American writer who,
illustrating the stampede of intellectuals back to religion, gives
the names of Eugene O'Neill, Sheila Kaye Smith, J. Maritain, and
Compton Mackenzie!
This is the only kind of "liberalism" that is allowed
expression in our press and magazines and gets its books honestly
reviewed and adopted in the circulating libraries. And it is
extraordinarily ignorant and misleading. Dr. Joad, for instance, is
a man of high courage and integrity, and one has no alternative but
to think that he is remarkably ignorant about the religious
situation on which he writes. For in spite of the desertion of
science, in spite of the abandonment of the traditional anti-
clericalism of Labor in many countries, in spite of the disowning
of its great skeptical pioneers by the feminist-movement of our
time, in spite of an alliance of the clergy with violence and all
the maneuvers I described in the first chapter, Atheism has made a
hundred times more progress in the last 10 years than any religion
ever made. I have not in this small space been able even to glance
at every country. While I write I hear, for instance, that at the
Census recently taken in Australia about 800,000 -- one-seventh of
the entire population yet, presumably, all adults wrote themselves
as having "no religion." Central and west-central Canada, New
Zealand, and the other, British colonies and dominions add to the
total.
Bank of Wisdom
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
33
IS THE POSITION OF ATHEISM GROWING STRONGER?
Given the conditions for the operation of the historic law --
freedom and knowledge -- Atheism will in this century be the common
attitude of civilized people. Non-Christians are the great majority
in every free country today. Atheists number tens of millions,
quite apart from Communist activity, in such countries. Let us get
those facts recognized before it is too late. Sooner or later the
despairing Churches will try to get a world-alliance with something
like Fascist tyranny to check the growth of Atheism. It is their
one hope. Let our young folk act in defense of the liberties that
have been won for them and break up this fabric of lies.
**** ****
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