freeinfidel

When challenged on Christianity’s dark and savage history of repression, torture and abuse, the more intellectually challenged sometimes retort with the long-discredited assertion that worse atrocities were committed by two infamous ‘atheists’ - Stalin and Hitler. It’s a tired and feeble argument, deployed only by those too ignorant to know better. So why go over this ground again? Well, it does have a habit of coming back…

There’s the argument that Stalinism and Nazism committed their atrocities in the name of atheism. To argue this is to be ignorant of, or confused about, what atheism means. Atheism is an idea, not a movement or ideology. There are movements, organisations, campaigns and philosophies that take atheism as a basic tenet, but you can’t fight for atheism. It has no inherent agenda. It is, in that sense, essentially a negative concept - simply that god does not exist. As my wife, Trish, said on a recent BBC phone-in programme, it’s like saying that you don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster. How could you fight a war on the principle that the Loch Ness Monster does not exist? It’s a logical absurdity. To say, then, that Hitler and Stalin committed mass murder and oppression ‘in the name of atheism’ is intellectually absurd and logically cretinous.

The other argument is that Stalinism and Nazism were condemned to commit their atrocities because they lacked the morality provided by religion. This is ignorance on a heroic scale

First, it assumes that being religious makes you ‘moral’ in some automatic and absolute sense. The Inquisition, ‘honour’ killings, abortion clinic bombings, witch hunts in Nigeria and countless other acts of religiously inspired murder, violence and oppression over many centuries, and continuing today, are enough to prove that being religious does not make you ‘good’ by default. Morals, then, are separate to religion. A moral code or philosophy may develop from many sources - and yes, religion can be one, but it is not necessary.

Second, this attitude ignores the difficult idea that both Stalinism and Nazism - in common with all totalitarian regimes, such as Roman Catholicism - did, in fact, have highly developed moral codes. Such regimes depend on them to keep people in line. The morals they enshrined were twisted, and we rightly see them today as corrupt, despotic and evil, but they existed. All ideological systems develop their own moral codes. Christians once considered it ‘moral’ to burn people at the stake for being heretics. Many muslims still consider death a ‘moral’ punishment for apostasy.

Stalinism and Nazism were driven by political ideologies so extreme that they took on the form of quasi-religions. And it’s worth looking at one facet of both - their anti-semitism. This, after all, can be seen as a religious motivation.

Jews have been persecuted throughout history. Some point the finger at the Jews’ own isolationism: the Jewish faith is designed to make it difficult for Jews and gentiles to mix socially. It insists on Jews’ superiority as the chosen race. And the reaction to this (one might say overreaction) has been to isolate the Jewish people more. For example, at various times, in various places, money lending has been a forbidden trade for Christians. In those same cultures, it was usually the case that the Jews were disbarred from most professions - other than money lending. And so Christians allowed the Jews to lend money, borrowed money from them, and then despised and persecuted them as usurers.

Christians also persecuted Jews as ‘Christ killers’. They perpetuated the blood libel against the Jews. The canonical books of the New Testament were written and re-written to vilify the Jews. So anti-semitism has both social and religious roots.

Would ‘Christian morals’ have prevented the Nazis from building the death camps? Given that anti-semitism has been practised by Christians for centuries, it seems unlikely. And let’s not forget the support given to the Nazis by Pope Pius XII, before, during and after the war.

Hitler’s anti-semitism is usually portrayed as simple race hatred. Indeed, the language of the Nazis is steeped in contempt for the ‘Jewish race’. Its addiction to eugenics led it to measure the size of noses. And its henchmen scoured people’s ancestral records for any trace of Jewish blood. And the Nazis considered many other races to be inferior and worthy of destruction. Was this, then, purely a racist issue? No. The racism was one aspect of the whole, profoundly obscene ideology. There were other factors at play, too - and one can test that assertion. Anyone who converted to Judaism would have guaranteed themselves a one-way trip to the death camps just as fast as someone discovered to have Jewish parents. Given that such a person would not have had a drop of Jewish blood, the only rationale for such punishment would have been … religious.

So where do we look for the roots of anti-semitism in the 20th century’s most lethal ideologies? Well, here’s one place we could start: Stalin trained as a priest and Hitler was raised a Roman Catholic.

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