Nathan Johnstone, The New Atheism, Myth, and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion , (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 309 pp.

Since 2015 I have been arguing on this blog that many anti-theistic and anti-religious activists often abuse and distort history while making their case against religion. Too many New Atheists use outdated, naive, over-simplified or simply plain wrong ideas about history in their arguments and claim to be “rational” while doing so. Now historian Nathan Johnstone has written an excellent monograph arguing precisely the same thing and drawing on a number of the same examples of New Atheist bad history.

Johnstone, a former history lecturer at Christ College Cambridge and the University of Portsmouth, begins his book by noting that while New Atheist polemicists bolster their case against the belief in God via a range of scientific and philosophical arguments, when they turn to making the case for the malevolence of religious belief, they rely heavily on history:

“[T]he focus of the God debate on scientific naturalism and justification for belief has overshadowed the fact that much of the New Atheist critique of religion is actually based in areas such as politics, sociology, …. cultural studies, education, criminology, literature and, of course, history” (p.3)

Johnstone notes that their emphasis on history in particular “is far from a secondary concern” for the New Atheists. Their objective is not to simply show that belief in God and the practice of religion is not well founded, irrational or even plain silly, but also to show that it is evil. For all their scientism, to do this they have to turn to history to show religious belief is not just malevolent now, but always has been.

Indeed, the general New Atheist view of religion is based on a framework that is “a literal battle of past and present” (p. 14). They see us in a historical context whereby we have escaped, or all but escaped, a horrible past but, as Hitchens puts it, “gnarled hands … reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjugation and abjection” (God is Not Great, p. 283). This perspective is founded on a broad and simplistic caricature of history:

New Atheists identify a counter tradition of virtuous scepticism that, originating in Antiquity, and barely surviving the Christian and Islamic supremacies, was ultimately to coalesce and flourish in the Enlightenment’s outright attack on superstition and in the unshackling of science. (p. 7)

Johnstone notes that the issue is not that no argument can be made that religion can and has been oppressive, violent and retardant or that an argument cannot be made that it is often or even necessarily so. The problem is that the New Atheists “are cavalier regarding the disciplines that seek to understand how these effects [of religion in history] occur” (p. 5). Far from seeking to understand history by putting aside their assumptions and presuppositions, they approach it with their conclusions already fixed in place and then cherry-pick the “evidence” they believe supports them. They are, as Johnstone puts it “hunter-gatherers” not “explorers”:

Their attitude is proprietorial, and the humanities are treated as a grab-bag from which to seize examples of the peculiar malefaction of believers. (p. 7)

Counter-examples, context, an understanding of the complexity of the issues they touch on are either ignored, brushed aside or openly condemned as “revisionism” or even “apologism”. Most of this extended exercise in a priori motivated reasoning is predicated on an outdated pseudo historiography of value judgements and presentism, where anything in the past which seems (however superficially) to be like modern ideas is judged “good”, while anything that does not (or cannot be superficially painted as doing so) is condemned as “bad”. History, to them, is a long struggle of the things they deem “good” against the regression, retardation and suppression of religion. Anything that does not fit this caricature is ignored, dismissed or ruled out of court.

Of course, this is precisely the kind of motivated reasoning that the same polemicists rightly condemn in others – e.g. Creationists and conservative Christian apologists. When it comes to the sciences, they hold everyone to a high standard of evidentialism.

But respect for the importance of rationalism and empiricism cannot be demanded if we ourselves practice it only when it is convenient …. those who preach evidentalism, and presume superiority over others on that basis, forfeit the luxury of reading lightly. (p. 6-7)

As Johnstone’s examples go on to show, the New Atheists he holds to account can barely even be accused of reading history lightly – many of them seem to have barely read any at all. Indeed, most of them work from popular cliches, non-specialist overviews and the occasional work of skewed polemic that fits their views, however dated, dusty, amateur or undistinguished. When you start with your conclusion, actual deep understanding really does not matter. Nuance and context just get in the way of the onrush of dogmatic conviction:

The New Atheism actively eschews “relativist” attempts to understand the development of fundamentalism and religious violence as manifesting in specific political climates, arguing that to do so distracts attention from the dominant role played by religion itself. Destructiveness is not one characteristic that might emerge under certain conditions; it is religion’s innate and unchanging nature; artificially contained at such times it is deprived of power. (p. 15)

All of this is based on a series of unexamined assumptions and an understanding of the history of religion in society that is, at the very least, 70 years out of date. Modern historians rely on that very so-called “relativism” and contextualisation that New Atheists so vigorously reject for ideological reasons. The more we examine histories of religion using the tools of modern historiography, the less valid the New Atheists’ bedrock assumptions prove to be. But they do not care about this. They accept their assumptions with a dogmatism and deep faith that would put any Creationist to shame.

New Atheism’s Black Legends

New Atheist authors rarely even bother to argue any point of history in detail. To them, this is unnecessary – they need only gesture to the historical evidence that is in the common understanding of their readers. As Johnstone puts it, they “are not levelling an accusation so much as calling on their readers to remember a conviction” (p. 21). Since none of the leading New Atheists is trained in history and exhibit little to no genuine interest in it beyond utilising it for polemical purposes, they assume their popular understanding of it to be serviceable enough for their purposes and assume (probably correctly) that their readers will have the same understanding.

So on topics like the Witch Craze or the Inquisition they feel no need to actually make the case that these complex historical phenomena conform to and undergird their arguments, they just assume they do. After all, what could be more clearly evidence that religious irrationality leads to violence and murder than the Witch Craze: a religious frenzy in which many thousands died for a crime that did not and could not exist? Johnstone quotes several leading New Atheists as they drive home this point:

“To be accused of demonic possession or contact with the Evil One was to be convicted.” (Christopher Hitchens)

“In the 1400s the Inquisition changed its focus [from heresy] to witchcraft and thousands of women were tortured into confessing and then burned or hanged.” (Victor Stenger)

“Witch hysteria raged for three centuries with estimates of the number executed ranging from a hundred thousand to two million.” (Victor Stenger again)

These and other references to the Witch Craze sound as though they support the argument that unfettered religion leads to such atrocities without bothering to ensure that their details are correct. Except, in fact, they are not:

[The] anti-religionists seem unconcerned to check whether their understanding is accurate. Contra Hitchens, no-one was accused of being diabolically possessed for the simple reason that possession was not a crime but a diagnosis. And only in the ‘superhunts’ that for a few decades afflicted a handful of areas in the Holy Roman Empire, may something like the equation of suspicion with conviction have existed. Contra Stenger, the Inquisitions killed very few witches and no serious historian now believes the number of executions for witchcraft exceeded 50,000. (p. 21)

Again, not only do these champions of checking your facts not bother to check their facts, but that nuance, contextualisation and so-called “relativism” that they tend to reject undermines their simplistic story. In his book The Meaning of Things (2001), A.C Grayling tries to use history to argue that religion is always potentially murderous while science must be “perverted” by “politics and politicians” to become destructive (Grayling, pp. 116-17). So he turns to the fate of Urbain Grandier, who was burned as a witch in 1634.

Grandier’s story has been popularised by the 1952 Aldous Huxley novel The Devils of Loudun and by the gloriously silly 1971 Ken Russell film The Devils. He was a smart and charismatic priest who was probably sexually promiscuous. He also had a penchant for annoying prominent people, and had written a critique of clerical celibacy and a satire of Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of France. In 1630 a number of nuns of the local Ursuline convent began to exhibit hysterical behaviour and, when investigated, accused Grandier of sending a demon to possess them. But when these claims were investigated by the rather sceptical Bishop of Poitiers and the Archbishop of Bordeaux, they were found to be fanciful and dismissed.

However, further public defiance of Cardinal Richelieu by Grandier brought the claims back to attention in 1633. This time it was the Cardinal who ordered re-examination of the case and a bizarre show trial ensued, where the “demons” themselves gave evidence in court (via the “possessed” nuns), public exorcisms were performed, Grandier was tortured and a pact with Satan – written in backwards Latin and signed by the priest and, allegedly, several demons – was dramatically produced. On the strength of this circus, Grandier was convicted and burned.

For any modern, looked at from a safe distance, this is a deliciously bizarre and macabre story, complete with sex, demonism and death – thus all the attention from Dumas, Huxley and Russell. But as a proof of Grayling’s argument it fails totally. As Johnstone notes, “rather than an exposé of faith, Grayling has given us a story of political intrigue” (p. 22). Far from being met with bloodthirsty credulity, the original claims were sceptically examined and dismissed by the religious authorities. It was only when Richelieu saw the accusations as a way to take political revenge on a particularly “turbulent priest” that the affair turned deadly, and not even Grayling pretends that the cardinal was motivated by any genuine witch-hunting zeal. In fact, Grayling concludes “[to] read about the terrible fate of Urbain Grandier is to follow … a black story of intrigue, politics, malice, duplicity, credulity, suffering and madness”. The problem here is obvious – yes, this is indeed a story of politics and intrigue. So why does Grayling present it as evidence that religion is inherently violent while science requires, as he puts it, the external machinations of “intrigue, politics, malice [and] duplicity” to be so? Grayling seems oblivious to the fact that his own anecdote undermines his argument.

Johnstone observes wryly that “it is difficult not to suspect that for Grayling, any witchcraft narrative will do because he has predetermined, quite wrongly, that they will all speak to his conclusions” (p. 23). When subjected to just the slightest contextualised analysis, his story fails to deliver what he claims, but he is so convinced that it does he does not notice the failure.

Other New Atheist attempts to use the Witch Craze to bolster their arguments suffer from similar problems. Because the New Atheist approach to history is to cherry-pick at it for examples that fit their theses, they prefer easily digestible secondary sources and tend toward those which are generalist, written by non-historians and, usually, rather dated. After all, current scholarship by professional peer reviewed scholars working from primary documents tends not to give them the stuff they like. So when Sam Harris turns to the Witch Craze in his The End of Faith (2004), he draws mainly on Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) by the poet Charles Mackay and Religion and Science (1935) by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell, in turn, depends on William Lecky’s The Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism (1878) and Andrew Dickson White’s notorious A History of the Warfare between Science and Theology (1897). Cutting edge, modern, objective scholarship of the topic this is not.

But these biased and dated books give Harris the kind of stuff he prefers. To make the New Atheists’ point, it is imperative that the Witch Craze be depicted as widespread, all pervasive and as deadly as possible. After all, if it was so common across all Christian Europe and led to large scale suffering and a massive death toll of obviously innocent people, this drives home the point that religion unfettered by reason and science is necessarily evil and genocidal. So New Atheists have joined neo-pagans, New Agers and some feminists in uncritically accepting the more fanciful estimates of the Witch Craze’s death toll. One figure still bandied about is the estimate by Gottfried Voigt (1740-1791), a German antiquarian who used a flawed methodology to arrive at the startlingly precise figure of 9,442,994 executions for witchcraft. Johnstone makes the dry observation that, based on modern techniques and over a century of exhaustive archival research, “[Voigt] was out by around 9,400,000” (p. 27).

But the New Atheists prefer sources that give very high estimates of the toll. One of Harris’ sources, Mackay, assures his reader that “thousands upon thousands” of victims were consigned to the flames and puts the rate of executions as high as “two per day”. His other main source, Russell, shakes his jowls over the “age of faith” in which he says “millions of unfortunate women [were] burnt as witches”. As already noted, Stenger settles on a wide range from 100,000 up to a whole two million victims, though on this he depends on James Haught’s lurid and amateurish Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness (1990) which in turn drew on secondary works, only one of which was published after 1973.

Harris, at least, has bothered to consult some modern scholarship and so notes the far more accurate estimate of “perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 over three hundred years” (Harris, p. 87). This is taken from Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (1996) – a work of actual, current, professional historical scholarship by a genuine expert in the field. But Johnstone notes that Harris is not entirely comfortable with this much lower estimate and is at pains to stress (in a footnote) that “such revaluation of numbers does little to mitigate the horror and injustice of this period” (Harris, p. 255, n. 19).

Of course, there is no denying that each of the 40-50,000 people executed underwent a terrible ordeal and clearly did die because of a delusion. But the problem with the much lower death toll is that it undermines the New Atheist argument that this phenomenon is clear evidence of what happens when religion is unrestricted in its power. If we accept an estimated population of Europe at around 100 million in 1600 and posit around 100,000 witch trials between 1560 and 1660, the likelihood of anyone having any direct knowledge of a trial, let alone falling victim to one, is minute. This is hardly indicative some wild craze seizing the whole of Christian Europe – it is more like evidence of a sporadic and fairly unusual phenomenon. Which leaves us with the question: if the source of the madness was late medieval and early modern religion generally, why was this phenomenon not far more common and widespread?

This problem is made more stark by the fact that instances of witch hunting were not uniform across Europe or across the time period of 1500 to 1700. On the contrary, Johnstone notes the trials and executions clump together in certain locations and periods:

The overwhelming majority of executions took place within the Holy Roman Empire. …. Of the 30,000-35,000 executions believed to have taken place between 1560 and 1660, 25,000-30,000 were inflicted [in the Empire], and only two major witch-hunting centres – Scotland and Denmark – lay outside is jurisdiction. (p. 29-30)

France and the Empire had comparable populations, yet the latter had executed c. 30,000 “witches” by 1650, while the former had killed 500. And the executions are not spread evenly across the patchwork of 300 states that made up the Empire in this period – a handful of Imperial territories saw the “superhunts” that account for most of the Empire’s much larger death toll.

This means the New Atheists’ glib but simplistic picture of unfettered religion gone mad not only needs to account for why the executions were so sporadic, but also why they are concentrated in some places and times and not others. Actual historians have begun to do this using the very tools that the New Atheists so dislike: objective and dispassionate analysis, contextualisation and an examination of what local and particular factors (politics, economics, climate) meant the Craze flared in one place but not other or raged in one valley but left the next untouched – see Ronald Hutton’s excellent recent work The Witch: A History of Fear (2017) for a careful summary of the scholarship here. This means that while a change in theology in the fifteenth century meant that former medieval scepticism about the existence of witches gave way to an official acceptance that they did, this did not therefore lead to common or widespread witch hunting. It took local, social and/or political factors to trigger sporadic outbreaks and only in some areas. Vast swathes of Europe saw few to no witch trials at all, despite having the same religious and theological basis for them as the places that saw regular or massive outbreaks of the hysteria. The simplistic New Atheist formulations are wrong.

Appropriating Atoms

As already noted, the New Atheist conception of history is based on an assumed narrative of two opposing views of the world: religiously based credulousness and naturalistic rationalism. Anyone who can be seen as or is depicted as championing the latter is held up as a hero of the story and as an ancestor of modern anti-religious secularists. Anything else, especially anything or anyone who opposed or differed from the narrative’s heroes, is depicted as the villains of the story and the historical precursors of modern fundamentalists, theocrats and and other “faithheads” (as Dawkins sometimes calls religious believers).

This is a neat story and it is a consistent framework into which pretty much any historical element can be jammed, with the application of sufficient rhetorical brute force. Johnstone notes that where a person fits into this tale is determined by a simple formula: the heroes are the ones who question and doubt while the villains are the ones who believe or impose belief. He notes that Hitchens draws on historian Jennifer Michael Hecht’s book Doubt: A History (2003), but that he uses it only as a mine from which to pick out various historical doubters and hold them up as champions and heroes in the New Atheist narrative. Hecht’s actual thesis, however, is that both doubt and belief are driven by the same “great schism” between human experience of “reason and plans, love and purpose” and the realisation that the universe seems quite empty of these qualities. A secular person may well have strong sympathy with the doubters’ response to this realisation – the striving to work out what this inhuman universe means for us. I certainly do and so, clearly, does Hecht herself and, I gather, Johnstone. But as an actual historian, Hecht is objective and clear-eyed enough to see both this response and its religious alternatives come from the same place and pays the non-secular processes of thought due respect as a valid and very human response. Hitchens and his cohorts do not.

One of the oddities of this rigid historical narrative is the way the New Atheists have to work so hard to make everyone and everything fit into it. This is achieved by a rigorous, steel-edged presentism, whereby often remote and disparate people and phenomena are either marshalled into the ranks of “Doubt” or consigned to the wickedness of “Belief”. Johnstone stresses in this “the role of hindsight in creating an impression of a constant philosophical rectitude”:

Those naturalistic aspects of historical rationalism and proto-science that appear most familiar to us are represented as fundamental and defining. Their similarities to modern scientific understandings are taken always to be prescient rather than coincidental. (p. 123)

So we end up with an image of the Greeks and Romans as wise and rational, the medieval period as the epitome of a “dark age” mired in superstition and the “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment” as stages in a long Whiggish struggle toward the sunlit uplands of modern secularism, constantly threatened by Hitchens’ “gnarled hands” of religious belief that want to drag us backwards.

This is a fairy story – a fantasy pseudo history that requires careful shaping of the historical elements out of which it is constructed to get the pieces to fit just so. This is why Giordano Bruno gets painted as a scientist or at least a rational free thinker, rather than as a mystic, magician and eccentric pantheist who waved aside empirical science as the work of mere “geometers”. It is also why Hypatia of Alexandria’s study of mathematics and astronomy gets emphasised, while the fact that it was a ancillary adjunct to her highly mystical and fundamentally theistic neo-Platonist cosmology is ignored. That way she too can be painted as a rationalist scientist, or even as an atheist, who was murdered by dirty, ignorant monks who hated her learning, when she was nothing of the sort and her murder was purely political. Similarly, the complex tangle that is the Galileo Affair gets reduced to a cartoonish caricature where Galileo is the defiant champion of a proven scientific consensus on heliocentrism and the Church opposes him out of pure wilful ignorance; refusing even to look through his telescope. New Atheists can only make history conform to their agenda by warping it.

The elements in history which look, superficially, a little like something we moderns recognise as scientific – parts of Bruno’s mystical cosmology, say, or Hypatia’s mathematical treatises and astronomical commentaries – are taken as sufficient to ram these figures and their ideas into the side of “Good” and to appropriate them for the simplistic narrative of “Thinkers” versus “Believers” in a centuries long conflict. As Johnstone details, the way some New Atheists depict atomism is illustrative.

In the fifth century BC, Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera argued for a universe made up of combinations of fundamental particles called “atoms” – literally “uncuttables”. These tiny particles and their aggregates account for all matter, these Greek philosophers argued, and everything can be accounted by reference to them. This certainly looks like what modern science has confirmed about the foundations of the universe and various New Atheist luminaries are thus suitably impressed:

Hitchens writes of ‘the mighty Democritus’ and of ‘the brilliant atomist school’; Victor Stenger of ‘the brilliant intuition’ and ‘the remarkable feat of human perception’; whilst for Michael Onfray the atomist revelation was ‘a stroke that never ceases to amaze’. p. 127

The thing that enthrals these writers is not just the connection between ancient atomism and modern science, but the contrast between this “brilliant intuition” and religious thinking. Faced with an unknown and mysterious cosmos, theists imagined anthropomorphic gods and weird mysticism, while these clear-eyed rationalists intuited material systems based on logic. Given that it was the latter which came to be confirmed by science, what better evidence can there be of the superiority of rational doubt over superstitious mysticism? And given that the Church and other religions have historically rejected atomism, even persecuting its proponents as heretics, what better evidence of the historical wickedness of religion?

This last point is argued with particular enthusiasm by several New Atheist writers. For Hitchens, Christian thinkers rejected atomism because they knew it “offered a far better explanation of the world than did religion” (Hitchens, p. 259). For Onfray, their rejection was simply because “the Church has always been wrong about everything: faced with an epistemological truth, it automatically persecutes the discoverer” (Onfray, In Defence of Atheism, p. 88). So atomism presents us, they argue, with a key historical example of rationalists arriving at a logical “epistemological truth”, religion rejecting it and persecuting the rationalists who keep this precious idea alive, only for it to be triumphantly validated by empirical science in the modern era. This is a neat little story, but it is a fairy tale.

This is because while ancient atomism bears some superficial resemblance to modern scientific ideas, this resemblance blurs considerably on closer examination. For the Greek atomists, the colour white is produced by smooth “shining” atoms, while black is the result of rough atoms that “cast shadows”. Very small, fine “soul atoms” produce sensation and consciousness and the loss of them causes death, while breathing ingests them and so maintains life. It is very hard for a modern to find anything recognisable in these odd ideas. As Johnstone comments:

Those parts of ancient atomism that appear familiar to us are celebrated as prescient fundamentals. The remainder are relegated to the status of the status of the theory’s disposable ephemera …. When an ancient philosophy is described only in terms of what it got right, it will appear to have been uncommonly right. And when that philosophy is taken to exemplify a certain perennial mindset, that mindset will appear uncommonly insightful. p. 133

Just as they cherry pick historical anecdotes that seem to fit their theses, these New Atheists select the aspects of ancient atomism that look superficially most scientific and pretend the rest – spiky atoms that cause the taste of bitter foods, for example – somehow are not important. Johnstone quotes the scientist (and atheist) Peter Atkins’ rather shrewd observation:

‘The Greeks thought a great deal about matter and proposed so many different hypotheses about its nature that at least one of them was likely to be right.’ p. 136

Very true, especially if its “rightness” is enhanced by emphasising the elements that actually are right (more or less) while ignoring all the many parts that are wrong. The fact is that the atomists’ ideas were no more scientific or even logical than Miletus and Thales’ conception that everything was actually made of water, Anaximander’s ultimate creative principle of apeiron, Anaximenes’ idea that air was the fundamental element of all things, Heraclitus’ belief that fire was the creative basis of the cosmos, or Empedocles’ combination of the elements (fire, water, air and earth) that came to dominate Aristotelian and therefore medieval and early modern cosmology. To hold up atomism, shorn of its weirder aspects, and claim it represents an “epistemological truth” that was somehow different to all these other Greek speculations is, as Johnstone notes, merely “an illusion of hindsight” – a contrived exercise in ideologically-motivated presentism that ignores context, and shrugs off relevant but inconvenient details. Which is pretty much a summary of the whole New Atheist approach to history.

The Historical Innocence of Atheism

Christian apologists and other critics of atheism often try to turn the historical tables on atheists by noting that, in the twentieth century in particular, atheism proved itself as bloodstained as any religion. Notorious conservative commentator and apologist Dinesh D’Souza is typical:

Whatever the motives for atheist bloodthirstiness, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades. It’s time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the greatest source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history. (“Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history”, The Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 2006)

This is typically overblown rhetoric and tries to attribute atrocities that had many intersecting motivations to “atheism” and to lump the distinctly non-atheist regime of the Nazis in with the atheistic ideology of Marxist regimes. But there is a kernel of a genuine issue here for the New Atheists: if atheism can be as capable of inspiring mass murder as any other idea, then their claim that religious ideas are uniquely or particularly malevolent loses its force. Johnstone notes their various lines of defence against this problem. Dawkins tries to brush the issue aside, arguing “individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism” (The God Delusion, p. 315). In a similar line of argument, Keith Parsons notes that atheism is, by its nature, not an ideology but the absence of one, saying “atheism …. just does not have sufficient content to constitute a worldview” (“Atheism – Twilight or Dawn” in R.B. Stewart, ed., The Future of Atheism, 2008, p. 55). Sam Harris tries the tack of arguing that atheism at its essence an antidote to dogma, prejudice and absolutism so any atheists who indulge in these things are, ipso facto, no longer acting as atheists. So he claims the regimes people like D’Souza use to attack atheism are ones that became “cultic and delusional” and so effectively religions by another name (see The End of Faith, p. 79, 231). Hitchens makes this argument at greatest length in Chapter 17 of God is Not Great:

Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it. The solemn elevation of infallible leaders who were a source of endless bounty and blessing; the permanent search for heretics and schismatics; the mummification of dead leaders as icons and relics; the lurid show trials that elicited incredible confessions by means of torture . . . none of this was very difficult to interpret in traditional terms. (p. 84)

None of these arguments work particularly well. Harris’ argument is little more than an example of the No True Scotsman Fallacy by trying to redefine “true” atheists as ones who do not do murderous things in the name of atheism. This is not convincing when Christians try to do the same thing to brush aside the Inquisition or the Crusades, so it is equally ineffective when the boot is on the other foot. Hitchens, in typical style, uses many eloquent words to try to redefine Soviet Marxist Leninism as a religion and so dodge the implications of its murders, but this is just smoke and mirrors. Whatever outward trappings and superficial similarities Stalin’s ideology may have with some forms of religion, it was inherently atheistic and, at several key points, overtly and murderously anti-religious. The argument that atheism per se is not an ideology so cannot be blamed for anything done by an actual ideology is cute, but disingenous. As Johnstone notes:

But politically, sociologically, culturally, even biologically, atheism is no longer an answer but a question. If there is no God, why has mankind been so disposed to believe in one? …. How far are we obligated to reshape our cultures in line with scientific naturalism, and is continued supernaturalism now a barrier to human well-being? (p.179)

To pretend that Soviet Marxist Leninism having atheism as a core tenet did not mean that it therefore proposed answers to this and related questions is being wilfully blind. And to pretend that, especially at certain points, it did not decide to enforce that tenet and its attendant ideological answers to these questions by force is being wilfully ignorant of history.

Of course, D’Souza and his ilk are trying to argue that there is something inherently immoral in an ideology that had no room for God. This is simply an extension of the apologist argument from morality, that assumes no true ethical system is possible unless it is based on objective absolutes mandated by a divine power – which is a dubious proposition, as any undergraduate moral philosophy student could explain to D’Souza (not that he would listen). But while it is hard to blame the totality of Soviet Marxist Leninism’s millions of murders on the supposed inherent wickedness of Godlessness, it is impossible for the New Atheists to dodge the fact that at least some of this murderous oppression was based on atheism as a central idea in the ideology.

Marxism grew out of a radical tradition in Europe that had always been inclined toward atheistic materialism. Lenin and Trotsky were atheists and enshrined atheism in the ideology of the new Soviet state, but thinking on how this should be practically applied in a political program differed among the early ideologues and Soviet policy towards religions shifted and changed over time. Some Communist thinkers believed that religion would inevitably wither naturally in the face of the inexorable historical process that was Dialectical Materialism, and so the congregations of churches and mosques should be left to dwindle as the benefits of Marxism become clear. Others thought this process needed a helping hand from the state in the form of propaganda, legal restrictions, financial constraints and, eventually (because the expected dwindling did not seem to be happening) via persecutions.

In two periods in particular – initially during the Civil War and then with more organised intensity from 1922-1941 – the Soviet regime confiscated and destroyed churches and other places of worship, seized money and valuables for the state and harassed, arrested, imprisoned, exiled, tortured and killed thousands of clergy and other believers purely because of their opposition to Soviet anti-religious policies. Religious festivals were banned and private observance of them brought official scrutiny and possible persecution. Outspoken critics of atheist ideology were targeted, usually on trumped up charges of “counter-revolutionary activity”, and were imprisoned, sent to gulags, executed or simply disappeared. The Soyuz voinstvuyushchikh bezbozhnikov or “League of the Militant Godless” was established as an official arm of the Communist Party in 1925 and by 1941 it had 3.5 million members, 95,000 offices. It published a national newspaper, a monthly magazine and hundreds of books and pamphlets, as well as lecturing in schools and at Komsomol youth meetings. Its members also took part in tearing down religious icons, smashing church bells and exposing religious opponents of the regimes policies to the authorities.

Stalin reigned in the anti-religious campaign in 1941, when he realised firstly that it was not working and secondly that religion could be harnessed in the existential struggle that was the war with Nazi Germany. New Atheists like Hitchens like to skip over the inconvenient pre-War campaigns to impose atheism by force and highlight Stalin’s wartime co-opting of the Orthodox Church as “proof” that the Soviet regime was not actually anti-religious at all – yet another example of convenient New Atheist cherry picking history to make it fit their ideas. Johnstone makes it clear that this gambit and all the others used by the New Atheists fail to avoid the key problem: when an ideology that was based on atheism arose it not only proved as murderous as any religious regime, but actually did persecute and murder in the name of state-mandated atheism. Around the time Johnstone’s book was released, Wesleyan University historian Victoria Smolkin brought out A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton: 2018), which makes exactly the same point and goes through the various ways Soviet ideological atheism was forcibly imposed in even greater scholarly detail. An article on the New Atheist rhetorical dodging of these facts of history will be part of my “Great Myths” series in the future.

As with the failure to show that the Witch Craze was purely religious in motivation and so different to non-religious ideological persecutions, the attempts to claim that the persecution of religions by the Soviets and other Communist regime had nothing much to do with atheism relies on some weak rhetorical gambits. The historical fact is that an ideology that had atheism at its core showed that it could be as murderous as any religious fanaticism.

Atheism and Anti-Religion

Atheism, per se, is not an ideology, but simply a position on the question of the existence of God or gods. Johnstone notes that we atheists have a wide variety of responses to religion, ranging from an accepting acknowledgement of it as a valid human response to the search for meaning to outright militant anti-religious zealotry of the kind manifested in the Soviet Union. But the more anti-religious end of this spectrum has both problems and dangers. Atheist philosopher Julian Baggini does not indulge in the semantic and rhetorical fiddling noted above and has stated clearly “what happened in Soviet Russia is one of the reasons why I personally dislike militant atheism” (quoted by Johnstone, p. 263). Of course, none of the New Atheists are advocating believers be sent to gulags or shot, but many of them make statements which indicate a disturbing combination of intolerance and overly dogmatic certitude.

Most New Atheist objectives are nebulous, fairly inchoate and, thus, seem generally benign. Atheists, they argue, should encourage rationality, foster science education and resist religious egregious intrusions into politics and education. But some of their language and lines of argument go further. Atheists must “destroy” faith, says Harris. The “enemy” of religion must be “cleared” from our collective minds, says Hitchens. Onfray looks forward to the dawn of a atheistic “new order”. And Peter Boghossian proposes how an army of trained “street epistemologists” must go forth to actively “intervene” with believers in everyday situations. Stenger waxes apocalyptic, warning this must happen “if humanity is to survive”. And Boghossian declares stridently that “atheists have a right and duty to attempt to de-faith others unsolicited.”

Grayling says that secularism should be welcomed by the religious, because it guarantees their freedom of worship. But Grayling’s secularism is simply there to give religion room to fail and die:

Grayling’s clear expectation is that, deprived of its financial power and cultural privileges, religion will simply become the reserve of the few most irrational …. It is difficult to read Grayling’s ideas without being reminded of the aspirations of the Bolsheviks. (p. 266)

Of course, Grayling is no totalitarian and stresses that he will “fight hard to protect the right of the benighted to the stupidest beliefs”. But once your tolerance gains this level of reluctance, the temptation to be less tolerant grows. Boghossian’s street preachers are told they have the right, or even the obligation, to “intervene” with believers in the most mundane of circumstances: after overhearing a conversation in a coffee shop, for example, or taking a friend’s child to choir practice. And where does tolerance end if you can characterise religious belief as “an unclassified mental illness” (Boghossian) or religious education as actual “child abuse” (Dawkins; Grayling)?

The New Atheist distortion of history – both the history of religion and the history of anti-religious unbelief – warps the ideology of militant secularism. Johnstone concludes:

It is only by recognising the absolutist potential of certain forms of atheism that those who would wish to can work towards maximising its progressiveness. The past does indeed show us what atheism can be. Is is lesson worth learning and applying to ourselves. (p. 279)

This is precisely what I have been arguing on this blog and elsewhere for around 15 years – if we are going to try to use history, we have to get it right and be honest about what it does and does not tell us. Johnstone is not the first to note the many problems with New Atheist history and historiography. The theologian David Bentley Hart skewers some of the more silly examples in his Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale: 2009) and historian Borden W. Painter covers similar ground to Johnstone in his short work The New Atheist Denial of History (Palgrave Macmillan: 2014). But Johnstone’s monograph is more extensive and systematic than either and has the added advantage of being written by someone who is not a religious believer. This is an excellent book and should be required reading for any atheist who wants to practice the ideals of critical scrutiny and the avoidance of confirmation bias. Highly recommended.



