How Can Anyone Support Secular Government, Given History of Atheistic Governments?
Friday, 22 March 2024. FFP#58
About the Friday Freethought Perennials in general: This subset of my blog is to answer questions, nearly always already answered by me and by many others but posed again and again—over many years and in many places—on freethought, atheism, secular humanism, secularism/church-state/”This is a Christian Nation,” and similar topics. These answers are mostly not intended to be original analyses, breaths of fresh air, so much as just putting a whole series of things on the record (I’d say “forever,” except I know better). One source for many of these answers is the 2012 Prometheus Books book by me and my son (Michael E. Buckner), In Freedom We Trust: An Atheist Guide to Religious Liberty—and that is where footnotes and careful citations of sources can be found. It’s available in many libraries and pretty readily in the used book after-market. I’ll cite writings of others that answer these things in more depth if I’m aware of them when I post these.
How can you support secular government, or say secular government is better than a government grounded in religious ideas, given the horrors perpetrated by such twentieth-century atheistic regimes as Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia?
Nazi Germany was not atheistic, but askers of questions like this often claim it is. Gregory S. Paul has shown, in exhaustive detail, that Christians, Christianity, and the church played a major role in the rise of Nazism. Others have provided similar evidence and analysis.
That said, the various totalitarian Communist regimes of the twentieth century—Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia—were undeniably atheistic and hostile to traditional religion and to religious liberty. As we state in the introduction to In Freedom We Trust, although we are atheists, the authors of the book are in no way calling for an “atheistic government” in the sense of a government that promotes atheism over religious belief. We no more want atheistic repression of theism than we do theistic repression of atheism (or of competing theisms). What we (and the Founding Fathers, as they expressed in the US Constitution and First Amendment) wan is a government that is neutral between atheism and religious belief, as well as between different sorts of religious belief.
Stalin was an atheist, and so are we; Osama bin Laden was a monotheist, and so was Mister Rogers. Stalinism has about as much in common with the kind of secularism we are advocating as the Taliban does with mainstream American Protestantism.
The next two guest essays on Letters…, from Keith Parsons and Clint Tankersley, will address government (and politics), though not with an emphasis on secular. The survival of democracy and of the planet are their respective subjects—and both essays are grand (if frightening).
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I think the most insidious model is where dictators corrupt religion as a means of power. I’m thinking of how Hitler co-opted the German Lutheran Church, Putin has co-opted the Russian Orthodox Church and how bin Laden capitalized on the corruption of Islam. And, of course, there’s Trump’s attempted capture of the Evangelical churches in the US - a movement with which he has little in common, but he talks a good game.
I’m personally divided on the role that churches should take in society. I think they have much to offer in providing things like food, shelter, disaster relief, and healthcare - You know, the things Jesus did. I’ve often said that the existence of poverty in America is not because the government is not doing its job, it’s because the religious aren’t doing theirs.
But when these organizations become too powerful or political, they run the risk of being used as a tool for those with more insidious motives.
"Stalin was an atheist, and so are we; Osama bin Laden was a monotheist, and so was Mister Rogers."
Quite the pantheon, Ed!! That line really made me smile. 😁