Ideology, Not Atheism
Contents
A common claim among theists is that the 20th century proved atheism is a killing machine. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot ran officially atheist regimes and killed tens of millions. Take away God, the argument goes, and you take away the brakes. This post argues that the claim gets the causes wrong.
The real question: weighing factors
No great war or mass killing has a single cause. So the honest question is not "what was the cause?" but "how much did each factor contribute?"
That makes it a comparison: the share atheism had in the killings of secular regimes against the share religion had in killings by religious societies. These estimates are rough, but rough estimates are still estimates. My claim is that the religious share is consistently larger than the atheist share. I don't claim religion was the only cause of any war, or even the main one. Only that it is regularly among the leading factors, which atheism almost never is.
Atheism is not an ideology
What drives mass killing is ideology: a positive set of beliefs about how the world is and ought to be, with goals, enemies and a program.
Atheism is none of these things. It is the absence of belief in gods, with no commandments and no utopia. A negative does not move you to act. Nobody picks up a rifle to fight for the non-existence of God.
The record shows this. Soviet and Khmer Rouge speeches are about class struggle, revolution and enemies of the people, not about unbelief. Historians Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley describe what drove Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot as a fanatical certainty that socialism could be made to work, with failures blamed on class enemies, spies, saboteurs and traitors.
What about the persecution of religion?
These regimes did persecute believers. Churches were destroyed and clergy were killed, and some of that may fairly be linked to atheism.
But religion was targeted mainly as a rival loyalty, alongside independent unions, intellectuals and resisting peasants. And it was a small slice of the dead. Most deaths came from famine, collectivization, purges and camps. Atheism played a part in some of the killing, not most of it.
Not one war started over atheism
Religion has been a leading cause of wars, as in the Thirty Years' War, even where politics kept them going. I have yet to find a single war where atheism ranks among the three main reasons it began. The closest cases, such as Soviet anti-religious campaigns or Albania's 1967 declaration of state atheism, are domestic persecutions, not wars.
Religion motivates killing more strongly
The 20th century had plenty of killing by religious societies: the Catholic-backed Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, Imperial Japan's cult of the divine emperor, the Partition of India, Bosnia.
Religion comes with commands, sacred duties, holy enemies and rewards after death. It can push people to act in a way unbelief never can. Even as a secondary factor, its share outweighs atheism's.
The "removed restraints" argument
The strongest theist reply is that atheism didn't push anyone to kill, but removed the moral law above the state that would have stopped them.
The answer is that religion is two-faced as a restraint. Its prohibition on murder has very often protected only fellow believers, while permitting or even commanding the killing of heretics and unbelievers. Holy wars, crusades and sectarian massacres show the brakes coming off as easily as they go on, so long as the victims are outsiders. Believers will say this corrupts the faith; history shows the in-group version winning again and again.
Listen to the killers
Ask the perpetrators why they killed. Their victims were counter-revolutionaries, kulaks, enemies of the emperor, traitors to the nation or the faith. You will search in vain for masses of people killing in the name of atheism.
Conclusion: the culprit is ideology
Define ideology as a set of beliefs that shapes how you see the world and governs behaviour across a wide range of life situations. Religion fits that definition well. Like communism, it can be totalizing, governing marriage, birth, sex, food and daily life. That many believers practise a softer version no more disqualifies it than moderate communists disqualify communism. (I made the case that religion is an ideology at more length in Is Religion an Ideology?.)
The evidence lies in showing that ideology drives mass killing. Religion is a special case of ideology; atheism is not an ideology at all. The lesson of the century is not that unbelief kills, but that totalizing ideologies, religious and secular alike, become deadly once they hold the power of a modern state.
(The other half of the theist case, the sheer size of the communist death toll, is the subject of Why Body Counts Can't Tell Us the Motive.)