Secularism by Andrew Copson

Author:Andrew Copson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191064319
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

Nations under Marx

Theocrats want to use the state to promote and defend their religion. It wasn’t until the 20th century that atheists offered examples of the flip side of the coin.

The political thinker Karl Marx (1818–83) thought religion would naturally disappear as humanity progressed towards what he called ‘upper-stage Communism’: a global society where everyone was equal, without distinctions of class. His ideas inspired Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), first leader (1917–24) of the Soviet Union, set up under Marxist principles in Russia after a violent revolution. His interpretation of Marxism—Marxism-Leninism—was influential on all future Communist states. Lenin believed that the state was justified in actively removing barriers that stood in the way of humanity’s destiny rather than just waiting for nature to take its course. Religions were one such barrier because they were untrue (and so made people ignorant) and anti-socialist (because they taught workers to be satisfied with their exploitation in hope of better treatment in an afterlife).

Adopting the same tactics as the French ultra-revolutionaries in the 1790s, Lenin’s regime confiscated the property of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had supported the absolutist monarchy of Russia just as the Roman Catholic Church had supported that of France. Seminaries and religious institutions were closed down and clerics persecuted. An official doctrine of atheism was expounded in schools and other state social institutions. The Soviet Union lasted for over seventy years, and over the course of its history there were different schools of thought on what the policy towards religion ought to be. Some argued that religion should be left to its natural fate with no need for state persecution. Others argued it must be exterminated by force. At this extreme end of the spectrum was the Communist Party organization known as ‘The League of the Militant Godless’, led by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky (1878–1943), which was active from the 1920s to the 1940s in trying to persuade and coerce people away from the religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. It sent state-sponsored atheist missionaries to both urban and rural workers and issued periodicals and other pamphlets satirizing and condemning both religious beliefs and religious believers. All members of the Communist Party youth wing were required to join the League and in 1930 it adopted a five-year plan to eliminate religion entirely. Generally, however, persecution of the religious came in waves in the Soviet Union, and never again grew as intense as in these early days.

Albania was the first Communist state to officially declare itself atheist rather than secular under the regime of Enver Hoxha (1908–85). In 1976 the constitution declared, ‘The State recognises no religion, and supports atheist propaganda in order to implant a scientific materialistic worldview in the people.’ Religion was banned, with prison sentences for those found in possession of religious writings or artefacts. In the same year Cuba also declared itself officially a materialist state, amending its constitution to say that the state ‘bases its activity on, and educates the people in, the scientific materialist concept of the universe’.

These avowedly atheist states were short-lived.

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