Theist vs. Atheist: What Should You Believe? is a seven-part series of articles by two authors, John C. Wright and Stephen R. C. Hicks, in which they debate seven key issues in religion.
Is Religion Good or Bad for Politics?
John C. Wright
The question is whether religion is good or bad for politics.
The wording of the question is charmingly misleading, akin to asking whether economic theory is good or bad for politics, without bothering to distinguish between the economic theory of the free market, which produced the industrial revolution, versus the economic theory of Stalinist Marxism, which produced the Ukraine famine, the gulags, and the endless fear and bloodshed of the Cold War.
Politics is the study of how to organize the laws and customs of the state to preserve the common good, maintain the social order, deter crime and win wars, and promote virtue among the citizens and subjects.
Reading the ancient and the modern literature on the topic, one soon realizes that every writer from Plato to Marx and beyond sees the sole mechanism of political control to be the abolition of liberty, with one glaring exception.
This exception is so obvious that only an intellectual would somehow contrive to overlook it.
Only in Christian commonwealths and kingdoms can the study of how to organize the state to achieve the common good and promote virtue be subordinated to how to preserve liberty. This is what politics properly so called is, and all that it is.
Only in Christian commonwealths and kingdoms is there even a logical reason to curtail the power of the king or republic to lawful objects, and to decree some matters, matter of conscience, to be beyond secular power.
A man who does not believe in the supernatural cannot believe in any law above human law.
He cannot criticize the race laws of Nazi Germany nor the property laws of Socialist Russia nor the criminal laws of Maoist China based on anything higher than personal sentiment, or a watery appeal to the utility of various human actions for ends not shared by these bloodthirsty tyrants.
There is no way to discuss politics except as power relations – who does what to home and gets away with it – absent a reference to a supernatural authority above all human authority from which human authority takes whatever legitimacy it possessed. Appeals to efficiency are woefully inadequate to this purpose. The Socialists of Germany, Russia and China were appallingly efficient.
In no other worldview is there a logical reason to respect a man who thinks wrong things, comes to bad conclusions, indulges in vice, and leads other men astray, because in no other world view is the freedom of the conscience sacred and sacrosanct even when in the wrong. A Godfearing Christian would not remove the freedom of a man to damn himself to hell even if he could, because his God did not remove that freedom, not even from Adam.
The question of whether religion is good or bad for politics as stated is meaningless. There is no politics properly so called outside Christendom. The reason for this astonishing statement is there is no such thing as religion properly so called.
What is there, if there is no such thing as religion? It is too simple merely to divide matters into Pagan, Christian and Postchristian. We must take a more nuanced view:
(1) There is pre-Christian paganism (2) There is Catholic Christendom, which separates the spiritual from the secular power (3) There is Judaism, which separates the priestly tribe of Aaron from the royal lineage of David (4) There are various heresies and distortions of Catholicism which undo the Catholic separation of spiritual and secular power, from Anglican England to Mohammedan Caliphate (5) there is a corruption called laicism that starts from a healthy respect for all denominations and runs through sadistic communism and masochistic New Age mysticism or neopaganism, to end in unhealthy nihilism. (6) Nihilism is an end-state from which there is no recovery.
Please note that ‘politics’ as a study separate from ‘religion’ can exist only in the second condition, in Catholicism, where the spiritual and temporal powers exist in separate spheres.
No society on the surface of the Earth or the vast abyss of history ever tolerated alien faiths or rituals, except for one that is or recently had been Christian.
Likewise, anthropology does not exist outside of the Christian worldview, nor does respect for one’s pagan ancestors, and a desire to preserve beliefs one believes wrong. It is typical of Islam to dynamite Buddhist statues, and inevitable for Leftists to obliterate and rewrite history, but it is not typical for Spanish Bishop Diego de Landa to burn the Popol Vuh. (Indeed, this one example has no obvious second in Christian history).
The reason for this is simple: no one except a Christian has a logical reason to respect the free will of other men, and no one else regards the free choice to love God as sacrosanct, even when the choice is to refuse that love and embrace hell instead.
Pagans believe in fate, in forces beyond even the control of the gods, and Postchristian believe either than men are no different than beasts, guided by instinct, or no different from machines made of meat, carrying out natural operations without choice and without dignity.
There is no such thing as “religion”. There is on the one hand the Christian faith, and on the other there is the default state of mankind, which hovers around a pagan fear of an implacable yet whimsical spirit world and a pagan worship of strength that adorns tyrants with divine honors, from Caesar to Pharaoh to the Brahmin of India to the Emperor of China.
The only thing in human history that ever erected a direct and vehement contradiction of this fearful worship of tyrants both of this world and the other world is the faith of Abraham.
Buddha rejects the world as an evil illusion, merely a source of pain; Lao Tzu dismisses the question as unanswerable; Confucius as impractical. (These men, it must be noted, are sages or philosophers. They are not the prophets or promoters of a religion and the cultic practices that sprung up in their names are nothing more nor less than the divine honors pagans are wont to pay to any great man or great sage. They are the brothers of Plato and Pythagoras, not of Moses and Elijah.)
The Hellenes held the world to have arisen from Chaos, the Norse from the roaring void of the Ginnungagap, and the modern atheist hold the world to have arisen from the Big Bang and the inexplicable advent of life from non-life, and intelligent life from non-intelligent life. In all such worldviews, the soul of man is an accident, a by product, and a gods either do not exist or are the toys of deadly fate. No one is really in charge of the universe. The Chinese sages are too wise and logical to have concerned themselves with the origins of the cosmos, since they ask, quite sagely, who might have been present to witness such a thing? In this they agree with Greek philosophers in dismissing the folk beliefs of the folk. The Hindu in a stance even more filled with despair hold that all the suffering of the countless eons of the universe have no beginning and no end: life is a purgatory without any endpoint of purgation. There is Karmic punishment for sin but not forgiveness. It is indistinguishable from hell. The Buddhist stance, in rebellion against this, is even more despairing, for it promises an end to the endless wheel of suffering in a type of enlightenment indistinguishable from obliteration.
Regard, for example, the Aztec who sacrificed hundreds of human souls to the steaming and blood drenched pyramids of Mexico in order that the sun would not go dark. To live in a world where you thought your ritual observances where all that kept the world from hideous obliteration would be as grim and hopeless as … as … as your average environmental activist.
The despair of the Buddha is reflected in the writings of the Gnostics and in the request of Socrates at his death that a bird be sacrificed to Aesculapius, as if to die were to be healed of the material human condition. Many pagans believe in reincarnation or in elevation to a disembodied state, or a reunification with the world-soul. The Christians teach that the individual survives death and will be reincarnated in a glorified body at the end of human history (which is the beginning of real history, when the fun starts) in a new heaven and a new earth, cleansed of all sin and all stain.
Only in the writings of Moses is the world stated unambiguously to be the work of a benevolent creator, and the material world to unambiguously be good. Paganism is astonishingly grim and hopeless. And in a hopeless world where nothing is unambiguously good, there is no reason to recognize the liberty of foolish men as sacrosanct, something even the king many not touch. The pagan gods are worshipped because they are more powerful than men, not morally superior. Jupiter is a parricide and rapist, and Brahma destroys the universe in an act of cosmic genocide once every turn of the great wheel of time by opening his eyes and ending and restarting the meaningless dream of existence. The behavior of the gods of the Aztecs is too vile to repeat in public.
The modern rejection of Christianity is merely a return to pagan despair and this power worship, but retaining the Christian notions of the equality of man and compassion for the poor.
Unfortunately, absent God, there is no logical reason to believe in the equality of man or to believe in compassion for the poor. And, sure enough, when the modern atheist actually gains secular power, history displays that the logic of atheism is the same as the logic of paganism.
The adoration of the corpses and images of communist leaders in Russia or in the Far East differ from the adoration of the demigods and founding heroes of pagan empires only in a metaphysical nicety that rejects supernaturalism. There are naturalistic and secular gods. The Marxist belief in the ineluctable evolution of history toward a socialist utopia differs from the Buddhist belief in the achievement of nirvana only in its metaphysical trappings. One involves evolution and the other metempsychosis.
There are, to be sure, non-Christians and pagans who speak about the dignity of man and the sacred nature of human free will. One needs only look at history to see those speeches are not worthy of credulity. They are akin to the guarantee of the free practice of religion found in the written constitutions of socialist states in Asia or semi-socialist states in Europe.
In the first state, in paganism, the Caesar or Pharaoh or ‘Son of Heaven’ is both a proper object of worship and a source of divinely ordained social order. The slaves are at the bottom because such is the will of the gods, and the rulers are Brahmin and sons of demigods and culture heroes who are less sinful than their inferiors. Helping the untouchable poor is blasphemy, because the gods ordained their poverty. They are not the image and likeness of God, nor does any Christ walk among them. Pagan sages and priests are found in palaces, not mangers, and certainly not on crosses.
Also, a certain study of politics is possible, at least for a season, in the first and healthy phase of the final corruption stage, where the secular power is forbidden from interfering in the spiritual authority of the various denominations living in a culturally (but not legally) Christian state. This is basically coasting on empty, that is, it is living with the moral maxims of a Christian worldview without any logical way to articulate why those maxims are true or should be followed.
In the fourth state, the Established Church is an organ of State power, with the results one sees during the reign of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, Bloody Mary and so on. My point here is that in all the states outside Christendom the study of politics is the study of religion, for the legislator is also the bishop, and the head of state is also the head of the Church.
In the fifth state, the laicist state, the state might at first permit or even encourage a nondenominational form of Christianity, or a form of Judeo-Christian Deism vaguely honoring the Supreme Being.
But it is the nature of power to expand. Where there is no universal, that is, Catholic and international church to counterbalance the imperial or national power, that power expands. Even in enlightened commonwealths like England or the United States, the members of unpopular denominations will find their right to worship as they see fit preserved only for so long as the default assumptions of the consensus of society as a whole are Christian, and hence respect with awe the terrifying power of the free will to chose freely to love Christ or to hate him.
If that default is ever overthrown, the results are either slow and terrible or swift and terrible. A swift example is the Terror in France, or the greater and longer lasting terrors in Russia and China after their laicist revolutions attempted to eliminate Christianity entirely from life. An example of the slower and more insidious terror is the current generation in Europe and America, where certain thoughts and ideas can be decreed by anonymous voice to be inappropriate, beyond the pale, unwelcoming, or politically incorrect. Social pressure is currently being directed against the free exercise of religion in this Postchristian and postrational generation, but the warning signs of intolerance and hatred for all Christian denominations, but especially for the Catholics, are clear enough for any with eyes to see.
It is almost not worth discussing the impact of Christianity on politics to those who refuse to read history and refuse to admit what causes what. It is practically unknown to those educated in modern public schools that slavery was wiped out of Europe during the so-called Dark Ages, so called by Protestant writers wishing to slander their Catholic grandfathers, and groping for some reason to attribute all progress and enlightenment to themselves, and not to the previous generations which did all the work of progress and enlightenment.
The notion of the rule of law is found nowhere outside Christendom and makes no sense outside Christendom. The unique Christian worldview holds that all men are sinners, even the highest and noblest king or the wisest sage and scholar or the bravest hero. The unique Christian worldview holds that no man is unworthy of salvation, not even slaves. There can never be a caste of untouchables in a Christian commonwealth, nor can there be a class of people like the Kulaks or the Capitalists slated for extermination.
No Sultan of the Near East, no Emperor of the Far East or the New World ever walked barefoot in the snow in penance for having unjustly destroyed a city. No Postchristian can imagine their adored political leader of their party even being criticized by the press, much less walking to Canossa, as Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV did. The idea of Imperial power being itself bound by a spiritual power independent of his scepter is unimaginable outside Christendom.
There is no abolition of slavery outside Christendom, not even any discussion of such a notion, except among those who take the notion from Christian roots. And where there are Christians, there are always abolitionists, even as far back as St John Chrysostom, who lived and taught in the Fourth Century. Slavery made its great renaissance in Europe from Muslim Spain, who addicted the Spanish to the practice, and the other great powers during the Age of Discover copied them.
There is no struggle for Civil Rights except at the hands of men of the cloth like Dr. Martin Luther King. When agnostics and atheists take over this movement, it becomes a mechanism merely to expand state power by addicting the unwary poor to an endlessly expanding welfare state.
And so on and so on. Outside the Christian worldview, there is no such thing as politics because there is no such thing as politics separate from religion. Outside the Christian worldview, the secular and the spiritual power are, and always have been, one and the same, for there is no logical reason imaginable within a non-Christian philosophy to sever them. There is no logical reason imaginable within a non-Christian philosophy to respect folly, wrong choices, heretics, or the poor and weak and dispossessed. Only if man is sacred is his free will sacrosanct. Only is the will of man is sacrosanct, is the freedom of the conscience beyond even the power of earthly kings and emperors.
The atheist can neither account for the freedom of the will nor call anything sacrosanct.
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Theist vs. Atheist: What Should You Believe? is a seven-part series of articles by two authors, John C. Wright and Stephen R. C. Hicks, in which they debate seven key issues in religion.