The New Atheist Denial of History

by Borden W. Painter, Jr.

In particular, their constant cries for evidence-based reasoning contradicted their treatment of history, where they ignored the evidence presented by mainstream historians. On that score, they seemed to me no better than others who misused history for their ideological purposes.

Their treatment of the past got a passing grade by default, while I gave them a failing grade in history. In 2007, I published a short op-ed piece on the subject in the Hartford Courant. The nasty responses from those outraged that anyone should pose such a challenge to the New Atheists introduced me to the blogosphere and an awareness of the significance of the Internet in spreading New Atheist history.

But in fact, his abstract appeals to history and evidence-based reasoning fail when measured against the concrete conclusions of mainstream historians concerning the topics he addresses in making his case against all religion throughout all history. The New Atheist Denial of History calls him and other so-called New Atheists and their allies to account for failing to take seriously the historical record to which they so freely appeal when attacking religion.

No excuse comes to mind justifying the New Atheist misuse of history. Sound writing on historical topics lies readily at hand for anyone with an interest in them.

The New Atheists constantly claim the high ground of evidence-based reasoning in the tradition of the Enlightenment, yet they fail to heed readily available historical evidence that does not support their views, even when presented by scholars trained in history as it has developed since the Enlightenment. Ideology and a set of predetermined conclusions drive their way of doing history. In method, although not in substance, they have much in common with Holocaust deniers, Glenn Beck’s “University,” the proponents of the “War of Northern Aggression,” and others who rearrange history to suit their own ideological and political positions.

Instead of relying on the work of professional historians, the New Atheists and their allies follow their own historical methods and interpretations. They have, in short, gone beyond the boundaries of good historical practice. Unlike those who have pioneered new approaches to history, the New Atheists’ historical views gain force through constant repetition without reference to what mainstream historians have produced. There is no other way to explain some of the “truths” declared by one or another of the New Atheists: Martin Luther King Jr. was only nominally a Christian. Joseph Stalin supported the Russian Orthodox Church. Totalitarian regimes are religious because they are political religions. The popes ruled medieval Europe. Without religion we might have had democracy and the Internet by 1600. Religion has been the primary cause of war in history. In the Holocaust, the Nazis acted as agents of religion. North Korea’s regime is Confucian, not Communist. John Calvin’s Geneva was the prototypical totalitarian state. Only religion makes good people do bad things.

The New Atheists claim they rise above such manipulation because they base their ideas on evidence, but as I will demonstrate, they fail when it comes to their practice of history. It is reasonable to hold the New Atheists to the standards they constantly set in criticizing others. Why should they not adhere to their own standards of reason and rationality in making the case against religion in general and Christianity in particular?

The stakes are high, for if history exists only as an adjunct to ideology, it has nothing of objective and independent value to teach us. History then ceases to be as an autonomous discipline capable of giving some useful and truthful perspective on the human condition generally and our current state of affairs specifically.

The late J. H. Hexter counseled his fellow historians to obey three commandments: (1) do not go off half-cocked; (2) get the story straight; and (3) kee...

The press covered the campaign to reconstruct the cathedral from its inception in 1990 and subsequently reported regularly on the rebuilding from 1994 to 2000. In the larger picture, historians have written about the Soviet campaign, initiated by Lenin and made state policy by Stalin, to eliminate religion, targeting all religious institutions but especially the dominant Russian Orthodox Church. Historians’ works, from general surveys of the USSR to monographs on religious and cultural policies, tell the story of physical destruction of churches and monasteries, persecution and execution of clergy and believers, and attempts to win Soviet citizens to scientific atheism through such means as museums of atheism housed in former churches and proselytizing by the League of the Militant Godless.

In the face of this well-known evidence, Richard Dawkins, justly appalled by the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, informs us that he does “not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca—or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.”2 Despite such assurances, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior fell to the Soviet wrecking crews in 1931 as part of a systematic campaign by atheist leadership to destroy Russian Orthodoxy. On the site of the razed cathedral, the Soviet government originally planned to erect a monumental Palace of Soviets, topped by a huge statue of Lenin. World War II prevented that project, and so afterward the space became a huge outdoor swimming pool. The swimming pool replaced the cathedral physically, while spiritually the state sought to replace Christianity with scientific atheism. Dawkins’s ill-informed statement turns out to be only one of a long list of false, misleading, and irresponsible historical pronouncements from the Big Three bestselling New Atheist authors: Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris.

Dawkins patently falls short in his knowledge and understanding of Soviet policies and practices toward religion. He reduces the topic of Stalin’s atheis...

In the New Atheist version of the twentieth century, “there is not the smallest evidence” that atheism in any way informed Stalin’s policies, although the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.

This book contends that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens ignore or manipulate history in ways that violate the basic canons of historical discourse. They do it in ways that undercut their constant calls for the rational consideration of evidence in constructing arguments and reaching conclusions. They may think they have good reasons for believing that atheism is reasonable, but they make a poor case for including historical reasons among them.

Sam Harris took offense at such suggestions. He thought he had dealt with the problem of atheism and twentieth-century dictators in the original edition of The End of Faith. The problem with modern “genocidal projects,” Harris argued, came from “rigid ideology” that demonstrated that their perpetrators lacked rationality: “Even where such crimes have been secular, they have required the egregious credulity of entire societies to be brought off. Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion.”4 Apparently religion lay at the root of these crimes carried out by antireligious regimes.

The problem stems from dogma, apparently including secular dogma. “The problem I raise in the book is none other than the problem of dogma itself—of which every religion has more than its fair share. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”5 Notice Harris’s ploy in linking dogma to “every religion.” Harris offers a confusion of categories as he shifts back and forth between the religious and the secular, dogma and reason. It fails to occur to him that some dogmas may stem from secular, not religious, sources. That failure impedes a historical understanding of modern history. It leads to confusion, not clarity, in grappling with the twentieth century.

Moving right along, Hitchens informs us that “in a very few cases, such as Albania, Communism tried to extirpate religion completely and to proclaim an entirely atheist state.” At this point it is not clear if Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China belong among these “very few cases” or whether he thinks that these regimes sought only to extirpate religion partially. But then, miraculously, the religious impulse had once again grabbed hold of these antireligious regimes because “there is nothing in modern secular argument that even hints at any ban on religious observance,” and he quotes Sigmund Freud on the “religious impulse.”

Confusion reigns as Hitchens piles one non sequitur on another.

Dawkins never does present informed historical examples of those “horribly frequent” religious wars that have plagued history, and he remains content to offer sweeping, unsubstantiated generalizations.

The Institute for Historical Revision (IHR) that sponsored the conference and published the journal is to this day the leading organization dedicated to Holocaust denial. Toland’s biography of Hitler included coverage of the “Final Solution” and the systematic killing of between five and six million Jews.16 One cannot tell from his speech whether he understood who had invited him to speak, although he should have. His most controversial book, Infamy, Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (1982), presented the attack on Pearl Harbor as a conspiracy led by FDR. That may have been enough for the IHR to invite Toland, as it favored the notion that FDR conspired to bring about the Japanese attack that allowed the United States to enter the war.

John Lukacs in his Hitler of History comments that “Toland’s admiration for Hitler seeps through in many of his pages, and his documentation, too, is inadequate.”18 As we shall see, Toland gains frequent citation from a number of New Atheist allies and supporters. There are better historians than John Toland to rely on when it comes to making statements about Adolf Hitler.19 Unfortunately, the New Atheists commonly use as evidence dated or second-rate sources while avoiding more recent and more credible work by major scholars.

The second article comes from the foundation’s founder and leader, Anne Nicol Gaylor, in August 2004. She makes the case that Hitler lived his whole life as a Catholic, backing up her portrait of Hitler’s religious life with quotations from John Toland.

The device is a simple one: Arbitrarily drop in religion whenever it suits your purpose, as in “Beyond the abject (and religious) loyalty to Hitler, the Holocaust emerged out of people’s acceptance of some very implausible ideas.” Then add the word dogma, apparently meant to imply religious or religious-like dogma: “At the heart of every totalitarian enterprise, one sees outlandish dogmas, poorly arranged, but working ineluctably like gears in some ludicrous instrument of death.”21 He offers the conclusion, “The anti-Semitism that built the crematoria brick by brick—and that still thrives today—comes to us by way of Christian theology. Knowingly or not, the Nazis were agents of religion.”

Harris also mixes in the role of the Catholic Church in a way that “merits a slight digression” into the controversy over “modernism” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pope Pius X condemned modernism in 1907. That allows Harris to mention the Index of Prohibited Books. Harris then admonishes the papacy for adding Descartes to the list in 1948 instead of finding “greater offense

Rather than delve deeper into the origins and characteristics of modern totalitarianism, Hitchens asks the question, “How did religion confront the ‘secular’ totalitarianism of our time?” Thus he puts religion, not totalitarianism, on trial and uses quotation marks to suggest that totalitarianism may not be secular at all.

As he rambles on, Hitchens throws in personal anecdotes, such as the uncle who had his life ruined by religious fanatics, a reference to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to show the connection he makes between totalitarian rule and sexual repression, and sweeping generalizations such as “In the early history of mankind, the totalitarian principle was the regnant one.”33 The fact that contemporary scholars see totalitarianism as a modern phenomenon escapes Hitchens because he has not bothered to read them.

The collective view of these three authors presents a historical rending of the twentieth century like no other I know. It commits errors of both omission and commission by the selective use of evidence that skews, distorts, and, at times, misrepresents the past. It plays fast and loose with definitions of religion, secular, dogma, rational, evidence, and other words central to the subject they choose to treat. Chronology is often hazy, context is commonly narrow, and nuance absent. These shortcomings produce history that would earn a failing grade in an introductory course in modern European history.

Through a combination of polemical zeal and ignorance, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens get history wrong. They claim to marshal evidence that proves religion morally culpable of the greatest crimes of the century. The Big Three and their allies concentrate much of their attention on fascism, Nazism, and communism, without having read what mainstream historians have to say about these subjects.

many church leaders, this initiative also spawned some resistance among a minority of Protestants who formed an alliance known as the Confessing Church. Its members included Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Overall, “the historiography of fascism and religion during the last 40 years has clearly established that the leaders of German National Socialism and Italian Fascism were fundamentally anti-Christian, even if, in the latter case, that tendency was more latent than actual during the early stages.”38 The New Atheists ignore or are unaware of this historiography, and they stick to their preoccupation with showing fascism and Nazism as falling in the religious camp.

The historian’s task is that of seeking such understanding, not playing a moralistic “blame game” in the service of an ideology.

Marxism presented itself in the Soviet Union and elsewhere as the science that had unlocked the true direction of history. That lent an aura of infallibility to the Soviet Party as it carried out the dictates of Stalin and the leadership.

Polemics constitutes the first. As in any debate, they want to score telling points against their opponents, and in history they believe they have a reservoir of damning evidence against religion. Ignorance constitutes the second characteristic. They present no evidence in their texts or notes that they have bothered to read much of what historians have written on the subjects they purport to cover. Many of their cited sources appeared decades ago, and they generally ignore the work of historians in recent decades or, even worse, sometimes misrepresent them.

Dawkins’s apparent ignorance of the role of atheism in twentieth-century Marxism stands out as an example. When he claims, in reference to Stalin, there is “not the smallest evidence atheism systematically influences people to do bad things,” he ignores massive evidence of a Soviet system of religious persecution that did many “bad things.”39 How is it possible not to know about these antireligious acts of the Soviet Union, from Lenin to Khrushchev, that historians have included in standard works on Soviet history? What sense does it make to declare that atheism is the “absence of belief” and therefore meant nothing in terms of a state policy that promoted atheism and attacked religion?

What all three seem adept at doing is changing the meaning of words to fit their polemics so that the word religion loses any meaning. Such manipulation of vocabulary has no place in historical discourse. A subsequent book in support

He takes on Stalin and his Soviet regime by first attacking professor and sociologist Paul Froese’s The Plot to Kill God (2008), which chronicles and analyzes the effectiveness of the antireligious policies of the Soviet Union and its satellites.

Froese presented well-documented evidence of the savage campaign against religious believers in the 1930s. Not surprisingly, he finds that the terror tactics of the regime and the relentless work of the League of Militant Godless led to a sharp decline in attendance at church services. The number of churches declined from 54,000 in 1914 to a low of 4,200 in 1941, rebounding during the war years to 16,000. Increased, if less savage, persecution in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years resulted in 7,500 churches left open in 1966.42 These and other statistics presented by Froese go unchallenged by Stenger, offering another instance of the New Atheists’ inability or unwillingness to confront evidence out of step with their version of history.

Stenger, in company with the New Atheists he praises in his book, presents facts out of context that ignore any understanding or account of Stalin’s religious policies throughout the years of his rule. Indeed, he combines an omission of the persecution of churches and believers before World War II with a misleading suggestion that Stalin and the Soviet Union supported the church consistently during the war and after. Such an account of Soviet religious policy does not find a place in mainstream historical accounts for the simple reason that it is not true.

47 Before the outbreak of the war, Stalin “had proclaimed a ‘Godless Five-Year Plan’ by the end of which (1943) the last church was to be closed and the last priest destroyed.” The war changed all that for the moment, as Stalin began “his remarkable, and short-lived return to God.”

Avalos struggles, as Stenger and Dawkins do not, to give some context to Stalin’s policies, but he gets muddled in trying to explain the relationship of religious, political, and economic factors during Stalin’s regime. His most specific evidence consists of statistics about church life in 1944 when he cites large numbers of baptisms, attendance at Easter services in Moscow, and financial support Stalin gave to the church.51 He makes no mention of World War II and the reasons Stalin temporarily reversed his attack on the church. Stenger seizes the statistics in Avalos’s book, reproducing them in his as

Bruce Pauley, in his study of totalitarianism in the twentieth century, comments, “The passive resistance of the Russian Orthodox Church against the antireligious policies of the state resulted in the confiscation of its property and long prison sentences and the execution of 8,100 Orthodox priests, monks, and nuns in 1922 alone.

Avalos wishes us to believe that such atrocities were “more akin to the church-state unions common in many Western Christian countries,” he might at least give us some examples of what he has in mind as evidence—perhaps the Church of England, or the Lutheran Church of Sweden, or maybe the French Catholic Church before its separation from the state in 1905? He doesn’t tell us.

Stenger and Avalos illustrate one of the New Atheist methods of doing history: Ignore evidence contrary to your point of view and go searching for evidence that supports it. Recall that Stenger dismissed Paul Froese’s book, The Plot to Kill God, without telling us anything about it.

Stenger, for no reason he bothers to give us, just dismisses it and goes on to “hard evidence” that turns out to be extremely soft. Stenger and Avalos also treat Hitler

Stenger, in particular, wrote his book in defense and celebration of the New Atheists. Not only does he not question their version of the twentieth century; he accepts it and adds to it. A major concern of this book is that this kind of bogus history will replicate itself and become its own historiographical tradition, apart from mainstream history.

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To select bits and pieces of information for polemical purposes to support a predetermined position falls outside the boundaries of accepted historical method. Historians try the difficult business of having the evidence drive them to conclusions rather than the other way around.

identify with the victims of these atrocities and condemn the perpetrators. Nevertheless, “it is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding . . . To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman,

The three authors adopt a view of European history popular in the Victorian era that posits a war between science and religion. This struggle had its origins in the triumph of Christianity that led to a dark age of a thousand years that we call the Middle Ages. Religious orthodoxy squelched wisdom and science as it ushered in centuries of superstition. Progress came to a halt.

Improved education also encourages us to understand that “each of us shares a common humanity with members of other races and with the other sex—both deeply unbiblical ideas that came from biological science, especially evolution.”

Dawkins also heaps scorn on Pascal’s wager.11 Hitchens characterizes Pascal’s theology as “not far short of sordid.”12 The attack on Pascal by all three authors illustrates their penchant for issuing moralizing judgments on figures from the past rather than offering reasonable appraisals of the historical significance of such persons.

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