The historian
Geoffrey Blainey wrote that during the 20th century atheists in Western societies became more active and even militant, expressing their arguments with clarity and skill. They reject the idea of an interventionist God and they argue that Christianity promotes war and violence. However, Blainey notes that anyone, not just Christians, can promote violence, writing "that the most ruthless leaders in the Second World War were atheists and secularists who were intensely hostile to both Judaism and Christianity. Later massive atrocities were committed in the East by those ardent atheists,
Pol Pot and
Mao Zedong. All religions, all ideologies, all civilizations display embarrassing blots on their pages". Philosophers
Russell Blackford and Udo Schüklenk have written: "By contrast to all of this, the Soviet Union was undeniably an atheist state, and the same applies to
Maoist China and
Pol Pot's fanatical
Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s. That does not, however, show that the atrocities committed by these totalitarian dictatorships were all the result of atheist beliefs, carried out in the name of atheism, or caused primarily by the atheistic aspects of the relevant forms of communism". However, they do admit that some forms of persecutions such as those done on churches and religious people were partially related to atheism, but insist it was mostly based on economics and political reasons. Historian
Jeffrey Burton Russell has argued that "atheist rulers such as Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot tortured, starved and murdered more people in the twentieth century than all the combined religious regimes of the world during the previous nineteen centuries". He also states: "The antitheist argument boils down to this: a Christian who does evil does so because he is a Christian; an atheist who does evil does so despite being an atheist. The absolute reverse could be argued, but either way it's nothing but spin. The obvious fact is that some Christians do evil in the name of Christianity and some atheists do evil in the name of atheism". William Husband, a historian of the Soviet secularization has noted: "But the cultivation of atheism in Soviet Russia also possessed distinct characteristic, none more important than the most obvious: atheism was an integral part of the world's first large-scale experiment in communism. The promotion of an antireligious society therefore constitutes an important development in Soviet Russia and in the social history of atheism globally".
Early twentieth century in Moscow during its 1931 demolition as
Marxist‒Leninist atheism and other adaptations of
Marxian thought on religion have enjoyed the official patronage of various one-party Communist states. In
Julian Baggini's book
Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, the author notes: "One of the most serious charges laid against atheism is that it is responsible for some of the worst horrors of the 20th century, including the Nazi concentration camps and Stalin's gulags". However, the author concludes that Nazi Germany was not a "straightforwardly atheist state", but one which sacralized notions of
blood and nation in a way that is "foreign to mainstream rational atheism," whereas the Soviet Union was "avowedly and officially an
atheist state" – this being not a reason to think that atheism is necessarily evil, though it is a refutation of the idea that atheism must always be benign as "there is I believe a salutary lesson to be learned from the way in which atheism formed an essential part of Soviet Communism, even though Communism does not form an essential part of atheism. This lesson concerns what can happen when atheism becomes too militant and Enlightenment ideals too optimistic". From the outset, Christians were critical of the spread of militant
Marxist‒Leninist atheism, which took hold in Russia following the 1917 Revolution and involved a systematic effort to eradicate religion. In the Soviet Union after the Revolution, teaching religion to the young was criminalized. The Soviet leaders
Vladimir Lenin and
Joseph Stalin energetically pursued the persecution of the Church through the 1920s and 1930s. reigned during the rise of the dictators in the 1930s and his 1937 encyclical
Divini redemptoris denounced the "current trend to atheism which is alarmingly on the increase". Pope
Pius XI reigned from 1922 to 1939 and responded to the rise of totalitarianism in Europe with alarm. He issued three papal encyclicals challenging the new creeds: against
Italian Fascism,
Non abbiamo bisogno (1931; 'We do not need to acquaint you); against
Nazism,
Mit brennender Sorge (1937; "With deep concern"); and against atheist Communism,
Divini Redemptoris (1937; "Divine Redeemer"). In
Divini Redemptoris, Pius XI said that atheistic Communism being led by Moscow was aimed at "upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of
Christian civilization": was a significant figure in the spread of political atheism in the 20th century and the figure of a priest is among those being swept away In Fascist Italy, led by the atheist
Benito Mussolini, the Pope denounced the efforts of the state to supplant the role of the Church as chief educator of youth and denounced Fascism's "worship" of the state rather than the divine, but Church and state settled on mutual, shaky, toleration. Historian of the Nazi period
Richard J. Evans wrote that the Nazis encouraged atheism and deism over Christianity and encouraged party functionaries to abandon their religion. Priests were watched closely and frequently denounced, arrested and sent to concentration camps. In
Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, the historian
Alan Bullock wrote that Hitler, like
Napoleon before him, frequently employed the language of "Providence" in defence of his own myth, but ultimately shared with the Soviet dictator
Joseph Stalin "the same materialist outlook, based on the nineteenth century rationalists' certainty that the progress of science would destroy all myths and had already proved Christian doctrine to be an absurdity". In this climate, Pope Pius XI issued his anti-Nazi encyclical,
Mit Brennender Sorge in 1937, saying:'''' Pius XI died on the eve of World War II. Following the outbreak of war and the 1939 Nazi, and subsequently Soviet, invasion of Poland, the newly elected
Pope Pius XII again denounced the eradication of religious education in his
first encyclical, saying: "Perhaps the many who have not grasped the importance of the educational and pastoral mission of the Church will now understand better her warnings, scouted in the false security of the past. No defense of Christianity could be more effective than the present straits. From the immense vortex of error and anti-Christian movements there has come forth a crop of such poignant disasters as to constitute a condemnation surpassing in its conclusiveness any merely theoretical refutation". Post-war Christian leaders including Pope
John Paul II continued the Christian critique. In 2010, his successor, the German
Pope Benedict XVI said: British biologist
Richard Dawkins criticised Pope Benedict's remarks and said that "Hitler certainly was not an atheist. In 1933 he claimed to have 'stamped atheism out. In contrast, historian Alan Bullock wrote that Hitler was a rationalist and a materialist with no feeling for the spiritual or emotional side of human existence: a "man who believed neither in God nor in conscience".
Anton Gill has written that Hitler wanted Catholicism to have "nothing at all to do with German society".
Richard Overy describes Hitler as
skeptical of all religious belief Critic of atheism
Dinesh D'Souza argues that "Hitler's leading advisers, such as
Goebbels,
Heydrich and
Bormann, were atheists who were savagely hostile to religion" and Hitler and the Nazis "repudiated what they perceived as the Christian values of equality, compassion and weakness and extolled the atheist notions of the
Nietzschean superman and a new society based on the 'will to power. In political speeches, Hitler spoke of an "almighty creator". According to Samuel Koehne of
Deakin University, some recent works have "argued Hitler was a
Deist". Hitler made various comments against "atheistic" movements. He associated atheism with
Bolshevism,
Communism and Jewish
materialism. In 1933, the regime banned most atheistic and
freethinking groups in Germany—other than those that supported the Nazis. The regime strongly opposed "godless communism" and most of Germany's
freethinking (
freigeist), atheist and largely
left-wing organizations were banned. According to Tom Rees, some researches suggest that atheists are more numerous in peaceful nations than they are in turbulent or warlike ones, but causality of this trend is not clear and there are many outliers. However, opponents of this view cite examples such as the
Bolsheviks (in Soviet Russia) who were inspired by "an ideological creed which professed that all religion would atrophy [...] resolved to eradicate Christianity as such". Increasingly draconian measures were employed. In addition to direct state persecution, the
League of the Militant Godless was founded in 1925, churches were closed and vandalized and "by 1938 eighty bishops had lost their lives, while thousands of clerics were sent to labour camps".
After World War II Across Eastern Europe following World War II, the parts of
Nazi Germany and its allies and conquered states that had been overrun by the Soviet
Red Army, along with Yugoslavia, became one-party Communist states, which like the Soviet Union were antipathetic to religion. Persecutions of religious leaders followed. The Soviet Union ended its truce against the Russian Orthodox Church and extended its persecutions to the newly Communist Eastern bloc. In
Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and other Eastern European countries, Catholic leaders who were unwilling to be silent were denounced, publicly humiliated or imprisoned by the Communists. According to Geoffrey Blainey, leaders of the national Orthodox Churches in
Romania and Bulgaria had to be "cautious and submissive". going far beyond what most other countries had attempted—completely prohibiting religious observance and systematically repressing and persecuting adherents. The right to religious practice was restored in the fall of communism in 1991. In 1967, Hoxha's regime conducted a
campaign to extinguish religious life in Albania and by year's end over two thousand religious buildings were closed or converted to other uses and religious leaders were imprisoned and executed. Albania was declared to be the world's first atheist country by its leaders and Article 37 of the Albanian constitution of 1976 stated: "The State recognises no religion, and supports and carries out atheistic propaganda in order to implant a scientific materialistic world outlook in people". with
Joseph Stalin in 1949 as both leaders repressed religion and established
state atheism throughout their respective Communist spheres , here with
Pol Pot in 1978, launched a
persecution of religion in Romania to implement the doctrine of
Marxist–Leninist atheism, while Pol Pot banned religious practices in Cambodia. In 1949, China became a Communist state under the leadership of
Mao Zedong's
Chinese Communist Party. China itself had been a cradle of religious thought since ancient times, being the birthplace of
Confucianism and
Daoism. Under Communism, China became officially atheist, and though some religious practices were permitted to continue under state supervision, religious groups deemed a threat to order have been suppressed—as with
Tibetan Buddhism since 1959 and
Falun Gong in recent years. During the
Cultural Revolution, Mao instigated "struggles" against the
Four Olds: "old ideas, customs, culture, and habits of mind". In Buddhist Cambodia, influenced by Mao's Cultural Revolution,
Pol Pot's
Khmer Rouge also instigated a purge of religion during the
Cambodian genocide, when all religious practices were forbidden and Buddhist monasteries were closed. Evangelical Christian writer
Dinesh D'Souza writes: "The crimes of atheism have generally been perpetrated through a hubristic ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values. Using the latest techniques of science and technology, man seeks to displace God and create a secular
utopia here on earth". He also contends: And who can deny that
Stalin and
Mao, not to mention
Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic? Who can dispute that they did their bloody deeds by claiming to be establishing a 'new man' and a religion-free utopia? These were mass murders performed with atheism as a central part of their ideological inspiration, they were not mass murders done by people who simply happened to be atheist. In response to this line of criticism,
Sam Harris wrote: The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship.
Auschwitz, the
gulag and the
killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
Richard Dawkins has stated that Stalin's atrocities were influenced not by atheism, but by dogmatic
Marxism On other occasions, Dawkins has replied to the argument that Hitler and Stalin were antireligious with the response that Hitler and Stalin also grew moustaches in an effort to show the argument as fallacious. Instead, Dawkins argues in
The God Delusion: "What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does". Historian Borden Painter assessed Dawkins' claims on Stalin, atheism and violence in light of mainstream historical scholarship, stating that Dawkins did not use reliable sources to reach his conclusions. He argues: "He omits what any textbook would tell him: Marxism included atheism as a piece of its secular ideology that claimed a basis in scientific thinking originating in the Enlightenment". D'Souza responds to Dawkins that an individual need not explicitly invoke atheism in committing atrocities if it is already implied in his worldview as is the case in Marxism. Mark Chaves has said that the New Atheists, amongst others who comment on religions, have committed the religious
congruence fallacy in their writings by assuming that beliefs and practices remain static and coherent through time. He believes that the late
Christopher Hitchens committed this error by assuming that the drive for congruence is a defining feature of religion and that
Daniel Dennett has done it by overlooking the fact that religious actions are dependent on the situation, just like other actions. == Atheism and science ==