“The most detestable wickedness,” wrote Thomas Paine, “the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest
miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.”
So why not let the institutions responsible for all that misery simply die off, and if we have spiritual needs seek some new means to satisfy them? Here, I’m afraid, we are entering the realm of atheistic self-deception.
There is no good evidence that religion has been a special source of violence in human history, as compared to the entirely worldly and secular aims of conquest or resource control that drive most warfare between countries and peoples.
Any society that takes religion seriously will, of course, look for theological justifications for its political decisions. Religious impulses, like other loves — home, family, freedom — are often exploited or suborned by worldly powers. But this is just as likely to reflect the unfortunate captivity of religious institutions to kings and would-be conquerors than the captivity of some kind of otherwise-peaceable secular politics to the bloodlust of religious zeal.
This should be especially clear from the history that followed after Paine’s confident pronouncement, which undermined his sweeping condemnation of religion much as subsequent history undermined David Hume’s pontifications on the mystical and supernatural. When Paine published his pamphlet blaming the Bible and Christianity for all the bloody wars of Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte was three years away from his accession as First Consul. This was just a warm-up act for the great power wars and political persecutions of the twentieth century, which piled up tens of millions of casualties in the name of nationalism, Communism, and fascism — all causes untainted by the dogmas of revealed religion, and yet somehow, despite Paine’s expectations, much more pitiless than the Christendom they overthrew.
This should be entirely unsurprising when you realize that the very idea of Christendom — a supranational entity making specific, detailed moral claims on all its members — is an example of how the great religious traditions have attempted to transcend the local, familial, and national loyalties that actually drive most human conflict. This was true in the Axial Age when the great religions began to take their modern shape, it was true when the Christian revolution overtook the Roman Empire, and it’s been true for most of American history — in which Christianity, usually Protestant Christianity, has been the basis for the most insistent demands for racial equality and universal citizenship.
Indeed it is extremely strange for anyone who inhabits the current liberal order, with its framework of universal rights, its humanitarian ideals, its missionary impulses that sometimes work and sometimes come to grief, and think of themselves as lucky escapees from a world of religiously motivated politics. The entire order we inhabit is built upon many centuries’ worth of attempts by people with religious impulses — often strong and strange ones — to gentle the great powers of the world, to force moral absolutes upon statesmen who preferred to deal in machtpolitik, to impose rules that were often, if not always, justified with appeals to a higher law, to heaven itself, to nature’s God.
The idea of international law emerged from the work of Spanish Catholics and Dutch Protestants; the abolitionist movement was a work of Quakers and evangelicals; the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was written mostly by a Catholic. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were not secular figures, whatever else they may have been; Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is not a secular document; William Wilberforce and Bartolomé de las Casas invoked the Bible, rather than rejecting it, when they railed against the evils permitted by their supposedly Christian governments. Perhaps the structures of peacemaking built upon all of those religious efforts no longer need religious ideas to remain standing (though you know I think they do). But the idea that the modern world has been built simply in bold secular defiance of religious violence is more mythological than Zeus
