In 1955 I gave two broadcast talks on Morals without Religion, in which I suggested that Scientific
Humanism was the natural successor to Christianity. The broadcasts caused some excitement: and many
Christians protested, with varying degrees of vehemence, that it was a pity I did not know more about the
religion I had so irresponsibly attacked.
I thought there might be something in this. Up to the time of the broadcasts, I had been interested in
philosophical theism rather than in historical Christianity, about which I knew no more than the average
layman who has had a nominally Christian education. So I decided to fill this gap in my knowledge. In the
last few years I have studied the Bible diligently, and now, I suspect, know a good deal more about it than
the average vicar; and I have also read many books about the origins and history of the Church. This
reading has altered my view profoundly.
At the time of the broadcasts, I held two assumptions that were common among the more highbrow type
of sceptic. These were (i) that Jesus, though he was deluded in believing himself to be the long-awaited
Jewish Messiah, was, nevertheless, a great moral teacher, and a man of outstanding moral excellence, and
(ii) that though Christianity is now rapidly being outgrown, it was a great force for good in its day. In the
light of wider knowledge, both assumptions now seem to me to be false. I now incline to the view that the
conversion of Europe to Christianity was one of the greatest disasters of history.
"GENTLE JESUS"
To deal first with the personality of Jesus. If one reads the Gospels with a fresh mind, one gets a picture of
the founder of Christianity that is quite startlingly different from the traditional "gentle Jesus". The
conception of Jesus as meek and gentle may derive in part from his refusal to plead his cause before Pilate.
But Jesus may well, by this time, have identified himself with the "suffering servant" of Isaiah 53 ("He is
brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his
mouth")�and have been consciously fulfilling the role for which he believed he was prophetically
destined.
In his preaching, he continually extolled loving-kindness and meekness, but, as so often happens, his
practice fell short of his precepts. He was, it is true, gentle and affectionate towards his disciples and
towards those who took him at his own valuation: and he was tolerant towards self-confessed sinners. But
he was a fanatic; and, like most fanatics, he could not tolerate disagreement or criticism.
Towards the Pharisees and others who were sceptical of his messianic pretensions, he was often savagely
vindictive. Any hint of criticism, any demand that he should produce evidence for his claims, was liable to
provoke a torrent of wrath and denunciation. Most of Chapter 23 of St. Matthew's Gospel, for example, is
not as we are encouraged to regard it, a lofty and dignified rebuke: it is what on any other lips would be
described as a stream of invective. "Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto
whited sepulchres, which, indeed, appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of
all uncleanness. . . Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?"
This can hardly be called loving one's enemies. Jesus, in fact, was typical of a certain kind of fanatical
young idealist: at one moment holding forth, with tears in his eyes, about the need for universal love; at the
next, furiously denouncing the morons, crooks and bigots who do not see eye to eye with him. It is very
natural and very human behaviour. But it is not superhuman. Many of the great men of history (for
example, Socrates) have met criticism with more dignity and restraint.
HISTORICAL CHRISTIANITY
Clerics frequently refer to "the Christian message" of love and human brotherhood. But there is nothing
exclusively Christian about this message; it is basic to modern Humanism, as it was to the pre-Christian
Humanism of China, Greece and Rome. In the 6th century B.C. Confucius propounded the Golden Rule
and Lao-Tzu enjoined his followers to "requite injuries with good deeds". And later the Stoics, among
others, emphatically proclaimed the brotherhood of man regardless of race or nation. There is no ground
whatever for the claim, so often made by religious apologists, that these ideals are specifically Christian
and originated with Jesus.
What were specifically Christian were some less enlightened teachings, which have done untold harm.
Christians claim that organised Christianity has been a great force for good, but this view can be
maintained on one assumption only: that everything good in the Christian era is as a result of Christianity,
and that everything bad happened in spite of it. But, as a matter of historical fact many of the worst
features of life in the ages of faith (and later) have stemmed directly from the teaching of the Church.
Outstanding among these features are the doctrine of hell, intolerance and persecution, anti-intellectualism,
asceticism, other-wordliness, and the condonation of slavery.
The hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and misery, more
cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any religious belief in the history of mankind.
Yet this doctrine was unambiguously taught by Jesus. "The Son of Man shall send forth his angels, and
they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them
into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth" (Matt. Ch. 14): "Then shall he say also
unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire. . . And these shall go away
into everlasting punishment" (Matt. Ch. 25): "He that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath, never
forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation" (Mark, Ch. 3).
The Roman Catholic Church still teaches the doctrine of eternal punishment, but the current tendency
among Protestants is to say that Jesus' pronouncements on this subject were "symbolic". But no one has
yet answered the question why, if Jesus did not intend his statements about hell to be taken literally, he
made them in a form that ensured that they would be taken literally. Why, in other words, did he
deliberately mislead his hearers? If he was God, he must sureIy have been able to foresee what disastrous
results would follow.
INTOLERANCE AND PERSECUTION
No other religion has such a bloodstained record as Christianity. During the ages of faith the Church
argued, not illogically, that any degree of cruelty towards sinners and heretics was justified, if there was a
chance that it could save them, or others, from the eternal torments of hell. Thus, in the name of the
religion of love, large numbers of people were not merely killed but atrociously tortured in ways that make
the gas chambers of Belsen seem humane. Europe, also, was frequently devasted by religious wars, which
destroyed a far higher proportion of the population than the global wars of the twentieth century. The
Thirty Year's War, for example, reduced the population of Germany by a third.
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM
Jesus exhorted his followers to "become as little children", and the Church throughout history has extolled
credulity, and feared and distrusted the free intelligence. During the Dark Ages the Church was in control
of education, and for centuries scarcely anyone who was not a potential priest learned to read or write.
One of the most persistent fallacies about the Christian Church is that it kept learning alive during the Dark
and Middle Ages. What the Church did was to keep learning alive in the monasteries, while preventing the
spread of knowledge outside them. To quote W.H. Lecky, "The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the
whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind. . . The spirit that shrinks from enquiry
as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of
man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till
Mohammedan science, and classical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the
Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin" (History of European Morals, Ch. IV). Even as late as
the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, nine-tenths of Christian Europe was illiterate.
ASCETICISM AND OTHER WORLDLINESS
Jesus was a celibate, who appeared to regard sexual love as displeasing to God. "The children of this world
marry, and are given in marriage: but they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the
resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage" (Luke, Ch. 20). "There be eunuchs,
which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake" (Matt. Ch. 19). This tendency
was even stronger in Paul. "It is good for a man not to touch a woman. . . But if they cannot contain, let
them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn" (I Cor., Ch. 7). This attitude accounts in part for the
strong neurotic and masochistic strain in Christianity.
Jesus believed that the Last Judgement was at hand "And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven
is at hand" (Matt. Ch. 10). "There be some standing here that shall not taste of death, till they see the Son
of Man coming in his kingdom" (Matt., Ch. 16). "This generation shall not pass till all these things be
fulfilled" (Matt., Ch. 24). "The kingdom of God is at hand" (Mark, Ch. 1). Jesus' moral teaching was
therefore directed mainly towards getting believers into heaven: he showed little concern for the affairs of
this world.
Later, the Church ceased to believe that the end of the world was imminent, but it still held that this life
was no more than a momentary prelude to eternity, and of little importance except as a preparation for the
life to come. Thus throughout most of its history the Church has been indifferent to social progress and
social reform. It has encouraged its members to regard suffering and misery as part of the inscrutable
decrees of Providence; to be patient under wrong and oppression; to accept evil instead of resisting it: all in
the certainty that things would be put right in the next world.
To a privileged minority this attitude has obvious advantages, in that it helps to keep the unprivileged
majority resigned to their lot, but it has retarded human progress for centuries. The emancipation of slaves
and of women, and factory reform in the nineteenth century are three progressive struggles which the laity
waged themselves with little or no support from the clergy.
SLAVERY
There is no justification for the common claim that Christianity was responsible for the abolition of
slavery. The Negro slave trade�a far more infamous practice than slavery in the ancient world�was
initiated, carried on and defended by Christian men in Christian countries. To quote H.A.L. Fisher, "It is a
terrible commentary on Christian civilisation that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was
initiated by the action of Spain and Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for
more than a thousand years been the establised religion of Europe" (History of Europe, Chap. 23).
The abolitionist movement took its impetus, not from Christianity which had condoned slavery for
centuries, but from the secular humanitarianism of the Enlightenment. Many of the leading abolitionists
were unbelievers � Condorcet and other leading figures of the Revolution in France, Abraham Lincoln in
America, Fox and Pitt in Great Britain.
Christians like William Wilberforce who actively opposed the slave trade were far from typical: with the
honourable exception of the Quakers, the attitude of most of the Churches towards abolition was in
America actively hostile, and in Britain (to use Wilberforce's own words)~ "shamefully lukewarm". The
Churches, of course, had no difficulty in citing: scriptural authority for their attitude. The Old Testament
condones it (Leviticus, 25, 4446): and St. Paul told slaves to obey their masters (Colossians, 3, 22). (The
Greek word for slave, "doulos", is wrongly translated as "servant".)
THE ESTABLISHMENT
The indictment against Christianity is formidable: and when Christians today grow indignant about
obscurantism, intolerance and ideological persecution in Communist countries, they would do well to
remember that the Church in the ages of faith had a far worse record. This is not to deny that the Church
has also done some good; so too has Communism. But the crucial fact, surely is that, as Voltaire
remarked, "Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities." One of the best ways to improve men's
behaviour is to enlighten their minds: and today, against the strong opposition of the Church and the
Establishment, Scientific Humanism is attempting to do just that
by Margaret Knight
CHRISTIANITY - THE DEBIT ACCOUNT
Lecturer in Psychology
Aberdeen University
