How socialism causes atheism
by Ben Johnson, Acton Institute:
George Orwell’s 1984 defines the booming genre of dystopian literature, but Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World provided a more accurate prophecy of the future. In another of his works, Ends and Means, Huxley offered deep insights into why people choose to become atheists. In a time when 26 percent of Americans are unaffiliated with any religion, and the number of atheists and agnostics in the U.S. has doubled in the last 10 years, people of faith must pay heed to his observations. Huxley wrote that he and “most of [his] contemporaries” saw atheism’s moral vacuum as their “instrument of liberation,” because it allowed them to embrace sexual hedonism and socialism:
The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons.
“Serious writers associated political with sexual prejudice” and recommended atheism as “a preparation for social reform or revolution,” he wrote. The idea that atheism foments the revolutionary spirit was not lost on the revolutionaries. In 1905, Vladimir Lenin encouraged the Bolsheviks to “follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.”
More than a generation later, a young American radical reiterated to William F. Buckley Jr. that the locus of the struggle lay in the soul. “You have to change the conscience of people,” Dotson Rader, a onetime revolutionary who went on to write celebrity profiles for Parade magazine, told Buckley during a 1972 episode of Firing Line. “You’ve got to change people’s sexual attitudes, people’s attitude towards the church, people’s attitude towards education, towards business.” He admitted that drug use, “sexual promiscuity and sexual deviancy is a device,” because they create “natural allies to a revolutionary movement.”
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