20th-century secularization: War and the sexual revolution

With no sense of irony, Christopher Hitchens includes a chapter in his atheist screed, "God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything," titled "Religion Kills." He cobbles together five or six examples of wars and killings supposedly inspired by religious zealots. He begins the chapter with a quote from his two-millennia-old fellow militant atheist, Lucretius, "To such heights of evil are men drawn by religion."

Now, there is no question that evil men under the guise of religion have committed atrocities. I neither justify nor excuse such behavior. However, all the evil acts committed in the name of religion in human history do not compare with the depredations of power-hungry men from recorded history until today. And nowhere is this more true than those atrocities committed in the 20th century by men and regimes that were and are built upon godless, totalitarian, materialistic and secular philosophies.

Paul Johnson provides an indispensable chronicle of the evils wrought by men in the 20th century. In his magisterial "Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties," Johnson notes, "For many millions, especially in the advanced nations, religion ceased to play much or any part in their lives, the ways in which the vacuum thus lost was filled, by fascism, Nazism and communism, by attempts at humanist utopianism, by the ideologies of sexual liberation, form much of the substance of the history of our century." Indeed, he notes the significant influences on this, the bloodiest of all centuries, of, among others, Darwin, Marx and Freud. "Darwin's notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism. Indeed, the political and social consequences of Darwinian ideas have yet to work themselves out."

So that the record is clear on the scale of the bloody barbarism of the 20th century, researchers estimate the number of deaths range from between 140 million to 170 million. This includes tens of millions of deaths directly at the hands of communist, Nazi and fascist regimes. Of course, the human suffering and deprivation of rights that accompanied these deaths is not calculable.

Not only can none of this suffering be laid at the feet of religion, it is explicitly the absence of any religious or godly impulse that opened the floodgates of this blood and horror of the 20th century.