Militant atheism

The terms militant atheism and militant atheist are designations applied to atheists who are, or are perceived to be, hostile towards religion. The term has been used going back to at least 1894 and it has been applied to people from Thomas Hobbes onwards. It had a specific application within the materialism of Marxism–Leninism, and in the early years of the Soviet Union, and more recently the term has been used, frequently pejoratively, to describe atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett.

Julian Baggini defines militant atheism as "Atheism which is actively hostile to religion", which "requires more than strong disagreement with religion — it requires something verging on hatred and is characterised by a desire to wipe out all forms of religious belief. Militant atheists tend to make one or both of two claims that moderate atheists do not. The first is that religion is demonstrably false or nonsense and the second is that it is usually or always harmful."

Concerns about the use of the term
The term militant atheist is often used pejoratively by theists to describe people believed to campaign actively or outspokenly for atheism and against religion. Catherine Fahringer of the Freedom From Religion Foundation suggested that the label militant was often routinely applied to atheist for no good reason – "very much as was the adjective 'damn' attached to the noun 'Yankee' during the Civil War." Another term that is similarly used is "Evangelical Atheism".

The linguist Larry Trask suggests that the word militant "is used all too freely in the feebler sense of 'holding or expressing views which are unpopular or which I don't like'." He notes that Richard Dawkins is "accused by tabloid newspapers and other commentators of being a 'militant atheist'", although, according to Trask, the adjective is never used of Christian activity. Trask concludes, "if you find yourself writing this word, stop and think whether it has any clear meaning, or whether you are just using it as a swearword."

Soviet Bloc


Engels is considered a militant atheist by Oscar J. Hammen. The belief that Marx was a militant atheist has been challenged. The ascent of the Bolsheviks to power in 1917 "meant the beginning of a campaign of militant atheism" and in 1922 Lenin referred with approval to "militant atheist literature" and demanded that the journal Pod Znamenem Marksizma "must be a militant atheist organ", explaining that he meant militant 'in the sense of unflinchingly exposing and indicting all modern “graduated flunkeys of clericalism”, irrespective of whether they act as representatives of official science or as free lances calling themselves “democratic Left or ideologically socialist” publicists'.

Marxist-Leninist militant atheism resulted in the administrative elimination of the clergy, the housing of atheist museums where churches had once stood, the sending of many religious people to prisons and concentration camps, a continuous stream of propaganda, and the imposing of atheism through education (and forced re-education through torture at various prisons).

In 1923, the Bezbozhnik ("Atheist", or "Godless") magazine appeared, around which the "Union of the Friends of the Bezbozhnik" was formed in 1924. The organization, renamed the Union of Militant Atheists (Союз воинствующих безбожников, Soyuz voinstvuyushchikh bezbozhnikov) in 1929, carried out anti-religious propaganda at the grassroots level. In 1941, soon after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, the newspaper closed, and in 1947 the society itself folded, the task of the anti-religious propaganda being transferred to the more neutrally named All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge (Всесоюзное общество по распространению политических и научных знаний).

The society in its turn was in 1963 renamed to simply Obshchestvo "Znanie" (Общество "Знание", The All-Union Knowledge Society). Since 1959 the society has published a monthly journal called Nauka i Religya (Science and Religion) which, during the Soviet era, described itself as "a fighting organ of militant atheism", rejecting the view that religion would disappear of itself. In 1961 the Ukrainian branch produced a similar journal called Militant Atheist.

The Peoples' Republic of China
In China, according to Julia Ching, Falun Gong was seen by Jiang Zemin as an ideological threat to militant atheism and historical materialism.

Usage in other contexts
Other examples of the usage of these terms include the following:


 * Rodney Stark describes Thomas Hobbes and the other originators of 'The social "scientific" study of religion' as "militant opponents of religion" whose "militant atheism...was motivated partly by politics".
 * Some participants in the French Revolution have been described as militant atheists, as have some of their international sympathisers, such as Thomas Holcroft.
 * The 19th-century political activist Charles Bradlaugh has been described as "the first militant atheist in the history of Western civilization", and the term has also been applied to other 19th-century thinkers such as Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, Annie Besant and Schopenhauer
 * * Figures in the 20th century in the USA and the UK who have been described as militant atheists include Michael Newdow. and Joseph McCabe. McCabe wrote that "Russia is doing the finest and soundest reconstructive work of our time, and it is doing this, not only without God, but on a basis of militant Atheism." Oxford lecturer and historian Timothy Ware used the term to describe the approach of the Soviet government towards religion, which resulted in the systematic killing of 78 bishops, 2,700 priests, 2,000 monks, and 3,400 nuns by 1926. By the 1960s, the number of priests who had been killed was estimated to have risen to 12,000. He notes that the number of laity who were imprisoned and/or killed because of their faith will never be known.
 * The Polish religious leader Stefan Wyszynski decided during his imprisonment (1953–1956) "to defend the faith of the nation against militant atheism by means of the power of the Virgin Mary."
 * More recent examples of the use of the term include an opinion piece by Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph entitled "Militant atheists: too clever for their own good", and an article in the same newspaper by Raj Persaud, who applies the term to Richard Dawkins. The editor of Quadrant Magazine also refers to Dawkins in these terms, and suggests that Dawkins' views are an extreme example of intolerance. Kevin Drum in the Washington Monthly applies the term to Polly Toynbee. RJ Eskow in The Huffington Post refers to Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, saying "I believe most atheists are progressive, enlightened people who are simply 'nonbelievers.' My quarrel is only with those who advocate the elimination of religion based on grandiose and unsubstantiated claims." Theo Hobson in The Guardian claims that "criticisms levelled at religion by militant atheists are often crude and short-sighted". Dawkins has responded to criticisms that he is hostile towards religion, saying "such hostility as I or other atheists occasionally voice toward religion is limited to words" and "It is all too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion. I may well appear passionate when I defend evolution against a fundamentalist creationist, but this is not because of a rival fundamentalism of my own."
 * Andrew Fiala in his paper "Militant atheism, pragmatism, and the God-shaped hole" begins by referring to "Militant atheists such as Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens"
 * Melanie Phillips suggests that ‘militant atheism’ "in junking religion, has destroyed our sense of anything beyond our material selves and the here and now" and "paved the way for the onslaught on bedrock moral values ... and intimidation and bullying to drive this agenda into public policy".
 * Simon Blackburn writes that "many professional philosophers, including ones such as myself who have no religious beliefs at all, are slightly embarrassed, or even annoyed, by the voluble disputes between militant atheists and religious apologists".
 * The Argentinian Supreme Court Judge Carmen Argibay apparently describes herself as a "militant atheist", and the journalist and campaigner Paul Foot has been praised as a "militant atheist". Comedian Kathy Griffin identifies herself as a militant atheist.