Motus Mentis

If I told you that I knew there were invisible beings directing the flow of traffic on the highway, or that I had just seen someone rise from the dead and ascend into the sky, you’d want some proof — and if I had none to offer, you’d begin to doubt my sanity, and might start looking for the door. If the President of the United States were found to be making decisions based on such assumptions, you’d be gravely concerned for the safety of the nation.

All of this stands on its head, of course, when the subject is religion. So powerful a system for social cohesion is religion that, regarding religious notions, one is not only granted a waiver for holding bizarre beliefs on no evidence, but one is looked upon with wary suspicion (or worse) if one does not hold such beliefs: if one does not exempt these ideas from the rational scrutiny that is in all other matters the touchstone of sanity itself.

In last year’s Presidential campaign we were treated to a prime-time battle-royal in which the various candidates, oozing pious solemnity, elbowed and jostled one another to be judged the one most confidently guided by his or her “faith”. (Not since watching Queen For A Day as a boy, I think, have I seen anything on TV that I found quite so depressing.) I expect that even the politicians themselves found it undignified — which is saying a lot — and would never have participated in such a tawdry spectacle were it not essential, as seekers of American votes, for them to establish what I suppose we might aptly call their bona fides.

The atheist’s sin is compound. At the simplest and most benign level, he is simply not “joining in”; he is willfully refusing to participate in a social behavior that actively binds the group. It is like not going to the company picnic, or being too much of a sourpuss to put on your funny hat at the New Year’s party.

More than that is the notion that the atheist, in not joining in, is not only sitting out the dance, but is making it clear that he thinks himself above it all (which, to be fair, is often the case). Religious believers often see the mere fact of the atheist’s disbelief as confrontational or even insulting. Some atheists, now that they are less likely, for the moment at least, to be burnt at the stake or stoned to death, indeed go out of their way to be confrontational. I have to say my sympathies are most often with them: atheists are a despised minority, and their only crime is refusing to believe preposterous assertions on no evidence.

But the real threat, I think, is that the atheist is resented for being freer than the believer. He has set himself outside the network of internal and external constraints that bind the community of God-fearing men and women each to the other, or at the very least to their gods. Without the expectation of divine supervision and retribution, without any concern for the celestial Panopticon that chastens and inhibits the believer, without the certainty that a great many consequential things are so simply because God made them that way, without the reassurance that justice will prevail in the end, and without a Creator to secure his oaths, he is very much a rogue, a loose cannon, and not to be trusted.

It’s not true, of course; our moral instincts are antecedent to the religions that variously codify them, and conscience guides believer and heathen alike. But this reputation makes freethinkers easy pickings, and many a politician has advanced his own fortunes by finding a suitable infidel and then stoning him with enthusiasm. We find a good example in the early political career of Lord Randolph Churchill.

By the middle 1800’s the enormous Churchill fortune had dwindled considerably, and Randolph’s older brother Blandford would inherit the ducal title and Blenheim Palace. Randolph, as a young member of Parliament seeking to make a splash, wanted some sensational cause upon which to build a reputation. He found just the thing in Charles Bradlaugh.

Bradlaugh was a vocal atheist who, upon managing to get himself elected to Parliament as the member for the liberal constituency of Northampton, had a little problem regarding the oath. He first sought simply to “affirm”, which option he was denied, and then offered to make a pro forma reading of the oath — but this was refused as well (presumably for the reason mentioned above: that as an unbeliever the oath would have no hold upon him).

In his fascinating book Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, Arthur Herman explains that this was just what young Randolph, his eyes glittering with ambition, needed:

Randolph soon discovered that Bradlaugh made an easy target. He was not only a free thinker but a socialist, an advocate of birth control, and even a critic of Empire. Bradlaugh was also a radical republican who denounced the monarchy and aristocrats like Randolph in heated terms. So when Randolph made his speech on May 24, 1880, condemning Bradlaugh for his atheism, he also read aloud from one of Bradlaugh’s pamphlets calling the royal family “small German breast-beating wanderers, whose only merit is their loving hatred of one another.” He then hurled the pamphlet on the floor and stamped on it.

The House was ecstatic. “Everyone was full of it,” Jennie [Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston’s mother] wrote, who had watched the speech from the gallery, “and rushed up and congratulated me to such an extent that I felt as though I had made it.” Lord Randolph Churchill’s career was launched as a sensational, even outrageous, headline-grabber. Together with [Sir Henry Drummond] Wolff and another friend, Sir Henry Gorst, he formed what came to be known as the Fourth Party, a junta of Tory mavericks who ripped into their own party leaders any time they sided with the government, to the delight of journalists and newspaper readers.

Suddenly, thanks to Randolph Churchill, politics was fun again. When Bradlaugh was re-elected in spite of being denied his seat, Randolph attacked him again, carefully playing it for laughs and for the gallery and the news media; when the voters of Northampton insisted on returning Bradlaugh again, Randolph did the same thing. And then a fourth and a fifth time: at one point Bradlaugh had to be escorted out of the House chamber by police and locked up in the Big Ben tower. Some people began to joke that Randolph must be bribing Northampton voters to keep voting for Bradlaugh, since they were also keeping Randolph in the headlines.

Lord Randolph went on (before untreated syphilis led to his decline and death at the age of 45) to enormous power and influence, including the position of Secretary of State for India — an office that gave him, in effect, personal sovereignty over hundreds of millions. When young Winston Churchill sought to make his way in politics a few years later, his father’s outsized reputation opened a great many doors.

The rest, as they say, is history.