Book Review: Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell

Book Review

Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

by Bertrand Russell

     The British philosopher Bertrand Russell took on the subject of religion approximately 100 years ago. Some of his essays spanning the time from 1900 to 1940 are collected in Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. The quality and relevance of the writing varies from chapter to chapter. About half of them are good.

     The titular essay is more like a short introduction to the thoughts of Russell. He addresses the strongest arguments in favor of religion he can find. We have all heard that God is infinite and he created everything. There would be no morality without religion. Societies without religion become tyrannical and so on. Russell effectively uses Occam’s Razor to slice these ideas to shreds. His logic is clear, simple, and direct. It is like he is in a boxing match with God and the match should actually end in a TKO by the fifth page with Russell winning an easy and effortless victory.

     Of course, as he says, religious belief is motivated by emotion and fear is the strongest emotion that inspires faith. A big problem is that when logic comes into conflict with emotions then logic does not get understood and feelings override truth. Russell was optimistic, though, that science would put faith to rest and that the next stage in human evolution would be a turn away from religion and irrationality in a move towards greater knowledge, understanding, and kindness. Obviously we have not gotten there yet. Intellectuals still always seem to be at the mercy of stupid people who react but do not really think. These ideas get developed further in the essay “What I Believe”, a piece of writing that got Russell banned from the teaching faculty at the College of New York because its optimistic tone about secular humanism offended the Catholics at the university. Instead of engaging in debate with conflicting ideas, those people chose to silence them instead; a sign of fear and mental weakness indeed.

     The essay “Nice People” continues on in a similar vein. Dissenting ideas, especially scientific ideas, often get stifled and censored by the political elite because they disrupt the public order. Being disruptive is not nice, in fact it can be infuriating; it is just better for everyone to say what is socially acceptable for the sake of making peace. Those who would speak out in favor of pursuing intellectual truth need to be threatened or violently suppressed for the sake of maintaining the status quo. Therefore the nice people who act as society’s authorities use cruelty and sadism to ensure that everybody remains nice. Russell exposes the violence inherent in religious leadership.

     The essay “Freedom and the Colleges” runs along the same lines. In the early 20^th century, religion was being used to ban freethinkers and atheist philosophers from lecturing at universities. Bertrand Russell points out how religious Americans hypocritically hate socialism because it supposedly suppresses people’s freedoms but do not mind when the church does the same. In his era, Russell demonstrated how religion in the so-called free world resulted in the same intellectual shackling that fascism and communism enforced in Europe. Anybody who does not tow the capitalist or Christian line in the U.S.A. gets publicly humiliated or socially ostracized. It is interesting to note that Russell was fighting against the conservative and anti-science right wing of his day; in our time, scientific thought and freedom of speech are under threat from not only the right wing science-denying capitalists and evangelical Christians but also by the politically correct left as well. When science does not support ideas like the social construction of gender, the political activists try to drive scientists out of the universities, prevent their research from getting published, and join in internet lynch mobs that publicly shame people for trying to engage in healthy debate. Perhaps Bertrand Russell was a bit hasty in his optimism that knowledge could liberate us from mean-spirited idiocy.

     Not all of Russell’s thinking is infallible. A lot of the information in his details is outdated. He sometimes relies on over-generalizations and over-simplifications, especially in the essay “What I Believe”. The hasty conclusion that all the world’s problems will be diminished if religion gets abandoned sounds naive. There are some false equivalencies here and there, for example prisons should cure criminals the way hospitals cure sick people so treating prisoners with kindness the way patients are treated with kindness will make them stop committing crimes. Russell has obviously never encountered any real criminals. But then again, a member of the British upper class would never associate with such kinds of low people anyhow, would they? But these logical errors tend to be small details and the core ideas of his writing still remain difficult to disagree with. Another significant criticisms are that his writing style is about as exciting as a pile of dust which is not surprising since Russell argued strongly throughout his career against the validity of emotions in intellectual thought. Also, some of these essays are either too far from the main topic of religion or just seem too trivial to be worth reading; they could have cut out the filler because only about half the book was worthwhile reading.

     In the end, this collection may not be so good for seasoned thinkers and long-time atheists. There is a lot here that such people have probably already thought about and a lot of it just sounds like common sense. Maybe an agnostic who wants to decide what they truly believe might get more out of this, at least they could if they read it with an open mind and take these ideas into serious consideration.

     While religious thought does appear to be more or less foolish, if it inspired John Coltrane to play such amazing jazz then maybe it is not 100 percent bad. Maybe it is just 98 percent terrible and useless instead.

Russell, Bertrand. Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. Touchstone Books, New York: 1957.