Joseph McCabe

“ Thus even if we suppose that little more than a tenth of the population of these smaller countries of Europe are Atheists, it adds some 10,000,000 to our total; and I have given precise evidence that in many of them the number of Atheists is nearer one-fifth than one-tenth. ”

“ The one very important difference was that Socialism counted millions of followers amongst the workers, and it was preponderantly or quite generally atheistic. Its great leaders had all been, and in fact were 20 years ago, outspoken Atheists. The Russian Revolution gave an impetus to Communism, and between 1923 and 1933 it spread so widely that the fear of its capturing Germany was made the pretext for the propagation of Fascism (as Nazism really is) and the burning, of the Reichstag by the Nazis to secure their triumph. ”

“ In Czechoslovakia, the 14,000,000 people of which are so predominantly agricultural that there are only six cities with more than 50,000 people, no less than 854,638 adults reported themselves at the Census of 1931 as of "no religion." It would be a desperate apologist who would try to persuade us that "no religion" means simply no Church. The Freethought movement is stronger in Czechoslovakia, where the atheistic President Masaryk has for decades been the chief popular idol, than in any other country in Europe. ”

“ The Communists were solidly and aggressively atheistic, and, though there had been attempts to get rid of the old aggressive Atheism of the Socialists, no Catholic could belong to the party, and, if any Protestants or other Theists did, their number was far more than counterbalanced by the millions of Atheists in the middle class and the non-Socialist working class. ”

“ We are expected to be patient and polite while Catholic publications in America boast of a few tens of thousands of converts snatched from other Churches and deny this enormous loss of millions in Germany by giving that country the conventional figure of 20,000,000 followers of the Vatican. ”

“ Census reports are apt to be, as I have shown in the case of Germany, quite ridiculous, but wherever in a Census a body of men and women write down that they have "no religion" we may certainly take these as the more definite or aggressive Atheists of that country. ”

“ On the other hand, the smallness in some cases of the number of those who so describe themselves is not in the least a proof of the scantiness of Atheists. In Sweden and Norway, for instance, the number is negligible, yet one has only to reflect that in those countries the Socialists are so powerful that they are sometimes described as Socialist states; and any person who imagines that the immense body of Swedish Socialists and Communists, who together number more than a million adults in a population of 6,000,000 are religious is very far astray. ”

“ In other countries we must proceed much as we have done in regard to America, though in some of them, even in small countries, we have official registers of professions of Atheism which must surprise those who are not on the alert for such matters. ”

“ Add a large proportion of the non- Socialist but republican workers and nearly the whole of the middle class, and you see that considerably more than half the population is atheistic. We can safely say that there is a minimum of 20,000,000 Atheists in France.
In Italy there are at present no aggressive Atheists and there is little open expression of Atheism. It was part of the bargain with the Pope that critics of religion should be imprisoned. ”

“ Belgium has a million Socialists and Communists, Poland half a million, even Bulgaria about 200,000. Austria had, until Dollfuss and the religious criminal Starhemberg brought out their artillery, a formidable body of 1,578,000 Socialists and Communists, and the massacre of some hundreds has not induced the remainder to become convinced that there is a God in the heavens. ”

“ This strength of the Communists and Socialists at the last free elections in 1932 gives us an exact indication of the minimum number of Atheists in Germany. I say minimum because just the same proportion of Atheists were found in the middle class as in other advanced countries. ”

“ Until about 20 years ago Germany was in much the same condition as regards religion as America and Great Britain. In the cities at least four-fifths of the people never attend church- services of any sort, and the "best sellers" amongst the thoughtful reading public were Atheists like Nietzsche and Haeckel. ”

“ Except in cultivated circles there is virtually no literature urging people to believe in any other sort of God, and the popular press does not, as in America, keep up the pretense that ours is a Christian civilization under the presidency of a deity. ”

“ No people so thoroughly appreciate jokes at the expense of religion and its petit bon Dieu (good little God) as the French do. The atheistic note is predominant in every town, and the 10,000,000 Radical-Socialist, Socialist, and Communist organized workers are solidly atheistic. ”

“ Higher teaching was mainly in the hands of Atheists, and popular and rather caustic atheistic weeklies had a circulation of more than a million amongst the workers. From that date the Socialist movement, which in Italy is atheistic and bitterly condemned by the Church, rapidly advanced. At the election of 1919, the last entirely free election, it secured 1,840,593 out of a national total of 3,500,000 votes. Atheistic Socialism and Communism had won the immense majority of the town-workers and a very large part of the peasants. ”

“ At all events, the results of both municipal and general elections showed to the end of 1933 that the Socialists, Communists, and other atheistic bodies controlled half the voters. Anti-clericals generally had 255 out of the 463 deputies to the Cortes. In Latin countries anti-clerical generally means Atheist. God is to them the God of the Catholic Church. ”

“ We are thus fortunate in having precise statistics in a few cases, and these give us some clue to the situation in other countries. Denmark, for instance, is certainly not behind Holland in the growth of advanced opinions. ”