The Fruits of State Atheism

I have spent a lot of time talking with people in the Facebook group Christians and atheists. Some of those talks stay with me. A few atheists there insist that religion is the root of most suffering in the world. They point to wars and scandals and say faith itself is the problem. I listen. I ask questions. Then I ask them to look at what actually happened when governments tried to wipe faith out of public life.

I am a 68-year-old Christian and Air Force veteran. I have lived long enough to watch ideas move from talk to policy to body counts. State atheism is not a theory on a chalkboard. It is a record of governments that declared God dead and then treated people as if they had no soul worth protecting.

Every country that has enforced state atheism has been socialist or communist. That is not an opinion. It is the historical list. The Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. Mao’s China. Enver Hoxha’s Albania, which called itself the first atheist state on earth. Pol Pot’s Cambodia. North Korea’s official line. Cuba after the revolution. None of them were free republics. None of them left room for churches, Bibles, or a conscience that answered to something higher than the party.

A high school student can understand the pattern without a college course in political theory. Socialism and communism start with the claim that the state, not God and not the individual, owns the future. When the state also owns the truth about God, it can decide that some lives are obstacles. The results were famine, prisons, and mass graves.

In the Soviet Union the government closed churches, shot priests, and sent millions to labor camps. Farmers who would not give up their land starved. Historians still argue over the exact number, but tens of millions died from execution, hunger, and the camps. Families learned to hide a Bible the way people once hid a radio so they could hear news the government did not want them to hear.

China under Mao launched the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution. Villages were told to melt their tools to make steel. The harvest failed. People ate bark and then each other. Children were taught to denounce their parents. Temples were smashed. The death toll from those years is commonly placed between forty and eighty million. That is not a church scandal. That is a government that decided faith was an enemy of progress.

Albania banned all religion by law. Pastors and imams disappeared. Crosses were torn down. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge emptied the cities, murdered anyone who wore glasses or spoke a foreign language, and tried to restart the calendar at year zero. Two million Cambodians died in four years. North Korea still treats unauthorized worship as treason. The pattern is the same: the party becomes the only permitted god.

Compare that record with the United States and other democratic republics that protect religious freedom. America was founded by people who had seen what happens when a government claims the right to dictate belief. The First Amendment did not appear out of thin air. It grew out of a Christian conviction that the human conscience belongs to God, not to Caesar. That idea produced a country where churches, synagogues, mosques, and atheist societies can all exist without the secret police kicking in the door.

Look at the societies that have given ordinary people the most safety, the most food, the most chance to speak and to raise children. They have either been shaped by Christian teaching or they have copied the legal protection of conscience that Christianity first insisted upon. Religious freedom is not a modern invention of secular philosophers. It is the fruit of a faith that said every person is made in the image of God and therefore cannot be owned by the state.

I have heard the reply in that Facebook group: “Those were not real atheism. They were just power hungry dictators.” The dictators said they were building a scientific, godless future. They wrote it in their constitutions. They taught it in the schools. They measured success by how completely they erased the old faith. The suffering followed the teaching.

No American I know would choose to raise a family under those systems. We argue about taxes and elections and what our kids should read. We do not argue about whether the government may starve a province or send a pastor to a camp. That difference is not an accident. It is the difference between a republic that still remembers a higher law and a state that recognizes none.

The fruits of state atheism are not peace and reason. They are empty churches, empty stomachs, and filled graves. The record is public. A high school student can read it. The question is whether we will keep pretending the record does not exist.