Easter and the Despair of Forgetting God
An atrocity from half a century ago is a fresh reminder of the futility of imagining or trying to create societies without God.
Good Friday is one of the important days of the year, in my view. We must stop and gaze up at the disfigured body of our Lord and contemplate the intersection of good and evil on that Roman cross. To that end, I wrote an essay for National Review on a twentieth-century atrocity and what it teaches us about the futility of ideologies that seek to eliminate the supernatural. I copied the first half of the piece here:
Fifty years ago, just after Easter, the insurgent army known as the Khmer Rouge toppled the official government of Cambodia and initiated the devastating genocide that put Pol Pot on the list of history’s bloodiest rulers. What began with naïve hopes of peace and the end to the war that had spilled over from neighboring Vietnam soon turned into terror as the new regime pushed millions of residents out of the capital city. It soon hunted down anyone perceived as an ally of the government it had just toppled, including scientists, priests, and even anyone who wore glasses, which was interpreted as elitist. The goal was to create a Marxist-Leninist utopia, a classless agrarian society. What resulted, after four brutal years, was a campaign of brutality and torture, leaving a quarter of the Cambodian population in fresh graves.
The evil perpetrated half a century ago belongs to but one of several ignominious periods in a century that began with the promise of human progress, enlightenment, and less violence. Finally, the thinking went, humanity would shed primitive ideas about the supernatural while reason and technology would lead the world into a new utopian future. In his essay “Why I Am Not a Christian,” philosopher Bertrand Russell promised, “Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can often teach us, what sort of social arrangements are likely to promote human happiness. That is all we mean when we speak of morality.”
Karl Marx, the godfather of the ideology that would motivate Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, and softer versions that crept into the West, famously blamed religion for holding humans back from their full potential: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” But, as the 20th century embraced those ideas and the body counts piled up around the world, it would be a Soviet dissident, who experienced the cruel torture of the Gulag, who would understand the perversity of this project:
I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s words were not merely a lament for his beloved Russia, but a warning for the West. And he could not have been more prescient. In the nearly four decades since he delivered his address, America and other leading nations have been pushing Christianity to the margins while living off the fumes of its benefits. It turns out that mere modernity, with its technological advancements, has left many people in a state of digitized misery, comforts at our fingertips but missing the guiding hand of God. It’s no secret that as church attendance has fallen, indexes of loneliness and despair have risen dramatically. The bonds of faith, family, and community have been broken in our atomized world. The ordered liberty envisioned by the American Founders, the twin spirits of liberty and religion described by Alexis de Tocqueville.
But perhaps there might be cracks in the secular ceiling, where the light of the supernatural is breaking through.
In the second half of the piece I pivot to the importance of Easter and how the truth of Christ’s death and resurrection helps us face and confront evil and find hope in the world to come. You can read the whole essay here.
I pray you and your family enjoy a meaningful Holy Week, contemplating the agony of the crucifixion and the triumph of the resurrection.