On Bertrand Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian"

I first came across Russell's book on the shelf of my college library around 1979. I had never heard of Bertrand Russell. At the time I was just getting introduced (or re-introduced) to the religion I'd been brought up in and I had a strong aversion to the title itself. I was in a position like that of someone who finally had a ticket to see his favorite band and was told at the door, "you're really not going to like this show."

I put off reading the book for over forty years, first because I forgot it existed, then, finding a cheap copy somewhere and putting it in the extensive pile of "books to be read" just never got around to it. I even put it on my night stand, and let it sit there for ten years while I read who knows how many other books, including several volumes the Anchor Bible--expecting to get around to it someday. Meanwhile I had read a fair amount of the other words of Russell including his Introduction to Philosophy and I got a pretty strong impression of what I would find if I ever did pick it up.

I have finally started to read the book, though I've gotten no farther than the first essay, the title essay (the books is really a collection of essays given at different times and places on the topic of religion or theology. My impression was spot on. Russell is a scientific-rationalist. And if you know that, you know beforehand pretty much everything he's going to say. At least, nothing he says is likely to surprise you. He's brilliant when he writes about logic and mathematics. He's not brilliant when he writes about religion. (Nietzsche does a much better job at tearing down Christianity than Russell does). At least this is my first impression.

He starts his essay by taking down the Scholastic arguments for the existence of God. No doubt in the 1920s this was something that still needed to be done. He does the job in the perfunctory way you'd expect from someone who was never going to take any argument seriously to begin with. He's right, of course, that you can't get to the existence of God through pure reason. Didn't Kant already get us most of the way to that conclusion? What Russell does not do is arrive at what seems to me the obvious conclusion, that the problem is not with God but with reason. A God who can be encompassed by language is not the infinite God of Christianity. And this gets at the fundamental problem I have with Russell and many others: their faith in reason as the guiding principal of all inquiry, whether the subject in question is amenable to reason or not. The proper conclusion to Russell's take down of argument for God is not "God does not exist," but "we still don't know whether God exists." He's taken a path through the woods that ended in the woods and has suggested therefore (though he did not say so in so many words) that because the path ended here, there's no castle on the other side of the woods.

Russell could never belief in God because he believes that the only path to knowledge is reason, and that the pursuit of reason is science. He has disqualified all other forms of knowledge--or of that others would call knowledge, including of course faith, which the book of Hebrews defines, contra Russell as "the knowledge of what is unseen." He did the same in his history of philosophy when he came to the Romantics. 

One cannot necessarily fault him for his decision, but one should note that the decision lies in that odd place where so much that is essential lies, between the arbitrary and the necessary. It is not an arbitrary decision. It can be defended. But it's not a necessary decision either. Nothing in creation requires one to make it. 

Russell goes on to argue against the moral character of Christ--like Nietzsche he believes that Christ is in many ways exemplary but in other ways deeply flawed--and the character of those who profess Christ as well as the churches in which they make their confession. But to start he makes the almost off-hand remark that Christ probably never existed as an historical person. He offers no evidence for this highly dubious claim. But it allows him to take the Christ of the gospels as the whole of his critique. And this in turn allows him to take wholesale the Christ of the gospels in exactly the way that the must fundamentalist of fundamentalists do and to avoid the messy problem they also avoid that there is no "Christ of the Gospels." Each gospel offers us a different interpretation of Christ, a different Christ because even the earliest followers of Christ were already struggling with the question of who he was and what he meant. Russell has no interest in that struggle. He can simplify and dismiss Christ with a simple, bad-faith gesture. 

I won't explore either his praise or his condemnation. Others have dealt with all of this--not in the context of Russell but in Biblical exegesis in far greater degree that I could. There's no need to repeat old arguments. But I will point one one obvious instance of Russell's bad faith in order to illustrate the lack of seriousness with which he takes his subject. Russell is particularly offended by Christ's teaching about Hell (and, side note, I find this part of Russell the most most compelling in general; it is something a Christian must struggle with). But he proclaims that Hell is made for "People who do not like his teaching." Russell's Christ is a pure egoist, but one that does not come close to matching any reasonable interpretation of the Christ of an of the gospels or any part of any of the gospels. The teaching in question is "Love one another," with all that that implies. If you refuse to love in this world, where love is not only possible but essential, then you are refusing what the gospels call "salvation." Russell is particularly lathered by the failure of God, after millions (we can now say billions) of years, not to have come up with a world better than the one we find ourselves in. And this serves better to reveal Russell's conception of a time-bound, earthly-reasoned God, one he can so easily take down, than the infinite, beyond-time God of the faith he is trying to take down. I won't develop this further here.

Russell's final take down is of the churches, of dogma and organized religion, which he finds does little if any good and an awful lot of evil. It is the best part of his essay. It is where he is most Christ like. In fact one could argue that Christ's most fundamental teaching is about the hypocrisy of religion. Organized religions always turn to the support of themselves and their needs. They are the individual writ large. This is sin itself. I will not say the churches do not do a lot of good. But we can expect them to be social institutions and to look out for their temporal interests against their spiritual interests. And we an expect them to be co-opted by power-hungry individuals. The evil of the churches, even if it were as pervasive as Russell wants us to believe, is no argument against Christ. It may serve to clarify Christ for anyone sincerely interested, as Russell is not, in Christ.