AEI national fellow David Gelernter delivered the ninth of the 2007-2008 Bradley Lectures on May 5. Edited excerpts follow. A video of the lecture is available at www.aei.org/event1554/.

David Gelernter

On September 6, 1939, during the first week of the Second World War, T. S. Eliot added this final note to his Idea of a Christian Society: "The alignment of forces which has now revealed itself should bring more clearly to our consciousness the alternative of Christianity or paganism." In mentioning paganism, he was speaking, of course, of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which had just aligned themselves two weeks earlier in the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. Britain was the Christian alternative, so far as there was one; Eliot might have referred to Poland and, in a sense, France also, but those were secondary for him.

One might have thought that "the alternative of Christianity or paganism" would have emerged even more clearly over the course of the fighting. Stalinist Russia changed sides, but the Soviet Union's conduct continued to present a radical contrast to Britain's. When America entered the fight, it became a second instance of Eliot's Christian alternative, broadly speaking, and imperial Japan made a third pagan regime. The violent contrast between the conduct of the two Christian or quasi-Christian powers on the one hand and the three pagan regimes on the other grew only more striking as the war continued. When it was over, certain conclusions might have been inevitable, but Eliot himself was not interested in them. In his influential Notes Towards the Definition of Culture in 1948, he never returned to this question of Christianity or paganism.

In fact, there has been no great tendency among historians or thinkers in general to consider the possibility that the crimes of the state-pagan regimes were fundamentally related. Neither has there been a tendency to discuss the great moral collapse as it was manifest in all three state-pagan regimes during the 1930s and World War II--years I will refer to as "the war era" for convenience, although in Soviet Russia, large-scale atrocities began earlier and continued longer.

The thesis I want to investigate--one that involves such a daunting tangle of complex issues and demands so many qualifications that it is hardly surprising that it has not recommended itself very widely, though it seems to me crucially important nonetheless--is that we need to study not only the Holocaust, the Gulag, and Japanese atrocities, but this phenomenon of moral collapse as it was connected with the doctrine of state paganism. And we should consider the extent to which war-era Britain and America were not merely modern liberal nations, but unofficially--perhaps only implicitly--Judeo-Christian nations.

In short, is it fair to associate the great moral collapse of the war era, in three very different nations, with the surge of state paganism in those same nations during those same years? Was the war era, among many other things, a trial of the state-pagan versus Judeo-Christian worldviews under conditions of worldwide crisis? Was it perhaps the greatest and most important such trial in history?

Of the many qualifications that crop up in any approach to the thesis I have mentioned, the first is the uniqueness of the Holocaust as an attempt to rip an entire nation out of history, to murder the nation itself. We have no right to equate the Shoah with the Gulag or Japanese atrocities, but we are obligated at the same time to remember the immense suffering created by Stalinist Russia and imperial Japan.

Of course, the Soviet Union fought against Nazi Germany--and against Japan, too, at the very end of the war. So the distinction in worldviews is not a distinction of Allied versus Axis. On the same lines, it is worth noting that Fascist Italy, which was such an inspiration to Hitler and proved itself a brutally aggressive nation in its own small way, continued to consider itself a Christian nation throughout the Fascist era; in the Lateran accords of 1929, Benito Mussolini acknowledged that Italy was a Catholic nation.

Italy never committed systematic atrocities on the level of Nazi Germany. In these years, being a fascist or Axis regime did not imply in itself regime-sponsored mass murder. But aggressive state paganism did.

It is important to note, nonetheless, that no one can claim that Christian nations in general behaved admirably or even decently in the war era. There are the cases of Poland and other Eastern European nations with respect to their Jewish populations. Austria remained Christian to a greater extent than Germany. Francisco Franco's Spain is a complicated case, and so is France. But China, Indochina, Burma, Siam, and other Asian nations were neither Christian nor state-pagan and suffered rather than inflicted atrocities. I mention these all just to hint at the huge complexity of the topic. Nonetheless, the topic seems to me so important that we ought to press on through this blizzard of complexity, even if we skid or spin out or smash up along the way.