RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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hind the Iron Curtain. There are similarities in the broken con–
fessions of the old Bolsheviks of the Moscow trials and that of
Cardinal Mindzenty. There are religious people today on every side of
every issue.
Religious differences can easily be used to divide people socially.
Religion is not the central issue in the world today. The effort to
substitute religion for politics is one of the tactics of Stalinism, and,
often, it is used as a tactic by some Catholics, and others. When
anti-Stalinists allow this to become an issue, they are falling into a
Stalinist trap. And we must also remember that many non-Stalinist
radicals have fallen into the same trap. A number of radicals and
liberals are as fearful of religion as some religious people are of agnos–
tics. Again and again, I have seen liberal and radical intellectuals
greet honest changes of mind and even the practice of tolerance as a
diseased symptom of a return to religion. What is involved here is a
counter-absolutism, a political absolutism which reveals all of the
psychological features of religious absolutism. Freud spoke of "free–
floating anxiety." And in our time, we have had what might be
called a free-floating intelligentsia. Many of its members have been
floating around the edges of successive absolutisms. They were seduced
by dreams of power. Some of them now dream only of guiltless
peace of mind. "Avarice ... and blind lust for honours," wrote
Lucretius, "which constrain unhappy men to overstep the bounds of
right and sometimes as partners and agents of crimes to strive night
and day with surpassing effort to struggle up to the summit of
power-these sores of life are in no small measure fostered by the
dread of death. . . . Some wear themselves to death for the sake
of statues and a name. And often through dread of death does hate
of life and the sight of daylight seize upon mortals, that they com–
mit self-murder with a sorrowing heart, quite forgetting that fear is
the source of their cares. . . . "
Please here let me stress that I have sincere respect for persons
with genuine religious beliefs. I never attempt to argue about these
beliefs or to change them. I am a naturalist. But I know Quakers,
Catholics, even some priests, whose genuine belief gives them con–
fidence and conviction, and eliminates a need for intolerance. James
Connolly was such a man. He was both a believing Catholic and
an advocate of Marxian economics. Through their belief some
