On Solzhenitsyn’s shoulders
SPEAKING AT THE LONDON GUILDHALL upon receipt of the Templeton Prize in 1983, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dropped a heavy meme on the history of the twentieth century. When he was still a child, he said, he had heard older people saying that all the disasters befalling Russia were happening because “Men have forgotten God”. After nearly fifty years of reading, collecting testimonies, and writing about those disasters, “I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’”
Solzhenitsyn’s speech came on the heels of Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech, in which the American president blamed Lenin’s abandonment of religious morals for Soviet totalitar-ianism. Jimmy Carter had mentioned atheism when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Martin Luther King had cited it in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. Senator Joseph McCarthy had used it to frighten Middle America. Franklin Roosevelt had pressured Stalin to abandon it at the outset of their wartime alliance. Pope Pius XI had led a “crusade of prayer” against it.
And yet, no one had made atheism as central to the traumas of the century as Solzhenitsyn, nor expanded the criticism so precipitously to encompass the foundations of western secular liberalism. Solzhenitsyn targeted not just Lenin, but all the works of the Enlightenment. Was it not thanks to Thomas Jefferson’s had felt emboldened to publish a “shameless caricature” of the Virgin Mary, or that “a blasphemous film” (clearly Monty Python’s ) had found success in America?
