Religion: The Importance of Atheism

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Religion is immensely important to atheists—as was demonstrated once again last week in Moscow by the Scandal of Sasha Turkin.

Sasha was an honor student in the tenth grade of Moscow's School No. 147. Naturally he applied for membership in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth Organization. But just as the classroom vote on him was about to be taken, according to Moscow's Komsomolskaya Pravda, his friend, Vitali, tried to make everyone laugh by asking Sasha a stupid question: "Do you believe in God?" "Yes," replied Sasha in a hushed voice. "I do."

Inna, the girl friend who had sponsored Sasha's application, blushed crimson, and Vitali paled in horror. Then, according to Komsomolskaya Pravda, everybody decided that it was just too ridiculous—good old Sasha must have been kidding—and they accepted him anyway. Later, when his membership came up for confirmation by the school Komsomol committee, he admitted once again that he believed in God. His father had been giving him Bible instruction ever since he was a little boy. But when Sasha denied going to church or wearing a cross, the committee decided to confirm his membership.

All this, intoned Komsomolskaya Pravda, is symptomatic of a dreadful laxity. First, if Sasha's classmates had been the militant atheists they should have been, they would have found out about his non-atheism earlier and gone to work on him. And second, they should never have admitted him. "In our country," lectured Komsomolskaya Pravda, "the first country of mass atheism in the world, religion is a citizen's private affair. But how can Komsomol members consider religion a private affair when it affects the Komsomol? They were not admitting him to a club of pigeon fanciers, but to a political organization!"

In general, complained Literature and Life not long ago, irreligion is lax, while religion is zealous. Not only did the Communists fail with a program of building youth clubs, so that churches now outnumber clubhouses in some areas, but the churches are warmer and cozier than the clubs. Example: without openly taking the offensive, but "quietly and peacefully," the Russian Orthodox Church has infiltrated the industrial region around Perm in the Urals, so that "alongside the universities of culture, universities of obscurantism flourish." Unlike the propagandists for atheism, "these holy fathers are not deterred from their duties either by cold or by impassable roads.''