Was the Soviet christian persecution motivated by atheism or marxism?

Internet christians love to say that 20th century atheism (Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Polpot, Mao) killed more people than all religious wars since the beginning of times. While that figure is up for debate, one of the arguments many atheists offer is that the russian dictators namely, Lenin-Stalin etc did kill hundreds of thousands (if not millions) but they did this as part of the program of marxism. They were indeed atheists but did not kill them in the name of atheism but out of political motivation. They do this beacuse then it becomes easy to distinguish religious fundamentalism (suicide bombings etc) that are done solely in the name of religion but not have any equivalent reference in the atheist world as Dawkins said in God Delusion

I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca—or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

(Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 249)

Here on this blog, Tim O Neill, medievalist blogger and prominent atheist shows that this is untrue. The article is long and well written. Here, I list some of his main arguments that he nuances how much of atheism within the marxism drove a proportion of deaths during the multiple regimes.

Before we go in, as a reply to Dawkins, O Neil mentions that the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, commissioned in 1812 by the Tsar as a commemoration of the victory over Napoleon’s retreat and consecrated in 1883 (took decades to build), third tallest church in the world, housing 20 tons of gold in its domes, was reduced to rubbles(with gold going to the soviet state) by order of Josef Stalin by the use of high explosives, Taliban-style. Marxists did that to suppress clericalism and not in the name of atheism? Read on…

1. Soviet pogrom was mere anti-clericalism not motivated by atheism

anti-clericalism means trying to liberate or at least opposed in principle to the influence religion/religious organization have on political society. According to Hitchens, this is what led to the murders not atheism. O Neil writes,

Hitchens tries to deal with the awkward fact of specially anti-religious atrocities by dismissing them are mere “anti-clericalism”. The flaws in this argument are apparent if we look at his examples. Henry VIII and Cromwell were trying to reform the clergy – they were not against clerics, they just thought the clerics of their time were corrupt, immoral, heretical or all three. And the French revolutionaries and the political radicals of Italy’s unification were trying to establish a separation of church and state, to remove ecclesiastical entanglement in politics. This was nothing like what we see in the Soviet Union, which was a concerted effort to destroy religion completely, based on an ideological commitment to atheism.

2) Atheism is not an ideology: Internet atheists also like to say that atheism is inherently incapable of driving people to oppress others because only an ideology can do this and atheism is not an ideology. Far from being an ideology, they argue, atheism is an absence of an ideology. So Keith M. Parsons contends “atheism, whether it is taken as the claim that belief in God is false or incoherent or unjustified, just does not have sufficient content to constitute a worldview”. O Neil writes quouting JohnStone

But politically, sociologically, culturally, even biologically, atheism is no longer an answer but a *question*. If there is no God, why has mankind been so disposed to believe in one? If so much of our lives have been shaped by an unreality, has this been beneficial or harmful? How far are we obligated to reshape our cultures in line with scientific naturalism, and is continued supernaturalism now a barrier to human well-being? The metaphysical conclusion of atheism has always been a trigger to sociological, cultural and political analysis – it makes almost unavoidable the development of a viewpoint on these issues.

O Neil further writes that if it were not an ideology/world-view, New Atheists would not have dedicated troves of books presenting detailed answers to these questions in trying to explain how the atheistic world stands on itself.

3) Soviety ideology did have atheism as its central tenet and people were oppressed and killed as a result but fanatical application of any ideology is irrational. So these were not really atheists by merit of their murderous fanaticism. O Neil remarks that

This is a classic “No True Scotsman” Fallacy – it does not cut much ice when Christians try to claim Crusaders or Conquistadors were “not really Christians” when they killed in the name of Christ and it is equally weak here.

4) Soviet ideology killed so many because it was like a religion (so atheism in itself did not)

Here, Hitchens lists various parallels between Stalinism and religious extremism, from making science subordinate to theology, to fixed iconography, ritualised slogans, processions and parades and so on. His argument goes that as Leninist-Marxists ideology was like a religion, it would have all the religous facets including extremism, fanaticism etc.

O Neil explains that

To pretend that having trappings that can also be found in religions somehow makes Stalin’s Marxist-Leninism into a religion is absurd. The Olympic movement also has slogans, ideals, symbols, iconography, parades, rituals and other elements that parallel religious practices and ideas, but it is not a religion. Nor was Soviet Marxism. And to pretend that an ideology that was fundamentally atheistic and anti-religious was somehow a de facto religion is clearly nonsense, especially when at least a proportion of the crimes it committed were specifically and explicitly motivated by that atheism.