Why I Am Not a Christian

On March 6, 1927, Bertrand Russell delivered a lecture to the National Secular Society at Battersea Town Hall in London. The lecture was titled “Why I Am Not a Christian.” It was later published as a pamphlet. Nearly a century later it remains the clearest short statement of secular humanism that exists in the English language.

The lecture works by precision. Russell begins by defining his terms: what does it mean to be a Christian? He settles on two conditions — believing in God and believing that Christ was at minimum a morally admirable figure, if not divine. He then argues against both.

Against the existence of God, Russell works through the main arguments systematically — the First Cause argument, the Natural Law argument, the Argument from Design, the argument from morality — and finds each of them wanting. The demolition of the First Cause argument is the most elegant: if everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause too; if God can exist without a cause, so can the universe.

Against the moral perfection of Christ, Russell is more surprising and more interesting. He does not dispute that Christ taught some admirable things. He disputes the completeness of the picture: Christ also preached hell, preached his own imminent second coming (which did not occur), and expressed vindictiveness toward those who did not receive his message.

The lecture closes with Russell’s account of what he actually believes: that the world’s sufferings are not caused by insufficient religion but by fear — fear of the unknown, fear of death, fear of the consequences of independent thought — and that the cure for that fear is knowledge, not faith.

Reading it now, what strikes you is not the arguments (which remain cogent) but the tone: amused, confident, and completely unsentimental. Russell takes religion seriously enough to argue against it carefully; he does not take it seriously enough to be angry about it.