Listen to ‘Why I Am Not a Christian,’ Bertrand Russell’s Powerful Critique of Religion (1927)

The Eng­lish logi­cian and philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell was con­vinced that the reli­gions of the world are not mere­ly untrue, but that they do griev­ous harm to peo­ple. That con­vic­tion is very much in evi­dence in his 1927 speech, “Why I Am Not a Chris­t­ian,” read here in its com­plete form by the British actor Ter­rence Hardi­man.

Rus­sell begins by estab­lish­ing a very gen­er­al and inclu­sive def­i­n­i­tion of the term “Chris­t­ian.” A Chris­t­ian, for the pur­pos­es of Rus­sel­l’s argu­ment, is one who believes in God and immor­tal­i­ty and also in Christ. “I think you must have at the very low­est a belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wis­est of men,” says Rus­sell. “If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not believe you have any right to call your­self a Chris­t­ian.”

Begin­ning with the belief in God, Rus­sell points out the log­i­cal fal­lac­i­es in sev­er­al of the most pop­u­lar argu­ments for the exis­tence of God, start­ing with the ear­ly ratio­nal argu­ments and mov­ing along what he sees as the “intel­lec­tu­al descent” of Chris­t­ian apolo­get­ics to some of the more recent argu­ments that have “become less respectable intel­lec­tu­al­ly and more and more affect­ed by a kind of mor­al­iz­ing vague­ness.” Rus­sell then goes on to explain why Jesus, as depict­ed in the Gospels, has nei­ther superla­tive wis­dom nor superla­tive good­ness. Although Rus­sell grants Christ “a very high degree of moral good­ness,” he asserts that there have been wis­er and bet­ter men.

The speech was pub­lished in 1957 in the book Why I am Not a Chris­t­ian and Oth­er Essays on Reli­gion and Relat­ed Sub­jects. The text is avail­able online, and you can click here to open it in a new win­dow. This record­ing will be added to our Free Audio Books col­lec­tion. Although Rus­sell is address­ing the major­i­ty reli­gion of his own coun­try, he is equal­ly crit­i­cal of all reli­gions. He leaves off with these words:

The whole con­cep­tion of God is a con­cep­tion derived from the ancient Ori­en­tal despo­tisms. It is a con­cep­tion quite unwor­thy of free men. When you hear peo­ple in church debas­ing them­selves and say­ing that they are mis­er­able sin­ners, and all the rest of it, it seems con­temptible and not wor­thy of self-respect­ing human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be bet­ter than what these oth­ers have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowl­edge, kind­li­ness, and courage; it does not need a regret­ful han­ker­ing after the past or a fet­ter­ing of the free intel­li­gence by the words uttered long ago by igno­rant men. It needs a fear­less out­look and free intel­li­gence. It needs hope for the future, not look­ing back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far sur­passed by the future that our intel­li­gence can cre­ate.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

Face to Face with Bertrand Rus­sell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish’

Bertrand Rus­sell and F.C. Cople­ston Debate the Exis­tence of God, 1948

Bertrand Rus­sel­l’s ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty: The Clas­sic Intro­duc­tion to Ein­stein