State atheism
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State atheism is the official rejection of religion in all forms by a government in favor of atheism. As a strict rule, only Marxist governments have ever sought to promote atheism as a public norm, and as a rule in accordance with the doctrine of dialectical materialism. Marxism may not be the only ideology to have ever rejected religion altogether; the ultra-capitalist objectivism of Ayn Rand, although a nearly diametric opposite of Marxism, also recognizes religion as pre-modern superstition. No government based wholly upon the principles of Rand's objectivism is likely to ever take power; most conservatives who share most of her economic views accept the compatibility of religious devotion and sentiment with capitalism, and find religious devotion a barrier to Marxist ideology. The anti-religious, totalitarian dystopias that George Orwell and Ray Bradbury depicted in 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, respectively, either model themselves upon communism or upon vague ideologies unlikely to ever arise.
Distinction of state atheism from irreligion in government
State atheism is not to be confused with anti-clericalism, the effort to reduce the economic and political power of clergy in politics that itself is a relic of the feudal era. Neither is it to be confused with religious neutrality in which a government recognizes the legal necessity of separation of church and state. The State may be irreligious, but those who would separate religious bodies from political and economic power; power of religion within a political system implies bias toward one tradition at the expense of others. Thus the separation of church and State protects religious minorities, the seeming object of the founders of the United States of America, among other democratic societies. Finally, state atheism is not to be confused with selective persecution of some religious beliefs or their adherents in favor of some other, more dominant tradition, as under Saddam Hussein in Iraq, where Shiites faced disabilities analogous to those of non-whites under Apartheid in South Africa or especially in Nazi Germany, where persecutions of Jews culminated in the Holocaust. State atheism persecutes and defames all religion equally.
State atheism and Marxism
All Marxist states show some hostility to religion consistent with the view by Karl Marx that religion is the opiate of the people. In practice, Marxists generally conceal their antipathy toward religion so that they can avoid offending the sensibilities of religious believers within the proletariat before they seize power; they may in fact seek to exploit the more communitarian tendencies within a religious tradition against an amoral clique of capitalists, landowners, and state bureaucrats. Once in power, Marxists almost invariably turn against religion of all kinds.
Marxist regimes and their dominant communist parties seek to fully reshape whatever preceded them into societies wholly consistent with Marxist doctrine. Part of the effort is to turn schools and youth groups into propaganda mills in which all sentiments inconsistent with Marxism are ridiculed and debased. Another is to close almost all places of worship, disband all religious orders, and to imprison or murder clergy. Under communist rule, those who assert religious beliefs of any kind are subjected to discrimination, if not forcible efforts to reshape their thoughts in accordance with Marxist doctrines. At the extreme, religious expression of all kinds can be outlawed, as in Albania at one time or especially under the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, who exiled or murdered anything contrary to the ideology of the leadership.
In practice, state atheism, however much it may seek to force itself into public acceptance, faces the difficulty of extricating religious values from a culture in which they are so entwined (most obviously in Poland) that nationhood depends upon them. Even the despotic Josef Stalin found that against the Nazi onslaught of World War II, the Russian Orthodox Church was more of an asset than a liability, and that a servile church could serve purposes of international propaganda. The personality cults that some communist leaders have adopted imitate religious ritual and may ultimately cause people to seek religion as an alternative.
The decline of state atheism
By the late 1980s, the failures of communism to achieve either prosperity or social justice had discredited Marxist regimes in central and southeastern Europe to the extent that the bankrupt regimes from East Germany to Bulgaria collapsed. Post-communist governments abandoned state atheism along with all other aspects of Marxism Leninism. State atheism in the Soviet Union weakened under Mikhail Gorbachev and died in the final collapse of the system as the KGB was abolished. The People's Republic of China seems to have relaxed its old antipathy toward religion, although it continues to persecute any group (such as the Falun Gong) posing real or imagined danger to the government.
Whatever virtues atheism may have, it may fail even more spectacularly than religion when it proves as intolerant of alternative views of reality as religion at its worst.
