Nancy Pearcey explains her comments about Stalin

Nancy Pearcey asked me to send the following message to this list on her behalf,

ted
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To All:
 
James Mahaffy was kind enough to let me know about the discussion going on about my book Total Truth. I have enormous respect for the people on this list, and am honored by your attention to the book. However, it seems that few, if any, have actually read it. So I have embedded the relevant passage below. It is a brief quotation from a book on Stalin that, as you will see, I first read in a (secular) biography for young adults; later I tracked down the original source. Don Nield has drawn attention to scholarly biographers who question whether the story is more hagiography than history (thank you, Don). However, there is also the fact that the author was writing while Stalin was still alive and could easily have suppressed the book (and the author!). Back then, a bullet in the back of the head was the ultimate a negative review, so to speak. So Stalin himself clearly did not object to the characterization.
 
You will see that Total Truth is not an academic book but written for a broad audience. (I might note, if I may be forgiven a bit of shameless self-promotion, that the book won an Award of Merit in the Christianity Today book awards, and just won an ECPA Gold Medallion Award for best book in the Christianity & Society category.) The Stalin story simply takes his own words at face value, as reported by his friend, as a brief opening anecdote for a chapter on the worldview impact that Darwinism has had. My own comments are minimal--I only note that Stalin took Darwinism to imply atheism, and that his atheism, when applied consistently, had negative social consequences.
 
Best regards,
Nancy
 
Personal Note to Glenn Morton--yes, of course, I remember talking with you at a conference. I recently posted something you had written, which I found particularly insightful, on an ID listserv.
 
Opening lines of Chapter 8 in Total Truth:
 
The impact of Darwin on worldview came home to me starkly one day while I was homeschooling my son. One of the joys of teaching your own children is that you get a chance to read all the wonderful books you missed when you were growing up. Thus it was that when Dieter was in junior high, we were reading together several young adult biographies of famous people*including Joseph Stalin. Suddenly I came across a startling dialogue from the days when the young Stalin was a seminary student, studying to become a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. As one of his friends relates, they were discussing religion:
“Joseph heard me out, and after a moment’s silence, said: “‘You know, they are fooling us, there is no God. . . .’

“I was astonished at these words. I had never heard anything like it before.

“‘How can you say such things, Soso?’ I exclaimed.

“‘I’ll lend you a book to read; it will show you that the world and all living things are quite different from what you imagine, and all this talk about God is sheer nonsense,’ Joseph said.

“‘What book is that?’ I enquired.

“‘Darwin. You must read it,’ Joseph impressed on me.”2

We all know what happened after that: Having become an atheist, Stalin went on to murder literally millions of his own people in his attempt to construct an officially atheistic state.

Here in the West, the impact of Darwinism has been more subtle, yet it runs far deeper than most of us imagine. In the 1950s a group of scholars produced a thick volume titled Evolutionary Thought in America surveying its impact across the curriculum. The book included chapters on the influence of evolution on sociology, psychology, economics, political thought, moral theory, theology, and even literature.3 Simply reading the table of contents hammers home the wide-ranging impact Darwinism has exerted on virtually every field of study. It is impossible to understand twentieth-century America unless we grasp the implications of evolutionary thinking.

In fact, in the late nineteenth century when Darwinism crossed the Atlantic, it was welcomed to American shores by a group of scholars who founded an entire school of philosophy upon it. The school was called philosophical pragmatism, and its core assumption was that if life has evolved, then the human mind has evolved as well*and all the human sciences must be rebuilt on that basis: psychology, education, law, and theology. Pragmatism is America’s only “home-grown” philosophy (most of the others were imported from Europe), and for that reason alone it has been enormously influential. By taking a closer look at philosophical pragmatism, we will get a good handle on the way Darwinism has altered not only the way Americans think but also the very structure of American social institutions.
 

 2. The story was originally told in E. Yaroslavsky, Landmarks in the Life of Stalin (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1940), 8-9.

 3. Stow Persons, ed., Evolutionary Thought in America (New York: George Braziller, 1956).

 
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Nancy R. Pearcey
Francis A. Schaeffer Scholar
World Journalism Institute
www.totaltruthbook.com

Edward B. Davis
Distinguished Professor of the History of Science
Messiah College, Box 3030
One College Avenue
Grantham, PA 17027
717-766-2511 (voice)
717-691-6002 (fax)
Received on Fri Jul 29 21:04:03 2005