It is fashionable among the sneering left to belittle the Christian faith

To an increasing number of secularists in the West, Easter is an occasion for protest and resentment, just like Australia Day.

Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian Arctic prison, said it was his Christian faith that sustained him and his heroic opposition to dictator Vladimir Putin. This is downplayed even by his supporters. Picture: AFP

For Christians and those who are sympathetic to the Christian faith, Good Friday represents the death of Jesus Christ and Easter Sunday his resurrection from the dead. To an increasing number of sneering secularists in the West, it is an occasion for protest and resentment.

Already Australia Day is under attack from invariably well-off individuals who have come to be alienated from the land of their birth or the nation they or their parents chose to settle in. Calls for the abandonment of Australia Day on January 26 are likely to be followed by an increasing demand that Anzac Day no longer be a public holiday. After that, there could be Easter.

Yet Christians continue to inspire. Writing in America: The Jesuit Review on February 22, 2024, Maggie Phillips commented: “When Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death in an Arctic gulag was announced in the media, none of the public eulogies, outside a few religious outlets, included Mr Navalny’s conversion from atheism to Christianity.”

Phillips recorded that Navalny’s “letters from prison to the former Soviet Union prisoner of conscience Natan Sharansky (now resident in Israel) are peppered with biblical, religious and spiritual illusions”. To Phillips, “By leaving out his faith in a creed that believes in redemptive suffering, media coverage summing up his life’s work misses a key part of what made his opposition to Vladimir Putin so powerful.”

The story is relatively well known. Navalny was born in Russia in 1976. He was a lawyer who became an anti-corruption campaigner and an avowed critic of Putin. Putin’s regime managed to poison Navalny with nerve agent novichok. Navalny recovered in Germany but in 2021 voluntarily returned to Russia, where he was tried, convicted and imprisoned in the Arctic gulag.

He died, effectively murdered, on February 16, 2024.

In his writings, Navalny claimed that even some of his political supporters in Russia sneered at his religious belief. But it was this that sustained him and his heroic opposition to the elected dictator Putin – formerly a KGB operative who, these days, presents himself as a supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church.

It is fashionable among the sneering left to accuse the Catholic Church of effectively supporting Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany between 1933 and 1945. I remember saying in passing to a high-profile ABC journalist a decade ago that Pope Pius XI had condemned Benito Mussolini’s Italian fascism and Hitler’s German Nazism in the papal encyclicals Non Abbiamo Bisogno and Mit Brennender Sorge in 1931 and 1937 respectively. The ABC journalist simply did not believe me.

In his book Who’s Who in Nazi Germany, Robert S. Wistrich described Clemens von Galen, the cardinal archbishop of Munster, as “one of Hitler’s most determined opponents”. The regime considered executing him but decided not to do so in view of his public support. Instead, von Galen was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl led what Wistrich referred to as “the ill-fated but gallant Munich University Resistance called The White Rose”. They were brutally executed by the Gestapo in February 1943.

And then there was the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a member of the Protestant Confessing Church. He was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1943 and executed in April 1945. These days the conservative Christian Bonhoeffer is perhaps the best known of the small German opposition to Hitler.

It should also be remembered that between August 1939 and June 1941 – when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in operation – the opposition to Germany comprised Britain and the Commonwealth nations. At the time Britain was a Christian nation, the sovereign of which (George VI) was also head of the Church of England.

For its part, the Catholic Church also condemned Joseph Stalin’s communist totalitarian dictatorship in Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris.

British writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg delivered The Sydney Institute annual dinner lecture in March 2012 on “The Other Life of the King James Bible”. Bragg is not a believer but he recognises the enormous contribution of Christianity to the world in general and Western civilisation in particular.

Bragg made the point that biologist and writer Richard Dawkins “holds religion, Christianity in particular, responsible for all the violence and destructive atrocities in the world”. Bragg dismissed this with reference to Genghis Khan, whom he said “wasn’t much of a Christian”, along with the wars in China during the eighth century.

He added: “Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao had nothing to do with Christianity or any other religion.” Bragg also made the point that, over time, Christian believers have included Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon – a clever trio.

A decade later, it would seem that Dawkins, author of the 2006 book The God Delusion, has softened his stance. In 2024, in a discussion with Rachel S. Johnson on the Leading Britain’s Conversation program, Dawkins criticised the decision of London mayor Sadiq Khan to turn on 30,000 lights for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan but not for the Christian holy week of Easter.

Dawkins now describes himself as a “cultural Christian” but not a believer, adding that Christianity seems to him to be a “fundamentally decent religion”. Bragg also commented that it would be “truly dreadful” if Christianity in Britain were “substituted by any alternative religion”. He also dreaded a future in Britain “if we lost our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches”.

William Wilberforce, of the Church of England, led the movement for the abolishment of slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries. Across the Atlantic, in the 20th century Martin Luther King, a Baptist minister, led the civil rights movement in the US until his assassination in 1968.

This Easter, Christians, despite past errors, have much to be proud about and good reason to dismiss the sneering secularists in our midst. Moreover, Christianity is on the rise in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

In the past in Australia, the two main religious minorities, Catholics and Jews, joined with Protestants, atheists and agnostics in recognising their various contributions to Western civilisation. There were few secular sneerists at the time. Navalny, who had many Jewish friends such as Sharansky, should inspire many believers and non-believers alike.