Why I Am Not a Christian

What the book is

Why I Am Not a Christian began as a lecture delivered by Bertrand Russell to the South London branch of the National Secular Society on 6 March 1927. It was printed as a pamphlet the same year, read widely in secular circles through the 1930s, and expanded into a book in 1957 with the addition of more than a dozen related essays and a preface by the editor Paul Edwards. The 1957 volume is the one still in print today, and still typically the first Russell most readers encounter on religion.

Russell was already a famous mathematician and philosopher by 1927, co-author of Principia Mathematica and holder of a university career that would be interrupted and resumed more than once. The lecture is not the product of an angry outsider; it is the public position of someone at the centre of twentieth-century thought explaining, in plain prose, why the arguments for Christianity fail to persuade him.

The core thesis

Russell defines a Christian, for the purposes of the lecture, as someone who believes in God and immortality and accepts Christ as at least the best and wisest of men. He then argues that there is no good reason to believe in God, no good reason to believe in immortality, and no reason at all to accept Christ as the best and wisest of men. The lecture moves through the main theistic arguments, demolishes each, and then turns to the figure of Jesus, evaluating him by the standards the gospels themselves provide.

What distinguishes Russell’s approach from the polemics that would come later is tone: he is careful, precise, mildly amused, and entirely unembarrassed. He does not treat the arguments for God as absurd; he treats them as hypotheses that simply do not survive examination. This is why the lecture remains useful reading. It is philosophy done at the same level of rigor Russell applied to mathematics, not rhetoric dressed as argument.

Key arguments

The first-cause argument. Russell takes up what is now called the cosmological argument: everything has a cause, therefore there must be a first cause. His rebuttal is blunt. If everything must have a cause, so must God; if something can exist without a cause, the universe is as good a candidate as any deity. Russell credits his own exit from Christian belief to reading John Stuart Mill’s autobiography and encountering exactly this point.

The argument from design. Russell notes that post-Darwin, the design argument has lost its most plausible form. The apparent fit between organisms and their environments is explained by evolution, not designed in advance. He is particularly caustic about the idea that the universe we inhabit shows the handiwork of an omnipotent and benevolent creator, given the amount of suffering and waste it contains.

The moral argument.Russell addresses the claim, famous from Kant, that without God morality collapses. He observes that either the distinction between right and wrong is due to God’s decree, in which case it is arbitrary — the old Euthyphrodilemma — or it is independent of God, in which case we do not need God to know it. The moral argument for God does not survive this fork.

The argument for the remedying of injustice. Russell also takes up the consoling idea that there must be an afterlife because otherwise the injustices of this world go unanswered. He points out that this is not an argument for the existence of an afterlife but only a reason we might wish for one, and that wishes are not evidence.

The character of Jesus. The most provocative section evaluates Jesus not as God but as a historical figure. Russell notes that Jesus preached eternal punishment for those who failed to heed him, an idea Russell finds morally repellent. He contrasts Jesus unfavourably with Socrates and the Buddha on questions of cruelty and threat. Whether or not one accepts the historical premises, the move is striking: Russell refuses the cultural habit of exempting Jesus from the ethical scrutiny applied to other teachers.

Notable quote

One line from the lecture has been widely repeated: “Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes.” Russell’s related analogy — the celestial teapot, from a 1952 essay included in the book — is among the most influential arguments about the burden of proof in the philosophy of religion.

Impact and reception

The book has never gone out of print and is freely available in several online archives. It has been cited as formative by nearly every major atheist writer of the subsequent century, from A.J. Ayer to Kai Nielsen to the new atheists. Richard Dawkins has repeatedly named it as an early influence on The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens included the title essay in his anthology The Portable Atheist.

In its own time the lecture generated enough outrage to contribute to Russell being denied a teaching position at the City College of New York in 1940 by court order — a case that remains a landmark in American debates about religion, employment, and free speech. The furor marked the book as a cultural artifact rather than a dry philosophical exercise, and the 1957 expanded edition has benefited from that status ever since.

Criticisms and weaknesses

The lecture is short, and some of its arguments are schematic. The treatment of the cosmological argument does not engage the versions developed by Thomas Aquinas or, later, by William Lane Craig, who argue that the universe has a specific kind of beginning that requires explanation. The treatment of Jesus rests on historical readings that later scholarship has complicated. And Russell’s claim that religion is rooted in fear is more a hypothesis than a proof; alternative accounts emphasize community, narrative, and identity in ways his essay does not address.

Still, the book’s limitations are the limitations of a public lecture. It was never meant to be an encyclopedia of objections. It was meant to be readable, quotable, and honest, and it succeeds on each of those terms.

Why it matters

For readers new to philosophical atheism, Russell is the first stop that is not yet a polemic. His prose is calm, his arguments are organized, and his attitude toward religion is neither contemptuous nor indulgent. He treats the question as a question — which is, in the long history of these debates, more unusual than it sounds.

Eighty years before the new atheism, Russell had already made most of its core arguments, in shorter form and often in better English. Every serious reader of The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, or The End of Faith should eventually circle back to the lecture that prefigured them, if only to see how much was already available in 1927 and how much still needed to be argued.