https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/literature/george-orwell-a-man-for-our-time/
Thomas Banks: Orwell and the Life to Come
George Orwell was an atheist for nearly all his life. If the account of his school years which he supplied in his long essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” is to be relied on, he had ceased to believe in God by the time he was fourteen years old, and had conceived a strong distaste both for the doctrines of Christianity and for its Founder:
I hated Jesus and the Hebrew patriarchs. If I had sympathetic feelings towards any character in the Old Testament, it was towards such people as Cain, Jezebel, Haman, Agag, Sisera: in the New Testament my friends, if any, were Ananias, Caiaphas, Judas and Pontius Pilate. But the whole business of religion seemed to be strewn with psychological impossibilities.
As the boy grew into the man, his views on Christ and the characters of sacred history do not appear to have changed very much, though his early esteem for such oddly chosen heroes as Haman and Judas appears to have left him. But to the religion of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer in which he had been raised Orwell never returned. His guiding allegiances were to the revolutionary working classes, to the socialist movement, and the liberal tradition of free speech. All of these loyalties, as he understood them, were bound to turn him into an enemy of organised Christianity in general and of the Catholic Church in particular. For Catholic intellectuals he rarely had a good word, even if he might on occasion recognise the literary talents of a Chesterton or a Hopkins, or the plainspoken honesty of a Frank Sheed. As for the Catholic culture of his time, to him it principally meant General Franco, mental stagnation, authoritarian politics and repression generally.
Contempt for the sacred he carried about like a loaded weapon, and was willing to use it against even fairly innocuous targets. In a letter to a female friend in 1932, he describes an experience at an Anglican parish in a poor neighbourhood where he was temporarily lodging:
My sole friend is the curate—High Anglican but not a creeping Jesus and a very good fellow. Of course it means that I have to go to church, which is an arduous job here, as the service is so popish that I don’t know my way about it … I have promised to paint one of the church idols (a quite skittish looking [Blessed Virgin], half life-size, and I shall try to make her look as much like one of the illustrations in La Vie Parisienne as possible) …
La Vie Parisienne, for those not familiar with the name, was an erotic men’s magazine in the early twentieth century. To quote this much is to demonstrate that Orwell was not, like certain other sceptics, a man burdened with any lingering fondness for the religion he had cast off as an adolescent.
The lessons of war gave his odium more fuel on which to feed. Orwell served as an infantryman with a Loyalist unit in the Spanish Civil War, in which the cause of the Church was closely bound up with that of Orwell’s Nationalist enemies. The cause of literature nearly suffered an irreplaceable loss on May 20, 1937, when the future author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was shot through the neck by an enemy sniper. Orwell recovered and returned to England with no kinder feelings towards the political Right than those he had carried with him to Catalonia. His encounter with the Catholic Church in the flesh had, if anything, left him even more hard-bitten in his anticlericalism. He wrote approvingly at this time of the burning of Spanish churches in communist-controlled areas, mentioning with regret that Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia was spared during the violence. He treated with scepticism accounts of murdered nuns (stories now known to be horribly true), and, being left hors de combat, continued his war with the Nationalists and their sympathisers with his pen.
One notes in his journalism from the end of the 1930s and the early 1940s with what vigilance he kept accounts of allies and enemies. He was not by nature a bitter man, but he made a point always to know which side of politics a fellow writer was on, and party affiliations certainly factored in his judgments of books and their authors. His professed belief in literary objectivity was not a hypocritical sham, but its application in his own practice had its limits. He was saved from turning into a narrow and tiresome ideologue by his generous instincts and quintessentially English sense of fair play, yet he never let sleep his awareness of who is For us and who is Against.
The political was not everything to him. The doctrinaire Marxist and every other crank who lives to overthrow the established customs of mankind were, equally with the Jesuit and the reactionary, objects of his personal disgust. The civilised decencies of private life he never ceased to value, as the reader discovers in Orwell’s homely reflections on the English pub, the English rose garden and the domestic fireplace. These and other of this life’s unbought graces had in him a devout appreciator. Still, a writer less interested in the world above this world would be far to seek.
