This lecture was delivered on March 6, 1927, at Battersea Town
Hall, under the auspices of the South London Branch of the
National Secular Society.
As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am
going to speak to you tonight is ‘Why I am not a Christian’.
Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what
one means by the word ‘Christian’. It is used these days in a very
loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more
by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense
I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds;
but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word,
if only because it would imply that all the people who are not
Christians—all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and
so on—are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a
Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his
lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite
belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The
word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it
had in the times of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. In those
days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what
he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which
were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of
those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your
convictions.