FAQ: Who is saved?

Some WORLD members like to claim that people secretly are Christians, or that particular celebrities have had deathbed conversions. Others ask about particular individuals. I can’t answer those questions definitively. No one on earth knows what’s going through the minds of some people in their last hours, as their minds are going. Still, we have no indication that Charles Darwin, Christopher Hitchens, or others had radical last-minute changes.

Although WORLD is not a library reference desk, we do try to respond to our members—and sometimes we get assertions that are far off. One letter this month responded to a mention of atheist Josef Stalin in one of my columns. The member said Stalin was not an atheist, and offered two pieces of evidence: Stalin when young went to a seminary, and Stalin when old, upon hearing Henry Ford was dying, said, “God save him.”

The member said Stalin was not an atheist, and offered two pieces of evidence.

I wrote back that the universal sense of both leftist and rightist scholars is that Stalin was an atheist, and I offered two quotations from his seminary days. First: “They are fooling us, there is no God” (Landmarks in the Life of Stalin, 1942, by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, page 9). Second, after reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Stalin wrote in a letter, “We’ve been deceived: If God existed, he’d have made the world more just. … I’ll lend you a book and you’ll see” (Young Stalin, 2007, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, page 4).

Seems to me that when Stalin said about Henry Ford, “God save him,” he apparently was saying something like Henry Ford is a dead man. Only the Easter Bunny could save him.