What Middleton Murry feared was that a post-Christian society could become a totalitarian society (as had happened in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia).
He predicted that for humans, without their sense of solidarity with God and other humans that came with that sense, it was certain that, through very fear, they “will rush to the solidarity of the slave-state”.
Writing in the mid 20th century, he said:
“We live in a time when the old fixed framework of the human consciousness is finally breaking down: when the religious consciousness, above all, is in the melting pot, thrown into the fiery furnace by a terrible upheaval of the demonic and savage forces, which men vainly believed only a generation ago were finally conquered.
In the spiritual chaos of these days – at least one thing stands firm: the necessity and the truth of spiritual rebirth… Because spiritual rebirth is the only way by which a human society can become a brotherhood, and unless human societies become brotherhoods, they will assuredly use their vast powers to do one another to death…
I certainly do not believe that the existing Christian Church will become the medium of that renascence, unless it is itself reborn. But that may happen in the same way – here a little and there a little”.
[Not As The Scribes, pp.42-43].