text: Stalin was raised a Christian and even studied for the priesthood.  The pogroms were a mode of eliminating political enemies - had nothing to do with religion.  There is no connection between whether Stalin and Mao believed or didn't believe and the political extermination of millions of their respective citizens.  Pogroms and the forced movement of intellectuals (The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolutions) and professionals to work farms were a way of political control not religious or non-religious.  Both Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot (Buddhist) were are extraordinary examples of fanatics, but religion was not driving that fanaticism and that doesn't automatically make them non-religious. 
  
  The Founders had had enough of the constant rendering of community that the various competing religious adherers wrought; it didn't make for brief, unintrusive, and effective government and thus they purposely left it (religious observation) out of the Constitution.