The Haunting Specter of Communism
Communism is the Counter Faith of Christianity
The conservative movement in the twentieth-century was an eclectic mix of three loose groups: social conservatives, economic libertarians, and foreign policy war hawks. Each element had their own internal logic, political goals, vision for America, and public heroes. But what bound these disparate and at times seemingly contradictory strands together, was their fierce opposition to Communism. Communism was the common enemy of all conservative Americans, no matter their stripe (and in theory liberals as well—although not so much in reality). Communism was a mortal threat to the family, to traditional moral values, and to Christian faith; it was a destroyer of property rights, economic freedom, and limited government; and its political authoritarianism was a tyrant ever seeking to subdue and strangle liberal democracy.
Since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1989 and the ostensive defeat of Communism with it, the conservative movement has boasted of its triumph over this civilizational menace. The memory of the intellectual, military, and personal battles against Communism has never left Movement Conservatism, and continues as an undying, even if fading, legacy. Many a conservative conference or gathering has hearkened to the Great War against Communism of the last century, has cheered and saluted its combatants and surviving veterans, and has issued sober words of warning to the next generation of the need for sleepless vigilance against the enemy of freedom.
Yet all this is a faux victory propelled along by myths that we weave. In truth, the conservative movement failed. Communism has won, even in America.
What Communism Is
How could it be that Communism has won in America? Is not Communism the belief in the classless society, the utopia of the brotherhood of man after the long night of capitalist exploitation? Is it not the historical class struggle, dialectical materialism, the labor theory of value, common ownership of the means of production, the proletariat revolution, and finally at the end of all things, the withering away of the state? America is none of these things. Capitalism is thriving. Private property is everywhere protected. Democracy is threatened, perhaps, but is kicking back. Americans have never been so free.
In the beginning of his 1952 book Witness, Whittaker Chambers wrote a foreword entitled, “Foreward in the Form of a Letter to My Children.” There, Chambers tells us what Communism really is, for Chambers had been a card-carrying Communist and Soviet spy for many years (he was intimately involved in the Alger Hiss espionage and perjury trial) before defecting in 1938. Chambers denied that the essence of Communism was to be found in the theories or writings of Marx or Lenin. “These,” Chambers insisted, “are the expressions of Communism,” but “they are not what Communism is about.”
Instead, Chambers incisively described the core of Communism as a rational faith. This faith, however, “is not new.” It is “man’s second oldest faith” that was “whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘ye shall be as gods.’” Chambers called this the “great alternative faith of mankind,” for whereas the original faith was “the vision of God and man’s relationship to God,” the communist vision is its counterpart: “the vision of Man without God.” Chambers vibrantly relayed the inner workings of the communist vision:
It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.
If God is dead, then man can take his place. The crowing creation of man by which he was to acknowledge and glorify God—his mind, reason, and speech—then becomes an idolatrous instrument of conquest. If God is dead, then men must be the authors of meaning and purpose—they must force goodness and meaning upon a senseless, bloody, and brutish life. As Chambers mused, the vision of communism “challenges man to prove by his acts that he is the masterwork of the Creation—by making thought and action one. It challenges him to prove it by using the force of his rational mind to end the bloody meaninglessness of man’s history—by giving it a purpose and a plan.”
Thus it is that Communist Man deploys the gifts of science and technology not merely to subdue and conquer nature, but ultimately to create the physical world and human nature anew. Scientific materialism promises to overcome all evil and injustice, and to deliver to man the immorality and bliss that he ceaselessly desires. And Man said, “Let perfect justice reign in the rational state,” and it was so.
For Chambers, this vision of Communist Man “is the Communist revolution, which, like all great revolutions, occurs in man’s mind before it takes form in man’s acts.” Thus, he concluded that on Communism, “man’s mind is man’s fate.” If man can find a way to will it into existence, no matter the cost, then it will be so. If it can be done—whether changing one’s sex or animal nature, or developing fully-conscious AI, or cryofreezing one’s body for a future life—then it will be done, for no other reason than to prove that man’s mind is the sovereign author of life and creation. As Nietzsche’s madman says, “Must we not ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us—for the sake of this deed, he will be part of a history higher than all history hitherto.”
Communism was not a philosophy but a practical vision. As Marx had quipped in his Theses on Feuerbach, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Thesis XI). Vision must become reality, otherwise the entire edifice of Communism collapses. This, Chambers warned,
is Communism’s moral sanction, which is twofold. Its vision points the way to the future; its faith labors to turn the future into present reality. It says to every man who joins it: the vision is a practical problem of history; the way to achieve it is a practical problem of politics, which is the present tense of history. Have you the moral strength to take upon yourself the crimes of history so that man at last may close his chronicle of age-old, senseless suffering, and replace it with purpose and a plan? The answer a man makes to this question … is the root of that sense of moral superiority which makes Communists, though caught in crime, berate their opponents with withering self-righteousness.
The Communist vision of progress and a better future is contrasted to the crises of the present. Both work together and attract men of every class and standing: “the vision inspires. The crisis impels. The workingman is chiefly moved by the crisis. The educated man is chiefly moved by the vision. An educated man, peering from Harvard Yard, or any college campus, upon a world in chaos, finds in the vision the two certainties for which the mind of man tirelessly seeks: a reason to live and a reason to die. No other faith of our time presents them with the same practical intensity.” Communism’s power comes from its ability to give men a reason to live and a reason to die.
The Apostle Paul on Rebellion and Corruption
The irony is that the rational Communist state is destined to fail precisely because it is godless. In Romans 1, the Apostle Paul describes the state of fallen and rebellious men, who, although knowing of God their Creator, still rebelled against him. One of the most profound results of such rebellion is that the very faculty that originally raised man above the beasts and made him like God, man’s rational soul, becomes twisted and deadened: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (v. 21). Later Paul reiterates this point, saying, “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done” (v. 28).
Biblical scholars and Christians in general tend to focus too much on the sins that fallen men do while overlooking the fact that a debased mind, futile thinking, and a darkened heart is the path by which all rebellion leads to sin. Unlike Plato who believed that evil was the result of ignorance and nothing more (and thus education and knowledge are the keys to virtue and wisdom), Paul blames a rebellious and disordered will for evil. The act of defiance before God cannot fail to corrupt the good that God has made. Man’s mind, originally given for man’s learning and to distinguish between good and evil, the just and unjust, is degraded; speech, originally given to glorify and worship God, is used to curse Him and profane creation. Yet this is not all, for the darkened mind of rebellious man cannot comprehend its own stupidity and futility: “claiming to be wise,” Paul tells us, “they became fools” (v. 22). A frightening consequence of the mind’s degradation is that it cannot comprehend its own blindness.
The darkened mind of fallen man does not mean reason has been completely erased. Natural man is still capable of knowing much about himself and the world, as well as performing natural virtues, both physical and moral. The rational Communist state is doomed not because it attempts feats of technical and organizational brilliance but primarily because its vision is one of human salvation. Communism seeks to save fallen man and the groaning world from their sufferings without the aid of God.
Liberal Democracy and the Degrading of America
America today encapsulates the Communist vision and faith. Yes, the Western powers defeated a variety of Communist regimes in the twentieth-century. Yet these victories were pyrrhic. The spirit of Communism had already long before invaded our lands and threatened the souls of our people. Nietzsche’s madman had come too early; now, he would be too late. The “tremendous event” that was “still on its way” then has long since reached the itching ears of restless man; the storm that was building is now raging around us. Yet in another sense all of this is still in the future: we have lost God because we have killed him within ourselves and in our societies, and yet we do not realize it. When we do, madness will break out.
That madness is already breaking out in America, a symptom of our Communist faith. The obsession with historical wrongs and correcting them through reparations, collective atonement, and the pursuit of cosmic justice is simply the Communist vision of taking on the “crimes of history” in order to once and for all meld meaning out of meaningless suffering. We believe in the power of man’s will to change the nature of marriage, the raising of children, and male and female sex and gender through the pronouncements of Supreme Court Justices, the missives of Politburo bureaucrats, and the white papers of Ivory Tower faculty and HR department protocols.
Despite the corruption, grift, and criminal behavior rife in academia, business, and government, when exposed, our cultural elites erupt in paroxysms of fanatical obscurantism and angry, self-righteous indignation. “That’s not happening and it’s good that it is” they stammer with the kind of hubristic self-justification that can only come from the faith that their vision and action will be vindicated by the “long arc of history.” Many commentators have observed that the “successor ideology” to liberalism—critical race theories, DEI, and other minority and privileged/disadvantaged theories—has taken on the character of a religion, outfitted with its own priests and clerisy, holy books, rituals, prayers, and means of atonement. This would, of course, be expected of a way of life that has slain God and deified man in His place. Men can’t not have a faith, even at the very moment that they seem to succeed in casting down God.
Madness does not relieve suffering but multiplies it a hundredfold. Millions of innocent babies have been slaughtered in their mothers’ wombs and abortion justified in the name of “personal freedom,” the “right to privacy,” and “reproductive health.” Deputized as agents of death, doctors and citizens alike sacrifice their children upon the altars of individual autonomy, personal desire, profit, and convenience. Public intellectuals defending such ghastly customs boast of their common sense, not realizing they are the ones whose foolish hearts are darkened.
These are but a few examples that overwhelm us daily. They are, in a sense, the final act of liberal democracy’s tragic plot. Liberal democracy promised true freedom through self-government, which, as long as the people were Christians first and liberals second, could plausibly work. But liberal democracy in its political form downplayed the civil magistrate’s role as a “nursing father” caring for the bodies and souls of the people. Religion ought to be privatized, and religious freedom maximized; opinions about divine and spiritual matters ought to be removed from the halls of Parliament and Congress, for disagreement over the highest goods is sure to lead to fierce and bloody conflict. Knowledge was redefined scientifically, and all moral and religious claims excluded. Democratic man and his sensibilities (whatever they might be) were elevated as a sacred and unquestionable good. All valuations of the Good were equally valid, which meant none were true; nihilism was repugnant, and thus only might could make things right. Man’s will then became preeminent: the rational mind had to prevail, otherwise justice and meaning would fail. The will to power, to become God, was all-consuming.
Freedom is undoubtedly a deep human need. But freedom without restraint—freedom without God as its end—leads to bondage. Whittaker Chambers understood this well:
Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for freedom.
It turns out that what is most important about a people and society is not population demographics and birthrate replacement rates, or GDP and productive output, or the arrangement of their branches of government in a perfect symbiosis, but whether or not a people collectively acknowledge the Almighty God. Through his agonizing exit from Communism, Chambers came to grasp this truth clearly:
Communism is what happens when, in the name of Mind, men free themselves from God. But its view of God, its knowledge of God, its experience of God, is what alone gives character to a society or a nation, and meaning to its destiny. Its culture, the voice of this character, is merely that view, knowledge, experience, of God, fixed by its most intense spirits in terms intelligible to the mass of men. There has never been a society or a nation without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died.
The question for America going forward is whether we will continue to be indifferent toward God or choose a different path. There are many crises in our country currently, but this is the only crisis that truly matters.
The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. It exists to the degree in which the Western world actually shares Communism’s materialist vision, is so dazzled by the logic of the materialist interpretation of history, politics and economics, that it fails to grasp that, for it, the only possible answer to the Communist challenge: Faith in God or Faith in Man? is the challenge: Faith in God.
Conclusion
Communism is not primarily a political arrangement of the state or a sociological theory of class struggle or an economic analysis of property rights, production, and distribution. As Chambers pointed out, “Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways.” Homo economicus is a thin and pitiable man. Communism is, in essence, a spiritual condition, and an equally pitiable one at that.
Thus we find ourselves today in a great spiritual crisis in America. The West is failing, its civilization crumbling and disappearing. This is because we have abandoned God. While this is discouraging, there is reason also to hope. Listen to Chambers one last time: “Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but already possesses an answer to this problem—but only that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism’s faith in Man.” The only way out is back: back to faith in God in which man—both individually and collectively—humbles himself before the Sovereign Creator and confesses with his heart and mouth that God is God and he is not.
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