This is going to be one of my last dispatches about the upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival this fall. Along with our sponsor, the Victims of Communism Foundation, we are going to show some movies and throw a party.
For this post, I want to explore an idea that can be hard to confront. Namely, the question of whether God is allowing communism to flourish in America and the West as a way to teach us a lesson. To show us that life without God results in violence and catastrophe.
In his 1948 book Communism and the Conscience of the West, Bishop Fulton Sheen argues that Christianity and communism have similar world views. Christianity contains the truth about our lives, teaching us that love of God and neighbor, respecting the natural law, and the anticipation that we will have to battle real evil in this world. It is bluntly realistic. Communism is a distortion of Christianity. It makes the individual, in Sheen’s phrase, “a robot,” a slave to unstoppable historical and economic forces, which will result in utopia – if only after a lot of violence.
Yet both Christianity and Communism see the world as the spiritual battleground that it is. Sheen respects Communism more than he does liberalism, which seeks comfort and virtue without any real battle.“Thought utopian and violent,” Sheen wrote, “Marxism reveals a better insight into the historical process than liberalism, which saw peace coming without a struggle and which denied that even a relative Easter of economic order would come without the Good Friday of self-sacrifice and effort.”
Sheen goes on to argue that “the Gospel for the last Sunday of Pentecost and the Gospel for the first Sunday of Advent are gospels of catastrophe, they proclaim that the final era of peace will not be ushered in until the final conflict between good and evil, when God shall come to judge the living and the dead and the new city of Peace will be descending from the heavens.”
Sheen also points out that the Russians learned Marxism from German intellectuals:
As many a parent who educated his child in an extremely progressive school, where the child equated freedom with doing what he pleased, is now the parent who wants to know what to do with his recalcitrant, alcoholic, neurotic son, so the Western world that taught Russia some bad ideas may soon want to know how it can be saved from a country which learned is lesson all too well. A Freudian psychoanalyst cannot help the son, so neither politics nor economics can help the Western world, for the fault is deeper; the world is under the judgment of God and needs repentance.
Sheen writes that “though Babylon fell because it was very wicked, it was nonetheless God’s instrument for disciplining the people of Judah. Assyria was bestial, but to was the ‘rod and staff’ of God’s anger against the people of Israel.” In the West, “communism may be the instrument for the liquidation of a bourgeois civilization that has forgotten God.”
Those are extremely bracing words. They also ring true. Our bourgeois culture has forgotten God. One of the most famous ex-communists of the 20th century was Whittaker Chambers, a Time magazine editor who revealed in 1948 that State Department officer Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. When testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Chambers explained that he joined the communist party after he witnessed the destruction of Europe after World War I: “It seemed to me that a crisis had been reached in western civilization which society was not able to solve by the usual means.” Chambers then read Marx and Lenin. “They seemed to me to explain the nature of the crisis, and what to do about it.”
Normal, mainstream liberalism could not compare to the “totalizing” vision of communism. Chambers was once asked how a liberal “who made a real living” in America could become a communist. “The making of a good living does not necessarily blind a man to a critical period which he is passing through,” Chambers replied. “Such people, in fact, may feel a special insecurity and anxiety. They seek a moral solution in a world of moral confusion. Marxism-Leninism offers an oversimplified explanation of the causes and a program for action. The very vigor of the project particularly appeals to the more or less sheltered middle-class intellectuals, who feel that the whole context of their lives has kept them away from the world of reality.”
Yet perhaps most importantly of all, Chambers came from a middle-class home that had no faith. His father, a graphic artist, was a bisexual who expressed contempt for his wife Laha, a resentful former actress. Chambers’ brother Richard committed suicide, using the oven in the family home on Long Island. “My brother was lying with his head in the gas oven, his body partly supported by the open door,” Chambers wrote in his masterpiece Witness. “He had made himself as comfortable as he could. There was a pillow in the oven under his head. His feet were resting on a pile of books set on a kitchen chair. One of his arms hung down rigid. Just below the fingers, on the floor, stood an empty quart whisky bottle.”
As much as any speeches by Lenin or Karl Marx, the death of Richard was the catalyst for Chambers to reject God and embrace totalitarianism. In his family, Chambers saw “in miniature the whole crisis of the middle class.” The solution to this total disaster was a “totalizing” solution – communism. In 1925, Chambers joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). He defected in the late 1930s. Alger Hiss, the man he accused of being a spy, was guilty.
Chambers explained that a communist “may feel a special insecurity and anxiety” that is cured by attachment to a grand movement. This echoes a New York Times piece from 2017 marking the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution: “the Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified.”
This is why communism, despite its many failures, continues to survive – and why it continues to appeal to middle and upper-class kids. The godless comforts of bourgeois liberalism just can’t compete with it.
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