Who can doubt that wherever communism has risen, war follows?
Who can doubt that wherever communism has risen, war follows?
The carnage it has caused in this and the last century is beyond dispute. The staggering numbers of people executed, imprisoned, poisoned, starved, and exiled to gulags are almost beyond belief, as the authors of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression have meticulously documented. The authors are all European. All were and are deeply acquainted with communist ideology and its fruits. One, Stephane Courtois, was a committed Maoist during the 1960s.
The book documents the death toll: 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia. Wherever Communism took root, it immediately led to criminality, terrorist tactics, and suppression of opposition.
But what does communism war against?
The answer to that question is best answered by former true believers who assiduously worked to advance Communism, but who eventually rejected Communism and exposed it for the horrors it produces within any society in which it roots itself.
In America, that question was answered by Whittaker Chambers.
For Chambers, who was a member of the American Communist underground for 13 years and who decisively rejected communist ideology by 1938, the struggles of the West were a war between two irreconcilable faiths — Communism and Christianity. He wrote:
“The 20th century… is the first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God… The most conspicuously menacing form of the rejection is Communism.”
Chambers, who became a committed Christian in the Quaker tradition, wrote of his experience of Communism and of his eventual rejection and exposure of its influence in America’s political and academic elite in his book Witness, published in May 1952 at the height of the Cold War. Much of the book focused on the 1948 House Committee on Un-American Activities’ Alger Hiss probe. Chambers was a witness against Hiss, who was an active member of the American Communist underground. He was also highly placed in FDR’s administration, including a position as advisor to the president at the calamitous Yalta Conference, which, despite Churchill’s opposition, legitimized the Soviet Union’s occupation and subsequent oppression of Eastern Europe — including the Christian churches.
Today, it is still important to remember what Chambers wrote in the early fifties, a time during which the Cold War was at its height. Throughout the 799 pages of his book, Chambers points out the core belief system driving the communist ideologues who began infiltrating America’s institutions, including academia, which he saw as beginning to lean left by 1929.
Other institutions were infiltrated, including political entities.
Chambers relates that many Communists were well placed during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal and the subsequent establishment of a left-leaning, anti-Christian bureaucracy is a prime example of parasitic communist infiltration. “All the New Dealers I had known were Communists or near-Communists. None of them took the New Deal seriously as an end in itself. They regarded it as an instrument for gaining their own revolutionary ends.”
The New Deal wound up being a pink version of the red Soviet Five-Year Plans. More importantly, the bureaucracy founded in FDR’s tenure accelerated, eventually becoming a foundation of the enormous left-leaning Deep State apparatus that acts as an alternate governance that has been vitiating the American republic for decades. Until the advent of the Trump administration, it remained virtually untouched, encountering only sporadic resistance.
The deep infiltration of American institutions was not confined to national boundaries. As Chambers noted, communist influence was global: “There is an invisible chain of command that laces the world.” That invisible command was (and is) characterized by terrorism: “The communist party, despite occasional pious statements to the contrary, is a terrorist organization… It respects only force. Only terror terrifies it.”
He added that since Communism is globalist in nature and characterized by warfare, it inevitably comes into conflict with Christianity, the foundational belief system of the West and a supranational world view found in almost every corner of the globe. Christianity’s claims of a transcendent God who is the Creator of the universe and a supernatural order that influences the destinies of mankind and its institutions comes into direct confrontation with the Communist belief system, which believes only in the power of the human being and the almighty state. As Chambers noted, the communist worldview is “An attempt to imitate the escape of national and institutional boundaries as the Christian church did, but with the view of disrupting and destroying rather than reform.” (Italics mine.)
Chambers understood the Communist mentality because he lived within that worldview for many years. But as he witnessed the carnage that system of thought perpetrated, he understood that he must break from it. As he put it, “The Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites — God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.”
A realist, he believed the only answer to the terrors of Communism was probably the least likely choice. As Daniel J. Mahoney points out in his essay “Whittaker Chambers and the Crisis of the Modern Soul,” that option was that “The West must either ‘develop or recover’ those spiritual and moral resources that constituted its superiority over communism or risk irrevocably losing its soul.”
The option will only be realized with the rise of Christian opposition to a worldview that elevates man over God.
At this time, much of the Christian church is partially paralyzed into submission by the absorption of the leftist dogma that insists Christianity has no place in any sphere other than the church buildings. The retreat into a subculture has led to lack of discernment and a refusal to confront Communism — as most Christians once failed to confront anti-Jewish and anti-Christian fascism.
The steady retreat from the secularized world stage is partly due to a vague and amorphous ecumenism that regards all faiths as equal and above judgment. The result is that many have failed to see communism regards the elimination of the Church as necessary in order the world it wishes to construct after the ruination of the West may rise.
But instead of recognizing and confronting the threat, the church generally has accepted faith as a merely private matter; or, as seems to suggest, the doctrines of faith become determined by group (synodal) consensus rather than by supernatural revelation.
Churches’ refusal or inability to acknowledge the applicability of the transcendent, supernatural Christian faith to all spheres of Western civilization has allowed the witless absorption of the leftist mentality–sometimes unconsciously, but often quite deliberately, as in the case of many Main Line denominations. Witness the capitulation of the Presbyterian Church USA to communist-inspired liberation theology.
But resistance by the Christian church to the corrosive effects of the communist faith now often allied with terrorist organizations, must happen if the West is to survive. The Church must confront the relentless anti-civilizational attacks presently ravaging Europe and now threatening America as well.
Resistance is possible.
But resistance can only begin by understanding, articulating, and confronting what Chambers saw as the “irreconcilable moralities” of Communism and Christianity.
Christian thought leaders can begin by recognizing what Chambers, immersed as he once was in the Communist faith, eventually discerned: “There are two great camps of men — those who reject and those who worship God.”
Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her the prize for excellence in systematic theology. Her thoughts have appeared in many online magazines. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com
American Thinker
