THE HUMAN AFFAIRS PAMPHLETS 

THE TWILIGHT OF GOD 

by 

Clare Boothe Luce 

HENRY REGNERY COMPANY 

CHICAGO 1949 





THE HUMAN AFFAIRS PAMPHLETS 

THE TWILIGHT OF GOD 

by 

Clare Boothe Luce 

HENRY REGNERY COMPANY 

CHICAGO 

1949 

( 



PAMPHLET NUMBER 44-45 

JULY-AUGUST, 1949 

Copyright 1949 
By CLARE BOOTHE LUCE 

Quotation in part is permitted only if credit is given to the author 
and to Henry Regnery Company, Publishers, Chicago, . Illinois 

Manufactured in the United States of America 



THE TWILIGHT OF GOD 

I 

Is the United States a Christian Nation? 

THE STRUGGLE that shakes our world was recently de-
scribed by Charles E. Wilson, president of the General Electric 
Company, and chairman of the National Conference of Chris-
tians and Jews, as a contest between the "God fearing power 
of Democracy and the God-hating power of Communism." 

That Communism hates God is a matter of official record. 
But that Democracy-American Democracy-fears God is a 
matter not so easily proved. 

In Civilization on Trial, Arnold Toynbee sums up his view 
of the condition of Christianity in the West. (By Christianity 
Toynbee means, of course, the belief in the Incarnation and Di-
vinity of Jesus Christ, His Crucifixion and Resurrection, and 
the consequent acceptance of His moral and spiritual teach-
ings.) Toynbee observes that our civilization has been "living 
on spiritual capital; I mean, clinging to Christian practice with-
out possessing Christian belief-and practice unsupported by 
belief is a wasting asset, as we have suddenly discovered, to our 
dismay, in this generation."l 

To what extent is Christianity a wasting asset in America? 
The overwhelming majority of our Founding Fathers were ar-
dent and devout Christians who believed passionately in church 
institutions and Christian education. Although their Protestant 
interpretations of the Bible may have differed, once they had 
interpreted it to their own satisfaction, its authority was then 
accepted without diffidence or doubt. They made, or tried to 

1 Arnold Toynbee: Civilization on Trial (New York, Oxford University 
Press, 1948), p. :137. Italics ours. 

1 



make, their decisions, both public and private, in the light 
of their Christian faith. To say that they often failed to live up 
to it, is only to say that they were human. 

Here is a far too infrequently quoted part of the Farewell 
Address of George Washington: 

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, 
religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that 
man pay the tribute of patriotism who would labor to subvert these 
great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties 
of men and citizens .. . . And let us with caution, indulge the sup-
position that morality can be maintained without religion. What-
ever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on 
minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us 
to expect that national morality can prevail in the exclusion of 
religious principles. 

John Adams, in his inaugural address of March 4, 1797, 
offered as part of his qualifications to occupy the office vacated 
by Washington ". . . a love of science and letters and a wish 
to patronize . . . every institution for promoting knowledge, 
virtue and religion among all classes of people . . . a.s the only 
means of preserving our Constitution from its natural enemies." 

Alexander Hamilton often declared in his State papers that 
God blesses a nation in proportion as it adheres, in its public 
acts, to the divine law of morality and justice. Like Washing-
ton, he felt certain that any attempt to substitute a secular 
morality for a religious one must result in the death of religion, 
and with it, of all morality. James Madison and James Wilson 
were two other signers whose writings were full of a most ardent 
devotion, and a sound understanding of Christian doctrine. 
They were especially convinced of the paramount importance 
of religion as the only means of inculcating morality in the 
citizen. Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, almost all of them were in accord with Washington, 
Adams, Madison, Wilson and Hamilton.1 

The notable exception to the devout Christianity of the Signers 

1 Robert C. Hartnett, S. J., "The Religion of the Founding Fathers," in 
Well Springs of the American Spirit (New York, Harper and Bros., 1948), 
PP·49-5 2 • 



was Thomas Jefferson, who claimed to be a "deist," but who has 
been called, by a recent specialist, "a conservative materialist."! 

Possibly the reason the American Communist quotes Jeffer-
son almost to the exclusion of the other Founding Fathers is 
his explicit anti-Christian bias. No great American has ever 
been more deliberately, provocatively, anti-Christian in politics 
than Thomas Jefferson. Nevertheless, as his private papers 
show, some of his own political reasoning was taken from the 
works of St. Robert Bellarmine and indirectly from St. Thomas 
Aquinas; and he insisted to the end that he was "a real Chris-
tian," according to his own understanding of the teachings of · 
a mortal Jesus. "An atheist I can never be," he wrote to John 
Adams.2 

Dr. Witherspoon, another signer, and the first president of 
Princeton, was a devout Presbyterian. He also maintained that 
the foundations of popular government, as well as morality, 
were laid in a strong belief that "God governs the affairs of 
men."3 

It would be interesting to be able to bridge the centuries, 
to hand Dr. Witherspoon a copy of the Atlantic Monthly for 
September, 1948, and ask him to read aloud to the other signers 
an article by a present member of Princeton's philosophy de-
partment, Professor W. F. Stace. The article is called "Man 
Against Darkness." The following quotations would surely give 
our Founding Fathers reason to wonder whether Christianity 
were even a wasting asset in Dr. Witherspoon's Princeton. Thus 
writes Professor Stace: 

For my part, I believe in no religion at all .... Since the world 
is not ruled by a spiritual being, but rather by blind forces, there 
cannot be any ideals, moral or otherwise, in the universe outside us. 
Our ideals, therefore, must proceed only from our own minds; they 

1 Adrienne Koch, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 
Columbia University Press, 1943), p. 34. 

• Jefferson to John Adams, Apr. 11, 1823. 
• Cf. Proceedings of the Presbyterian Synod, 1788. Dr. Witherspoon was 

one of the leading framers of the Presbyterian Assembly. ' 

3 



are our own inventions. Thus the world which surrounds us is 
nothing but an immense spiritual emptiness. Nature is nothing but 
matter in motion ... governed, not by any purpose, but by blind 
forces and laws .... Religion can get on with any sort of astronomy, 
geology, biology and physics. But it cannot get on with a purpose-
less and meaningless universe. . .. The life of man is meaningless, 
too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man 
may ... still pursue disconnected ends, money, fame, art, science 
... but his life is hollow at the center. Hence the dissatisfied, dis-
illusioned, restless spirit of modern man .... The picture of a mean-
ingless world, and a meaningless human life is, I think, the basic 
theme of much modern art and literature. Certainly it is the basic 
theme of modern philosophy .... Belief in the ultimate irrationality 
of everything is the quintessence of what is called the modern 
mind.1 

Our Founding Fathers, being educated men, would not 
be astounded by this atheistic view, knowing atheism to be as 
old as antiquity. But what would probably shock them is the 
fact that so little attention has been paid to Professor Stace's 
credo in educational or journalistic circles. Concern for the fate 
of the nation would no doubt overcome our Founding Fathers 
were they to learn that in our times it is no longer news that 
a prominent American educator professes to be an atheist, and 
asserts publicly the worthlessness, futility, hollowness, meaning-
lessness and amorality of all human life. 

Yale's original charter states as its purpose the training of men 
"for the service of Church and State." Today one of Yale's most 
brilliant and popular teachers, Professor F. S. C. Northrop of 

. the philosophy department, clearly shows in his voluminous 
published writings that he appreciates the need and desire of 
mankind for faith. 2 

The pragmatic case for religion is brilliantly made by Dr. 
Northrop, who believes with Edmund Burke that "Man is by 
his constitution a religious animal."3 On the other hand, he 

1 W. F. Stace, "Man Against Darkness," Atlantic Monthly, September, 
1948. 

• F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West (New York, The 
Macmillan Company, 1946), p. 61. 

• Reflections on the Revolution in France. III. 1790. 

4 



also makes it abundantly clear to his readers (and, one assumes, 
to his students) that Christianity, the predominant religion of 
the West, is inadequate to present-day world spiritual needs, 
especially the spiritual needs of the East. He insists that a new 
religion, "with transforming power," must be constructed, if 

. the world is to be reintegrated culturally. 
The question of the possibility of "constructing," or discover-

ing, or inventing, a new worldwide religion-a wholly mechan-
istic concept-is not the point here. Once again the point is that 
an influential, respected, and popular American professor in a 
great university is teaching his students that Christianity-the 
basis of their own ethics and morals-is inadequate, partial to 
mankind's needs, and therefore outdated. 

Evidence could be multiplied into volumes to show that many 
of our secular American universities and colleges are dominated 
by educators who are either positive atheists, negative deists, 
or indifferent Christians. . 

Certainly no one doubts that at the topmost levels of educa-
tion-in the great endowed universities which were almost all 
envisioned, at their inception, as institutes for the formation of 
Christian leaders-a disbelief in Christianity can be taught in 
the name of science, philosophy, democracy, or even religion 
itself, without effective criticism from any quarter. But if edu-
cators were to suggest that Negroes be admitted equally with 
white students (a positive Christian proposal) one can imagine 
that, before a wholesale withdrawal of students and money took 
place, the educators would probably be requested to withdraw. 

Most of the leaders in all fields of American life are college 
graduates . Today, the potential leaders of the American people 
are being treated to an educational fare that is less and less 
Christian. 

In the public field of lower education, it is no different. The 
Supreme Court opinion on the McCollum case, which declared 
released-time religious instruction in the public schools to be 
unconstitutional, seems to many merely a re-emphasis on the 

5 



separation of Church from State. It was more than that: it made 
official the separation of the State from God. 

In America, a child can now complete twelve full years of 
public schooling without ever having had, in the formative en-
vironment of school, a word of instruction about God or the 
Christian religion. Only a completely prejudiced and unhis-
torical mind could believe that this situation would be accept-
able to the founders of this Republic. The historic and proper 
relationships of State to Church, of Christianity to Democracy, 
are matters of endless and fruitful debate among students of 
American history and politics. But that a relationship existed, 
because both existed, was the important fact. Today, the rela-
tionship ceases to be a matter of deep concern largely because 
of the shrunken power of the churches to inform and animate 
the opinions of our citizens. 

Clearly, the bias of government and law today is increasingly 
in the direction of substituting secular education for religion as 
a means of inculcating ethical and moral principles in the 
citizen. 

It is useful here to consider the implications of the now 
famous opinion of the Federal Communications Commission 
known as the Scott opinion.1 This opinion may well mark the 
historic moment when our nation began its official acceptance 
of atheism . The opinion suggests that atheists areconstitu-
tionally entitled to equal time on the air with believers in super-
natural faiths, in view of both the first and second clauses of 
Article I of the Constitution, which guarantee religious free-
dom and forbid abridgment of free speech. 

A petitioner, Mr. Scott, asked the Federal Communications 
Commission to revoke the license of three California coastal 
stations for refusing to make time available to him for a broad-
cast denying the existence of God. The memo issued by the 
department is, perhaps, the first governmental excursion into 
the realm of theology. It asserts that the existence of God, or 
any transce~dent Being, is a legitimately controversial public 
question, and that "freedom of belief necessarily carries with it 

1 Federal Communications Commission Memo 96050 in re: Petition of 
Robert Harold Scott. Signed by T. J. Slowie, July 19, 1946. 

6 



freedom to disbelieve" and freedom to express these disbeliefs 
on the air, however abhorrent they may be to the majority of 
listeners or however at variance with commonly accepted ideas 
of morality. 

There is no explicit mention of God in the Constitution, but 
this document was composed by the same minds that dictated 
the Declaration of Independence. Did the writers of the FCC 
memo display ignorance of it or did they consider the Declara· 
tion totally irrelevant to the spirit of the Constitution? The 
Declaration states that all the rights of our citizens, and our own 
right to nationhood, are those "to which the laws of Nature and 
of Nature's God entitle them" ... and that "men are endowed 
by their Creator" ... with these rights; that a people's final 
court of appeal is "The Supreme Judge of the World"; and that 
their entire destiny is in the hands of "Divine Providence." 

The FCC, an official government agency created by act of 
Congress, advocates in the name of freedom of speech, and of 
religious freedom, radio debate on the validity of the only au-
thority, set forth by the Declaration of Independence, for the 
existence of all our freedom. 

Perhaps the time has come for our lawmakers to clarify the 
religious issue as it impinges on laws affecting radio, movies, 
education. This could be done by offering an amendment to 
our Constitution similar to that in Article 124 of the USSR 
Constitution which reads, in part: 

"Freedom of religious worship and freedom of antireligious 
propaganda is recognized for all citizens . . ." 

Such an amendment would make it plain that the time had 
come in America when atheism was to be considered of equal 
validity with religion-and that Americans could no longer be 
called a God-fearing or a Christian people. The Scott and Mc-
Collum decisions to the contrary, our Constitution does not 
make it plain that freedom of worship includes the additional 
right to undermine or destroy the worship of others. 

There is much incidental evidence of our nation's betrayal 
of its Christian heritage. Let us consider the controversial, 

7 



divisive, and distressing issues that plague this country today, 
and measure the proposed solutions (if any) against our his-
torically professed devotion to Christian ethics. 

There is, for one example, the matter of the breakup of the 
home as viewed in the light of the unequivocal words of Jesus 
on the subject of divorce and marriage: "Whom God hath 
joined together, let no man put asunder." For hundreds of years, 
these words were invoked as infallible authority for the indis-
solubility of marriage among Christians. Today in the United 
States of America one out of three marriages ends in divorce. 
In marriage, the most important of all communal relationships, 
America is certainly becoming less and less Christian. 

America stands scarcely touched by the horrors of war, yet 
it is with considerable reluctance that many of our people have 
come to the aid of Europe. And in order to put the Marshall 
plan over, to many groups, the emphasis was largely placed on an 
appeal to self-interest. There has been 'no really effective volun-
tary curtailment of food, or sacrifice of luxuries by the majority 
of our citizens in behalf of the starving "foreigners" who are, 
according to Christian principles, our brothers and sisters . 

Here is the poem carved on the base of the Statue of Liberty 
in the 1880'S. It is a Christian Uncle Sam-aritan's political inter-
pretation of Matthew 25:35-36: <t ••• I was a stranger, and you 
took me in ... " 

Give me your tired, your poor, 
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, 
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: 
I lift my lamp beside the golden door. 

Today, these words are a mockery to the millions of European 
DP's seeking, in vain, entrance to the United States. We have 
no use either for "wretched refuse" of other teeming shores or 
for the thousands of skilled workers who, through no fault of 
their own, were rendered homeless by the war. We offer only a 
very limited asylum to the distressed, dispossessed or persecuted. 
Our representatives wrangle incessantly with what they call 

8 



American "do-gooders" to cut down the number of refugees 
entering the United States to a bare minimum of "useful" 
workers. 

How many of our national domestic problems, involving labor 
disputes, wages and living conditions, racial questions-above 
all the Negro question-are viewed from the Christian point of 
view? 

Or, let us consider an issue long before the public eye, the 
wasting assets of our natural resources. Soil erosion, deforesta-
tion, the prodigal waste of every kind of raw material, are 
plainly the marks of man's wanton abuse of a nature that was 
made for his use. A wrong attitude towards "Nature's God" re-
sults in an equally wrong attitude towards God's nature. 

Let us consult as a final arbiter that great barometer of the 
American soul: the nation-wide poll. 

Recently ' a survey was made on the religious situation in 
America, and from its findings Lincoln Barnett wrote a deeply 
understanding analysis of the spiritual condition and religious 
behavior of "Mr. and Mrs. America."1 

Thomas Jefferson once suggested that God was "an ethereal 
gas." While an amazing proportion of Americans (95 per cent) 
claim to believe in Him, most of these have no clearer concept of 
what Christian or Judaic theology means by God than had 
Thomas Jefferson or the author of the FCC opinion. This whole-
sale ignorance of an adult concept of God is not surprising: the 
poll shows that only 40 per cent of the Americans who do claim 
to believe in God claim to be "regular churchgoers." Only an 
insignificant fraction of our citizens has the most elementary 
notions of Christian dogma or can tell the difference between 
any of the Protestant sects. While 56 per cent of them admit 
to praying off and on, only a small percentage pray regularly, 
only 5 per cent of these ever ask to be forgiven for their sins, and 
only 4 per cent thank Him in their prayers for His blessings. 
The vast majority of prayers seem to be petitions for material 
benefits. Few of the prayers-26 per cent-are addressed to a 

1 Lincoln Barnett, "God and the American People," Ladies Horne Jour-
nal, November, 19i8. 

9 



personal God (or a loving Father, or His obedient Son) who can 
answer prayers of petition. 

Interpretations of this penetrating survey were made by three 
noted theologians: Rev. Reinhold Niebuhr, professor of Applied 
Christianity at Union Theological Seminary; Rabbi S. Green-
berg, professor of homiletics and practicing provost of the Jewish 
Theological Seminary, and Rev. George B. Ford, formerly 
Catholic advisor at Columbia University, now pastor of Corpus 
Christi Church in New York City. 

"I find little indication," said Dr. Greenberg, "of any com-
pulsion to obey God. Nor does there seem to be any suggestion 
that people think of God as the power that makes for justice 
and freedom in the world." He reluctantly concluded that al-
though the average American "believes" in God, he does not 
associate that belief directly with his own behavior, or integrate 
it in his daily living habits. 

"I didn't notice," Father Ford observed, "that too many felt 
a personal responsibility to give honor and glory to God. On the 
contrary, most people defined their motives for going to church 
purely in terms of satisfaction to themselves." 

Dr. Niebuhr pointed out the most tragic error of modern 
Christianity revealed by this poll. "The whole history of human 
self-righteousness," says Dr. Niebuhr, "proves that man always 
judges himself, not from the standpoint of what he does, but 
from the standpoint of his knowledge of what he ought to do." 
This fact deludes man into making the assumption "that he is 
as good as the ideals of justice and love which he entertains." 

Modern Protestant Christianity, he points out, has permitted 
men to confuse their own partial, relative and imperfect ethical 
concepts, such as political co-operation in increasingly social 
welfare, with the real Christian idea of Charity, or transcendent 
Love. The very keystone of Christian ethics is a troubled con-
science on charity's score, which uses as its frame of reference 
no merely human standards of love and brotherhood, but 
points to the Cross, the supreme example of self-denying love, 
of crucified self-abnegation. Such a frame of reference must leave 
a man forever dissatisfied with his own conduct towards his 
neighbors and his community. 

10 



According to this survey, the American feels no such dissatis-
faction with himself. On the contrary, 91 per cent of those 
questioned thought "they honestly tried to live a good life," ac-
cording to their beliefs. Only 7 per cent admitted "halfway or 
less" failure to do so. This is not surprising: 82 per cent said 
that the struggle to live up to their faith in no way interfered 
with their business, politics, or recreation. And, as further evi-
dence of their confidence in their own triumphant virtue, only 
5 per cent of the 52 per cent who believe in Hell have any fear 
whatsoever of going there. 

Unhappily, the survey developed a portrait of the "God- . 
fearing" American as a Pharisee, certain of the need of remov-
ing the beam from his brother's eye, quite unaware of the beam 
in his own. 

If any part of America's claim to the role of world leadership 
is based on the assertion that she will supply true Christian 
leadership, the claim is-relative to the Cross-disastrously hypo-
criticaL 

If this should be true, what bcomes of the issue as defined 
so simply by Mr. Wilson-that the world struggle is one be-
tween the power of our Godfearing democracy and the power 
of God-hating Soviet Russia? 

The religious spirit is withering in America. Is it, as we so 
commonly suppose, altogether dead in Soviet Russia? 

II 

Is the Soviet Union Irreligious? 

WHAT IS the fundamental Communist concept of man? It 
is simply that he is an animal without a souL This belief is the 
basic creed of all Communist prophets, teachers and leaders. 

Here is the way Lenin, writing about Karl Marx, puts it: 

Religion is the opium of the people. And this postulate is the cor-
nerstone of the whole philosophy of Marxism. Marxism always 
regards all modern religions and churches and every kind of re-

11 



ligious organization as instruments of that bourgeois reaction whose 
aim is to defend exploitation by stupefying the working class. 

And again: 

Atheism is an integral part of Marxism. Consequently, a class-
conscious Communist party must carry on propaganda in favor of 
Atheism .... The Communist party ... organizes the widest pos-
sible scientific, educational and antireligious propaganda .... One 
of the most important tests of the cultural revolution affecting the 
wide masses is the task of systematically ... combating religion-
the opium of the people .... 1 

And again: 

Religion must be regarded as a private matter; in these words the 
attitude of the [Communists] to religion is usually expressed. But 
we must define the meaning of those words precisely, so as to avoid 
misunderstanding. We demand that religion be regarded as a private 
matter as far as the State is concerned, but under no circumstances 
can we consider it a private matter with regard to the Communist 
party .. . . [Our Party] does not for a minute regard the fight 
against religion as a private matter.2 

There is no Communist leader from the time of Marx and 
Lenin who has not fanatically embraced this conviction of 
man's wholly materialistic nature. 

In spite of the cold violence with which all Soviet officialdom 
has exercised its constitutional "freedom of antireligious propa-
ganda," to destroy the citizens' equally constitutional "freedom 
of religion," a case might be made that Soviet Russia is, today, 
the more religious in spirit of the two contending nations. 

It should be noted here that in using the words religion and 
religious in connection with Communism and its followers, the 
reference is not to any supernatural character in Communism, 
but to the religious a priori which Communism taps in man, 
inspiring a devotion, fidelity, rigidity, fanaticism, and apostolic-
ity, generally associated with religionists. 

1 Collected Works of Lenin (:md Russian ed.), XIV, 68-69. 
• Ibid., p. 76. 

12 



Certainly Communism appeals at a wholly materialistic level 
to many of the poor, the disfranchised, the unjustly used, the 
discriminated against, the downtrodden, the underprivileged-
everywhere on this side of the Iron Curtain. But, strangely 
enough, its deepest appeal is often to the talented, the rich and 
the famous, and is experienced by them as an emotion, or a 
mystique. 

The intellectual appeal of Communist teachings has been 
grossly overrated. It is an ascertainable fact that few, if any, 
first-rate European minds have ever been tempted to accept 
Communism as either a complete explanation of history, or 
an adequate philosophy of man and nature. And yet, in Europe 
and the U .S.A. Communism appeals to a host of well-to-do 
and, for the most part, well-thought-of characters in poli-
tics, the arts and sciences. It has numbered here among its 
fellow travelers some second-generation multimillionaires, and 
even some clergymen. Are we to assume that all these adherents 
are either cheap notoriety-seekers or conscious traitors? Then 
these persons must have been drawn to Communism by some 
call to their deeper natures, by some idealistic appetite, some 
spiritual need that craved satisfaction. Nothing else could ex-
plain why so many ardent defenders of Communism in Europe 
and America have been people of substance, and not only the 
ignorant and "downtrodden." 

Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr has called Communism a Christian 
heresy.1 A belief cannot be a heresy from a creed which it denies 
in toto, as Communism totally denies Christianity. What Nie-
buhr means is that a vaunted concept of Marxian doctrine, "the 
brotherhood of man," is also an integral Christian concept. It 
is equally Jewish. Perhaps it is truest to say that Communism 
is a political perversion of the Golden Rule, that primary law 
of natural theology which has manifested itself in every great 
religion. .. 

No distaste for the abhorrent actualities of Communism 
should blind us to the fact that Communists, from Marx's time 
until now, have often made just and pertinent criticisms of 

1 "Can We Avoid Catastrophe?" The Christian Century, May 26, 1948. 
13 



I 
pharisaical Christianity. And certainly many of the Western 
world's terrible economic and political problems, and its diffi-
culty in recapturing spiritual leadership of the civilized world, 
spring from this hypocrisy. 

All clear-sighted observers of the world crisis realize that 
America's failure to propose Christian solutions for the domestic 
and foreign economic and political problems that affect us, is 
the main reason for the readiness of many distraught people to 
accept Communist solutions. But they do not always see so 
clearly that the attraction of the "liberals" and "intellectuals" to 
Communism is caused by a deep need for a dynamic faith. 

The last hope of the Western man who is determined to live 
without God is furnished by the dream of a brotherhood to be 
found in revolution; an absolute will, in the will of Humanity; 
and an end worthy of pain and sacrifice in the Risen Masses, 
the Transfiguration of the Common Man, the Glorification of 
the Proletariat. Although the philosophy of Karl Marx is based 
on atheistic materialism, for that very reason its transformation 
into a religion, however inverted, demonstrates better than has 
ever been demonstrated in human history, that man is a "religi-
ous incurable." 

Some writers, notably Rev. William McDonald, in the Amer-
ican Ecclesiastical Review, have found remarkable parallels on 
the organizational hierarchial and theological planes between 
Communism and Catholicism.l Father McDonald notes that 
both call for the overcoming of the state of nature by a higher 
condition. Each has its Paradise Lost and its Paradise Regained. 
Pre-Socialist man equals unredeemed man; classless society is 
the Kingdom of God. The Holy Trinity can be compared with 
the triadic movement of the Marxian Dialectic; "there unity, 
dilating eternally begets variety; and variety, condensing is eter-
nally resolved in unity." Salvation through the Cross becomes 
Salvation through the Hammer and Sickle. 

1 William J. McDonald, "The Religion of Communism," The American 
Ecclesiastical Review, May, 1948. Cf. also Communism and the Conscience 
of the West, by Fulton J. Sheen (Indianapolis, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 
1948 ). 



Lenin is the Messiah of the new religion; Marx and Engels its 
prophets. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus finds its counterpart in 
the exclusion of all but Party members from any position of 
authority, or benefices. 

Communism has its bible in Das Kapital; its orthodox doc-
trine in Leninist Marxism, its heretics in such men as Zinoviev 
and Trotsky. And like Catholicism, it claims a universal loyalty: 
"Workers of the World Unite!" Its followers are called upon to 
deliver not only themselves but all mankind up for salvation. 

It is authoritarian, and infallible. Everything not directly in 
line with Party policies, however shifting, is damned as heresy · 
or fascism. Communism breeds fanatics by the thousands who 
thrill with a common zeal and palpitate in mutual enthusiasm. 
The Communist leaders indulge in violent theological disputes. 
They are full of the spirit of self-dedication. They persecute 
unbelievers and heretics, who can be guilty of Marxian heresy 
even in such fields as biology, music, and architecture. They do 
great homage to their converts. 

In his apocalyptic vision Marx was truer than he would ever 
admit to his background: baptized a Christian, he never lost 
the traditional Jewish sense of messianic expectation, and the 
Kingdom Come on Earth. 
There is a story told about Frank Sheed, the Catholic publisher-
apostle, who was preaching one day in London's Hyde Park. 
An unwashed heckler cried, "We've had Christianity for two 
thousand years . How do you explain the shape the world's in 
now?" Sheed replied, "We've had water for two billion years. 
How do you explain the condition of your neck?" Marx was 
making the same complaint as that heckler, but there was none 
able to convince him that the widespread failure of a so-called 
Christian society's leaders to be Christian was one of the main 
reasons that society was in so sad a condition. 

The real damage to society had been done, before Marx ap-
peared on the world scene, by the forces of an increasingly ma-
terialistic secularism that every day widened the gap between 
God and man. Marx invented nothing, created nothing. He 
merely carried the atheistic materialism of Europe to its logical 

15 



conclusion: he made a religion of Europe's failure of religion, 
and a faith of man 's lack of faith. 

Viewed merely as a proposal to share material goods, Com-
munism would not alarm a thoroughly Christian mind. Did not 
the word communism itself spring from the economic commu-
nity of early Christians who lived together sharing everything? 
"We who are united in heart and soul have no hesitation in 
sharing things," wrote Tertullian in The Christian's Defence, 
about 215 A.D. "Among us all things are common except 
wives." The voluntary sharing of all things in common not 
essential to personal survival, is known today, in a pure state, 
in only one environment: that of the convent, monastery, or 
religious community. 

It is the philosophical-religious concepts of Communism 
which have alarmed the Christian thinker. 

Communism is man's attempt to construct for himself, and 
with himself as God, a world of purely natural origins. Com-
munists preach that there is only one reality in the world-
matter. Individual mind, intellect, spirit, soul, if they are to be 
thought of at all, must be thought of as vapors or gases, or elec-
trical impulses cast off by the body. In any case, you are wholly 
an animal. You are born to live and die like a pig; you root, and 
rut, and rot. All your hopes beyond life are a fraud. And death 
is the final swindle of all your sacrifices. You will know no justice 
or judgment in a future life. You possess no freedom of will in 
this life. This is the brutal philosophy that is craftily embedded 
under a glittering mass of utopian Marxian verbiage. 

Over a hundred years ago when Communism first attracted 
the attention of Europe's intellectuals and liberals, Pope Pius IX 
foresaw its threat to the peace of the world. He castigated it 
then as "that infamous doctrine of so-called Communism 
which is absolutely contrary to the natural law itself; and if once 
adopted would utterly destroy the rights, property and posses-
sions of all men, and even society itself."l And in 1878, Leo XIII 

1 Pius IX, Qui Pluribus (Encyclical issued Nov. 9, 1846), cited in Prin-
ciples for Peace ... Edited for the Bishops' Committee on the Pope's 
Peace Points by the Reverend Harry C. Koenig (Washington, NCWC 
[Bruce Pub. Co., distributors] 1943), pp. 511-12. 

16 



defined Communism as "the fatal plague which insinuates itself 
into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its 
ruin."1 And twelve years ago, Pius XI in thunderous warning 
said, "Communism ... strips man of his dignity and removes 
all moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse." 
The individual "is a mere cogwheel in the Communist system." 2 

Ever since the time of Pius IX, Christian statesmen and 
scholars have consistently and vociferously denounced and 
fought Communism. But so have many Jews, and even 
Buddhists and Confucians . It does not seem to matter what a 
person's faith or creed, so long as he believes that human life . 
has any sacred or spiritual value. The Communist doctrine of 
the nature of man revolts him. 

In 1842, the great poet Heinrich Heine, a German Jew and a 
friend of Karl Marx, warned against his friend's philosophy. 

Communism [he wrote] is the secret name of the dread antagonist 
setting proletarian rule . . . against the present bourgeois regime. 
How will it end? . .. I do not know; .. . wild gloomy times are 
roaring towards us, and a prophet wishing to write a new Apocalypse 
would have to invent entirely new beasts-beasts so terrible that 
St. John's old animal symbols would be like gentle doves in com-
parison .... The future smells of Russian leather, blood, godless-
ness and many whippings. I should advise our grandchildren to be 
born with very thick skins on their backs.3 

What has most horrified and disgusted all intelligent critics of 
Communism is its unnatural mien, its clammy, subhuman, 
morbid, Frankenstein aspect, which nevertheless wears some of 
the emotional trappings of a religion. 

Will this new religion sweep the world? Is it the religion with 
"the transforming power" that Professor Northrop has sought, 
for the spiritual unification of the East and West? 

This is the question we must next consider: whether in the 

1 Leo XIII, Quod Apostolici Muneris (Encyclical issued Dec. 28, 1878), 
cited in Social WeIIsprings, I, 14. 

• Divini Redemptoris, op. cit. 
a Heinrich Heine, Works of Prose (ed . Herman Kesten; New York, L. B. 

Fischer, 1943), pp . 51, 53· 



years ahead there is any alternative to Christianity, for the world 
and for America, except Communism. 

III 

Christianity or Totalitarianism? 

IN THEORY, some of the long-range objectives of Com-
munism are similar to those that our own Democracy seeks. 

The "abolition of the exploitation of man by man," and the 
ultimate distribution of the production of labor in accordance 
with the formula of "from each according to his abilities, and 
to each according to his needs"; the social objectives of the 
"equality of rights of citizens ... irrespective of their nationality, 
or race, in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and 
political life,"l-these professed Soviet political and economic 
goals are American goals, too. And in practice, no less than in 
theory, our Democracy has moved towards them steadily 
throughout the years. Indeed, one might say that the avowed 
political and economic goals of Communism were historically 
inspired by The American Dream. 

What Americans generally mean by democracy is freedom. 
To Americans, freedom is the dearest and most familiar of 
words. We say it, and we sing it. We know we have ourselves 
created it, and yet it seems a part of created nature. We associate 
it, above all other words, with the roots of our tradition and the 
springs of our history. This, we claim, is a nation "conceived in 
Liberty." And we are a people who have ever sought to make 
"the bounds of freedom wider yet." 

All history witnesses that freedom pertains to the will. As a 
political ideal, freedom means that men should be allowed to do 
the things they will. And this freedom to act according to one's 
will is seen to be an ideal because the will itself is free, is a 
faculty by which a man freely makes his own choices. There 

1 Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845, 1846), tr. Max Eastman . 

18 



would be no great value in allowing men freedom to act as they 
will, if their will itself were not free. 

Where does freedom come from? Here again it has been the 
overwhelming verdict of mankind that it is our Maker's gift to 
our human nature. We Americans celebrate that truth when we 
sing: 

Our Fathers' God, to Thee, 
Author of Liberty, 
To Thee I sing. . . . 

Americans, as a people, are still more free to choose among 
more things and ideas than any other people in the world. We are 
still more free to choose between what we will eat and wear, 
where we will go, what we will do, whom we will be friends 
with, love, marry, worship, than the men and women of any 
other land. There are, of course, our American Negroes, who 
have been shamefully denied many of the existing freedoms of 
choice that white Americans enjoy. The Negro question, since 
the first days of slavery, has been the skeleton in American 
Democracy's closet, the ghost at every patriotic feast. 

But even white Americans as a people, have never attained 
the maximum of freedom as citizens. We cannot choose be-
tween perfect peace and war, perfect security and poverty, per-
fect health and sickness, perfect happiness and misery, because 
we are not presented with such happy choices. But even when 
the free will of man seems to be limited to choosing between 
{'viIs, he can still choose the lesser. "Of the two evils, the lesser 
is always to be chosen," states Thomas a Kempis in The Imita-
tion of Christ. 

Our wide, though imperfect, historic American freedom of 
choice is, however, being slowly threatened at home and rapidly 
threatened from abroad. We are still the freest people in the 
world but, apart from the halting political and educational prog-
ress made in behalf of minorities like the Negroes, the majority 
of Americans are not as free as their forefathers were fifty 
years ago. 

Who and what menace our freedom? 



If we agree with our Founding Fathers that God is the author 
of our liberty, and that He gave us our unalienable right to exer-
cise our wills freely, we must then say that any thought system, 
or intellectual concept that denies the existence of God, will 
tend to destroy our belief in our free will and, with it, the value 
of all our moral judgments. 

Or, if any theory is advanced which denies the existence of 
our free will, it will tend to destroy our belief in God, and with 
it, the judgment of all our moral values. 

The Catholic Bishops of the United States issued a statement 
that said in part, "No man can disregard God, and playa man's 
part in the world." They said indifference to God was the root 
cause of all our troubles. They called it "secularism." They as-
serted that secularism has been the "fertile soil in which such 
social monstrosities as Fascism, Nazism and Communism could 
germinate and grow." Even where secularism makes its Sunday 
bows to the concept of a Creator, it shows a steady drift towards 
materialism, and materialistic ideas and philosophies.1 

Man forgets God, and loses his soul. And man, whom God 
had made "a little less than the angels," and had crowned with 
glory and honor, tends to become a mere "hand," or "produc-
tion unit" in the materialistic capitalist West. He becomes a 
slave, a robot, an ant, in materialistic Communist Russia. 

When God is taken out of the individual's life, man becomes 
first selfish, then discontented, then egomaniacal, then bitter, 
then blasphemous, then sqdden in self-pity. And in the end, 
stricken by despair, he is driven to self-destruction. 

When God is taken out of family life, its members become 
cynical, self-willed, and self-centered. The results are divorce, 
with all its adult heartbreaks and its lasting scars upon children, 
and juvenile delinquency. 

When God is taken out of field and factory, things go no 
better. Then we get that strange and most dangerous physical 

1 Secularism. Statement issued November 14, 1947, by the Bishops of 
the United States and signed in their names by the Members of the Admin· 
istrative Board, National Catholic Welfare Conference (Washington, 
NCWC, 1947). 

20 



phenomenon of our times : the rape of the soil for quick profits, 
resulting in erosion and deforestation, with their devastating 
cycles of flood and fire and dust storms. And we get the irra-
tional and wild economic individualism that leads to cutthroat 
competition and monopolies. These lead inexorably to the 
booms and busts, with all their consequent sufferings and 
turmoil. 

When God is taken out of politics we always get tyranny. 
And when God is taken out of everything by fiat or by force, 
we get naked atheistic materialism: we get Communism. 

The object of all political tyrants and despots of the past was 
to bend or break men's wills. This they tried to do by threats 
of exile, imprisonment, death, torture; by handsome bribes or 
sweet seductions; by clever suasion or low trickery. But no tyrant 
of the past ever denied that the wills he tried to coerce or 
persuade were free wills. It took Karl Marx to do that, and his 
illegitimate and legitimate progeny, Hitler and Stalin. With the 
acceptance by Europeans of Marxian philosophy, something 
new had been added: the final denial that men were born free; 
and then the insistence that men voluntarily use what freedom 
they seemed to have to seek slavery. 

The totalitarians educated those under their sway to accept 
their unnatural theories of the helpless nature of man in the 
universe by keeping from them all access to theories other than 
their own, that is, by denying to the citizens any freedom of 
choice between true and false concepts of economics, politics, 
or religion. This wall built by the Soviet tyrants to keep its own 
people shut off from making intellectual choices has come to be 
known as an Iron Curtain. 

In our Democracy there are evil forces and evil men that 
contradict our professed democ~atic tenets. Our shame is this 
hypocrisy: we don't always do what we believe in. But this is 
the momentous difference: The Soviet leaders are indeed no -
hypocrites-they believe in brutal and coercive means, involving 
the liquidation of inconvenient humans. The Soviet Party not 
only relies on-it advocates violence, coercion, hatred, and false-
hood in the attainment of its announced good ends. The Com-

21 



munist creed insists that any means are justified in the reaching 
of its goal. 

The reason Communism can, within the framework of its 
own logic, hold that bad means are justified by good ends, is 
that Marxian philosophy denies that Absolute Truth exists. 
The destruction of Absolute Truth follows from the destruc-
tion of Absolute Good, which is God. 

With the destruction of God as an ultimate authority for 
man's personal actions and thoughts goes the destruction of his 
personal conscience. He accepts, instead, the corporate con-
science of the State. That is to say, he accepts the personal 
judgments of a ruling caste whose notions of right or wrong are 
purely relative to concepts of State opportunism or expediency. 

Western Democracy has insisted on the principle that no 
man, or group or nation, is permitted consciously to do evil, 
even though the intent is to accomplish eventual good. That 
good ends do not justify bad means is a religious dogma. It is 
true that reason can arrive at it without the aid of revelation. 
Yet the generality of men are not likely to act on it save as a 
supernatural law of life. Christian morality is eternally at war 
with all concepts of opportunism, pragmatism, expediency. 

In all arguments over Democracy, and its true or proper mean-
ing, the core of the matter remains the proponent's rejection or 
acceptance of the Judeo-Christian concept of man as a being 
responsible to his conscience before God, and of the J udeo-
Christian ethical principle that the ends do not justify the 
means. 

Is it possible for a people to practice Christian ethics, without 
holding Judeo-Christian beliefs? 

The basic concept of any man is his concept of his own nature 
and its relation to the universe. Regardless of whether the con-
cept is true or false, once he has arrived at it, man will naturally 
hegin to act upon it. Thereafter his laws, morals and ethics, and 
all his cultural, political and economic institutions, including 
his international actions, will reflect that concept faithfully. 

In practice, it is not proving possible for the U.S.A. to doubt 
the validity of Christianity and to act as though it were valid. 

22 



What is a Christian? A Christian, all will agree, is one who be-
lieves in the Apostles' Creed-in God, the Father Almighty, 
and in Jesus Christ, His only-begotten, crucified and resurrected 
Son. A "good Christian" is one who tries to follow the impli-
cations of that Creed and accepts the authority of Jesus Christ 
in matters of behavior. If he believes, but nevertheless repeatedly 
fails, because of pride, willfulness, lust, sloth, greed, or selfish-
ness, to follow the teachings of His faith, he is considered a 
"poor" or "bad" Christian. But if he does not believe, he is not 
a "real" Christian, however moral, ethical, or humane he may 
be as a person . 

A Communist is a man who does not believe in God, who is 
an atheist and a materialist, who blindly accepts the Party Line 
as it is interpreted, according to the writings of Marx and Lenin, 
by a small group of men in the Kremlin, and who is prepared 
to give obedience to those men with all his heart and mind, 
wherever they may lead him. A man can be a "good" Com-
munist, or a "bad" Communist. But he cannot be a "real" Com-
munist at all if he lacks faith in the Communist creed, i.e., if he 
does not believe that the materialistic and atheistic doctrines of 
Karl Marx give the primary answers to all human problems. It 
is an instinctive awareness of this need for total submission that 
makes so many fellow travelers deny with much heat, and with 
some reason, that they are Communists. 

Possibly if the men of the West would examine their con-
sciences deeply, many would discover they are neither Christians 
nor Communists. 

What, then, are they? Let us remember those 95 per cent of 
Americans who "believe in God," but who do not all, by any 
means, believe either in a personal God or in His Incarnation., 
Their religion is neither Marx's nor Moses', nor Jesus'. What 
is it? 

Perhaps T. S. Eliot has given us a clue in his book, The Idea 
of a Christian Society. There he writes about a certain distin-
guished professor who set down his ideas of God in a book. 

His religion, said the professor, was deistic. He worshipped "a 
more than human God." And the religion of most of his fellow 

23 



countrymen, he believed, was "an eruption from the biological 
and spiritual depths of the nation." The professor believed that 
"each new age must mold its own religious forms," as does 
Professor Northrop, of Yale,1 for example, and many another 
American university professor. Mr. Eliot's professor urged toler-
ance in religious matters. He believed that Jesus is "one of the 
great figures who soar above the centuries." But he objects to 
Christianity because "it claims to possess the absolute truth, 
and with this claim is bound up the idea that men can only 
achieve salvation in one way, through Christ; and that it must 
send to the stake those whose faith and life do not conform, or 
pray for them until they quit the error of their ways for the 
Kingdom of God."2 

Thousands in America might agree with this professor that 
there is an unyielding element in dogmatic Christianity which 
is most unpalatable to the modern "liberal" mind. Many "lib-
erals" also object to Communism solely on the same grounds: 
its intolerant and dogmatic character. (In both cases liberals 
are prone to ignore the central point : How true or false is the 
dogma?) Others might further agree with this professor's ob-
jections to sacramental religion of any kind, since "everyone has 
an immediate relation to God, is in fact in the depths of his 
heart one with the eternal Ground of the World." 

Faith, the professor contends, comes not from revelation, but 
from "personal experience." He is not interested in "the mass 
of intellectuals" but in the "multitudes of ordinary people" who 
are looking for "life." "We believe," he concludes, "that God 
has laid a great task on our nation, and that he has therefore 
revealed Himself especially in its history, and will continue to 
do so." He also believes in the religion of the blue sky, the grass 
and flowers, and prefers to "worship" in the cathedral forests 
rather than in any church edifice. 

1 F. s. C. Northrop, "Towards a Religion with World Wide Transform· 
ing Power," Conflicts of Power in Modern Culture (New York, [Harper & 
Bros., distributors] , 1947), Vol. VII. 

• The Idea of a Christian Society (New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 
1949), p. 71 II. 



No doubt many an American will at this point either find 
himself in accord with this unnamed educator or be prepared 
with names of a dozen friends who are. 

Now the gentleman who pelieves all these things was Hitler's 
own Professor Wilhelm Hauer, a prophet of Nazism . And in 
1937 he contributed these thoughts to a State-inspired volume, 
called Germany's New Religion.1 

If this is our religion, then we must face a stubborn fact: 
If it is widely held, it is certain that our political institutions 
are going to pattern themselves in the future in conformity with 
these spiritual beliefs. Ideas have consequences-political, eco-
nomic and moral. And the mystically deistic or quasi-pagan 
mind must inevitably tend in our day towards fascistic or Nazi 
forms of government. 

In insisting that a connection existed in Germany between 
religion and fascism, the Communists were correct. A wrong 
idea about God is certain to produce wrong forms of govern-
ment. "God will not be mocked." He cannot be domesticated 
and nationalized as the Germans tried to do-and as some Amer-
icans try to do-nor can He be denied as the Communists at-
tempt to do without severe consequences. Many people in 
their idolatry of a Democracy consciously separated from Chris-
tian belief, if not Christian ethics, are in danger of going down 
the fascist road. Conversely, the atheistic mind will be drawn 
by the logic of materialism towards Communism, however vo-
ciferously it lays claim to a "new humanism." 

But let us briefly consider an example of the atheist who dis-
owns Communism as a personal philosophy: Mr. Julian Huxley. 
The distinguished British scientist who was, until last year, head 
of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural 
Organization, writes: 

The advance of natural science, logic, and psychology have brought 
us to a stage at which God is no longer a useful hypothesis . ... 
God equally with gods, angels, demons, spirits, and other small spir-
itual fry, is a human product, arising inevitably. from a certain kind 

1 Translated by T. S. Scott-Craig & R. E. Davies (Nashville, Abingdon-
Cokesbury, 1937). 



of ignorance and a certain degree of helplessness with regard to 
man's external environment .... 1 

Mr. Huxley, it would seem, agrees with Professor Hauer that 
God gushes, like Old Faithful, out of the subterranean biological 
depths of man, and is then squirted into the universe, there to 
be considered as an Omnipotent Niagara of Power. 

In another context Mr. Huxley unburdens himself as follows: 

God has become more remote and more incomprehensible, and 
most important of all, of less practical use to men and women who 
want guidance and consolation in leading their lives. A faint trace 
of God, half metaphysical and half magic, still broods over our 
world like the smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat. But the growth of 
psychological knowledge will rub even that from the universe.s 

But while Mr. Huxley feels that God may be rubbed out, 
and indeed ought to be, he still believes that the religious im-
pulse in man will remain. This, he believes, will be transferred 
to the state and the community, to the organization of society. 
He frankly admits that the individual "only acquires significance 
in relation to some form of society," and is an ardent proponent 
of the socialized state, which will manipulate and condition the 
minds of its citizens according to the decrees of its scientists. 

It was not Mr. Huxley who wrote, "The democratic concept 
of man is false, because it is Christian. The democratic concept 
holds that ... each man has a value as a sovereign being .... 
This is the illusion, dream and postulate of Christianity, 
namely, that man has a sovereign soul." It was Karl Marx. But 
he, like Huxley, contends that man has no value whatever as an 
individual, but only so far as he is representative of a class. "If 
we speak of individuals," Marx said, "it is only in so far as they 
are personifications of economic categories and representatives 
of special class relations and interests."3 

1 Man in the Modern World (New York, Mentor Books, 1948), p. 132. 
• Ibid. 
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das Kapital (Chicago, Charles H. 

Kerr & Co ., 1906-<)), II, 864. 



Upon examination, there seems to be little philosophical 
difference in Huxley's fundamental approach to human per-
sonality, and that of Communism. Mr. Huxley, who is still far 
more imbued with Christian ethics than he would admit, de-
plores the unkindness and brutality of Communism, its "in-
humanity of man to man," although he is not able to explain 
why men should behave other than as animals, if they do indeed 
consider themselves to be nothing but animals. 

Huxley, like all other scientists who attack theological con-
cepts to prove the priority of science, never comes to grips with 
the greatest question of all: Why ought man to behave with 
mercy, justice, love, charity, to his fellow man if there is no im-
mortality, no reward or punishment for his sins in the hereafter? 

"Many men and women," says Mr. Huxley, "have led active, 
or self-sacrificing, or noble, or devoted lives without any belief 
in God or immortality." Who? Mr. Huxley answers: Some 
Buddhists-unnamed. The great nineteenth-century agnostics-
unnamed. And the Orthodox Russian Communists!1 

If man denies the concept that he is a child of God, and there-
fore should be obedient to God's laws, he must deny all morality 
based on superhuman law, truth, mercy, or justice. Mr. Huxley 
tries desperately to escape this conclusion. The Marxians face 
it with equanimity and vigor. Said Lenin: 

We deny all morality taken from superhuman or non-class con-
ceptions .... We say· that our morality is wholly subordinated to 
the interests of the class struggle .... We deduce our morality from 
the (daily) facts and needs of the class struggle .... We say that a 
morality taken from outside of human society does not exist for us; 
it is a fraud .2 

And from such a denial of morality, except as it may be ex-
pedient in the class struggle, it inexorably follows that no Com-
munist, high or low, ought or need be bound by any objective 
notions of truth in relation to human conduct, either in his 
personal life or in his political life. Then, as Communist Yaro-

lOp. cit. 
• Collected Works at Lenin (1St Russian ed.), XVII, 145. 



slavsky's famous phrase puts it: "Whatever helps the proletarian 
revolution and the Communist Party is ethical." 

Lenin put it this way: "We must be ready for trickery, deceit, 
lawbreaking, withholding and concealing the truth." Stalin, 
writing of morality versus diplomacy, states the matter with 
equal candor. He says: "Words must have no relation to action 
-otherwise what kind of diplomacy is it? Words are one thing, 
actions another. Good words are a mask for the concealment 
of bad deeds. Sincere diplomacy is no more possible than dry 
water or wooden iron." 

Scientific materialism logically leads to a conception of what 
government for men without souls should be like-indeed, must 
be like. In Problems of Leninism Stalin says: 

The scientific concept, dictatorship of the proletariat, means noth-
ing more or less than power which directly rests on violence, which 
is not limited by any laws or restricted by any absolute rules . .. . 
Dictatorship means-and note this for once and for all-unlimited 
power, resting on violence, and not on law. 1 

This is a harsh saying, but granted the basic concept of scien-
tific materialism, its logic is irrefutable. For if men are not to be 
governed by hiw founded on widely held concepts of absolute 
truth and justice, how shall they be governed if not by force? 

In "Man Against Darkness," Professor Stace writes: "Those who 
wish to resurrect Christian dogmas are not, of course, consciously 
dishonest. But they have that kind of unconscious dishonesty 
which consists in lulling oneself with opiates and dreams ... "2 
This is to re-echo, almost a hundred years later, Marx's own 
words : 

The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle 
against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious misery 
is at once the expression of real misery and a protest against that 

1 English edition (Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1940), 
p. 129. 

• Op. cit. 



real misery. Religion is the sigh of the hard-pressure creature the 
sentiment of a heartless world, as it is the soul of soulless cir~um­
stances. It is the opium of the people .. .. 1 

But strangely enough, Marx, in wishing to destroy Christian-
ity, was motivated by the desire to construct : Marx offered man 
an alternative creed of salvation which he believed better than 
<\ 

~hristianity. Mr. Stace, the Princeton atheist, frankly has 
dithi~g. to s~ggest that might alleviate man's many ~iseries. 

~ThiS IS particularly unfortunate, as Professor Stace admIts that 
the undermining of religion, which he is engaged in, 

is disastrous for morals because it destroys their entire traditional 
foundation .... Along with the ruin of the religious vision there 
went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values .... 
Another characteristic . . . is loss of belief in the freedom of the 
will . . . . Not moral self-control, but the doctor, the psychiatrist, 
the educationist, must save us from doing evil. Pills and injections 
in the future are to do what Christ and the prophets have failed 
to do .... 2 

But later in the article, Professor Stace, like Mr. Huxley, says 
that even without religion "a great many others of us . . . can 
at least live decent lives .... "3 

Both men fail to see (or say, at any rate) that to live "decent" 
lives without faith is possible only in an atmosphere where 
other men do believe in faith. Such atheists are parasites on the 
Christian tradition. It would be interesting to see them try to 
live their "decent" lives in the godless environment of a Nazi or 
Communist America! 

Many Americans believe with Professors Huxley and Stace that 
man can embrace the fundamental spiritual and philosophical 
concepts of Communistic thought-atheism and materialism-

1 Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto. Authorized English Translation. Ed-
ited and Annotated by Frederick Engels (Chicago, Charles H . Kerr & Co., 
1912), Sec. 2, p. 36. 

lOp. cit. 
I Ibid. 



without coming to accept sooner or later the economic and po-
litical concepts that always flow from man's basic attitudes 
towards himself in relation to the universe. 

What the whole world is seeking and what we, too, are seek-
ing as a nation, is a plan for a whole way of life; a workable plan 
that will effectively apply principles of justice to the vast human 
problems created by a mass production technology that grew 
Topsy-like in an age of diminishing faith. 

It is precisely such a plan that Communism claims to have 
found and which it seeks to impose on society by any means, 
fair or foul. 

Christianity proposes another solution : the creed of love, and 
truth, and persuasion, as against that of hate, and lies, and force. 

If the Western democracies today have evolved free institu-
tions, it is to the extent that they have tried to view the nature 
of man from this Christian point of view. 

The Christian point of view of human nature insists on the 
inviolability of the person and personality, and of personal con-
science and personal responsibility, the political expression of 

. which is the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. 
Communists, and intellectuals with an imperfect knowledge 

of Christian teaching, often accuse Christianity of failing on 
two counts: one, Christianity allows man to shove personal re-
sponsibility off on God; and two, it contains no policy of social 
responsibili ty. 

The very reverse is true: Christianity is uniquely the religion 
of personal and social responsibility. Christian Man, because he 
possessses free will, must at all times, in all circumstances, be 
choosing between the greater and the lesser good; and at all 
times he is being strictly held to account by his conscience and 
his God for his free choices. 

The bearing of one another's burdens is the very heart of the 
Christian message : "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so you 
shall fulfill the law of Christ!" (Gal. 6:2.) 

Throughout 1900 years the Christian has been the faithful 
proponent of man's free will, the loyal defender of man's free 



will, and the heroic witness of man's free will. The Christian has 
solidly stood against every denial, and every abuse, of the free-
dom of man's will. He has stood against all who regard man as 
a bundle of fleshy cogs and cams in a machine called the state. 
He has never ceased to warn that this machine must grind him 
into a slave, or goad him into a monster. He has stood against 
all the libertarians who, in the selfish pursuit of every dainty 
folly, brutish vice, and novel notion, have corrupted for many 
the meaning of freedom into license. 

In the name of Christ's justice and mercy, Christians have 
raised their voices louder and longer than any other world group 
against the fast rising modern bars to economic freedom and 
justice, bars laid in the foundation of secularism, and changed 
into iron curtains by Communism. 

When industrial capitalism was at its ugliest and worst, it was 
the voice of the Christian Churches that passionately spoke up 
for labor. Today, as then, the exploiter of labor. from either the 
Left or Right, from labor's ranks or capital's, will find the Chris-
tian against him. 

The Christian must never let mankind forget that Christianity 
itself is the greatest revolutionary political and economic move-
ment of all the ages. 

"Depart from me, ye cursed, into the everlasting fire that was 
prepared by the devil for his angels!" is addressed by our Lord 
directly to those who have failed to feed the hungry, shelter the 
homeless, clothe the poor. If Christians have forgotten this-
and millions of them have-it may be no more than God's jus-
tice that a foretaste of that Hell on earth has been prepared 
for us by two world wars, by Fascism and Communism. 

Today it is difficult for us to imagine a Christian society-
largely because it is difficult for each of us to imagine beginning 
the formation of such a society where it must begin : with the 
reform of the inward self. 

Huxley feels that the hypothesis of God is no longer required 
as man has conquered his external environment: he has defeated 
Nature. But until man has defeated his internal environment, 



conquered himself, the hypothesis of God may still be the only 
one that will help man to understand his world and himself, 
inside and out. 

The persistent moral dualism which has existed in our country 
-the Sunday Christians and weekday pagans-must in the end 
be our moral and economic and political undoing. We Amer-
icans have long prided ourselves on our tremendous diversities 
of opinions, aims, ambitions. But now we must unite on some 
overarching spiritual principle that will inform our consciences, 
and release the dynamic energy we once exhibited as a young 
nation, strong in Christian faith. For unity that does not encircle 
diversities is an empty and sterile affair. But diversities that are 
not encompassed by unity are disorder and chaos. 

The present American disorder of opinion and chaos of spir-
itual conviction will be organized in our century either in the 
spirit of Karl Marx, or in the spirit of Jesus Christ. 

The day the men of the West desert completely their his-
torical concept of man as a child 'of God, with free will and 
an immortal soul, the day, in short, when they, too, go over to 
"scientific materialism," that day not our oil or gold in the 
ground, not our assembly belts, not our air forces nor our navies, 
shall save us from being conquered at home or abroad by 
Communism. 

Without the spiritual unity provided by Christian belief and 
practice, we shall have only one frame of reference left for the 
diplomacy of peace or of war: nationalism, and its naked power. 
So we must fight against Communism in the Christian spirit. 

Does this mean that we must, or should, launch an atomic 
Christian crusade against Soviet Russia? 

IV 

Must We Have a "Holy War" with Russia? 

FIRST IT must be clearly understood that, if war does come, 
it is bound to be viewed by us as a "holy war." All wars tend to 

32 



take on the character of a crusade. A contending nation will al-
ways call down as witness to the righteousness and necessity of 
its cause the highest Authority. 

Gott mit uns, cried the Germans during World War 1. The 
Allies excoriated the Germans for their vainglorious presump-
tion. But we also claimed that God was on our side and for our 
"crusade." 

"Holy" Russia (which could only mean a Russia dedicated 
to or loved by God) proved to be a more effective battle slogan 
in Russia during World War II than "Workers of the World 
Unite!" It combined two idealistic concepts, God and Country. 
The authority of the red flag was given highest sanction-that 
of supernatural force. 

There is, however, nothing more unpopular or dispiriting to a 
people than to launch a "holy war" which has once before been 
fought and lost. That is why "Democracy" as a slogan lost so 
much of its power after Versailles. Between World War I and 
World War II, many Americans lost appetite for trying to make 
the whole world safe for free, representative government. They 
failed to see how precious was the limited objective they had 
obtained in war: the security of the United States against the 
threat of a Europe consolidated by German imperialists. They 
remembered only their failure to achieve the unlimited objec-
tive: the crusade to Make the World Safe for Democracy. 

A real crusading title for the second World War was never 
found. The press and the people continued to call the conflict 
"World War II," although nobody liked that. It contained the 
dreadful suggestion that we were engaged in what was to be a 
series of world conflicts. 

A war against Soviet Russia, however, might easily become 
in the popular mind a "holy war," in the literal sense of its being 
viewed as a war between believers and nonbelievers, between 
Christians and atheists, between the godly and the ungodly. 
Indeed, once a war between the United States and Soviet Russia 
had been initiated, there would be nothing to prevent such 
claims on our part. 

This very fact would be a grave temptation to further enlarge-

33 



ment of the pharisaic spirit of the "Christian" West which has 
already given the non-Christian world such a low-and false-
opinion of Christianity. It would be so easy, once war had 
begun, for us to believe we were Christians, and that we were 
fighting for Christ (and the whole religious nexus of morals and 
ethics and ideals) simply because they would not be Christians 
and would not be fighting for Him. 

It would be no effort at all for us to tell ourselves we were, to 
boot, pious, kind, merciful, loving folk, first, because we knew 
we ought to be, but secondly, because they would so plainly 
not be. 

The very fact that in World War II the USSR fought on our 
side rather than on the German side (which ideologically was 
so much closer to the Soviet position) did help in a measure 
to keep us from indulging in too much self-satisfied and self-
commendatory praise of the utter purity of our own political 
and religious motives. There would be little, except the grace of 
God, to prevent us from wallowing in hypocrisy once we found 
ourselves fighting against the sons of Marx and Lenin. For this 
reason, if for no other, we should regard the impulse to wage 
a "holy war" with Russia as a great temptation to the growth of 
an un-Christian spirit in the nation. 

The West might fall an easy prey to the Russian school of 
ideas long before "the Bomb" had demolished the last _Russian 
city. We might be the victor. But the victor might then become 
the victim of the vanquished. 

It has been said that, although Germany has been physicaUy 
crushed, she really won World War II: the contemporary mind 
was largely formed by German philosophical and political ideas. 
When the Nazi troops had been driven out of France, in 1944, 
it become apparent that French philosophy and French letters 
had been completely conquered by the German fathers of 
"existentialism," Nietzsche and Heidegger. The Germans, Hegel 
and Marx and their disciples, were the inteUectual forebears of 
the materialistic atheists of modern Western political and social 
philosophy. German idealistic materialism, in one form or other, 
has swept through the West. It has completely triumphed, 

34 



ironically enough, in Russia, at the exact moment of German 
military collapse. 

Because of the spiritual danger to ourselves and the world of 
an exhausting conflict between halfhearted Christian nations 
and wholeheartedly atheistic ones, we must try to avoid such a 
struggle with all the subtlety, honesty, wit, generosity and skill 
at our command. 

There is nothing whatsoever in Christian teaching which 
would tur':1 our minds or hearts towards the initiation of war 
as a solution for the world crisis. Meanwhile, realism requires 
us to face the fact that Soviet dogmatism does assume the ir-
reconcilability of the issues between the West and Russia . . 

We have seen that this materialist philosophy is, in Marx's own 
words, "a world concept," based on violence and force, "trickery, 
deceit, lawbreaking." It is also a world revolutionary concept. 
From the time of Marx down to the present day, no Communist 
leader has ever abandoned the program of bringing Com-
munism, by peaceful or violent means, by direct aggression or 
subversive efforts, to every nation and all peoples of the world. 

Stalin puts it quite bluntly in his counterpart to Mein Kampf, 
Problems of Leninism;1 

The international significance of our revolution lies in this, that it 
is a beginning in our country of the cracking of the system of 
imperialism ... a first step in the world revolution and a powerful 
base for its further development. ... What is our country, as it 
builds socialism, but a base for world revolution? . . . 

And Stalin writes: 

It is, therefore, the essential task of the victorious revolution in one 
country to develop and support the revolution in others. So the 
revolution in victorious countries ought not to consider itself a 
self-contained unit, but an auxiliary means of hastening the victory 
of the proletariat in other countries. 

1 London, D. Allen & Unwin, 1940 . 

35 



The concept of world revolution excludes the right of any na-
tion, as well as any individual, to reject Communist doctrine. 
In his report to the Twelfth Congress of the Communist Party, 
Stalin states: 

Communism refuses to admit the right of self-determination is 
prior to the right of consolidation of Communist power .... It 
should be borne in mind that besides the right of nations to self-
determination there is also the right of the working class to con-
solidate its power, and to this latter right the right of self-determina-
tion is subordinate. The right to self-determination can and must 
not serve as an obstacle to the exercise for the working class of its 
right to dictatorship. The former must give way to the latter. 

It is entirely logical that a system of belief based on the idea 
of man as an amoral, soulless, collective animal should not con-
sider men or nation.s as having any right to express a contrary 
belief, or to seek or practice any form of government contrary to 
his "nature." 

It was an awareness of the fundamental conflict between Rus-
sia's material, and the West's historical spiritual, interpretation 
of the nature of man which made Stalin write in Problems of 
Leninism: "It is inconceivable that the Soviet Republic should 
continue to exist for a long period side by side with imperialist 
states-ultimately one or the other must conquer." 

Because of the Communist assumption that the conflicts be-
tween the USSR and the West can never be composed, they 
have sought and must continue to seek to widen and deepen 
their physical and ideological control of the world. 

We must seek to counter this threat of an intolerable pene-
tration and expansionism. 

How? 

It is precisely at this point that we must survey our situation 
with the utmost honesty. We can, with justice, claim that Com-
munism relies largely on the spirit of force. But we do not (and 
dare not) rely entirely on the force of the spirit. It is sheer 
nonsense to claim that Marxism gives full sovereignty to the 

36 



material, to the powers of arms and purse, while we give it to 
spiritual matters . In actual practice, we oppose, if we do, one 
material force to another. 

"Christianity," said the"late William Temple, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, "is not for the elimination of force. It is for the con-
secration of force ." 

The individual Christian might quarrel with this statement, 
and insist that Christ was for the elimination of force . But what 
if force cannot be eliminated? 

We may make some claim here that we have already done 
some things at home and abroad, things calculated to prevent 
war, to abate the forces of force. These efforts were conceived 
in the tradition of Christian statesmanship. For there is a moral 
case to be made for the West. 

In the three years since the wars' end, we have made some 
effective strides in assembling a physical and a moral defense 
against Soviet aggression and Communist propaganda, and in 
extending that defense to our friends. 

In the atomic bomb this nation has an instrument of extraor-
dinary military power, if we should choose to use it against 
Soviet Russia now. We have not only refused to use it, we have 
even chosen not to remain the sale possessors of this dread 
power. We have offered to give it away. As David Lilienthal 
pointed out in a recent article in Life magazine, only the refusal 
of the Soviet Union to join our plan for the control and peace-
ful use of atomic energy has prevented us from divesting our-
"selves of this shattering force in order to consecrate it to peaceful 
uses . But never before in the history of mankind has it been 
known that a nation possessing so much power has honestly 
tried to share it, in order to prevent its being used. Indeed, we 
have not only asked, we have implored the world to accept joint 
stewardship of this evil weapon. This is an act of public morality 
which, we can honestly claim, shows that we as a nation have 
not wasted our Christian assets entirely. 

It is true that American self-interest would be well served by 
the successful economic reconstruction of Europe. To the extent 
that this is our motive in propounding it, the Marshall Plan is 

37 



a selfish, rather than an altruistic, or Christian gesture. But the 
Marshall Plan does not guarantee success. It is a risk, and a 
sufficiently large risk to say truthfully that generosity rather than 
self-interest, tipped the scales in the balance for it with the 
American public. Certainly we all know the money will never 
be repaid. Most of us know that it will earn us small thanks 
from Europe. Nevertheless, the American taxpayers have ap-
propriated billions for the succor of ravaged nations. 

Our actions in respect of these two vast powers, money and 
the bomb, are some evidence that internationally we are trying 
to behave in the responsible fashion that is historically asso-
ciated with the actions of "God-fearing" free peoples. 

Certainly, an angry vision is a blurred vision. And we enhance 
our chance of preserving peace if we keep our minds free of 
hatred and prejudice. Patience and fair-mindedness, no less than 
prudence and candor in our attitude towards the USSR, will 
keep us from resorting to arms until the final extremity. But 
merely to think calmly and charitably will not, of course, pre-
vent war. War will come when to refrain from using force-
or, as we have come to call it, "appeasement" -would be 
immoral. 

For we must hold to our pledged word. We must resolutely 
refuse to yield the liberties of those we have promised to safe-
guard. We must keep sufficient military strength to discourage 
any sudden use of force to which Russia might be impelled by 
what she considered tempting evidence of our physical or moral 
weakness. To defend the truth and to save their souls, Christians 
must be just as ready to combat the world as to renounce it. 

Ours is an age of widespread irrationality and disbelief, and only 
in such an age could Communism have reached its present 
power. For Communism could offer to irresolute men the lure 
of iron resolution; to those sick of cynicism and skepticism, a 
fanatic belief in the power of man without God to order his 
own destinies; and to those seeking for certainty and an absolute, 
bloody certainties and stern absolutes. 

38 



Against such a religion agnosticism, cynicism and skepticism 
do not stand a chance. The only faith to challenge Communism 
at every point is Christianity. That is why the Communists' 
greatest aim is to smother the spiritual in American man, and 
to paralyze his Christian conscience. 

Will America embrace, or be conquered by, the dynamic 
false faith of Communism? "This is their hour and the power of 
darkness." This is the Twilight of God. 

And yet Christians know the answer: The Light, if they seek 
it, will prove stronger. It was promised them, though they should 
be reduced in numbers by apostasy or atomization to a mere 
handful-say, no more than twelve-that the gates of Hell shall 
not prevail. 

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