As author of second book to refute the new atheists, my lifelong hobby of reading attacks on Christianity is becoming obsolete. We come to feel like the prisoners in the old story who share a single joke book. Someone announces the joke number and everyone laughs. “Blind faith!” “Oppression of women!” » “Who created God? » Such punchlines, once amusing for the the ignorance they showgrow old with repetition.
So I find Joseph Klein’s argument that Christianity is responsible for communism quite refreshing. Someone introduced a new prison joke! His case isn’t that lame either. Klein offers superficially plausible arguments and two genuine ideas (although he misinterprets them), and seems sincere and open-minded.
His occasion was the recent conversion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
My favorite atheist
Ali was my favorite atheist. She brilliantly tells the story of her beginnings in life Unfaithfulthen his move to America in Nomadic. Born into a polygamous family in troubled Somalia and raised partly in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, Ali emigrated to the Netherlands and became a women’s rights activist and member of parliament. Accepting the arguments of Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, she denied God. But she rarely struck me as strident or flippant: she spoke from her heart and from a lifetime of painful experiences and observations.
Then last month, Ali shocked many with an article explaining “Why am I now a Christian.” Some of his reasons were personal: “I ultimately found life without any spiritual comfort unbearable – almost self-destructive. ” But she focused on the role that Christianity played in the creation and preservation of Western civilization, and on the triple threat of “great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the form of the Communist Party Chinese and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism…and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating away at the moral fiber of the next generation.
A wealth of evidence
Klein also doesn’t like these moves, but is wary of Ali’s conversion. Where does she express her faith in the divinity of Christ? The resurrection? Or even in God? He thinks that if she searches carefully, she will not find real evidence of the existence of Christ. But whose fault is it that Ali’s neo-atheist friends were not convincing? And wait until she discovers GK Chesterton, William Lane Craig, Stephen Meyer, NT Wright, Craig Keener or (who knows?) maybe even my books. There is a wealth of evidence for the Christian faith waiting to be explored.
Is Christianity responsible for communism?
Klein also accuses Christianity of being responsible for communism. He knows that serious communists deny God. In fact, I would add that most atheists alive today learned to despise “religion” from the Chinese Communist Party, Kim Il Sung, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jim Jones or others. other disciples of Marx. But I’m always happy to meet an atheist who recognizes how murderous communists are. (Especially an atheist not named Ayn Rand, whose anti-communist cult might be almost as hateful and stupid.)
Yet, as a student of communism (or the “far left”, as Klein calls it), I find his three arguments that Christianity is responsible for Marx & Co rather weak:
The far left appears primarily in Christian countries, with some notable exceptions in East Asia, where Marxism and classical liberalism were Western imports.
“Any notable exceptions? » The communist countries of East Asia have three times more inhabitants than all the European countries of the Warsaw Pact combined. One and a half billion people are indeed “remarkable”! But oops, Mr. Klein, your “exceptions” turn out to be the rule.
And which of these countries remains communist? And who overthrew Marxism in others? Have you heard of a Catholic electrician named Lech Walesa? A German pastor whose prayers and candles helped overthrow a dictatorship? A Nobel Prize-winning Russian author who wrote, “Thank you, prison, for being in my life,” because it was in Soviet concentration camps that he got rid of Marxism and atheism and returned to Christ, before helping to inspire the overthrow of Soviet communism?
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This writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, grew up in a Christian family. He lost his faith at school – wonder why so many of those fighting woke education are Christians today? Young people are often gullible. But which young people are most likely to join a pro-Hamas or BLM crowd: those who grew up in public or secular schools, or those who taught in, say, mainstream Christian schools? Why are so many dissidents in the Far East also Christians?
And which nation led the fight against communism? France skeptical? A free-thinking Sweden? Japan, where religion is rarely mentioned? Or the more Christian United States under the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan?
Communist values do not come from the Bible
Second, Klein argues that communist values come from the Bible.
These atheists were instituting exactly the same values that their Christian culture had instilled in them.
Like that, Acts of the Apostles:
“Selling their possessions and possessions, they gave to each according to his need. »
Apparently, this was Marx’s life verse! He took the Bible too literally, poor guy. Christian values ignited his soul from within:
Again and again, the magmatic flow of his indignation seeped through the crust of his scientific-sounding prose.
Klein is right about the contradiction in Marx’s thought and the source of truth to be found there, but his conclusion could hardly be more wrong.
What it really means
It is true that Christianity launched a moral revolution in favor of the oppressed. As Holland and others show (I will add to this genre soon, but will also read the Roman historian Suetonius), ancient Rome had little mercy for slaves, the weak, newborns, or women. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and his disciples blessed billions of marginalized people. They founded hospitals and schools, operated on lepers, rescued girls from brothels and cared for the elderly. (I’ve met people who did all of these things.) Historians note that in the early Church, many rich people sold everything they owned and gave it to the poor.
But while Marxists responded to the concern for the marginalized that Christ had planted in the culture, their solution was the Gulag, not the Gospel. Marx and his disciple Lenin persuaded his followers to seize the “means of production” and establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Communism constitutes ethics on three new bases
And Marx and Engels openly warned:
Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all moralityinstead of establishing them on new bases.
It is true that communism could not really abolish morality, nor the pursuit of profit. It constitutes ethics on three new bases: rules for judging capitalists, others for revolutionaries (“the end justifies the means”), and still others for citizens. (Which explains the subways in China – that day another day.) But Marx radically broke with Christian morality, even with the Ten Commandments, which his followers smashed into pieces, ground into dust and forced believers to to swallow with their prison waters.
What Jesus said
Nor did Jesus say that people should “live for others rather than for themselves,” as Klein claims. Rather: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus then explains what he means by the story of the Good Samaritan, who saved a man belonging to an enemy tribe.
The difference between torturing your enemy and saving him may seem subtle to Klein, but it creates different cultures. The Gospel sees obvious truths, but also those that some find elusive. This is why Christianity builds a solid foundation for society, while (as Clement of Alexandria says) cults tear off an arm or a leg from the body of Christ, venerating subordinate facts as Truth itself. Millions are dying, beauty is delighted and cruelty exalted because people mistake an axiom (“power to the people!” “down with racism!”) for the Law and Gospel as a whole. Klein, too, misses the forest of Christian values for the withered bush of an isolated ideal.
Finally, Klein calls Christianity a “sinking ship.” Young people are less religious! Churches are closing! How can a condemned religion save civilization?
Again, look at the big picture.
What is the big picture?
Klein may not realize it, but he borrows this metaphor from GK Chesterton. (You have to get up early in the morning to sneak past Gilbert Keith.) Again and again, Chesterton said, the Church of Christ is sinking like a ship, and everyone says it’s over. Then it emerges from the waves, shining brighter than ever! We almost pity his enemies: the Leninists, the Maoists, the Nazis, the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the Neo-Confucians, the Muslims, the Gnostics, Nero, the crowds who shouted “Crucify!” As they hammer in the last nail, the ground shakes and the body they buried appears more alive than ever, eating fish and daring us to stick our fingers in its side, oh you of little faith!
Young people are often stupid
Besides the rascality of its supporters, one of the reasons Christianity is in decline in the West today is that most believers oppose the easy ideologies that Klein and Ali both view as threats. As a young man, Solzhenitsyn abandoned Christ for the Communist Young Pioneers. Prison taught him the error of that choice, but it took a lot of hard knocks. Young people are often stupid, Mr. Klein.
Words of life
“Do you want to leave too?” » Jesus asked as the crowd thinned after he said something quite shocking.
“Where will we go? You have the words of life! Pierre replied.
Christianity continues to grow in many parts of the world, often in places where opposing ideologies have long held sway. The fact that it is currently in decline in the West hardly calls into question Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s reasons for listening to these “words of life” again.
So I need to find another favorite atheist. Klein can apply, but Ali was hard to follow.
David Marshall, educator and writer, holds a doctorate in Christian thought and Chinese tradition. His most recent book is The Case of Aslan: Evidence for Jesus in the Land of Narnia.
