A Challenge to Christianity

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” So wrote Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx in their celebrated Communist Manifesto published in 1848. If that document were published today it would have to be amended to read: “A spectre is haunting the world—the spectre of Communism.” More than one billion souls have now come under the rule of Communist governments—one-third of the world’s population.

One of the notable characteristics of Marxist tyranny in every country where it has become securely established is its unflagging hostility to religion in every form, and especially to the Christian faith. This is not surprising since, working for human freedom, religion has ever been one of the strongest factors in history. Men and women who believe in God and his government of the world are not good material for any form of slavery. That is why all dictators who wish to make individual citizens subject to the dictatorship of the state, realize that first they must destroy or silence the Christian churches and ministers within their bounds.

The Marxist Cornerstone

This is how Lenin expressed himself on Marx’s dictum, “Religion is the opium of the people”:

“This dictum of Marx is the corner-stone of the entire Marxist world outlook concerning the problem of religion. All contemporary religions, churches and all types of religious organizations, Marxism forever looks upon as organs of bourgeois reaction serving to defend the exploitation and stultifying of the working class.” Lenin, Stalin, Malenkov, and now Khrushchev have steadfastly fashioned their attitude to religion by this statement. There has never been a softening of this rigid dictum except as the hand of Soviet leadership has been forced to relax its pressure.

Always there have been those observers of the Russian scene who assure us that Soviet opposition to religion was prompted by the unquestioned corruption of the Orthodox Church and especially by the fact that the church permitted itself to become a tool of tzarist tyranny. If only these leading Marxists could come to know some of the enlightened manifestations of our Western brand of Christianity, their attitude would undergo a decided change, say these observers.

A Mistaken Diagnosis

This, however, is a mistaken diagnosis. Some years ago Professor Julius F. Hecker, a native Russian and a teacher in a Soviet university, wrote these revealing words on the subject of religion:

There is a tendency among some writers on Communism to ignore the religious issue or to regard it a misunderstanding, interpreting Communist opposition to organized religion as an opposition to the abuses of religion but not to religion in its pure state. This is a great error. Communists, particularly Lenin, have always emphasized that reformed, modernized, socialized and every other improved religion is worse than the old Orthodox reactionary religion.…

Religion in every shape and form, and especially Christianity, is regarded by Communism as its archenemy.

Only once did Stalin ever relax his unrelenting opposition to Christianity, and then only when circumstances forced him to do so. When Hitler invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, he already had trained Orthodox priests standing ready to take over and operate the churches throughout the newly acquired territory. In addition, he broadcast in the Russian language that religion would soon be completely free throughout the Soviet Union. What a caricature of the truth Adolf Hitler, Liberator of Religion! At this moment 1,300 German pastors were behind bars in his own Reich. When Stalin learned that his people were going over to the enemy, he became frightened almost out of his wits and began to give a larger measure of freedom to the Russian churches. He sent his emissaries into the Russian mines, internment camps, and the frozen reaches of Siberia to ferret out almost-forgotten Orthodox priests and bring them back to newly opened churches. It might have fared ill with Stalin and his government had not the Metropolitan Nikolai come forward and urged the Russian people to rally to the motherland’s defense and rout the Nazi invaders.

Ever since these events the Soviet government has been more lenient with the Orthodox Church and its leadership, while at the same time steadily working to circumvent everything for which the church of Christ stands.

Stalin’s cynical attitude toward religion was revealed in 1942 when his government printed in English a beautifully bound book purporting to show the important place religion held in Russian life. This author was one of those who received a copy of the book. It was bound in sky-blue cloth, edged with gold, with many pages of artistically printed photographs. What gave the show away was a line of small print on the back page, bearing this information: “Put out by the Anti-religious Press of the U.S.S.R.” Several thousand of these had been posted before the censor discovered this unintentional blunder.

Turning The Tide

What can we Christians do to turn in our favor the tide that has been running with such strength toward Communism?

1. We should seek to recapture the spirit of first-century Christianity with its passionate proclamation of Christ’s inevitable triumph. Present-day Christians, by and large, have lost this note of conviction. Our leadership speaks with uncertain trumpets, and the masses of Christians are not preparing themselves for battle. We lack the spirit of confident militancy and are characterized by confusion, disunity, dubiety, and defeatism. It is the Communists who tell the world that the forces of history are on their side—that the wave of the future is sweeping them on to victory. It is the Communists who manifest confidence and tireless enthusiasm. They mean business. We do not. We plod wearily on—or merely mark time. It is the Communists who are sending out the greatest number of missionaries into all quarters of the globe, trained technicians who move into every vacuum that our apathy creates. We appear to lack both the will and the strategy of victory.

Where is that holy zeal that enabled the early Christians to vanquish the ancient gods of paganism and within three hundred years to lift the cross of the despised Galilean higher than Rome’s proud eagles?

Professor T. R. Glover, in an oft-quoted passage, puts the matter succinctly: the Christians “out lived,” “out died,” and “out thought” the pagans. They beat them all hollow in living, says Glover. Would to God that the same could be said today.

Christianity has not failed, but we have failed. Faith in their crucified but risen Lord freed all the true Christians of the fear of death and inspired them to stand defiantly before governors, magistrates, and kings. This spiritual dynamic saved the world once. By the grace of God it can save the world again.

2. We ought to choose carefully the battleground on which we will meet our adversary. Up to the present, Marxist strategists have induced us to meet them on their ground. Millions of Americans followed with absorbed attention the discussions that took place a few years ago between Mr. Khrushchev and representatives of our government and of American business. The Russian leader told us industrial production had made such unprecedented advances in so short a period in the Soviet Union that backward and uncommitted peoples, marvelling at this materialistic triumph, would cast in their lot with the Communists. In the foreseeable future, said the Russian leader, Marxism will win the whole world to its banner without recourse to war.

And what did our representatives say in reply? They talked of America’s materialistic might, her industrial strength, her monumental production, her high standard of living with comforts and luxuries undreamed of by any other people in history. An American government official remarked to Mr. Khrushchev that the strongest nation is the one “whose people are the best fed, the best clothed, and the best housed.” The Soviet leader could go back and report to his people that America is more materialistic than the Soviet Union.

Did that spokesman for the American people truly state our case? Was it the abundance of material things in this land that for more than a hundred years caused oppressed peoples all around the world to look to this nation as the champion of human freedom and the defender of the rights of man? Was it material resources and wealth upon which our forefathers laid the foundations of this great republic—or was it rather great moral and spiritual principles, from which we have drawn our strength through successive generations?

Why didn’t our representatives ask Mr. Khrushchev, in the hearing of all the world, when the Soviet government would be prepared to give to the Russian people and Soviet satellite nations the right to choose their own leaders and their own form of government? Why did they not ask him when he and his politbureau intended to fulfill Marx’s prophecy of the “withering away” of governmental tyranny—monopoly and political absolutism? The thing that Marx most feared was that the monopoly of the party would become the monopoly of a small oligarchy and the dictatorship of the oligarchy end in a tyrant who would become a kind of irresponsible and (in the case of Stalin) bloodthirsty monster, from whose decrees there could be no slightest hope of appeal.

We must remind the Russian people, and indeed all nations, that the Soviet system with its athestic absolutism denies man’s individuality before God. We must affirm and reaffirm those spiritual principles upon which Christian democracy rests: belief in the dignity and worth of every human being; in the priceless value of human freedom; in the brotherhood of man based upon the Fatherhood of God; in those inalienable rights of the individual that have come to us, not from the hand of a dictator but as the gift of the Creator when he fashioned man in his own image and likeness.

The great postulates of freedom must be proclaimed, not once or twice or even a score of times but hundreds of times, until they become deeply implanted in the conscience of mankind.

3. We must insure that in our own lives and in our national life we do not contradict the very precepts we proclaim. One of our truly urgent tasks is to close the gap between our profession of equal opportunity and justice for all classes and races within our own borders, and our too-frequent practical denials of these high ideals. The Communists are forcing us to become a better people.

A special responsibility rests upon Protestant Christianity, which in the past has so often provided the leadership for spiritual and social advance, to manifest once again its concern for the sacredness of personality and human rights. Our churches, in which millions of people assemble each week, may well become the spearhead of a new spiritual reformation that will combat and root out moral flabbiness manifested in a national obsession with sex, a low estimate of marital vows and fidelity, preoccupation with material success, failure to recognize the dignity of labor, and an inordinate love of pleasure and mass entertainment.

We have lost faith in ourselves and in those lofty national purposes that have ever been our inspiration and hope in the past because we have been losing faith in God and his providential ordering of the world. The leadership of mankind will not be secured simply by the possession of megaton bombs—though we must not relax our vigilance—but by the nation that is dedicated to moral and spiritual ends which are bigger and more important than itself and its material possessions. In the face of a resolute, dedicated, disciplined, God-fearing people, mountains of difficulty will become a plain across which they shall speed to their divinely appointed goal.

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MISSION TO THE WORLD

There is a paramount need for distribution of Bibles and Christian literature not only to meet the needs and the yearnings of the uncommitted world but as well to meet the pagan propaganda in the vast amount of Communist literature which is everywhere being distributed. Without the truth being available, Communism in this way mobilizes the thinking and hearts of its victims.

Above all, what is needed today is a renewed and vital Christian faith. The Christian believes in individual worth and dignity and the sacredness of the human personality.

Mankind today faces a struggle between the forces of religion and irreligion, between the forces of good and the forces of evil in the terms of ultimate human destiny.

The strongest power we possess is the practice of the Christian religion with its cardinal tenets of love, dignity, humility, and faith.

The Communist challenge covers religious, social, political, economic, and military fronts, and lays a tremendous burden on those who believe in spiritual values.

Can it then be said that the day of the individual or group missionary effort is past?

Mass Christianity of the Christian nations does not “rub off” on others who need it. It depends on personal relationships between God and man—and between man and man. To meet man’s hunger and need it demands the constant reinforcement of the zeal of dedicated individuals. It is in this, more than in any other aspect, that Christianity differs from other religions. It is personal religion, a religion that must be enshrined in the soul as well as the mind—and that, for all practical purposes, means that it must be renewed again and again in each individual.

The missionary zeal of individual Christians is the hope there is for the bringing about of a better world in time to stem the tide of that other world force which is the very opposite of everything that is Christian—the ominous and ever-threatening tide of materialism, whose political arm is International Communism.

It is sometimes said that a world struggle is being waged for men’s minds, but it is more than that. It is a struggle for men’s souls. Therein lies the assurance of ultimate victory. Here and there Communism may for a time win the minds of men, but it can never win their souls. What the Man of Galilee came to tell the world two thousand years ago is the need of today.…

The world needs the acceptance of the fundamental principles which Christ gave to mankind to meet the problems of mankind. In this age, one of the watersheds of history, Christian men and women need courage re-inforced on faith, for all history shows that however evil may have triumphed over short periods of time, good has ultimately triumphed.

We need a renewed realization that “except the Lord build the house they labour in vain that build it.”

Believing this, I have constantly advocated the need for provision being made for a room for prayer and meditation in the Parliament Buildings, similar to that established by the United States Congress. The Prayer Room in Washington is only a small room 17 feet by 18 feet. Its overall concept is: “This nation under God.” The concept rests for its greatness on the open, massive Bible. It signifies the need for divine guidance and blessing. A similar room will shortly be available in Ottawa.—Prime Minister JOHN G. DIEFENBAKER of Canada in remarks to the assembly of the Baptist Federation of Canada.

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