RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Black Widow” star David Harbour says he doesn’t know “that there’s anyone who could disagree with socialist ideology.” So does this mean he’ll be returning the part of his multimillion-dollar salary that is beyond his “needs”? Of course not. There is no logic in ideology. He is a believer. That is enough.

The French revolutionaries believed in reason so deeply that if you disagreed with them they’d cut off your head.

The French Revolution began, as do all modern Communist revolutions, with the abolition of Christianity. Not the abolition of religion, or even state religion, but Christianity. The French fully intended to have a state religion, complete with “Temples of Reason” (Notre Dame was turned into one). The crucifix was replaced with a symbolic “torch of truth.”

Fascism, which Winston Churchill called the “shadow, or ugly child of Communism,” was identical in this respect: Nazi Germany was to replace its cathedrals with Hitler Kirche, in which Mein Kampf took the place place of the Bible and the crucifix was again removed, this time in favor of a sword.

Marxism is not and has never been an atheist philosophy. When a Marxist tells you he’s an atheist, he’s lying. Marxism is the most aggressively dogmatic religion in the world. Its struggle for ascendancy is a holy war in which Islam is the only serious competitor and all other religions seem resigned to a defensive posture (i.e., losing).

To fight the Left effectively, we need to stop thinking of Marxism as a philosophical alternative to capitalism and instead think of it as a religious alternative to Christianity.

Marxism is not anti-Christianity because belief in God is a crutch or an opiate of the masses. It simply recognizes that you cannot believe in two gods at once. Marxism and Christianity are rival religions, and it’s no more possible to believe in both than it is to believe simultaneously in Judaism and Islam.

In the Marxist religious structure, the supreme leader—Stalin, Mao, Castro, Xi—is God. Leftist intellectuals are priests. Government bureaucrats are Levites, making sure the ceremony runs smoothly and the sanctuary is guarded. There is a caste (“class”) system in which some are holy by virtue of their birth and others are damned for the same reason. Ordinary citizens in this religion have no role except to believe and to do as they are told: “Believe the science!”

This favorite phrase of the progressive Left is a nonsensical juxtaposition: Science is not meant to be believed. Science is the process of drawing conclusions from evidence. Those conclusions are never “safe” from reevaluation in the light of new evidence—not even after thousands of years.

Science can never be settled. Religious dogma can be settled. Religion is meant to be believed: “Believe the experts!”

Which means, “Don’t bother assessing the facts for yourself: You’re just a layman.” For ordinary people to assess the facts and make their own decisions is a Marxist blasphemy. Instead, people memorize the dogma: Soviets were required to memorize Marx. The Chinese had to memorize Mao’s Little Red Book. American schools are trying to do the same with “antiracism.” But Marxism doesn’t really want a bible for the masses. It prefers to retain intellectuals, the priestly class, as the sole interpreters of their faith. The commoners are left with woke jargon and platitudes. After all, to quote Chairman Mao, “To read too many books is harmful.”

Early Catholic priests, in a similar vein, thought that only they should read and interpret the Bible. But Christianity ultimately made the Bible an object of common study available to every man. This was its principal and greatest spiritual breakthrough.

The Scriptures tell us repeatedly that human sacrifice is an abomination to God. To Judaism and to Christianity, every human life is valuable. To Marxism, human sacrifice is fundamental and even desirable. “Deaths have benefits,” says Mao, speaking both metaphorically and literally: “They can fertilize the ground.”

There are good religions and bad. Christinanity is a good religion. Judaism is a good religion. Marxism is a bad one. But the main point is not Marxism’s merits as a religion but the fact that it is a religion. Anyone who favors separation of church and state in the public schools should oppose teaching the tenets of Marx or “antiracism” as a violation of that separation.

Or, better, we could teach Christianity too and let the students make an informed choice. But Marxism wouldn’t like that. The idea that religion must be expelled from all public places is a lie and a fraud—a Marxist trojan horse: The goal isn’t to expel all religion. The goal is to expel all competing religions.

The Establishment Clause was intended to protect an American’s right to practice his chosen faith. Now, a species of Marxism is being imposed on young people and on our culture and throughout our government against our will, and in violation of that clause.

At the same time, our founding fathers knew the Bible and expected every American to know it. Lincoln never in his life made a public speech without a Biblical quotation. Believe what you want, learn as much as you can, but you cannot understand America unless you know the Bible well. And that is why Marxists are so desperate to get rid of it.

They’re doing a great job. When I was in public high school (over a decade ago), I conducted a survey in the English classes and found, among other things, that only 41 percent of students could name the first book of the Bible.

The intellectuals on today’s college campuses speak down from a position of imagined superiority as rational human beings who have rejected God, and who want you to reject God too. In reality, they have simply chosen a different god and are trying to convert you. They tilt the field in their favor by banishing all other religions from the classroom.

Don’t assume your children can grow up without a religion. No one can, and no one does. If your kids reject Christianity or Judaism, it means they are kneeling at other altars with the fervor of a convert. There will be no arguing them away from Marxism with reason and logic and historical fact, because to them it is religious conviction.

The simplest remedy is to teach your children the Bible, and make sure they learn its most important lesson: Love thy neighbor. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Marxism can offer nothing like that.