Why Communism Rejects God

From "A Letter to My Children" by Whitaker Chambers in the introduction to Witness. An American, Whitaker Chambers was a communist in the 1930's and an active spy for the USSR. He later converted to "Christianity" and became a witness in the famous Alger Hiss trials. Alger Hiss was a high ranking official in the federal government in the 30's and 40's who was accused of spying and of having a dramatic effect of skewing American decisions in the direction of communism.

The True Nature of Communism

The revolutionary heart of Communism is not the theatrical appeal: “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain.” It is a simple statement of Karl Marx, further simplified for handy use: “Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world.” Communists are bound together by…a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world.

Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die — to bear witness — for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it.

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.

The vision is a challenge and implies a threat. It challenges man to prove by his acts that he is the masterwork of the Creation — by making thought and action one. It challenges him to prove it by reducing the meaningless chaos of nature, by imposing on it his rational will to order, abundance, security and peace. It is the vision of materialism. But it threatens, if man’s mind is unequal to the problems of man’s progress, that he will sink back into savagery until nature replaces him with a more intelligent form of life.

It is an intensely practical vision. The tools to turn it into reality are at hand — science and technology, whose traditional method, the rigorous exclusion of all supernatural factors in solving problems, has contributed to the intellectual climate in which the vision flourishes, just as they have contributed to the crisis in which Communism thrives. For the vision is shared by millions who are not Communists (they are part of Communism’s secret strength). Its first commandment is found, not in the Communist Manifesto, but in the first sentence of the physics primer: “All of the progress of mankind to date results from the making of careful measurements.” But Communism, for the first time in his­tory, has made this vision the faith of a great modern political movement.

Hence the Communist Party is quite justified in calling itself the most revolutionary party in history. It has posed in practical form the most revolutionary question in history: God or Man? It has taken the logical next step which three hundred years of rationalism hesitated to take, and said what millions of modern minds think, but do not dare or care to say: If man’s mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God? Henceforth man’s mind is man’s fate.

This vision is the Communist revolution, which, like all great revolutions, occurs in man’s mind before it takes form in man’s acts. Insurrection and conspiracy are merely methods of realizing the vision; they are merely part of the politics of Communism… Communism does not summon men to crime or utopia, as its easy critics like to think. On the plane of faith, it summons mankind to turn its vision into practical reality. On the plane of action, it summons men to struggle against the inertia of the past which, embodied in social, political and economic forms, communism claims, is blocking the will of mankind to make its next great forward stride.