The false faith of the 20th century

My academic specialty is communism and the Cold War, and looking back, I see that three books gave me a framework for understanding the Cold War: Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, and Fulton Sheen’s Communism and the Conscience of the West.

It strikes me that the three books were published in the narrow period of 1948-52, and none of these writers hesitates to speak of communism as evil and the fight against it as a spiritual one. The struggle against communism was not merely a battle of rockets and tanks. We fight against the powers and rulers of the darkness of this present world, and communism has been just that since the publication of Karl Marx’s Manifesto in 1848.

Witness to evil

My journey in studying the evils of communism started with Witness, Whittaker Chambers’ stunning memoir. Chambers burst onto the national scene via his dramatic 1948 showdown with Alger Hiss. In an epic trial that riveted the nation, Chambers accused Hiss of spying for Stalin’s Soviet Union. Chambers himself had served Moscow. His memoir is not only gripping in its cloak-and-dagger details but elegantly written, and Chambers makes it clear he was more than a mere witness to the Hiss trial.

Chambers was born in Philadelphia on April 1, 1901, and raised in a dysfunctional home. When the brilliant young man enrolled at Columbia University, he became a further victim—this time to the college’s dysfunctional ideologies. The Marxist “faith,” as Chambers described it, gave his life a sense of ­purpose. By the 1930s, he was editing Marxist publications and serving the Soviet Comintern, conspiring with (among other dubious characters) a high-level State Department official: Alger Hiss.

Chambers ultimately came to see “Communism is absolutely evil,” and he finally admitted to himself: “Of this evil I am a part.”

He concludes that it was his “fate” to be a “witness” to each of the “two great faiths of our time.” He writes, “For in this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist [or] whether the whole world is to become free.”

Chambers saw his life as a testimony. “I had promised God my life, even, if it were His will, to death,” he writes. “This is my ultimate witness.”

His witness would profoundly influence those who sought to win the Cold War on behalf of the forces of faith and freedom, including a later president, Ronald Reagan, who would identify Witness and the Bible as the two books that most impacted him in that 20th-­century struggle of good over evil.

Joy in the truth

Four years before Witness was published in 1952, an unknown Catholic writer named Thomas Merton released a brilliant memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain.

The book is a fascinating account of another young man who encountered communism at Columbia University in the 1930s, but who then entered a Trappist monastery in the 1940s.

Merton, like Chambers, was duped by communists in his youth. But unlike the grim Chambers, Merton remained sunny, cheery. He’s a happier read—lively, vibrant, funny. His personality exudes from his pages. You can’t help but like him.

The faith commitment in Merton’s memoir is deep and edifying. As with Chambers, one learns that the more one commits to God, the more that person moves away from communism. Merton’s personality was such that he was prone to laugh at communists as silly. And yet, concedes Merton, “Communists are, in actual fact, noisy and shallow and violent people, torn to pieces by petty jealousies and factional hatred and envies and strife.”

Today Merton has been claimed by the social-justice left. Progressives have tried to hijack the monk and remake him in their own image, but in truth, Merton was a complex character, much easier to understand earlier in life than later when he died tragically in a freak accident at age 53. Still, much of his writing is intensely, richly pious. This book is Merton at his best.

The choice before us

Published the same year as Merton’s memoir was Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s Communism and the Conscience of the West. Sheen was one of the most influential American preachers in the 20th ­century. He even had his own television show, Life Is Worth Living, for which he won an Emmy for most outstanding television personality. At the ceremony, the winsome priest quipped, “I would like to thank my writers: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”

In his memoir, Sheen excoriates Soviet communism. He suggests that Marxists had “put before the world a dilemma,” an “apocalyptic” one: “They have thrown down the gauntlet to the world. The voice is either brotherhood in Christ or comradeship in anti-Christ.”

Communism and the Conscience of the West is an impassioned work displaying the remarkable breadth of Sheen’s knowledge of theology, philosophy, history, literature, languages. He noted that communism was a “distortion of the true nature of man,” a “dehumanization of man that [makes] him a social animal for whom an economic machine is the total meaning of existence.”

Sheen, like Chambers, notes that communists treated their ideology like a faith. He quotes Karl Marx himself: “Communism begins where atheism begins.” Sheen argued that it was communism that was an opiate of the masses, not religion.

Sheen dedicated his book to Russia’s conversion and advised that Christians pray daily for Russia. Sheen urged that the Russian people—for whom, he said, “atheism is not natural”—take heart that Jesus’ tomb is empty, whereas Vladimir Lenin’s tomb is not.

—Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and editor of The American Spectator. His books on communism and the Cold War include The Devil and Karl Marx, A Pope and a President, and The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.