The Blackberry Walk

Evangelicism is not the fastest growing protestant movement: Humanist atheism is. As Protestant reformations go, this Enlightenment era crypto-reformation was really rather ballsy for removing the Trinity in its entirety, replacing it with such concepts as "inalienable rights" which are "self-evident". Enlightenment thinkers in their utter blindness, bedazzled by the light emanating from their navals, renounced the Christian heritage of democracy, human rights, a universal code of law, and every other institution up to that point as not having been created by the church, but rather by ancients living over a millennium ago. Few new ideas were created during the Enlightenment. Instead, it represented a mass migration from the boat of Christianity and "superstition" to the boat of Enlightened ones and "reason", hoping it'd better survive a flood. This mass translation effort was the Procrustean bed of reason, making sensible what is paradoxical, dissolving mystery into a solution. All the while, they didn't give Christianity an ounce of credit, to the point at which some atheists today claim Jesus was never even a real person. Do they not realise that Liberalism is but the Trojan Horse of Christianity? Or that America's insistence in spreading liberal democracy around the world is but a crusade without a cross? The Enlightenment was merely a flash grenade to the past. Today I'll be talking about Communism, and how, as you might expect from what you've just read, Marx didn't come up with it. Communism's ideas instead stem from Christian heresy; a heresy which the church has dealt with since time immemorial. Many a communist jokes that "Jesus was a communist" - and there is some truth there; reading Christ's story, it's easy to come away with the idea that treating neighbours as equals means an equality of wealth, and that for the camel to go through the eye of a needle, the rich must give away all of their worldly possessions. An early proponent of this idea was Pelagius. Pelagius argued for a kind of complete free will, where sin was merely habit, and if only man worked harder, he could achieve a kind of perfection. Here in Pelagianism, we see the germ of modern communism: since man is perfectible, if we band together and become sinless as a society we can effectively eradicate inequalities and live in harmony. Ironically much like with modern communism, Pelagianism was popular with the idealistic Roman elites. Sandwiched between the fatalism of his past Manichaean life and the growing popularity of the Pelagians' radical free will, St. Augustine managed to find a middle path. Original sin, Augustine said, was why man is unable to work his way to perfection; however hard we try, we're unable to do good and end up falling back into our own patterns of sin. Augustine's ideas on sin and predestination heavily influenced John Calvin during the reformation, who frequently lobbed the pejorative Pelagian or Semi-Pelagian at the Catholic church. Calvinism influenced the Baptists who form the modern-day Bible Belt of the US: the area with the most anti-communist sentiment. Returning to early communist movements, there were the Taborites. The Taborites were followers of the Czech proto-Reformation figure Jan Hus, who had argued that the pope was had no right to rule Christendom and that the Bible should be written in vernacular language. Believing the Second Coming was nigh, they set up what was essentially a commune, where peasant and noble alike lived as brothers. Marx similarly understood communism as the final chapter of history, as the great climax of time; the coming of utpoia, of heaven on Earth, was a secularised crypto-Christian version of Christ's return. In the reformation, similar movements were seen. Anabaptists like the Hutterites and the Amish to this day live in small communes; then in the 17th century the Levellers in the UK sprung from the religious tolerance under Cromwell. From the start of Christendom, there's been a sustained communist underbelly often hanging dim and unconscious but rising up every once in a while, sometimes with a devastating effect. Marx masterminded the method by which communism comes about, but ended up merely rephrasing ideas potent in Christianity as novelties of the Enlightenment. In a sense, Marx wedded the communism of monasteries with a kind of Pauline universalism, forgetting why monks and nuns make the vows they do: in civil everyday society, man is too fallen to be as holy as Marx imagines. When original sin isn't recognised in man, it's projected out into the structures of society. It's the police who are corrupt; the banks; the schools; the government: if only it weren't for one of these institutions, mankind would be spotless and clean - free of sin. Unfortunately, hunter-gatherers aren't as Noble as Rousseau imagined; we are without the ability to perfect ourselves like Pelagius claimed. After World War 2, once the threat of the Soviet Union could be understood, the antibodies of the Humanist West (Christendom) from long, long ago were activated. In the world's greatest Calvinist hot-spot, the US, ancestral memories of St. Augustine fighting the Pelagians were revivified, birthing the Cold War: a crusade against the great communist heresy. Similar to the Catholic crusades against the Albigensians and the Hussites, the Cold War was a crusade against the heterodox heretical interpretation of Christianity which took the form of communism. Whilst the West preached sermons of liberty, democracy, and the universal rights of the individual, the pulpits of Russia resounded with collectivism, brotherly love, and charity: in Christ's shadow our civilisation so evidently lives. How could either of these ideas have emerged from another tradition? Yet we cling with all our might to the idea of the secular, to the idea of never-ending change; not believing in the universality of God, yet believing in the universality of His and His Church's laws. The past has become foggy at this render distance, for we chose to see ourselves merely as children of the Enlightenment; but the anaphylactic shock the spread of communism had on many in the West is testament to our deeper religious molding. In summary, for any idea or thinking to achieve mass popularity, it must have it's foundations in Christian thinking. After all, the ideas of a single man can only build foundations of sand, whilst it takes many generations of pressure-testing and sand-shovelling to produce a hard rock. And it was upon this hard rock of Christian tradition that Marx founded his church of what we now recognise as communism.