In the prior post I quoted Philip Jaffe, one of many American operatives, agents, or otherwise “true believers” who, although they did incalculable harm to the United States and her allies, that harm was nothing compared to the tens of millions who were tortured, starved, and murdered plus the hundreds of millions who were enslaved under the Communist utopias they helped usher in and maintain in power.
Let us read again part of what Jaffe wrote:
“It was through Chi Chao-ting, a cousin of mine by marriage, that I accepted the Communist version of Marxism as a guide to the contemporary world … For a period of more than fifteen years, Chi Chao-ting and I were intimate personal friends and close personal associates…. (emphasis mine)”
Like Jaffe, many 20th Century Americans and Europeans had lost the “Guide” that previous generations had taken for granted: Christianity.
For example, a Wall Street Journal survey, published in March, of this year found that “America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It: Patriotism, religion, and hard work hold less importance”.
“Since 1998”, it found drastic declines in importance of patriotism (70% to 38%), religion (62% to 39%), childbearing (59% to 30%), and more. What is truly alarming is that these categories had already suffered steep downturns throughout the 20th Century, especially from the late 1950s onward. To experience such additional declines “since 1998” is indicative of a country that has been transformed more deeply than most of us care to acknowledge.
I believe that all men are religious; we are religious because we are made in the image of God. Even atheists such as Jaffe concede the religious need for a “guide” through which to see the world. Of course, he would have denied that need to have been “religious”, but it most certainly is. His bible was Communism and he acted upon it. His gods were Marx and Engels and Chi Chao-ting, his cousin by marriage.
In the 1990s during business trips to Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Italy, I would seek opportunities to talk about American history with professionals in financial and general management executive positions of power and influence. They all had higher education and above average intelligence. Without exception, not one of them mentioned Christianity or religion when I’d ask them what they knew or had learned about the history of the United States. Instead, their confident, matter-of-fact replies would go into great depth on issues such as autonomy, material wealth, distrust of monarchy, hatred of taxation, with the Boston Tea Party thrown in for good measure.
They were genuinely surprised when I would steer the discussion to historical facts such as the Mayflower Compact; the great Puritan migration; the “Presbyterian rebellion”; the Great Awakening; the influence of Puritan, John Winthrop in the colonial era, which was the foundation of the constitutional republic, founded over a century later; the pervasive role of Calvinist Presbyterian, John Witherspoon, in the founding of the republic and his influence on our Founders; and much more.
The distressing thing about the ignorance about the true causes of liberty and our love thereof was that much of their learning had come from American sources taught in their European schools. It is a false teaching, which has had profound, baleful effects on Europe to this day.
So now, in both Europe and the United States, individual rights and personal autonomy are glorified and idolatrously exalted. All forms of collective identity — family, church, community, “mom and pop” commercial or agrarian entrepreneurship — are mocked, downplayed, and, where possible, destroyed. Did you notice that during the recent years of “crisis”, the “Big Boys” — Walmart, Sam’s, Costco, etc. — were deemed “essential” but small businesses, homes, farms, and church were not?
By seeking to supposedly unshackle ourselves from any religious guidance, we end up pursuing freedom from even biological certainties — men and women denying their physical realities and actually harming their bodies in doing so; mothers doing the same to their own children(!). We now hear about “transhumanism” where some seek to take us beyond the reality of being human.
In my boyhood, I had the privilege of being in the presence of general managers and even high executives of Bethlehem Steel. They saw themselves as “belonging” to their country; as leading a company that was “an American company”. They were not perfect, but at least they had an identity you could sink your teeth into. Movies such as 1954’s Executive Suite with William Holden merely reflected the reality on the street in that era.
But now, we hear of CEO’s and President’s who consider themselves to be “citizens of the world”. They pay more attention to Xi Jinping than to Middle America.
Their pragmatic, cold, decisions tell us they are uncaring because they are unmoored.
It is refreshing to read about Poland and Hungary who, seeing the devastation such rootless atheism has wreaked on their countries, have openly questioned the wisdom of modern liberal democracy, so called, and have called instead for a return to the old paths. In 2012, Hungary passed the Fundamental Law, a way of law based on Christianity. The liberal Guardian, practically beside itself, promptly went on the attack, mocking Hungary’s appeal to “values such as family, nation, fidelity, faith, love, and labor,” and its recognition of marriage and childbearing as foundational to society, and Christianity as inseparable from nationhood.
Hungary simply announced that a Christian democratic model entails the separation of church and state but not that of church and society. She rejects the compulsory atheism now prevalent in America and Europe. And for that she has been attacked to this very day. I wish them the very best and hope we take a page from her gutsy valor. Because it is a page from our own founding.
We all need a Guide. We all need a framework, or spectacles through which we see and measure our lives and the world we inhabit and in which we act. Jaffe was honest in admitting this and his guide led him to embrace the antithesis of the principles which formed our founding and our liberty and in so doing, it led him to a very real, palpable, costly, and bloody betrayal of those principles and of the very real people who believed in those principles. People not only in America, but in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
What is most distressing is that Jaffe’s guide is what has been being inculcated in America’s universities and in her elementary and high schools since the early and the mid 20th Century, respectively.
It is an Erastian indoctrination, one that insists on giving the state (government) all power and authority, even above the church. That is not our heritage. Our founding, which includes the century and a half colonial era, presupposed a Triune God under Whom all else lives and has its being. The state is merely one sphere of several, which include the family and the church. But all are under God, our Guide.
Any sphere which rejects this ends up usurping what belong to God alone. And the results are not pretty.
“Between 1629 and 1640, no fewer than twenty thousand Puritans fled from England to America. This was an astonishing number, considering the distances and the hazards of the journey (M. Stanton Evans).”
Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) and Karl Marx (1818-1883). Engels was a wealthy industrialist who pretended to tell the rest of us what was good for us; Marx was a truly despicable, hateful character (see Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals) whose personality is rampant in all Communist regimes. Their apologists have a very tough row to hoe: they must overturn the words of Jesus: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
Mayflower Compact (1620) — America’s history, including the constitutions of the 13 colonies, the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the constitutions of the states simply cannot be understood if we ignore the covenantal nature of our founding.
John Winthrop (1588-1649), first governor of Massachussets, whose sermon, known as “The City Upon A Hill” resonates even today.
John Witherspoon (1723-1794) was a very influential Founding Father of the United States. He was a minister of the Gospel and the president of Presbyterian College of New Jersey, now Princeton.
Viktor Orbán (born 1963), Prime Minister of Hungary. Having lived under Soviet Communism, he now refuses to live under EU totalitarianism.
Iconic view of the “stacks” in Bethlehem, PA. Bethlehem Steel Company no longer exists (1857-2003)
The cast of 1954’s classic movie, Executive Suite