Any form of communism or Big Government Socialism requires the abandonment of religion. I do not mean simply that the government must be secular or (as in the United States) “respect no establishment of religion.” I mean strict atheism must be enforced upon the people at personal and societal levels. Religious morality must be replaced by government-imposed morality. This has been true since the political theories of communism and socialism were developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. As Engels wrote in the 1847 Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith:
All religions which have existed hitherto were expressions of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is that stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and supersedes them.1
Engels was a German philosopher and perhaps the closest confidant of Marx—who is more widely known as the father of modern communism and socialism. Together they drafted The Communist Manifesto and hundreds of other papers that laid the groundwork for Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Bernie Sanders—and every communist-socialist leader in our history.
The purported necessity for this imposed atheism is that a perfect society must be guided by science, logic, and reason rather than religion or superstition. More importantly, Marx and Engels argued that religion was a lever of control used by the ruling, upper classes (the bourgeois) to keep the working classes (the proletariat) oppressed and under control. They cited the centuries of war and conflict that were predicated on religious disagreements.
But more practically, Marx and Engels knew that their ideas simply cannot coexist within a religious society. In the Marxist-Leninist model, for communism or socialism to work (spoiler: they can’t and never have), the government must be the sole arbiter of what is right and wrong. More importantly, the central government must be held as a higher authority than God—and there must be no authority between the government and the people. You can see how religion simply can’t be tolerated in this system.
This is why Lenin began a campaign to undercut and diminish the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious institutions when he became the first leader of Soviet Russia and later the Soviet Union. Lenin’s campaign against the church included denying clergy the right to vote, seizing and selling church property, and ramping up atheist propaganda programs while outlawing proselytization.2
Stalin followed Lenin’s lead to a much more violent end. Stalin sought to impose the idea of the “New Soviet Man”—as a play on the earlier “New Socialist Man.” Stalin’s ideal Soviet Man was deeply ideological but completely irreligious—devoted to the fundamentals of Marxism and Leninism and devoid of any religious ties. Stalin went so far as to insist that the ideal Soviet citizen dissolve his or her national ties as well. There were no more Russians, there were only Soviets. In 1928, Stalin announced a five-year plan that would render the Soviet Union entirely godless. More pointedly, the name of God was to be forgotten in the Soviet Union by 1937.3 Religious leaders were rounded up, labeled enemies of the state, and either imprisoned or killed. Religious schools and civil institutions were forced closed. Stalin took an ancient church on Red Square and turned it into a men’s room so people would be forced to desecrate the church every time they went to the bathroom. Today it is a church again. Stalin even released a new Soviet calendar that eliminated weekends and all religious holidays to make it harder for Jews, Christians, Muslims, and other religious people to practice their faiths.4
For the same reasons as Lenin and Stalin, the necessity of religious intolerance drove Mao to kill as many as 20 million of his own people in China during his historically brutal Cultural Revolution. Mao’s goal was to abolish traditional Chinese religion and spiritual practices and replace them with a political religion. In the process he exhibited enduring hostility toward Christianity and other religions.
As Thomas F. Farr wrote for First Things, published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life in January 2020:
Mao had overreached, attempting to eliminate all religion. He understood, as had Stalin and Hitler, that religion (some religions in particular) poses a threat to the totalitarian state by encouraging fidelity to a greater authority. Churches were desecrated, looted, and turned into factories and storerooms. Priests, pastors, and nuns were tortured, raped, murdered (some were burned alive), and imprisoned in labor camps. Lay Christians were paraded through towns and villages with cylindrical hats detailing their “crimes.” Millions died terrible deaths, including by starvation. Tens of millions were brutalized, their lives destroyed.5
This vigorous antireligious sentiment is not merely a vestige of a bygone form of Marxism. It remains central to the movement today. As Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation executive director Marion Smith wrote for the Wall Street Journal in August 2019, “No amount of hope or hermeneutic effort can cleanse communism’s record of blood—especially the blood of religious adherents. Every communist regime has sought to purge the faith of its people. An atheistic ideology, communism is not only irreligious but antireligious.”6
As Smith pointed out, the dictatorship in North Korea has banned the Holy Bible, and countless people have been imprisoned or killed for possessing one. Communist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have also persecuted people of faith because of the inherent threat religious freedom poses to Marxist ideology.
But far more than any other contemporary example, the Chinese Communist dictatorship is aggressively executing the antireligious tenet of Marxism. As Smith wrote:
Communist China is today’s worst offender. Since its founding, the People’s Republic of China has tried to control or eradicate every religion within its borders. Some, like Tibetan Buddhist monks, regularly face arrest, imprisonment or even death. Others, like Falun Gong practitioners, have their organs forcibly harvested for the benefit of party officials and foreign medical tourists. Christian churches are either shut down or forced to preach the party line. This includes the Catholic Church, which recently struck a deal with Beijing that allows the Chinese Communist Party to approve the selection of bishops and priests.
Modern communism’s inherent hatred of religion has perhaps found its most brutal demonstration in China’s treatment of the Muslim Uighurs. Since the time of Marx, the communist goal has always been the creation of a “new man.” That is the sole purpose of the so-called re-education camps in the province of Xinjiang. As many as three million Uighurs—more than a quarter of the population—have undergone political brainwashing in these camps. The goal is to strip them of their faith and culture, making them “fit” for the Chinese socialist system. As investigative scholar Adrian Zenz notes, those who are released from the “re-education” camps are most likely to be put into forced labor camps, which also continue to maintain regular ideological training in Marxist thought.7
Similarly, Russian president Vladimir Putin is presently persecuting people of faith—although he is going about it in a different way. Putin outwardly champions the Russian Orthodox Church (having filled its leadership with those loyal to the Kremlin). But Putin has been deeply oppressive of other religious minorities, namely Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other non-Russian Orthodox Christians. According to Radio Free Europe, in occupied Crimea, Putin’s forces have been imprisoning religious minorities on made-up charges of extremism and terrorism.8 In October 2021, a Russian court sentenced three Jehovah’s Witnesses to eight years in prison, and another to three and a half years, for gathering to worship. The court called the activity “extremism.”9 This case was only a recent example. According to the U.S. Department of State’s 2020 Report on International Religious Freedom, there were 109 people of faith imprisoned for practicing their religion in occupied Crimea.
“Religious activists, human rights groups, and media reports said Russian authorities in occupied Crimea continued to persecute and intimidate minority religious congregations, including Muslim Crimean Tatars, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and orthodox Church of Ukraine members and clergy,” according to the report.10
While Putin’s Russia is not overtly imposing atheism, it is promoting the state-approved (and essentially state-run) church while oppressing all others. This is Putin’s way of achieving the Marxist goal of making the state the supreme moral authority. After all, Putin ultimately wants to remake Russia back into Lenin’s Soviet Union.
In every other Marxist regime in the world, socialism and religion cannot coexist. There is plenty of evidence building that the same is true for Big Government Socialism in America. Wokeness is inherently antireligious by the nature of its totalitarian belief system.
Even before the full rise of Big Government Socialism, which has been developing in the American left and corporate ecosystem for decades, there has been a prevailing effort to erase religion and symbols of faith from public life. This includes doing away with prayer in public schools (including simple moments of silence in some states), efforts to bar religious schools from receiving otherwise available public funding, and the erasure or removal of religious icons from public spaces. Specifically, it has included efforts to punish religious institutions, such as religious hospitals or charitable organizations, that do not provide health insurance or services for those seeking abortion, contraception, or other treatments and procedures that conflict with the institutions’ deeply held religious beliefs. This antireligious effort has come almost entirely from the American left.
In fact, in 2019, the Pew Research Center found that both Republicans and Democrats in America agreed that religion was losing influence in our society—but there was huge disagreement between the two parties over whether that was a good thing. According to Pew, about 63 percent of Republican-leaners reported that religion was losing its prominence—and that was not good for the country. However, Democrat-leaning adults were completely divided (27 percent said religious decline was bad, 25 percent said it was good, and 24 percent said it didn’t matter too much).11
The pressure for this erasure of religion can be found in the Big Government Socialists’ inherent hostility toward it. Not only are federal government officials increasingly hostile to people of faith, but state and local government agencies are now following the federal lead.
Consider how churches and synagogues have been treated throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In cities and states across the country, churches were forced to close, drastically limit the size of their congregations, and abstain from some sacraments or rituals. At the start of the pandemic, when we didn’t really know how dangerous the virus could get, temporary restrictions made some sense while health officials accessed the specific risks—and people made their own decisions about accepting those risks.
However, city and state officials across the country quickly began making bizarrely discriminatory decisions about what activities were safe and what were too dangerous. In many cases, religious observances were made public enemy number one. New York was perhaps the most aggressive and public in its antireligious discrimination. Governor Andrew Cuomo—before he was forced to resign amid sexual harassment allegations—had put together a color-coded map that applied variously stringent COVID-19 restrictions across the state. It just so happened that churches and synagogues were almost always placed in “red” zones, which prohibited gatherings of more than ten people—and in some cases forced houses of worship to simply close. Meanwhile, bars, restaurants, and other businesses were arbitrarily assigned less restrictive zoning. As the New York Times reported, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and two synagogues challenged Cuomo’s discriminatory rules—and won. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately favored religious freedom over Cuomo’s antireligious bigotry. As Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion:
It is time—past time—to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques.12
Of course, in the face of the pandemic, many churches got creative and sought safe ways to worship together and avoid breaking social distancing rules. Many churches began offering “drive-in” services, wherein congregants could drive their cars to church parking lots and hear services either on their car radios or through loudspeakers outside the churches.
However, as the Georgia Baptist Mission Board13 reported, governments in Wilmington, North Carolina; Greenville, Mississippi;14 Chattanooga, Tennessee;15 and Kent County, Michigan, all sought to prevent even these gatherings—despite worshippers having zero contact with anyone outside their own cars. At the same time, in many of these jurisdictions, fast-food restaurants and other “drive-through” businesses were allowed to keep operating.
In more egregious examples (more in line with Cuomo’s edicts in New York), religious institutions in Kansas, Massachusetts, Oregon, Indiana, Nevada, Washington, and other states were held to strict occupancy limits while other businesses faced fewer or no restrictions. In Nevada specifically, massive casinos that could hold thousands of people could reopen at 50 percent capacity, but churches of any size could have no more than fifty people in attendance, according to the Georgia Baptist Mission Board.16
But draconian, discriminatory COVID-19 social distancing restrictions were just the beginning. The Biden administration is also seeking to track federal employees who claim religious exemptions from taking the mandated COVID-19 vaccine and other intrusive rules. Sarah Parshall Perry reported for the Daily Signal in January 2022 that nineteen federal agencies were proposing to keep “personal religious information” lists of employees who request religious exemptions for various reasons. This includes the departments of defense, health and human services, transportation, the Treasury, and other major centers of bureaucratic power.
As Perry wrote:
As the nation’s largest employer, with over four million civilian and military employees, the federal government has received tens of thousands of religious exemption requests. It now appears that an increasing number of federal agencies are keeping and preserving those individuals’ names, religious information, personally identifying information, and other data stored in lists across multiple government agencies.
Why?17
Why indeed? At best, the various government agencies could be using the data to review or improve various rules they impose on their employees—although I find this unlikely. It’s more probable that the Biden administration is seeking to use the lists to pressure or punish employees who don’t follow orders that contradict their deeply held religious beliefs. After the Daily Signal broke the story, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives quickly introduced a bill to bar the government from collecting and keeping this information. South Carolina Republican representative Ralph Norman, who introduced the bill, told Fox News:
The ability for individuals to openly practice their faith without fear of retribution is a precious right we must guard closely. As if overreaching government vaccine mandates aren’t bad enough, it is highly inappropriate for federal dollars to be used to collect information about someone’s religious beliefs. The only way to prevent this information from being abused is to prevent its collection in the first place.18
Outside of government, these public, overt efforts to delegitimize First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion have been accompanied by real threats and harm to people of faith throughout the United States. On January 15, 2022, an antisemitic gunman entered Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, and held four members of the clergy and congregation hostage for eleven hours. The offender was demanding the release of an imprisoned terrorist in exchange for the hostages’ safe release. Ultimately, the gunman was shot and killed by police, and the hostages escaped safely. The FBI announced it was investigating the attack as an act of terrorism.19
Two days later, according to CNN, the FBI reported in January 2022 that people of faith and religious institutions should expect to continue to face threats and attacks. The federal agency urged states and local governments to review and update their plans to protect churches, synagogues, and other large gathering places.20
This message doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence that the federal government is vigorously defending religious communities from violence and persecution.
Like the Marxist regimes that came before, the Big Government Socialists are seeking to erase traditional morality and impose a new morality upon the American people that is approved and dictated by the state. The movement that started as political correctness in the late 1980s and early ’90s has been fully codified today into identity politics, Critical Theory, and the pervasive woke-think that is being absorbed by our government, corporate, academic, entertainment, and media institutions.
Make no mistake, all three of these concepts are rooted in Marxism. In particular, identity politics and Critical Theory (including Critical Race Theory, Critical Social Theory, Critical Gender Theory, etc.) accept and further the Marx-Engels belief that all of society is based on the bourgeois oppressing the proletariat. Instead of applying this notion to socioeconomic class, identity politics and Critical Theory apply the model to race, gender, sexuality, or other “identity” traits. In the new interpretation, non-white Americans become the victimized proletariat, and white Americans (regardless of their own beliefs or actions) become the oppressive bourgeois. In other cases, transgender people are the oppressed proletariat, while everyone else is the cruel bourgeois. Gay and lesbian Americans—proletariat. Heterosexual Americans—bourgeois. You get the model. Creating these divisions is imperative to Marxist theory, because without division and conflict, you can’t have a revolution—and that’s the ultimate goal of Marxism.
Wokeness, wokeism, or woke-think is the modern expression of the Marxist method of using language and propaganda to drown previous cultural notions of morality and replace them with the new, state-defined notions of morality.
In this case, the goal of American wokeness is in part to erase the American belief laid out in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”21
The woke doctrine says Americans can’t be created equal, because all non-white Americans are born into a systemically racist system that prevents such equality. Even further, they say that because non-white Americans cannot have been created equal under this system, equality itself must be wrong (or a tool of systemic oppression invented by the white bourgeois). So, instead of God-given equality as a goal of society, adherents of wokeness say equity (or government-imposed equal outcomes) should instead be the goal. In other words, Americans aren’t created equal by a Creator. They are made equal by the state.
As I wrote in my book Beyond Biden, the problem is not that Critical Race Theory (the college-level course) is being taught to young students as curriculum—it’s being taught to them by example. In school systems across the country, administrations have applied Critical Race Theory to lessons, school rules, and the most mundane activities.
Second graders in a Connecticut school were made to verbally identify characters in books by race as they read aloud in class. A teacher in the system ultimately resigned in protest.22 At a school in Virginia, a class was made to play “privilege bingo” to identify aspects of their classmates’ lives that gave them “unearned advantages” over their others. One such point of privilege was being the child of a member of the military.23
These are just a few. As the Washington Examiner reported on July 12, 2021:
There are plenty of other examples that prove racial essentialism and collective guilt are being taught to young students. In Cupertino, California, an elementary school required third graders to rank themselves according to the “power and privilege” associated with their ethnicities. Schools in Buffalo, New York, taught students that “all white people” perpetuate “systemic racism” and had kindergarteners watch a video of dead black children, warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence.” And in Arizona, the state’s education department sent out an “equity toolkit” to schools that claimed infants as young as 3 months old can start to show signs of racism and “remain strongly biased in favor of whiteness” by age 5.24
It should come as no surprise that school systems across the country are suddenly adopting these policies. The Biden administration, which controls a trove of grant money for state and local systems, has been explicit about supporting them, and the academic left is passionately and aggressively in support of imposing these radical policies.
After Congress passed nearly $200 billion to help reopen schools that had been closed during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden’s Department of Education released guidance urging (read: coercing) those schools to spend the money on various woke programs. As reported by the New York Post, some of these included, among other things, the removal of punishments that “spirit-murder black, brown and indigenous children,” “learning from students, families and educators who disrupt Whiteness and other forms of oppression,” and “‘antiracist therapy for White educators and support staff,’ and ‘free, radical self/collective care and therapy for educators and support staff of color.’”25
Unfortunately, schools are just the start. The leadership of our military has begun implementing woke curricula at our top military colleges. Books such as How to Be an Antiracist, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and Sexual Minorities and Politics have been added to mandatory reading lists alongside essential texts on military history, tactics, and combat.
In June 2020, a U.S. Navy task force set up to help find and stop discrimination in the service proposed that its members should have to take a new pledge that was rife with language taken straight from Critical Theory:
I pledge to advocate for and acknowledge all lived experiences and intersectional identities of every Sailor in the Navy. I pledge to engage in ongoing self-reflection, education and knowledge sharing to better myself and my communities. I pledge to be an example in establishing healthy, inclusive, and team-oriented environments. I pledge to constructively share all experiences and information gained from activities above to inform the development of Navy-wide reforms.26
At a time when we face serious threats from China, and potential NATO-involved conflict over Russian aggression toward Ukraine, does this seem like something on which warfighters should be focused? Especially considering the complete catastrophe of the evacuation of Afghanistan (which was entirely the fault of leadership—not service members), do we want our top brass spending time defending the implementation of the woke agenda on Capitol Hill or thinking deeply about how to start winning wars again?
Further, the infection of woke doctrine on the military has potentially devastating political implications. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote on June 25, 2021, of General Mark Milley’s defense of the military’s curriculum to Congress, “The military is a rare American institution that commands bipartisan confidence. If that trust is torpedoed over the next few years, Gen. Milley and his colleagues will share responsibility for the long-term damage.”
With this level of woke activity coming from government, it is no wonder that many American corporations have read the tea leaves and adopted woke-think into their company standards. As Fox Business reported in December 2021, whistleblower employees at several major U.S. companies had reported being forced to take trainings that were clearly guided by wokeness.
Coca-Cola employees were reportedly made to sit through a seminar to help them “be less white.” White workers at Walt Disney Company were told they needed to “work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness to understand what is beneath them and what needs to be healed.” Similar stories were shared with Fox Business by employees of Bank of America, Lowe’s, and Truist Financial Corporation.27
Ironically, the aggressive movement of woke-think should be the clue that wakes up the world to what is going on. Anyone who has read George Orwell’s dystopian, anti-totalitarian classic 1984 should immediately be able to identify woke-speak as Newspeak, the new language that the fictitious socialist British regime developed to better control its populous. Just as the Party did in Orwell’s novel, the Big Government Socialists are seeking to replace our language, so they can more easily replace objective truth—which is, according to woke-think, an entirely racist, white construct of control.
All this effort also comes back to the inherent hubris of attempting to destroy religion and replace it with a man-made version of morality. I’m not arguing that a person who is atheist cannot also be moral. But I would argue that a group of people with a great deal of power—who actively reject and persecute the religious freedom of others—cannot possibly be moral.