Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Politics and Religion
Whatever Happened to Anti-Communism?

Whatever Happened to Anti-Communism?

Last updated on: October 3, 2019 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

0 Comments

Whatever Happened to Anti-Communism? 2019-10-02T16:39:53-04:00 Gene Veith

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!” So tweeted President Donald Trump on October 1, the anniversary of the takeover of China by the Communist Party.

As someone who came of age during the Cold War, I was astonished to hear such positive sentiments about communism from an American president, especially one with the reputation as a fire-breathing conservative. But it isn’t just President Trump. An overt socialist is a leading candidate for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, nearly two-thirds of whose members (64%) have a favorable view of socialism. Marxism and its variations are very prominent and influential in the academic world.

It’s hard to find anti-communist sentiments these days. You can still find them among dissidents in neo-communist Venezuela and refugees of Castro’s Cuba. And there are still some old-style Cold Warriors. (Ironically, the very day President Trump was congratulating “the Chinese People” for 70 years of communism, Senate Republicans were issuing statements condemning what the Chinese Communist Party has done over those seven decades.)

During the Cold War, Americans considered communism to be an “existential threat,” the overused term meaning a threat to America’s very existence. The issues were not just matters of different economic systems. Communism, with its authoritarian governments and totalitarian insistence on controlling every facet of life, was a direct threat to freedom, democracy, religion, and everything Americans hold dear. And because communists sought to spread their system throughout the world, including by military conquests, and because the major communist powers possessed nuclear weapons, Americans felt that their very lives could be at risk. Republicans and Democrats, for all of their differences, agreed on the necessity of opposing communism.

Yes, Cold War anti-communism sometimes went too far, with inquisitions that violated America’s own ideals of civil liberty and paranoid fears of communist infiltration and a communist behind every bush. Still, documents recovered after the fall of the Soviet Union showed that some of those fears were justified, that communists were behind a lot of bushes.

At any rate, after Russian communism imploded and the Cold War ended, Americans were enormously relieved, to the point of wanting to put all of that communist, anti-communist stuff behind us.

But the Cold War was mainly focused on the Russian-dominated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That evil empire did, indeed, fall. Today the major Communist power is the People’s Republic of China, which has grown more powerful than ever. Chinese Communism does not seem nearly the threat that the Soviet Union was. (Never mind that the actual shooting wars in the period of the Cold War–Korea, Vietnam–were military conflicts that involved China and its client states.)

Today, though, China is easier to like. China revised communist economic theory to allow for private property and market forces, resulting in a tremendous growth of wealth and prosperity. But China retained the authoritarian government and totalitarian controls of classic communism, the opposition to freedom, democracy, and religion that made communism so antithetical to American ideals.

Michael Brendan Dougherty discusses how two of the old bulwarks against communism, American business and the Catholic church, have to a great extent become defenders of the Chinese communist regime. He describes a TV interview in which Wall Street tycoon and former mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg praises China’s anti-pollution efforts and denies that China is a dictatorship. Dougherty comments:

What concerns me is that the attitude [Bloomberg] expressed to Hoover has come to predominate among the American business elite. Tim Cook is happy to announce retaliatory measures against U.S. states that are on the wrong side of the culture war. But you won’t hear a peep about the anti-suicide nets that Apple’s Chinese contractor Foxxconn installed to deal with the public-relations problem of iPhone-assembly workers throwing themselves to their deaths. Nor about concentration camps for Muslims in Jinjiang province, or the ructions in Hong Kong. In an article on the trade war, James McGregor, the chairman of the greater China region for the consultancy APCO Worldwide, was quoted admitting the awful truth: “For many American tech companies, Xi Jinping is more important than Donald Trump, because China is often their largest and fastest-growing market.”

Dougherty then cites the pro-China cheerleading from the Roman Catholic Church:

The Church might even be even worse in this respect. “Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese,” Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, said last year as the Vatican was buttering up the Chinese ahead of a historic deal meant to solve long-standing conflicts between the Church and the Chinese Communist Party. Like Bloomberg, Sorondo burbled credulously about a fictive regime that does not exist, praising China’s “positive national conscience.” “You do not have shantytowns, you do not have drugs, young people do not take drugs,” in China, he said. Even better, “the economy does not dominate politics, as happens in the United States, something Americans themselves would say.”

He then cites the concordat between the Vatican and China that allows the avowedly-atheist government to approve the selection of Catholic bishops. “The day after it was signed, Xi humiliated the Vatican by having the bishops of the CPCA [Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association] sign a statement affirming their ‘independence’ from Rome, and their determination to pursue the ‘sinicization’ of their religion. Prelates who remained underground, like Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin, were rounded up and detained.”

The legacy of the 70 years of Chinese communism continues, as John McCormack notes:

Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed perhaps 45 million people. The Communist regime still denies its people freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and has imposed a policy of forced abortion. At the present moment, China has detained something like 1.5 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in re-education camps. Its crackdown on Hong Kong escalated this week, when a protester was shot in the chest.

But China is doing what the Soviet Union could not do. Not only forging an economic system that “works,” but solving the problem of totalitarianism of how to control the lives of millions and millions of individuals. China has found the solution in ground-breaking technology that can monitor its citizens, assign or deduct “social credits” depending on their behavior, and punish dissidents by denying them access to education, travel, home ownership, and other social goods.

Meanwhile, the Chinese model is being seen as an alternative to the Western model of free market capitalism and liberal democracy. (Read China’s success an alternative to Western development model.)

Even in the United States, some are looking with envy at what Chinese authoritarianism can accomplish, not having to worry about the obstacles of citizens’ personal freedom and the messy processes of the rule of law. (For example, Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist Thomas Friedman has fantasized about all we could accomplish for the environment if we could be “China for a day.” )

As American thinkers on both the left and the right are expressing a willingness to throw out freedom and democracy, maybe the Chinese model is in our future. Maybe Nikita Khruschhev was right in insisting upon the historical inevitability of the communist dialectic when he predicted “We will bury you.”

Illustration: “Long Live Chairman Mao – The Red Sun in the Hearts of the World’s Revolutionaries, People’s Republic of China, 1969,” lithograph – Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art- Eugene, Oregon, Daderot [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

Previous Post

October 2, 2019

How Bad the Political Polarization Is Getting

Next Post

October 4, 2019 Faith in God and Good Works for Your Neighbor

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"I know wired earbuds are making a comeback (I never stopped using them as I ..."

reg

Luther on Tools

"VCRs, tape decks, and cassette players are all having a revival among a segment of ..."

Tom Hering

Luther on Tools

"As a (retired) lawyer I see potential liability from sharing things like power or sharp ..."

reg

Luther on Tools

"I am not sure the items you mentioned, though disused, discontinued, discarded, could be considered ..."

reg

Luther on Tools

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category America Apologetics Art baseball Bible Blog Christ Church crime Culture Economics Education Ethics Family Food Football Government History Holidays Holy Week Humor International Islam Language Law Life Issues Literature Media Medicine Movies Music Nature News Personal Philosophy Politics psychology Reformation Religions Sacraments Science sex Social Science Sports technology television terrorism Theology Uncategorized Vocation war

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What did Eve eat in the Garden of Eden?

Select your answer to see how you score.

An unclean animal Bread Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge A vine branch

Books by This Author Books by Gene Veith

See All Titles »