“We are all socialists now,” Newsweek Magazine decrees, so we should at least try to understand the prospects entailed in the editors’ celebration.  Joshua Muravchik’s Heaven on Earth:  The Rise and Fall of Socialism (San Francisco:  Encounter Books, c. 2002) is an engaging, historical description of what’s happened wherever it’s been tried.  The title comes from Moses Hess, the 19^th century “Father of German social Democracy,” who said (in A Communist Confession of Faith, 1846):  “The Christian . . . imagines the better future of the human species . . . in the image of heavenly joy. . . .  We, on the other hand, will have this heaven on earth” (p. 338).  This endeavor—what Muravchik calls “man’s most ambitious attempt to supplant religion” (p. 3)—has everywhere failed, and revealingly (given the glossy advertisements) “socialism’s epitaph turned out to be:  If you build it, they will leave” (p. 6).  

Though rooted in the ideology of the French Revolution and its call for equality, the word socialism was first coined by the wealthy English utopian, Robert Owen.  He was an atheistic materialist who detested all religion and believed that a good environment would necessarily produce good people.  Thus he bought land in Indiana, where he launched “New Harmony” to establish “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”  He further determined to eliminate three evils—private property; religion; and marriage—the goal of most socialists (whether totalitarian or democratic) in decades to come.  He then ordered the letters “C.M.” inscribed on one of the buildings, “standing for ‘Commencement of the Millennium’” (p. 55).    Within less than a decade, however, New Harmony proved most unharmonious and the community disintegrated, largely because idle ideologues rather than workers joined it.  

Though Owen’s New World utopia failed, he helped inspire budding socialists such as Friedrich Engels, who (rebelling against his parents’ devout religious faith) joined Owen in assailing Christianity.  Here he was joined by another young German, Karl Marx.  Both men celebrated the skepticism of  David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s atheistic The Essence of Christianity.  Muravchik largely credits Engels for the ideology we call Marxism, though he was overshadowed by Marx’s domineering personality.   Few socialists actually read Marx’s Capital, taking their precepts from Engels’ popular writings.  As Karl Kautsky explained, “’Engels stands as a master of popular exposition; his writings are read by all thinking proletarians, and the majority of those who have accepted socialism have obtained their knowledge and understanding of the Marx-Engels theory from these writings’” (p. 91).  “It was to Engels the popularizer that we can trace many of the catch-phrases of Marxism:  ‘historical materialism,’ withering away of the state,’ ‘dialectical materialism,’ ‘scientific socialism’ and, above all, ‘Marxism’ itself” (p. 91).  

Various thinkers sought to own the Marxist label, but Lenin most effectively grasped it by calling for a “proletarian revolution” to establish a utopia in Russia.  Like Marx and Engels, he was an intellectual with little knowledge of the real workers for whom he struggled to establish a “workers paradise” in Russia.  His Italian contemporary, Benito Mussolini, soared to prominence in the Socialist Party and launched a journal called Utopia.  Though he broke with his leftist confreres following WWI (preferring dictatorial to democratic methods), his Fascism retained salient socialist precepts.  So too Hitler espoused scores of socialist notions and declared that “’National socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order’” (p. 164).  

The totalitarian systems established in Russia, Italy, and Germany manifestly failed.  But softer forms of socialism endure.  Before WWII ended, Clement Atlee led Britain’s Labor Party to victory and began the transformation of his country.  Atlee’s socialism served as a surrogate for his parents’ Christian faith; it was not, he said, “’ just a piece of machinery or an economic system, but a living faith translated into action.  I desire the classless society’” (p. 186).   Atlee implemented the socialism advocated for nearly a century by English Fabians (including George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb), who had patiently worked to democratically establish their faith.  At the same time, many new nations, liberated from colonial rule, followed Atlee’s approach, effecting what Daniel Patrick Moynihan “dubbed the ‘British revolution’” (p. 199).   Thus Julius Nyerere subjected Tanzania to the Fabianism he’d absorbed while studying in Edinburgh.  Lavishly supported by Western philanthropy, Nyerere brought into being a nation wherein everyone was reduced to the perfect equality of utter poverty!  And much the same transpired, uniformly, in the rest of the three score new nations who embraced the socialist creed.  

Standing virtually alone in resisting socialism was the United States.  Labor leaders such as the AFL’s Samuel Gompers warned against “’entangling alliances with intellectuals who did not understand that to experiment with the labor movement was to experiment with human life’” (p. 232).   He decried laws dictating the eight-hour work day, though he supported gaining that objective in other ways, and he “opposed minimum-wage legislation as well as all manner of government social insurance except to cover physical disability” (p. 241).  George Meany also supported the capitalist system that empowered workers by providing them amazing opportunities.   (Gompers and Meany, of course, dealt with capitalists producing goods for market; today’s unions, such as the NEA, increasingly represent governmental employees, making them congenitally more sympathetic with the socialist agenda.)  

Muravchik ends his presentation with an epilogue:  “the kibbutz goes to market.”  He shows how the Israeli kibbutzim, so idolized by various socialists, have failed to realize their dreams.  For a generation, they usually thrived, but as children grew up they almost always rejected the radical demands entailed in bringing about “socialism’s perennial goal of a new man” (p. 329).  So in large numbers they fled to find better lives and traditional family structures in Israel’s booming economy.  Following the pattern of 19^th century utopias in America, the kibbutzim fell apart on the hard rock of human nature.  

A great American historian, Eugene Genovese (who was himself a Marxist for most of his life), says, in a blurb for this book:  “Socialism has been a story of nobility, heroism, and self-sacrifice—and of self-delusion, absurdity, and murderous criminality.  Joshua Muravchik provides a thoughtful account, at once objective and personal, in which he—miraculously-manages to eschew polemical point-scoring and holier-than-thou trumpeting.  This sprightly and moving book combines warm sympathy with tough-minded criticism to help us understand the greatest tragedy of our age.”  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

For a classic study of the phenomenon, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium:  Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York:  Oxford University Press, c. 1961; revised and enlarged 3rd ed. 1970), is irreplaceable.  Apocalyptic themes in Jewish and early Christian sources were picked up and expanded by Medieval enthusiasts, who laid the groundwork for modern socialist notions.  Thus we find a 12^th century monk named Henry gaining hearers by denouncing the clergy for their failure to live up to his ideal of apostolic purity.  He considered himself directly called of God (thus needing no ordination), rejected the authority of the Church, and reduced the Sacraments to symbolic acts of one’s faith.  True believers would necessarily embrace poverty, and “love of one’s neighbour was the essence of true religion” (p. 40).  

Henry was simply one of a great number of preachers who called for a religious revival that would totally transform society.  Invariably, they both praised the poor and denounced the wealthy for refusing to enrich them.  Equally inevitable, it seems, such movements lent themselves to aberrations!  Take, for example, a renegade monk called Jacob, known as the “master of Hungary,” who denounced the clergy as corrupt, the sacraments as vain, and recruited an army of some 60,000 for the Second Crusade.  In the process he freely performed marriage (or divorce) ceremonies as requested.  “He was said to have married eleven men to one woman” (p. 95).  He also praised his followers who killed priests.  His career was mercifully brief, but his fanaticism illustrates fatal currents continually swirling within millennialism.  

Joachim of Fiore (1145-1202) probably serves as the best illustration of Medieval utopianism.  His “revelations” foretold the immanent coming of a “third age,” quite unlike Augustine’s view of a Kingdom of God that could never be realized until Jesus’ Second Advent.  To usher in this new age, various devotees of “the Free Spirit”—including Gnostic Cathars (Albigensians) in southern France—taught a “quasi-mystical anarchism—an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kid of restraint and limitation” (p. 148).  Much like Friedrich Nietzsche, they called for “amoral supermen” who lived in accord with their own inner light.  “The core of the heresy of the Free Spirit lay in the adept’s attitude towards himself:  he believed that he had attained a perfection so absolute that he was incapable of sin.  Although the practical consequences of this belief could vary, one possible consequence was certainly antinomianism or the repudiation of moral norms” (p. 150).  

Free Spirit visionaries flourished throughout Europe, featuring what Cohn dubs “an elite of amoral supermen.”  Basically they identified themselves with God and thus claimed that whatever they said and did was enjoyed His approbation.  Consequently, “What distinguished the adepts of the Free Spirit from all other medieval sectarians was, precisely, their total amoralism.  For them the proof of salvation was to know nothing of conscience or remorse” (p. 177).  As one of them said, “’He who recognizes that God does all things in him, he shall not sin’” (p. 177).  Frequently this led to a “promiscuous and mystically coloured eroticism” manifested in various sexual deviancies.  Still more:  since they denied the legitimacy of private property, holding that all things are common, they condoned theft—especially when taken from the “rich.”  

To establish an egalitarian paradise, preachers such as John Wyclif argued:  “’Every man ought to be in a state of grace; if he is in a state of grace he is lord of the world and all that it contains; therefore every man ought to be lord of the whole world.  But, because of the multitudes of men, this will not happen unless they hold all things in common:  therefore all things ought to be in common’” (p. 200).   One of Wyclif’s admirers, John Hus, said much the same, and both inspired popular revolutionary movements—the Lollards in England and the Taborites (Hussites) in Bohemia.  Fanatical Taborites believed the Millennium was at hand and an “anarcho-communist order” of Paradise was to be established.  “Taxes, dues, rents were to be abolished and so was private property of all kinds.  There was to be no human authority of any sort:  ‘All shall live together as brothers, none shall be subject to another’” (p. 215).  

Out of this soil sprang Thomas Muntzer, who took Luther’s revolt against the Church in thoroughly non-Lutheran directions and helped provoke the Peasants’ War in 1525—a bloody affair costing 100,000 peasants’ lives and prompting Luther to write “his ferocious pamphlet Against the Thievish Murderous Gangs of the Peasants” (p. 248).  Muntzer also played a significant, if convoluted, role in the development of Anabaptism, which carried with it many of the mystical, anarchical themes of the Free Spirit devotees.  Interestingly enough, Friedrich Engels and a host of Marxists have found in Muntzer “a giant symbol, a prodigious hero in the history of ‘class war’” (p. 251).   

Cohn’s research in primary sources enables him to set forth a richly-detailed treatise.   While more suitable for scholars than general readers, The Pursuit of the Millennium reminds us of how perennially we not only long for a perfect world but move heaven and earth to establish it here and now.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

However anarchical their rhetoric, triumphant socialists unfailingly turn totalitarian.  This is the message of The Coercive Utopians:  Social Deception by America’s Power Players, by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac (Chicago:  Regnery Gateway, c. 1983).  They argue that “utopianism, by its inherent logic, leads to coercion” (p. 8).  The book comes commended by one of America’s preeminent philosophers, Sidney Hook, who said:  “I have rarely read a book which has contained such challenging information, and which raises so many troubling questions about the good will and bona fides of many organizations soliciting public support.  The Isaacs’ book should be read by all intelligent laymen who are active in public affairs.”  

Illustrating one of the facts that elicited Hook’s alarm was a 1980 decision of the General Conference of the Methodist Church to financially support communist regimes in Cuba and Vietnam as well as the PLO.  Aligned with the National Council of Churches, which encouraged its functionaries to disguise how the organization’s funds were spent, the Methodists were simply one of the mainline denominations supporting Marxist movements that promised to inaugurate perfect societies.  To one Methodist spokesman, the church’s mission was to establish “’solidarity with the poor and the powerless’” (p. 20).  Church delegations visited Cuba and inevitably found what they hoped for—a wonderful, egalitarian society.  Other representatives visited Vietnam and wrote glowing reports of the communist transformation taking place following the war.  They found grounds for praising Pol Pot’s movement in Cambodia and gave financial support to Robert Mugabe as he began his brutal rule in Zimbabwe.   

Linking arms with radical religionists, environmental utopians sought to restore the planet to a pristine “Mother Earth” condition.  With Earth Day in 1970 the environmental movement began to shape the nation’s consciousness, prodding Congress to pass laws designed to “produce the perfect environment” (p. 49).  To get clean air and water, to protect endangered species, to banish toxics of all sorts, became morally obligatory and justified a massive expenditure of public funds.  Yet “no reasonable standards satisfy the perfection-seeking environmental organizations” (p. 56) and laws passed decades ago are now used to restrict personal liberties in unimagined ways.  “The distinguished sociologist and historian of ideas Robert Nisbet sees environmentalism as a revolutionary social movement.  Indeed Nisbet sees it as potentially the third great social movement of Western civilization after Christianity and socialism, and one, ironically, that strikes at the roots of that civilization.  If environmentalists as such do not ‘hate the system’ they hate what is vital to the system—the development of energy sources, with the most environmentally benign source, nuclear energy, assuming a literally demonic character.  Nisbet sees the reason for the movement’s fascination with the sun as ‘a form of spiritual purification, for there is a renascent primitivism in the envioronmentalist’s characteristic approach to life’” (p. 60).  

Though a concern for the environment had shaped an earlier “conservationism,” the movement that emerged in the ‘70s was largely guided by the New Left.  Its sacred texts included Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful.  Its causes included the banning of DDT and nuclear power, despite the utter lack of hard evidence that they threatened anything.  The environmentalist agenda, promoted by powerful groups such as the Sierra Club, successfully promoted a “utopian campaign against modern technology” (p. 70) that prevailed politically, despite counterfactual realities.  

The environmentalists’ disdain for Western civilization was amplified by anti-American advocates in utopian think tanks such as the Institute for Policy Studies, which endeavored to destroy “public belief in the virtues of key American institutions, particularly those crucial to maintaining American power and influence in the world.  An image of the United States is constructed as a rapacious imperial villain, the greatest single threat to the world’s peace and prosperity” (p. 108).  To make their case, they camouflaged their presentations under the guise of seeking “to preserve traditional American values and institutions” (p. 109).   Thus Derek Shearer, an IPS representative, confessed that because it was imprudent to “’use the “S” word [socialism] too effectively in American politics, we have found that in the greatest tradition of American advertising the word “economic democracy” sells’” (p. 131).  Such folks also claimed to identify with the “workers” whose welfare they championed.  In fact, however, they harbored “’a tremendous elitist contempt for ordinary Americans, hatred of blue collar Americans because they weren’t revolutionaries, contempt for them because they didn’t want to smash and destroy, contempt for their pastimes, contempt for their marriages, contempt because they were Americans.  Yet these elitists wanted to take that away from them, smash it, set up a system based on China or Cuba or Vietnam or Tanzania’” (p. 135).   Equally counterfeit was the pacifism espoused by many of the radicals.  Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth elicited fanatical fever within “peace” movements such as Clergy and Laity Concerned.  Such pacifism, however, was largely a guise of anti-American tirades and generally followed dictates from Moscow, mediated through compliant popular front organizations.

Environmental organizations, along with other utopian groups, skillfully learned to “subvert the constitutional arrangements of the country” by infiltrating and manipulating governmental bureaucracies such as the EPA (p. 221).  Here they saw themselves (though never elected by anyone) as “executors of the will of ‘the people’ as they intuitively understand it.  Utopian bureaucrats thus feel free to reshape, circumvent and disregard the laws they are assigned to administer” (p. 222).  This took place quickly under President Jimmy Carter, who allowed the Natural Resources Defense Council to effectively set the coal leasing agenda for the Department of the Interior.  Federal monies flowed into various “alternative energy” schemes, many of which proved wastefully utopian.   Even more gratuitously, the Legal Services Corporation has “consistently defied its Congressional mandate” (p. 234) and taken upon itself the task of reforming American society (as well as providing a comfortable income for thousands of lawyers).  Taking money from the government, these lawyer-bureaucrats sought (always in the name of “social justice”) to undermine it through class action suits designed to destroy industries they disliked!  As one of the presidents of the National Lawyers Guild declared, as reformers within the system they espoused “anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism” (p. 238).  

Much of this activity goes unnoticed because the media, enamored with environmentalism and hostile to big business, acts “as a filter, screening out most of the information that could damage the utopians in the public view” (p. 251).  Consequently, the nuclear power industry has been consistently misrepresented by journalists determined to destroy it.  When government officials pled for stronger defense policies, TV personalities such as Walter Cronkite dismissed them as alarmists.  Few Americans heard of the genocide in Cambodia, as horrific as Hitler’s holocaust, because it would have questioned the rectitutde of those who had opposed the Vietnam War.  While millions died in Cambodia, the New York Times and Washington Post saw fit to mention it a total of 13 times in 1976!  The next year, when the slaughter reached its zenith, America’s TV networks noted Pol Pot’s slaughter three times—and NBC said nothing at all.  The networks were able, however, to devote 159 reports to human rights violations in South Africa.  Shameful though it was, such media bias elicited no shame in journalistic circles.  (Indeed, as the 2008 election showed, the media now sees itself as cheerleaders for the causes they support.)  

Marianne J. Legato, MD, FACP, is a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University and has devoted herself to the study of “gender medicine.”  She has concluded, on the basis of massive (and often quite recent, Nobel Prize awarded) research, that men and women are in fact quite different, fully aware that this truth may offend some in the feminist movement—including a large contingent of Harvard professors who effectively ousted President Larry Summers for daring to suggest it.  Truth to tell, “there is a tremendous risk in categorizing certain behaviors as ‘male’ or ‘female’” (p. xxii) as she does throughout her recent treatise (written with the assistance of Laura Tucker).  Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget (Rodale, 2005) makes clear why this is so and offers suggestions concerning how we should deal with the opposite sex.  

Legato’s thesis, set forth in the Introduction, is this:  “Men and women think differently, approach problems differently, emphasize the importance of things differently, and experience the world around us through entirely different filters” (p. xiv).  While processing information, men use only one side of the brain and consider “one thing at a time” (p. xvi).  Women, however, have more gray matter in the frontal cortex of their brains and simultaneously synthesize several strands of information.  Consequently, women have significantly superior verbal skills, whereas men are able to focus like a laser on specific tasks.  

“Men and Women Are Different” declares chapter one, affirming the consensus judgment of common sense.  A few decades ago, Legato says, she and others “assumed that women were, physiologically speaking, simply small men” (p. 2).   Brain studies, however, make it clear just how the sexes differ.  At the moment of conception we are genetically either male or female.  So many sexual differences are “hardwired.  But as soon as we’re born, the environment  works in powerful ways to interact with, and even change, our hardwiring to shape the way we act and interface with others.  . . . .  Treating your daughter like she’s a girl may make her more so” (p. 7).   Though men’s brains are larger,  “women use more parts of their brains when given a wide variety of verbal and spatial tasks” (p. 10).  

Sexual differences naturally explain sexual attraction.  Women want men who will “provide emotional and financial security” and display strength and assertiveness, whereas men desire women who are “young and healthy enough to reproduce; indeed, many of the physical characteristics that men find most attractive in women are ones that connote youth and good health” (p. 19).  Like it or not, looks matter!  Women crave men who are “sociable, approachable, and of high social status.  They also gave high marks to expensive or elegant clothing” (p. 22).  In the dating and mating dance, women initiate (at least 70 percent of the time) the process, though the process is so “subtle” that the man appears to make “’the first move’” (p. 30).  A man initiates a conversation only after a favorable “glance from the woman” (p. 30).  

Legato devotes a chapter to conversational differences between the sexes.  As important as it is to communicate well, men and women frequently fail in this area.  From the moment of birth, girls hear better than boys.  Subsequently, they listen better and talk more fluently.  Studies of the brain simply document the fact that male and female brains significantly differ in their capacity to handle words.  Women also interpret visual cues—i.e. facial expressions, body language—more skillfully than men.  And they also have better memories “for the spoken word” (p. 68).  Consequently, they remember all the details of arguments quickly forgotten by men.  Women love to talk and tell stories, especially about family and home; it’s a part of sustaining friendships.  Men, however, talk mainly to get information, discussing the news or sporting events.

Having explained and justified her position, Legato proceeds to offer advice regarding marriage, parenting, stress and aging.  Some of her views are derived from her studies; others come from her personal experience.  Apart from what she considers scientifically demonstrable, however, she gives no clear moral guidance.  Multiple marriages (including her own)—and affairs between married folks—may be the best way to cope with life.  Despite the lack of a moral compass, however, the book merits reading for its cogent defense of one, simple, guiding truth:  the differences between men and women are anything but social constructions, they are naturally given and inescapable.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Meg Meeker’s Epidemic:  How Teen Sex is Killing Our Kids (reviewed in “Reedings” #135) is a book I recommend to everyone concerned with adolescent sexuality.  She has recently published Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters:  10 Secrets Every Father Should Know (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2006) to emphasize the irreplaceable role of fathers in rearing healthy daughters.  Whereas Epidemic was richly documented and sought to describe alarming developments in the nation, this book is generally anecdotal and filled with the common sense of a practicing physician, wife (married to a physician with whom she shares a medical practice), and mother of four children.  The bibliography duly  refers us to serious scholarly resources, but the text itself targets a popular audience.

A medical doctor, Meeker credits her father (also a MD) with instilling in her the confidence she has needed to succeed in life.  He “was an eccentric man, quiet, antisocial and extremely smart” (p. 3).  He said very little, yet his daughter always knew he loved her.  “My dad protected me fiercely, to the point where I was almost too embarrassed to date anyone.  He was a hunter and he let my boyfriends know that” (p. 3).  It was easier to talk with her mother, but she knew she’d call on her dad, who was “tough” and “serious,” if ever her “life or health” were endangered.  He was thoroughly, unapologetically, masculine.  

In retrospect, ever more deeply impressed by her father, Meeker says:  “When we think of masculine men, we (women at least) envision those with one overriding quality:  a spine of steel.  Nothing makes a woman’s heart melt like a man with courage and resolve” (p. 132).  “True masculinity is the moral exercise of authority.  And your little girl needs it” (p. 47).  Troubled girls rarely have “authoritative” fathers; their dads are almost always absent or indifferent.  Even when she “pushes hard against your rules, flailing, crying that you are mean or unfair, she is really asking you a question:  Am I worth the fight, Dad?  Are you strong enough to handle me?  Make sure she knows the answer is yes” (p. 32).  

All daughters need what Meeker’s dad provided.  Men, she insists, “are natural leaders, and your family looks to you for qualities that only fathers have.  You were made a man for a reason, and your daughter is looking to you for guidance that she cannot get from her mother” (p. 4).  She has written this book to summon men to stand up and assume the role required of them if their daughters are to flourish.  “Men, good men,” she says:  “We need you.  We—mothers, daughters, and sisters—need your help to raise healthy young women.  We need every ounce of masculine courage and wit you own, because fathers, more than anyone else, set the course for a daughter’s life” (p. 7).  In her medical practice, she has talked with hundreds of girls.  She has watched them react to their fathers’ presence.  And she firmly believes that dads really matter.  

They matter because every girl wants a hero.  And she wants, above all else, for that hero to be her dad.  She wants someone who will protect her.  Indeed, Meeker devotes an entire chapter to this theme:  “Protect Her, Defend Her (and use a shotgun if necessary).”  She wants someone who will enforce rules that protect her—especially from the sexual predators (both in person and the media) that prowl about everywhere.  Knowing the ravages resulting from teenage promiscuity—STDs, depression, suicide—dads must resolutely stand guard over their daughters’ sexual behavior.  “Of the fifteen to eighteen million new cases of STDs that occur every year, two-thirds occur in kids under the age of twenty-five” (p. 101).  This need not be!  Strong fathers could prevent lots of it!  For the truth is:  “If you don’t want your daughter to be sexually active in high school, you need to tell her, you need to teach her.  Otherwise, she will be.  Popular culture trains our daughters for a life of promiscuity” (p. 121).  

Dads are also important because they’re their daughters’ first love.  Girls easily identify with their mothers, for they have much in common.  But men are a mysterious and alluring other.  So girls desire to know and love the opposite sex, and they rightfully long to establish ties with their fathers.  Daughters need to know, continually, that they are loved.  Words are important, but actions count for much more.  Setting and enforcing curfews, spending time together (even when little is said), listening to her a mere 10 minutes a day, telling her you love her.  Above all:  stay married to her mother, even when it takes unusual grit and discomfort.  “The most common cause of unhappiness and despair, what crushes the spirit of children more often than anything else, is divorce.  Divorce is really the central problem that has created a generation of young adults who are at higher risk for chaotic relationships, sexually transmitted diseases, and confusion about life’s purpose” (p. 144).  And, ultimately, if you’re a good dad, chances are your daughter will marry a man just like you.  If you’re truthful, she’ll covet a truthful husband.  If you’re a man of integrity, she’ll look for that quality in a man.  

Importantly, dads must realize that they will, like it or not, “teach her who God is.”  In this book, unlike her early one, Meeker reveals her religious commitments.  She insists that girls need God, and they need a dad who will “show her who He is, what he is like, and what he thinks about her” (p. 177).  Irreligious parents reading this book, she says, need to disregard much the media says about religion and realize how deeply children need religious roots.  All sorts of research demonstrate the healthy role religious faith plays in the lives of the young.  Parents who ignore this endanger their kids far more than parents who smoke cigarettes in their cars and homes!  “God is more important than dinner” (p. 182).  “Kids are born with an inherent sense that life is more than what they see” (p. 181).  They simply know that there is “an invisible, real, and wonderful” inner self, the “soul,” that is of ultimate and eternal worth.   Dads “are the first authority figure” in a girl’s life.  “If you are trustworthy, loving, and kind, your daughter will approach god more easily” (p. 190).  Much more than boys, “girls tend to see more similarities between God and their parents” (p. 190).  So dads need to read (C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel, Thomas a Kempis, Pascal and Dostoevsky are recommended) and think and come to conclusions regarding God.  Your daughters especially need to know where you stand—and where you are headed.  

In a land plagued by “experts” who insist kids can be reared by same-sex couples, or by single parents, Meeker’s book is a realistic reminder that both boys and girls (and girls especially) need dads who are committed to and involved in their daughters’ development.  As Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., M.D., professor of psychiatry at Harvard medical School, the author of The Question of God, says:  “No one interested in what children experience growing up in our culture today and the impact that parents, especially fathers, have on that experience, can afford to miss reading this book.”  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Meeker and Legato certainly espouse politically incorrect views on various issues.  So, as one might expect, Carrie L. Lukas, in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2006), shares and extends their basic positions.  Lukas did her undergraduate work at Princeton, earned a master’s degree from Harvard, and is the vice president for policy and economics at the Independent Women’s Forum.  She declares:  “The modern feminist movement isn’t about women’s equality.  It’s about an agenda designed to benefit a special interest group:  women who will follow the professional feminist’s idea of what a woman should want” (p. ix).  

She insists that men and women are truly different and that romance (drawing together the two sexes in a relationship that is more than sexual) is truly good.  Despite the feminist briefs for “safe sex” and unlimited sexual freedom and the abolition of marriage, most women actually desire lasting, monogamous, marriages.  Despite the hostility to men amply evident in women’s studies departments and feminist literature, despite the inflated rhetoric about female “victims of violence” at the hands of vicious males, most women long for the “right man” to come along.  Despite the approbation afforded divorce, as the first step to take when unhappy in a marriage, the evidence mounts regarding the devastation of splintered unions and fractured kids.

Lukas also insists on facing “fertility facts.”  Increasingly numbers of women remain childless—and age plays a major role in this fact.  It’s simply much easier to get pregnant when you in your 20s than in your 30s.  But women are increasingly marrying (and hoping to conceive) too late to realistically expect to procreate.  The National Association of Women blithely assures the faithful that women can easily conceive in their 40s, but such propaganda is utterly self-serving rather than truthful.  Consequently, “Many women have been led to believe that they can postpone childbearing without consequence and regret that decision later in life” (p. 110).  For many women discover, at the age of 40, having “made it” in a career, that they long for children much more than money and vocational “success.”

In fact, work in the real world rarely resembles the fantasies of feminist literature, portraying a “politically correct TV-land” filled with female “lawyers, surgeons, or impeccably dressed advertising executives” (p. 135).  Most working women in the real world, however, “are working in traditional fields and are motivated by financial need” (p. 138).  Given other options (part-time work or full-time homemaking), only 15 percent of the nation’s women want “to work full-time” (p. 139).  Increasingly, women acknowledge the impossibility of “having it all.”  You can be a successful career woman or a satisfied mom.  Attaining both goals, except for those privileged few (often the professors who write and teach the books assigned in university classes), proves to be difficult if not impossible.  Complicating the picture are the “daycare delusions” promoted by feminists and politicians.  Kids just don’t thrive in daycare, nor are moms happy to be away from them for most of their waking hours.  

All-in-all, Lukas concludes that women have been seriously misled by their self-anointed leaders.  Her book is a wake-up call, designed to embolden women who want to live as they are designed to live.

 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

In Real Sex:  The Naked Truth About Chastity (Grand Rapids:  Brazos Press, c. 2005), Lauren F. Winner persuasively argues (from a very modern perspective) the case for an ancient virtue.  “Chastity,” she notes, “is one of the many Christian practices that are at odds with the dictates of our surrounding, secular culture” (p. 9).  However unpopular, however, it is perennially right, for it “is God’s very best for us.  God created sex for marriage and that is where it belongs” (p. 15).  

Real Sex, in many ways, is a profoundly personal story, for Winner transparently details her less-than-chaste pre-Christian life.  Coming to faith in Christ, however, led to conviction for sin (while receiving the sacrament of penance in an Episcopal church) and (through many struggles) commitment to chastity.  Her position, importantly, is deeply rooted in the scriptures and traditions of the church.  Neither a subjective personal opinion nor a simplistic citing of selected Bible verses, it’s an ethic grounded “in the faithful living of the fullness of the gospel” (p. 30).  

What’s needed in our day is a faithful explication of this gospel.  Everyone seems to freely talk about sex.  Talk is truly cheap when it’s about sex!  All the talk, all the sex education, all the “liberated” TV and seminar discussions of a “new morality” have de-sanctified and vulgarized what ought to be one of the most precious of human interactions.  “The problem is not that we talk about sex,” Winner says.  “The problem is how we talk about sex” (p. 63).  We need some “straight talk,” refuting the secular lie that “sex can be wholly separated from procreation” (p. 64).  Christians need to carefully consider the ethical ramifications of contraception.  For “if contraception invites us to be carefree, it also encourages us to be people who think we can control and schedule everything including the creation of our families, down to the month, down to the week.  And, most important, it invites us to be people who have utterly separated sex from procreation” (p. 65).  

Talking straight also leads us to reject the lie that “how you dress doesn’t matter” (p. 70).  Modesty and appropriate clothing cannot be severed, though we have, as a society, increasingly failed “to discern why clothes matter, and what clothing is appropriate when” (p. 71).  Winner argues that “casual Fridays” reveal much about our “confusion about clothes.  Professional workplaces have dress codes in part because managers know that how we dress shapes our behavior” (p. 74).  This is powerfully evident in students’ classroom behavior, where casual clothing encourages “a casual attitude, a slouching, an irreverence.  But it is not my students’ fault.  Some of their teachers wear blue jeans to class, so why should students dress up?  They are, as it were, just following suit” (p. 76).  So too, she says, casual dress (e.g. flip-flops) in church leavens a flippant attitude towards God and the holy.  

Christians in earlier eras understood this.  Granted, some preachers erred in their single-minded criticism of women’s fashions.  But both men and women need to take seriously their appearance.  “There is,” she argues, “a certain power in modest dressing, an assertion that though my body is beautiful, I am more than a sex object designed for your passing entertainment.  But the power of dressing is also the power of narrative.  For our clothes tell stories, and it would be naïve and irresponsible to pretend otherwise” (p. 77).  

The “straight talk” Winner desires means the church must stop telling lies about sex!  Despite much rhetoric, it’s not true that premarital sex will “make you feel lousy.”  In truth, it often feels great.  But feelings, of course, are often deceiving!  And the Father of Lies generally “whispers to us about the goodness of something not good.  It makes distortions feel good” (p. 89).  What the church ought to clarify is this:  “premarital sex is bad for us, even if it happens to feel great.  In other words, sexual sin is not subjectively felt” (p. 90).  That women dislike sex, that sex is somehow dirty, are other lies occasionally promoted within Christian circles.  

Supported by “straight talk,” Christians can live chastely.  Winner explains why fornication—and pornography and masturbation as well—must be rejected if one practices chastity.  It takes self-discipline and the support of a strong faith community, but it’s possible to follow God’s will in this area.  And it’s truly what’s good for us.  “That people have sex outside marriage is understandable; we fornicate for the same reason we practice idolatry.  Idolatry carries in it the seed of a good impulse—the impulse to worship our maker.  Idolatry is that good impulse wrongly directed to disastrous ends.  Like idolatry, fornication is a wrong reflection of a right creational impulse.  We were made for sex.  And so premarital sex tells a partial truth; that’s why it resonates with something.  But partial truths are destructive.  They push us to created goods wrongly lived.  To borrow a phrase from Thomas Cranmer again:  they are ultimately destructive to our selves, our souls and bodies” (p. 121).  

As archives and witnesses in formerly Communist lands have become available to historians, we better understand the significance played by Western intellectuals promoting the Soviet agenda.  In Double Lives:  Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals (New York:  Enigma Books, 2004; completely revised and updated), Stephen Koch details the tangled web of espionage and subversion spun by one of Lenin’s and Stalin’s premier agents, Willi Munzenberg, a German communist who “covertly directed propaganda operations in the West” (p. 5).  He mastered both the arts of spreading propaganda and enlisting fellow travelers, shaping public opinion through various “Popular Front” mechanisms to garner support for the Soviet position.  

“He wanted to instill the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to criticize or challenge soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility” (p. 15).  He did so by co-opting public opinion in democratic countries and then denying he’d actually done so.  “He organized in all the media:  newspapers, film, radio, books, magazines, the theater.  Every kind of ‘opinion maker’ was involved:  writers, artists, actors, commentators, priests, ministers, professors, ‘business leaders,’ scientists, psychologists, anyone at all whose opinion the public was likely to respect” (p. 15).  

He shrewdly manipulated scores of left-leaning intellectuals, fellow travelers whom he disdainfully called the “innocents.”  He played upon man’s hunger for righteousness, for an inner sense of making the world a better place.  “More than perhaps any other person of his era, he developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century;  the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is politics” (p. 20).  Thus the “lost generation” of the ‘20s—writers and artists such as Lincoln Steffens and John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht and a cadre of Hollywood screenwriters and wealthy donors cultivated by another Soviet agent, Otto Katz—were Munzenberg’s primary targets.  

Hemingway, an “unchallenged celebrity” in the ‘20s and ‘30s, was as important to Munzenberg as Andre Gide (the French novelist).  His literary style, providing a model for scores of writers, elicited an acclaim from all quarters.  He became “the most influential moralist of the Word in his era,” and, consequently, “all three of the principal leaders of the Hollywood Popular Front—Lillian Hellman, Dashiel Hammett, and Dorothy Parker—were writers whose prose vulgarized Hemingway’s style” (p. 309).  Hemingway’s prominent role in supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War opened the door for Soviet apparatchiks looking for propaganda opportunities.  He was not himself a communist, only one of the “useful idiots” so easily manipulated by Munzenberg’s men.  

Since the Bolsheviks saw America as a serious threat to their endeavors, it was necessary to awaken a “worldwide anti-Americanism,” to “instill a reflexive loathing of the United States and its people” (p. 41).  Alienated intellectuals, looking for righteous causes, were easily massaged by Munzenberg’s ministrations.  The celebrated Sacco-Vanzetti case, for example, was almost wholly his creation, and he worked through a committee led by Gardner “Pat” Jackson, a prominent liberal of the day who persuaded Marion Frankfurter, the wife of Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor who later became a Supreme Court Justice, to rally support for the accused killers.  When Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, Professor Frankfurter wrote an impassioned defense of them that appeared in the Atlantic and was widely circulated to assail the injustices of the American judicial system.  

During the ‘20s and ‘30s Munzenberg also promoted pacifism in the West, seeing it as a way to weaken (and if possible disarm) the democracies that might oppose the USSR.  Communists, of course were not pacifists!  They relished “class war” and attained their dictatorial goals through violence.  But they knew how “peace” and “non-violence” appeal to idealists, so they frequently worked through “innocents” intent on making the world a paradise through good intentions.  Bolsheviks such as Munzenberg thus easily found cooperative mouthpieces for their cause among Quakers and like-minded liberal Christians who made opposition to all war an item of faith.  

The world changed dramatically when Hitler seized power in the ‘30s.  Munzenberg fled his native Germany and found refuge in Paris, where he continued his subversive activities, promoting the Soviet agenda.  The Reichstag Fire in Berlin, for example, generated an enormous propaganda war as various factions (both Nazi and Communist) were blamed and political advantages gained in the aftermath.  Sitting in exile in Switzerland, Thomas Mann, the great German novelist, concluded that “’in the final analysis the origin of the fire may itself remain as mysterious and elusive as the intellectual and subjective line dividing National Socialism from communism.  As I see it, the unconscious meaning of the trial lies in its exposure of the closeness, the kinship, yes even the identity of National Socialism and communism.  Its “fruit” will be to push to absurdity the hatred between the two camps and their idiotic determination to annihilate each other, when in fact there is no need for such enmity.  They are kindred though divergent manifestations of one and the same historical situation, the same political world, and are even less separable than are capitalism and Marxism.  Symbolic outbreaks like the Reichstag going up in flames are, we sense, even if we cannot prove it, their joint work’” (pp. 132-133).  

In England, Munzenberg’s apparatus drew wealthy, privileged students into the “Cambridge Conspiracy.”  Similar work was done in “every country of interest to the Bolsheviks” (p. 180).  In America, recruiters targeted Ivy League colleges.  Elite, gifted youngsters easily adopt an “adversary” or “counter-cultural” stance regarding the “establishment” that enables them to live so comfortably.  This adversary culture appeals especially to “vigorous intellectual and artistic” youngsters who relish a radicalism that seems to represent “freedom and truth.”  They want to “tear aside the bourgeois façade” and stand strong for “the deepest truth” ever known (p. 189).  Thus young men in England such as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, Americans including Alger Hiss and Michael Straight (whose family owned the New Republic magazine) were recruited for the communist cause.  Young women too played an invaluable role.  Ella Winter served as Felix Frankfurter’s secretary at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, “guided the steps” of her first husband, the famous muckraker, Lincoln Steffens, and ultimately became “one of the most trusted party agents for the West Coast,” working with special effectiveness within the Hollywood community.  

Given their elite standing, these youngsters naturally enjoyed easy entry into the highest realms of government, academe, the media and arts.  And they were ordered to ever support the Soviet cause and undermine Western democracies.  They were, of course, never to admit this.  Willi Munzenberg’s widow, Babette Gross (an invaluable source for this book) remembered these agents’ approach:  “You do not endorse Stalin.  You do not call yourself a Communist.  You do not declare your love for the regime.  You do not call on people to support the Soviets.  Ever.  Under any circumstances” (p. 249).  Rather:  “You claim to be an independent-minded idealist.  You don’t really understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break.  You believe in open-mindedness.  You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here on our own country.  You are frightened by the racism, by the oppression of the workingman” (p. 250).  But in fact, all of these agents took their orders from Moscow!  

In time Munzenberg, along with virtually all veteran Bolsheviks, fell from Stalin’s favor.  He managed to avoid execution through various shrewd maneuvers, but he died (hanged under mysterious circumstances) soon after German forces invaded France in 1940.   Double Lives reads much like a mystery novel, but it deals with some of the most historically significant currents of the 20^th century.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Martin Amis is both the son of a highly acclaimed novelist and himself an accomplished writer.  In Koba the Dread:  Laughter and the Twenty Million (New York:  Hyperion, c. 2002), he ponders the incredible slaughter of millions of innocent Russians by Joseph Stalin and the equally pernicious failure of Western intellectuals to discern and denounce it.  His famous father (Kingsley) was for years a “fellow traveler,” supporting the USSR until he became disillusioned with Stalin.  Troubled by this, Martin tries to look back and summarize the enormity of the Stalin’s genocide and simultaneously fathom the complicity of his English enablers.  

Most of Amis’s information comes from the path-breaking historical work of Robert Conquest (a family friend) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who have documented how ruthlessly Stalin followed this prescription:  “’Death solves all problems.  No man, no problem’” (p. 57).  Murder, on a mass scale, marked his regime and explained his lengthy reign.  But the value of this work is not its information, which has been widely available for decades.  What Amis provides, in a non-systematic way, is insight into the support Stalin enjoyed around the world, for it was his “ideology” that justified his atrocities.  Thus the same intellectuals who staunchly condemned the Nazis often defended the Bolsheviks.  

As Orlando Figes explained it, “’the Bolshevik programme was based on the ideals of the Enlightenment—it stemmed from Kant as much as from Marx—which makes Western liberals, even in this age of post-modernism, sympathise with it . . . even if we do not share its political goals; whereas the Nazi efforts to “improve mankind,” whether through eugenics or genocide spat in the face of the Enlightenment and can only fill us with revulsion’” (p. 85).  In fact, the Bolsheviks were far worse than the Nazis.  “Nazism did not destroy civil society.  Bolshevism did destroy civil society” (p. 88).  Thus Germany, her basic institutions and traditions intact, recovered quickly following WWII, whereas Russia still welters in the wasteland created by Lenin and Stalin.  

One mark of that growing wasteland appeared early as Russians quickly failed to reproduce themselves.  “Since 1917 the Bolsheviks had systematically undermined the family.  Divorce was encouraged (to achieve it you were simply obliged to notify your spouse by postcard); incest, bigamy, adultery and abortion were decriminalized; families were scattered by labor-direction and deportation; and children who denounced their parents became national figures, hymned in verse and song” (p. 154).  Cultural chaos so quickly consumed the land that within two decades the regime decreed abortion illegal and Stalin suddenly appeared as a champion of traditional family life!  Then the Germans invaded and WWII began and Stalin revoked many of the restrictions on the Russian Orthodox Church, appealing to the ancient religion in his war with the Nazis.  

He did so, however, with a severely depleted military.  Amazingly, his brutal purges in the ‘30’s led to the following reductions:  “3 of the 5 marshals; 13 of the 15 army commanders; 8 of the 9 fleet admirals and admirals Grade I; 50 of the 57 corps commanders; 154 of the 186 divisional commanders; 16 of the 16 army political commissars; 25 of the 28 corps commissars; 58 of the 64 divisional commissars; 11 of 11 vice commissars of defense; 98 of the 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviet” (p. 175).  That the officer corps, generally the least political of the public servants, would be so savagely dismembered bears witness to the nature of Stalin’s tyranny.  “One soldier likened the purge to ‘a Tartar massacre,’ but even this understates the case.  As Roy Medvedev put it:  ‘Never has the officer corps of any army suffered such losses in any war as the Soviet Army suffered in this time of peace” (p. 175).  

Thanks to the American and British armies, of course, the Axis powers were defeated and Stalin laid claim to much of Eastern Europe as well as reestablished his dictatorship following WWII.  And strangely enough, Amis says, Stalin proved to be “an extremely popular leader” (p. 212).  Millions were sent to their deaths in the camps, millions were deliberately starved, but the leader remained popular!  He did so by manipulating public opinion.  He, like Hitler, mastered all the means of propaganda, the “hypnotic power of mass ideology” (p. 213).  “The love for Stalin:  it is very nearly the saddest story of all” (p. 213).  

But why Western intellectuals joined the Russian masses, loving Stalin, remains a mystery to Amis.   He describes, but fails to explain this phenomenon.  I suspect he lacks the philosophical and theological acumen to rightly diagnose the powerful allure communism posed for intellectuals who had abandoned the principles of Western Civilization.  But he does at least divulge the disillusionment many, like him, now share as they reflect upon the past century.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

One of the few journalists to clearly see—and honestly report—conditions in Stalin’s Russia was Malcolm Muggeridge, whose novel, Winter in Moscow (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdman’s Publishing Co., c. 1987; first published in 1934 by Eyre and Spottiswoode, London), was based upon his observations as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in 1932 and 1933.  Reared in a socialist home, married to the niece of Beatrice Webb (an eminent socialist who routinely praised and defended the Bolsheviks), Muggeridge arrived in Russia with great expectations, confident he’d find the dreams of himself and his father fully fulfilled.  He even considered becoming a Russian citizen and devoting the rest of his life to the socialist cause.  But he’d barely arrived before he was overwhelmed with the reality of what had happened, the misery of the “workers’ paradise,” the illusions of Marxist slogans.  So instead of writing an encomium to the endeavor, he drafted one of the most searing indictments of the Soviet system written in his era.  In his introduction to this edition, Michael D. Aeshliman notes that “A.J.P. Taylor, one of the finest English historians of our time, wrote in 1965 that this novel was ‘probably the best book ever written on Soviet Russia’” (p. vii).  

The novel is loosely structured around a corps of English visitors’ and journalists’ activities in Russia.  Representative of the thousands of “political pilgrims” who toured the country was a woman, a devout feminist, who was delighted “to find that so many things she believed in had been put into practice—co-education, sex equality, humane slaughterer, family allowances, communal kitchens” etc. (p. 24).  Another, an Anglican clergyman, “by nature mild and gentle,” who had no faith in either the Thirty-Nine Articles or the Virgin Birth he officially upheld, sought a better world in Russia and agonized over the “intolerance and cruelty” so amply evident under Stalin’s rule, but he took comfort in the fact that every home “had its wireless, and its gramophone, and its shelves of revolutionary literature” (p. 38).  Coming to Russia for a brief visit, knowing what they wanted to see and seeing what the tour guides chose to show them, they generally returned home with glowing testimonials for the communist system.  

Western journalists too gave Stalin support.  They were epitomized by a man Muggeridge called “Jefferson”—clearly the celebrated, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who (while millions of peasants died) merely acknowledged that there was “’a shortage of some districts’” that might in “’certain very rare’” cases be called “’a famine.  But, as I said in a piece I sent a few days ago, you can’t make omelettes without cracking eggs’” (p. 90).   Years later, Muggeridge would say that Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism” (p. xix).  Evaluating another journalist, who solemnly praised Duranty, Muggeridge said:  “The old man embodied in himself the character of his age.  He was the decadence of European civilization getting a last sensation out of the establishment of Asiatic barbarism in Russia.  Lines on his face traced out a record of the world to which he belonged.  Co-education in creases round his nose.  Votes for women wrinkling his forehead.  Pacifism the slobber of his lips” (p. 93).  He was, in short, “bloated, inflated, but with no core” (p. 93).  

One of the characters, Wilfred Pye, representing Muggeridge, “had a simple mind” and went to Russia intent on finding the truth.  “Obviously, Pye thought, I must see where people eat; how they eat, and what they eat” (p. 127).  He’d always sided with the poor and dispossessed, and Bolshevism seemed to him a fully admirable movement.  “It was the future; hated by all save the far-seeing and the pure of heart; hated by all save Pye and his great English Liberal newspaper” (p. 128).  To him the helpless were always righteous, the impoverished were always victims, and the pursuit of justice required the transformation of society.  He was proud of standing up for the “weak and oppressed, [and] when he looked at a map it was not countries he saw, but wrongs sprawling across five continents” (p. 128).  

Arriving in Russia expecting to find a paradise, Muggeridge had to do little more than stroll about Moscow to see its refutation.  “He saw hunger everywhere” and wondered how the Dictatorship of the Proletariat could feed him and Western journalists while allowing masses of Russians to go hungry.  Determined to see more of the country, he traveled extensively and discovered, to his horror, that famine was everywhere and, worse yet, “it was organized from within” (p. 138).  Peasants were dying in what had once been the bread basket of Russia, and it was clearly an officially-orchestrated starvation of the people.  As Pye analyzed it, he realized that:  “Marxism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’s religion, is the most urban religion that has ever existed.  It was born in underground printing presses, in dingy lodgings and cafes and hotels.  Its prophets were wanderers from one European capital to another whose dreams, like themselves, were rootless” (p. 138).  In the deepest sense, the Bolsheviks warred against the “earth; with the nature of things and people; with life itself, that their embodiment involves” (p. 139).  In the service of an abstract ideology, Marxists easily denied both God and Reality and sought to destroy all created goods that challenged their agenda.  

Muggeridge rapidly discarded his illusions in the face of the monumental evils he witnessed.  One of his characters finally concluded:  “Every tendency in himself, in societies; the past and the future; all he had ever seen or thought or felt or believed, sorted itself out.  It was a vision of Good and Evil.  Heaven and Hell.  Life and death.  There were two alternatives; and he had to choose.  He chose” (p. 226).  He chose to deal honestly with reality rather than blind himself with ideological rhetoric, to tell the truth rather than toe the party line.  Walking about the decaying city of Moscow, he realized that the “litter of ideas in his own mind was the litter of ideas outside. Rootless, unreligious ideas.  What a blight they had been!  Piling up into shadows whose darkness cloaked a reversion to savagery.  Piling up into a Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (p. 232).  Under the Bolsheviks utopia had triumphed, consummating “all the dingy hopes that have echoed and re-echoed over Europe for a century” (p. 234).   

When he tried to publish what he saw in Russia, his articles were disbelieved and he was called a liar.  The Guardian fired him and when he returned to England he was blacklisted and virtually unemployable!  Only celebrations of Stalin were allowed!  But Winter in Moscow was published and remains for us one of the few truthful descriptions of what life was really like in those years.  

Raymond A. Moody’s Life After Life:  The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death (New York:  Bantam Books, c. 1975) was my first introduction to a scholarly investigation of near-death experiences.  Moody earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Virginia in 1969 before going to medical school and becoming a psychiatrist.  The book takes a tentative, but respectful attitude towards the subject that makes it compelling.  

We human beings have forever pondered death’s mystery.  “There is a graveyard in Turkey which was used by Neanderthal men approximately 100,000 years ago.  There, fossilized imprints have enabled archeologists to discover that these ancient men buried their dead in biers of flowers, indicating that they perhaps saw death as an occasion of celebration—as a transition of the dead from this world to the next.  Indeed, graves from very early sites all over the earth give evidence of the belief in human survival of bodily death” (p. 13).  In accord with this ancient inclination, when Moody, rather inadvertently, began to hear reports from people who claimed to have “died” and lived to tell of it, he was motivated to study some 150 such accounts.  

The people he studied (mostly through personal interviews) came from remarkably different “religious, social and educational backgrounds” (p. 15).  Nevertheless, they had remarkably similar “experiences” (p. 21).  Crafting a composite of such experiences, summing up his findings, Moody urges us to envision the following:  

     A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor.  He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel.  After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval.

     After a while, he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition. He notices that he still has a “body” but one of a very different nature and with very different powers from the physical body he has left behind.  Soon other things begin to happen.  Others come to meet and to help him.  He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before—a being of light—appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events of his life.  At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace.  Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives.

     Later he tries to tell others, but he has trouble doing so.  In the first place, he can find no human words adequate to describe these unearthly episodes.  He also finds that other scoff, so he stops telling other people.  Still the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his views about death and its relationship to life (pp.  21-23).  

Though there is a commonality to the reports, some of the book’s statements are most memorable.  In the section on “ineffability,” for example, one woman said:  “’Well, when I was taking geometry, they always told me there were only three dimensions, and I always just accepted that.  But they were wrong.  There are more.  And, of course, our world—the one we’re living in now—is three-dimensional, but the next one definitely isn’t.  And that’s why it’s so hard to tell you this.  I have to describe it to you in words that are three-dimensional.  That’s as close as I can get to it, but it’s not really adequate’” (p. 26).   Recounting his out-of-body experience, a “young informant” said:  “I was sort of floating about five feet above the street, about five yards away from the car, I’d say, and I heard the echo of the crash dying away.  I saw people come running up and crowding around the car, and I saw my friend get out of the car, obviously in shock.  I could see my own body in the wreckage among all those people, and could see them trying to get it out.  My legs were all twisted and there was blood all over the place” (p. 37).  Most of the witnesses say they entered into another body, different from but decidedly resembling their earthly body.  It’s a “spiritual body,” weightless and time-transcending, but still a body!  “A person in the spiritual body is in a privileged position I relation to the other persons around him.  He can see and hear them, but they can’t see or hear him” (p. 46).  

Virtually all the people encountered a bright, warm, loving being of light.  Some think it was an angel.  Others think it was Jesus.  Subsequently, they all considered loving others and gaining knowledge the great purpose of life on earth.  Many who had little interest in such things come back to life with a deep determination to spend the rest of their days loving and learning, activities that will flourish in the hereafter.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Howard Storm’s My Descent into Death:  A Second Chance at Life (New York:  Doubleday, c. 2005) is a fascinating near-death account.  A university art professor, a “self-sufficient” Stoic with no religious inclinations, Storm was in Paris in 1985 when he suffered a life-threatening perforation of his stomach, much like a burst appendix.  He’d hoped for artistic fame.  To become a “great artist” he’d been willing to sacrifice everything, and everyone.  “I didn’t believe in life after death.  When you died, it was like having the switch turned off.  That was it, the end of your existence, finished, just darkness” (p. 23).  

But that belief all changed in a moment!  His wife rushed him to a hospital, but it was a week-end when most of the staff enjoy their leisure, so he lay, untended for some 10 hours.  Lying there, he confesses to giving up on life:   “Saying to myself, ‘Let it end now,’ I closed my eyes.  . . . .  I knew that what would happen next would be the end of any kind of consciousness or existence.  I knew that to be true.  The idea of any kind of life after death never entered my mind because I didn’t believe in that kind of thing.  I knew for certain that there was no such thing as life after death.  Only simpleminded people believed in that sort of thing.  I didn’t believe in God, or heaven, or hell, or any other fairy tales.  I drifted into darkness, a sleep into annihilation” (p. 9).  

What followed was not “annihilation” but a “descent” into another realm of Reality, a descent that totally transformed Howard Storm.  He was aware of moving about the hospital, seeing others while being unseen.  He saw himself, looking like a “wax replica of me” (p. 112), lying unconscious under a sheet in the bed.  Leaving the hospital, he encountered various people, taking a journey, feeling deep despair and hopelessness.  He was surrounded by creatures who “were once human beings” (p. 17) who jeered and screamed and attacked him.  Immersed in darkness, he experienced some of the horrors of Hell.  

All alone, lying on the ground, under lethal attack, something inside him urged him to pray, to ask God for help.  As a child he had prayed, as taught in Sunday school.  But for years he had never even though of praying.  But his world had changed!  So he tried to remember how to pray, cobbling together fragments from the Lord’s Prayer, the 23d Psalm, and “God Bless America.”  

    To my amazement, the cruel, merciless beings tearing the life out of me were incited to rage by 

my ragged prayer.  It was as if I were throwing boiling oil on them. They screamed at me, “There 

is no God!  Who do you think you’re talking to?  Nobody can hear you!  . . . .  But at the same 

time, they were backing away . . . .   I realized that saying things about God was actually driving 

them away.  

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

I was alone in that darkness for time without measure.  I thought about what I had done.  All my life I had thought that hard work was what counted.  My life was devoted to building a monument to my ego.  My family, my sculptures, my painting, my house, my gardens, my little fame, my illusions of power, were all an extension of my ego.  All of those things were gone now, and what did they matter?  All those things that I had lived for were lost to me, and they didn’t mean a thing (pp. 19-21).                     

Fortunately, his prayer (however feeble) delivered him.  He also remembered a song, “Jesus Loves Me,” and began singing the bits of it he remembered.  He suddenly knew how much he needed such love!  

“For the first time in my adult life I wanted it to be true that Jesus loved me.  I didn’t know how to express what I wanted and needed, but with every bit of my last ounce of strength, I yelled out into the darkness, ‘Jesus, save me.’  I yelled that from the core of my being with all the energy I had left.  I have never meant anything more strongly in my life” (p. 24).  Then came the Light, brilliant and beautiful!  But “it wasn’t just light. This was a living being, a luminous being approximately eight feet tall and surrounded by an oval of radiance.  The brilliant intensity of the light penetrated my body Ecstasy swept away the agony.  Tangible hands and arms gently embraced me and lifted me up.  I slowly rose up into the presence of the light and the torn pieces of my body miraculously healed before my eyes.  All my wounds vanished and I became whole and well in the light.  More important, the despair and pain were replaced by love.  I had been lost and now was found; I had been dead and now was alive” (p. 25).  

The Light was Jesus.  “I was unconditionally loved and accepted.  He was King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Christ Jesus the Savior.  Jesus does love me, I thought” (p. 25).  Never before had he been so loved.  

Still more:  “This person of blinding glory loved me with overwhelming power.  After what I had been through, to be completely known, accepted, and intensely loved by this beautiful God/man of light surpassed anything I had ever known or could possibly have imagined.  I had called out to Jesus and he came to rescue me” (p. 26).  Jesus delivered him.  

In the presence of Jesus and the angels, Storm then went through an honest “life review,” presenting the often painful and disgraceful aspects of his past.  He realized how all of us, in time, will be judged.  The truth about us will be revealed.  Storm realized that only God’s love will save us.  But unless we live in that love and live rightly we will not fare well in the Judgment.  Full of questions, Storm  wondered “what happens when we die,” He learned:  

When people die, they don’t know that they have died.  The world looks the same to them, and they feel completely alive.  Whatever trauma a person experienced in dying is only a vivid memory.  The suffering is gone and the person feels physically better than he or she ever did in life.  

     There is disturbing confusion, however, because the individual cannot interact with other people or his surroundings.  No one can hear or see him.  Nothing responds to her touch.  Most people are not ready to die and can’t accept the fact they have died.  Some people are ready and are relaxed and eagerly anticipate the reunion with loved ones who have preceded them.  This is the condition that makes their transition beautiful and advances them toward heaven. 

     After death, you will be receptive to God’s love or you will not, depending on how you have lived your life.  Only God knows what is in a person’s heart.  How we judge people has little to do with how God knows us.  We judge people by their actions, and God knows us by our intentions.  God knows every deed, every thought, and every motivation that we have.  If we have loved God, loved the one that God has sent to us, loved our fellow person, and loved ourselves, we are drawn toward God.  If we have not loved God, God’s son, our fellow person, or ourselves, we are repulsed by God’s love.  There is nothing in between.  Every person knows inside whether or not he or she has lived lovingly.  God knows (pp. 49-50).  

Hopefully, Storm says, while still on earth we will come to terms with God’s will and walk His way.  We need to ever remember, he says, that:  

This life that God has given us is a precious gift. We are to use it wisely because this opportunity to prepare ourselves for heaven is given only once.  No one will ever be given this exact opportunity again.  God does not bestow the gift of life on us frivolously or arbitrarily.  We are given this life opportunity to prepare ourselves for our continuing spiritual growth in heaven.  Failing to use our life opportunities wisely and lovingly is a rejection of God.  Throwing one’s life away is a rejection of God and is not preparation for heaven.  The choices we make in this world determine whether we are candidates for heaven or not.  In each of us we know whether we are going to heaven or not.  If you don’t know the answer, you are in big trouble and need to ask God to show you the way immediately Fortunately God wants us to come HOME, and God has sent us someone to show us the way home. His name is Jesus (p. 59).

Jesus is the answer!  He alone is the “way, the truth, and the life,” the “resurrection and the life.”  Faith in Him brings us eternal life.  That Storm met Jesus in his near-death experience has made all the difference in his life.  And though he wanted to stay with Jesus and the angels, he was sent back to earth with a mission.  So he awakened in the Paris hospital, discovering that against all odds he had survived 10 hours with a medical problem that should have killed him much earlier.  Surgeons finally operated and the perforated stomach mended.  Somewhat miraculously, he managed to leave the Paris hospital and fly home to the U.S, where he soon found himself in another hospital, fighting double pneumonia, a collapsed lung, hepatitis, and a horrendous fever.  This resulted in a weeks-long, excruciating time.  Again his life was at risk.  And yet the realities he’d earlier encountered were sustained.  

Several times during this period, when I was awake, believing that I would die soon, an angel came into the room.  The room would fill with radiant white light, and the most beautiful figure of a luminous angel would appear by my bed. This happened only when I was awake, and I was amazed by the angel’s appearance.  The angel would assure me that I was going to live and that God was watching over me.  I would immediately feel better physically and emotionally. The angel never came when someone else was in the room and always left before someone arrived.  A nurse would often come into the room immediately after an angel had departed.  I would be sitting up in bed, tears running down my face, and I would tell her that an angel had just been in the room.  The nurses would always laugh and tell me to get some rest; I knew they didn’t believe me.  I also knew that the only reason I was alive was because the angels were helping me heal (p. 93). 

Storm suffered much pain in the hospital, but he discovered that prayer often brought more comfort when drugs (which he generally refused to take so as to stay alert to what was taking place).  In praising Him, in vowing to serve Him in any way possible, he found peace.  He also began to read—especially the Bible, which became a fountain of truth.  Rightly read, listening for God to speak through His written Word, tells us what we really need to know.  The writings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton became a special blessing.  In time he visited Merton’s grave in Kentucky.  While praying there, a young man came into the cemetery and gave him a copy of Merton’s poems.  He read, appreciatively, a poem.  He then noticed that the young man was gone.  He asked a friend who was with him if he had seen him, and he had.  A bit later, “when I was looking at photographs of Thomas Merton, I saw a picture of him when he was in his early twenties.  He looked just like the young man in the cemetery!” (p. 119).  Given his awakened sensitivities to the eternal world, Storm says:  “I believe the spirit of Thomas Merton had visited me and consoled me at his grave.  He reassured me that he understood my struggle of living in limbo between heaven and earth” (p. 119).   Just as he discerned Merton’s presence, so too he senses angels, God’s special messengers, in our world.  He finds God speaking to him through nature and other people as well.  Indeed, rather than astounding us with their glory and power, “Angels sometimes appear to us as people” (p. 137).  

After regaining his health, he attended United Theological Seminary and received a Master of Divinity degree.  Much that he studied, however, he had already learned from Jesus and the angels in his near-death experience.  He began to tell his story and attending church, finding a home in a United Church of Christ.  Before long, his university work became less and less interesting, and he embarked upon a pastoral ministry in that denomination.    

In her laudatory introduction to this book, Anne Rice says, “This is a book you devour from cover to cover, and pass on to others.  This is a book you will quote in your daily conversation.  Storm was meant to write it and we are meant to read it.”  That’s high praise from a highly successful writer and recent convert to Christ.  And she sums up nicely my commendation as well.  There are some underlying theological issues I could criticize (Storm is, after all, a minister in perhaps the most liberal of American denominations), but as long as one simply listens to his story it is most persuasive and edifying.  

# # #

It’s always wise, when hearing politicians speak, to disregard their promises and heed their past performances, to ignore rhetorical flourishes while examining historical actions, to dismiss their theatrics while looking for evidence regarding their character and integrity, to look for a record of leadership, decisiveness, and action.  Thus I’ve found three books about Barack Obama that help put his political career in context.  All three are, in various ways, critical of him, so they must also be read critically.  

Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man:  Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (New York:  Free Press, c. 2008) provides a probing analysis of the man.  (He may prove a poor prophet, however, in declaring Obama “can’t win”!).  Steele has longed pondered questions of race in America and written some fine books, including The Content of Our Character and White Guilt:  How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.  He sympathetically identifies with Obama inasmuch as he too has a black father and white mother (though his parents preserved an intact family in Chicago).  Like Obama, he went through an intense struggle as a young man, aching to racially define himself.  He too espoused radical views in his college years and invested several years thereafter to “community organizing.”  So he’s deeply sympathetic with Obama and openly admires the candidate’s “remarkable political talent” as well as the fact he is “elegant as well as eloquent” (p. 12).  But Steele finally finds Obama a deeply flawed man who ought not be trusted with this nation’s leadership.

Barack Obama “embodies a great and noble human aspiration:  to smother racial power in a democracy of individuals” (p. 8).  He exemplifies the best hopes of the Civil Rights movement launched by Martin Luther King, Jr.  This explains the excitement that has accompanied his rapid rise to prominence.  “It doesn’t matter that he sometimes goes along with race-based policies, or that he made his own Faustian bargain with affirmative action” (p. 8).  What matters—especially to multitudes of Americans encumbered with “white guilt”—is the fact that at last there has appeared a person who will signal the end of the long saga of injustice derived from slavery.  There has been, since the ‘60s, “a moral evolution away from racism so transformative that” millions of us desire “to see a truly qualified black person in the White House” (p. 11).  

To evaluate this particular black person, however, we must take seriously Obama’s personal quest for his father, an obsession that permeates his autobiographical Dreams from My Father.  This has been, Steele notes, the “lifelong preoccupation for Obama” (p. 17) that explains his “determination to be black, as if blackness were more an achievement than a birthright” (p. 18).  Hungry for a heroic sire, his youthful fantasies began to crumble in his 20s when he met his half-sister, the daughter of his father’s first wife, who shattered his dreams.  He was forced to admit that “the man Barack had always pictured as a formidable patriarch” was in fact “a figure of pathos, a man of some talent beset by petty weaknesses and the sort of arrogance that covers an inner faithlessness” (p. 22).  

Yet he would not detach himself from his father’s blackness—he wanted to don his racial identity, and that meant embracing his Kenyan ancestry.  But it also meant, strangely enough, mingling an African  identity with one crafted by African American writers such as Malcolm X and W.E.B. DuBois.  Steele understands Obama’s hunger.  “For racially mixed blacks, the search for ‘authentic’ blackness is also a search for personal credibility and legitimacy” (p. 28).  Still more:  it’s a hunger to belong to a people, a  community, that grants worth and purpose to one’s existence.  “The ache at the center of Dreams from My Father is this seemingly permanent ache of not belonging” (p. 34).  Thus some men (such as Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright) embrace varieties of “black nationalism.”  Steele himself felt its lure, but in time he saw that “kitschy images of ‘blackness’” would never help him “build a successful life in the modern world” (p. 37).  He understood, while working in the community in East St. Louis, IL, what Obama failed to learn later in Chicago, that he was indulging in a “gesture of identification—the act of going along with something that we may not entirely believe in to show our identification with our group and our militant disregard for mainstream society.  It is a way of belonging” (p. 37).  

This belonging “demands a solidarity (transparency) very similar to what totalitarian societies demand.  It expects many gestures of identification—a liberal politics and a Democratic Party affiliation among them” (p. 38).  Finding his identity in his blackness, rather than relying on his own abilities, Barack Obama fell into trap, a double bind that makes him a “bound man” (p. 38).  He could (like Tiger Woods) have developed his skills and entered the mainstream of American society.  He had that option.  But “Obama’s racial quest springs from a personal angst, not from an oppression in society” (p. 44).  This was markedly evident when he attended Occidental College, where he carefully chose to associate with black activists, “’Marxist professors and structural feminists’” (p. 45).  He particularly dissociated from “blacks like himself—blacks from integrated backgrounds and good preparatory schools who are at ease in the American mainstream” (p. 47).  Indeed, he spoke harshly of a fellow student who chose assimilation rather than segregation.  Obama “needs to ‘be black.’  And this hunger—no matter how understandable it may be—means that he is not in a position to reject the political liberalism inherent in his racial identity.  For Obama, liberalism is blackness” (p. 52).    Thus in Chicago he joined “a South Side black church with a ‘Black Value System,’ focused on ‘Black freedom,’ the ‘black community,’ and the ‘black family.’  In this church, the adjective ‘black’ is a more consistent theme than any of the nouns it modifies.  It is invoked as an atavism, a God-given specialness that is thought meaningful in itself” (p. 53).  

Having examined Obama the man, Steele then considers the society within which he functions.  Throughout American history, blacks have mastered the art of “masking.”  In earlier times it took the form of a smiling, compliant, entertaining Louis Armstrong.  “Today, racial victimization is the face we blacks want broader America to see because it entitles blacks and obligates whites” (p. 68).  This is the mask the two Obamas effectively wear.  As victims, blacks have found both “bargaining and challenging” useful strategies, emboldened by “a largesse of moral authority that whites simply can never have” (p. 74).  Bill Cosby effectively negotiated “the classic bargainer’s deal” with The Cosby Show.  Challengers, like Al Sharpton and petulant rap singers, militantly assert that “whites are incorrigibly racist until they do something to prove otherwise” (p. 77); they make militant demands and exact payments.  

Then there are, Steele explains, “iconic Negroes” like Oprah Winfrey, bargainers who embody “the highest and best longings of both races” (p. 86).  “Iconic Negroes are absolution for whites and redemption for blacks” (p. 87).  “Barack Obama,” Steele insists, “is nothing if not an iconic Negro” (p. 98).  His amazing rise to prominence is largely attributable to this fact.  “What white Americans deeply long for is a bargaining relationship with black America” (p. 104).  They dislike being called racists and want to be granted moral legitimacy as tolerant people.  “It is Barack’s Obama’s extraordinary good luck that the arc of his life and political career has intersected with this great hunger” (pp. 104-105).  But the source of his success also renders him a “bound man.”  He’s in a bind because he’s succeeding while betraying the very people he claims to represent.  It’s difficult to follow the “one sacrosanct admonition:  whether bargaining or challenging, you must never ever concede that only black responsibility can truly lift blacks into parity with whites” (p. 110).  Neither blacks nor whites want to mention it, but “black responsibility is the greatest—if not the only transformative power available to blacks” (p. 111).  When Bill Cosby recently asserted this truth, liberal wrath rained down on from all sides.  Unwilling to join Cosby in telling the truth, Barack Obama is a “bound man.  He cannot be himself without hurting himself politically” (p. 118).  Though both blacks and whites find him an attractive solution to this nation’s racial injustices, he “cannot serve the aspirations of one race without betraying those of the other” (p. 126).  

Thus, Steele thinks, “it was masking, not convictions, that brought Barack Obama forward in American life.  He is decidedly not a conviction politician.  His supporters do not look to him to do something; they look to him primarily to be something, to represent something.  He is a bound man because he cannot be two opposing worldviews at the same time—he cannot grant whites their racial innocence and simultaneously withhold it from them” (p. 133).  In the final analysis, he lacks substance; he lacks a fixed compass; he lacks presidential character.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

In The Case Against Barack Obama:  The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate (Washington:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., c. 2008), investigative reporter David Fredosso tries, like a prosecutor, to set forth evidence that will convince a jury (the American electorate) that Obama ought not be elected President.  Ample notes (largely drawn from Chicago newspapers and national periodicals) carefully document his presentation.  He urges us to calmly compare Obama’s rhetorical claims with his deeds.  What the record shows, he argues, is that Obama has done little more than speak and write and display an attractive persona that lacks much substance. 

  Fredosso first considers Obama’s claim to be a “new” kind of politician, a reformer intent on constructive change.  His speeches certainly move the multitudes, but his activities in Chicago prove the contrary.  He has never supported reform nor wrought change.  He has always worked, hand-in-glove, with the entrenched political machine, ever endorsing Mayor Richard M. Daley and supporting (even as a United States Senator) the notoriously corrupt Strogers (father and son) who helped run the political machine in Cook County.  The inner circle of Obama’s campaign staff are veteran Chicago operatives (including a handful of enormously wealthy women).   His campaign finance manager, Penny Pritzker, is a billionaire who inherited, among other things, her family’s Hyatt hotel chain.  (In her role as a banker, incidentally, she advocated the sub-prime lending strategy that bankrupted the Superior Bank, a strategy that now stands revealed as a prime reason for our nation’s financial troubles).  And Mayor Daley’s hand deftly moves the Obama campaign via his veteran publicist, David Axelrod.   

Much the same must be said of Obama’s years in Springfield as a state senator.  There he linked up with Emil Jones, the senate president, who quickly envisioned for Obama a route to the U.S. Senate.  Jones incarnates “the patronage system” (p. 28) that distinguishes Chicago politics—using tax money to distribute grants and subsidize all sorts of programs (and relatives) that perpetuate one’s career.  To boost  Obama, Jones took important legislative bills drafted by other senators (especially when they funded  powerful unions, such as the Service Employees International) and gave them to Obama.  This was called “bill-jacking” by disgruntled legislators, but it enabled Obama to claim responsibility for a litany of bills in the senate.  In fact he simply benefited from Emil Jones’ largesse and ambitions.  And once he entered the U.S. Senate Obama repaid his benefactor by earmarking millions of dollars for some of Jones’ pet projects.  In 2007, Obama also “earmarked $1 million for the University of Chicago Medical Center.  The vice president of this center is his wife, Michelle Obama, who received a pay raise of nearly $200,000 at just the time when Obama became a senator” (p. 96).  

In Washington, D.C., Fredosso shows, Obama has followed the Illinois pattern.  He is “still not a reformer.”  For example, he talks much about education.  He declares, in grandiloquent terms, his resolve to make things better for kids.  In The Audacity of Hope, he lamented that students in a Chicago high school were denied opportunities to take science and language classes because there wasn’t enough money.  But the school’s teachers averaged $83,000 a year!  Chicago’s public schools spend over $10,000 a year on every student!  Money is not the problem!  Yet Obama blatantly refuses to identify and work to reform the real problem:  ineffective teachers and administrators and negligent parents.  And that’s because he has ever cultivated a close alliance with the Chicago Teachers Union and enjoyed its lush and fervent support.  

Since I consider abortion this nation’s gravest sin, I was most interested in Fredosso’s documentation of Obama’s record as a resolute abortion rights’ advocate.  Running for President, he has made every effort to obfuscate the issue, but facts are stubborn things and he is clearly the most pro-abortion candidate ever to run for President.  He supports partial birth abortion.  He has promised (when speaking to Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund in 2007):  “’The first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act’” (p. 203).  Thus his very first act—the thing he apparently thinks most important for him to do as President—will be to “effectively cancel every state, federal, and local regulation of abortion, no matter how modest or reasonable” (p. 204).  He wants tax monies to subsidize abortions—thus increasing the millions of dollars Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers rake in from public coffers and then in return lavishly support politicians such as himself.  

Obama is also one of the few Democrats (in the party devoutly committed to abortion on demand) to oppose saving the lives of babies who survive abortions.  When an effort was made to enact legislation, identical to the federal “Born Alive Infants Protection Act,” in the Illinois state senate, only Obama spoke against it.  When the same bill was subsequently introduced, he both spoke and voted against it.  Though all abortions end a human being’s life (and are thus forms of infanticide), allowing living babies to die most graphically illustrates this reality.  In his recent book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama danced around the issue and hoped to convince readers otherwise, but (as Fredosso’s many pages of documentation Fredosso prove), Obama cannot escape the fact that he endorses all forms of abortion.  

Fredosso examines Obama’s radical associates in Chicago, his financial ties with Tony Rezko, his religious affiliation with Jeremiah Wright, and various other activities—aspects of his career that I’ll not address but certainly of concern to anyone trying to see how exactly the man has acted during his brief political career.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Jerome R. Corsi’s The Obama Nation:  Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (New York:  Threshold Editions, c. 2008) is even more harshly critical of the man.  Obama supporters have savagely attacked Corsi, mainly engaging in ad hominum attacks.  As an active member of the Constitution Party he certainly represents a political fringe, and he has in the past defended dubious positions.  In this book he looks for and mainly presents only the negative items he thinks disqualify Obama for the presidency, so one must carefully check his assertions.  Yet he earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard, rigorously researches the documents, and has published a great deal on various subjects.  His text is studded with footnotes citing a wide variety of sources (including accurate citations of Obama’s own books) and I did not find Corsi significantly differing, in factual matters, from the other sources.   What stands out is Corsi’s animosity.  As he puts it, he fears Obama’s election would establish an “Obama Nation” wherein “leftist politics, driven by the cult of personality” would result in an “abomination” (p. x) for this country.  

Corsi is especially helpful in sorting out Obama’s biography—filling in the gaps, identifying the persons, exposing the errors, documenting the fabrications, explaining the issues so often blurred in Dreams from My Father.  He delves into the senator’s father’s life, interviewing his relatives in Africa and finding articles in Kenyan and British sources that present him in a much less favorable light than does his son, who fails to mention, for example “how many wives his father had, or how many half-brothers and sisters he has from different mothers, whether the women were married to his father or not” (p. 21).  Corsi further examines Obama’s continued involvement in Kenyan politics, actively supporting one of the presidential candidates (a radical socialist and fellow Luo tribesman) in the 2006 election.

He digs into Obama’s Indonesian years, interviewing people who knew him, locating TV documentaries and newspaper sources found only in Jakarta.  Since both his father and his stepfather were  Muslims, and since young Barack attended a Muslim school for two years as well as a Catholic school for another two, Corsi notes those influences.  But he concludes that young Obama seemed almost oblivious to religion of any sort, no doubt following his mother’s example.  He refuses to question Obama’s claim to be a Christian.  He locates some of Obama’s Honolulu high school associates, explaining that the man he calls “Ray” in his autobiography is actually Keith Kakugawa—a  half African-American, half Japanese man who identifies himself as “mixed race,” and claims to have never been the “prototypical black guy” who prominently appears in Dreams from My Father. 

Corsi also helps us understand what Obama’s career as a “community organizer” in Chicago involved, providing a perspective rather different from Obama’s own account.  He was hired by Jerry Kellman, who ran a Saul Alinsky-inspired organization in Chicago that wanted to “’convert the black churches of Chicago’s South Side into agents of social change’” (p. 129).  This ultimately led Obama to contact Jeremiah Wright and join his congregation.  Obama’s many connections with Tony Rezko are clear, if not well publicized by the major media.  Rezko, one of Obama’s first clients when he began his career as a Chicago lawyer (the man Hillary Clinton accurately called a slumlord) “helped bankroll Obama in five election runs” (p. 153).  A FBI informant “often saw Obama coming and going at Rezko’s offices” and the two apparently talked frequently on the phone.  One Chicago journalist called him Obama’s “’political Godfather’” (p. 154). 

In return for supporting various Democrats in Chicago, Rezko received, within a decade, “more than $100 million” from state and local governments to “rehabilitate thirty buildings in Chicago” (p. 160), supposedly to provide housing for the poor.  The work he did, however, was so shoddy that most of the buildings soon proved uninhabitable.  Eleven of these buildings were in Obama’s district, but “there is no record that Illinois state senator Obama ever so much as placed a speech in the record objecting to the public-housing practices perpetrated in his district by Tony Rezko, let alone calling for investigation of Rezko and his business practices” (p. 164).  Indeed, the friendship flourished, and the Rezkos recently helped the Obamas purchase their current home in an up-scale section of Chicago.  Now the taxpayers’ money is gone and the decaying buildings are empty and Rezko has been sentenced to prison.   Though Obama claims to have had only passing connections with the convicted felon, the proven connections between the men should give voters pause.  

Corsi also devotes many pages to William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, who were close to Obama in the past two decades.  In his opinion, all these associations (and particularly their cumulative weight) raise too many red flags for voters wanting a good President.  This is particularly true because he thinks in this case “the candidate is the message.”  Obama has done very little, though he certainly makes alluring promises.  The facts, Corsi insists, render Obama’s rhetoric (however impressive) self-promoting and vacuous.    

# # #

In 1883, William Graham Sumner, a Yale professor, noted:  “As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X.  Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X, or in the better case, what A, B, and C shall do for X . . . .  What I want to do is look up C.  I want to show you what manner of man he is.  I call him the Forgotten Man.  Perhaps the appellation is not strictly correct.  He is the one who never is thought of . . . .”  This forgotten man, Sumner concludes, “works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays. . . .”  

Sumner’s phrase serves as the title for Amity Shlaes’ recent work:  The Forgotten Man:  A New History of the Great Depression (New York:  HarperCollinsPublishers, c. 2007).  For too long, she argues, fans of Franklin Delano Roosevelt have forged the story of the Depression to portray him in heroic terms.  But in truth he effectively prolonged it.  Following a decade of genuine prosperity (the 1920s) the stock market crashed in 1929.  Yet this event in itself “did not cause the Depression.  It was a necessary correction of a too-high stock market, but not a necessary disaster” (p. 5).  What caused the Great Depression was the loss of faith in the free market and consequent government intervention—begun by Herbert Hoover and continued by FDR—that acerbated and deepened the nation’s economic woes.  (In the last presidential debate, incidentally, Barack Obama declared we were in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and John McCain replied that Obama’s economic proposals would, like Herbert Hoover’s, exacerbate it.  Though Obama probably exaggerated the gravity of the crisis, McCain was surely right in identifying Obama’s announced economic agenda as a rerun of Hoover’s.)  

To set the stage, Shlaes portrays the positive aspects of the “Roaring ‘20s.”  Presiding over the prosperity of the nation was President Calvin Coolidge, a “country lawyer” committed to limited government and individual liberty.  Aiding Coolidge was his Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, whose tax policies “reduced the national debt from $24 billion to $16 billion” (p. 37).  Unemployment dropped to “5 percent in the year he was elected.  From there it dropped to 3.2 percent in 1925 and then into the twos and ones” (p. 39).  On the other hand, his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover—the “Great Engineer”—envisioned and agitated for a more activist government.  Of Hoover, Coolidge quipped:  “’that man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad’” (p. 38).  

Despite the nation’s prosperity, discontent flourished in “progressive” circles.  Illustrative of this was a 1927 USSR-bound “junket” of intellectuals, including:  Rexford Guy Tugwell, a Columbia University economist who would significantly shape the New Deal; Paul Douglass, a University of Chicago labor scholar; and Stuart Chase, an economist deeply influenced by Henry George and his “single tax” proposals, who wrote a book entitled A New Deal in 1932.  Joining them were labor union officials, ACLU lawyers, and noted socialists.  They called themselves an “unofficial American trade union delegation” and endeavored to cultivate friendly ties with Joseph Stalin and his Communist regime.  They were not, of course, Stalinists themselves.  But as idealistic “progressives”—or, in some instances, “radicals”—they longed for a more egalitarian world, a society favoring workers rather than dollars.  Thus, Tugwell lamented:  “’Life in the 1920s was often frustrating for those of my political persuasion—political progressives or radicals’” who were “’all but regarded as social misfits’” (p. 61).  

When the market crashed in October 1929, these “misfits” were poised to make radical changes in the country.  Though hardly himself a radical, the recently elected President, Herbert Hoover, shared their conviction that dramatic governmental action was needed to rectify the economic downturn.  He had written a book entitled American Individualism, but it was hardly a defense of what earlier generations had understood by that term.  Indeed he “disdained laissez-faire economics” and refused to make a fetish of private property (p. 34).  Within a month he poured $423 million into a “public buildings program” designed to “boost the economy” (p. 91).  He then urged Congress to provide national programs for all sorts of folks.  Former President Coolidge later protested “these socialistic notions of government” (p. 94), but within a year (Shlaes argues) Hoover managed to seriously damage the economy “on three fronts: by intervening in business, by signing into law a destructive tariff, and by assailing the stock market” (p. 92).  The 1930 protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed despite the opposition of one thousand of the nation’s premier economists, proved especially disastrous, shutting down international trade at precisely the moment it was most needed.  Playing the populist, blaming Wall Street for the nation’s woes proved popular—especially as FDR picked up on the litany—but did little more than provide an outlet for anger.  

When Roosevelt won the 1932 election, he reminded the nation that, as the Harvard historian  Frederick Jackson Turner had declared, the endless opportunity of the western frontier had ended and it was now “time for the ‘princes of property,’ the wealthy, to share their resources.  Growth would not provide for the poor; only redistribution could” (p. 135).  So he brought to Washington D.C. a corps of “reformers,” his Brain Trust of elite university professors committed to economic experiment and change.  The currency was instantly inflated by discarding the gold standard—“an act of social redistribution” whereby $200 billion was transferred from creditors to debtors.  Within two years of his election, income tax rates for the wealthy soared to 75 per cent, quickly quenching most all entrepreneurial activity.  He launched a host of federal agencies—the “alphabet soup (quipped Huey Long) of CCC, WPA, NRA, AAA, WPA, et al.—designed  to provide employment and infuse cash into the system.  

Naturally these populist endeavors placated the populace.  FDR enjoyed great popularity as a spokesman for the people, a leader who was getting great things done.  He appealed to the masses with soaring, utopian rhetoric, declaring:  “’We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world’” (p. 299).  Unfortunately he, like Hoover, abjectly failed to deal effectively with the depression.  Massive governmental intervention paralyzed the economy, doing nothing to restore it to health.  His fireside chats persuaded the folks that he cared for them, but his economic policies insured their prolonged suffering.  “Where the New Deal was faltering economically, it was gaining politically.  Roosevelt’s radio voice was succeeding” (p. 210).  His popularity fueled his love of power and prodded him to propose “packing” the Supreme Court with justices more amenable to his agenda—a rash act that ignited his opponents and stalled some of his momentum.  

Joining the opposition was New York’s venerable Al Smith, who’d run as the Democratic presidential nominee in the 1928 election.  Addressing a large crowd in the nation’s capital, “Smith argued fiercely against Roosevelt’s ‘arraignment of class against class’; of the brain trust he said ‘the young Brain Trusters caught the socialists in swimming and ran away with their clothes.’  Most outrageous of all to Smith was the rise of professors, the way Roosevelt had ignored others—himself, especially included—and constructed such a revolution with the brain trusters” (p. 265).  The brain trusters themselves, such as Raymond Tugwell, began departing FDR’s administration following his re-election in 1936.  Their ideas had been tried and found wanting.  Unemployment endured.  Stocks had not regained their value.  By 1938, it was becoming apparent, even to Democrats, that government intervention had sucked the life out of the private sector.  

The economy recovered, quite simply, when the nation was plunged into WWII.  “Roosevelt hadn’t known what to do with the extra people in 1938, but now he did:  he could make them soldiers” (p. 381).  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Jim Powell anticipated many of Amity Shlaes’ positions in FDR’s Folly:  How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (New York:  Crown Forum, c. 2003).  The author is a historian who studied under Daniel Boorstin and William McNeill—two of the greatest 20^th century American historians—at the University of Chicago.  He is now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and is thus openly aligned with its libertarian, laissez faire economic philosophy.  

Powell begins by noting that despite FDR’s many initiatives during his first two administrations, “the medium annual unemployment rate was 17.2 percent” (p. vii).  Living standards for the American people regained pre-depression levels only after WWII.  The President did, however, triple taxes during the ‘30s.  He imposed “higher personal income taxes, higher corporate income taxes, higher excise taxes, higher estate taxes, and higher gift taxes.  . . . .  Ordinary people were hit with higher liquor taxes and Social Security payroll taxes” (pp. ix-x).  Amazingly, in 1942, FDR informed Congress:  “’No American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than 25,000 a year.’  The Treasury Department submitted to the House Ways and Means Committee a memorandum calling for a 100 percent tax on incomes over $25,000” (p. 245).  Everyone paid more.  No one prospered.  But government expanded, federal employees proliferated, and FDR garnered powers unimagined by the nation’s Founders.  He failed to end the Great Depression, but he radically altered the nature of the United States.

To set the stage for his analysis, Powell asks, in his first chapter, “How Could Such Bright, Compassionate People Be Wrong?”  Among those bright people was Stuart Chase, the author of A New Deal (1932) and one of the “progressives” who had visited the USSR in 1927.  Fondly remembering his visit to Stalin’s paradise, Chase declared that communists possessed a “’burning zeal to create a new heaven and a new earth’” and wondered “‘Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?’” (p. 3).  Though Roosevelt himself had little interest in any ideology, he surrounded himself with folks like Chase and easily “absorbed the spirit and tactics of class warfare” (p. 6) whenever it suited his purposes.  Thus, in dealing with the nation’s agricultural problems, he relied on Rexford Tugwell, who had for years advocated the central-planning, collectivist socialism promoted by Scott Nearing.   

When he became President in 1933, Roosevelt basically followed Herbert Hoover’s agenda, confident that government spending would end the depression.  To provide his New Deal for the American people, various federal agencies were chartered to dictate policies and provide financial subsidies for farmers and businessmen, labor unions and power companies.  Taxes soared (despite tax revolts around the country), the dollar was devalued, and the banking industry was significantly changed.  “The New Deal,” Powell says, “was the American version of the collectivist trend that became fashionable around the world,” quite similar to developments in Europe, such as Mussolini’s Fascism, wherein, as Mario Palmieri said, “’Economic initiatives cannot be left to the arbitrary decisions of private, individual interests.’”  Rather than encourage free enterprise,  “’The proper function of the state in the Fascist system is that of supervising, regulating and arbitrating the relationships of capital and labor, employers and employees, individuals and associations, private interests and national interests. . . .  More important than the production of wealth is its right distribution, distribution which must benefit in the best possible way all the classes of the nation, hence the nation itself.  Private wealth belongs not only to the individual, but, in a symbolic sense, to the State as well’” (pp. 76-77).  

But despite all its supervising and regulating, despite all the subsidies hurled at the helpless, the New Deal failed to bring the nation out of the depression.  Powell details, with both statistics and anecdotes, the abject failure of FDR’s central planning experiments.  Unemployment persisted.  Incomes languished.  Poverty deepened.  Tragically, “New Dealers assumed that individual rights, private property, and economic liberty were obstacles to recovery, but they are essential” (p. 166).  Despite the ugly aspects of the Industrial Revolution, living standards for ordinary people had soared to unimaginable heights in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, while FDR’s New Deal, suffused with frequently primitivist socialist ideology, sought to harness (or reverse) the economic growth of free enterprise capitalism.  

“The Great Depression,” Powell concludes, “was a government failure, brought on principally by Federal Reserve policies that abruptly cut the money supply; unit banking laws that made thousands of banks more vulnerable to failure; Hoover’s tariffs, which throttled trade; Hoover’s taxes, which took unprecedented amounts of money out of people’s pockets at the worst possible time; and Hoover’s other policies, which made it more difficult for the economy to recover.  High unemployment lasted as long as it did because of all the New Deal policies that took more money out of people’s pockets, disrupted the money supply, restricted production, harassed employers, destroyed jobs, discouraged investment, and subverted economic liberty needed for sustained business recovery” (p. 267).  

* * * * * * * * * * * 

The foremost 20^th century critics of socialism—and of central planning in any guise—were the Austrian economists Friedrich A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.  Surveying, at mid-point, the ravages of collectivism, Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom (Chicago:  Phoenix Books, c. 1944), a durable manifesto that warns, in the words of David Hume:  “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.”  Still more, citing Hilaire Belloc:  “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself” (p. 88).  Though Hayek was (by training and profession) an economist, his real concern was philosophical, and he championed, in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, the preeminent good of human freedom.  He knew, however, as Lord Action perceptively observed, that “’at all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous’” (p. vi).  

Economic freedom fueled the industrial revolution that birthed the modern world and lifted millions of men and women into an unprecedented affluence.  Economic inequities, however, prompted various socialists to propose utopian solutions—including Marxist-inspired central planning endeavors in Russia (Communism) and Germany (Fascism) that precipitated much misery.   (Hayak clearly shows why both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were thoroughly socialistic in a chapter entitled “The Socialist Roots of Naziism”.)  Parallel developments in Great Britain and the United States, while not blemished by the harshly dictatorial and genocidal policies of Stalin and Hitler, have (inasmuch as they weakened or destroyed economic liberty) set those nations on a similar “the road to serfdom.”  This is because “the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people” (p. xiv).  Whenever people surrender themselves to the State, begging politicians to care for them, they will in time be enslaved to its policies.    

Following the unification of their country under Bismarck in the 1870s, Germans surrendered many of their freedoms to the welfare state he established decades before Hitler.  They simply followed “people of good will, men who were admired and held up as models in the democratic countries” because they sought to satisfy understandable cravings for comfort and security.  The unintended consequences of their “high ideals” and “compassionate” policies would prove highly destructive.   Self-righteously pursuing “high ideals,” enraptured with visions of “social justice,” they abandoned the “basic ideals” of Western Civilization—the commitment to individual freedom and justice shaped by the Greco-Roman, Hebrew, and Christian traditions.  Consequently, in the 20^th century, despite warnings from “some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by De Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism” (p. 13).  

This was done on behalf of perfecting the world.  While most intellectuals had abandoned any hope for eternal life in God’s Heaven, they certainly longed for a heavenly world here-and-now.  In the wake of the French Revolution, they idolized the State as the humanly-designed means to an earthly heaven.  As the great German poet Hoelderlin, noted:   “What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven” (p. 24).  Empowering the State requires collectivism, sucking away the rights and power of the individual.  “The common features of all collectivist systems may be described, in a phrase ever dear to socialists of all schools, as the deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal” (p. 56).  As Lenin declared, in 1917:  “The whole of society will have become a single office and a single facotry with equality of work and equality of pay” (p. 119).  In 1848, the year when revolutions rocked much of Europe and Marx and Engels published their “Communist Manifesto,” Alexis de Tocqueville noted that “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom” whereas “socialism restricts it.  Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number” (p. 25).  

Whereas collectivists dream grandly of a world following their agenda within which inequity and poverty have disappeared, individualists generally exhibit a down-to-earth humility, dealing realistically with both themselves and the possibilities of political structures.  Thus they support laws that restrict individual wrong-doing, whereas collectivists seek to draft laws to organize everyone into a perfect world.  Similarly, individualists want to punish theft whereas collectivists want to eliminate poverty.  Individualists favor traffic laws that prevent accidents whereas collectivists want to shove everyone into mass transit systems.  

In sum:  “The choice open to us is not between a system in which everybody will get what he deserves according to some absolute and universal standard of right, and one where the individual shares are determined partly by accident or good or ill chance, but between a system where it is the will of a few persons that decides who is to get what, and one where it depends at least partly on the ability and enterprise of the people concerned and partly on unforeseeable circumstances” (pp. 101-102).  We can take responsibility for our lives, or we can ask the State to care for us and discover, in time, that the State will also order us about.  

That this was taking place in England and America alarmed Hayek.  He was especially concerned with the “end justifies the means” ethics of a growing number of intellectuals, such as E. H. Carr, who defended making “morality a function of politics” and rejected any higher, absolute source of truth and goodness.  Carr further supported what he labeled “’a revolution against the predominant ideas of the nineteenth century:  liberal democracy, national self-determination and laissez faire economics’” (p. 188).  Professors like Carr prospered in Hitler’s Germany, Hayek asserts, and the fact that they hold prestigious positions in England and America should be considered alarms in the night.  As is his classic, The Road to Serfdom!

To better understand this year’s two presidential nominees, I’ve read their books.  John McCain has written four—all co-authored by Mark Salter.  Such recognition of a co-author is remarkable in itself, for most politicians use “ghost writers” who are not credited for the book’s production.  McCain tells the story of his early years in Faith of My Fathers (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 1999).  Beginning with a candor that continually marks him, and noting that Victor Frankl stressed our uniquely human freedom to choose how we respond to various situations, McCain laments that he too often chose “carelessly, often for no better reason than to indulge a conceit” (p. vii).  Indeed he looks back over his life with many regrets!  Fortunately, he often managed to choose wisely, and finds in his story “a balance between pride and regret, between liberty and honor” (p. vii).  

The book’s title reveals its message, for McCain writes proudly about his father and grandfather—both military heroes, four star admirals, indelible prototypes for their progeny.  They were also Christians, following the Episcopal tradition, though they were hardly models of piety.  McCain’s grandfather, John Sidney, was a pioneer of naval aviation who displayed great courage, both physical and moral, and exuded a certain “irreverent, eccentric individualism” (p. 17).  He played a major role in America’s Pacific theater during WWII and stood beside General Douglas MacArthur when the Japanese surrendered on the battleship Missouri.  Senator McCain’s father, John Sidney, Jr. (a “small man with a big heart”), found certain doors closed to him because of his stature and chose to become a submariner, serving with great distinction in WWII.  Moving up the ranks he became, in time, the commander of all naval operations in the Pacific during the Vietnam War.  Though neither man was physically much present in young McCain’s life, since they were off to sea for extended periods, they were both powerfully present in his mind as he determined to follow their footsteps.  There’s no search for personal identity for him—he knows who he is.  He’s a McCain!  And he wants to honor his name.

After devoting one-fourth of the book to his fathers, McCain tells his own story, quite often in self-deprecating ways.  He was an easily-angered “strong-willed child” who tested his mother’s patience.  In time he became what she called a “hell-raiser” in high school and college.  He managed to graduate from elite institutions—Washington D.C.’s Episcopal High and the U.S. Naval Academy—but he laments largely wasting those years in youthful follies.  He’s obviously an intelligent man, but school routines (apart from athletics) were never his forte.  Graduating fifth from the bottom of his class from the Naval Academy, he launched his career as a Navy flyer.  “My early years as a naval officer,” he laments, “were an even more colorful extension of my rowdy days at the Academy” (p. 153).  Apparently the only thing he took seriously was the art of flying—and that he did reasonably well!  

Suitably trained, he went off to war in 1966, and the last half of the book details his years in Vietnam.  He first showed his courage when a fire swept the flight deck of his aircraft carrier.  He then joined the crew of the U.S.S. Orishany, flying missions over North Vietnam.  One-third (38) of his fellow pilots were killed or captured.  McCain himself was shot down during a bombing run over Hanoi.  He was seriously wounded and then survived both his largely untreated injuries and the atrocious conditions and periodic tortures of a prisoner of war.  Yet, while he describes his own injuries and beatings, much of his book celebrates others—his fellow POWs, his companions in prison.  He grants that his father’s position led the Vietnamese to give him special treatment at times.  But he also explains why he refused to trade on his father’s renown to secure the early release that was offered him.  

Though readers such as I easily see him as a courageous “hero,” the image he draws in his book is more of a survivor who, bolstered by the support of his buddies, managed to endure until he was finally freed.  He learned that his individualistic temperament, his “faith” in himself, fared poorly in prison.   “During the worst moments of captivity,” he says, “keeping our faith in God, country, and one another was as difficult as it was imperative” (p. 253).  Now and then—as when McCain took the lead in holding a worship service on Christmas, or when he tells about a Vietnamese soldier whose Christian commitment led him to treat him kindly, or when he mentions praying while suffering—one glimpses McCain’s Christian faith.  But generally he seems to have found his strength in his comrades rather than religion.  

Having read this account, I’ll never again see McCain, moving awkwardly, unable to raise his arms, without remembering the terrible injuries he incurred while serving his country.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * *

McCain and Salter followed up the first autobiography with a sequel, Worth the Fighting For:  A Memoir (New York:  Random House, c. 2002).  Returning from Vietnam, McCain went through a painful process of physical rehabilitation, determined to resume his naval career.  Few believed it possible, but he did so and rose through the ranks to significant command positions in a few years.  But as the years passed he realized that neither his temperament nor his deteriorating physical condition justified finishing his life as a career officer.  Ever longing to serve his country, he decided (after watching, as the Navy’s liaison officer with the Senate, the political processes in the nation’s capital) to devote himself to politics.  In particular, having studied the Vietnam War—and  knowing that politicians, not soldiers, lost it—he wanted to make sure men such as Jimmy Carter would not continue to undermine the nation’s military forces.  He also saw the positive influence of politicians such as Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Democratic Senator from Washington with whom he often traveled and came to deeply admire) and John Tower (Republican Senator from Texas), both of whom he counted as close friends and mentors.  

So in the early ‘80s McCain resigned from the Navy and moved to Arizona with his new wife, Cindy, determined to pursue public service.  (McCain’s first marriage collapsed after he returned from Vietnam, and he unfailingly blames his “selfishness and immaturity” for that failure, praising his first wife whenever she is mentioned).  He quickly involved himself in the state’s Republican Party and managed to get elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982.  In Washington, he supported the conservative agenda of President Ronald Reagan, but he also developed a close friendship with Mo Udall, one of Arizona’s most powerful (and liberal) politicians, who greatly helped him better understand his new home state’s political nuances.  Ever ambitious, when Senator Barry Goldwater retired, McCain campaigned for his seat and successfully won the 1988 election, serving thenceforth in the U.S. Senate.  

McCain recounts his many endeavors and adventures, triumphs and failures as a Congressman and Senator.  He discusses his unsuccessful defense of his friend John Tower, who was denied the first President Bush’s appointment as Secretary of Defense.  Just as Democratic Senators had denied Robert Bork a seat on the Supreme Court, so too they rejected Tower’s nomination in equally spurious ways.   The Kenneth Keating affair also merits many pages in this book, for McCain was one of the “Keating Five” accused of providing favors for one of the chief culprits in the Savings and Loan collapse in the late ‘80s.  Though he was cleared of any culpability, his friendship with Keating in Arizona—and meeting with his emissaries in Washington—led to McCain’s “worst mistake in my life” (p. 246).  

In the process of recording such events, McCain sets forth some of his guiding principles.  He clearly loves his country and has devoted himself to her service.  He cares much for courage, integrity and honor, in politics as well as military service.  So he devotes several chapters to heroic figures who helped shape his personal philosophy.  His favorite film, Viva Zapata! features a heroic leader, fighting for freedom and justice.  He celebrates the baseball legend, Ted Williams, who was both an extraordinary pilot in WWII and the Korean War, as well as being perhaps the greatest hitter in baseball history.   Conversely, he looks at certain foreign relations endeavors, such as Bill Clinton’s general approach to world crises, with the clear-eyed realism of a prisoner-of-war who dismisses as laughable many of the rhetorical and theatrical gyrations of “leaders” who lack the courage to speak truthfully and act courageously.  

At the same time, he openly admits to his many failures in doing what should have been done.  “Were I to catalog all my faults,” he says, “they would run the length of this book” (p. xviii).  Such refreshing candor, for me, marks McCain as not simply a “maverick” but as an honorable  man.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

McCain and Salter have also published two books providing historical illustrations of the traits McCain admires.  Whereas I attentively read his autobiographies, I only skimmed and sampled sections of these books, though I find them important inasmuch as they reveal the values he reveres.  One assumes that Salter did the research and writing, with McCain selecting the subjects and overseeing the process.  In Character Is Destiny (New York:  Random House, c. 2005), we find 34 “inspiring stories every young person should know and every adult should remember.”  For example, we find “honor” illustrated in the honesty of St Thomas More, who was executed by Henry VIII for upholding papal authority.  Then there’s the “authenticity” of St Joan of Arc, who died for her convictions and the “dignity” of Viktor Frankl, who survived Nazi concentration camps.  We should admire and emulate the “diligence” of Winston Churchill and the “cooperation” exemplified by UCLA’s legendary coach John Wooden.

McCain and Salter’s companion volume, Hard Call:  Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them (New York:  Hatchette Book Group, c. 2007), deals with what philosophers label “prudence”—discerning what’s right in order to make the good decisions.  Thus there is a section on “Awareness,” as evident in the coaching career of Branch Rickey, who decided to bring Jackie Robinson into the major leagues as a Brooklyn Dodger.  “Foresight” marked the career of Winston Churchill in the 1930s, when he heard “the steady drummer” of impending war when most of his peer listened to the sirens of “peace in our time.  Much may be learned about great historical figures in this book.  More importantly, one senses that McCain has carefully considered what it takes to make equally great and difficult decisions.  Assuming McCain ponders the lessons presented in these two books, we have an others-oriented politician who looks to the best examples of the past as he ponders the decisions to be made for today.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Barack Obama’s first book is his autobiography, Dreams from My Father:  A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York:  Crown, c. 1995).  Publishers approached him while he was still a student at Harvard Law School, asking him to write his autobiography simply because he was the first African-American president of the Law Review!  Given a significant advance, he began writing the book as soon as he graduated, before he’d done anything other than “community organizing” in Chicago for several years in the late ‘80s.  Thus, as the title indicates, Dreams from My Father is an inner journey of self-understanding, largely defined by his utterly absent but desperately desired father, Barack Obama, Sr., and his determination to self-identify as African-American.  Thus, as Obama, Jr. acknowledges, there is a dreamlike, fictional dimension to the book—individuals’ names are changed and at times seem to be a composite of several persons.  Nor is it a chronological account of his first 30 years. He devotes one-third of the book to a trip to Kenya that is (I’ve learned from other sources) actually a fusion of two trips.  Most of the Kenyan details focus upon his family, moving about the country meeting and trying to understand his father in the light of Africa.  Lengthy dialogues are, as in novels, invented.  

Nevertheless Obama tells the story of his birth in Honolulu to an American woman and Kenyan man who met at the University of Hawaii.  Given the opportunity to pursue a graduate degree in economics at Harvard University, his father soon abandoned his wife and son and moved to Boston, where he began living with another woman, who would follow him back to Kenya and become his third wife (he  apparently never divorced his first wife, a Kenyan).  Then his mother married an Indonesian who’d come to the University of Hawaii, and they moved to his home, where Obama attended elementary schools.  That marriage also floundered, and Barack, his mother and half-sister, returned to Honolulu, where she resumed her studies in anthropology.  (While the Obama speaks respectfully of his mother, who died in 1995, the year this book was published, she is a surprisingly peripheral figure in his story.)  When she finished her studies, she determined to continue her anthropological work by returning to Indonesia, but she wanted her son to get his education in Honolulu.  He then spent his adolescence with her parents, who were in many ways the only stable “parents” he’d ever know.   His generally unemployed grandfather, who seemed to have failed at most everything he attempted while moving about the country, offered a rather constant criticism of the “system” that had failed him.  But his grandmother became a highly successful woman who rose to a significant position in a Honolulu bank and provided the income for the family.  

Obama gained entry to the city’s most elite high school, Punahau, but he seems to have majored in drugs and alcohol and basketball rather than academics.  On his own, however, he read, rather voraciously, writers such as W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X and Franz Fanon, whose radicalism shaped his budding race-consciousness.  Though he seems to have encountered little actual race discrimination (the minor incidents he mentions are quite trivial), his reading fueled a “black rage” that seemed to become part of his self-identification as an oppressed African-American (though his Kenyan father was neither American nor in the remotest sense affected by this nation’s history of slavery).  He was also quite taken by an elderly friend (and drinking buddy) of his grandfather’s, a black poet identified only as Frank (in fact Frank Marshall Davis, who was well-know for his advocacy of radical, often overtly Communist causes).  

Graduating from high school, Obama then went to Los Angeles, where he attended another prestigious institution, Occidental College.  Here his main concerns were still extracurricular, especially racial discussions and protest meetings.  He then finished his university studies in New York, graduating from Columbia University.  While there he “decided to become a community organizer” so as to “organize black folks.  At the grass roots.  For change” (p. 133).  After working a couple of years in New York, in 1985 he moved to Chicago and became a “community organizer” as an employee of a Saul Alinsky-inspired organization trying to enlist black churches in social justice endeavors.  Here Obama mastered the “change” rhetoric of Alinsky and became acquainted with Pastor Jeremiah Wright, who led one of the large churches Obama needed to support his activism.  In the first service Obama attended, Wright preached on “the audacity of hope,” and Obama decided to identify with the church after a tearful response to that message.  Disillusioned with his glaring lack of success as a “community organizer,” Obama set off for Harvard Law School, though he says little of those years. 

Indeed, though he has attended some of the nation’s finest schools, they apparently played no role in his formation.  Rather, he recounts, in lengthy detail, his community organizing efforts and his trip to Kenya, seeking to identity himself as his father’s son.  “All my life,” he says, “I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own” (p. 220).  His father, of course, had abandoned him when he was two years old, leaving no actual memories.  He had returned only once to Honolulu for a few days when his son was 12, making less than a positive impact upon him.  So there is a strange, if obviously powerful hunger in Obama’s heart for his father!  In Kenya, talking with his relatives, he began to see his father as he was:  a brilliant but deeply flawed, alcoholic man with whom he could identify but from whom he must diverge.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Barack Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope:  Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York:  Crown Publishing Co., c. 2006), sets forth his agenda as a presidential candidate.   Like his autobiography, this book is skillfully written, but it offers glowing rhetoric and pleasing platitudes rather than reasoned positions or specific proposals.  I finished the book with little understanding of his core principles, little appreciation for any philosophical depth.  He demonstrates this in his Prologue, where he says:  “we need a new kind of politics” shaped by “shared understandings that pull us together as Americans” (p. 9).  His central concern is to “begin the process of changing our politics and our civic life.  This isn’t to say that I know exactly how to do it.  I don’t” (p. 9).  Rather, he promises to “suggest in broad strokes the path I believe we should follow” while admitting his views are “partial and incomplete.  I offer no unifying theory of American government, nor do these pages provide a manifesto for action” (p. 9).  N.B.:  there’s no specificity, no substance to such statements!  Since he has, in fact accomplished remarkably little it is understandable that he has little to say about his public life.  His response to Rick Warren’s question as to when human life begins—that answer requires “a level of specificity that’s above my pay grade”—rather characterizes his treatment of a great many issues.  So The Audacity of Hope is largely distinguished by 350 pages of dexterously facile word-smithing!  

For example, he devotes a chapter to “values,” and it’s clear he values them.  But he sets forth is no objective grounding for his values in Scripture or Natural Law.  So it seems one must create his own values and then be true to them.  Perhaps the most cogent of his chapters is one on “Our Constitution,” where he identifies with and indicates he would appoint to the Supreme Court justices such as Justice Stephen Breyer, who considers the Constitution a living document needing continual judicial redefinition.  Of interest to Christians is Obama’s chapter on “Faith.”  He notes that he had virtually no religious instruction or interests as a child.  His mother was, apparently, an atheist with save-the-world utopian aspirations.  His father, though reared a Muslim, had apparently become an atheist by the time he came to Hawaii; his step-father was an occasionally practicing, rather tepid Muslim; and young Barack never really identified with either Islam or Christianity.  Then, dramatically, while attending his first service at Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ church in Chicago he found an Afro-centric, black liberationist message that suited his “progressive” concern for “social justice.”  He recalls:  “I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change” (p. 206).  

What struck me in The Audacity of Hope is its real focus:  Barack Obama.  There’s hardly a hint that he’s read anything or consulted anyone.  He seems to decide what he thinks on a purely personal, experiential basis.  His chapter on “Politics” deals not with the Founding Fathers and the American system but with his experiences and their educational value.   He talks about “the world beyond our borders” by describing the Indonesia of his boyhood, apparently convinced that the world and Indonesia are quite alike.  His understanding of Iraq was established by a day-and-a-half visit there.  He insists that racial divisions must be bridged, but it’s clear that racial identity is one of the major (and sensitive) concerns in his own life!  In short:  when I look for the “thoughts” suggested by the book’s subtitle, I found little more than sweeping generalizations, without persuasive specificity, to tell me exactly what they are.  

The assassination of John F. Kennedy profoundly changed the nature of America, James Piereson argues in Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:  How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (New York:  Encounter Books, c. 2007), for on November 22, 1963, “the cultural consensus of the 1950s began to give way to the oppositional and experimental culture that we associate with the 1960s” (p. vii).  Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s assassin, was a committed communist who openly hated America and loved Fidel Castro.  One would think his act would “have generated a revulsion against everything associated with left-wing doctrines.  Yet something very close to the opposite happened.  In the aftermath of the assassination, left-wing ideas and revolutionary leaders—Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Castro foremost among them—enjoyed a greater vogue in the United States that at any other time in our history.  By 1968, student radicals were taking over campuses and joining protest demonstrations in support of a host of radical and revolutionary causes, even going so far as to grow beards and don army jackets in emulation of Castro.  . . . .  It is one of the ironies of recent history that many of those young people who filed in shocked grief past the president’s coffin in 1963 would just a few years later embrace as political activists the very doctrines that drove Oswald to assassinate him” (p. x).  The New Left—as was evident in the Port Huron Statement, issued by the Students for a Democratic Society, and spokesmen such as Tom Hayden and Bill Ayers—espoused the same views as Lee Harvey Oswald and moved rapidly and successfully to gain control of the Democratic Party.  

To explain this anomaly, Piereson first explores the liberalism that had developed in this country during the 20^th century.  Rooted in pre-WWI Progressivism, re-oriented in a pragmatic direction by the New Deal, the liberalism of John F. Kennedy championed a big government designed to alleviate poverty and establish social justice.  It was, moreover, staunchly anti-communist.  Alongside this political and economic liberalism, however, there emerged, by 1960, a “social radicalism that . . . found adherents among the intellectual and academic classes, and in many instances among the idle rich” (p. 23).   These radicals were committed to social revolution—above all sexual liberation—and “moved into politics in order to transform education, the family, religion, relations between the sexes, and attitudes toward life generally” (p. 24).  

Kennedy, however, was a liberal, not a radical.  While in the Senate he actually had enjoyed generally good relations with Joseph McCarthy—indeed, his little brother Bobby served on McCarthy’s staff.  His great hero in politics was Winston Churchill.  But his support of the civil rights movement had elicited the enmity of “right-wing” extremists, so when he was killed “the immediate and understandable reaction was that the assassin must be a right-wing extremist—an anticommunist, perhaps, or a white supremacist, but in any case ‘a right-wing nut’” (p. 58).  When it became clear that a communist had killed him, Jacqueline Kennedy lamented that he hadn’t died for the cause of civil rights.  “’It had to be some silly little communist,’ she said.  “It even robs his death of any meaning’” (p. 59).  If, in fact, he was a martyr, it was for his role in the Cold War, but she and the Kennedy clan were determined to make him, like Lincoln (whose funeral provided the pattern for JFK’s), a martyr for social justice.  Still more, she began to craft the illusion of “Camelot” (something her husband never mentioned) to glorify him (a 20^th century King Arthur!) and the New Frontiersmen surrounding him in Washington.  

Given the fact that Lincoln was invoked by Mrs. Kennedy had her circle, Piereson wonders at the comparison and devotes a chapter to Abraham Lincoln, finding that “the effort to link the two men was based on the assumption that they had died in the same cause—an assumption that was far from being the case” (p. 61).  Lincoln represented deeply-held moral and religious convictions concerning the immorality of slavery and the idea of a nation providentially called into being as a beacon of liberty.  He was thus a “martyr” in the classic sense.  Kennedy could have qualified as a martyr if his death had been attributed to his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, demonstrating that “communism was the large cause behind the assassination and, further, that Kennedy was martyr to the ideals at stake in the Cold War” (p. 86).  

But that was not the Liberal script!  To blame communism, or Castro, for the event would involve demonizing what Liberals lionized—the collectivism of the Left.  So almost immediately JFK’s death was blamed on the American people, perversely racist and militaristic, rather than a fanatical individual, a committed communist.  Pundits, politicians and preachers joined in a great chorus of accusation.  Chief Justice Earl Warren blamed “the hatred and bitterness” infused into “the bloodstream of American life” by “bigots” (p. 92).  An editorial in the New York Times declaimed:  ‘”none of us can escape a share in the fault for the spiral of unreason and violence that has now found expression in the death by gunfire of our martyred president’” (p. 91).  Oswald and communism literally disappeared from the narrative.  Disdaining the evidence, Kennedy was made a martyr for civil rights—the victim of a vicious, violent, militaristic, right-wing “society.”  

In this they were joined by the Soviet press, which insisted “that ‘rightists’ were responsible for the assassination and that plots were being hatched to blame the crime on a communist” (p. 96).  Reactionaries, racists, Ku Klux Klanists, Birchists!  Anyone but an avowed communist must be blamed!  Kennedy court historians quickly supported this account.  “Arthur Schlesinger, in his thousand-page history of the Kennedy administration, could not bring himself to mention Oswald at all in connection with the assassination but allocated several paragraphs to a description of Dallas’s hate-filled atmosphere” (p. 98).  Sadly enough, Piereson laments, “The public did not hear in that dark time the explanation that President Kennedy had been killed for his advocacy of liberty in the face of communist tyranny in Cuba and elsewhere, or that he was a casualty of ‘the long twilight struggle’ to defend and promote freedom in the world” (p. 104).  Amazingly, “In a bizarre paradox, Kennedy’s arch-enemy, Fidel Castro, was turned into a hero in the late 1960s by many of those young people who had mourned Kennedy’s death in 1963” (p. 107).  

Thus many “conspiracy” explanations were floated to exonerate Oswald and his communist convictions!  These received considerable currency among leaders of the New Left who resolutely doubted the official report of the Warren Commission.  Books and articles, TV programs and films, discredited the official account.  Some devious plot—orchestrated by the CIA, perhaps—led to Kennedy’s death.  Skillful propaganda, such as Oliver Stone’s egregious film, JFK, swayed public opinion so that “by the mid-1970s, according to a Gallup Poll taken in 1976, some 80 percent of American were convinced that Kennedy was a victim of a conspiracy, a figure that was not wavered much since that time” (p. 126).  

To clarify the truth, Piereson devotes an illuminating chapter to Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin.  He was a high school dropout who latched on to some Marxist notions that fueled a deep hostility toward America.  He joined the Marines, tried to emigrate to Russia, and generally seemed to be the prototypical “loser” in whatever he attempted.  But he did develop some political convictions, and his “ruminations on politics sound more than a little like the theories outlined in the Port Huron Statement, the New Left manifesto written in 1962 that denounced U.S. preoccupations with communism . . . and exalted an alternative system based on a concept of participatory socialism” (p. 149).  When Kennedy was shot, both the FBI and CIA were confident that he had acted on his own, motivated by his very public communist convictions.  But powerful politicians, including the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, demanded that they mute their public statements lest they provoke Soviet hostility.  

Consequently, “Kennedy’s anticommunism, for example, was turned on its head by the radicals of the 1960s and by the liberals who eventually took command of the reform movement” (p. 204).  Replacing Kennedy’s type of liberalism was what Piereson calls “Punitive Liberalism,” designed to assail America for her failures and demand radical social transformation.  American history became a litany of oppression and abuse—women, blacks, Indians, et al. had all suffered at the hands of a deeply flawed, if not evil, nation.  Thus we have today’s liberalism, primarily committed to speaking up for the “oppressed” and rectifying proliferating “injustices” in America.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Looking at Liberalism from a different perspective, Jonah Goldberg has written Liberal Fascism:  The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York:  Doubleday, c. 2007).  Goldberg’s title, and treatment, are almost deliberately incendiary, designed to anger American liberals, who have routinely insisted that “fascism” is a conservative trait!  Here they ape “Stalin [who] stumbled on a brilliant tactic of simply labeling all inconvenient ideas and movements fascist” (p. 10).  So for clarity, Goldberg provides this definition of fascism:  “Fascism is a religion of the state.  It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people.  It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good.  It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by fore or through regulation and social pressure.  Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives.  Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy.  I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism” (p. 23).  Consequently, he points out remarkable correlations and draws intriguing conclusions that make his treatise quite thought-provoking.  Historically, the argument he endeavors to prove is this:  “Progressivism was a sister movement of fascism, and today’s liberalism is the daughter of Progressivism” (p. 2).  

Before the Holocaust, “when it never occurred to anyone that fascism had anything to do with anti-Semitism” (p. 26), many American liberals, including members of FDR’s “brain trust” such as Rexford Guy Tugwell, openly admired fascist efficiency.  To New Dealers (pragmatists to a man) success validated the truth and goodness of ideas.  Thus Tugwell praised Italian Fascism as “’the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen.  It makes me envious’” (p. 13).  What Tugwell—and earlier Progressives such as Woodrow Wilson—craved is what Goldberg calls “the totalitarian temptation—that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian cream of ‘creating a better world’” (p. 15).  That longing still marks the liberal rhetoric of “hope” (Barak Obama) and the “politics of meaning” (Hillary Clinton).  The desire to create a better world, to make sure that everyone’s cared for, to require everyone to live right, informed “the Nazi antismoking and public health drives [that] foreshadowed today’s crusades against junk food, trans fats, and the like.  A Hitler Youth manual proclaimed, ‘Nutrition is not a private matter!’” (p. 19).  

To rightly explain Fascism, Goldberg gives careful attention to Benito Mussolini.  “He was one of Europe’s leading radical socialists in arguably the most radical socialist party outside of Russia.  Under his stewardship, Avanti! became close to gospel for a whole generation of socialist intellectuals, including Antonio Gramsci” (p. 36).  He was clearly indebted to the syndicalism of Georges Sorel, and “without syndicalism fascism was impossible” (p. 36).  Interestingly enough, “Sorel was deeply influenced by the Pragmatism of William James, who pioneered the notion that all one needs is the ‘will to believe’” (p. 37).  Still more:  Sorel replicated much of Rousseau and Robespierre and the radical ideas of the French Revolution, which “was the first totalitarian revolution, the mother of modern totalitarianism, and the spiritual model for the Italian Fascist, German Nazi, and Russian Communist revolutions” (p. 38).  

One of the most prestigious and prolific contemporary biblical scholars, N.T. Wright, builds upon and nicely summarizes his earlier, magisterial work. The Resurrection of the Son of God, to set forth his position in Surprised by Hope:  Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church  (New York:  HarperOne, c. 2008).  He asks us to ponder two questions:  “What are we waiting for?  And what are we going to do about it in the meantime?” (p. xi).  This leads us to hope for eternal life (Paradise and Heaven) hereafter and commit ourselves to working within the Kingdom of God here and now.  Importantly, “the robust Jewish and Christian doctrine of the resurrection, as part of God’s new creation, gives more value, not less, to the present world and to our present bodies” (p. 26).  

Wright repeatedly stresses the centrality of Christ’s Resurrection to the early Christians.  Without that event, there simply would have been no Christians!  “Take away the resurrection, and you lose the entire New Testament and most of the second-century fathers as well” (p. 43).  “The only way we can explain the phenomena we have been examining is by proposing a two-pronged hypothesis:  first, Jesus’s tomb really was empty; second, the disciples really did encounter him in ways that convinced them that he was not simply a ghost or hallucination” (p. 58).  They believed in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, and, consequently, looked forward to their own bodies’ resurrection.  The body will be transformed through, not annihilated by, death.  It will be a different kind of body.  But like our risen Lord’s, it will still be a body!

We deal here not with science, but history and its concern for singular events, not repeatedly observable experiments.  “Historical argument alone,” Wright admits, “cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which skepticisms of various sorts have long been hiding.  The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivaled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity” (p. 64).  Still more and most importantly:  Christ’s resurrection “is not an odd event within the world as it is but is the utterly characteristic, prototypical, and foundational event within the world as it has begun to be.  It is not an absurd event within the old world but the symbol and starting point of the new world.  The claim advanced in Christianity is of that magnitude:  Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation” (p. 67).  

Wright evaluates the Christian’s hope vis-à-vis the secular optimism regarding “the myth of progress,” showing how much more realistically Christians face their world.  Marx and Darwin—and all the champions of endless development—look less and less credible as the 21^st century dawns.  Christians who know their Faith put little faith in “progress.”  They hope for the “new creation” embodied in the resurrected Jesus.  Colossians 1:15-20 and I Corinthians 15 are crucial texts Wright embraces and builds upon to demonstrate what the world really needs.  

Several pages are devoted to Jesus’ Ascension.  Rarely have I heard preached, or taught, much about this post-resurrection event.  Yet, Wright says, “some kind of belief in Jesus’s ascension has recently been shown to be not just a strange added extra to Christian belief, as has sometimes been thought, but a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong” (p. 109).  The Ascension opens to us this truth:  “Basically heaven and earth in biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter.  They are two different dimensions of God’s good creation.  And the point about heaven is twofold.  First, heaven relates to earth tangentially so that the one who is in heaven can be present simultaneously anywhere and everywhere on earth:  the ascension therefore means that Jesus is available, accessible, without people having to travel to a particular spot on the earth to find him.  Second, heaven is, as it were, the control room for earth; it is the CEO’s office, the place from which instructions are given.  ‘All Authority is given to me,’ said Jesus at the end of Matthew’s gospel, ‘in heaven and on earth’” (p. 111).  Still more, he continues:  “The mystery of the ascension is of course just that, a mystery.  It demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable:  that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time” (p. 115).  Heaven and Earth mysteriously but actually intertwine.  Heaven is not far away but near at hand.  Jesus, at the right hand of the Father, is not remote from us but immediately and always present.  Our departed loved ones are not in a distant land but right next door.  To try and imagine all this, Wright refers us to C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.  

Moving from the Ascension to the Second Coming, Wright resists some of the millennialism popular in evangelical circles while firmly reminding us that Christians do await the day when God’s purposes in history are attained and the Son can fully reign over a new creation.  For us, this will mean a “new type of bodily existence, the fulfillment and redemption of our present bodily life” (p. 147).  There is a remarkable consensus in the N.T. on this subject.  “The risen Jesus is both the model for the Christian’s future body and the means by which it comes about” (p. 149).  Wright notes that the Greek word translated “mansions,” monai, was “regularly used” to indicate a place where one briefly paused on a longer journey.  Similarly, the word “Paradise,” spoken to the thief on the cross, meant “not a final destination but the blissful garden, the parkland of rest and tranquility, where the dead are refreshed as they await the dawn of the new day” (p. 150).  As did Randy Alcorn in Heaven, Wright stresses that our ultimate Heaven is a new creation, a new earth, where we will enjoy a transformed bodily life.  When Early Christians spoke of resurrection, “It wasn’t a way of talking about life after death.  It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death.  It was, in other words, life after life after death” (p. 151).  

“This is where one of the great Easter hymns [attributed to Thomas a Kempis] gets it exactly right:

O how glorious and resplendent

Fragile body, shalt thou be,

When endued with so much beauty

Full of health, and strong, and free!

Full of vigour, full of pleasure,

That shall last eternally” (p. 154).  

Some of the earliest and best Christian thinkers—Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen—stressed bodily resurrection.  They pondered the nature of matter and spirit, wondering what, exactly, “spiritual bodies” would be like.  Early Christians discerned  that the matter in our bodies (what we label molecules and cells) continually changes while we ourselves remain the same.  There is a real physicality about us, but what we are is the inner essence, the form our bodies take.  “(C.S. Lewis, summarizing this argument, offers an illustration:  I am in that respect, he says, like a curve in a waterfall.)  This argument is repeated by Thomas a millennium after Origen and nearly a millennium before Lewis.  It’s a good argument” (p. 157).  As developed by Hugh of St. Victor, this position holds that the resurrected body “’will be immune from death and sorrow; it will be at the height of its powers, free from disease and deformity, and around thirty years old, the age at which Christ began his ministry.  It will surpass anything we can imagine, even from the accounts of Christ’s appearances on earth after his own resurrection’” (p. 158).  

Like so many of us, Wright pays “homage” to C.S. Lewis, who helps us imagine “what the risen body might be like.”  Thus in The Great Divorce Lewis “manages to get us to envisage bodies that are more solid, more real, more substantial than our present ones.  That is the task that 2 Corinthians in particular invites us to.  These will be bodies of which the phrase ‘the weight of glory,’ taken from that letter (4:17), will be seen, felt, and known to be appropriate” (p. 159).   When I first grasped the fact that  “solid” walls are mostly empty space I was able to imagine that Jesus walked through walls because his resurrected body was more dense than the walls and thus quite capable of penetrating what seems to our senses hardened stone.  We will not be disembodied “immortal souls” throughout eternity.  Rather, inasmuch as our bodies are both now and then formed by our souls they will be the same (transformed) bodies we now know.  

We will have bodies in Heaven because God’s original design was for us to rule on Earth.  This world—time and space and matter—are good.  They are flawed by sin.  But they are good.  Thus, in God’s good time, a new world (the old world restored) will come into being.  As Lewis said, in Miracles, “’the old field of space, time, matter and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop.  We may be tired of that old field:  God is not’” (p. 163).  

Wright discusses purgatory (he discounts it) and paradise (where Christians who have died rest for a time) and hell.  We need not believe in purgatory to maintain concern for our departed loved ones.  “I see no reason why we should not pray for and with the dead and every reason why we should . . . that they should be refreshed and filled with God’s joy and peace.  Love passes into prayer; we still love them; why not hold them, in that love, before God?” (p. 172).  While rather reticent regarding Hell, Wright insists the justice of God must be carried out.  “God is utterly committed to set the world right in the end” (p. 179).  And people who refuse God’s gracious offer of salvation will suffer forever without it.  “I wish it were otherwise,” he confesses, “but one cannot forever whistle ‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy’ in the darkness of” the past century’s atrocities (p. 180).  

In the second part of this book, dealing with the mission of the Church, Wright develops a major part of his thesis:  God intends to establish His Kingdom, and we’re privileged to help out while anticipating eternal life therein.  Salvation is not an exclusively individual blessing.  Nor is it something reserved for the “sweet by-and-by.  The resurrected Jesus is truly Lord of heaven and earth.  As Paul proclaimed in Athens, in Jesus “God has unveiled himself and his plan for the whole world by appointing a man to be judge of the whole world and has certified this by raising him from the dead.  This is what the resurrection does:  it opens the new world, in which, under the saving and judging lordship of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, everything else is to be seen in a new light” (p. 244).  So what are we to do, this side of the grave?  In a memorable passage, Wright says:  “I don’t know how my planting a tree today will relate to the wonderful trees that there will be in God’s recreated world, though I do remember Martin Luther’s words about the proper reaction to knowing the kingdom was coming the next day being to go out and plant a tree” (p. 209).  

Beyond planting trees, however, much that Wright says about establishing the Kingdom in our day reflects the social gospel mindset one expects of current Anglican clergymen.  He’s especially concerned that wealthy Western nations forgive debts of poorer nations.  But however one evaluates his personal convictions regarding politics, his main thesis stands:  we who await the new creation should, it seems obvious, cooperate in preserving and cultivating and developing this one.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *  

N.T. Wright focuses on “the communion of saints” in a brief treatise, For All the Saints?  Remembering the Christian Departed (New York:  Morehouse Publishing, c. 2003), wherein he discusses the saints and their enduring estate.  Parts of the book deals with controversies within the Church of England and are thus rather irrelevant to us who are not part of that communion.  But the central points (also made in Surprised by Hope) are quite persuasive and helpful.  For a quick (75 pp) read that sums up Wright’s theology, this book is useful.  He is particularly alarmed by the creeping notion of purgatory in Anglican circles.  This is not so much the Roman Catholic notion (which he also stoutly rejects), but rather the current and notably universalistic view that everyone will somehow be saved through some sort of purgatorial process.  (Note, for example, the ease with which the British public assumed Princess Diana passed from earth to heaven).  

He declares, with biblical evidence, that saints are God’s people and are all saved through the atoning work of Christ.  All saints, following death, enter Paradise, where they await the final resurrection and the triumphant establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth. He believes the departed saints “are at rest; they are conscious; . . . but they are not yet enjoying the final bliss which is to come in the New Jerusalem.  This is in line with the classic Eastern Orthodox doctrine which, though it speaks of the saints, and invokes them in all sorts of ways, does not see them as having finally experienced the completeness of redemption.  Until all God’s people are safely home, none of them is yet fulfilled.  That is why the Orthodox pray for the saints as well as with them, that they—with us when we join them—may come to the fulfillment of God’s complete purposes” (p. 24).  

So it is perfectly normal and good to feel bonded with our departed loved ones.  We rightly pray for them, but not that they move quickly through Purgatory!  “True prayer,” says Wright, “is an outflowing of love; if I love someone, I will want to pray for them, not necessarily because they are in difficulties, not necessarily because there is a particular need of which I’m aware, but simply because holding them up in God’s presence is the most natural and appropriate thing to do, and because I believe that God chooses to work through our prayers for other people’s benefit, whatever sort of benefit that may be.  Now love doesn’t stop at death—or, if it does, it’s a pretty poor sort of love!  In fact, grief could almost be defined as the form love takes when the object of love has been removed; it is love embracing an empty space, love kissing thin air and feeling the pain of that nothingness.  But there is no reason at all why love should discontinue the practice of holding the beloved I prayer before God” (pp. 73-74).  He goes on to note that Professor Sir Norman Anderson, a distinguished evangelical Anglican thinker, lost all three of his children, early in their adult lives.  And, on a very personal level, Wright relates, he came “to realize that it was perfectly in order to continue to hold those beloved children before God I prayer, not to get them out of purgatory, nor because he was unsure about their final salvation, but because he wanted to talk to God about them, to share as it were his love for them with the God who had given them and had inexplicably allowed them to be taken away again” (p. 74).  

Wright never retreats from the New Testament claim that Jesus arose from the dead with a transformed, resurrected body.  The tomb was truly empty.  The vacuous liberalism that portrayed the Resurrection as a “spiritual” experience of some sort has no credibility.  He further believes that there must be a Hell of some sort—and folks who actually go there forever.  While restrained in describing it, while hopeful in regards the numbers who will go there, Wright cannot take seriously Jesus’ words without allowing the reality of Hell.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Folks interested in the scholarly foundation for N.T. Wright’s more popular works should consult  The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press, c. 2003), the third volume of his  magnum opus (“Christian Origins and the Question of God”) which has established him among the most highly acclaimed (and orthodox) of contemporary biblical scholars.  Indeed, he builds a strong case for rejecting many of these scholars’ (Bultmann, Schillebeeckx, Crossan, et al.) positions!  For example, as a somber historian he seriously questions the existence of the mysterious “Q” document routinely cited by New Testament scholars.    Furthermore, as he carefully studies the resurrection narratives in the Gospels  he finds them remarkably different, testifying to the reality of the central event but providing unique details treasured by the writer.  Importantly, he declares:  “The idea that faith must never have anything to do with history, so popular in certain circles for many years, is long overdue a decent burial” (p. 716).

He endeavors, in this treatise, “to investigate the claim of the earliest Christians, that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead.  In order to be sure we are aiming at that target, it is important to locate their claim where it belongs, within the worldview and language of second-Temple Judaism.  In addition, since the (still recognizably Jewish) claim was quickly advanced within the wider non-Jewish world of the first, century, it is important also to map out where the claim belonged within that larger universe of discourse” (p. 28).  Consequently, he devotes considerable (nearly 200 pp!) attention to primary sources revealing the ancient world’s views on death.  Remarkably few pagans were strict materialists who denied any life after death.  Overwhelming, like Plato, they firmly believed in the immortality of the soul—but not of any resurrected body.  A few first century Jews, notably elite Sadducees, denied any resurrection, but most of them, represented by the Pharisees, devoutly believed in a final resurrection of the nation of Israel. 

Into that world came Christians proclaiming what had never been proposed—that Jesus had in fact arisen from the grave.  And with that assurance they looked forward to the resurrection of the bodies of all who believed in Him.  Faith in the bodily resurrection of Jesus was the absolute source of their faith—not an addition to a primitive spiritual ecstasy spawned by His message.  This is evident, Wright shows, in Paul’s letters, which he explores in depth (200 pp.), providing sufficient exegetical information to prove his point.  The same can be shown in the Gospels and other New Testament books, as well as a wealth of material in second century Church documents.  

What is clear, in Wright’s historical documentation, is this:  “The early Christians believed Jesus was the Messiah; and they believed this because of his resurrection” (p. 554).  And so does Wright!  After presenting all the evidence, he explains why, as a disciplined historian, he finds the early Christian claims persuasive.  “The language of ‘resurrection’ and the specific modifications within Jewish resurrection belief which we have seen in early Christianity, could only have occurred, I suggest, if the early Christians believed they had clear evidence, against all their own and everyone else’s expectations, both of continuity between the Jesus who died and the Jesus who was now alive of a transformation in his mode of embodiment” (p. 696).  Following a brief explanation of historical logic, he says:  “We are left with the conclusion that the combination of empty tomb and appearances of the living Jesus forms a set of circumstances which is itself both necessary and sufficient for the rise of early Christian belief” (p. 696).  Still more: good historians follow “inference to the best explanation, which is one variety of ‘abduction’” (p. 716).  Historians, like detectives, deal with singular bits of evidence and try to construct the best conclusion possible.  To Wright, the conclusion is inescapable:  Jesus is Lord.  And He is risen! 

# # # 

  One of the world’s most distinguished historians, Michael Burleigh, has written a two volume study detailing the struggle between religion and politics during the past two centuries.  In short, he argues, political movements (particularly the revolutionary call for “change”) have frequently taken on notably religious characteristics while religious communities have often abandoned their traditions so as to promulgate a sociopolitical gospel.  Volume one is entitled Earthly Powers:  The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York:  Harper Perennial, c. 2005).   Beginning with the French Jacobins, continuing through various 19^th century utopian socialisms, culminating in 20^th century totalitarianisms, we witness political religions wrecking havoc in the world.  

Burleigh cites a prescient statement of Frederick Voigt, a “Burkean neo-Tory” in a “remarkable [1938] book called Unto Caesar.”  Therein “he compared totalitarianisms with religions:  ‘We have referred to Marxism and National Socialism as secular religions.  They are not opposites, but are fundamentally akin, in a religious as well as a secular sense.  Both are messianic and socialistic.  Both reject the Christian knowledge that all are under sin and both see in good and evil principles of class or race.  Both are despotic in their methods and their mentality.  Both have enthroned the modern Caesar, collective man, the implacable enemy of the individual soul.  Both  would render unto this Caesar the things which are God’s.  Both would make man master of his own destiny, establish the Kingdom of Heaven in this world.  Neither will hear of any Kingdom that is not of this world’” (p. 9).  

It all began with the Enlightenment, wherein (as Carl Becker noted long ago in his little classic The Heavenly City of the 18^th Century Philosophers) thinkers such as Rousseau who sought to establish a perfect world.  As Alexis de Tocqueville explained, these intellectuals ignored the social wisdom of the ages and “’built an imaginary society in which everything seemed simple and coordinated, uniform, equitable, and in accord with reason’” (p. 44).  They imagined a world more to their liking—a world that ought to be—and sought to establish it by whatever means necessary.  Since the Catholic Church in France represented all that the intellectuals despised, it became the target of intense persecution during the Revolution.  Within five years, “only 150 of France’s 40,000 pre-Revolution parishes were openly celebrating mass” (p. 66).  Vandalized churches, the suppression of monastic orders and widespread killing of priests and the laymen who defended them, characterized the Jacobin “terror.”  

In 1793 a large-scale revolt (the Vendee uprising) occurred in western France.  Most of the anti-revolutionary “rebels” were farmers, artisans, middle class merchants outraged by the excesses of the Revolution.  The Jacobins in Paris dispatched the army, and 250,000 “fanatics” were slaughtered.  In an area near Nantes, “up to a third of the population perished, a statistic roughly equivalent to the horrors of twentieth-century Cambodia” (p. 101).  “This was the first occasion in history,” Burleigh says, “when an ‘anticlerical’ and self-styled ‘non-religious’ state embarked on a programme of mass murder that anticipated many twentieth-century horrors” (p. 97).  

Though Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy in 1815 reestablished significant elements of the Church in France, the Revolution of 1789 had unleashed turbulent currents that troubled and reshaped Europe throughout the following century.  Particularly powerful was its stimulus for Nationalism.  In Burleigh’s judgment, “Nationalism was the most pervasive and potent Church to emerge during the nineteenth century, although for most people belonging to their nation was entirely compatible with Christian, Jewish or other devotions” (p. 199).  The revolutions of 1848, the unification movements in Italy and Germany, all reveal a deep attachment to Nation, a virtual deification of the State.  One’s loyalty shifted from the Church to secular regimes.  Still more:  while encouraging some forms of sentimental piety, the Romantic movement generally incubated a deeper passion for one’s fatherland.  

Coupled with Nationalism was another equally secular outgrowth of the French Revolution—Socialism.  Discarding the Christian portrait of a Golden Age in the past from which we are fallen, secularists in the 19^th century envisioned a perfect world just ahead of us, to be inaugurated by scientific and technological breakthroughs.  Man, by nature, was considered good, not sinful.  All that was needed, to eliminate ignorance and poverty, was scientific education and social transformation.  “Saint-Simon was the ur-guru of all future technocratic solutions to social problems and one of the early lights of European central socialist planning through which so much misery was inflicted on so many.  Beyond that, he was the ancestor of those who seek global governance, world parliaments and world peace, the contemporary manifestation of the utopian legacy” (p. 224).  

Saint-Simon opened a Pandora’s box of utopian socialist fantasies, including those of Auguste Comte (the “Father of Sociology”), Charles Fourier and Robert Owen (both of whom inspired some American settlements such as Brook Farm and New Harmony, Indiana).  There was usually a “religious” aspect to such endeavors, but, as Burleigh notes:  “Sectarian millennial doctrines were effectively transformed into an ideology of social progress whose Advent would come not with the millennium described in Daniel or Revelation, but as a consequence of general subscription to the communitarian way of life” (p. 24).  Interestingly enough, he thinks that Chartism, a reform movement that significantly changed England in the 1830s, “was little more than a secularized form of Methodism” (p. 242).  

In Karl Marx’s “scientific socialism” there appeared an atheistic version of communism intent on reviving the radical “Babouvism,” named for Gracchus Babeuf, who sought to establish, reacting against Napoleon and the Directory in 1798, the “equality of goods, to be achieved by distributing the property of the rich, would guarantee paradise on earth” (p. 243).  Equality everywhere!  Though Marx himself was irreligious, many 19^th century communists blended a religious fervor with their heaven-on-earth aspirations.  To Burleigh, Marxism itself is studded with religious trimmings:  “Marxism combined the assurance that everything was operating according to the dispositions of secularised versions of higher powers with Gnostic sectarian belief that the messianic elect that had grasped these laws was morally entitled to destroy existing society (which was entirely without virtue) in order to achieve earthly paradise.  Like medieval millenarians or early modern Protestant zealots, Communists took it upon themselves to realise heaven on earth through transforming violence:  that exercise in regrettable but necessary killing which would murder eighty or a hundred million people in the twentieth century” (p. 251).  

Yet another movement, overtly politicizing religion, was “Christian Socialism.”  Many 19^th century Christians, abandoning the doctrines of the Faith, sought to transform their religion into a social ethic.  In England especially, hand-in-hand with Victorian moralism, Christian Socialism attracted a corps of converts.  “Salvationism gave way to meliorism” (p. 253).  Rather than saving souls, these Christians worked to rectify society.  “Equality, justice and plenty were not endlessly deferred to an afterlife, but were attainable in this life through faith in Jesus Christ” (p. 262).  Rather quickly, of course, the “Christian” aspects faded and a secular Socialism (evident in various Fabians and the resultant Labor Party) emerged.

There were, admittedly, significant critiques of all this.  Pope Pius IX and John Henry Newman sought to counteract liberalizing trends within the Catholic Church.  The Pope called Vatican Council I, the first General Council in 300 years.  He and the Council sought to build a fortress, resisting the “satanic conspiracy of anticlericals, freemasons and liberals” that he detested.  In Germany, Catholics were battered by Bismarck’s Kulturkampf but clung to the ancient faith and “mounted an impressive counter-campaign of civil disobedience and passive resistance” (p. 332).  Nevertheless, by the century’s end, effective conservative resistance to the revolutionary message of the French Revolution had markedly faded.

Burleigh concludes this volume with a chapter titled “Apocalypse 1914.”  In the “great war” the mixture of politics and religion stood clearly revealed.  In Germany, for example, “the immanentist and Hegelian strain in German liberal Protestant theology, in which whatever one felt powerfully enough was indicative of the developing presence of God, meant that He was manifest in the intense emotions of August 1914, directing the movements of German armies at war.  As a wartime German cleric put it:  ‘God is what the god-inspired people do’” (p. 442).  Nationalism easily usurped the catholicity of the ancient Christian creeds.  Politics became a religion; religion embraced politics.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Burleigh’s second volume, Sacred Causes:  The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York:  HarperCollins, c. 2007), brings his narrative into the present.  Impoverishment and disillusionment, as well as massive political changes, resulted from WWI.  The Russian and German and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed.  Italy’s liberal regime was displaced by Mussolini in the 1920s and Germany’s Weimar Republic barely survived the decade before falling to Hitler.  Totalitarians—all sharing a thoroughly socialistic worldview—triumphed in much of Europe.  Their totalitarianism, according to Langmead Casserly, was “’founded not only on the will to power of autocratic statesmen, but also on the will to security, and the impulse to adore and propitiate, of the mass of citizens    . . .  The pseudo-divinity of the modern state is perhaps not so much a divinity which it has arrogantly usurped as a divinity thrust upon it by the masses of insecure and frustrated people, insistently demanding some powerful and venerable object of faith and trust’” (p. 15).  

In a lucid chapter entitled “The Totalitarian Political Religions” Burleigh analyzes Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler.  While granting their many differences, he finds remarkable their  remarkable.  Before any of them appeared, a clairvoyant thinker, Semyon Frank (born into a Russian-Jewish family but converting to Orthodox Christianity in 1912), assessed “the nihilistic moralism of the Russian intelligentsia.  Of the socialists’ infatuation with the idea, he presciently declared:  ‘Sacrificing himself for the sake of this idea, he does not hesitate to sacrifice other people for it.  Among his contemporaries he sees either merely the victims of the world’s evil he dreams of eradicating or the perpetrators of that evil . . .   This feeling of hatred for the enemies of the people forms the concrete and active psychological foundation of his life.  Thus the great love of mankind of the future gives birth to a great hatred for people; the passion for organizing an earthly paradise becomes a passion for destruction’” (p. 39).  

Legions of Western Europeans were enchanted by the 1917 triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.  One of them was Bertrand Russell, who joined a delegation of the Labor Party that visited the promised land in 1920.  Witnessing what actually happened, he discerned (within 24 hours) the impact of Lenin:  “’I felt that everything I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib and narrow philosophy, and that in the process untold misery was being inflicted upon many millions of people’” (p. 39).  Groping about for an explanation of what he saw, Russell concluded:  “The war has left throughout Europe a mood of disillusionment and despair which calls aloud for a new religion, as the only force capable of giving men the energy to live vigorously.  Bolshevism has supplied the new religion.  It promises glorious things” (p. 39).

Substitute Fascism or National Socialism for Bolshevism and you have a valid explanation for much that transpired during the third and fourth decades of the 20^th century.  Italy’s Il Duce, for example, had been “a rising star of the revolutionary left-wing of the Italian Socialist Party” before the war (p. 55) whose “concern with culture and values led Mussolini to a quasi-religious conception of politics, in which a dedicated elite would help regenerate mankind from the social and spiritual ills that were commonly held to debilitate it” (p. 55).  Hitler too incorporated religious resonances in his rhetoric.  “His God was not the Christian God” (p. 101), and he was ferociously anticlerical.  But “the fundamental structure of the Nazi creed was soteriological, a redemptive story of suffering and deliverance, a sentimental journey from misery to glory, from division to mystic unity based on the blood bond that linked souls” (p. 105).  

Having demonstrated the religious aspects of political movements, Burleigh then turns to “the churches in the age of dictators.”  Almost everywhere Christians suffered.  Details differ as one moves from revolutionary Mexico to Republican Spain to Portugal and Austria, Italy and Germany, but these were difficult years for churches.  The popes were especially hard pressed to deal with political upheavals in so many different “Catholic” countries.  In 1931, evaluating dangers posed by Fascism in Italy, Pope Pius XI cautiously warned, in Quadragesimo anno,  that “there are some who fear that the State is substituting itself in the place of private initiative, instead of limiting itself to necessary and adequate assistance” (p. 166).  

His successor, Pius XII, facing the more overtly anti-Christian Nazis in Germany, decried the Nationalism which “’is perhaps the most dangerous heresy of our times’” (p. 169).  Under his guidance, Catholic bishops in Austria and Germany “were more condemnatory of Nazism than may be popularly realised” (p. 170).   Rooted in the Natural Law, Catholics were more likely to oppose Hitler’s program than Protestants, who were “generally more prone to worrying about seeming out of step with scientising modernism” than preserving the ancient faith (p. 180).  Individual Protestants such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer certainly distinguised themselves by opposing the Nazis, but virtually all Christians in Germany failed to do so. Hitler effectively suppressed church publications, drove into exile eminent intellectuals, spread lies about traditional church leaders, and subtly co-opted many nominally “Christian” Germans.  

In Burleigh’s judgment, Pius XII (contrary to being “Hitler’s Pope,” as some calumnists contend) fought Hitler as effectively as anyone.  According to an American consul, Pius XII “’opposed unilaterally every compromise with National Socialism.  He regarded Hitler not only as an untrustworthy scoundrel but as a fundamentally wicked person.  He did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, in spite of appearances, and he fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand” (p. 187).  Even Albert Einstein, no champion of Christianity, said that “’Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth.  I had never any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom.  I am forced to confess, that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly’” (p. 213).  

WWII, Burleigh says, was (like WWI) an “apocalypse.”  World-wide havoc destroyed millions of people but left a globe in tatters.  It was, to be sure, a war.  But, as T.S. Eliot said noted, it was actually  “’an enormous catastrophe which includes a war’” (p. 215).  Christians—and their churches—suffered wherever the Nazis ruled, and one of the great contributions of this book is to make known what they endured while the war was waged.  In Poland, the most devastated of all nations, three million Christians, as well as three million Jews, perished.  One-fifth of the Catholic clergy disappeared.  In Holland the churches ineffectually protested the deportation of Jews, but at least they spoke up—and many suffered for so doing.  With Catholics in all European countries, Pope Pius XII walked a thin wire, trying to be both prophet and diplomat, denouncing evil while doing what possible to protect believers wherever they lived.  

Wherever possible, he protected Jews as well—in Rome one third of the Jews “were hidden in buildings owned by the Catholic Church” (p. 278). Jews in the American army “which liberated Rome were unequivocal in their praise for Pius for his role in protecting Jews,” declaring that without his assistance thousands would have perished.  “In recognition of Pius’ efforts, Rome’s chief rabbi Israel Zolli took the baptismal name Eugenio when he formally converted to Christianity in February 1945” (p. 280).   While we might second-guess Pius XII—as we might well do with FDR—in his response to the Nazis, no one who examines the evidence can blame him for the Holocaust.  Thousands of Christians could certainly have responded more courageously, but the blame for Hitler’s wrongdoing rests with Hitler and his minions.  Indeed, “In 1945 the Allied occupying powers and the broad German public had a greater regard for the conduct of the Churches under National Socialism than would be the case by the 1960s, the beginning of decades of therapeutic inquisition that has since become tawdry” (p. 301).  

WWII was followed, immediately, by the “Cold War,” wherein Stalin replaced Hitler as the great threat to the West.  “Within a remarkable short time totalitarian rule had been reimposed on half a continent using a combination of force and fraud” (p. 344).  A new corps of politicians, notably Konrad Adenauer in West Germany, sincerely sought to rebuild their countries with a commitment to their Christian traditions and resist the creep of Communism.  For decades, of course, Russian Orthodox Christians had suffered under Bolshevism.  Now, as the “Iron Curtain” fell over Eastern Europe, Christians in the West began to heed their anguish and join in doing what possible to stop the spread of an overtly atheistic socialism.  Anti-communism became, particularly in some American circles, almost an item in the Creed!  

There was, for a decade following WWII, a rather remarkable religious revival in England and America.  But things changed in the 1960s.  Young radicals, marching in the streets, called for “change.”  Indeed, Burleigh notes, “Change came to be fetishised for change’s sake” (p. 350).  Whatever had been should be no more!  Sexual standards, including opposition to contraception and abortion, carefully defended for generations, were jettisoned in the “sexual revolution.”  Criticizing, rather than supporting, one’s country was abruptly labeled “patriotic.”  Spokesmen for Christianity, such as Joseph Fletcher, with his “Situation Ethics,” joined the “movement,” as did various champions of “liberation theology,” and by 1970 a profoundly different cultural world was settling into place.  “Ill-digested economics and sociology flooded into the minds of theologians for whom the Gospels were not sexy enough unless flavoured with a heavy shake of Marxism” (p. 371). 

Ironically, while trendy theologians in the West flirted with Marxism, those suffering its iron hand hungered for the ancient certainties of the Christian Faith.  “As the future Solidarity leader Lech Walesa would comment:  ‘The invocation of a moral order was the most revolutionary response that could be made to the increasingly dogmatic socialism practiced in Poland, and people we caught up in this wave of moral reawakening’” (p. 419).   So too, said Russian dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn!  When Pope John Paul II visited Poland in 1979, his countrymen chanted “’We want God, we want God, we want God in the family circle, we want God in books, in schools, we want God in government orders, we want God, we want God’” (p. 430).  And when President Ronald Reagan courageously called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” he was cheered by the millions who knew the truth whereof he spoke.  

So ends Burleigh’s story.  The carnage wrought by messianic political movements, running from the Jacobins to Castro, should prompt us to eschew any and all political saviors and solutions.  And the implosion of the churches should warn us to ever worship God and pray for the forgiveness of our sins rather than mobilize believers to rectify the world’s social and economic woes.  

# # #