The Cold War's Christian Heresy

What can Christians learn from Communism?

We’re almost a month into the spring semester, so let’s check in on how my newest class is going.

If you missed that post earlier this year… Invited to teach a 300-level course on “concepts of community” for Bethel’s Pietas Honors program, I adapted my long-running Cold War history course to serve as a semester-long exploration of how different ideologies have asked questions about community: “how communities stay together and come apart, what they hold in common and how they deal with dissent and disagreement, how they celebrate tradition and pursue progress, how their leaders use and abuse power, and what role individuals play within them.”

To do that well, I suggested to students earlier this week, we need to take seriously the insights of a British historian of the Soviet Union who has already been mentioned twice in our first book: E.H. Carr, who in 1961 famously told a university audience Cambridge that

Much of what has been written in English-speaking countries in the last ten years about the Soviet Union, and in the Soviet Union about the English- speaking countries, has been vitiated by [the] inability to achieve even the most elementary measure of imaginative understanding of what goes on in the mind of the other party, so that the words and actions of the other are always made to appear malign, senseless, or hypocritical. History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.¹

Tomorrow we’ll reverse things, and ask what a Soviet historian would have to understand about American capitalism and democracy to make contact with minds like ours. But on Monday, I pushed my students not to start with whatever seems “malign, senseless, or hypocritical” about Communism, but to try to understand it on its own terms — at least, in its theoretical explanations and its idealistic aspirations, which undeniably shaped the minds and quickened the consciences of millions around the world.

Lenin and Trotsky (center) during a 1919 celebration of the Russian Revolution - Wikimedia

Yesterday we turned to the inherent contradictions of the Soviet system. But not before I first asked students the unlikely question that gave me the subtitle of this post. What can Christians learn from Communism?

Now, before anyone starts writing an angry letter to my president or provost…

Let me emphasize that I agree with the famous American minister who once told a congregation in Atlanta that “the basic philosophy of Christianity is unalterably opposed to the basic philosophy of communism, and all of the dialectics of the logician cannot make them lie down together. They are contrary philosophies.” In its rejection of God, disdain for religious belief and practice, neglect of the non-material dimensions of the human soul, and its attempt to justify violent means in light of futile ends (plus other problems I’ll get to below), Communism is “diametrically opposed” to Christianity.

And yet, continued Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., “we must realize that there is something in communism which challenges us all…. although communism can never be accepted by a Christian, it emphasizes many essential truths that must forever challenge us as Christians.”²