BISHOP ROBERT BARRON: The real reason communists fear religion and want believers silenced

Like many others, I have been alarmed by the success of certain politicians in our country who identify as extreme socialists or communists. This is not a matter of classical liberals triumphing over standard-issue conservatives; this is the victory of people who stand athwart the fundamental principles that undergird our country.

There are many reasons why I detest communism, but I want to draw attention to just one issue of supreme importance. Karl Marx said that the first critique is the critique of religion. He meant that, before a complete reworking of the politics and economics of a society can take place, religion has to be taken down. This is because religion, as he saw it, is the "opium of the masses," a drug taken to dull our sensitivity to the suffering caused by economic exploitation. As long as the suffering populace is lured into complacency by fantasies about God's providence and the promise of eternal life, they will never rise up and throw off their chains.

In making this clarification, Marx was taking a step beyond his teacher, Ludwig Feuerbach. That little-known but massively influential German intellectual had asserted that God is but a projection of the idealized self-understanding of human beings. We are knowledgeable, kind and powerful to a limited degree, but we would love to be omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipotent. And so we project this fantasy outward and invent the character of God. And then, pathetically, we fall on our knees and worship what we have made and ask it to give us what we want. Marx completely accepted this interpretation of religion, but he asked the follow-up question: Why would we do such a thing? His answer is the opium theory — that we do it to dull our pain.

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On this reading, by the way, I, as a bishop of the Catholic Church, would qualify basically as a high-level drug dealer. And during my years as a seminary professor, I was essentially a trainer of retail-level drug pushers.

Can you see, therefore, why, for convinced Marxists, people like me have to be gotten out of the way and why the fantasy we propagate has to be debunked?

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But there is a second reason why the elimination of religion is of paramount significance for Marx. Communism aspires to be a totalizing system, involving the government's control over education, entertainment, communication, politics and especially economics.

What stands resolutely athwart this ambition is religion, which declares that all of these societal expressions are finally under the judgment of God. If God exists, then there is an objective moral criterion by which all of it — government, politics, economics, etc. — can be evaluated and thus delimited. 

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How fascinating that the Bible, practically unique here in the literature of the ancient world, refused to deify its leaders or its political arrangements. Even David, the greatest king in the Old Testament, is frankly portrayed as an adulterer and a murderer. And all of the kings of Israel — for the most part, an unsavory lot — must answer to the divine law and to the prophets who represent that law.

This is why, incidentally, the nonestablishment of religion, as well as its free exercise, enshrined in the First Amendment to our Constitution, is so vitally important. In giving religion freedom to operate independently of the state, the framers of the First Amendment permitted religion to play its properly critical role vis-à-vis the government.

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Therefore, it should be clear that if one wants a totalizing system such as communism to succeed, religion has to be stamped out and its leaders have to be silenced, marginalized or, at the limit, eliminated. If you doubt me on any of this, I would encourage you to read the recent histories of China, Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Venezuela and Poland.

When, in June 1979, Pope John Paul II spoke in Victory Square in Warsaw, at the height of the Cold War, he was fulfilling the prophetic function of a religious leader. With the entire communist government of Poland behind him on the stage but with roughly a million of the Polish people in front of him, he spoke of God, of human rights and dignity, of the value of the individual — and the throng before him commenced to chant, "We want God! We want God! We want God!" They say it went on for 15 minutes. That moment proved to be the beginning of the end for the communist Soviet Empire. Again, do you see why they're afraid of religion?

Might I encourage my fellow believers in God not to be complacent in the face of this very troubling development in the American body politic? The success of radical socialists and communists in our electoral process is, for religious people, a real and present danger. 

So vote! Speak out! Get organized!

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