American Progressive Liberals Follow the Soviet Example

 

 The Russian Orthodox Church Under Lenin's Regime 

In the over fifty years since the American cultural revolution of the 1960s, the progressive liberal war upon American Christianity has matured into open conflict.  The descent began during FDR’s New Deal, and today the Democratic party platform is indistinguishable from that of the Communist Party USA of 1936.    Bernhard Thuersam

American Progressive Liberals Follow the Soviet Example

“The Bolshevik victory in Russia created an unprecedented problem of the relationship between the church and a state ideologically committed to the complete elimination of religion among its subjects.  Over the fifty years following the Revolution, the relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet state evolved from their initial open conflict, through the weakening, division, and decimation of the church, toward a modus vivendi whereby the church secured a measure of legality and toleration for limited and closely policed activities; in return it pledged its unconditional loyalty to the Soviet state and positive support for the latter’s policies, at the price of alienating those members of the church who considered this compromise a surrender of the church’s spiritual mission and moral integrity. 

Eventually, by 1929, the Evangelical Christians and Baptists [also] found themselves in a position similar . . . struggling for survival during the years of antireligious terror . . . [resulting from] Marxist atheism with its militant Leninist bent . . . 

Relations between religious groups and the Soviet state were also shaped by the regime’s tendency to extend its control and direction into every type of social relations, to absorb into the all-embracing pattern of the Bolshevik dictatorship all social institutions and to destroy those of them which could not be transformed into the transmission belts of the Party will. 

With no scope left for an autonomous group life, and with the absence of effective legal restraints upon the arbitrariness of the state, the notions of “freedom of conscience” and the “separation of church and state” became constitutional fictions designed to conceal the actual state of affairs.”

(Religion and the Soviet State, A Dilemma of Power, Max Hayward and William Fletcher, editors, Frederick Praeger, Publishers, 1969, pp. 71-72)