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)
