The
Menace of the Religious Left
by
Murray
N. Rothbard
by Murray N. Rothbard
DIGG THIS
A
menace to America and even to the rest of the world, not only of
our time but of the last few centuries, is the deadly threat of
the "Religious Left," a left which began, in the Middle Ages and
even earlier, as a hellish Christian heresy, and by now can only
be considered "Christian" in the most remote and twisted sense.
This menace, which reached its most influential early form in the
views of the charismatic and highly influential late-twelfth century
Calabrian Abbot, Joachim of Fiore, is "postmillennial": that is,
it struggles to bring about, either immediately or as quickly as
possible, a thousand-year Kingdom of God on Earth, a "perfect" and
sinless world, a world which would be Communist, collectivist, and
egalitarian, although that "equality" would be supposedly assured
by the totalitarian rule of a cadre or vanguard of "saints," presided
over by a self-proclaimed Messiah or proto-Messiah, whose reign
would supply the pre-conditions for the eventual Second Advent of
Jesus Christ. Private property would be stamped out, and all "heretics,"
that is, any dissenters from this messianic rule, would be slaughtered.
After Joachim,
there came waves of these heretics, including the Amaurians, the
Brethren of the Free Spirit, and the left-wing of the Czech Hussite
Revolution. But before the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic
Church was able to contain this plague successfully. Say what you
will about the Reformation, even Martin Luther came to acknowledge
that he had opened Pandora's Box, that he had unleashed, perhaps
forever, the furies and crazies of fanaticism and horror.
In 1520, young
Thomas Muntzer, a Lutheran pastor in southern Germany, unleashed
upon Western Europe the scourge of what came to be known as Anabaptism:
the imposition by force and terror of an alleged Kingdom of God
on Earth, with a cadre of rulers, headed by himself, communizing
all persons and property and killing all "heretics" who might dissent
from his rule. For a brief but frenzied fifteen-year period, there
was a real danger of Germany and Holland falling sway to groups
of Anabaptist fanatics. Fortunately, when Muntzer urged Luther to
join him in this messianic crusade, arrived at by alleged divine
revelation, Luther immediately saw the deadly danger; at the end,
the Anabaptist movement was crushed by an alliance of Catholic and
Lutheran princes.
Movements can
be stamped out, but ideas, good or bad, often keep marching on,
and the same was true of the idea of imposing a totalitarian Kingdom.
In troubled times, the idea popped to the surface: among the Familists,
the Diggers, the Ranters, and the Fifth Monarch Men during the English
Civil War of the Seventeenth Century; and before and during the
French Revolution. By the early and mid-nineteenth century, the
main carrier of a Communist Kingdom was the burgeoning "socialist"
or "Communist" movement in Europe. (In those days, before the split
between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the two concepts were considered
by all adherents to be identical.) What is little realized today
is that at the time of the flourishing of Karl Marx as a socialist-Communist
leader, at least half of the Communist movement was heretically
Christian, the other half following Marx's atheized version of the
search for an apocalyptic and secular Kingdom. The victory for Marx's
atheist version was not preordained; it was touch and go, until
Marx's superior organizing ability and the dispersals following
the failed revolutions of 1848 led to the complete triumph of Marxian
atheism within the socialist-Communist movement.
Indeed, the
Marxist Communist utopia is virtually a replica of sixteenth-century
Anabaptism: once again, private property is stamped out, all resources
and people are owned in common by a cadre of "saints,"
a vanguard headed by a messianic leader, and all dissent to this
collective organism is crushed. Marx's theoretical problem was that
since he could not rely on God, Providence, or some mystical force
to bring about the allegedly inevitable Kingdom, he had to seek
out "material forces" the class struggle, productive forces,
the "dialectic" of history to constitute the inevitable engine
of social change.
But the idea
of messianic, Christian Communism never disappeared, and during
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries it showed up in various
forms: as Christian Socialism, the Social Gospel, and other variants
of left-wing Christians and Christian leftists. Perhaps most fascinating
and most blatant was the widely beloved East German Stalinist Ernst
Bloch, whose widely known three-volume The Principle of Hope
was translated into English in the late 1980s. Early in his lengthy
career, Bloch in common with many other Marxists wrote
a laudatory study of Thomas Muntzer, whom he hailed as magical or
"theurgic." The inner "truth" of things, wrote Bloch, will only
be discovered after a "complete transformation of the universe,
a grand apocalypse, the descent of the Messiah, a new heaven and
a new earth." For Bloch, mystical ecstasies and the worship of Lenin
and Stalin went hand in hand. Thus, Bloch's culminating work, The
Principle of Hope, contains such remarkable assertions as: "Ubi
Lenin, ibi Jerusalem" ["Where Lenin is, there is Jerusalem"] and
that "the Bolshevist fulfillment of Communism" is part of the "age-old
fight for God."
How is all
this seemingly bizarre stuff relevant to the present day? My contention
is that, bizarre and weird and horrifying as all this may be, we
are not dealing merely with erratic oddballs or with irrelevant
history. My contention, ever since the Clintonian Democrat convention
in New York in 1992, is that the Clintonian movement is not "centrist,"
or simply erratic, confused, or evasive, but that it is in essence
a dedicated movement of the "Christian" or religious left. It is
an attempt to impose, not immediately as in the case of Muntzer
or Lenin, but over a period of years, and as quickly as politically
possible, a Kingdom of God on Earth, at least in the United States.
The horrifying New York convention had very definite religious and
even messianic overtones. The Kingdom, of course, is not the orthodox
Christian Kingdom: it is collectivist, egalitarian, multicultural,
and "multi-gendered"; it deliberately overthrows and "transvalues"
our entire structure of traditional or "bourgeois" Christian values
and principles.
It might be
thought that one crucial difference between the current left and
the medieval or post-Reformation heretical Christian left is that
the current movement of course trumpets the glories and even the
superior morality of various sexual what used to be called "perversions,"
but are now worthy and even morally superior "alternative families"
or "alternative lifestyles." But that isn't new either. The Anabaptists,
the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and the rest were aggressive "antinomians,"
that is, claiming to be saintly, quasi-divine or even divine and
therefore without sin, they believed in publicly demonstrating and
even flaunting their alleged sinlessness by committing all manner
of sins imaginable, including adultery, theft, and murder. The Clintonians
have nothing on these older "Christian" movements.
The Clinton
Inaugural was, of course, a horrifying display of a neopagan, multicultural,
New Age religious left at work, a fact, which was only discerned
by the liberal but highly perceptive New York humorist Fran Lebowitz,
who struck a delightfully sour note, saying that even watching the
Inaugural orgy of religious leftism on television had driven her
to "a new planet of fury." Then, in the crucial early months of
the Clinton administration, Michael Kelly wrote an insightful and
quickly famous article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine
(May 23, 1993), entitled "Saint Hillary," replete with a painting
of Hillary on the front cover dressed as Joan of Arc, significantly
wearing a sword but not a cross. After a lengthy and discerning
interview with Hillary, the article, which was carefully neutral
in tone but all the more effective, pointed out that Hillary thought
of herself as leading the charge for "something on the order of
a Reformation: the remaking of the American way of politics, government,
indeed life." Hillary, the article explained, had set out "to make
things right," to "make the world a better place," to install a
"politics of virtue" or "politics of meaning."
Hillary was
converted to her current grandiose stance, first by her hometown
Methodist preacher, who introduced her to "alienation," the Social
Gospel and Paul Tillich, and then to the admonition of that other
trendy left Protestant theologian of our century, Reinhold Niebuhr,
that we must never be reluctant to wield Power in the service of
The Good. An admonition that the power-mad Hillary took to as a
duck takes to water. Hillary's most recent guru, of course, is the
socialistic pro-war (Gulf War that is) peacenik, Michael Lerner,
editor of the pretentious glossy magazine Tikkun and notorious
coiner of the phrase "the politics of meaning."
Armed with
an all-encompassing ideology, and with what many interviewers have
noted as her arrogance and complete self-assurance and self-righteousness,
Hillary was now ready to wield total Power in the service of her
own hellish conception of The Good.
It was reported
that Hillary and her camp in the White House were furious at the
Kelly article and its important revelations, and since then she
has said not a word about the importance of remaking all of America
by wielding State power. But the goal and the means are, unfortunately,
still there.
And Slick Willie,
too, Hillary's co-president and ideological puppet, underlying his
continuing stream of lies, evasions, and tactical changes to front,
is deeply committed to the very same goal. Considering his rotten
character, does the Slick One's commitment to anything seem
improbable? But consider two points. First, each and every one of
his programs, regardless of attractiveness of label, whether it
be "crime" or "welfare reform," is designed to increase the power
of the State, that is, the federal government, and to diminish the
liberties and the property rights of every American.
And finally,
ponder this: Remember that weekend in August when Willie began his
frantic and febrile, but unfortunately successful, drive to reverse
his House defeat on the crime bill? He gave a speech in Maryland
before the grandiosely named Full Gospel African Methodist Episcopal
Zion Church. What the media reported Clinton to proclaim was odious
and blasphemous enough: that "God wants us to pass the crime bill,"
and that his, Clinton's "ministry" (?!) was devoted to that task.
But he said something else in that speech, of far greater purport,
that received almost no publicity. He said that the goal of his
"ministry" was to bring about no less than the "Kingdom of God on
Earth"! Yes, he said it, he actually said it! Now I have no idea
how Clinton's "parishioners" reacted to this phrase, or what the
almost uniformly secular media people thought they were hearing.
Maybe they thought they were merely hearing a grandiloquent metaphor
for improving society.
But
we know what he said, and it is our business to inform America
of its import before it is too late. We know that William
Jefferson Blythe "Clinton" IV, that Monster in the White House,
was at last revealing, perhaps in a typical moment of unguarded
vainglory and exuberance, the cloven hoof, the face of pure evil,
the unholy mission of himself and his Lady Macbeth. We know
the truly diabolic nature of the Kingdom that the Clintons are trying
to put over on an unsuspecting America.
And still the
liberal media wonder: Why do so many people hate this charming
and wonderful couple and with such intensity.
Murray
N. Rothbard (19261995) was the author of Man,
Economy, and State, Conceived
in Liberty, What
Has Government Done to Our Money, For
a New Liberty, The
Case Against the Fed, and many
other books and articles. He was
also the editor with Lew Rockwell of The
Rothbard-Rockwell Report.
Copyright
© 2007 Ludwig von Mises Institute
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