The Worldviews of Destruction in the 20th Century

Introduction

“Beware lest any man [educator, politician, rock star, news anchorman/woman] take you captive through vain and deceitful philosophy [naturalism, materialism, existentialism, pragmatism], after the tradition of men [Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Wellhausen, Freud, Dewey, Foucault], after the rudiments of the world [socialism, evolution, higher criticism, humanism, moral relativism, deconstructionism, collectivism], and not after Christ.” — Colossians 2:8

The 20th century is the praxis of this verse. Western Civilization in general and the United States in particular have embarked on a hazardous journey of rejecting and replacing Christ with any number of mortal men and their ideas. Since ideas have consequences the 20th century has witnessed the consequences of these utopian schemes and ideas.

Over one hundred years ago (1890–1891), James Orr presented the Kerr lectures in Edinburgh, Scotland. He entitled his series The Christian View of God and the World and argued forcefully for the proposition that biblical Christianity is a worldview. By this term (German Weltanschauung) he meant that Christianity is more than a two-hour emotional experience on Sunday morning. Rather Christianity is a 24 hours a day relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

In other words, one who says he believes with his whole heart that Jesus Christ is the Son of God “is thereby committed to much else besides,” says Orr. Christianity is more than heart. It is head as well. It is body, mind, soul and spirit (Mark 12:30). The Christian, by the very fact that he or she is a Christian is committed to a “view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny.” ¹ Add these views together and they add up to a worldview.

Elsewhere I define worldview as any ideology, philosophy, theology, movement or religion that provides an overarching approach to understanding God, the world, man and man’s relations to God and the world. ² Specifically, a worldview contains a particular perspective regarding each of the following ten areas: theology, philosophy, ethics, biology, psychology, sociology, law, politics, economics and history.

Not surprising the worldviews of destruction in the 20th century spoke to these areas with ideas but they were ideas responsible for the death of millions.

At approximately the same time that James Orr penned his work four other individuals (three men and a woman) were about to emerge on the world’s stage and before they finished speaking, writing and living out their worldviews millions of human beings paid with their lives. And as we enter the 21st century millions more will perish because of these same worldviews and their ideas.

The 20th century is history. It is a history of incredible advances in many areas (inventions, computer chips, medical science, technologies, transportation, communications, expansion of the Christian Gospel), living standards, free states), but devolution in other areas (dictatorships, poverty, illegal drugs, pornography, homosexuality, venereal diseases, AIDS, lawlessness, immorality, teenage pregnancy, abortions). But most important for our study it is a century of mass murders and killings unheard of in human history. The 20th century is the century of slaughter. More human beings have been killed in the 20th century than in all previous centuries combined.

“During the first eighty-eight years of this century [20th century], ” says historian R.J. Rummel, “almost 170 million men, women and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not germs.” ³

When we put the human cost of war and genocide together, says Rummel, “Power has killed over 203 million people in this century.” ⁴ And this figure does not include the slaughter of the innocent (abortion) — a foundation stone of the Secular Humanist worldview.

These millions died, not because of James Orr’s Christian worldview. Most of these millions died at the hands of the three men and one woman whose worldviews were inflicted on the world (and in many ways continue to be so).

The three men are Benito Mussolini (b. 1883), Adolph Hitler (b. 1889) and Joseph Stalin (b. 1879). The woman is Margaret Sanger (b. 1879).

Mussolini and Hitler represent the 20th century’s Fascist/Nazi worldviews. Stalin represents the Marxist/Leninist worldview. Margaret Sanger represents the Secular Humanist worldview.

These are the worldviews primarily responsible for the millions of human beings slaughtered on the altars of atheism, naturalism, dialectical materialism, ethical relativism, beyond good and evil, libertinism, class morality, biological evolution, social darwinism, euthanasia, sterilization, infanticide, eugenics, abortion, collectivism, statism, dictatorship, new Fascist man, new Aryan man, new Soviet man, new Humanist man, new international child of the future, new social order, new world order, socialism (national and international), positive law or sociological jurisprudence and other ideas “chemically and physically” exploding from the fevered brows of the intelligentsia.

Whoever said ideas have consequences summarized the 20th century. The ideas that moved across and out of the 19th century were fleshed out in the 20th century and the results are obvious for all to see — death, destruction, devastation, heartache, misery — all words and nuances that portray a century ripe for a judgement grade.

As we begin the 21st century we have yet to admit a deep, dark secret — the ideas that brought us a century of terror and slaughter are still being taught in our public institutions of higher education. Ironically, the only worldview not responsible for the slaughter is the only worldview proscribed viz., biblical Christianity. All other worldviews have their voices and defenders in our colleges and universities.

“Paul DeMan,” for example, says Gene Edward Veith, Jr., “who has done more than anyone else to promote deconstruction in the United States, was a Nazi propagandist.” ⁵ Michel Foucault, a major Postmodern voice and lecturer at the University of California (Berkeley) was a Maoist ⁶ and a homosexual who died of AIDS after infecting his lovers on the premise of “inventing new pleasures beyond sex . . . sex as murder.” ⁷

And who can deny that both Nietzsche and Heidegger are ‘back in fashion on university campuses.” ⁸ Nietzsche was not only a major precursor to fascism, but is openly admitted to be the father of Postmodernism. ⁹ And Heidegger was “an active, ideologically committed member of the Nazi party.” ¹⁰

The Marxist influence on America’s campus is also rampant as Arnold Beichman notes in The Weekly Standard. America’s communists and former communists are already taking out full page ads in the New York Times seeking to exculpate communism. Historian Theodore Draper is quoted as saying, “clearly an attempt to rehabilitate communism by making it part of the larger family of socialism and democracy” is underway. “No one,” he says, would think of doing this favor for fascism, but communism with even more millions of victims and a much longer life span is the beneficiary of this sustained effort of historical rehabilitation in — of all places — American colleges and universities.” ¹¹

David Horowitz observes: “The situation in the universities was appalling. The Marxists and socialists who had been refuted by historical events were now the tenured establishment of the academic world. Marxism had produced the bloodiest and most oppressive regimes in human history — but after the fall, as one wit commented, more Marxists could be found on the faculties of American colleges than in the entire former Communist bloc. The American Historical Association was run by Marxists, as was the professional literature association.” ¹²

And in America, one worldview monopolizes public education. It is the worldview of Margaret Sanger and John Dewey. It is the worldview of thousands and thousands of professors and teachers and entertainers and professional organizations. It is the Secular Humanist worldview. “The [secular] humanistic system of values has now become the predominant way of thinking in most of the power centers of society,”‘ says James C. Dobson and Gary L. Bauer. ¹³ Dobson specifically mentions the universities, news media, entertainment industry, judiciary, federal bureaucracy, public schools and Congress. Elsewhere Dobson and Bauer state, “Professors, whose salaries are paid by the taxes and tuition subsidies of millions of hard-working Americans, ridicule capitalism, attack family values, and rewrite American history, so that if it is taught at all, America is always the villain.” ¹⁴

The 20th century has been the century in which various humanistic worldviews vigorously and systematically eradicated the biblical Christian worldview from the public square. ¹⁵ If this continues into the next century one can expect the same results — death and destruction.

I. Nazism

What most Christians have not understood about Nazism is that it is a religious worldview. In fact, most Christians look upon Nazism, Fascism and Communism as merely political and/or economic movements. And nearly every Christian has missed the point that Secular Humanism is a religious worldview. Contrary to some German Christians, who insisted that the Nazi state is “a state that once again rules in God’s name,” ¹⁶ Nazism never was a Christian worldview. None of its ingredients was Christian. Rather it is pagan with occultish overtones. Deitrich Echart, for example, a founding member of the Nazi Party was “a dedicated satanist, a man immersed in black magic and the Thule group of occultists.” ¹⁷ Himmler, Rosenberg and Goebbels were dedicated occultists as was Karl Haushofer, who became Hitler’s spiritual mentor following Echart’s death. According to Erwin Lutzer, Haushofer took Hitler “through the deepest levels of occult transformation.” ¹⁸

While Adolph Hitler historically represents the Nazi worldview it is important to keep in mind that behind him stood a bevy of thinkers, philosophers and theologians including Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Gobineau, ¹⁹ Wagner, ²⁰ Chamberlain, Heidegger, Karl Barth, Paul DeMan and a who’s who of intellectuals amongst Europe’s elites. As Gene Edward Veith, Jr. observes, “The intellectual establishment itself is trying to keep hidden the fact ‘that European high culture in its most advanced phase not only was powerless to prevent the construction and implementation of the death camps, but actually provided the ideological base on which the death camps were built.'” ²¹

No matter how pagan, occultist or even anti-Jewish or anti-Christian Nazism may have been or how socialistic, collectivistic, or evolutionistic, on Easter Sunday, April 16, 1933, “Protestant pastors across Bavaria delivered an official blessing of Nazism . . . passed the collection plate on Hitler’s birthday, beflagged their churches on state holidays, and even marched in the 1933 May Day Parade for National Labor with swastikas stitched to their Vestments.” ²²

In fairness to these pastors it should be noted that in 1918 the Marxist Kurt Eisner staged a communist coup in Munich and held the city for over three months. ²³ The Nazis played on this theme and insisted that Christianity and Nazism fight the Red terror together.

What the pastors didn’t realize is that Hitler’s militant socialism and Marxist socialism are blood brothers — one national; one international. And that the Nazis were quick to adopt the Soviet methods. They imported from Russia, according to Ludwig von Mises, “the one-party system and the pre-eminence of this party in political life; the paramount position assigned to the secret police, the concentration camps; the administrative execution or imprisonment of all opponents; the extermination of the families of suspects and of exiles; the methods of propaganda; etc. etc . . . .There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.” ²⁴

University of Wisconsin historian Stanley G. Payne summarizes some of the major ingredients of Nazism. These include dictatorship, a new Social Darwinist structure of state and society, a racial revolution, and a state-regulated national socialism. ²⁵

A.E. Wilder-Smith in Man’s Origin, Man’s Destiny points up the two major ideas behind Hitler and his Nazi movement. Says Wilder-Smith, “It is noteworthy that many of our Western intellectuals have socialistic as well as Darwinistic views. Perhaps the two positions may be related. But it is more remarkable that Darwinism is not only the state doctrine of the Communists but was also that of the National Socialists and Fascists.” ²⁶

Anyone reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) realizes “how full Hitler was of Darwinistic thought” and how he based his racial and militaristic policies on the theory of Darwinian evolution. “Darwin’s concepts of struggle for existence,” says Wilder-Smith, “dominated Hitler’s whole thinking and, by guiding selection in this struggle, Hitler intended to help nature a little.” ²⁷

It is certainly no secret that Darwin’s theory of evolution is still taught throughout our nation’s colleges and universities. It is also taught at the high school level with absolutely no competition since the U.S. Supreme ruled that creationism is unconstitutional and cannot be taught. The writer of that decision, Judge Brennan, was the court’s most vocal Secular Humanist.

This in spite of the fact that Cambridge professor Adam Sedgwick, after reading Darwin’s Origin of Species through Natural Selection or the Preservation of Savored Races in the Struggle for Life, commented, “If this book were to find general public acceptance, it would bring with it a brutalization of the human race such as it had never seen before.” ²⁸

Can anyone seriously doubt that the 20th century has witnessed the fulfillment of Sedgwick’s observation as Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin glorified struggle and war on the basis of the struggle for life.

Ian T. Taylor in In the Minds of Man: Darwin and the New World Order, summarizes a number of scholars who “noted the strong connection between evolutionary theory and the German Fuhrer’s objectives.” ²⁹ Taylor also points out that Werner Maser’s study of Hitler found that “Darwin was the general source for Hitler’s biology, worship, force, and struggle, and of his rejection of moral causality in history.” ³⁰

Darwin wasn’t Hitler’s only god, however. Since Nazi means national socialism it should not surprise anyone that socialism ³¹ is as much a part of the Nazi worldview as evolutionism. Then, too, socialism is consistent with collectivism or statism since it requires a dictator to abolish or control private property and decide what and when to produce a pair of shoes.

Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom observed the mental collectivizing of students in Germany and writes that, “Many a university professor during the 1930s has seen English and American students return from the continent uncertain whether they were communists or Nazis and certain only that they hated western liberal (in the traditional sense) civilization.” ³²

Youth flocked to the Nazis and Communist causes and some observed the incredible “susceptibility of university-trained people in Germany to totalitarian appeals.” ³³ Twenty-five percent of the Nazis SS were Ph.Ds.

It was Germany’s intellectual community that prepared the German people and especially the German youth for the “acceptance of some form of militant socialism.” ³⁴ Vetterli and Fort quote Hans Kohn and his work The Mind of Germany (Harper and Row, 1960) to the effect that “within little more than a decade German intellectuals succeeded in leading German people into the Abyss.” ³⁵ Kohn says it was primarily the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the political theory of Carl Schmitt and the theology of Karl Barth that convinced German intellectuals that Germany’s future was not with the West.

Barth, of course, later joined forces with the anti-Nazi movement and was part of the Barmen Declaration. ³⁶ But as John Robbins notes, while Barth’s theological views changed over the decades, his political and economic views did not. Barth admitted that he chose theology because he felt a need to find a better basis for his social action. He was referred to as “Comrade Pastor” and “Socialism,” claimed Barth, “is a very important and necessary application of the gospel.” ³⁷

The most revealing Barth comment is: “If you understand the connection between the person of Jesus and your socialist convictions, and if you now want to arrange your life so that it corresponds to this connection, then that does not at all mean you have to ‘believe” or accept this, that, or the other thing. What Jesus has to bring us are not ideas, but a way of life. One can have Christian ideas about God and the world and about human redemption, and still with all that be a complete heathen. And as an atheist, a materialist, and a Darwinist, one can be a genuine follower and disciple of Jesus. Jesus is not the Christian worldview and the Christian worldview is not Jesus.” ³⁸ Unfortunately for Barth and his many defenders he also ended up praising Communism and even Joseph Stalin. He was the ultimate anti-anti-Communist. ³⁹

So it wasn’t just the teachings of Nietzsche, Fichte, Heidegger, Robertus, Lassalle and Marx that prepared Germany for Hitler and Nazism. It was also Emanuel Hirsch, a dialectical theologian, Paul Tillich, a Marxist socialist theologian, Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth, Gerhard Kittel and Friedrich Delitzsch. All played a role in turning the hearts and minds of the German people away from Christ, the Cross, the empty tomb and biblical Christianity to National Socialism and in some cases Marxist Socialism.

Hirsch, and those who basically accepted German Higher Criticism taught that the resurrection of Jesus Christ was “only a spiritual vision” and that the resurrection accounts in the Gospels were later additions. Hirsch thought the idea of a physical resurrection distorted Christianity by focusing attention to the hereafter instead of the present. He stressed the importance of community in the Christian life. ⁴⁰ Tillich, a member of the Marxist Frankfurt School, ⁴¹ was never friendly to biblical Christianity and Bultmann advocated demythologizing the New Testament.

While space only allows a brief discussion of the Nazi worldview we need to mention Hitler’s and the Nazi’s hatred of the Jews (and Bible-believing Christians).

Gene Edward Veith, Jr. in Modern Fascism has a chapter entitled “The Hebrew Disease.” He explains why Hitler and the Nazis were anti-Jewish. As he notes, it was more than Jews being considered an “inferior race.” Hitler hated the ideas and worldview of the Jews — especially their monotheism and defense of an absolute moral order based on something apart from the natural order. The Nietzsches and Hitlers of the world rejected a transcendent God who distinguishes right from wrong. Nazis believed that right and wrong are determined by nature, state, community or human choice. They especially rejected the notion of a God judging man according to His standards. Hitler’s anti-Jewishness and anti-Bible believing Christians (these types of Christians were considered a subset of the Hebrews) were as much theological as biological and racial. There is no doubt that Hitler was an ideological part of the Nietzsche/Wagner/Gobineau/Chamberlain cabal.

Veith also explains why the Christian church in Germany split over Hitler and his Nazi worldview. Those Christians who believed the Bible generally rejected Hitler; those soften up by German higher criticism of the Bible generally went with the German church collaborating with Hitler. Hitler referred to his type of Christian as “positive Christians.”

How much have we learned from this portion of history? Not much according to historian Franklin Littell: “The lessons to be learned from the Church Struggle and the Holocaust have hardly penetrated our Protestant seminaries, our liberal Protestant press, our church literature, the thinking and writing of even our ablest older theologians . . . American Liberal Protestantism is sick, and the theological form of its sickness can be summarized by saying that it stands solidly on ground but lately vacated by the ‘German Christians’ . . . who collaborated with Nazism.” ⁴²

II. Fascism

Fascism is a religious worldview in the same vein as Nazism. It was a pagan religion with worship of the state and its Duce on its list of major ingredients.

“Fascism,” says Stanley G. Payne, “was above all a product of the new culture and intense international Social Darwinism of the early twentieth century, normally (though not in every instance) wedded to war and fundamental international changes. Its pagan warrior mentality sometimes conflicted with the norms and processes of modernization, but fascist states eagerly incorporated major functions of rationalization and modern development.” ⁴³

Evolution was as important to Mussolini as it was to Hitler. A.E. Wilder-Smith states that both “Hitler and Mussolini glorified struggle and war on the basis that the fittest would survive and the race would be thus cleansed.” ⁴⁴ Both sought to assist nature in its inevitable progress of mankind.

Elsewhere Wilder-Smith says that Mussolini found “evolutionary doctrine a real windfall, in fact, a godsend.” ⁴⁵ It gave Mussolini the excuse to enslave whole peoples, or wipe them out — especially if they were less highly evolved than his own people. The whole concept of evolution, says Wilder-Smith, “justifies the terror of fascism communism and other types of tyranny. ⁴⁶

According to Gene Edward Veith, Jr. the major elements of the Fascist worldview emerged from three sources: romanticism, Darwinism and existentialism. He says these were mainstream Western thought patterns and were the basic assumptions of the intellectual elite of the 1930s. Because Fascist totalitarianism sought to control all of life it was a worldview and since it sought to establish a new religion it is a religious worldview. Says Veith, “This new worldview defined itself against the existing spiritual framework — that of the Jews and their Bible. In rejecting not only the Bible but objective meaning, transcendent morality, and the authority of language itself, the fascists arrayed themselves against the Word.” ⁴⁷

As with Hitler, who personally failed the lower grades of high school, but had his quiver full of intellectuals, so too Mussolini. “Some of the greatest modern writers,” says Stephen Spender, “sympathized with fascism.” ⁴⁸ These included Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Wyndham Lewis, T.E. Hulme, Roy Campbell and the early T.S. Eliot. Also, says Spender, “Avant-garde artistic movements — Vorticists, Italian Futurists, German Expressionists — included many devotees of fascism.” ⁴⁹

George Bernard Shaw, a darling of every leftist and a founder of the socialist British Fabian Society, characterized the Jews as “the real enemy, the invader from the East, the Druze, the riffian, the oriental parasite, in a word the Jew.” ⁵⁰ Henri Bernstein, the French Jewish writer, sarcastically referred to Shaw as “dear socialist, multimillionaire and anti-Semite.” ⁵¹ Shaw’s advice to the Nazis on the Jewish question was “Force the Jews to wed Aryans” and thus he claimed the Jewish question would be solved. ⁵²

Shaw’s fascistic bent was also coupled with an intense “sympathy for the communist world,” says Dobbs. “All totalitarianism fascinated him since they fitted into his plans for a rigid collectivism.” Therefore, he could announce to the world, “We, as socialists, have nothing to do with liberty. Our message, like Mussolini’s, is one of discipline, of service, of ruthless refusal to acknowledge any natural right of competence.” ⁵³

But Shaw’s famous definition of socialism (and true of Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Fabianism⁵⁴) was, “You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner.” ⁵⁵

None of these individuals or movements could be considered conservative or “right” in any meaningful sense of those words. Fascism, Nazism and Communism were brutal socialist dictatorships. Besides, Mussolini’s father was “a socialist revolutionary,” ⁵⁶ and Mussolini “chose at first the orthodox Marxian position.” In fact, says von Mises, “Nobody could surpass Mussolini in Marxian zeal. He was the intransigent champion of the pure creed, the unyielding defender of the rights of the exploited proletarians, the eloquent prophet of the socialist bliss to come.” ⁵⁷

According to both von Mises and Vetterli/Fort, Mussolini was under the influence of an Angelica Balbanoff, a trained communist agent who was later to become the first secretary of the Third Communist International. ⁵⁸ Mussolini also edited a socialist newspaper for some time entitled “The Class Struggle.” He thought himself to be Nietzsche’s rendition of “Superman.”

Says Vetterli and Fort, “Fascists theory thus exemplified much of the philosophy of Nietzsche. To Nietzsche, the will to power, the desire to dominate gave meaning to life. Truth is relative. It is freed from moral connotations. Truth is whatever aids the will to power . . . This superman would be beyond the pale of moral restraint. He would himself create the standard of value. The cult of power was to replace traditional religion and moral values. There is no doubt that Benito Mussolini, (as Hitler after him) believed himself to be the personification of Nietzsche’s superman.” ⁵⁹

Have we learned anything from this portion of history? “Will to power,” “moral relativism,” “truth is relative,” “replace traditional religion,” “replace moral values,” are all fundamental planks of Postmodernism! Postmodernism is the latest rage of the intellectuals on America’s colleges and universities. ⁶⁰

We have learned nothing!

III. Marxism/Leninism

The third destructive worldview of the 20th century is Marxism/Leninism. Like Nazism and Fascism Marxism likewise is a religious worldview. In fact, Marxism is a well-developed atheistic, materialistic, evolutionistic, socialistic worldview.

While I have examined this worldview in great detail elsewhere ⁶¹ and will summarize it briefly in this section let’s cut directly to the praxis of this worldview and state for the world to hear — Marxism/Leninism has been the greatest killing machine in recorded history. And history has recorded some unbelievable mass killings. ⁶²

With Hitler given the distinction of eliminating 21 million human beings from off the face of the earth — V.I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao tse-Tung and other Communist dictators eliminated some 86 million human beings. ⁶³ The suffering and stark terror of this figure is humanly impossible to comprehend. For a taste of what was involved we recommend Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrows, the account of Stalin’s slaughter of the Ukraine. But Stalin’s basis for such a slaughter was Darwin. “Evolution,” said Stalin, “prepares for revolution and creates the ground for it; revolution consummates the process of evolution and facilitates its further activity.” ⁶⁴ The Ukrainians were considered not fit to survive! But before Stalin could move into the high stakes of death and destruction he needed Marx and Lenin.

Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and called for the elimination of the bourgeoisie (property owners). Said Marx, “This person [bourgeois] must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.” ⁶⁵ And again, “the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” ⁶⁶ And again, “They [Communists] openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” ⁶⁷ Lenin took this one step further and set up the state apparatus to, in fact, eliminate the bourgeoisie. And while Lenin did his fair share of killings, it was Joseph Stalin and Mao tse-Tung who took Marxist’s teachings and Lenin’s state apparatus to its ultimate extent.

Again, as with Nazism and Fascism, Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist Communism is based on Darwinism, socialism, statism; it is also based on atheism, dialectical materialism and proletariat morality. In fact, the millions that perished at the hands of the Communists all perished under the innocent sounding expression of proletariat morality. The bourgeoisie were unfit to live since they believed in God, believed in a created order, believed in transcendent morality, believed in family values, owned property, etc.

“It is a commonplace,” says Jacques Barzun, “that Marx felt his own work to be the exact parallel of Darwin’s. He even wished to dedicate a portion of Das Kapital to the author of The Origin of Species.” ⁶⁸

Marx thought he had discovered the evolution of society as Darwin discovered the evolution of biological life. Both theories brought the world to the bottom of the abyss. The struggle for life and survival of the fittest form the basis of both Darwin and Marx. And thus Stalin, too! Stalin merely put into practice what Marx (and Lenin) taught.

Marx’s atheism, dialectical materialism, evolution and socialism make up the heart of the Communist worldview. These are the ideas put into praxis which brought us the slaughter of the 20th century. Yet, as we enter the 21st century Marxist ideas are still part of the intellectual’s quiver. Campus Marxists and Postmodernists, for example, continue to propagate atheism, materialism, evolution, socialism, collectivism. Hardly anything has changed! It is as though we have allowed history to teach us absolutely nothing. If one is an atheist and an evolutionist, for example, one has immediate access to America’s public educational institutions. And stands a good chance to win recognition and awards. If one is a theist and a creationist one is denied access to such educational institutions and considered a neanderthal or a trilobite. If one is an atheist, an evolutionist and an advocate of world government one has access to all educational institutions and is guaranteed even more awards and foundation grants. Anyone suggesting U.S. military personnel should not be placed under U.N. control will not be allowed access and will be told he is narrow-minded, intolerant and unloving. The ways of the left in propaganda and name-calling haven’t changed for over a hundred years (see Zygmund Dobb’s The Great Deceit: Social Pseudo-Sciences) and evidently will not change anytime soon.

Regarding theology Marxism/Leninism/Stalinism is atheistic. Lenin, for example, in his “Socialism and Religion” address insisted that Communism is based on the scientific, materialistic view of the world and therefore, says Lenin, “our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.” ⁶⁹ Elsewhere Lenin said, “Every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness . . . vileness of the most dangerous kind.” ⁷⁰

“For Marx and the classical Marxist authors,” wrote Hans Kung, “in their personal life, in their culture, in their system and in their practice — atheism was and remained of central importance and essentially connected with their theory of society and history.” ⁷¹ This led Dostoevski to remark, “The problem of Communism is not an economic problem. The problem of Communism is the problem of atheism.” ⁷²

The philosophy of Marxism/Leninism/Stalinism is dialectical materialism. The heart of the philosophy states two things: a) matter is reality, and b) matter behaves dialectically. ⁷³ Dialectical materialism attempts to explain all of reality — including inorganic matter (the molecular, atomic, and subatomic), the organic world (life and, according to materialism, mind or consciousness), and social life (economics, politics, etc.). All of nature reflects, illuminates, and illustrates communist dialectical philosophy. For better or worse, the Marxist’s philosophy is built primarily on the “science” of Darwinian evolution. Matter behaves in an upward progression from inorganic to organic state, from the organic to man, from man to the social level and all responding to certain laws: a) the unity and struggle of opposites, b) the transformation of quantity into quality, and c) the negation of the negation. The dialectical laws manifest a threefold rhythm of equilibrium (thesis), disturbance (anti-thesis) and re-establishment of equilibrium (synthesis). All good Marxists believe the physical universe acts according to such laws.

Marxist ethics proceeds out of Marxist theology, philosophy, biology, economics and history. It is an ethics that states an absolute: class morality. Whatever advances the proletariat class, by definition, is good. Or put another way, each act is considered ethically good if it assists the flow of history toward a communist end. Killing, raping, stealing, and lying are outside the boundaries of communist morality. Marxists/Leninists/Stalinists have absolutely no trouble believing that killing evolving materialistic human beings infected with the concepts of God, transcendent morality, private property is as morally justified as a farmer killing a materialistic evolving cow afflicted with hoof-and-mouth disease. The killing fields of Cambodia, the Ukraine, Russian and China were the practical results of class morality.

Said one Communist dictator, “Our cause is sacred. He whose hand will tremble, who will stop midway, whose knees will shake before he destroys tens and hundreds of enemies, he will lead the revolution into danger. Whoever will spare a few lives of enemies, will pay for it with hundreds and thousands of lives of the better sons of our fathers.” ⁷⁴

Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist biology centers on Charles Darwin. Says Marx, “Darwin’s [Origin of Species] is very important and provides me with the basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.” ⁷⁵ Frederick Engels put it like this, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.” ⁷⁶ Few doubt that Darwin’s theory of evolution and Marx’s theory of Communism fit hand to glove.

The psychology of Marxism centers around materialistic behaviorism in which man is looked upon as a conditioned evolving animal or as Lenin says, “Matter is primary nature. Sensation, thought, consciousness, are the highest products of matter organized in a certain way. This is the doctrine of materialism, in general, and Marx and Engels, in particular.” ⁷⁷

Marxist sociology can be summarized quickly: abolish all social structures that reflect a theistic worldview. Or as Marx says in The Communist Manifesto, “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” ⁷⁸ The three social institutions fit for overthrow are the family, the church and the state. Few remember that Marx and Engels called for “an openly legalized community of women” in The Communist Manifesto. ⁷⁹

Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist law is simply evolutionary law writ large. There are no legal absolutes because mankind is evolving and law is evolving with it. There is no eternal lawgiver since there is no God according to their theology. Therefore there are no eternal legal principles. Legal principles that assist man in his evolutionary, socialistic history are just laws; all others are unjust. Case closed! Marx put it like this, “Law, morality, religion, are to [the proletariat] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” ⁸⁰

Politics is power politics. State terror is part and parcel of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Lenin states, “The art of politics lies in correctly gauging the conditions and the moment when the vanguard of the proletariat [the killing machine] can successfully seize power.” ⁸¹ Engels is likewise brutal, “In reality, however, the State is nothing more than a machine for the oppression of one class by another.” ⁸² The political machinery put together by the disciples of Marx murdered and slaughtered 86 million human beings. And that figure continues to rise.

The economic phase of the Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist worldview already has been covered but the word is socialism. Karl Marx summarized it, “The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” ⁸³ Lenin also summarized the heart of socialism, “Communist society means that everything — the land, the factories — is owned in common. Communism means working in common.” ⁸⁴ Millions were slaughtered to establish a socialist utopia . But then one can’t have an omelette without smashing eggs. But from a Communist point of view an evolving human animal is no different than an egg.

The Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist interpretation of history consists of one major and a few minor players. The major player is the dialectical nature of matter. All history — all reality — is seen as the outworking of this all-encompassing concept. Dialectical matter is eternal. All else follows from this premise. Dialectical matter determines history. Interesting, Communists believe in nudging history. Joseph Stalin alone was guilty of “the persecution, imprisonment, torture and death of some fifty million human beings.” ⁸⁵

Have our intellectuals learned anything from this portion of history? “Postmodernism, a wayward stepchild of Marxism.” ⁸⁶ Some haven’t!

IV. Secular Humanism

Secular Humanism, too, is a religious worldview. John Dewey in A Common Faith said, “Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.” ⁸⁷

Margaret Sanger, recipient of Humanist of the Year award, represents that aspect of Secular Humanist that could end up killing more human beings than Nazism, Fascism and Communism combined.

Sanger is the founder of Planned Parenthood, an organization responsible for the death of millions of unborn human beings and the killings continue 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with no end in sight.

Secular Humanists have put into practice the slaughter of the innocent in accordance with their desire to further the sexual revolution. Sanger, Mary Calderone and Faye Wattleton have all been recipients of the Humanist of the Year award. All three were heavily involved in promoting the revolution. “If it is possible for one person to change the very foundations of civilization from a moral one to an immoral one, then Margaret Sanger should rightfully be known as the founder of modern culture because today’s culture is characterized precisely by the values she and her admirers taught.” ⁸⁸ H. G. Wells agreed, “Margaret Sanger made currents and circumstances. When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.” ⁸⁹ As part of the Wantley Circle, H. G. Wells, along with Harold Child and Hugh de Selincourt, were Sanger’s lovers. ⁹⁰ The Wantley Circle was a free-love association.

The goal of Planned Parenthood? To help “young people obtain sex satisfaction before marriage. By sanctioning sex before marriage, we will prevent fear and guilt.” ⁹¹ The Planned Parenthood publication You’ve Changed the Combination states, “There are only two kinds of sex: sex with victims and sex without. Sex with victims is always wrong. Sex without is always right.” ⁹²

When Wattleton accepted her Humanist of the Year award, she paid special tribute to the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. To a great extent Sanger epitomizes the Secular Human worldview. Nothing in her teaching or lifestyle fall outside of Humanism in theory or practice.

For example, she founded the publication “The Woman Rebel,” whose slogan was “No Gods! No Masters!” Since Secular Humanism is an atheistic worldview such a slogan could well be theirs as well. In her very first edition of “The Woman Rebel” she denounced marriage as “a degenerate institution” and sexual modesty as “obscene prudery.” ⁹³ Sanger’s hero was Havelock Ellis. Upon reading his massive seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, she told her husband that she needed to be liberated from the strict bonds of marriage. She ultimately deserted her husband to practice free love in Greenwich Village.

Sanger’s relationship to the Nazi worldview involves Hitler’s director of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene, Ernst Rudin. In 1933, the Planned Parenthood Review published Rudin’s article “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need.” Later in 1933 it published an article by Leon Whitney defending the Third Reich’s racial program. ⁹⁴

Sanger called for limiting the amount of children for the poorer classes of people, require parents to apply for licenses to have babies, and forcibly sterilize poor people, encourage the more successful human types to have more children and preached a new world order without crime and poverty caused by the birth of genetically inferior children. “But, unlike, Adolph Hitler, Margaret Sanger successfully encouraged peaceful methods of racial ‘purification.’ Whenever possible she advocated that people should be paid to be sterilized by gifts of money and presents.” ⁹⁵ Her term for such people — “human weeds.”

Dr. Lothrop Stoddard (Harvard doctorate), a co-worker of Sanger’s, wrote a book entitled Into the Darkness, Nazi Germany Today (1940), expressing his admiration for the Germans’ method of cleaning up their race problems using “scientific and truly humanitarian ways.”

As George Grant notes Margaret Sanger was mesmerized by the “scientific” racism of Malthusian Eugenics. She followed her lover Havelock Ellis who in turn followed Francis Galton who first systemized and popularized Eugenic thought. Galton was a cousin to Charles Darwin. But Grant says that Sanger’s attraction to race was also political. “Virtually all of her Socialist friends, lovers, and comrades,” says Grant, “were committed Eugenicists — from the followers of Lenin in Revolutionary Socialism, like H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Julius Hammer, to the followers of Hitler in National Socialism, like Ernest Rudin, Leon Whitney, and Harry Laughlin.” ⁹⁶

While we are using Margaret Sanger as the representative of Secular Humanism every student of this worldview knows that John Dewey is their most famous and important voice. Dewey’s influence on American education has been dominate since the 30s. Secular Humanism is the only worldviews allowed in the public schools. Humanist Charles Francis Potter in his work, Humanism: A New Religion, says, “Education is the most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday Schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching.” ⁹⁷

From kindergarten through graduate school America’s students are immersed in the doctrines and dogmas of Secular Humanism. The U.S. Supreme Court has made sure that only Secular Humanism is taught in the classroom in spite of the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court designated Secular Humanism a religion in 1961. ⁹⁸

How this situation came about is told in one of the most powerful studies of the 20th century. This study traces how the leftists, socialists, liberals, humanists slowly but surely captured the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, history, economics, jurisprudence) and even some pulpits of America. The Veritas Foundation’s study is entitled The Great Deceit: Social Pseudo-Sciences and Keynes at Harvard.

The Great Deceit is replete with references to John Dewey ⁹⁹ including his relationship to the American counterpart to the British Fabian Society — the League for Industrial Democracy. Dewey epitomizes Secular Humanism since he was an atheist in theology, a naturalist in philosophy, an ethical relativist in morals, an evolutionist in biology, and a socialist in economics.

In concluding this section let the Humanists express themselves in the various areas of their worldview.

Theologically — atheistic: “Humanism cannot in any fair sense of the word apply to one who still believes in God as the source and creator of the universe.” ¹⁰⁰

Philosophically — naturalism: “Naturalistic Humanism . . . is the Humanism that I have supported through the written and spoken word for some forty years.” ¹⁰¹

Ethically — relativism: “No inherent moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life.” ¹⁰²

Biologically — evolution: “Evolution is a fact amply demonstrated by the fossil record and by contemporary molecular biology. Natural selection is a successful theory devised to explain the fact of evolution.” ¹⁰³

Psychology — Self-actualization: “For myself, though I am very well aware of the incredible amount of destructive, cruel, malevolent behavior in today’s world — from the threats of war to the senseless violence in the streets — I do not find that this evil is inherent in human nature.” ¹⁰⁴

Sociology-Social “Science”: “Marriage, for most people, has outlived its usefulness and is doing more harm than good.” ¹⁰⁵

Law — Positive law: “No matter how misperceived as natural they may be, rights . . . are the works of human artifice.” ¹⁰⁶

Politics — Globalism: “It is essential for UNESCO to adopt an evolutionary approach . . . the general philosophy of UNESCO should, it seems, be a scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background . . . .Thus the struggle for existence that underlies naturals selection is increasingly replaced by conscious selection, a struggle between ideas and values in consciousness.” ¹⁰⁷

Economics — Socialism: “A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible.” ¹⁰⁸

History — Atheistic evolution: “The laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history.” ¹⁰⁹ “War is one of the constants of history and is the ultimate form of natural selection in the human species.” ¹¹⁰

Conclusion

“But sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, with gentleness and reverence.” I Peter 3:15

Every believer, says Erwin W. Lutzer, in Hitler’s Cross, “must be able to give a rationale for his or her faith, defending the supremacy of Christ over all other alternatives.” ¹¹¹

The alternative to the 20th century humanistic worldviews is Christ. I agree with Lutzer who says, “We do not know where all this [the ACLU and liberal left seeking to cleanse the public square of biblical Christianity] will end. What we do know is that we have the high honor of representing Christ in the midst of this ideological mega-shift. Our challenge is to rise to this hour of incredible challenge and opportunity.” ¹¹²

Lutzer doesn’t think that a two-hour Sunday morning church service will do it. The question is, is it worth the effort to live out Christ 24 hours a day on one hand, or be a Christian couch potato on the other. Living out Christ 24 hours a day is hard. It demands discipline, prayer, witness, study, confrontation (Acts 17:16f). Since the “being” of life involves theology, philosophy, ethics, biology, etc. it demands we follow Christ in these areas. But then this is exactly what the Bible teaches.

For example, in theology, Christ is “the fullness of the Godhead” (Col. 2:9); in philosophy, Christ is the “logos” of God (John 1:1–3); in ethics, Christ is “the true light” (John 1:9); in biology, Christ is “the life” (John 1:4); in psychology, Christ is “the Savior” of the soul (Luke 1:46, 47); in sociology, Christ is “the son” (Luke 1:30, 31); in law, Christ is “lawgiver” (Gen. 49:10); in politics, Christ is “King of kings and Lord of lords” (Rev. 19:16); in economics, Christ is “owner” of all things (Ps. 50:10–12; and in history, Christ is “alpha and omega” (Rev. 1:8). None of these areas is secular. All are sacred because they are founded on Jesus Christ. Since Christ is the fountainhead of all wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2:2,3) all areas are open for Christian living and study. ¹¹³

If the 21st century is not to be a slaughter similar to the 20th century Christians need to listen carefully to Lutzer, who has studied the surrender of the Christian church under Adolph Hitler, and learned some valuable lessons.

“It is time,” says Lutzer, “that Christians become leaders in art, education, politics, and law.” He could have added to that list: theology, philosophy, ethics, the sciences, psychology, sociology, and history. “Let’s not make the mistake of the German church,” says Lutzer, “and isolate the spiritual sphere from the political, social, and cultural world. Bonhoeffer was critical of the church when its only interest was self-preservation. We should be characterized by giving, not withholding. Since we share this planet with all of humanity , we must reestablish leadership in all of those areas where Christians often led the way.” ¹¹⁴