Marxism

Karl Marx formulated his economic, political, and religious philosophy about the middle of the last century as an antidote to a rampant capitalism. He appealed to the downtrodden workers in industrial nations to throw off the bondage with which they were yoked and to introduce a new classless society. But in industrial nations the lot of the worker slowly improved through the efforts of labor unions and reformers and through governmental intervention. So, it was in the great agrarian nation of Russia, unresponsive to change and the needs of the masses, that Communism, as reconstructed or reinterpreted by Lenin, first caught fire. Communism engulfed over 1.6 billion people at its height in the 1980s; and though it has lost its grip in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, it still controls over one billion two hundred fifty million people in China, North Korea, Southeast Asia, and Cuba. Wherever it has gone, this atheistic system has sought utterly to uproot Christianity—either by direct onslaught or by subversion. Although Communism was not able to obliterate Christianity in the countries where it won control, it surely proved to be a formidable enemy. In the former U.S.S.R. and China and some other countries, official churches of sorts were permitted, both to provide some impression to the world of freedom of religion and to control more effectively religious expression. The true church largely went underground in all Communist countries. Opposition to or persecution of Christianity in most Marxist-dominated states has been covert. Christians have been prohibited from attendance at university and from advancement into prestigious positions. Sometimes they were even fired from menial employment. Efforts were made to choke off a supply of trained leadership of churches by severely restricting the numbers permitted to matriculate in theological seminaries. In order to prevent adequate places for meeting, building permits often were denied to churches or tied up in bureaucratic red tape for long periods of time. Pastors might be intimidated, as was true in the fall of 1982 in Romania when four leading Baptist pastors were accused of embezzling church funds for affirming separation of church and state and for opposition to state interference in church affairs. It was also common in the former Soviet Union for Christians to be accused of having mental illness and to be assigned to mental hospitals for “treatment.” Of course not all the opposition is covert or indirect. As a case in point, in Marxist Ethiopia late in 1982 authorities in Wollega Province closed 284 of the 350 churches of the Lutheran Ethiopian Evangelical church there. And as is well known, the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–1969) openly made war on Christianity and tried by every means to destroy it. It is hard to discover how many believers may be in prison for their faith at any one time in a given country, but the research center at Keston College in England reported that there were 307 known Christian prisoners in the Soviet Union at the beginning of 1981. According to another report, there were 63 Christians being held in Chinese prisons or under house arrest for religious reasons early in 1991. Then in the latter part of 1991 reports reached Hong Kong of “large-scale arrests” of believers in the provinces of Zhejiang, Anhui, and Jiangsu, and the cities of Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. As the bastions of Communism collapse elsewhere, the Chinese seem determined to maintain their own defenses. Strong evidence indicates that Christians and other dissidents provided some of the slave labor that built the gas pipeline from Siberia to Western Europe Howard Frederic Vos, Exploring church history, electronic ed., Logos Library System, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson) 1997, c1994 by Howard F. Vos.