When God is Ignored, the Communist Collective is Waiting, Like a Dark Spider
One of the great mistakes of modern secularism was the assumption that if people ceased believing in God they would simply become rational individuals, calmly constructing their lives according to evidence and enlightened self-interest. Human beings do not seem to work that way. We are meaning-seeking creatures, and when one source of transcendent meaning disappears, the resulting space does not necessarily remain empty. Something else can move in. Something sinister, like communism in all its forms.
That is the disturbing proposition explored by Allan J. Feifer in his American Thinker essay "Collectivism and God." His argument is not merely that socialism is economically defective or that communism has produced terrible historical results. It is that collectivism can function psychologically and morally as a substitute religion. As religious faith declines, the human desire to belong to something larger than oneself remains, leaving political movements capable of supplying purpose, identity, moral certainty and even a secular version of salvation.
This needs qualification at the outset. An atheist does not automatically become a socialist, any more than a Christian automatically becomes a classical liberal. There are atheist libertarians, religious socialists and innumerable people who fit neither category. Feifer himself acknowledges that the correlations he cites do not establish that secularism causes socialism.
The more interesting argument concerns what happens at the level of civilisation when belief in a transcendent source of moral authority declines. If God no longer stands above society, where does ultimate authority reside? One possible answer is the autonomous individual. Another, historically much more dangerous answer, is the collective.
Marxism provided perhaps the clearest example. Marx's philosophy was explicitly materialist and regarded religion not as revelation but as a human product arising from earthly conditions. Communist regimes subsequently recognised something politically important about religion: it creates a source of loyalty and authority beyond the state. A Christian can be commanded by Caesar and still answer that Caesar is not God. A church can survive as an institution that the government does not completely control. For totalitarian systems seeking comprehensive authority, that independence is intolerable.
This helps explain why communist hostility to religion was not an accidental eccentricity of particular dictators. The Soviet Union, Maoist China and other communist systems repeatedly attacked churches and religious institutions because they competed with the ideological state for allegiance. If the Party possesses the correct interpretation of history and is constructing the just society toward which history itself is moving, rival claims to ultimate truth become political obstacles.
Here the similarities between religion and revolutionary collectivism become uncomfortable. Both can provide a comprehensive account of human existence. Both can identify good and evil. Both can demand sacrifice. Both can create communities of believers. Both can explain suffering by locating it within a larger historical or cosmic story.
But there is an enormous difference between Christianity and political collectivism concerning where perfection is expected to be found.
Christianity begins from an exceedingly pessimistic assessment of human moral perfection. Human beings are fallen creatures. The king is fallen, the priest is fallen, the merchant is fallen and the ordinary citizen is fallen. Nobody acquires moral perfection merely by acquiring political authority. Indeed, power creates additional opportunities for human weakness to become dangerous.
That principle has profound political consequences. If rulers are no less susceptible to pride, greed, self-deception and cruelty than everybody else, power should be divided and constrained. Laws should bind rulers as well as ruled. Independent institutions should exist. Property should not all depend upon political favour. Families, churches, voluntary associations and local communities should possess spheres of authority that government cannot simply absorb.
The collectivist temptation moves in the opposite direction. Society contains injustice, inequality and suffering, therefore sufficient political organisation might eliminate them. Give enlightened administrators enough information, resources and authority and they will supposedly construct a more rational social order.
But who administers the administrators? That question has destroyed more utopias than any shortage of economic theory. Collectivism does not abolish the defects of human nature. It concentrates them. Greed does not disappear when private property is nationalised; ambitious people compete for political privilege instead. Inequality does not vanish when markets disappear; access to the political hierarchy becomes the new currency. Self-interest does not disappear when businesses are collectivised; it migrates into bureaucracies.
The Soviet Union abolished the capitalist class and promptly produced a privileged Communist Party elite. Mao's revolution attacked traditional hierarchies while constructing an extraordinarily powerful new hierarchy centred upon Mao himself. Collectivisation did not magically turn ordinary human beings into selfless economic actors. It instead gave political authorities immense power over the allocation of food, employment, housing and opportunity, with catastrophic consequences when their policies failed. Feifer rightly identifies the central historical problem: changing an economic system does not change human nature; it changes who possesses power over whom.
This is where abandoning God can have consequences extending far beyond declining church attendance. The Christian conception of the individual supplies a powerful barrier against total collectivisation because the individual possesses a value preceding the state. A human being made in the image of God cannot logically derive his entire worth from membership of a class, race, party or political collective.
Nor does Christianity regard humanity as a homogeneous mass. Salvation itself is irreducibly personal. One cannot be saved because 51 percent of the electorate voted for salvation, nor because one's social class collectively qualified for it. Moral responsibility ultimately attaches to persons.
This does not make Christianity an ideology of selfish individualism. That would be an equally serious misunderstanding. Christianity commands charity, community, family responsibility, care for the poor and obligations towards one's neighbour. The early Christian community was anything but a collection of atomised consumers pursuing private gratification.
The crucial distinction is between community and collectivism. A community consists of persons who possess value in themselves and enter relationships involving obligations, loyalties and sacrifices. Collectivism reverses the relationship: the individual derives his significance from the collective and may therefore be subordinated to whatever those claiming to represent the collective declare necessary.
C. S. Lewis understood the distinction particularly well. His Christian critique rejected both atomistic individualism and collectivism. Individualism forgets that human beings are social creatures, while collectivism threatens to reduce persons to interchangeable units within a mass. Christianity instead maintains the paradox that human beings become part of a community without ceasing to be distinct persons.
That distinction has become increasingly important because modern collectivism seldom announces itself by demanding collectivised farms and five-year plans. It presents itself through moral categories: social justice, equality, inclusion, climate responsibility, public health, anti-racism and protection of vulnerable groups. Each of these can identify genuine moral concerns. The danger begins when the asserted collective good becomes sufficient justification for overriding individual conscience, property, speech or freedom without meaningful limits.
The process is particularly powerful when politics supplies the psychological functions once supplied by religion. Political movements acquire saints and sinners, orthodoxies and heresies, rituals and confessions. History becomes a story of oppression leading toward liberation. Political activism provides purpose. Membership supplies community. Dissent becomes not merely mistaken but morally contaminated.
Most importantly, political salvation requires political power. That is where the substitute religion becomes dangerous. Christianity can tell the believer that ultimate justice lies beyond the capacity of earthly government. The political religion cannot. If injustice is to be eliminated here and now, somebody must possess sufficient power to eliminate it. Every remaining inequality becomes evidence that the transformation has not gone far enough.
Failure therefore produces an extraordinary ideological escape mechanism. Feifer observes that collectivist experiments repeatedly survive their own disastrous outcomes because failure can always be blamed upon the wrong leaders, foreign interference, inadequate commitment, imperfect implementation or insufficient central planning. The ideal itself remains untouched. Next time the correct people will administer it properly.
That resembles religious faith in form while lacking one of Christianity's most important restraints: the doctrine that we ourselves are among the sinners. The revolutionary is perpetually tempted to locate evil somewhere else. The bourgeoisie, capitalist, landlord, counter-revolutionary, reactionary or privileged class becomes the obstacle preventing paradise. Once the obstacle has been identified, coercion can become morally admirable because it serves the future good.
The twentieth century demonstrated where that logic can lead. People were dispossessed, imprisoned, deported and killed not necessarily because their persecutors believed themselves evil, but often because they believed themselves agents of historical justice.
There is a lesson here for contemporary Western societies experiencing simultaneous religious decline and political polarisation. The decline of Christianity does not guarantee the arrival of a calm post-religious rationalism. The old religious impulses, belonging, transcendence, moral certainty, sacrifice and redemption, may simply attach themselves to politics.
And politics is a particularly dangerous object of worship because the state possesses police, prisons, taxation and ultimately force. A government can be useful precisely because its ambitions are limited. It can enforce laws, defend borders, protect property, provide essential services and maintain the framework within which civil society operates. It becomes something altogether different when citizens expect it to supply meaning, identity, moral perfection, economic equality, emotional security and redemption from every human misfortune.
No political system can deliver those things. Governments consist of the same imperfect human beings as the populations they govern. That was once easier for a civilisation shaped by Christianity to understand. Caesar had legitimate authority, but Caesar was never God.
The danger identified by Feifer is therefore deeper than another argument about socialism versus capitalism. A civilisation abandoning God may discover that it has not abandoned faith at all. It has merely transferred faith from the transcendent to the political, from a God standing above rulers to institutions administered by rulers.
History gives us little reason to believe that transfer ends well. When people stop kneeling before God, they do not necessarily stand permanently upright as sovereign rational individuals. Sometimes they find another altar. And the state is always willing to provide one.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/08/collectivism-and-god/
