Communism is a religion unto itself

From The Australian:

The Left is killing religion

Giles Auty | July 01, 2009

Article from: The Australian

BY an odd coincidence, Hal G.P. Colebatch's excellent article "UK bill an attack on faith" appeared in yesterday's The Australian about five days after I had the pleasure of delivering the annual St Edmund Campion lecture at Sydney's Campion College.

Colebatch's moving piece explained why it may soon become illegal to hang a cross in any Catholic school in Britain and asks advisedly what sort of intolerant world postmodernist totalitarianism is creating.

Anyone familiar with Elizabethan history in Britain may recall that Campion was tortured and executed in 1581 for trying to keep alive the old faith - Catholicism - in Britain after Henry VIII's historic rift with Rome in 1533.

The substance of my talk, which was called "Are we truly evolving? Reflections on the life of an Elizabethan saint", touched on the creeping influence of postmodernist totalitarianism throughout the Western world rather than only in Britain.

Anyone who has read Evelyn Waugh's biography of Campion will understand something of the extraordinary heroism through which he and scores of other martyred priests - plus thousands of devout laypeople - struggled to keep what they regarded as the true, historic Christian faith alive in Britain.

Now, instead of finding itself persecuted by Elizabethan spies, informers and hangmen, Catholicism finds itself under severe assault from the self-righteous, politically correct social engineers of Britain's political Left.

Thankfully the same thing has yet to happen in Australia, but with the increasing politicisation of public education here by an ideologically driven Marxist Left, something very similar may not be far away.

Already Christianity in all its forms is treated with increasing contempt in societies that basically believe they have evolved and so distanced themselves from what they imagine are the old-world superstitions - and attendant moral constraints - of their past.

Postmodernist ideology is an exclusively man-made - and, of course, woman-made - ideology that finds no basis whatsoever in any traditional human system of belief. Until the advent of postmodernism, communism was Christianity's most persistent and relentless recent foe.

Now postmodernism in all its largely Marxist-inspired guises - political correctness, gender theory, feminism, post-colonialism, determinism, deconstruction, relativism, structuralism, historical revisionism - has become a stealthier and thus even more sinister adversary that flourishes, generally unremarked, in our midst.

Why has Western society, with all its proud history, generally allowed such an abject internal collapse?

American Roger Kimball, who is one of a number of international cultural commentators with whom I have corresponded through the years, explains the whole matter as well as anyone: "In a democratic society like ours, where free elections are guaranteed, political revolution is almost unthinkable in practical terms. Consequently, utopian efforts to transform society have been channelled into cultural and moral life.

"In America, scattered if much-publicised episodes of violence have wrought far less damage than the moral and intellectual assaults that do not destroy buildings but corrupt sensibilities and blight souls. The success of America's recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values.

"If we often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake, that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive the extent of our transformation." These wise words are taken from Kimball's The Long March.

Postmodernism corrodes society largely through assaults on its soft underbelly, principally through theeffective hegemony it has created in the arts, education and culture generally.

Perhaps its most damaging corrosion has been through the politicisation of public education at the tertiary, secondary and even primary levels.

In Australia, generations of children have effectively been abducted from the influence of their parents, who often have little or no say in what - or how - their children will be taught.

Now, as Colebatch makes clear, the postmodernist Left is intent on wiping out the remaining pockets of resistance that exist in private and religious schools.

I hope I am not alone in regarding this as an insult to the basic principles of democratic life.

Giles Auty is a former art critic for The Spectator and The Australian.