(Minghui.org) [Editor's Note] This series is a reprint of The Epoch Times' English translation of the book How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World by the editorial team of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.

Table of Contents of the Book

Preface: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World

Introduction: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World

Chapter One: The Specter’s Strategies for Destroying Humanity

Chapter Two: Communism’s European Beginnings

Chapter Three: Tyranny in the East

Chapter Four: Exporting Revolution

Chapter Five: Infiltrating the West

Chapter Six: The Revolt Against God

Chapter Seven: The Destruction of the Family

Chapter Eight: How Communism Sows Chaos in Politics

Chapter Nine: The Communist Economic Trap

Chapter Ten: Corrupting the Legal System

Chapter Eleven: Desecrating the Arts

Chapter Twelve: Sabotaging Education

Chapter Thirteen: The Media – The Specter’s Mouthpiece

Chapter Fourteen: Popular Culture – A Decadent Indulgence

Chapter Fifteen: The Communist Roots of Terrorism

Chapter Sixteen: The Communism Behind Environmentalism

Chapter Seventeen: Globalization and Communism

Chapter Eighteen: The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Ambitions

Conclusion: How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World

What is Included in This Part?

Chapter Six: The Revolt Against God

Introduction

1. In the East: A Violent Revolt Against God

a. The Soviet Union’s Violent Destruction of Orthodox Religionsb. The Chinese Communist Party’s Destruction of Culture and Religion

2. In the West: Infiltrating and Weakening the Church

a. Infiltrating Religionb. Restricting Religion

3. Communism’s Twisted Theology

4. Religious Chaos

References

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CHAPTER SIX: THE REVOLT AGAINST GOD

Introduction

The peoples of the world have their own ancient myths and legends about how the divine created man in the image of the divine. These traditional beliefs are the foundation of morality and culture for their people and leave a path of return to Heaven for those who believe. In the East and the West, there are legends about how Nüwa and Jehovah created their people.

The divine calls on man to follow their commandments or else face divine retribution. In times of widespread moral decay, the divine destroys man in order to preserve the purity of the universe. Many races in the world have legends about how great floods destroyed civilizations. The legendary Atlantis was said to have been lost to the sea overnight.

To maintain the morality of human beings, there are times when enlightened beings or prophets are born in the human world to rectify people’s hearts and lead civilizations to develop and mature. Such sages include Moses and Jesus of the Near East, Lao Tzu in China, Sakyamuni in India, and Socrates in ancient Greece.

Human history and culture help people to understand what Buddhas, Taos, and gods are; what it means to believe in God; and how to practice cultivation. The different schools of practice teach what is righteous, what is evil, and how to distinguish truth from falsehood and good from evil. They teach man to await the Creator’s return to Earth before the end of the world, in order that he may be saved and return to Heaven. Once people sever their connection with the divine being that created them, their morality will quickly deteriorate. Moral corruption ultimately leads to the end of civilized life.

In the East, especially in the ancient land of China, beliefs are rooted in the hearts of people through traditional culture, handed down through the millennia. Therefore, it is difficult to deceive the Chinese people into accepting atheism with simple lies. In order to uproot China’s five thousand years of beliefs and culture, the communist specter used violence on a mass scale to slaughter the elites who had inherited the traditional culture. The communists then used lies to deceive young people from generation to generation.In the West and other parts of the world, religions and faith are the means of maintaining contact between man and the divine, and are important cornerstones for maintaining moral standards. Although the evil specter failed to establish communist tyranny in these countries, it achieved its goal of destroying orthodox religions and corrupting human beings through deception, deviance, and infiltration.

1. In the East: A Violent Revolt Against God

a. The Soviet Union’s Violent Destruction of Orthodox Religions

The Communist Manifesto calls for the destruction of the family, the church, and the nation-state. Eliminating and subverting religions is one of the important goals of the Communist Party.

From believing in God to becoming a follower of Satan, Karl Marx clearly knew about the existence of the divine and the devil. He also knew that unvarnished demonic teachings were hard for people — especially religious people — to accept. Therefore, he advocated atheism from the start, declaring that “religion is the opium of the people,” “communism begins from the outset with atheism,” and so on. [1]

As long as people no longer believe in the divine, the devil can corrupt and occupy the soul, eventually dragging people toward hell. That is why the “Internationale,” the communist anthem, says there are no supreme saviors — not God, nor human rulers — on which to depend. Marx vilified religion and the divine in his theories, while Vladimir Lenin was able to use the machinery of the state to attack religion after seizing power in 1917. Lenin used violence and other high-pressure tactics to oppress orthodox religions and righteous faith in order to force people to depart from gods.

In 1919, Lenin introduced a new Party program that included the large-scale elimination of religion. Then, in 1922, he passed a secret resolution stipulating that all valuables including precious stones must be removed from churches and religious institutions “with ruthless resolution, leaving nothing in doubt, and in the very shortest time.” He declared: “The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this ‘audience’ must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades.” [2]

In the following years, a large amount of church property was looted, churches and monasteries were closed, and an unknown number of Orthodox and Catholic clergy members were executed.

After Lenin died, Joseph Stalin followed his example and started an extremely cruel cleansing in the 1930s. Stalin ordered that the whole country implement the Five-Year Plan of Atheism. He declared that when he completed the plan, the last church would be closed, the last priest would be destroyed, and the Soviet Union would become a fertile land for communist atheism — one would not find a trace of religion anywhere. In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of clergy members were arrested and tortured to death. By 1941, there were just 4,225 Orthodox churches open to the public; there had been more than 46,000 before the Soviets seized power. Ninety-seven percent of Orthodox monasteries were destroyed, leaving just 37. During this period, cultural elites and intellectuals were sent to the gulag or shot dead.

During World War II, to take advantage of the church’s financial resources and manpower in the fight against Nazi Germany, Stalin seemed to pause in his persecution of Orthodoxy and Catholicism, giving the impression that he might rehabilitate these religions. But he had a baser goal in mind: to exercise strict control over the restored Orthodox and Catholic churches as a tool to undermine religious faith by placing the clergy under the rule of the Communist Party. Religion was thus made a tool of the communist specter for deceiving and controlling the public, especially believers whose traditional faith was too strong to be destroyed by overt persecution.

Alexy II, of the former Soviet Union, was promoted to bishop of Tallinn and Estonia in 1961, archbishop in 1964, and metropolitan in 1968. He became patriarch of the Orthodox Church in 1990, before the Soviet Union’s disintegration. Following the Soviet collapse, the briefly declassified KGB archives revealed that Alexy II worked for the KGB intelligence agency.

Later, Alexy II confessed that he had been compromised and had acted as a Soviet agent. He openly repented, in a 1991 interview with the daily newspaper Izvestia: “Defending one thing, it was necessary to give somewhere else. Were there any other organizations, or any other people among those who had to carry responsibility not only for themselves but for thousands of other fates, who in those years in the Soviet Union were not compelled to act likewise? Before those people, however, to whom the compromises, silence, forced passivity or expressions of loyalty permitted by the leaders of the church in those years caused pain, before these people, and not only before God, I ask forgiveness, understanding, and prayers.” [3]

The Soviet Union did not keep this adulterated religion merely to its own territory, but spread its malignant influence to the rest of the world.

b. The Chinese Communist Party’s Destruction of Culture and Religion

The Destruction of Traditional Chinese Culture

China has the world’s oldest surviving civilization, with continuous historical records reaching back five thousand years. Known as the “Celestial Empire,” its splendid and magnificent traditional culture earned the esteem of many nations. Chinese culture deeply influenced the entire East Asian region and led to the formation of a Chinese civilizational sphere. The opening of the Silk Road and the spread of China’s Four Great Inventions (papermaking, the compass, gunpowder, and printing) to the West helped accelerate the development of European civilization.

Although Chinese faith is not characterized by a single predominant religion as is often the case in other countries, the Chinese people have a firm belief in gods and Buddhas, and religious beliefs are the foundation of China’s traditional culture. Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and even Western religions have coexisted peacefully in China for thousands of years.

Communism sought to destroy this ancient culture, but it could never achieve this goal by simply deceiving the Chinese people into giving it up. Therefore, the Chinese Communist Party used all manner of evil tactics over decades of persistent political campaigns, starting with mass slaughter. The CCP worked to undermine the essence of religion, persecuted intellectuals, and destroyed material culture, such as temples, cultural relics, antique paintings, and ancient artifacts.

Throughout the history of communist rule in China, incessant political campaigns, persecutions, and mass killings have given the Party an unparalleled understanding of how to use propaganda, terror, economic interests, and other tactics to bring people under its power. In destroying traditional culture, the CCP established a malicious Communist Party culture that has poisoned generations of Chinese.

Steeped in the evil characteristics of the CCP — deception, perniciousness, struggle — millions of Chinese have lost all understanding of the universal values built up over millennia of civilization. This was the communist specter’s twisted arrangement, made in preparation for the final confrontation in our world between the forces of righteousness and evil.

The landlords and gentry in rural areas and the merchants and scholars in urban areas were the elites carrying China’s traditional culture. In the early stages of the CCP’s seizure of power in 1949, the Party used a series of campaigns to massacre landlords, gentry in villages, and capitalists in cities, thus plundering social wealth while creating terror. At the same time, the Party “ideologically reformed” scholars — indoctrinating them with materialism, atheism, and the theory of evolution — to systematically brainwash a new generation of students and instill in them a hatred toward traditional culture.

Through the Anti-Rightist Movement in the 1950s, all disobedient intellectuals were exiled and sentenced to re-education through forced labor, casting them to the bottom of society. The Party made scholars the subject of mockery and ridicule. The eradication of the traditional elites ended the process of inheriting and passing on traditional Chinese culture over the generations. Young people at the time were no longer socialized and nurtured in that culture through the family, the schools, the society, or the village — and thus became a generation without traditional culture.

After the Anti-Rightist Movement, few independent voices remained, yet the CCP was still not satisfied. After all, the elderly still preserved the memory of traditional culture, and material objects, such as ancient artifacts and architecture, were everywhere. Moreover, art still carried traditional values. In 1966, the CCP initiated a movement aimed at destroying traditional culture on a larger scale: the Cultural Revolution. Using students who had been brainwashed after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Party stirred up adolescent restlessness and rebelliousness and used the campaign of Destroying the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits) to wreak havoc.

The hellfire of the campaign burned across the land of China. Monasteries, temples, Buddhist statues and paintings, and cultural sites were destroyed beyond hope of restoration. Before the Cultural Revolution, every city and town in China had ancient artifacts. Just one foot below the earth, artifacts from recent history could be found; down another two, three, or twenty feet, countless artifacts left by preceding dynasties could be found. The campaign not only ruined the sites of religious practice, prayer, and cultivation — ancient places that represented the harmony between man and Heaven — but also went about eradicating basic righteous beliefs from human hearts, such as the belief in harmony between man and the cosmos.

Furthermore, to cut off the Chinese people’s connection to their ancestors and gods, the CCP took the lead in cursing the ancestors and defiling traditional culture. Countries around the world usually revere their ancestors and kings of the past, and value their traditions. Yet in the CCP’s eyes, the emperors, generals, scholars, and gifted people of ancient China were good for nothing. Making such insults toward one’s own ancestors is indeed a rarity throughout history. Led by the CCP, the Chinese people came to oppose the divine, reject their ancestors, and destroy their own culture, putting them on a perilous path.

Persecuting Religions

After the CCP obtained power, it followed the Soviet Union’s approach to eradicating religions. On one hand, the CCP promoted atheism and launched ideological attacks against religious beliefs. On the other hand, through a series of political movements, it suppressed and killed religious practitioners. The persecution of those with orthodox faiths became more and more severe, until it reached a peak with the start of the bloody persecution of the spiritual practice Falun Gong in 1999.

Shortly after seizing power in 1949, the CCP banned religious gatherings and burned numerous copies of the Bible and scriptures from other religions. It demanded that Christians, Catholics, Taoists, and Buddhists register with the government and repent their “mistakes.” Those who refused to comply were severely punished. In 1951, the CCP declared that those who continued to attend religious gatherings would be executed or imprisoned for life. Numerous Buddhist monks were chased away from temples or forced to live and labor in secular settings. Catholic and Christian priests were jailed and tortured. Believers were executed or sent to reform through forced labor. According to incomplete statistics, within the first few years of the CCP’s rise to power, nearly three million religious followers and members of religious organizations were arrested or executed.

Like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the CCP established regulatory agencies for each religious group, such as the Chinese Taoist Association, the Buddhist Association of China, and the like. To control Catholics, the CCP established the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. All religious associations were made to follow the will of the Party, which “thought-reformed” members. At the same time, the CCP used these associations to perform deeds that could not be done by the evil specter directly: to sow discord and corrupt orthodox religions from within.

Similarly, after dispatching troops to occupy Tibet in 1950, the CCP began to severely persecute Tibetan Buddhism. The 14th Dalai Lama escaped Tibet in 1959 to live in exile in India, which the CCP considered a rebellion. In May 1962, the 10th Panchen Lama submitted to the CCP’s State Council a petition describing the Party’s sabotage of Tibetan culture and Buddhist traditions, carried out by the Chinese army:

As for the eradication of Buddhist statues, Buddhist scriptures and Buddhist stupas, basically speaking, apart from a very small number of monasteries, including the four great monasteries which were protected, in Tibet’s other monasteries and in the villages, small towns and towns in the broad agricultural and animal herding areas, some of our Han cadres produced a plan, our Tibetan cadres mobilized, and some people among the activists who did not understand reason played the part of executors of the plan.

They usurped the name of the masses and put on the face of the masses, and stirred up a great flood of waves to eliminate statues of the Buddha, Buddhist scriptures and stupas, threw them into water, threw them onto the ground, broke them and melted them. They recklessly carried out wild and hasty destruction of monasteries, Buddhist halls, “mani” walls and stupa, and stole many ornaments from statues of the Buddha and precious things from the Buddhist stupas.

Because the government purchasing bodies were not careful in making distinctions when purchasing non-ferrous metals, they purchased many statues of the Buddha, stupas, and offering vessels made from non-ferrous metals, and showed an attitude of encouraging the destruction of these things. As a result, some villages and monasteries looked as if they were not the result of man’s deliberate actions, but rather they looked as if they had been accidentally destroyed by bombardment, and a war had just ended, and they were unbearable to look at.

Furthermore, they unscrupulously insulted religion, using the “Tripitaka” as material for fertilizer, in particular using pictures of the Buddha and Buddhist sutras to make shoes. This was totally unreasonable. Because they did many things that even lunatics would hardly do, people of all strata were thoroughly shocked, their emotions were extremely confused and they were very discouraged and disheartened. They cried out, with tears flowing from their eyes: “Our area has been turned into a dark area,” and other such piteous cries. [4]

After the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, many lamas were forced to turn secular, and numerous precious scriptures were burned. By 1976, out of the 2,700 monasteries originally in Tibet, only 8 were left. Jokhang Temple, built more than 1,300 years ago — before the Tang Dynasty — and the most important temple in Tibet, was ransacked. [5]

In China, the cultivation of Taoism has an ancient history. More than 2,500 years ago, Lao Tzu left behind the Tao Te Ching, which comprises five thousand characters. It is the essence of Taoist cultivation, and its spread was not limited to Eastern countries; it was translated into the native languages of many Western countries as well. Yet during the Cultural Revolution, Lao Tzu was criticized as hypocritical and the Tao Te Ching was deemed “feudal superstition.”

The core beliefs of Confucianism were benevolence, righteousness, the moral disposition to do good, proper conduct, wisdom, and trust. Confucius set the moral standards for generations. During the Cultural Revolution, the rebels in Beijing led the Red Guards to Qufu, Confucius’s hometown, where they sabotaged and burned ancient books and smashed thousands of historical tombstones, including that of Confucius. In 1974, the CCP started another movement to “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius.” The CCP considered the traditional thinking of Confucianism — how one should live and the moral standards to uphold — to be worthless.

Even more brutal and tragic was the campaign launched in July 1999 by then-Party chief Jiang Zemin: the persecution of Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) and its cultivators, who practice truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

Jiang’s political rise began in the wake of the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989. Following the death of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in 1997, Jiang assumed full power, sidelining other senior Party officials and establishing an entrenched network of patronage. In 1999, making use of the PRC’s well-developed security forces and propaganda machine, Jiang launched the persecution of Falun Gong and its estimated one hundred million adherents. This nationwide campaign of state terror — the largest since the Cultural Revolution — boosted Jiang’s political authority and allowed him to place his allies in positions of power and profit. Jiang’s brutal policies against Falun Gong, and the corruption he encouraged, laid the foundations for the CCP’s modern resurrection of totalitarianism and threw China into an unprecedented moral freefall.

Furthermore, to this day, the Party has carried out a crime that has never before existed on the planet — the harvesting of organs from living Falun Gong practitioners.

In only a few decades, the CCP devastated thousands of years’ worth of China’s traditional culture, moral values, and beliefs in self-cultivation. As a result, people no longer believe in gods, turn away from the divine, and experience a spiritual emptiness and corruption of moral values.

2. In the West: Infiltrating and Weakening the Church

Communism has made systematic arrangements for attacking religious believers in noncommunist countries. Through the CPSU and the CCP, it used money and spies to infiltrate the religious institutions of other countries under the pretext of “religious exchange,” in order to warp righteous beliefs or directly attack them and introduce socialist and communist ideologies into religion. Believers continued to worship and practice in religions that had been irrevocably changed by communist ideology.

a. Infiltrating Religion

In the United States, Marxists infiltrated Christian churches and entered the seminaries, miseducating class after class of priests and pastors, who then went on to influence religion on a broader scale throughout the country.

In testimony given before the Committee on Un-American Activities in July 1953, high-level Communist Party member Manning Johnson said:

Once the tactic of infiltrating religious organizations was set by the Kremlin, the actual mechanics of implementing the “new line” was a question of following the general experiences of the living church movement in Russia, where the Communists discovered that the destruction of religion could proceed much faster through infiltration of the church by Communist agents operating within the church itself. …

In general, the idea was to divert the emphasis of clerical thinking from the spiritual to the material and political — by political, of course, is meant politics based on the Communist doctrine of conquest of power. Instead of emphasis towards the spiritual and matters of the soul, the new and heavy emphasis was to deal with those matters which, in the main, led toward the Communist program of “immediate demands.” These social demands, of course, were of such a nature that to fight for them would tend to weaken our present society and prepare it for final conquest by Communist forces. [6]

Bulgarian historian Momchil Metodiev, after extensive research into the Cold War-era archives of the Bulgarian Communist Party, exposed the fact that the Eastern European communist intelligence network closely collaborated with Party religious committees to influence and infiltrate international religious organizations. [7]

On a global scale, one organization that was infiltrated by communism in Eastern Europe was the World Council of Churches (WCC). Established in 1948, the WCC is a worldwide interchurch Christian organization. Its members include churches of various mainline forms of Christianity, representing around 590 million people from 150 different countries. The WCC is thus a major force in world religious circles. It also was the first international religious organization to accept communist countries as members during the Cold War and to accept financial support from them.

Based on a released KGB file from 1969, Cambridge University professor and historian Christopher Andrew wrote that during the Cold War, five KGB agents held seats on the WCC Central Committee, exerting covert influence on the WCC’s policies and operations. A released KGB file from 1989 shows that these KGB-controlled agents ensured that the committee issued public communications that aligned with socialist aims. [8]

In 1975, Russian Orthodox bishop Nikodim (birth name Boris Georgievich Rotov), metropolitan of Leningrad, was elected as one of the WCC’s six presidents. A veteran KGB agent, Nikodim served three years in the position, until his death in 1978. [9]

Another victory was the election of Bulgarian communist spy Todor Sabev as deputy general secretary of the WCC in 1979. Sabev served until 1993.

Knowing how the Eastern European communists infiltrated and manipulated the churches, it is not difficult to understand why the WCC insisted on giving grants to the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) in January 1980, despite the opposition of its members. The ZANU-PF was a notorious group of communist guerrillas who were known to murder missionaries and shoot down commercial aircraft.

The WCC also was infiltrated by the CCP through the China Christian Council. The council is the only official representative of communist China in the WCC, yet, due to monetary and other influences, the WCC has for years gone along with the CCP’s interests.

The general secretary of the WCC officially visited China in early 2018 and met with several Party-controlled Christian organizations, including the China Christian Council, the National Committee of Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches in China, and the State Administration for Religious Affairs. In China, the number of members of non-official Christian groups (underground churches) is far greater than the official ones, yet WCC delegates didn’t arrange to meet with any non-official Christian groups, in order to avoid friction with Beijing.

b. Restricting Religion

Communist infiltration is omnipresent in the West, and religions have been buffeted by ideologies and behaviors that vilify God. Ideas like “separation of church and state” and leftist “political correctness” have been used to marginalize and sabotage righteous, orthodox religions.

The United States was built as one nation under God. All US presidents, when sworn in, put one hand on the Bible and ask God to bless America. Nowadays, when religious people criticize behaviors, ideas, and policies that depart from the divine, or when they speak out against abortion or homosexuality, communists in the United States or the militant Left go on the offensive. They use “separation of church and state” to say that religion should have nothing to do with politics, and so seek to restrict the will of God, as well as the limitations on human behavior laid down by the divine.

For thousands of years, divine beings have made themselves known to those who have faith. Faithful people with righteous beliefs accounted for the majority of society in the past and had a tremendously positive influence on social morality. Today, people can only talk about God’s will in church. Outside of church, they can’t criticize or resist the attempts to undermine God’s parameters for human conduct. Religion has almost lost its function in maintaining the morality of society, and as a result, morality in the United States has collapsed like a landslide.

In recent years, political correctness has been promoted to new heights, to the point where people are hesitant to say Merry Christmas in a country that was founded on Christianity, because some claim that it’s politically incorrect and hurts the feelings of non-Christians. Similarly, when people openly speak of their belief in God or pray to God, some claim it is discriminatory against people with other beliefs, including nonbelievers. The fact is, all people should be allowed to express their beliefs, including respect for their gods, in their own ways, and this has nothing to do with discrimination.

In schools now, classes that involve righteous beliefs and traditional values are not allowed to be taught. Teachers are not to speak of Creation, since science has yet to prove the existence of the divine. Science also has yet to prove atheism and evolution — but these theories are taught as truth in schools.

The communist specter’s infiltration of society, and its restraints against and manipulation of religion, culture, education, the arts, and the law, is an exceedingly complex and systemic issue.

3. Communism’s Twisted Theology

In the past century, various distorted theologies gained currency as communist thought swept through the religious world, subverting clergy and infiltrating and subtly corrupting orthodox religions. Clergy shamelessly interpreted the scriptures according to their whims, distorting the righteous teachings left by enlightened beings from orthodox religions. Especially in the 1960s, “revolutionary theology,” “theology of hope,” “political theology,” and other distorted theologies saturated in Marxist thought sowed chaos in the religious world.

Many Latin American priests in the past century were educated in European seminaries and were deeply influenced by the new theological theories that had been altered by communist trends. “Liberation theology” was prevalent in Latin America during the 1960s to 1980s. Its main representative was the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez.

This school of thought introduced class warfare and Marxian thought directly into religion, and it interpreted God’s compassion for humanity to mean that the poor should be liberated — and, thus, that religious believers should take part in class warfare in order for the poor to attain equal status. It used the Lord’s instruction for Moses to lead the Jews out of Egypt as the theoretical basis for the belief that Christianity should liberate the poor.

Liberation theology was greatly praised by Fidel Castro, the leader of the Communist Party of Cuba. Although the traditional Catholic Church has resisted the proliferation of these so-called emerging theologies, the new pope, appointed in 2013, invited Gutiérrez to attend a press conference in the Vatican on May 12, 2015, as the main guest, thus showing the present-day Catholic Church’s tacit acquiescence and support of liberation theology.

In various parts of the world, many emerging theologies similar to liberation theology have appeared, such as “black liberation theology,” “feminist theology,” “liberal theology,” “queer theology,” and even “Death of God theology.” These distorted theologies have greatly disrupted Catholic, Christian, and other orthodox beliefs around the world.

In the United States in the 1970s, Jim Jones, the leader of the infamous Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ (“Peoples Temple” for short), who called himself the reincarnation of Lenin, set the original teachings of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as his cult’s doctrine. He claimed that he was proselytizing in the United States in order to achieve his communist ideals. After killing American congressman Leo Ryan, who was investigating allegations against the cult, Jones knew that it would be difficult for him to escape, so he cruelly forced his followers to commit mass suicide. He even killed those who were unwilling to commit suicide with him. In the end, more than nine hundred people died. The cult tarnished the reputation of religious groups and adversely affected the righteous faith people had in orthodox religions. Thus, it had a serious negative impact on the American people in general.

4. Religious Chaos

The book The Naked Communist, published in 1958, lists forty-five goals for communists in their mission to destroy the United States. Astonishingly, most of the goals have already been achieved. Number twenty-seven in the list states: “Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with ‘social’ religion. Discredit the Bible. …” [10]

For thousands of years, religion has been an important cornerstone of the Western world, yet in recent generations, the communist specter has twisted this sacred institution beyond recognition. The three orthodox religions in particular — Christianity, Catholicism, and Judaism (together referred to as the revealed religions) — have been altered and controlled by the communist specter, and they have lost the functions they had in their original forms. New denominations, established or demonically altered with communist principles and concepts, have become even more direct promulgations of communist ideology.

In today’s churches, many bishops and priests preach deviated theology while corrupting and consorting with their followers in a nonstop series of scandals. Many believers go to church for habit’s sake, or even as a form of entertainment or social life, rather than out of genuine commitment to cultivating their character or coming closer to the divine.

Religions have been corrupted from within. The result is that people lose their confidence in religions and their righteous belief in the divine. Consequently, they end up abandoning their beliefs. If man does not believe, then the divine will not protect him and, ultimately, humankind will be destroyed.

With the doctrine altered and the sacredness of faith under attack from within and without, even clergymen indulge in despicable practices, further eroding the integrity of the church.

In 2002, The Boston Globe carried a series of reports on Catholic priests’ sexual molestation of children. The investigation revealed that over several decades, close to 250 Boston priests had molested children, and that the church, in an attempt to cover it up, shifted clergy members around from one area to another, rather than informing the police. The priests continued to molest children in their new locations, thus creating more victims.

Similar revelations quickly spread across the United States and extended to priests in other countries with a Catholic presence, including Ireland, Australia, and so on. Other religious groups began to publicly denounce the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.

Eventually, public pressure compelled Saint John Paul II to gather the cardinals for a conference in the Vatican to address the scandals. Following the meeting, he stated that the administrative structure of the church would be reformed and that it would expel priests who had committed sexual offenses. To date, the church has paid more than $2 billion in settlements for the abuses.Religious corruption is rife in other Christian denominations and in other faiths around the world. In China, religion is controlled by the CCP and prone to the same malfeasance found throughout the Party-state. Monks and Taoist priests have turned religion into a business, rampantly embezzling money from believers by taking advantage of their faith in Buddhas and traditional Chinese deities. Fees for religious ceremonies and incense burnings can run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

More churches and temples have been built, looking all the more splendid on the surface, while righteous belief in gods diminishes. Disciples who genuinely cultivate are harder and harder to find. Many temples and churches have become gathering places for evil spirits and ghosts, and temples in China have turned into commercialized tourist sites, where monks earn salaries and Buddhist and Taoist abbots preside as CEOs.

The five Party-sanctioned religions in China have been converted into organizations to distort the original faiths and serve the Party’s atheist ideology. Buddhism in China has lost its character as a community for spiritual cultivation. It is full of politician-monks who praise the CCP and take it as their deity.

The deputy chairman of China’s Buddhist Association, referring to the report of the Chinese Communist Party’s 19th Congress, said: “The 19th Congress Report is the contemporary Buddhist scripture, and I have hand-copied it three times.” He also stated, “The Chinese Communist Party is today’s Buddha and Bodhisattva, and the 19th Congress Report is contemporary Buddhist scripture in China, and it shines with the glowing rays of the Communist Party’s belief.” Other monks called upon Buddhist believers to follow the deputy chairman’s example and apply the method of hand-copying scriptures to copy the 19th Congress report with a “devout heart” so that they could experience enlightenment. [11]

For more than a thousand years, bishops around the world were directly appointed or recognized by the Vatican. The thirty or so bishops previously recognized by the Vatican in the Chinese region have not been acknowledged by the CCP. Likewise, the Vatican and the Catholics loyal to it in China (particularly the underground believers) have not acknowledged the Communist Party-appointed bishops. However, following a long period of coercion and enticement by the CCP, in 2018, the pope recognized seven CCP-appointed bishops, who previously had been excommunicated by the Vatican. Critics believed that the move to share the church’s authority with a totalitarian regime would set a dangerous precedent that could affect the rest of the world. The church is a faith community whose purpose is to enable believers to uplift their morality, come closer to God, and ultimately return to Heaven. When deals are done in the human world with an evil specter in revolt against God, where the CCP is allowed to arrange and appoint bishops and thus take charge of matters concerning the belief of tens of millions of Catholics in China, how would God look at the matter? What will the future hold for the tens of millions of Catholics in China?

In China, the specter of communism created a political abomination that destroyed traditional culture and crushed faith through mass murder and terror. The CCP’s atheist persecutions and destruction of tradition aim to forcibly sever human connections with the divine, and they have thrown China into moral collapse.

In the West and other parts of the world, deception and infiltration have led to the corruption and demonization of upright religions, confusing and misleading people into giving up their orthodox beliefs. In its rebellion against the divine, the specter of communism acts as the devil ruling our world. If humanity continues to lose its knowledge of and connections to the divine, man will fall further under the specter’s control until there is no longer hope for salvation.

References

1. Karl Marx, as quoted in Dimitry V. Pospielovsky, A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Antireligious Policies: History of Soviet Atheism In Theory and Practice, and the Believer, Vol. 1 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987), 80.

2. US Library of Congress, “Translation of Letter from Lenin,” Revelations from the Russian Archives, accessed April 17, 2020, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/trans-ae2bkhun.html.

3. Patriarch Alexy II as quoted in Nathaniel Davis, trans., A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy (Oxford: Westview Press, 1994), 89.

4. Choekyi Gyaltsen, Tenth Panchen Lama, as quoted in Central Tibetan Administration: Department of Information and International Relations, From the Heart of the Panchen Lama (Dharamsala, India: Central Tibetan Administration, 2003 edition), accessed April 17, 2020, http://tibet.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/FROM-THE-HEART-OF-THE-PANCHEN-LAMA-1998.pdf.

5. Tsering Woeser, Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution, Susan T. Chen, trans., Robert Barnett, ed. (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, April 2020)

6. US Congress, House, Committee on Un-American Activities. Investigation of Communist Activities in the New York City Area. 83rd Cong., 1st sess., July 8, 1953. https://archive.org/stream/investigationofcnyc0708unit/investigationofcnyc0708unit_djvu.txt.

7. Momchil Metodiev, Between Faith and Compromise: The Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the Communist State (1944–1989) (Sofia: Institute for Studies of the Recent Past/Ciela, 2010).

8. Christopher Andrew, “KGB Foreign Intelligence from Brezhnev to the Coup,” in Wesley K. Wark, ed., Espionage: Past, Present, Future? (London: Routledge, 1994), 52.

9. Metodiev, “Between Faith.”

10. W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing Co., 1958).

11. “Zhongguo Fojiao xiehui fuhuizhang: ‘Shijiu Da Baogao shi dangdai Fojing　Wo yijing shouchao san bian’” 中國佛教協會副會長：十九大報告是當代佛經　我已手抄三遍 [“Chinese Buddhist Association Deputy Chairman: ‘The Chinese Communist Party’s 19th Congress Report Is the Contemporary Buddhist Scripture, I Have Hand-copied It Three Times’”], Stand News, December 13, 2017. [In Chinese]