The Rage Against God: Chapter 9

Excerpts from Peter Hitchens:

The Left's hostility to Christianity is actually specific, because Christianity is the religion of their own homes and homeland, the form in which they have encountered―and generally disliked and resented―the power of God in their own lives. Islam, for most of the Left's time on earth, has been an exotic and distant creed, never taught to them as a living faith and never likely to be their own or to require their obedience. Therefore the Left can sympathize with it as the enemy of their Christian monoculture and as an anti-colonial and therefore "progressive" force. Some Marxist leftists in Britain have taken this to its logical conclusion and have formed alliances with British Muslims despite the Muslims' highly conservative attitudes toward women and homosexuals. Others prefer to live in a state of unresolved doublethink. This position is becoming harder and harder to maintain as Islam grows in power and reach, and as it becomes a major religious force in many nations of Europe, where so many "progressives" live…

God is the leftists' chief rival. Christian belief, by subjecting all men to divine authority and by asserting in the words "My kingdom is not of this world" that the ideal society does not exist in this life, is the most coherent and potent obstacle to secular utopianism. Christ's reproof of Judas―"the poor always ye have with you"―when Judas complains that precious ointment could have been sold to feed the poor rather than applied to Jesus' feet (see John 12:1–8 KJV), is also a stumbling-block and an annoyance to world reformers. By putting such socialistic thoughts in the mouth of the trader-to-be Judas, and stating so baldly the truth known to all conservatives that poverty cannot be eradicated, the Bible angers and frustrates those who believe that the pursuit of a perfect society justifies the quest for absolute power…

The last of these [referring to the "enormous power of 'progressive' education"]―by refusing to teach the previously accepted canon of literature, history, and philosophy, by attempting to turn Christianity into a museum-piece, and by abandoning the concept of authority―has left advanced societies entirely disarmed against intellectual assaults they could once have repulsed with ease. These influences were the real driving force of the 1960s social, sexual, and moral revolution that now seeks to destroy the last remaining restraints on its victory.

There is a general belief in the West that Marxist revolution came to a bitter and conclusive end with the fall of the Soviet Union and the European Communist regimes in 1989–91. On the contrary, the New Left were released from painful bonds by this collapse. No longer were they burdened with the failure of the Soviet experiment, which could always be used to argue against them. They were free at last from the identification of radical politics with the Kremlin enemy, which kept them out of political power in the Western democracies…

Any ideology or revolutionary state must alienate the young from their pre-revolutionary parents if it hopes to survive into future generations.