This is the most recent installment of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, on his book revealing how communists, from Moscow to New York to Chicago, have long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is based on an unprecedented volume of declassified materials from Soviet archives, FBI files, and more.
“Face it,” says Michael Novak, “you are going to have to read this book.” Big Peace’s own Peter Schweizer calls Dupes the “21st century equivalent” to Whittaker Chambers’ classic Witness.
Big Peace: Professor Kengor, this week millions of Americans celebrate Christmas. Communists weren’t real big fans of Christmas, were they? In fact, they weren’t exactly big fans of Christians or religion in general.
Kengor: A really ignorant thing I sometimes hear from leftist Christians is that the Old and New Testaments preach or advocate communism. I get emails from “progressive” Christians telling me communism is compatible with Christianity. That’s outrageous. The communists themselves vehemently disagreed with that. They were proudly, militantly atheistic. Marx called religion the “opiate of the masses,” and said, “Communism begins where atheism begins.” Lenin compared religion to everything from venereal disease to “a necrophilia,” proclaiming: “There’s nothing more abominable than religion.”
This was an institutionalized atheism, and communists everywhere viciously persecuted believers of all stripes. It was a “War on Religion.”
Big Peace: The communists didn’t like Christmas in particular.
Kengor: They despised it, like a vampire fleeing a cross. In Czechoslovakia, communists co-opted traditional Christmas carols and symbols and replaced them with things like red stars instead of the Star of Bethlehem. In Romania, Christmas trees were banned. In Dupes, I quote from the Soviet archives a December 25, 1919 edict from Lenin ordering that anyone caught taking off work that day for “Nikola” should be “taken out and shot.”
Big Peace: And these communists, who locked up and even executed Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, sang a different tune to liberal Christians?
Kengor: Yes. They cynically, contemptuously targeted the Religious Left. They knew that Religious Left Christians agreed with them on certain sympathies–workers rights, wealth redistribution. The communists exploited that trust, sometimes invoking the language of “social justice,” to enlist liberals in their petitions, marches.
Big Peace: Where did they have their best success?
Kengor: That’s easy. The mainline Protestant denominations: Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church USA, and Methodist Church.
Herb Romerstein, the veteran investigator of the communist movement, and himself an ex-communst, told me that communists found progressive pastors to be “the biggest suckers of them all.”
Big Peace: Any particular pastors stand out?
Kengor: Yes, the Rev. Harry Ward, Methodist minister, seminary professor, and founding member of the ACLU, which he ran with atheist Roger Baldwin. Baldwin wrote a dreadful 1928 book called Liberty Under the Soviets. Ward himself wrote a book called, The Soviet Spirit, a valentine to Lenin and Stalin, which the Daily Worker and Masses & Mainstream promoted big-time.
Ward, like Baldwin, made trips to the USSR, where he was given the full Potemkin village treatment. The progressive pastor was smitten, head over heels for the place. His seminary, Union Theological Seminary in New York, gave him a full one-year sabbatical to go to the Motherland to research and pay homage.
In Dupes, I publish a December 1920 list of liberal college professors targeted by the Soviet Comintern and American Communist Party. On the list is not only Ward but professors from other seminaries or religious colleges, from Mount Holyoke to Trinity College.
Big Peace: You say that in Harry Ward’s world, it was anti-communism that was the great menace to be resisted.
Kengor: Writing in Protestant Digest in January 1940, long before Joe McCarthy arrived on the scene, Ward warned the faithful of the perils of “anti-communism,” which was being employed “under the leadership of [Congressman] Dies in a new red hunt” that promised to be even “more ruthless than that of Mitchell Palmer.”
Here, Ward warned about Congressman Martin Dies, Texas Democrat, the first head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and Alexander Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general.
You see, for liberals/progressives, every new anti-communist is a hysterical, obscene Red-baiting reprobate–another Joe McCarthy.
Big Peace: You spend a lot of time in Dupes on Corliss Lamont, another core ACLU member. More like Baldwin (but not Ward), he was also a devout atheist, who wrote classic books on atheism.
Kengor: I recently wrote a piece for American Spectator on this “not-so-holy trinity“. Corliss Lamont also made a sojourn to Moscow, which he, too, turned into an awful book. Lamont was inspired by his tour of Moscow churches that were converted into atheist museums. In some of these churches, the Bolsheviks displayed decaying corpses of saints. Lamont, who had swooned at the site of Lenin’s corpse in Red Square, which he described as “beautiful,” eagerly reported “smelly” odors and worm holes in the saints’ corpses, and mockingly asserted that it looked as if the Lord wasn’t taking very good care of these “holy” folks.
I should add that Lamont’s Columbia University adviser/mentor, Professor John Dewey, the babe in the manger for our colleges of education, likewise made a Soviet pilgrimage. Dewey was suckered beyond belief. It took me three chapters in Dupes just to deal with Dewey.
Big Peace: As for actual communist campaigns that enlisted liberal/progressive Christians, tell us about the American Peace Mobilization, a World War II communist front-group. This is stunning.
Kengor: The American Peace Mobilization was secretly founded in a literal conspiracy between Soviet and American communists, with “social justice” pastors the chief target for exploitation. I have (and publish in Dupes) the Comintern document openly admitting that the Soviets founded the group in Chicago in September 1940, where, incidentally, it also found support from Barack Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.
The group’s goal was to keep America out of World War II, to push FDR to accommodate Hitler. Why? Because Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. This group demanded no Lend-Lease to the Brits, as the Brits were being savaged by Hitler. The group took this position because it was Stalin’s position–at least until Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the USSR, and then it became immediately pro-war.
As Congress later noted, this was “one of the most seditious organizations which ever operated in the United States.”
Big Peace: And yet, you say the American Peace Mobilization “had more success with peace-loving, turn-the-other-cheek liberal Christians than any other group.”
Kengor: Far and away. If these Christians understood how bad they were used, and to advance the worst of evils–the twin aims of Hitler and Stalin–they’d be on their knees.
By the way, typically taken for a ride here was America’s most duped newspaper, The New York Times, which called the American Peace Mobilization not a communist front but a “group of clergymen.”
Big Peace: Who were other manipulators of liberal Christians?
Kengor: One manipulator, as we noted in our recent interviews on FDR and Stalin (here and here), was Stalin himself. Stalin so hoodwinked FDR that the president mused that the mass-murdering atheist had taught him “something about the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave.”
Another communist who misled Religious Left Christians was Frank Marshall Davis, Obama’s mentor.
Big Peace: We covered Davis in previous “Big Dupes” (here and here). In Dupes, you have photo exhibits of Davis’s columns for the CPUSA organ in Hawaii, plus the page from his FBI file listing his Communist Party number, which, you show, was 47544. Davis also duped Christians?
Kengor: Yes, I saw that several times in Davis’s weekly columns.
In one column, titled, “Challenge to the Church,” September 29, 1949, Davis painted communism as friendly to Christianity. He imagined Judgment Day, where anti-communist Christians would be called to account for opposing Christ-loving communists. Not only was Soviet Russia not anti-religious, maintained Davis, but Joe Stalin had spared the planet of Hitler’s “anti-Christian paganism.” Christians ought to thank Stalin.
In another typical column, from July 1949, Davis called anti-communists “Pontius Pilates.”
The way Davis manipulated “social justice” Christians is quite revolting, but impressive.
Of course, the irony is that this was the man who mentored the current leader of the United States of America. Isn’t it interesting that liberal and moderate Christians–whose forebears Davis once duped–arguably elected Obama president? Frank Marshall Davis would have just relished that.
Big Peace: Professor Kengor, have a merry Christmas.
Kengor: Thank you. If I may, given the spirit of the season, let me share an exhortation that occurs throughout Scripture: We are exhorted not to be fooled, misled, deceived–duped, if you will–and to be wary of wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Ponder the verse from 2nd Timothy, which warns, “For the time will come when people … will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths.”