Above: Fresco depicting St. Gabriel of Georgia setting fire to a banner of Lenin, which resulted in him being imprisoned for psychological treatment by the Soviet state.

This week my friend and fellow Orthodox Christian Seraphim (Bruce) Foltz, professor emeritus of philosophy at Eckerd College, co-authored with me (an unworthy Literary Studies professor) co-authored this reflection on current trends toward socialism based on two classic works of Russian Orthodox literature: Ihttps://uoj.news/history-and-culture/the-serpents-old-promise. Our essay appeared on Election Day this week on the Union of Orthodox Journalists news site.

An updated frame for the above-linked article:

This week’s voting in the United States resulted in six more members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) heading to the U.S. House of Representatives, joining two already there. In addition, the new mayor of Los Angeles, Nithya Raman, ran with the endorsement of the local DSA chapter, to which she has been related, which leaves America’s two largest cities under the leadership of officials openly identifying with socialism (including Mayor Mamdani in New York). Socialism is becoming an acceptable part of the U.S. political scene openly in a way that it has not been since the days of Cold War Anticommunism in the U.S., and Mayor Mamdani in particular has specifically identified the current movement with older openly Socialist politics of the pre-Cold War era.

In historically significant writings, Soviet dissident Igor Shafarevich and earlier novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky highlight how the socialist ethos runs across party lines in the modern world, affecting both those on the “Left” and “Right” in an increasingly anti-Christian technocracy (or rule by technology the so-called “administrative” or “deep” state) in the West. In the broad sense critiqued by these Orthodox Christian writers, socialism undermines traditional family and a sense of “inner life” spiritually, by promoting an ultimately anti-Christian globalist agenda (following Karl Marx’s writings), which seeks to establish an earthly utopia based on mechanistic and consumerist principles of materialism shaped by technology. This is a reflection of the ancient heresy of chiliasm, and often involves not only atheism but more subtly a kind of Deistic Unitarianism identified with non-Christian “spiritualities” such as Freemasonry, Islam, and New Age or neopagan thought. Thus, for example, Lord Lothian, a Unitarian Christian Scientist, at the top levels of Anglo-American society in the early 20th century advocated for a world federation “management” state essentially socialist in nature, although with support from wealthy and aristocratic fellows.

Proponents argue that the DSA represents a healthy democratic form of socialism, European-style. However, to take one example, its advocacy of “advancing policies which respect working-class migrants’ ability to travel, work freely and participate fully in US society alongside their US-born working-class neighbors” echoes the older Comintern anti-national movement that sought successfully to undermine Christian societies in the last century (even while re-establishing its own closed societies later). Interestingly, this stand also reflects Libertarian globalism, in its effort to establish a kind of “Capitalist International.” For the socialist ethos as critiqued by Shafarevich and Dostoevsky is not just one partisan or philosophical side of the modern Western political framework, any more than socialism can be confined to either Communism or National Socialism (Nazism) in the last century.

In seeking to nullify old remnants of the American republic such as the electoral college, the U.S. Senate and the exceptionalism of the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court, many progressives seek to lift up a mechanically quantitative definition of democracy based on mass voting, at odds with traditional Christian views of God-given government. In the process, for example, civil “marriages” for throuples and foursomes (approved on Election Day in West Hollywood, CA), advance to further undermine definitions of traditional family, alongside renewed political support for “transgender rights.”

Shafarevich describes non-partisan socialism as ultimately a mental illness driven by an urge toward self-destruction, while Dostoevsky suggests it ultimately is demonic (the two in agreement on both aspects).

While in the 21st-century global West, the old idea of “class struggle” in overt socialism has morphed into a type of “race and sex” socialism that is more cultural and less economic, evident in feminism and promotion of racialist and sexual identitarianism, it remains targeted against Christianity, especially today seem in America and Russia, in different ways.

The Acts of the Apostles records the earliest Christians holding all in common, this was in the framework of the Church as the Body of Christ. Modern socialism of whatever political stripe–Progressive or Corporatist–is a parody of that, in the spirit of anti-Christ denying that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, and thus denying also His Church, the Orthodox Church. It essentialists worldly identities of class, race, and sexual passion, creating conflict and repression. Under Communism, the world saw the most extensive persecution of Christianity in history, and the death toll of Communism far exceeded even that of Naxism.

The views of Shafarevich and Dostoevsky were shared by St. Raphael of Brooklyn in his writing Against Socialism, by a number of notable Orthodox writers of the Russian diaspora such as Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky) and Archbishop Averky (Taushev), as well as by the 21st-century Irish Orthodox Christian writer Paul Kingsnorth, in his critique of global Western technocracy Against the Machine. The article linked above briefly discusses this issue from philosophical and literary perspectives in the works of Shafarevich and Dostoevsky, with our views being our own and not of our affiliated institutions. Prof. Foltz and I both participated in conferences and volumes int he past decade upholding Orthodox Christian views of marriage and family, Healing Humanity (Holy Trinity Seminary press) and Glory and Honor (St. Vladimir’s Press), and the fundamental concern from an Orthodox Christian perspective is shared across the topics of socialism and family life.

Lord have mercy!