Communism did not spring from nowhere. It is the logical end of a revolution that began in Paris in 1789 and never really stopped. The French Revolution tore down the old order in the name of equality and reason. It promised to free men from throne and altar. What it delivered was the guillotine, the Cult of Reason, and a new class of rulers who claimed the right to remake society by force. Marx and Engels simply finished the sentence the Jacobins began. They took the bourgeois revolution that had destroyed feudalism and declared that the next revolution must destroy the bourgeoisie itself. Where the French radicals still spoke of rights and property, the communists declared both to be instruments of class oppression. The line is clear. The methods are the same. Only the target has changed.
Marx and Engels were not identical. Marx was the philosopher of history who reduced every human institution to the struggle over the means of production. Engels was the popularizer and the anthropologist who applied that reduction to the family and to religion with ruthless consistency. Both agreed that religion is not a partial truth or a human longing that points beyond itself. It is an illusion generated by material conditions — the “opium of the people” that must be abolished so that men can revolve around themselves. Both treated the family as a product of private property rather than a natural society ordered to the good of children. In the Communist Manifesto they wrote that the bourgeois family “will vanish as a matter of course” with the vanishing of capital. Engels went further. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State he described monogamy as the historical means by which men secured inheritance of property and subjugated women. Once property was socialized, he argued, sexual relations would rest on mutual inclination alone. No economic compulsion. No permanent bond. The household itself would dissolve into social industries for cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. The two men differed in emphasis. They did not differ in conclusion. Atheism is required. The family as Christians know it is an obstacle.
The Soviet Union tested these ideas in practice. The 1918 Family Code made divorce easy and marriage a simple civil registration. Abortion was legalized in 1920. Homosexuality was decriminalized. Alexandra Kollontai and others promoted “free love” as the emancipation of women from the economic chains of the household. The experiment lasted less than two decades. By the mid-1930s the regime reversed course. Divorce was restricted. Abortion was banned. The state began to praise the stable family as necessary for industrial production and military strength. The reversal did not come from a sudden conversion to Christian morality. It came from the discovery that a society cannot function when the most basic unit of formation and care is treated as disposable. Engels’ anthropology had predicted liberation. Reality produced chaos, falling birth rates, and the need for the very stability the theory had dismissed. The Soviet retreat was an admission that human nature is not infinitely plastic. The theory had no answer for that fact. It could only suppress it.
These principles do not merely differ from the Ten Commandments. They invert them. The First Commandment forbids other gods. Communism installs the party and the laws of historical materialism in the place of the living God. Marx and Engels were explicit: the critique of religion is the prerequisite of all critique. The Fourth Commandment requires honor of father and mother. The Manifesto calls for the abolition of the family as an economic unit. The Fifth Commandment forbids murder. Revolutionary theory treats the liquidation of class enemies as historically necessary. The Sixth and Ninth Commandments protect marriage and forbid the coveting of another’s spouse. Engels treated permanent fidelity as a bourgeois form that would disappear with private property. The Seventh and Tenth Commandments protect property and forbid coveting. Communism defines the seizure of the means of production as justice rather than theft. The Eighth Commandment requires truth-telling. Historical materialism subordinates truth to class interest and licenses propaganda as a tool of struggle. These are not peripheral excesses. They follow from the core claim that morality, religion, and the family are superstructure determined by the economic base.
A communist who takes his own principles seriously already holds the premises that make Christianity difficult to evade. He insists that the exploitation of labor is truly unjust and that human beings possess a dignity capitalism violates. Historical materialism cannot ground that claim. If moral judgments are only the reflection of class interest, then the condemnation of the bourgeoisie has no more standing than the bourgeoisie’s own self-justification. The moment the communist treats the suffering of the worker as objectively wrong, he has stepped outside the ontology he affirms. Christianity supplies the ground he needs and cannot provide for himself. Human beings are made in the image of God. Their worth is not created by any mode of production and cannot be abolished by one. The moral outrage that drives the communist movement is not a class reflex. It is the residual recognition of a created order that materialism must either smuggle in or abandon.
Marx diagnosed alienation with precision: the worker separated from his product, his activity, his fellows, and his own nature. The proposed cure was the abolition of private property. Every attempt to apply that cure has reproduced new elites, new domination, and new forms of alienation under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The pattern is not an accident of insufficient development. It follows from the fact that the root of domination is not exhausted by property relations. The human will is disordered. Structural rearrangement alone cannot heal a desire turned against its own good. The Incarnation and the Cross address exactly this fracture. God enters the condition of the alienated and bears the consequence of human rebellion. What is offered is not a new distribution of goods but the restoration of the person. A communist who has watched revolutionary elites corrupt themselves already possesses the evidence that seizing the means of production does not solve the problem he has named.
The communist project also requires a reason why the future classless society is worth pursuing. If history is only the succession of modes of production driven by material forces, there is no basis for calling one stage higher rather than merely different. The language of emancipation and free development is teleological. Christianity does not invent this end. It reveals it. The Kingdom of God is not a projection of present class interests. It is the purpose for which human beings were made. The early Christian communities practiced forms of shared property and mutual care without the liquidation of opposing classes or the construction of a total state. They did so because they already lived under the conviction that persons are of infinite value and that the present age is passing. That practice flowed from redemption already received, not from a future utopia enforced by power.
Finally, the communist cannot consistently maintain both that religion is merely the opium that dulls the oppressed and that the oppressed should rise to seize real happiness. If religion only reflects existing misery, the demand that people abandon it presupposes an objective good that is not itself an illusion generated by the base. Christianity asserts that this good is the restoration of communion with the One who made them. The materialist who continues to speak of liberation, justice, and human flourishing after denying any transcendent ground is borrowing moral capital he cannot repay. The Christian does not ask the communist to abandon the desire for a world without domination. He shows that the desire itself is evidence of a created order that only the God revealed in Christ can fulfill without contradiction.
The French Revolution began the work of tearing down the altar in the name of man. Communism completed the demolition and discovered that the empty space does not liberate. It consumes. The Soviet reversal on the family was only the most visible admission that human nature resists the theory. The deeper admission is written in every failed attempt to build the classless society by force. The moral claims that power the movement — justice, dignity, the rejection of exploitation — cannot be sustained once God is removed. They are either smuggled in from the Christian inheritance the revolution claims to have surpassed, or they collapse into the will of whoever holds the instruments of power. The watertight case for conversion is not that Christianity offers a softer politics. It is that Christianity alone accounts for the facts the communist already knows: that human beings are more than the sum of their material conditions, that domination survives the abolition of private property, and that the longing for a world made right is not an illusion generated by the base. It is the mark of creatures who were made for communion with their Creator. The revolution that began in 1789 has run its course. The Cross remains.
Shane Schaetzel is an author of Catholic books and he is an Evangelical convert to the Catholic Church. His articles have been featured on LifeSiteNews, The Remnant Newspaper, Forward in Christ, and Catholic Online. You can read Shane’s books at ShaneSchaetzel.Com
