Even before the rise of communism, its precursors, the radical Jacobins of the French Revolution, bespoke a “passionate intensity” redolent of Islam. Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1856 The Old Regime and the French Revolution described the revolution as “a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without religion, and without life after death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.” Moreover, the French Revolution legitimized violence as the tool for regenerating mankind, as does Islam today.
Nor did it take long for Marxism also to be recognized as a political religion, a secular substitute for Christianity, which since the Enlightenment has been weakened among the Western cognitive and cultural elites. Historian Michael Burleigh has catalogued communism’s “cultural appropriations” of Christianity: ‘“consciousness’ (soul), ‘comrades’ (faithful), ‘capitalist’ (sinner), ‘devil’ (counterrevolutionary), ‘proletarian’ (chosen people), and ‘classless society’ (paradise),” to name a few.
Likewise, the memoirs of former communists collected in The God That Failed (1949) contain striking resemblances to Christian descriptions of the experience of conversion. French novelist André Gide said that his “conversion is like a faith,” one he would gladly become a martyr to. Arthur Koestler describes his conversion to Marxism as a reprise of St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus: “the new light seemed to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern . . . There is now an answer to every question, doubt and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past.”
Modern “woke” leftism performs the same functions for a generation of Americans who have repudiated religion, and have been badly educated as well. Of course, social and cultural fashions, spread by “social contagion,” account for much of their spurious moral preening and virtue-signaling, which provide badges of their superiority to “fascists,” “racists,” and “Islamophobes.” But the need for meaning and a justifying narrative is real and urgent enough to endorse publicly the Holocaust, and to celebrate the inhuman violence against Israeli children and babies.