THE RIGHT BOOKS

In one of the loveliest passages in the New Testament (Matthew 16: 25), Christ tells His disciples: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” Sacrifice (responsible sacrifice) is thus at the heart of Christianity; yet it always appears, in the Bible, as the sacrifice of one’s own self, not that of other people: a restrictiveness so little in favor in an age characterized not at all by self-sacrificial tendencies but, rather, by an aggressive acquiescence in the mass sacrifice of involuntary millions that it is now almost entirely disregarded by the left-wing vanguards of the Christian churches themselves, whose ideas regarding the subject are closer to those of Stalin, Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Daniel Ortega than to those of Jesus. According to Lloyd Billingsley, the author of The Generation That Knew Not Josef: A Critique of Marxism and the Religious Left (Multnomah Press, 10209 S.E. Division, Portland, Ore. 97266; $11.95), “Behind the phenomenon of leftist Christians stand not nefarious plots and cabals, but two things: the tyranny of the General Idea (in this case, the socialism = Christianity equation) and a death wish.”

This “General Idea” (the phrase is Hippolyte Taine’s) is a retro virus that has been detected in the bloodstream of radical Christians—whose moral immunity system it attacks with the lethal virulence of AIDS—for decades, in the course of which its victims compiled a record as long as the Colossus of Rhodes’s arm. It is this record that Billingsley, in the first half of his book, proceeds to dust off. “Communism has recovered the essential form of a real belief in God which organized Christianity has now largely lost,” wrote the Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, appointed Dean of Canterbury by His Majesty King George V in 1931. “I would like to thank my parents” (her father was a Congregationalist minister in Nebraska), Anna Louise Strong stated upon being made an Honorary Red Guard by Chairman Mao, “who taught me to ignore evil.” In view of all this, Billingsley muses, you might think it would take “a special kind of person to duplicate the earlier record of servile apology toward Marxist dictatorships, coupled with an antagonism toward the West. . . . Sadly, this is not the case. . . . One might say generally that the religious Left, including the radical revivalists, liberal Protestants, the World Council of Churches, the Catholic activists, and groups within the Anabaptist churches, are doing a good job of [it]. It is a weakness to which, for some reason, the religious mind is prone.”

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In one of the loveliest passages in the New Testament (Matthew 16: 25), Christ tells His disciples: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” Sacrifice (responsible sacrifice) is thus at the heart of Christianity; yet it always appears, in the Bible, as the sacrifice of one’s own self, not that of other people: a restrictiveness so little in favor in an age characterized not at all by self-sacrificial tendencies but, rather, by an aggressive acquiescence in the mass sacrifice of involuntary millions that it is now almost entirely disregarded by the left-wing vanguards of the Christian churches themselves, whose ideas regarding the subject are closer to those of Stalin, Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Daniel Ortega than to those of Jesus. According to Lloyd Billingsley, the author of The Generation That Knew Not Josef: A Critique of Marxism and the Religious Left (Multnomah Press, 10209 S.E. Division, Portland, Ore. 97266; $11.95), “Behind the phenomenon of leftist Christians stand not nefarious plots and cabals, but two things: the tyranny of the General Idea (in this case, the socialism = Christianity equation) and a death wish.”

This “General Idea” (the phrase is Hippolyte Taine’s) is a retro virus that has been detected in the bloodstream of radical Christians—whose moral immunity system it attacks with the lethal virulence of AIDS—for decades, in the course of which its victims compiled a record as long as the Colossus of Rhodes’s arm. It is this record that Billingsley, in the first half of his book, proceeds to dust off. “Communism has recovered the essential form of a real belief in God which organized Christianity has now largely lost,” wrote the Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, appointed Dean of Canterbury by His Majesty King George V in 1931. “I would like to thank my parents” (her father was a Congregationalist minister in Nebraska), Anna Louise Strong stated upon being made an Honorary Red Guard by Chairman Mao, “who taught me to ignore evil.” In view of all this, Billingsley muses, you might think it would take “a special kind of person to duplicate the earlier record of servile apology toward Marxist dictatorships, coupled with an antagonism toward the West. . . . Sadly, this is not the case. . . . One might say generally that the religious Left, including the radical revivalists, liberal Protestants, the World Council of Churches, the Catholic activists, and groups within the Anabaptist churches, are doing a good job of [it]. It is a weakness to which, for some reason, the religious mind is prone.”