American Spectator editor Dr. Paul Kengor, a historian of communism and the Cold War, said communist leaders made the destruction of religion a central mission from the earliest days of the movement, setting in motion a decades-long assault on American churches that continues to reshape the religious landscape today.
“The communists and Nikolai Bukharin said, ‘We take on religion with the tip of the bayonet, the tip of the spear. We must wage a war against religion,’” Kengor said on the Restoration Spotlight Podcast by Restoration News. “Now Lenin said there’s nothing more abominable than religion. All worship of a divinity is a necrilia.”
According to Crisis Magazine, communist Party USA leader Earl Browder told the Union Theological Seminary in December 1935 that communists had active party members working as preachers inside churches, and veteran investigators later testified under oath that Protestant denominations, including the Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches, had been thoroughly penetrated.
Kengor said the results of that infiltration are now clearly visible in the collapse of mainline Protestant denominations that embraced the left’s cultural agenda at the expense of their own congregations.
“They went after the mainline denominations with just a hellbent, you know, fury in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s,” Kengor said. “And they had uh great success with the mainline Presbyterian denomination, with the Episcopal Church, with the Methodist church, with the Methodist Church, the Reverend Harry Ward, his Methodist found foundation for social action.”
According to First Things, mainline Protestantism lost interest in transcendent Christianity and married the spirit of the age generations ago, a choice now playing out in free-falling membership and churches empty of both people and faith across the Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Episcopal denominations.
Kengor is editor of The American Spectator, one of America’s oldest and most influential conservative publications, a professor at Grove City College, and author of multiple bestselling books on Ronald Reagan and communism.
Restoration Spotlight is a podcast hosted by Hayden Ludwig that features interviews with advocates, experts and political commentators on topics including drug policy, economic issues, gender policy, and national security. The show describes itself as an alternative to mainstream media coverage and is produced by Restoration News.
