A Big Tent is Not a Universal Shelter: Utopian Socialism

Utopian Socialism was a first: The first Western philosophy to reject the Biblical tradition since Augustine and the world's first philosophy anchored in abundance rather than scarcity.

The American Spirit Essays #14

Previous: The Separation that Defined America

Against the Bible

The previous essay demonstrated the unique genius behind the American concept of separating church and state.  It showed how the country’s spiritual underpinnings, based in Christian ethics and natural law, defined a core ethical platform and invited all denominations of all faiths to build upon that platform.  At the time of the American founding, it appeared broad enough to be nearly universal.  But every ethical principle, by definition, excludes those who contest it.  In the nineteenth century, a new utopian strand of Western thought arose to challenge the core ethical foundations of the American nation.  This essay discusses that strand and the inherently anti-American ideologies that grew from it.

The uniqueness of the American approach to faith was evident even before the founding of the American nation; it became even clearer after the Bill of Rights enshrined it in constitutional law.  America’s faith communities, first Christian then Jewish then all others, differed from those planted elsewhere.  That was particularly true for denominations that had flourished primarily when and where they were dominant.  Established faiths can blur the distinctions among religion, governance, economics, and culture.  In America, faiths and communities dominant and established elsewhere had to determine which elements of their familiar cultures and lifestyles were central to their faith and which were not.  They then had to graft the central elements onto the American spiritual platform and relinquish control over many of the others.  That adaptation task was necessarily easier for some denominational communities than for others.  A big tent is not necessarily a universal shelter. 

Not long after the American founding, a new ideological movement seized hold of some of the West’s greatest thinkers: Utopian Socialism.  Though utopian socialists have long rejected the “religion” label, many have cast their plans to redo all aspects of life, community, economics, government, and belief as holistic ideologies that eliminated the need for religion altogether. 

In other words, their rejection of the label stemmed entirely from their dismissal of the concept of a deity and their refusal to acknowledge spirituality as a basic human need.  In all other respects, the systems they sought to construct were every bit as complete as the most rigidly enforced established faiths.  Subsequent experience in states adopting strong-form utopian socialist agendas—the Soviet Union, North Korea, Nazi Germany, and Mao’s China come readily to mind—demonstrate clear parallels to rigid theocratic rule.  In particular, the wars these regimes waged against disapproved faiths—typically labeling adherents as enemies of the state, of the people, of progress, and/or of justice—highlights their true nature.  To insist that such all-encompassing ideological systems are “not religions” is to get caught in semantics.  Any system that dictates belief and behavior deserves to be considered and treated as a faith tradition.

Attempts to graft utopian socialist denominations onto the American spiritual platform always posed unique challenges.  The utopian socialist writers—with Karl Marx proving to the most influential of the bunch—represented the first significant Western intellectual movement to reject the Biblical tradition since St. Augustine.  The Biblical tradition, as we have seen, was a central pillar of the American founding.