The campaign to patiently, purposely destroy the Christian Church began many years ago.

Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891 in Sicily. Reared in a strongly Roman Catholic culture, he grew to know it well. He studied history and philosophy at Turin University, and in 1921 he co-founded the Italian Communist Party. Elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1924, he soon headed the Communist faction in the Italian Parliament. As such, he became a threat to Mussolini's fascist government and was arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison in 1928. During his imprisonment, before his death in 1937, he wrote nine volumes describing in detail the way to achieve a Marxist world. The first of these volumes was published in 1947.

The inventive philosophy espoused by Gramsci was this: The classic Marxist dialectic which assumed the uprising of the masses was false. There existed something that bound the prince and the pauper to a common ground, a mutual understanding of life and society. Thus, the masses would never be so uncomfortable with their situation as to rise up in a serious way, as in the Marxist model. Next question: What is that something? What is the glue that binds the culture and the nations of the Western world? Ah, yes, Christianity!

Gramsci's subtle blueprint was to conquer the mind of society. Lenin's brilliant geopolitical structure, already in place and designed to conquer through uprising, could just as well be used to influence and change the Western social structure, institution by institution. The collective mind of the population must be weaned from the transcendent, convinced to believe that all things are possible through mankind's efforts. Man, not God, will provide the utopian world of complete freedom, equality, and justice. Forget the bankrupt notion of uprising, cried Gramsci.

Forget the old Marxist slogans such as "workers unite." We must promote with uplifting, encouraging slogans, such as "national consensus" and "equality for all."

Most important, they would have to proceed by engaging in the normal political and democratic processes of lobbying and voting. Bloody confrontations must be avoided. Instead, everything must be accomplished in the name of individual dignity and rights. Freedom and autonomy from outside constraints is the goal. Freedom from the claims and constraints of Christianity above all.

They must induce groups and individuals to ponder life's problems without reference to God and the laws of God, in fact to react with opposition to any introduction of Christian ideals into the treatment and solution of the problems of modern life.

By 1960 much progress had been accomplished in the socialist cause. The Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church convened during the three years ending in December, 1965. It concluded with a pronouncement of a new ecumenism, one which fit nicely into the
central theme of human solidarity, so long the goal of the Marxists. The Catholic Church itself had quietly succumbed to the notion that the struggle was no longer between Christ and Satan for men's souls. The struggle was, in fact, not on a supernatural plane at all. Rather, it was in the tangible, socioeconomic material circumstances of the here and now. A theological window had opened to reveal a promising sunrise, and the mainstream churches of the West eagerly jumped through that window. Antonio Gramsci, we might guess, chuckled in his grave.

The totally immanent struggle for sociopolitical liberation had been formally launched in the Christian world, united in the proposition that religion and religious faith have no function except to help mankind to unite and to be at peace in the world. Its object is to confirm the new Christianity in its antimetaphysical and essentially atheistic pursuit of liberation from material inconvenience, from sexual restriction, from any form of nonacceptance or perceived affront, and finally, from all supernatural fears. This, they claim, is to attain the ultimate in human development.

To tell anyone in the West -- the media, the scientific community, the academic community, the church leaders and the theologians, the judiciary -- that all of them have been thoroughly grounded in the basic tenets of Marxism and sold on its seductive desirability, would be to invite derision and screams of protest. Yet it is clear that all these groups have been penetrated by the undeniable sense of worldliness that we now find permeating our society, our culture, and our politics.

In America today Gramsci's ghost haunts the land, and has been brilliantly successful in convincing us of an appealing, and key, tenet: It is the right of every person not to be offended.

From this simple concept stems every form of political correctness. From this concept stem the demands for inclusiveness, acceptance of all behavior, the celebration of diversity, and fawning sensitivity. With national consensus on that idea, the next step was easy: Distort the meaning of the separation of church and state. With that in hand we destroy prayer in school, Christmas trees in the town squares, God on our coinage, and public display of the Ten Commandments.

We are urged to revert to paganism with school holidays associated with the Winter and Spring solstices rather than the celebrations of Christmas and Easter. The effect of these two concepts is not only to relentlessly remove God, and all references thereto, from the culture, but also to push churches ever closer to preaching secularism as its gospel, while outwardly operating beneath a transparent veneer of offering conventional, orthodox Christian worship and belief.

Now, dear reader, might one conclude that Gramsci's ghost has nudged aside the Holy Ghost?

The Episcopal Church is a church in name only, perpetuated with sanctimonious gibberish and clever biblical reinterpretation in an effort to justify its blatant turn to the secular. It has become, sadly, a mere political action committee, promoting an extremely dangerous and subversive agenda under the guise of compassionate, inclusive Christianity.

(A complete exposition of the above Marxist history can be found in "The Keys of This Blood", by Malachi Martin; Touchstone, 1990, pages 195-274.)

By Robert Seitz lives in Tampa, Florida

END