In a previous essay, we briefly mentioned that the theory of evolution had spawned some very evil progeny such as communism and Nazism.  It is imperative that folks grasp the truth of that (we will discuss this point further near the end).  To help them do so, we are going to look more closely at the effects of the theory of evolution – Darwinism – on key actors who developed and implemented these demonic ideologies.

Karl Marx, who is most responsible for socialism/communism and its murderous revolutions, will be first.  Dr. Jerry Bergman in a journal article writes,

Born in 1818, Marx was baptized a Lutheran in 1824, attended a Lutheran elementary school, received praise for his ‘earnest’ essays on moral and religious topics, and was judged by his teachers ‘moderately proficient’ in theology (his first written work was on the ‘love of Christ’)8^,9^,10 until he encountered Darwin’s writings and ideas at the University of Berlin. . . . Marx saw the living world in terms of a Darwinian ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ struggle, involving the triumph of the strong and the subjugation of the weak.12 Darwin taught that the ‘survival of the fittest’ existed among all forms of life. From this idea Marx believed that the major ‘struggle for existence’ among humans occurred primarily between the social classes. Barzun13 concluded that Marx believed his own work to be the exact parallel of Darwin’s, and that,

‘like Darwin, Marx thought he had discovered the law of development. He saw history in stages, as the Darwinists saw geological strata and successive forms of life. . . . both Marx and Darwin made struggle the means of development. . . .

Marx owed a major debt to Darwin for his central ideas. In Marx’s words: ‘Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural selection for the class struggle in history. . . . not only is it [Darwin’s book] a death blow . . . to “Teleology” in the natural sciences but their rational meaning is empirically explained’.15 Marx first read Darwin’s Origin of Species only a year after its publication, and was so enthusiastic that he reread it two years later.116 He attended a series of lectures by Thomas Huxley on Darwin’s ideas, and spoke of ‘nothing else for months but Darwin and the enormous significance of his scientific discoveries’.17 . . .

. . . Marx and Engels ‘enthusiastically embraced’ Darwinism, kept up with Darwin’s writings, and often corresponded with each other (and others) about their reactions to Darwin’s conclusions.23^,24 The communists recognized the importance of Darwin to their movement and therefore vigorously defended him:

‘The socialist movement recognized Darwinism as an important element in its general world outlook right from the start. When Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, Karl Marx wrote a letter to Frederick Engels in which he said, “ . . . this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view”. . . . And of all those eminent researchers of the nineteenth century who have left us such a rich heritage of knowledge, we are especially grateful to Charles Darwin for opening our way to an evolutionary, dialectical understanding of nature.’25

Prominent communist Friedrich Lessner concluded that Das Kapital and Darwin’s Origin of Species were the ‘two greatest scientific creations of the century’.26 The importance of Darwinism in the estimated 140 million deaths caused by communism was partly because:

‘Clearly, for Marx man has no “nature”. . . . For man is his own maker and will consciously become his own maker in complete freedom from morality or from the laws of nature and of nature’s God. . . . Here we see why Marxism justifies the ruthless sacrifice of men living today, men who, at this stage of history, are only partly human.’27

Joseph Stalin did his uttermost to stamp out Christianity in Russia to create a utopian communist state and slaughtered tens of millions of people to attain those ends.  Dr Bergman says of him,

The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (born Joseph Djugashvili) murdered an estimated 60 million people.39 Like Darwin, he was once a theology student, and also like Darwin, evolution was important in transforming his life from a professing Christian to a communist atheist.40^,41 Yaroslavsky noted that while Stalin was still an ecclesiastical student he ‘began to read Darwin and became an atheist’.42

Stalin became an ‘avid Darwinian, abandoned the faith in God, and began to tell his fellow seminarians that people were descended from apes and not from Adam’.40 Yaroslavsky notes that it ‘was not only with Darwin that the young Stalin became familiar in the Gori ecclesiastical school; it was while there that he got his first acquaintance with Marxist ideas’.43 Miller adds that Stalin had an extraordinary memory and learnt his lessons with so little effort that the monks who taught him concluded that he would

‘ . . . become an outstanding priest of the Russian Orthodox Church. But in five years at the seminary he became interested in the nationalist movement in his native province, in Darwin’s theories and in Victor Hugo’s writings on the French Revolution. As a nationalist he was anti-Tsarist and joined a secret socialist society.’44

The result was that

‘His brutal childhood and the worldview he acquired in that childhood, reinforced by reading Darwin, convinced him that mercy and forbearance were weak and stupid. He killed with a coldness that even Hitler might have envied—and in even greater numbers than Hitler did.’45

Koster added that Stalin had people murdered for two major reasons

‘ . . . because they were personal threats to him, or because they were threats to progress—which in Marxist-Darwinian terms meant some sort of evolution to an earthly paradise of a type never yet shown to exist.’46

The influence of Darwin on the Nazis must not go unmentioned.  Dr. Bergman in another journal article gives details:

The Nazi view on Darwinian evolution and race was consequently a major part of the fatal combination of ideas and events which produced the holocaust and World War II:

‘One of the central planks in Nazi theory and doctrine was …evolutionary theory [and] … that all biology had evolved … upward, and that … less evolved types … should be actively eradicated [and] … that natural selection could and should be actively aided, and therefore [the Nazis] instituted political measures to eradicate … Jews, and … blacks, whom they considered as “underdeveloped”.’ 23

Terms such as ‘superior race’, ‘lower human types’, ‘pollution of the race’, and the word evolution itself (Entwicklung) were often used by Hitler and other Nazi leaders. His race views were not from fringe science as often claimed but rather Hitler’s views were:

‘ … straightforward German social Darwinism of a type widely known and accepted throughout Germany and which, more importantly, was considered by most Germans, scientists included, to be scientifically true. More recent scholarship on national socialism and Hitler has begun to realize that … [their application of Darwin’s theory] was the specific characteristic of Nazism. National socialist “biopolicy,” … [was] a policy based on a mystical-biological belief in radical inequality, a monistic, antitranscendent moral nihilism based on the eternal struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest as the law of nature, and the consequent use of state power for a public policy of natural selection….’ 24

The philosophy that humans can control and even use Darwinism to produce a ‘higher level’ of human is repeatedly mentioned in the writings and speeches of prominent Nazis.25

While Nazis and communists deserve all the criticism they receive for the horrors they brought to the world, it is important that we not be selective in our criticism.  Some of the extremely wealthy capitalists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries in the West also were influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution; they must also be held to account.  Dr. Bergman, in yet another journal article, explains:

Darwinism helped to justify not only the ruthless exploits of the communists, but also the ruthless practices of capitalist monopolists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Kenneth Hsü (1986, p. 534) noted:

Darwinism was also used in a defense of competitive individualism and its economic corollary of laissezfaire capitalism in England and in America.

Like Stalin, Marx, Lenin, and Hitler, Carnegie also once accepted Christianity, but abandoned it for Darwinism and became a close friend of the famous social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer. Carnegie stated in his autobiography that when he and several of his friends came to doubt the teachings of Christianity,

. . . including the supernatural element, and indeed the whole scheme of salvation through vicarious atonement and all the fabric built upon it, I came fortunately upon Darwin’s and Spencer’s works. . . . I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. “All is well since all grows better” became my motto, my true source of comfort. Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation, but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection (1920, p. 327).

Carnegie’s conclusions were best summarized when he said:

the law of competition, be it benign or not, is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department (quoted in Hsü, 1986, p. 10).

John D. Rockefeller reportedly once said that the “growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest . . . the working out of a law of nature . . .” (Ghent, 1902, p. 29). The Rockefellers, while maintaining a Christian front, fully embraced evolution and dismissed the Bible’s early books as mythology (Taylor, 1991, p. 386).

Despite the passage of time, the influence of evolution has not diminished in the capitalist business world.  Dr. Bergman adds:

The Darwinian concept, applied to business, still is very much with us today. Robert Blake and his coauthors in their 1996 book, Corporate Darwinism, attempted to apply modern Darwinism to business. They concluded that business evolves in very predictable ways, specifically in defined stages very much like the stages of human evolution. This “business evolution” is natural; business in keeping with Darwinian principles either swallows the competition, or finds that it will be swallowed by that competition.

One may easily see this continuing to play out as behemoths like Amazon and Apple, Facebook/Meta and Google continue to devour and destroy weaker competitors.

What we have quoted in this essay regarding the effects of evolution on mankind is only scratching the surface; much more could be said.  Therefore, if political leaders in the various States of the union (particularly the Red States) want to do the most good possible for their respective peoples, they must eradicate the theory of evolution from the curricula of their schools.

It is ironic that they have not done so already, for Darwin’s theory of evolution provides the basis for things that conservatives say they fiercely oppose, such as abortion and the Jewish Holocaust.  There are numerous Holocaust memorials across the United States; remembrance of the victims of communism is also catching on in some States; efforts to end abortion are ongoing.  And yet most public schools are teaching children the same God-hating evolutionary theory that is largely responsible for all of those cataclysms.  Another Lenin or Hitler or Mao could just as easily spring from a North Carolina public high school or a Wyoming public college today as the former did in their countries.

Those who try to reconcile evolutionary dogma with Christianity are also misguided, for evolution was dreamt up precisely as a replacement for Christianity, as a way for mankind to discard the notions of an all-good, all-holy Creator and all the requirements for man’s obedience, morality, humility, etc., which that brings along with it.  They cannot be reconciled; they are implacable enemies.  That should be fairly obvious from the foregoing, but the Nazis leave us without any doubts:

As Keith noted, the Nazi party viewed Darwinism and Christianity as polar opposites. Milner said of Germany’s father of evolution, Ernst Haeckel, that in his Natural History of Creation he argued that ‘the church with its morality of love and charity is an effete fraud, a perversion of the natural order’.57

. . . Martin Bormann, Hitler’s closest associate for years and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, was equally blunt: the church was opposed to evolution and for this reason must be condemned, but the Nazis were on the side of science and evolution.

We have become so accustomed to the Godless, naturalistic/scientific view of society, politics, etc., that it is difficult to envision another, but a return to the Christian view is precisely what is needed.  For in the Church, man and society can achieve their highest potential.  John Horvat II describes this with his customary eloquence:

What is the real solution? Perhaps it would be best to get out of the nineteenth-century quagmire of modern ideologies and bizarre philosophies, which frame the debate and have brought the world to its present state of upheaval and crisis.

These relics of modernity’s flight from God are exhausted and no longer represent today’s reality. It is time to change the voluntarist paradigm. Certainty must replace doubt.

Hence, there needs to be a refreshing return to the wellspring of Christendom’s organic Christian society. Christendom was not a papal plan or a post-Roman conspiracy to power. It was born of the natural development of peoples’ customs, governing structures and qualities oriented by Holy Mother Church. From its unity was born an immense variety of organic solutions that addressed man’s physical and spiritual needs.

From the wound of Christ’s side came the Church, whose influence allowed Christians to live in transformative union, grace and charity.

It is time to abandon the liberal charade that society must function as if God does not exist. Instead, the world must again turn to God, to Saint Augustine’s “beauty so ancient and so new,” which will bring peace to today’s restless hearts.

Volume I of Fr. John Strickland’s Paradise and Utopia series is also very helpful in recovering a Christian culture.

The theory of evolution is the beating heart of many of the evils of the modern world.  There are many good, young, talented leaders rising in the South, particularly governors – Reeves in Mississippi, DeSantis in Florida, Mrs. Sanders in Arkansas, Landry in Louisiana.  If they and others want to end some of the worst problems now afflicting us (racial hatred and violence, socialist agitation, abortion, etc.) and prevent the rise of future beastly men who could initiate another series of mass incarcerations, persecutions, tortures, and ‘liquidations’ in furtherance of new revolutions, they will tear out Darwin’s theory of evolution from their States and take every possible precaution to ensure that it never comes back to life within them.