Moon Griffon has been raising the hue and cry over government-funded grocery stores in Louisiana. Representative Danny McCormick has joined him in that. He warned in a Facebook post:

‘The government wants to use YOUR taxes to open grocery stores across Louisiana. HB 1194 just passed the House, paving the way for hundreds of taxpayer-funded stores to compete against local private businesses.

‘This is NOT the Louisiana way.’

The last sentence there is worth exploring. Is he correct? Is taxpayer-funding of grocery stores truly not the Louisiana way?

We’re not so sure.

There is actually an affinity that most people miss between Marxism/socialism/communism and modern Americanism. At first glance, they appear to be polar opposites. The former is a top-down collectivist enterprise, while the latter emphasizes the liberty of the individual. But a closer look reveals the similarity: Both systems are antithetical to traditional Christianity; they both strongly desire to demote it from the central point of focus in the life of the community to a mere private pursuit (or worse, to eradicate it completely).

Instead of the renewed experience of Heaven in the Church through union with Christ, both Marxism and Americanism attempt to give mankind an earthly substitute, establishing a this-worldly paradise of material abundance that will satisfy all our needs and longings, making Christianity superfluous.

Both Marxism and Americanism supply man with teachings that are every bit as dogmatic as those found in the Church. In Americanism in particular, one sees this confirmed year in and year out as US citizens wrangle over the correct interpretation of the ‘sacred’ federal and State constitutions, whether the arena for contention is judicial rulings, debates between candidates during election seasons, or what have you. The faith of Americanism must be kept pristine and uncorrupt; the Christological debates between the Church Fathers and the heretics during the first several centuries of Christianity were scarcely more heated than those between the ‘true believers’ in Americanism and the political ‘heretics’.

This sort of political religion can hold things together for a little while, but eventually, after weakening and/or destroying the foundational beliefs and institutions that make a functioning society possible (faith in and experience of God, family, clan, schools, etc.), the nations founded on those false religions collapse. We have seen this over and over again with communist and socialist countries. We are seeing it now in the United States and across the wider Western world.

Mircea Eliade repeats an essential observation throughout his book The Sacred and the Profane: ‘The sacred is the real.’ Both Marxism and Americanism reject this. What is real for both of them is Lockean/Enlightenment empiricism – the material world and the perception of it through the physical senses.

In Christianity it is not so. God the Holy Trinity alone is truly real. Creation is valuable primarily as a spiritual symbol that reflects spiritual truths, not for what mankind can transform into. Fr Zechariah Lynch writes about this,

‘Creation is a book of teaching. One of many given by God. “It is clear that whoever reads the natural without knowing the spiritual content and significance of what he reads, reads death, sees death, appropriates death. Also, whoever considers visible nature as the only reality and not as a riddle on the mirror of the spirit, does not know more than a child who may recognize letters but is far from understanding written words,” proclaims St. Nikolai Velimirovich (The Universe as Symbol and Sign, pg 11).’ (‘The Parable of the Tree in Me,’ inklesspen.substack.com)

On mankind in particular he adds,

‘St. Nikolai propounds, “A tree must be rooted in the earth in order that it may grow. It is a symbol of the soul, which must be rooted in the spiritual, heavenly world, which is its earth, its soil. In order to flourish, a tree must be watered. Even so, the human soul must be watered by the grace of the Holy Spirit in order to be healthy and strong. St. Anthony the Egyptian says, ‘As trees cannot grow without water, just so the soul cannot grow if it does not feed on heavenly sweetness. Only those souls are growing, which have received the Holy Spirit and which are filled with heavenly sweetness,” (The Universe as Symbols and Signs, pg. 26).’ (Ibid.)

Americanism and Marxism both refuse statements like these to be proclaimed as absolute truths around which society must be ordered. To do so would violate the rights of the individual in the first system, while in the second they are viewed as primitive fables that the proletariat must evolve beyond.

But the disorder that their rejection spawns is unmistakable –indiscriminate stabbings and shootings, drug overdoses, dishonesty, and the like. This is causing some in the States to do some soul-searching. Proposals to return some bits and pieces of Christianity to public life (Ten Commandments posters and Bible teaching in public school classrooms, for instance) are beginning to reappear.

But the soul yearns for more. It yearns for the Sacred, the Real. It yearns for what Christendom in its Roman Catholic and Orthodox forms once had – a society that lived life as one extended, unending Mass or Divine Liturgy, when holy days celebrating the salvific acts of God and the victories of the saints and martyrs permeated the yearly calendar, sanctifying time and space. Marxism despises all of this as silly fictions. But so too does Big Business America hate it, where corporate CEOs and powerful politicians who measure progress only in terms of GDP and profits recoil at the number of days off employees would need to live a traditional, apostolic Christian life.

The Southern Agrarian writers in I’ll Take My Stand warned that socialism and capitalism were essentially two sides of the same centralized, industrialized coin. St Seraphim Rose of California later wrote something similar in his book Russia’s Catacomb Saints, about the lives of the persecuted Church under the Soviets: ‘Today in Russia, tomorrow in America.’ In other words, the same Christ-opposing, materialistic ethos is present in both Marxism and Americanism.

It is good that folks are spooked at the prospect of Marxism in Louisiana, NYC, and elsewhere in the States. But Americanism isn’t strong enough to ward it off. It will, in fact, only fan the flames of Christless materialism that will make Marxism all the more attractive, for socialism is a system that promises material fulfilment without the need to work.

When a man goes down the wrong road, it is essential that he leave it in order to get back on the correct one. It is the same with entire peoples. In the United States, we have been going down the dead-end road of a false, political religion. Now we must return to the Christian path. In doing so, we will not have to abandon everything we have known. There are a great many valuable things we can and should keep: lessons about government, cultural creations, etc. It will not be easy, nor speedy. Conversion often does not happen in a single moment in a man’s life, much less in a union with a population in the hundreds of millions. But let us at least acknowledge that it must be done, and take the first steps in that direction.