An often-overlooked Cold War journalist, political thinker, and ex-Soviet spy, Whittaker Chambers was born in 1901 and grew up in a poor and troubled home. Desperation and dissatisfaction with his upbringing and sympathy toward the plight of the poor and working class made Marxist ideology and its practical application—communism—especially appealing to Chambers.
Like many young individuals today, Chambers identified as a Marxist. He went on to join the Communist Party of the United States as a young adult. Eventually—and not unlike something out of a James Bond film—Chambers became a Soviet spy working in an underground spy ring within the United States complete with handlers, code names, and death threats.
But perhaps more interesting than his espionage exploits is Chambers’ renunciation of communism and the Marxist philosophy that underpins it. In the late 1930s, the once staunch atheist—as all good communists were—converted to Christianity. His conversion brought him to an understanding of free will, good and evil, and human nature that revealed Marxism’s inadequacy and unsuitability to facilitate human flourishing.
He then defected and went on to testify before Congress about the Soviet underground espionage activities of which he and others took part. He would later become a writer for Time magazine and an editor for National Review, and his outspoken and thoughtful critique of communism posthumously earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan.
Before his death in 1961, he penned his memoir, Witness, eloquently decrying the evils of communism as well as recounting his exciting life. Here are nine quotes from his memoir on religion and communism that highlight the relationship between religious devotion, personal and civic freedom, and the way in which Chambers’ understanding of religion refuted Marxist ideology:
9 Whittaker Chambers Quotes on Communism and Religion
1. “Why is it that 30 years after the greatest revolution in history the Communists have not produced one single inspired work of the mind? What is our lack? Now, in my despair, I asked at last: can it be God?”
2. “It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom.”
3. “We do not simply step from evil to good, even recognizing that any human good and evil is seldom more than a choice between less evil and more good. In that transition, we drag ourselves like cripples.”
4. “… All men simply pray, and prayer takes as many forms as there are men. Without exception we pray. We pray because there is nothing else to do, and because that is where God is—where there is nothing else.”
5. “I came to feel that the problem of evil was the central problem of human life, and that it took as many forms as there are men and women.”
6. “What I sensed without being able to phrase it has since been phrased in the simplicity of an axiom: ‘Men cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God man can only organize the world against Man.’ The gas ovens of Buchenwald and the Communist execution cellars exist first within our minds.”
7. “Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom, the soul dies. Without the soul, there is no justification for freedom.”
8. “In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. I began to break away from Communism and to climb from deep within its underground, where for six years I had been buried, back into the world of free men. … I felt a surging release and a sense of freedom, like a man who bursts at last gasp out of a drowning sea.”
9. “The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.”
It’s a pity most young Americans probably would not recognize the name Whittaker Chambers. Having been an ardent communist and Marxist himself, the ex-soviet spy turned American patriot serves as a thoughtful, and also sympathetic, critic of communism at a time in American history in which Marxism has once again gained the upper hand.
Chambers’ intriguing life story not only offers warnings against Marxism but also gives the promise of something better: reverence for man’s animating spirit and moral conscience. In fact, Chambers once went so far as to write that Stalin’s killings were justified by Marxist ideology on behalf of “the most promising social experiment in history,” if not for one glaring oversight. Chambers posits that this glaring omission can be summed up in one question: “And man’s soul?”
Only liberty, he argues, makes room for it.
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Image credit: public domain
