Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times* | October 30, 2019, Updated: November 6, 2019
Commentary
I heard a love story recently that brought me to tears. It wasn’t a Shakespearean tragedy of star-crossed lovers. It wasn’t romantic at all. It wasn’t a tale of a mother’s self-sacrifice for her children—quite the opposite.
It was a simple tale of masculine love—something so rarely praised and so often devalued that Western culture is dying for the very lack of it.
A highly regarded U.S. military leader, a veteran of one of this country’s toughest military units, told me his story.
Many years ago, my friend’s son was about 16. He was smoking marijuana every day, and no matter what his parents told him, or how much they pleaded or tried to reason with him, he simply wouldn’t quit. The son’s drug habit became a big family issue.
The boy’s mother offered him unconditional love. She would be there for him, no matter how he behaved. When the boy’s father threatened to throw his son out of the house, his distraught mother would tearfully plead his case. Her love for her son was overwhelming and unquestionable—and completely ineffective.
Eventually, the father, a man who had led some of the world’s toughest troops into combat, made one of the bravest decisions of his life. He put his son in the back of the family car. He drove him down to the local shopping mall and made him get out. He told his son: “This is your new home. … You stay here until you learn to love this family more than you love marijuana.”
The father drove away, choking back tears and praying all the way home.
Five long, tearful, and fearful days later, the boy turned up on the family doorstep and said: “I’m never smoking that stuff again. Can I please come home?”
The boy was joyfully welcomed back to the family—and he kept his word.
The big lie of modern Western society is that masculinity is dangerous, destructive, even toxic. Masculinity is harsh and unforgiving. It’s warlike, aggressive, and intolerant. It needs to be suppressed. We need more love, and that’s essentially a feminine virtue. Feminine love (the only “real” love, we are led to believe) is kind and forgiving, accepting and tolerant, welcoming and unconditional.
The truth, known to virtually every civilization in world history but somehow largely forgotten in our own, is that there are two sides to love: the masculine and the feminine. Both are essential to any healthy family, church, or society. And in proper balance, they produce results far greater than the sum of the parts.
No family can truly prosper without feminine love. How sad it must be for some to grow up without memories of a mother’s unconditional love: having your grazed knee bandaged, eating a hot meal with mom on a cold rainy day, and snuggling on her lap while she reads you a story. Or seeing her beam with pride when you graduate high school, or watching the tears roll down her face when you ship out to a combat zone.
But what of the love of the father? Can any family reach its true potential without masculine love? This is the love that demands respect, that will lay down conditions. This is the dad who will kick your backside if you disrespect your mother. The father who will make you clean up your room, or who will bawl you out for a bad report card.
This is also the father who will teach his son to stand up for himself and will expect him to strive for goals. He’ll demand that the boy shows courtesy to his elders and be willing to protect his younger siblings and those weaker than himself.
This is the father who will be a rock for his daughter, protecting her from every threat and danger, especially from boys like he used to be. He will encourage her to be the best she can be in every aspect of life. He will teach her to respect herself and look for a husband who is at least as good as her dad.
How many millions of young Western men—most other cultures haven’t gotten as crazy as us yet—are rotting in jails, working endless dead-end jobs, smoking dope all day long on welfare, or living in mom’s basement at 35 because they never had a dad around to take them fishing or boot their backsides when needed?
How many millions of young women move from one hopeless relationship to another because they so lack self-respect they’ll latch on to any man who’ll have them? How many of them struggle to develop real meaningful relationships because they have no yardstick to recognize a good man, even if they happen to stumble across one? How many millions of their children are almost certain to repeat the same cycle?
Masculine love isn’t just desirable; it’s essential for our survival. A lack of the masculine qualities of leadership, decisiveness, discipline, and courage are destroying the Western family, churches, and culture.
Masculine Christianity
Christianity, the bedrock of Western culture, was once a very masculine religion. Jesus came with a sword, not a poem. He overturned the moneychangers’ tables in the Temple and didn’t attempt to mediate a peaceful resolution.
He said, “Go forth and sin no more,” not, “Don’t worry, do what you feel like, I’ll make it right with dad.”
Modern Western Christianity is drowning in feminine love. Seldom will you hear an American or European priest or pastor ever get tough with his flock. You’ll hear very little about renouncing sin or denouncing evil in most Western churches.
Your modern Western church experience probably won’t include a military veteran priest or pastor who can preach a sermon that will chill your blood and cleanse your soul. You will likely not sing songs of praise such as “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
A caricature of today’s clergy would be a wispy-bearded, latte-drinking pastor, wearing skinny jeans and playing sappy “Christian” rock music, while he (or she) tells you that Jesus loves you no matter what you do, and as long as you put some money in the collection plate, you’re good with God—whoever she may be.
Western Christianity has all but abandoned masculine love, and our churches, families, and culture are dying because of it.
The fact that many people will be enraged by what I have just written only proves my point. We have so lost our bearings in the West that stating obvious truths about the virtues of masculinity and its role in family, church, and societal leadership could be enough to get you fired, banished, murdered, or even de-friended on Facebook.
To recover our culture, we must restore our respect for masculinity and the masculine virtues. We must recognize that masculine love is what drives young men to defy tyrants, fight just wars, explore space, create businesses, plant churches, and build strong families.
Life without feminine love is sterile, suppressive, harsh, and cold. Communist China, which so undervalues femininity that it has aborted tens of millions of baby girls under the “one-child policy,” is a case in point. Life without masculine love is, to borrow from Hobbes, “poor, nasty, brutal, and short.” Go to any inner-city welfare slum, where fatherless families are the norm, to see proof of that.
Any family, church, or society that can properly honor and balance both feminine and masculine love is destined to grow and prosper. We need both aspects of love to make us whole—and holy.
*Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Photo credit: A father and son watch batting practice prior to a game between the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz., on Aug. 20, 2019. (Norm Hall/Getty Images)
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times* | January 22, 2019,Updated: February 17, 2019
Commentary
The United States is a deeply religious country. Very early on, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) realized that if the United States was ever to be brought to socialism, religion would have to be harnessed to the task.
Enter the CPUSA’s Religion Commission, where socialist pastors, religious academics, and laypeople network to spread Marxist ideas through their churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques.
As the United States is primarily a Christian country, the communists began to infiltrate churches, seminaries, and theological colleges even before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
In congressional testimony in July 1953, former CPUSA Chairman Ben Gitlow described how the first communist front was established in the United States, by minister and later Party member Harry Ward:>
“The Methodist Federation for Social Action … was first organized by a group of Socialist, Marxist clergymen of the Methodist church headed by Dr. Harry F. Ward. … Its objective was to transform the Methodist Church and Christianity into an instrument for the achievement of socialism. It was established in 1907, 12 years before the organization of the Communist Party in the United States in 1919.”
In testimony a few days later, another high-ranking communist defector exposed Ward as a card-carrying communist and a powerful “agent of influence” for the communist cause:
“The Methodist Federation for Social Action, headed by the Rev. Harry F. Ward, whom I have already identified as a Party member, was invaluable to the Communist Party in its united-front organizations campaign. It was invaluable because, through it, the Party was able to get contacts with thousands of ministers all over the country.”
That defector, Manning Johnson, also went on to reveal how the CPUSA’s Soviet masters had shifted emphasis to co-opting religion from destroying it:
“Once the tactic of infiltrating religious organizations was set by the Kremlin, the actual mechanics of implementing the ‘new line’ was a question of following the general experiences of the living church movement in Russia, where the Communists discovered that the destruction of religion could proceed much faster through infiltration of the church by Communist agents operating within the church itself.
“The Communist leadership in the United States realized that the infiltration tactic in this country would have to adapt itself to American conditions and the religious make-up peculiar to this country. In the earliest stages, it was determined that with only small forces available it would be necessary to concentrate Communist agents in the seminaries and divinity schools. The practical conclusion drawn by the Red leaders was that these institutions would make it possible for a small Communist minority to influence the ideology of future clergymen in the paths most conducive to Communist purposes.”
According to Johnson, the CPUSA set about infiltrating American Christianity at every level:
“In the early 1930s, the Communists instructed thousands of their members to rejoin their ancestral religious groups and to operate in cells designed to take control of churches for Communist purposes. This method was not only propounded but was executed with great success among large elements of American church life. Communists operating a double-pronged infiltration, both through elements of Communist-controlled clergy and Communist-controlled laymen, managed to pervert and weaken entire strata of religious life in the United States.”
All over the United States, CPUSA members went back to their childhood churches. Over time, many gained positions of influence. This activity ramped up during the Vietnam era.
Some examples follow:
In Utah, Wayne Holley was a proud member of the Mormon Church and founder of the Joe Hill Club of the CPUSA. Holley worked for “all economic and social issues including universal health care, fair housing, jobs with justice, women’s issues, and all ‘movements for peace.’ He fought against nuclear testing at the Nevada test site, the Vietnam War, and the MX Missile Program,” according to CPUSA publication People’s World.
In Chicago, Bill Hogan, a CPUSA member and Catholic priest, joined in the national campaigns to end the U.S. war in Vietnam, was a leader in Chicago Clergy and Laity Concerned (an anti-war group), and “was one of the plaintiffs in a pair of federal lawsuits in 1974 and 1975 that sought to stop alleged Chicago Police Department harassment of political activists,” according to his obituary.
In New York, CPUSA member the Rev. Richard Morford was executive director of the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship and a leader of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
During the Vietnam war era, the American Communist movement split into Maoist, Trotskyist, and “democratic socialist” factions. The traditional CPUSA was dramatically reduced in numbers. However, far-left infiltration of seminaries and theological schools increased as thousands of young draft-dodgers opted to promote socialism in divinity school rather than fight communists in Vietnam.
Today, most of the leftist divinity professors and religious leaders come out of the 1960s Maoist and “democratic socialist” movements rather than the CPUSA.
However, the CPUSA did continue to make considerable progress in black-majority churches. Since the 1960s, when the CPUSA began to more deeply infiltrate the Democratic Party, a larger emphasis was put on recruiting black pastors. These pastors could be used to promote socialist policies within the Democratic Party, and to keep their congregations loyally voting for the left.
In April 2005, the CPUSA re-organized its Religious Commission with a conference in Des Moines, Iowa. The CPUSA’s People’s World newspaper quoted several participants to give a flavor of the event:
“‘The word of God and communism are hand in hand,’ said Diana Sowry, a school bus driver from Ashtabula County, Ohio. … Sowry is a union activist and also active in her church, where she sings in the choir. She feels communists and others who are working to defeat the ultra-right and advance peace, social and economic justice, and socialism are ‘doing the work of the Word.’
“The Rev. Scott Marks, from New Haven, Conn., said ‘people in the pews’ cannot simply stick to ‘feel-good issues,’ but must ‘be willing to go to the wall on the real issues.’ … [Marks] is a Pentecostal minister who leads the Connecticut Center for a New Economy. For him, this is doing ‘the real work’ of Jesus. ‘It’s not pie in the sky when we die,’ Marks told the World. ‘It’s how are we going to change things in the here and now.’ …
“In the session on work in local churches, the Rev. Gil Dawes, a retired volunteer pastor at Trinity Methodist Church here, emphasized that grassroots progressive religious activism has deep historical roots, and has to be re-energized today. ‘That’s where the right is way ahead of us,’ he said. …
“’People suffering will become leaders if they have a chance to put it together with other people,’ Dawes said. This kind of Bible study helped turn one congregation from fundamentalist to one of the most progressive, he said.
“In the session on Marx and religion, Paul Nelson, a Lutheran minister who teaches at a community college in Iowa, disputed the idea that Marx opposed all religion. What Marx denounced was an ‘illusory’ form of religion that served as ‘ideological cover for the exercise of aristocratic economic and political power.’”
Today’s Influence
Today’s CPUSA is still very active in the church. Here are some examples:
Edward Carson, chairman of the Boston Communist Party, was an editor for The Christian Century “Then and Now” blog.
Michael Adam Reale served on the CPUSA Religious Commission in 2004 and 2005. Reale told the CPUSA newspaper People’s Weekly World (later changed to People’s World) in 2004:
“I personally felt led to bring into the Communist Party three friends who are active in their faiths, one a Quaker, another who is the pastor of the United Church of Christ, and the third a Jehovah’s Witness—all three had expressed an interest in the party. We all need to confront the myth that communism is anti-religion. Communism is not anti-religion—it is anti-opulence. …
“I came to the Communist Party because of my deep Quaker faith. I have become convinced (a Quaker expression) of the ‘rightness’ of Marxism.”
In 2010, Pierre Williams was secretary of the Religion Commission of the CPUSA. He received his master’s in divinity from Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia. He also completed pastoral residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and served as staff chaplain at Harbor Hospital in Baltimore. He is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and has been a member of the Florida Interfaith Commission on Children and Youth.
Henry Millstein, a practicing Roman Catholic, is an activist in several faith-based social justice organizations. He serves on the National Committee and the Religion Commission of the CPUSA.
Millstein holds a doctorate in Jewish Studies from the University of California–Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union, with a focus on Jewish–Christian relations, and has taught humanities and history of religion at Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and the Graduate Theological Union.
Millstein is currently programs manager at Islamic Networks Group in San Jose. His LinkedIn profile states:
“His background includes both academic and experiential acquaintance with a variety of cultures and religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Native American traditions. In his current position at ING-Islamic Networks Group, he brings together his experience in moving across boundaries of faith and culture with his passion for peace, nonviolence, and social justice.”
The Rev. James Caldwell is one of two black pastors in the Houston Communist Party branch. He is a graduate of Phyllis Wheatley High School and Texas Southern University’s School of Public Affairs. He also attended Dallas Theological Seminary and has been an ordained minister for over 30 years.
The Rev. Tim Yeager was, in 2010, chairperson of the Religion Commission of the CPUSA. He has served on the Standing Commission on Anglican and International Peace with Justice Concerns and the Advocacy Center of The Episcopal Church.
After a Christian upbringing in Iowa, Yeager went on to study Russian and History at the University of Iowa. The Vietnam War was raging then, and he became involved in the anti-war movement.
“That opened my eyes to a whole host of issues. I moved away from Christianity and became a Unitarian. As time went on, I became a leader in left-wing student activities … I had read Karl Marx on Ludwig Feuerbach [a German philosopher and anthropologist] and decided that I had to move away from religion altogether and became a Marxist,” Yeager said in a 2015 interview in British local magazine Westcombe News.
Yeager also became chief organizer of the Communist Party in Iowa but was drawn back to the church by communist pastor Gil Dawes.
“I never really lost my connection to my home church in Iowa. It was part of my family. And then, I met a wonderful man named Gil Dawes. He was a Methodist minister and liberation theologian who showed me what I had not really taken on board, that Christianity and socialism had much in common and so I joined his church … but I have to admit that I had not yet become a Christian again in my heart,” Yeager said in the same interview.
In 2011, Yeager was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church, and, in 2012, he took on responsibility for serving a small inner-city church on the West Side of Chicago.
He currently serves at a church in London and is a member of the Communist Party of Britain.
Communists want to be gods on Earth. Their main competition for the minds of men is revealed religion. Attempts to brutally suppress Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the early days of the Soviet Union proved counter-productive; infiltrating and twisting religion is far more effective. This tactic has been applied all over the world and has made huge inroads in the United States.
Much of what is preached today in U.S. churches have been influenced, if not dominated, by communist ideology posing as religion.
Feature photo: A priest walks to the sanctuary following a mass Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Friday, July 17th, marked the 19th anniversary of the deaths of 230 people on TWA Flight 800. There remain unaddressed questions about how this jet mysteriously exploded off the coast of Long Island. But the mainstream media aren’t interested in providing the public with much needed answers, pursuing this scandal, or even, really, marking the anniversary of the victims. Instead, recent coverage of this anniversary has been confined to some local news reports. I’m sure there will be much more coverage next year, for the 20th anniversary.
But the media continue to do a disservice to America and the memories of those lost, by ignoring this enduring scandal and its many victims. They are not interested in re-litigating the facts because the facts overwhelmingly point to an administration cover-up, and to expose this scandal would implicate the Clintons in yet another scandal.
Andrew Danziger, a 28-year airline veteran, spoke out this past April about the transparent government cover-up that took place nearly two decades ago.
“This investigation smelled like bull all those years back, and time has done nothing to soften that stench,” wrote Danziger for the New York Daily News. “I don’t believe the findings, and neither do hundreds of other pilots that I know.”
That might be because the FBI, he says, took the “lead” in the investigation, an “unprecedented” step. In particular, Danziger wrote, one of the lead investigators representing the interests of the TWA pilots at the time told him that “the mechanics and their representatives were denied access, in the early going, to the hangar where all of the recovered material was stored and being re-assembled.”
His colleague also told him that “During the investigation, the FBI periodically required everyone to leave the hangar due to ‘national security issues.’”
“Only after they ‘sterilized the area’ were folks allowed back in to continue where they left off (that is, if what they were examining was still there),” writes Danziger. In addition, eyewitnesses were not allowed to testify, and their words were only summarized in FBI reports which they could not personally review.
“Lots can go wrong with an airplane,” he wrote. “But jets do not explode in midair.”
“…Hank Hughes, an [National Transportation Safety Board] NTSB investigator who headed up the reassembly of the wreckage in a hangar in Calverton, New York, had been telling what he knew since early in the investigation,” I recalled for Accuracy in Media two years ago. “He told a Senate committee in 1997 that he witnessed evidence being tampered with, and some being destroyed.”
I still believe that “the evidence remains overwhelming that the plane was brought down by a missile or missiles.”
AIM conducted a detailed investigation of the downing of Flight TWA 800 to attempt to expose the truth. We examined the evidence supporting each of the three leading theories of what caused the plane to explode, and then crash into the Atlantic, 19 years ago this week. Our award-winning documentary, “TWA 800: The Search for the Truth,” can be viewed here.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
