Evangelicals Demand Return to Communist Tyranny

James Peron
Sep 1, 2018 · 5 min read
Thousands of LGBT individuals, along with others, fled Cuba during the Mariel boatlift in 1980.

Cuba is slowly liberalizing and the Catholic Church, among others, doesn’t like it. A new constitution is being proposed that would among other things recognize markets and private enterprise and legalize same-sex marriage. The Miami Herald reports:

…analysts consulted by this newspaper believe the reforms will allow small and medium private businesses, modify family law to recognize same-sex parents and make official the term limits currently in place, of two five-year periods that can be extended for one term.

The Church is calling for people to reject the idea as “ideological colonialism.” That’s rich coming from Catholicism, which is the most colonialist religion in Western history.

Joining the Catholic Church to stop freedom in its tracks are various groups of evangelicals. One church leader seriously announced, “You can’t just pick from capitalism what’s convenient to you. If the country is Communists, then let it be Communist.”

Born-again bigots in America opposed marriage equality on the grounds it was a communist plot to destroy the family and in Cuba we have evangelicals saying marriage equality is a capitalist plot to destroy communism. I suspect they want any excuse to hate.

The statement by evangelicals said marriage equality is NOT a Communist value and pointed to how gays have been treated in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and North Korea as proof. Of course, LGBT individuals have been treated badly under communist governments; it’s just that evangelicals believe that treatment should continue.

They ignore the fact that evangelicals were treated badly as well. In fact, outside the ruling elite it’s hard to think of a group that wasn’t treated badly — and even the ruling elite had to walk carefully during the periodic purges. As one gay activist living in exile put it: “Those pastors should study a little history.”

Gay writer Andre Gide was a sympathizer to the Soviet revolution—until he actually visited Soviet Russia. He was horrified, by the sacrifice of human individuality to Marxist conformity—a tendency Marxism shares with conservatism. Gide wrote, in The God That Failed:

I doubt whether in any country in the world, not even in Hitler’s Germany, have the mind and spirit been less free, more bent, more terrorized over, and indeed vassalized — than in the Soviet Union… Humanity is complex and not all of a piece — that must be accepted — and every attempt at simplification and regimentation, every effort from the outside to reduce everything and everyone to the same common denominator, will always be reprehensible, pernicious, and dangerous.

That is the tradition to which Cuba’s evangelicals are appealing in order to stop gay marriage.

One thing that is encouraging here is that Cuba’s evangelicals, unlike their American cousins, are being honest about it. The freedom to marry, much like markets themselves, is consistent with capitalism and inconsistent with historical communism. Capitalism is a free economy and marriage equality is not really any different in principle, both are about individual choice. It was an idea repugnant to communists and to religious fanatics both.

These evangelicals and Catholic leaders are being honest in a way that Americans from the same intolerant belief systems are not. They are anti-choice across the board. They are socially intolerant and opposed to free markets — which certainly means they have much in common with Donald Trump.

We now have the spectacle of a Communist nation wanting to take baby-steps to expand individual freedom and evangelicals are opposed to the move because it ends the persecution of LGBT individuals. What does this say about the evangelical movement in this country?

This isn’t the first time evangelicals sided with the totalitarian Left. In 1990 Mario Vargas Lloso, a free market civil liberal, was locked in a heated battle with Alberto Fujimora, who had the support of the evangelical Christians and Peru’s political Left. Vargas Lloso tried to determine why evangelicals, most of whom were impoverished, were almost unanimous in their support of Fujimora. When asked why they liked Fujimora they couldn’t give answers. When pressed for an answer they gave one that would please the likes of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez, Vargas Llosa, in his autobiographical A Fish in Water, recounts:

When they were asked why they wouldn’t vote for me, it was noticeable that they were disconcerted at having to offer an explanation of something that they hadn’t thought about. Finally, someone mentioned the stands we had taken that were most often criticized: the economic ‘shock treatment’ and education for the poor. But the answer that appeared to sum up best the feeling of all of them was: “Rich people are for him, right?”

We need to remember Christian fundamentalism, in America, was allied with the radical Populist/Progressive movements that dominated Southern politics. They were the “Solid South” for a Democratic party that opposed economic freedom and civil liberties — especially for African-Americans. They rallied behind Strom Thurmond and his racist States’ Right Party in 1948, as they did for George Wallace in 1968 and as they are doing with Donald Trump today. They have consistently sided with authoritarians against freedom — both economic and social.

In September 1981 I wrote an article for Libertarian Review, “The New Theocracy: Moral Majority’s Grab for Power” about the rise of the so-called Religious Right. I warned:

The greatest irony of all is that even those economic freedoms in which the members so fervently believe will fall victim to the moral state. A theocratic state requires a big, expensive government; when you add in the cost of the super-military the Moral Majority also wants, massive governmental expenditures can be expected — and the only way to pay for them will be to severely limited economic freedom by increasing the power of taxation.

Civil liberties and economic freedoms are two sides of the same coin. Destroy one, and the other will disappear with it. Under the Theocratic State, freedom and liberty, will be memories of the past.”

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The Radical Center

A blog for the Moorfield Storey Institute: a liberaltarian think tank.

James Peron

Written by

James Peron is the president of the Moorfield Storey Institute, was the founding editor of Esteem a LGBT publication in South Africa under apartheid.

The Radical Center

A blog for the Moorfield Storey Institute: a liberaltarian think tank.

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