The gospel of radical equality: Whether it’s the community of the Faithful or the united workers of the world, Christianity or Marxism, this is a key selling-point. All those other ways of looking at the world (paganism; capitalism) cultivate hierarchies and inequality among people. In our utopia, as the spin would have it, everybody is equal.
Both Christianity and Marxism, in its pure form (as Idea, not practice), have attractive elements, but radical equality isn’t one of them. It doesn’t hold true in practice; consider the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, or the repeated devolutions of Marxist states into cults of the Beloved Leader (Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kim Jong-Il, etc.). Equally importantly, it doesn’t hold true in theory, either, though the propaganda surrounding either world-outlook seems to assert so.
To understand why not, consider Christian brotherhood from the perspective of a virtuous, idolatrous polytheist—say, my grandmother, now deceased. You could just as easily look at the Soviet Communist Party from the perspective of a dissenter. In either case, you have a Power (God/“History”), a prophet who communicates the will of that Power (Christ/Marx), and a small circle of the preferred (the Apostles/the Politburo) inside a larger circle of the right-thinkers (the Community of the Faithful/the Communist Party). Anyone can join this large circle, and everyone is expected to, eventually, if the true ideologues just spread it (the Gospel/the Revolution) energetically enough. There is a price, of course: Your identity. To join the Party, or the Faithful, is to give up a measure of individuality. What you believe is a known quantity, and you believe as part of a historically fortunate collective, membership in which may require you to inform on your loved ones. Just listen to Mao in the Little Red Book, excuse me, Matthew in the Good Book: “I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother….” If I, an iconopoetic polytheist, were to “convert” to Christianity, I would be declaring as true a universe, and an eternity, in which my own dead grandmother is burning in hell, forever.
And hell, so little harped-on in genteel suburban sermons today, reveals the real thing that Christianity and Marxism (and Islam and Maoism and Nazism) have in common: That they are totalitarian. This is the reason why Christianity’s gospel of equality brought forth a Church hierarchy, and Marxism’s gospel of equality brought forth the Supreme Soviet. All such totalitarian systems require a Gulag to house those who, through a sense of intellectual inviolability or plain hardheadedness, disagree. Not to join up knowingly is a great and punishable crime. The Gulag, the concentration camp, the system of secret prisons—these are all places to hide away those who commit the crime of not believing the one truth, not towing the Party line.
Monotheistic religions, absolute as they are, are forced to shunt my grandmother (let me tell you, the old lady was saintly) to the unbeliever’s eternal Gulag, regardless of how she behaved in life. Which points up the irony of calling such religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam—the “ethical religions.” When it comes down to it, these religions are willing to punish my grandmother for not believing the right thing; they could care less that she may have done the right thing. (She’s in good company: Gandhi is with her, and a baker’s dozen Dalai Lamas.) Come to think of it, monotheism may be crueler than Stalinism. Just think how hell is set up. At least you could escape the Gulag by dying.