Communitarianism: A Toxic Blend of Communism, Socialism, Atheism, and Cosmic Humanism
By Brannon S. Howse
The pastors and authors of one of America's fastest growing spiritual movements, the Emergent Church, sing the praises of socialism. As I’ll explain in more detail later, the Emergent Church champions the neo-Marxist call for a utopian society through spiritual evolution where good and evil merge to form a “better” third option. This idea derives from the belief system of philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and finds its contemporary manifestation in the "Third Way" movement of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. In the Third Way, capitalism, socialism, and communism merge to form a misanthropic combination of the three. This blending is now represented in the terms “the New World Order” and “the new enlightenment.”
The Third Way promotes Communitarianism, a toxic blend of communism, socialism, atheism, and Cosmic Humanism. Communitarians believe in universal health care, government-subsidized housing and education, radical environmentalism, Fabian socialism, and the like.
An article on the website of the Democratic Leadership Council explains how Clinton and Blair have promoted Third Way thinking across the globe:
[quote] Starting with Bill Clinton's Presidential campaign in 1992, Third Way thinking is reshaping progressive politics throughout the world. Inspired by the example of Clinton and the New Democrats, Tony Blair in Britain led a revitalized New Labour party back to power in 1997. The victory of Gerhard Shroeder and the Social Democrats in Germany the next year confirmed the revival of center-left parties which either control or are part of the governing coalition forming throughout the European Union. From Latin America to Australia and New Zealand, Third Way ideas also are taking hold. [end quote]
On Sunday, April 25, 1999, President Clinton and the DLC hosted a historic roundtable discussion, “The Third Way: Progressive Governance for the 21st Century, “with five world leaders including British PM Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Dutch PM Wim Kok, and Italian PM Massimo D'Alema, the First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and DLC President Al From.
Not to be hoodwinked by the window dressing of Third Way advocates, however, Vaclav Klaus, prime minister of the Czech Republic, warns against the real future it offers: "The Third Way is the fastest route to the Third World." But that seems to be where communitarians want to take us.
Dr. Amitai Etzioni, often referred to as the “guru” of the communitarian movement, founded the Communitarian Network in 1990. Etzioni received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, served as professor of sociology at Columbia University, and then went to George Washington University as director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies.
Etzioni characterizes President Obama as a communitarian in a February 4, 2009, Jerusalem Post article: “There is no philosophy that better describes Obama’s position than Communitarianism,” which Etzioni calls a philosophy “that would speak for community and the common good.”
Prior to Obama, Dr. Etzioni even noted Communitarianism at work in the Bush administration. In “Needed: Catchword for Bush Ideology; ‘Communitarianism’ Finds Favor,” a February 1, 2001 Washington Post article, Etzioni described the inaugural address of President George W. Bush as “a Communitarian Text.” The article also revealed that staffers inside the Bush White House were familiar with Communitarianism and the Third Way:
“This is the ultimate Third Way,” said Don Eberly, an adviser in the Bush White House, using a favorite phrase of President Bill Clinton, who also sought, largely unsuccessfully, to redefine the debate with an alternative to the liberal-conservative conflict. “The debate in this town the last eight years was how to forge a compromise on the role of the state and the market. This is a new way to rethink social policy: a major reigniting of interest in the social sector.”
Some have pointed to Communist Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika”—which sought to merge socialism with capitalism when he was president of the USSR—as an example of the Third Way. Whatever you call it and no matter how it evolves, it is the foundation of tyranny and punishment over those who dissent and reject collectivism. Communitarians have repackaged socialist ideas that are contrary to a Biblical worldview and to the principles declared as the purpose and responsibility of civil government in America's founding documents. Christians must expose and fight all degrees of socialism, communism, and Marxism/ Leninism. Regardless of how it begins or the assurances given, the end will be infringement of parental authority and freedom of religion, the elimination of freedom of speech such as radio programs that speak out against the government's tyranny, the establishment of hate-crime laws that criminalize Christianity, and much more.
Many within the apostate Church, civil government, the educational establishment, national and international corporations, charities, foundations, and non-government organizations (NGOs) have bought into what is called the sustainable development version of Communitarianism. Henry Lamb explains the danger:
[quote] From the highest rafters of academia comes another enemy of freedom: Communitarianism. This is a belief system that opposes both authoritarianism and individualism, and promotes instead a social organization that is governed by policies designed by civil society to limit individual freedom as required for the benefit the community. Dr. Amitai Etzioni is credited with founding this communitarian movement. [end quote]
For more than 200 years, all these questions were addressed by elected representatives of the community. Individual members of the community have always been free to propose projects to meet unmet community needs. Elected officials who failed to respond to the wishes of the community could always be replaced at the next election.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the environmental movement, joined by "social justice" advocates, grew impatient with the rate of change under this traditional policymaking procedure. That's why the President's Council on Sustainable Development declared, "We need a new decision process. …" This new decision process is constructed on a communitarian philosophy and employs the consensus process.
Typically, these councils have been initiated and funded by special interest groups or by the federal government—not by the local community. These councils inevitably create a plan that incorporates the recommendations set forth in Agenda 21, the U.N.'s bible on sustainable development. These plans limit individual freedom and impose individual responsibilities in order to create a community that the vision council has determined to be in the best interest of the whole.
Americans in Washington State and Wisconsin are learning the hard way about the freedom-robbing ways of sustainable development:
[quote] The King County, Wash., plan, for example, limits the freedom of property owners to use only 35 percent of their land, while imposing the requirement that 65 percent of the land be left in its natural condition. In Houston County, Wis., the plan limits individual freedom to build no more than one home on a 40-acre parcel. Similar restrictions on individual freedom have been imposed by so-called vision councils all across the country in order to "balance the rights of individuals against the needs of the community"—as determined by a non-elected group of communitarians. [end quote]
Communitarianism has been called "communism-lite." Others refer to it as "sophisticated socialism." On the ground, it appears to be academic justification for transforming the policymaking process, taking authority away from elected officials and empowering non-elected representatives of special interest groups.
As I document in this book, many of today's educators, government bureaucrats, and corporate leaders are committed to a radical environmentalism stemming from their mysticism and pantheistic pagan spirituality that requires the worship of nature. For another view of the interconnection of the government, corporation, education, and pagan spirituality I’ll be talking so much about in this book, I recommend “Business, Government, Academic Leaders Convene on Sustainable Real Estate Development,” an article by Melissa Anderson on the website of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
You’ll recall that the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s was largely about the promotion of mysticism, pagan spirituality, and socialism. Many 60s radicals grew up to become educators, reporters, elected officials, corporate officers, and leaders in the radical foundations now implementing sustainable development policies. To drastically understate the case: It’s a big problem.
The end game of sustainable development is global governance. If you doubt my claim, then consider the words of the Commission on Global Governance, an organization allied with the United Nations:
"The environment, perhaps more than any other issue, has helped to crystallize the notion that humanity has a common future. The concept of sustainable development is now widely used and accepted as a framework within which all countries, rich and poor, should operate. The aspect that particularly concerns us is the global governance implications." [emphasis mine]
After the Brazil Earth Summit, President Bill Clinton created the President's Council on Sustainable Development. As DeWeese explains, the Clinton Administration side-stepped Congress to approve the sustainable development agenda and implement its policies in America:
"All cabinet officials had to do was change some wording of existing programs and reroute already-approved funding to begin to implement the agenda—without Congress and without debate. Former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown told a meeting of the President's Council that he could implement 67% of the Sustainable Development agenda in his agency with no new legislation. Other agencies like Interior, EPA, HUD and more did the same thing. To help it all along, Clinton issued a blizzard of Executive Orders."
Some of the groups pushing the sustainable development agenda include Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, the National Education Association, and a host of government bureaucrats serving both Republican and Democrat administrations.
As this book is published—October 2009—Americans are watching the destruction of free-market capitalism under our most socialistic, left-wing administration ever. Yet, in my second book, published in 1995, I warned of this and quoted Maurice Strong, who was head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. I’ll repeat his words to point out that what is happening in America is a long-planned transformation of America into a socialist nation: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
He also extolled the need to destroy the concept of individual sovereign nations:
"It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation."
In a corollary to Strong’s position, Helen Caldicott of the Union of Concerned Scientists has declared the “horrors” of free-market capitalism:
"Free enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…Capitalism is destroying the earth."
It is not only free-market capitalism they seek to destroy but Christianity itself, since the Protestant Reformation is what gave birth to free-market capitalism. Bible-minded Christians are further enemies of these globalist goals because Christians do not believe in the worship of nature as does the pantheistic, pagan spiritualism behind the movement.
Copyright 2009 ©Brannon Howse. This content is for Situation Room members and is not to be duplicated in any form or uploaded to other websites without the express written permission of Brannon Howse or his legally authorized representative.
