What’s a Communist, Anyway?

Fresh out of seminary and into a small-town congregation, I decided to add altruism to Halloween. This was the late 1960’s, and we gathered all the children to go together in small groups of masked missionaries armed with their little collection boxes in quest of alms for UNICEF [United Nations Children’s Fund].

The one memory that stood out from that evening was the question a little child posed at the end of this worthy endeavor: “What’s a communist?” When I asked why she wanted to know, she said that a certain household closed the door and told her that they would not contribute to anything that was “communist”. While that might seem like a conundrum to some folk, that one word was a simple statement designed to confuse even a kid from the church who simply wanted to help hungry children.

After the bipartisan passage of the infrastructure bill this past week, Trump loyalists have demonized the bill as “Joe Biden’s Communist takeover of America”. There’s that fearful word again. The scapegoat word during last year’s election for the likes of others like us was “socialists”. You start slinging words like that around everywhere, people get so scared they shut their doors and refuse to give credence to any other arguments even if the hungry children will be saved from starvation by your little coins in this Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF box.

When I was growing up in the middle of Mississippi, word was that anything north of Memphis was in communist country. When I headed to Richmond for seminary in 1964, folk in my home church warned me that many of the faculty members there were godless communists. I discovered that all of the professors there were as American as apple pie, and Richmond was just a hotbed of social rest. I remember attending a meeting of Southern Presbyterians where we were warned that if we ever re-united with those Northern Presbyterians, we were opening the doors to the communist who lived in Michigan. Since my grandmother had come from there, their warning seemed more like an idle tale full of sound and fury and signifying nothing in particular.

Through it all, my crap detector was worn out trying to nail down who and where all these communists were. Way back in 1950’s, Senator McCarthy had a list of 205 names of “known communist” who were working for the State Department. He went after Hollywood with a vengeance by naming playwright Lillian Hellman as the worst of all. [read her Scoundrel Time] J. Edgar Hoover’s war on the “Red Menace” named Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr. as prime suspects. The northern college students who came to my hometown to encourage our segregated citizens to register to vote were called “outside communist agitators”.

The little girl’s innocent question that Halloween night still haunts me, but I have realized that “communist” is merely a term we use to vilify those “other people” who are not like us. And we’ve been “othering” each other all our lives as we try to decide just who in the hell we are for heaven’s sake. At least we are not one of them!

It’s the gospel truth, and Jesus tried his best to keep us from “othering” people who were not like us. Because he sided with outsiders and said we should become like that inquisitive child, the righteous folks, along with the empire, suspected him of being a godless communist. According to that ancient creed, “he was crucified, dead and buried” before going to hell with all those “others”.