"Heirs of the Red Guard: The Left's War on God and Family"

 

Heirs of the Red Guard: The Left's War on God and Family

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In the summer of 1966, Mao Zedong launched a spiritual and political campaign of terror.

Mao knew that to seize a civilization you must start with the altar and the hearth. On August 18 of that year, before a million Red Guards assembled in Tiananmen Square, he gave the order to "Destroy the Four Olds": old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.

The campaign was authorized at the rally and unleashed across the country within days.

The Red Guards didn't stop at renaming streets or smashing statues. They stormed the sanctuaries. In Baoding, Hebei, junior high students sacked the cathedral, dragged the religious articles into the square, and built a pyre.

Clergy and nuns were forced to stand around the flames.

Across the country Bibles were confiscated and burned, churches were stripped and converted into warehouses, and pastors were beaten in public struggle sessions. By the early 1970s, Christianity in China had effectively been driven underground.

The Marxist logic is that a father who governs his home and a congregation that bows only to Christ are rival jurisdictions. A confession of any sovereign above the State, and of any natural authority below it, is an obstacle to the total ideological monopoly that this kind of revolution demands.

So the home and the altar had to come down together. Sixty years later, the uniforms are different. The objective is not.

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On July 4, 2025, as the rest of the country celebrated independence, the Democratic Socialists of America convened a panel in Chicago titled "The Left and the Family: A Roundtable" at the annual Socialism 2025 conference.

Olivia Katbi, co-chair of Portland DSA, told the room that her movement argues "for abolition of the family in general," on the grounds that the household operates as part of the carceral system by treating children as property.

The panel description, posted by the DSA on YouTube, called the nuclear family "an inherently repressive, racist, and hetero-sexist institution that functionally reinforces and reproduces capitalism."

Sophie Lewis, whose 2022 polemic Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso) traces the family-abolition tradition from Charles Fourier through Marx and Engels to Alexandra Kollontai and on into the present, has been platformed by Current Affairs and welcomed onto Ivy League campuses.

Lily Sánchez, managing editor at Current Affairs, has written sympathetically of the same project. The argument is out in the open. The institution of the family "privatizes care."

It must be dissolved into the collective.

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The home is a "little Church." It's the school of catechesis where children first learn to recognize truth, to love rightly, and to honor God. The marriage itself is iconic, an image of Christ and His Church. Strip any of this away and the State doesn't simply acquire a new ministerial portfolio. It acquires the children.

Mao's Red Guards and America's family abolitionists operate on the same premise. You can't construct an all-powerful State so long as the people answer to God and defend their children. The traditional household is the last unconquered jurisdiction inside the regime. The apostolic congregation is the last institution that will not bow.

The modern socialist sees this perfectly. That's why they intend to burn it down.

What do you think the coordinated assault on parental rights in public education actually is? What is the apparatus of cancel culture? What is the unrelenting hostility toward Christian morality?

This is the new "Destruction of the Four Olds." The aim is the same. Strip away faith, family, and inherited memory until the citizen has no allegiance left except to the Party and to whichever ideology the Party happens to be preaching that month.

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12).

We will not surrender our children to the heirs of Mao. We will not hand the little churches of our homes to the commissars of a godless revolution. We stand on the rock of apostolic truth.

Against that rock, every Marxist delusion shatters.

Deus Vult.