Growing up in the 1970's and 80's, we saw examples of how communism both came to power and retained power over the people. It produced “art” that was actually propaganda, telling stories and revealing a world view of bold human progress through great effort together against all comers. Schools, state run, of course, taught a world view that necessitated compliance to the great vision and did not tolerate deviance, even and especially from parents. Education did not teach children to think, as did, supposedly, our education system, or reason. Ideas outside the state world view were not to be entertained. “How could that happen?” we wondered, “How could they be so foolish?”

Yet we have witnessed, if not understood, the very same happening in the United States test past few decades. It is the modernism the Church and her popes of the late 1800's into the early 1900's warned against. It is the danger we forgot to pay attention do in our own midst as the world fought two wars and a cold war and celebrated the fall of communism, but the poison was already in our air and water: the heresy of personal “truth.”

Perhaps, now that parents and children are home and parents are seeing how their kids do, and do not, think, what has been taught, and not taught, and what propaganda infiltrates modern shows, movies, social media ... perhaps we can see the greater danger facing humanity is to the soul.

The western world, the United States included, is about as secular, agnostic, and atheist as when Christianity was spreading across Europe. It has been over a millennia since society at large did not share a Judeo-Christian moral foundation, including a general belief that death was not the final word. Now? Now it is fairly common for people who self proclaim as rational to declare they know oblivion is the only rational reality after death, never mind they can't explain the reasoning behind such a conclusion other than not believing in “fairy tails.” Nor can they name a “first cause” prior to the Big Bang, to explain the existence of the mega-dense matter of all the universe that ... goes bang. But they declare two certainties as rational: there can be no God, and death is the end. How terrifying, death without faith!