Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

Bishop Fulton Sheen argued Communism and capitalism share a common root—materialism divorced from morality. That affinity, this piece argues, explains China’s persecution of Christians today.

Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen once called Communism and materialism the Moloch of collectivism.

Without the restraint of Christian morality, they’re bloodthirsty, cold and all-consuming.

It’s also why both hate Christianity.

This was part of Sheen’s overall argument that economic theories which “divorce economics from morality” are connected.

As Sheen wrote in 1948, while Communism “is unquestionably the enemy of our Christian civilisation, it is not the enemy of bourgeois Western capitalist materialism.”

Both view men and women as “economic animals,” not creatures made in the image of their Creator.

Marxists reject God, for pretty much the same reason materialists untether themselves from God’s objective morality: to satisfy the ego.

Where materialists exalt “individual egotism,” Sheen said, Communists exalt the ego of the collective.

One “concentrates wealth in the hands of a few capitalists, while the other concentrates it in the hands of a few bureaucrats.”

While the West only removes God from public spaces, Sheen argued, Communism goes one step further and cancels God altogether.

“Western individual atheism” is therefore not all that dissimilar to the “collective atheism of Communism,” he argued.

As such, “every Communist,” Sheen quipped, “is a capitalist without any cash in his pockets.”

“Communism is rotted capitalism.”

For Sheen, while materialistic capitalism and Communism are distinct, the two share an affinity.

Such as a shared contempt for Christianity’s revelatory claim to God over Government, money, sex, power and the “delusions of demons” (to quote Saint Augustine).

Consequently, Sheen states, the Communist and the materialist either need to abuse, suppress, or remove Christianity completely.

Tiananmen Square: An Uprising Within the System

The good bishop’s 1948 reasoning explains Communist China’s reliance on violence, capitalism, and the excesses of Western materialism.

Loyalists to the State are, and have been, profiting in a very capitalist way.

From Tiananmen Square to the systemic persecution of Christians, and the COVID-19 lockdown on pro-freedom protests in Hong Kong, Chinese Communism is the perfect incarnation of Fulton Sheen’s overall point.

At heart, China’s Communists are “rotted capitalists.”

As Chinese historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom told the Lex Fridman podcast in April last year, the 1989 Tiananmen protests rode the back of liberalised economic reform.

For the most part, students were taking a stand against socio-economic privileges granted to those close to the Communist Party. This created a strong sense of unfairness.

In sum, the “Tiananmen protests were a mix of things,’ Wasserstrom further explained.

“It’s an anti-corruption movement. It’s a call for democracy movement. It’s a call for freedom of speech movement.”

“There are also some counter-culture elements, like rock concerts on the square.”

More a reform socialism movement than a capitalist revolution, Wasserstrom added, this was about humanising Communism.

With students pouring in, the protests continued to grow. This was despite signals given by the Party to Chinese students telling them to end the protests.

Making the situation more volatile, the Communist regime was also besieged by an internal power struggle.

After workers joined the students and formed an independent labor union, the Party clamped down.

Troops were ordered in, Wasserstrom recounted.

“There’s a massacre near Tiananmen Square. Then, as the People’s Liberation Army takes over, they begin behaving like an occupying force.”

This is outside the PLA’s reason for being, he said.

The PLA are “supposed to be a force that saves China from foreign aggression,” yet here they are “acting like an invading force.”

Tanks roll in, and we’re left with the “famous image of the man standing in front of the tank.”

Wasserstrom then added, “That’s a banned image within China.”

“I really think,” he said, “the reason why it’s considered so toxic by the regime is that it shows the PLA looking like an invading force, not a stabilising force.”

Another reason is narrative control.

“By selective use of the footage, the Communist Party could [blame the students and] say, ‘Look, actually, the heroes and martyrs are actually the soldiers.

“The problem with that is lots of people around Beijing had seen what happened and knew that, in fact, the soldiers fired on unarmed civilians with automatic weapons first.”

Tiananmen and “The Tank Man” made history, while the Chinese Communist persecution of the church continues to land on the periphery of it.

Fulton Sheen’s “rotted capitalist” remarks about what sits at the heart of every Communist might explain why.

Both the materialists centralising money towards a few capitalists benefit the same way China’s wealthy Communist bureaucrats do when it comes to silencing Christians.

Better they be seen and not heard, or better yet, not seen or heard from at all.

This isn’t just about satisfying a politics of envy, or vying for the power and kingdom of God without God in it.

It’s about avoiding the cross by putting culture over Christ; using Jesus Christ to affirm culture, instead of transforming it.

The Church Under Siege

As Sky News’ Helen-Ann Smith stated last month, “It’s never been easy to be a Christian in China, but right now, this feels like a community besieged.”

“There are tens of millions of Christians in China. Officially, they can only worship at churches affiliated and overseen by the state.

“While many do, others refuse and are targets. Unregistered movements are forced underground.”

These house churches, Smith said, are for people who “want to worship independent of the state.”

Churches that comply with the Communist state “abide by the rules: a national flag, CCTV and total obedience.”

When trying to interview pastors of registered churches in a province populated with Christians, Smith shared,

“There’s a real sense the government know we’re here and they’re getting quite nervous, and they’re [pastors are] asking us to leave.

“Plenty of others were too anxious to talk. They simply said these times are too sensitive.”

Another issue, Smith found, was the “threat of church demolition. Not common, but it happens.”

There is a “feeling,” she added, “that just one step out of line could really have dire consequences. And we know that a lot of churches that have been targeted in the recent crackdowns have opted to keep as low a profile as possible.”

This makes it hard to document, Smith said.

“So ever present is the state paranoia about any group it does not control.”Pastor Bob Fu, founder of China Aid, told her that the Party is paranoid: “They regard any organised social structure as a political threat, and they’re determined to eliminate it.”

Fu, who was a student leader during Tiananmen, added that he thinks the 2026 crackdowns are “the worst since the end of [Mao’s] Cultural Revolution.”

As Sheen argued, there’s an affinity between materialism and Communism.

Western materialistic culture corrupts Christianity by bankrolling pastors.

Communists are trying to remake Christianity in their own image.

Although not the same, the hatred of Christianity is very similar. It’s just that “our Western bourgeois world is un-Christian; Communism is anti-Christian.”

Tiananmen ties in with China’s persecuted church because the image of bulldozers tearing down Christian churches draws the same emotion as the Chinese Communist tanks sent in to squash it.