COMMUNISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITY
Bernard Packard

"Reward for information leading to the apprehension of Jesus Christ-Wanted: for sedition, criminal anarchy, vagrancy, and conspiring to overthrow the established government. Dresses poorly. Said to be a carpenter by trade, ill-nourished, has visionary ideas, associates with common working people, the unemployed and bums. Alias, Prince of Peace. Professional agitator. Red beard, marks on hands and feet, the results of injuries inflicted by an angry mob led by respectable citizens and legal authorities."

That was the caption of a cartoon sketch of Christ, depicted as a wanted criminal, published in a Communist periodical, The Worker here in America.

This anti-Christ doctrine of today is propagated by the greatest masters of deceit the world has ever known, whose diabolical ambition it is to destroy every form of Christianity. Not only would they like to do so, they are entirely convinced they will, and they tell us so.

Lunacharski, commissar of education for Soviet Russia, said: "We hate Christians and Christianity. Even the best of them must be considered our worst enemies. Christian lovers are an obstacle to the development of the Revolution. What we want is hate. Only then will we conquer the universe." Nikita Khrushchev recently interested the American people by admiring a certain prayer offered in the General Assembly. He more particularly interested the Latter-day Saints by accepting six copies of the Book of Mormon from Elder Ezra Taft Benson. Then he said, "Do not think that the Communists have changed their minds about religion; we remain the atheists that we have always been; we are doing as much as we can to liberate those people who are still under the spell of this religious opiate." As long as Communism remains, the assault will continue.

Thus we have, spreading through and influencing 40 per cent of the world's population, this abominable doctrine preached by those godless fiends who teach their children that they are animals created by evolution, conditioned by their environment, and degenerated by the capitalist system; that the Communist party is the messiah of history, ordained to conquer the universe.

Not only is our Christian way of life in jeopardy, but the very freedom of our expression, of our communities, and of our homes has been threatened.

"I can prophesy," said Khrushchev, "that your grandchildren in America will live under Socialism. Now please do not be afraid of that, for your grandchildren will not understand how their grandparents could not understand the progressive nature of a Socialist society."

The Kremlin is thinking in terms of now! During our lifetime! In fact it is generally believed that their tentative date for the surrender of our United States is 1973, less than twelve years from now.

Will the Kremlin conquer America by 1973? Dr. Schwartz, leading authority in the free world on Communism, said, "At our present rate of progress, certainly yes!"

In 1903 there were in the world eighteen Communists, only eighteen. In 1917 there were 40,000; that is not very many, but it was enough to conquer Russia. Today they have conquered over ten hundred million-more than a billion people. Feed those figures to your electronic computers and see just how long it should take them to conquer the remaining one and three-quarter billion.

The Communists believe in themselves; if their boss says, "kill your mother," they kill their mother.

Just a short time ago I was in Jordan, a part of the Holy Land and also a member of the United Arab Republic. While there, I was touring the different Biblical sites. I was fortunate to have as my guide a nineteen-year-old Arab boy. His name was Shay. Shay possessed extraordinary intelligence; he was unusually strong-willed and determined; he thought for himself; and, he was a Communist. Since 1948 and the birth of the country of Israel, Shay has been a refugee from Israel into Jordan. The animosity and extreme hatred expressed by that boy toward those Jews surpasses any that I have ever seen or known. And he felt nearly the same toward any country supporting the Jews.

I guess I will never forget his words. We were traveling toward Bethlehem. Upon my expressing my admiration for the Jewish people, he spoke, and his voice was sharp and convinced and his eyes were just as determined. "Bernie," he said, "if I saw a Jew out there I would stop and kill him with my hands." He said, "If my brother and I were fighting in a war and he was on the Jewish side, I would kill my brother! I would die for Nasser today!"

And he meant every word of it.

Shay is dedicated to his cause. Now, if we value our freedom and the freedom of our children, we must be dedicated to our cause, to our Constitution and to our God.

So what if America does turn Communist or all the world for that matter? "Better Red than dead," someone said.

Too many of us Americans know too little about this evil power. Most of us do not realize that between the years of 1930 and 1933 ten millions of Russians were exterminated by the Communists because of their resistance to godless Communism. Perhaps we have not been informed that there are some twelve million Russian people in slave labor and concentration camps. And that they have destroyed over twenty million people in Asia in the last ten years. Communism is anti-Christ. Just a few years ago the American Communist party acknowledged that, having conquered this land, they would need to destroy one-third of the American people because of our Christian convictions.

That is the threat we face. What are we going to do about it?

It is the individual responsibility of everyone of us to learn just as much as we possibly can about this evil power. How can we compete with Communism unless we as Latter-day Saints can match their conviction with our conviction; their fervor with our fervor; their sacrifice with our sacrifice?

Communism is dedicated godlessness. We will enlist our dedication, our faith, our fervor, passion and capacity for sacrifice to defend our human dignity, our relationship with God, and our children's freedom. We will keep America a free Christian America, our homes free Christian homes.

(Heber J. Grant Oratorical Contest November 29, 1961, BYU Speeches of the Year, 1961 4 .)