What happens when a real good becomes so closely joined to Christianity that defending the good begins to feel like defending Christ Himself? What happens when Christian anti-communism and Divine Eros conflict?

The obvious answer is too easy. Communism was not an imaginary evil. Communist governments persecuted Christians, restricted religious practice, imprisoned believers, and claimed extraordinary authority over social life. Religious liberty, political freedom, Christian education, and resistance to totalitarian government are therefore not embarrassing things for Christians to love. They are genuine goods, and much of the Christian anti-communism arose from an attempt to protect them.

Saint Porphyrios gives us a way to take that goodness seriously without making it ultimate. He calls Christ the “summit of desire”, but he also speaks of created beauties as “little loves” that can lead us toward the “great Love that is Christ” (Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, 96, 99–100, 218). The problem begins, then, not when Christians love a country, a political liberty, an institution, or a social order. The problem begins when one of these lesser loves stops pointing beyond itself and starts carrying a weight that belongs to Christ.

The Good That Anti-Communism Tried to Protect

Bob Jones Sr. was warning about communism before the Cold War had fully taken shape. In a March 1937 newspaper column, he began from an explicitly patriotic judgment: “America is the greatest country in the world.” But he immediately qualified the claim. “We are not perfect,” he wrote, and “our form of government has faults” (Bob Jones Sr., “Communism,” Licking Courier, Mar. 25, 1937). This  shows that his patriotism was not, at least in this statement, a simple claim that America was morally faultless.

Nevertheless, the column quickly moved from political criticism into spiritual warfare. Jones described communist agitation as “a satanic attempt to uproot and unsettle civilization,” and he warned fathers and mothers to be careful about the colleges and universities to which they sent their children (Jones, “Communism,” Mar. 25, 1937). The concern is understandable. Ideas have consequences, education forms people, and an atheistic ideology hostile to Christianity should concern Christian parents.

But notice what has happened to the scale of the argument. Communism is not merely a false economic theory or an authoritarian political program. It is a satanic assault on civilization, and the institutions educating American children become one of the battlefields. Once the conflict is understood that way, love of America, love of civilization, love of Christian education, and love of Christ can begin to occupy the same emotional and theological space.

The “True South” Inside a Christian World Outlook

The 1950 World Outlook Conference at Bob Jones University gives us a clearer example. Strom Thurmond addressed an international Christian gathering only five years after the Second World War and during the Korean War. He spoke about atomic weapons, Soviet power, world conflict, and the isolation of the Russian people. That isolation, he said, left Russians with ideas about other nations that were “warped and biased” (J. Strom Thurmond, “Address at World Outlook Conference,” Bob Jones University, Dec. 14, 1950, 1–2).

Thurmond also told his hearers that the age required something larger than narrow nationalism. There needed to be “unity of thought among Christian men of the earth,” he argued. Yet he then turned to the South and told the international visitors that he wanted them to understand “the real South, the true South, as I know it and love it” (Thurmond, “World Outlook Conference,” 2–3). The word love is significant, because Porphyrios would call precisely this kind of created attachment a lesser love that must remain ordered toward the greater Love.

Thurmond’s next move joined that love of the South to the anti-totalitarian struggle. States’ Rights, he said, was not merely a Southern preference but a protection against centralized tyranny: “No fascist or communist dictator could ever take over the United States without first destroying the principle of States’ Rights” (Thurmond, “World Outlook Conference,” 4). Federalism can certainly be defended on constitutional and prudential grounds. However, placing it inside the struggle against fascist and communist dictatorship increases the moral significance of every dispute over federal power.

Then the speech moved from States’ Rights to Reconstruction and race. Thurmond described formerly enslaved people as having been left to white Southerners “as a millstone round our necks,” calling them “penniless, ignorant, unable to make their own way” (Thurmond, “World Outlook Conference,” 5). He later presented Black and white Southerners as living “side by side in harmony.” Whatever else one concludes about the speech, its structure is difficult to ignore: Soviet dictatorship, States’ Rights, Southern identity, Reconstruction, race, and Christian education all appear within one account of the world.

It would be inaccurate to conclude that anti-communism was simply a disguise for segregation. Segregation had older roots, and the constitutional debate over federalism cannot be reduced to race. The stronger conclusion is narrower: a real fear of centralized totalitarianism could attach itself to an existing love of Southern autonomy and social order, giving those created goods a much larger moral story. Once that happened, federal pressure against segregation could be experienced through categories already charged with fears of centralization and tyranny.

The ending of Thurmond’s address makes the theological setting explicit. He praised Bob Jones University as an institution needed for Christian leadership because “the forces of evil have learned to acquire skills of every degree,” and Christians therefore required “unceasing devotion to the development of Christian educational attainment based on the ideals of Christian living.” He closed by urging that “our world outlook” become “a Christian outlook” (Thurmond, “World Outlook Conference,” 11–12). Christian education was a real good. Yet the speech shows how easily a Christian institution, a constitutional theory, a regional identity, and resistance to communism could be experienced as parts of one Christian world.

From One Threat to a Field of Threats

The BJU recording inventory from 1961 and 1962 shows that this pattern continued. On November 7, 1961, Thurmond spoke at the university under the title “Shall We Survive?”; the inventory identifies the address as an anti-communist speech against Khrushchev. Three months later, BJU hosted a week identified as a “Threats to Freedom” or “Americanism Conference” (Bob Jones University, “Sermon Recording Requests,” 1961–62).

The sequence of topics deserves attention. Billy James Hargis spoke on “The Dangers from Internal Subversion,” followed by Dale Alford on “State’s Rights,” Harry T. Everingham on “The United Nations,” C. Stanley Lowell on “Separation of Church and State,” L. Mendel Rivers on “The Infringement Against the Freedom of the Press,” and Dan Smoot on “Liberalism” (BJU, “Sermon Recording Requests,” Feb. 5–10, 1962). The titles alone do not prove that every speaker equated every subject with communism. It would be careless to make them say more than the evidence allows.

Their proximity, however, is evidence of something. Internal subversion, federalism, the United Nations, church-state relations, press freedom, and liberalism were presented during one sustained examination of threats to American freedom. Communism was therefore becoming more than a foreign government to oppose. It provided categories—subversion, centralization, ideological capture, and survival—through which a much wider range of domestic questions could be interpreted.

This is where Divine Eros offers a sharper diagnosis than the language of mere political extremism. The issue is not that every concern on that conference schedule was illegitimate. Governments can overreach, institutions can become coercive, international bodies deserve criticism, and liberal ideas can be challenged. The theological problem appears when all these goods and dangers become fused so tightly that the preservation of a particular political order begins to function as a condition for the preservation of Christian faithfulness.

“For Christ, Against Communism”

Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade made the fusion much more explicit. A later convention program urged ministers to recognize “the various guises Satan uses to lead men astray.” It then declared, “Christianity and communism, Christianity and way-out liberalism, Christianity and apostasy … just as water and oil do not mix” (Christian Crusade, Fourth National Convention of Conservative Preachers program, 1971).

Part of that statement is simply true within historic Christianity. Marxist-Leninist atheism and Christian confession make incompatible claims about God, humanity, history, and final authority. Yet the sentence does more than state that incompatibility. Communism, “way-out liberalism,” and apostasy are placed beside one another within the same spiritual taxonomy, so political and theological opposition begin to reinforce each other.

The program then tells the ministers that they have gathered while “determined to follow God’s leadings in advancing the cause of Christ and stalemating the advances of communism.” Elsewhere it advertises books, tapes, and films to help clergy develop a “local anti-communist program,” and one Christian Crusade associate is praised as an effective speaker “for Christ, against communism” (Christian Crusade, Fourth National Convention program, 1971). Those four words are especially revealing. “For Christ” names ultimate allegiance; “against communism” names a political and ideological opposition; the compressed slogan allows the second to function almost as the practical expression of the first.

Again, the conclusion must be bounded. Opposition to communism does not become idolatrous merely because it follows from Christian convictions. A Christian could oppose Soviet persecution precisely because he loved Christ and his persecuted neighbors. The danger appears when negative political identity begins to verify positive Christian identity: I know that I am for Christ because I know the enemies I oppose.

Segregation, Freedom, and the Love of Constitutional Order

Race makes the problem more difficult because the goods being defended did not disappear when segregation entered the picture. Constitutional liberty remained a good. Religious freedom remained a good, and limits on government power remained a serious Christian and political question. The historical problem is that these goods could be joined to a racial order that also demanded protection.

A 1963 Congressional Record listing placed Bob Jones University among South Carolina’s “Segregated—Private” and “All white” institutions (U.S. Congressional Record, Oct. 21, 1963). The following year, a Gospel Herald notice reported that BJU had awarded Alabama governor George Wallace an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. The notice explicitly called Wallace a “segregationist governor,” while Bob Jones Jr. said Wallace’s primary-election success showed that “there is still in America love for freedom, hard common sense, and at least some hope for the preservation of our constitutional liberties” (“Religious News,” Gospel Herald, Oct. 6, 1964, 878).

The evidence does not say that the degree was awarded because Wallace defended segregation. According to the report, it recognized his performance in three presidential primaries. But the moral interpretation Jones supplied is still important. Wallace’s political success was read as evidence of “love for freedom” and hope for “constitutional liberties,” even while a contemporary Christian publication identified him by his segregationism.

This is the kind of case in which a lesser love can become difficult to examine because several real goods are wrapped around it. If the political figure represents freedom, constitutional order, resistance to federal power, and common sense, criticism of the figure can begin to feel like criticism of those goods. If those goods have also become closely associated with Christian faithfulness, the argument can move another step: criticism of the political cause can begin to feel like hostility toward Christianity. They confuse together Christian anti-communism and Divine Eros.

Divine Eros and the Difference Between Christ and His Gifts

Porphyrios’s language helps because he refuses the false choice between despising created goods and worshiping them. “Christ is our love, our desire,” he says, and Christ alone occupies the “summit of desire” (Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, 96, 99–100). Yet Porphyrios can also delight in creation and describe its beauties as “little loves.” These lesser loves are not competitors by nature; rightly ordered, they draw the soul toward “the great Love that is Christ” (Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, 218).

Religious liberty can be a little love. A country can be loved with gratitude, constitutional restraints can be loved because they protect neighbors from coercion, and a Christian university can be loved because it teaches Scripture, forms friendships, and prepares people for service. None of these loves must be reduced to selfishness or dismissed as secretly corrupt.

But their goodness is referential rather than final. America can protect religious freedom, but America is not Christ. States’ Rights can restrain centralized power, but States’ Rights are not Christ. Christian anti-communism and Divine Eros can exist, but one cannot overcome the other. A Christian university can communicate truth about Christ, but the institution is not the guarantor of Christ. Even a social world in which Christianity has flourished can be cherished without becoming necessary to Christianity’s survival.

That is the line fusion erases. A lesser love properly says, “I received good through this.” Fusion begins saying, “If I lose this, I lose the good itself.” A competing love goes further: “If faithfulness to Christ threatens this, I must reinterpret faithfulness so that this can be preserved.”

The historical documents, however, show how easy it became for Christian faith, anti-communism, American freedom, Southern autonomy, institutional independence, and racial policy to enter the same field of loyalty. Once they were there, correcting one part of the structure could feel like attacking all of it.

When Loss Feels Like Apostasy

The language of survival is therefore significant. “Shall We Survive?” is a political question, but in a Christian institutional setting it also reveals the emotional scale of the Cold War. If Soviet expansion, domestic liberalism, federal power, educational change, and institutional pressures are repeatedly interpreted as connected threats, the possible loss is no longer one policy or one election. A whole Christian way of life seems to be at stake.

But if correction of an institution feels indistinguishable from betrayal of Christianity, the mediator and the One mediated have become fused. If racial reform can be heard primarily as an attack on constitutional liberty, and constitutional liberty has become part of the felt structure of Christian survival, then the suffering of the Black neighbor becomes harder to hear on its own terms. The distant possibility of losing an entire order can outweigh the immediate demand to ask whether that order is just.

Thurmond’s 1950 address shows the tension vividly. He warned that Soviet isolation could produce ideas about other nations that were “warped and biased,” yet in the same speech he narrated emancipation partly as a burden placed on white Southerners and described formerly enslaved people as a “millstone” (Thurmond, “World Outlook Conference,” 2, 5). The problem is not simply hypocrisy. A person can become perceptive about the threats to what he loves while remaining less perceptive about the people disadvantaged by the order he is defending.

Divine Eros asks a different question from “Which side won the political argument?” It asks what love governs the judgment. If Christ is truly the summit of desire, then even a cherished country, constitution, university, tradition, or regional culture must remain open to correction by the truth and love of Christ. A lesser love that cannot be corrected has already begun to claim a kind of finality.

Christian anti-communism and Divine Eros

The answer is not to become less grateful for the goods these Christians tried to defend. Soviet communism deserved serious Christian opposition where it persecuted believers and denied basic freedoms. Christian education is worth preserving, constitutional liberty is worth defending, and a community that has mediated faith can deserve profound loyalty.

Porphyrios’s doctrine of Divine Eros simply limits what these goods can bear. The “little loves” are allowed to remain little loves, which means they can be cherished without becoming indispensable. They can be defended when they are just, criticized when they are wrong, reformed when they are corrupt, and relinquished when faithfulness requires it. You can have both Christian anti-communism and Divine Eros but love for the Divine must outpace the other by a lot.

Genuine goods and genuine fears became intertwined with an unjust racial order, and their intertwining made correction harder because the parts no longer felt separable.

The mature distinction is therefore neither contempt nor nostalgia. We can say that a Christian institution taught truth and also taught error. We can say that anti-communists identified real evil and also allowed that struggle to gather too many other questions into its orbit. We can say that constitutional liberty is a genuine good while refusing to make one historical arrangement of liberty a condition of Christian faithfulness. We can say we believe in Christian anti-communism and Divine Eros.

Christ does not need our lesser loves to be perfect before He can use them. But neither does He surrender His place to them because He once used them. The gift through which we learned something of Christ is not Christ Himself, and the world in which we learned to love Him is not the kingdom of God.

That may be the most important lesson the Cold War offer through the lens of Divine Eros. The question is not merely whether Christians loved America, freedom, their institutions, or their inherited social order too much in some measurable emotional sense. The deeper question is whether those loves remained capable of pointing beyond themselves, or whether losing them began to feel like losing Christ.

Porphyrios’s answer is not to love less. It is to let Christ become the measure and end of every other love. Then freedom can be loved as freedom, a country as a country, a university as a university, and a tradition as a tradition. They may be defended, corrected, grieved, or lost, while Christ remains what no created good can become: the summit of desire and the great Love toward which every lesser love must finally point.

Christian anti-communism and Divine Eros