http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2001_07-09/sempa_chambers/sempa_chambers.html
2012 American Diplomacy Publishers Chapel Hill NC
Whittaker Chambers is an editor of TIME magazine following WWII. During his life, he is Communist Party member and activist, underground espionage agent, hunted ex-comrade, Time magazine writer and editor, reluctant informer, vilified government witness, conservative anticommunist icon. During that journey Chambers finds Christ and develops an insight into the competing visions that fuel the titanic struggle between communism and the West.
In 1948, Chambers, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), identifies several members, notable Alger Hiss, of an underground communist network that had infiltrated the United States government in the 1930s and 1940s. He challenges the political and media leadership and is condemned by them. He is disbelieved by virtually the entire ruling political class because he warns of betrayal of American values by modern liberalism.
Ref: Weinstein’s painstakingly researched book, Perjury, published in 1978.
Witness is his autobiography and one of the more interesting books of the twentieth century. In it, he characterized communism as "the focus of the concentrated evil of our time" (words that President Ronald Reagan would repeat thirty years later); he defined the Cold War as a struggle between "two irreconcilable faiths," that is, faith in man and faith in God. Chambers described the Utopian vision that forms the basis of communism and all other totalitarian movements. When he rejected Communism, "What fell [from me] was the whole web of the materialist modern mind—the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright."
To understand Chambers, one needs to know that the "Enlightenment’s confidence in grasping the final truth of politics and economics merged in the 19th century with a progressive understanding of history. History was now issuing into completion and needed only the power of the state to push it forward."
"The communist vision is the vision of man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals."
Conservatives found a rallying point for their own fledgling conservative faith. "Thus began the greatest division in postwar American politics, a division that prepared the ground for another half-century of political fighting for the very soul of America."
1938 Chambers leaves Communism for "fear of being recalled for liquidation to the Soviet Union." He attempts to warn the U.S. government. Roosevelt refused to believe it. "FDR’s response to Chambers’ information typified his administration’s lax attitude about the threat of communist subversion." Release of the Venona Project files indicates Russian agents were in many U.S. government departments through WWII, including the White House.
Chambers became a Christian. "No man lightly reverses the faith of an adult lifetime, held implacably to the point of criminality.”
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/03/still-witnessing-the-enduring-relevance-of-whittaker-chambers
New Deal acolytes had no principled reason for opposing unlimited state intrusion into the social, economic, and political realms. Herein lies the source of Chambers’ ongoing relevance: While Communism stands discredited, many still accept its fundamental conceit that man makes his own reality and that the government is the solution to all our ills.
The contemporary West still asserts that reality should be understood through empirical reason alone, that man is merely a highly evolved creature; or, alternatively, it states that liberty is only a useful fiction because history, science, economics, and the state are the real movers carrying man forward. Find other evolution paragraphs using search term "evoxcross."
Chambers appeared before the HUAC to confirm the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, Chambers gave 21 names to the HUAC committee, many personifying the progressive movement’s understanding of government administration and service. Richard Nixon helped Chambers get a fair hearing when many in the government disbelieved Chambers.
Chambers envisioned 1) a tragic political victory whereby the West becomes brother enemy. The West would lose its soul and assume much of Communism’s philosophical imprint in the victory, or 2) victory through recovery of the religious and moral excellence of the West. The former possibility: Stripped of a claim to the good, the West would resolve the total crisis by assuming significant features of Communist ideology: a directed economy, highly centralized and overbearing political authority, sparse personal liberty, and law as an ideological weapon. [JE the Obama presidency, 2008 to 2016, sounds just like this, the Tea Party is a reaction]
In 1947 and 1948, Whittaker Chambers and TIME founder and publisher Henry Luce believed that a recovery of theism was a necessary defense against Communism. The cover stories on C.S. Lewis and Niebuhr were part of their effort to draw attention to the continuing relevance of Christianity in the battle against Communism.