First and foremost, one must remember that to achieve the revolutionary goals of Marx and Engels, there can be no alliance except to the state. Christianity, Islam, the Jewish faith, Buddhism, Hindi, all major religions, promote alliance to a philosophy or an entity that is not the state, and represent a potential threat to the state and are thus, contemptuous. The church was banned in the Soviet Empire; revolutionaries murdered clergy and forced Christianity underground. Churches were closed and priests were hunted down and executed during the Mexican socialist takeover. The church was exiled in Cuba and currently faces much difficulty and enmity in Venezuela. The Chinese have effectively banned not only religion, but anything that even remotely resembles religion like the infamous crackdown on the practice of Falun Gong. For the Left there can be no quarter, no safe spaces, no organizational philosophy and no church to rival the state.

Of course Leftism, as espoused in the US in its rarified progressive form among the academy, the media, the Democrat Left and certain elites, would never openly contend that religion is its adversary. (Obama’s depiction of heartland Americans “clutching their guns and their bibles” was an unusual slip of candor.) In fact, progressive liberals are at best only marginally aware that the statist nirvana they seek is really the same overarching state falsely conceived, prophesied and promised by radical atheists Marx and Engels. For the reflexive progressive Left in the US, religion is simply in need of sufficient reform to become sympatico with the correct progressive worldview, that is, it needs to move to the Left. Hard. Only the few true communists and socialist know that this must eventually lead to the effective dissolution of religious affiliation, but no one will ever admit this fact. It is the outcome that shall not be named. Rather, it is accepted that traditional religious dissolution is simply a part of the natural evolution, the progression, to a socialist or statist world where rational secularism naturally replaces irrational faith.