One such writer was Whittaker Chambers, whose autobiography Witness, published in 1952, details his life as an agent in the Fourth Section of Soviet Military Intelligence from 1932 to 1938, where he coordinated espionage activities with high-ranking United States government officials. Witness also movingly explains Chambers' departure from Communism and his conversion to Christianity. From his conversion, Chambers grasped that revolutionary ideology lied about the nature of man and the source of his being...
Chambers' conversion inspired him to atone for his past betrayal of his country. He divulged to the federal government information about the Soviet espionage cell he had organized during the 1930s in Washington, its membership, and his complicity in its operation. Of those officials in Chambers' Soviet-allied cell, Alger Hiss, Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs in the Department of State and Chambers' close friend, would prove to be the most consequential...
Naming Hiss to the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a Communist agent earned Chambers the full disdain of much of the political and media leadership, and was, in retrospect, the beginning of the deep social, cultural, and political divides that continue to mark American life between its elites and petit bourgeoisie. Chambers' fear was that subversive activity had continued in the ten years between his exit from Communist activity in 1938 and 1948, the year he first testified before Congress (he first revealed his traitorous conduct in 1939 to Adolf Berle, Director of Security at the Department of State). Chambers thought America was oblivious to the spiritual and philosophical degradations that surrounded it, and he believed his testimony would prove to be an exemplary sign of contradiction, calling forth the nation's latent spirit. He referred to the federal trial of Alger Hiss, truly one of the greatest trials of the 20th century, as one involving "two faiths." "At heart," Chambers observed, "the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time–Communism and Freedom–came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men."...
The West itself, Chambers feared, was listless at the moment when it most needed strength. Chambers argued that the West's weakness grew out of its tacit adoption of many of the philosophical errors on which Communism rested. A larger Western conversion, Chambers boldly urged, similar in many respects to his personal conversion, would have to be made if Communism and its philosophical underpinnings were to be defeated. The West would have to emerge from its deep-seated materialism, its confusion over the nature of the person and his dignity, and its detached understanding of the free society's conservative origins. This could happen, Chambers observed, only if the West reengaged the truth about God and man.
Chambers' diagnosis troubles us today because of the West's retention of so many of the ideas that shaped Communism. We still remain distant, if not cut off, from the intellectual and religious sources that shaped the West from its beginning. The contemporary West still asserts that reality should be understood through empirical reason alone, that man is merely a highly evolved creature, or that liberty is only a useful fiction because history, science, economics, and the state are the real movers carrying man forward.
