We may be living in a post-Christian America. Most traditional Christian denominations have seen attendance at their Sunday services decline ever since the late 1960s. Although polls vary slightly, no more than 30 percent of Americans today say they attend church services weekly, while 56 percent say they seldom or never attend. This contrasts sharply with the post-World War II era, when 93 percent of Americans identified themselves as Christian, 75 percent said they attended church weekly, and another 15 percent said they attended once or twice a month. Some have called the era another Great Awakening. If so, we might call the last several decades the Great Decline. 

Nonetheless, it seems man still has a powerful religious impulse, which finds expression if not in a variety of traditional churches, then in socialist governments. Look at the magnificent cathedrals of Europe: except for tourists, they are mostly empty. Then, look at the governments of Europe: most of them tilt toward the socialist end of the political spectrum. 

We had Norwegian girls stay with us three different times during the 1980s. They all considered themselves Lutheran but didn’t attend Lutheran services. They said that was not only true of most Norwegians but also of most Danes and Swedes. It reminded me of Scandinavians in Wisconsin and Minnesota, who arrived here as staunch church-attending Lutherans in the late 19th century. Today, their descendants are similar to other Americans in their less-than-regular attendance. Their religious impulses are expressed mostly in liberal politics rather than organized religion. 

This generally holds true throughout America. The states with the highest proportions of people who say they never or rarely attend religious services are typically the bluest states. Conversely, the states with the highest proportions of church attendance are the reddest. Although many factors likely contribute to this equation, I’d suggest that a good percentage of those who have lost faith in a higher power and an afterlife have turned to government to provide them with a heaven here on earth. If the rest of Americans would just follow their prescriptions for perfecting man and man’s institutions, we’d be living in a Utopia. 

This, of course, is why leftists, who have made politics their religion, don’t simply disagree with conservative Americans but hate them. Conservatives are heretics, standing in the way of ridding society of evil and inequality. Heretics must be banished or burned, exiled or executed. There can be no compromise. 

As long as Christianity remained vital and strong in America, attempts at creating a socialist Utopia through government policy and authoritarian control made little headway. Consequently, there were socialist Utopian experiments independent of and mostly at odds with government. These experiments were usually short-lived and ended in abysmal failure. The reason for the failure was obvious—human nature was not taken into account. Utopian theorists and leftists today agree that man’s nature is infinitely malleable—they think they can create a new man, given the right environment. One would think daily reality would be enough to make one understand that this notion is ludicrous.

When I was 11 years old, I learned my nature was contrary to any kind of socialist society. One of the courses for boys in the 7th grade at my junior high school was agriculture. We were outside in the fresh air with a male teacher, not confined to a classroom with a fussy spinster forcing us to diagram sentences. What an escape!

The teacher divided a plot of land into smaller plots for each of us. We were given hoes, rakes, shovels, and assorted implements and told to prepare our plots for fertilizing and planting. I went to it with gusto. I had been growing garden crops from a young age because I lived next door to a retired farmer. Red-faced and white-haired, he worked every day in his garden, growing everything from radishes and carrots to tomatoes, blackberries, corn, pumpkins, and watermelons. He soon had me digging, fertilizing, planting seeds, watering, and weeding a mini version of his garden. I was fascinated by the first shoots of various plants as they broke the surface of the soil. At 5 years old, it seemed magical. 

Now, here I was in junior high, doing the same thing. The teacher gave us a couple 50-minute class-periods to prepare our plots and left us to our own devices. Some of the boys worked hard without supervision, while others spent much of their time leaning on their hoes, and a few slipped behind bushes to smoke. 

On the third day, the teacher was out inspecting our plots. A third or so were full of rocks, weeds, and clods of dirt. The fertilizer hit the fan! I think the teacher felt betrayed. He had left us on our own to take care of business, and it was a disaster. He lined us up on one side of the class plot and declared it was now a communal plot and would be prepared from end to end by all of us. That did it for me. My small plot was now part of a Soviet-style collectivist farm. From that day on, I was repelled by anything that smacked of socialism. 

It shouldn’t be surprising to learn that California has been home to several dozen socialist colonies, far more than any other state. From the Gold Rush on, California has had a reputation as a place where people break convention, start over, or reinvent themselves. A ditty that dates back to the days of ’49 was sung throughout the Mother Lode country:

Oh, what was your name in the States
Was it Thompson, or Johnson, or Bates
Did you murder your wife
And fly for your life
Say, what was your name in the States

California was the proper place for new beginnings for both individuals and society. Most of the socialist colonies considered themselves examples for the rest of society to follow. Typical was the Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth, named for the Kaweah River, which flows out of the Sierra Nevada and into the San Joaquin Valley. Its principal founder was Burnette Haskell, a native son of California, who went east to Oberlin College and then the University of Illinois before returning to California for still more education at Berkeley. He was admitted to the State Bar in 1879 and soon used his legal skills to aid the working man and labor unions. 

In 1885, he and two others organized a group of anarchists, socialists, and unionists, mostly from San Francisco, to claim land in the Sierra foothills on the north fork of the Kaweah River under the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Timber and Stone Act of 1878. The claims totaled 12,000 acres, and colony members began settling the land in 1886.

Most of the settlers were skilled laborers from trade unions, but there were also artists, musicians, and writers. While all were devoted to the principles of Marxism, most came to the colony dissatisfied with their status in capitalist society and generally remained dissatisfied in their new socialist Utopia. Individual disputes and factional strife occurred early on and continued without interruption until the colony was dissolved in 1893. 

Haskell thought the colonists would not only harvest the timber on their own lands but also build a wagon road into Sequoia and harvest the redwoods of the Giant Forest. They would not stop with cutting and milling timber, Haskell said, but the colony’s products also would include “olive oil, pure Mount Vineyard wine, honey, curly redwood veneers, statuary marble, and selected California fruits.” All the while they would also be elevating and nurturing man through art, music, literature, and sports in an environment of cooperation and harmony. Kaweah would be Utopia. 

Membership in the colony cost $500, a good chunk of change in the 1880s, considering the wage for unskilled labor was generally $1.40 for a 10-hour day. However, after a down payment of $100 the rest could be paid in goods or labor. Labor in the colony was paid with a “time-check,” issued in denominations of minutes reflecting time worked. All work claimed equal value.

The number of colonists never exceeded 300 at any given time and mostly averaged under 100. The colonists thought their numbers would increase dramatically when they completed the road and began harvesting the giant sequoias, which they anticipated as a kind of timber mother lode. They even named the trees after their favorite socialist philosophers. They called the largest of the sequoias the Karl Marx; it’s now known by its original name bestowed on it by an Army cavalry unit: the General Sherman. 

Despite harvesting timber, the colony could not support itself and relied on donations, principally from Kaweah clubs composed of nonresident members in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and New York. It was more popular to support the socialist experiment from afar than to actually live and work in the colony, which meant living in canvas tents and felling trees in the forest or tending truck gardens. Life was not all labor but included occasional concerts, dances on summer nights, and picnics in the Giant Forest.

With colonists coming and going, the workforce dropping well below the size needed for all the necessary logging, milling, and road construction, and the ongoing regular and bitter conflicts, the colony struggled. It took the colonists more than four years to complete the road and by the time they finally finished, Congress had already created Sequoia National Park, meaning no one would be harvesting the Giant Forest. Moreover, the U.S. government rejected their land claims as invalid because they clearly were not individual claims, as the laws intended, but a group enterprise. 

Haskell said Kaweah “was one of the hopes of my life. And seeing it now, lying dead before me, knowing that its own hands assisted in strangling it, knowing that the guilt of its death rests upon nearly all its members, myself far from being excepted, the faltering steel that cuts the epitaph chisels … ‘peccavi’ [I have sinned].”

The colony’s official motto was “Men Made Here.” It seems that the men of Kaweah were the same old characters who had been around for thousands of years. ◆