The West is losing faith in God, individual responsibility, and the institutions that restrain our worst tendencies. In their place, an increasingly secular culture is bending the knee toward collectivist ideas. Collectivism falsely promises to solve problems that neither human beings nor traditional institutions have. In doing so, it completely forgoes history’s lessons.
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As a belief in God declines, people are not abandoning a desire to believe in something larger than themselves; instead, they are looking to the collective—in a misguided belief that government, society, or some other institution will magically deliver equality, justice, security, belonging, and moral order.
This ongoing transposition is accompanied by a loss of faith in individualism and institutions built on individual liberty, private property, voluntary association, and personal responsibility. Increasingly, individualism is viewed not as the cornerstone of a free society, but as the source of inequality, injustice, and social disorder. The collective, by contrast, is portrayed as society’s savior.
Western civilization did not achieve its wealth and power accidentally. Our best features—individual liberty, private property, limited government, and the rule of law—are bedrock requisites for a civil society, developed through centuries of painful trial and error. Human beings are imperfect, and the power of the state is an omnipresent danger to our essential freedoms.
Our founders did not assume perfect individuals would lead us. To the contrary, they assumed that leaders would frequently pursue their own self-interest, that governments might become oppressive, and that even the best of us might abuse their position. Our system is not perfect; however, it was designed to be realistic: intended to prevent imperfect people from acquiring too much power over one another. These are the classic checks and balances collectivists wish to dispose of.
Collectivism is diametrically opposed. For socialists and communists, the collective claims control over economic resources. It’s rational—economic equality is essential; labor is central to economic justice; capitalism is exploitative and ultimately fosters inequality; economic decisions should be subject to collective control; individual freedom is subordinate to collective objectives.
Socialism is Communist lite; fundamentally, it’s only a question of scale that ultimately tilts toward harsh and repressive communism as the means to enforce edicts humans will ultimately reject when they discover they’ve been enslaved.
But underneath the economics is something more fundamental: a different conception of the individual. Collectivists don’t care a whit whether individuals are good or bad. Collectivists simply lack confidence in an individual’s ability to govern themselves. Individual choices are seen as heavily influenced by economic circumstances, culture, class, institutions, and other factors. The individual therefore becomes someone who must be managed, corrected, indoctrinated, and protected from his limitations.
The collective became that answer. This is where the relationship between socialism and religion becomes important. Marx’s intellectual framework was fundamentally materialist. He viewed religion as a false truth arising from human social and material deficiencies. Communist regimes subsequently went further, frequently treating religious faith as a competing source of authority and allegiance to be eliminated.
There is an intriguing contemporary parallel. In a 2021 survey of nearly 13,000 members of the Democratic Socialists of America, roughly 60% identified as atheist or agnostic. The broader ideological divide is striking as well. Gallup found in 2022 that 94% of conservatives said they believed in God, compared with 62% of liberals.
This doesn’t prove that secularism causes socialism, nor that every socialist has rejected God. It does, however, raise a more interesting question:
What happens when people lose faith in God but desire to believe in something larger than themselves?
They still want meaning, moral purpose, and to believe their lives matter. The collective claims it can provide these things by fooling people into believing they are part of a historic struggle and that they, and only they, understand how to produce a superior and just society. It can then justify demanding sacrifice from the individual in the name of the greater good.
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In that sense, collectivism can become more than an economic theory.
It becomes a substitute for faith.
However, there is a fundamental difference between religious faith and secular collectivism. Traditional Judeo-Christian traditions start with the concept of imperfection. Man’s burden is the duality of being capable of extraordinary good as well as extraordinary evil. We therefore place moral limits on everyone—including those who govern us.
Collectivism places its faith in institutions rather than the individual. That distinction matters. If the problem is human nature, changing the economic system doesn’t eliminate it; it merely shifts who has the power to impose it.
The Soviet Union did not abolish human selfishness by abolishing private property, nor did Mao’s China eliminate inequality by collectivizing agriculture. Communist regimes never believed in individual freedom, yet they produced new elites, new privileges, coercion, and enormous human suffering.
Yet those failures have not killed collectivism. Collectivism itself is extraordinarily resistant to a reckoning with its own failures. When socialism or communism fails, believers blame corrupt leaders, insufficient commitment, hostile outsiders, poor implementation, inadequate planning, or something else, but the essential belief lives on like Count Dracula. This time will be different. This time the right people will be in charge. This time the lessons of past failures will finally be applied.
For many adherents, the problem isn’t that the experiment has repeatedly failed. It is that they don’t know—or don’t want to know—how often it has failed and why. And that is where the misunderstanding of history becomes existentially dangerous.
We were never ignorant of inequality or indifferent to suffering. Our systems were constructed because earlier generations understood something that modern collectivists seem to have forgotten: the greatest threat to freedom is not simply inequality; it is concentrated power.
Private property gives each person a stake in the system, while economic independence provides political independence. Voluntary association allows us to separate ourselves from the state, while religious institutions provide moral authority outside it. At the pinnacle of society, the rule of law constrains those who govern us.
Remove these restrictions on wanton power, and the individual becomes nothing more than a subject. That is the paradox of modern collectivism: by seeking to address economic inequality, it gives institutions control over people’s lives and concentrates the power to allocate resources, assuming whoever receives that power will use it wisely. History reveals this fallacy.
The real danger is not simply that Americans might become socialists. Eight percent of Americans describe themselves that way, but most Americans remain far from embracing collectivism. Today’s danger is that the intellectual foundations that kept collectivism in check are being undermined.
When a majority of people desire to give up their independence in favor of the state, no longer understand the importance of private property and individual responsibility, forget why institutions were designed to restrain power, and replace faith in God with faith in government’s ability to perfect mankind, the American experiment will end.
We’ve been down this road before. The destination has not changed simply because a new generation has lost its way.
God Bless America.
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Author, Businessman, Thinker, and Strategist. Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at 1plus1equals2.com.
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