Chain, chain, chain
(Chain, chain, chain)
Chain of fools

So ran the chorus to Aretha Franklin’s 1967 hit song “Chain of Fools.”

One hundred twenty years earlier, the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proclaimed: “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

The chains of Franklin’s song and those of the Marxist slogan are linked by one word: fools.

For over 175 years, believers have bought into Marxist visions of utopia. From the European revolutions of 1848 to the 2025 election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, devotees of communism and their apparatchiks have pushed an agenda that has wreaked ruin on nations, created a governing class comprised of thugs, criminals, and murderers, and killed more than 100 million people.

Yet this deadly failed philosophy still attracts ignorant bees to its honeyed visions.

The 21st century has forged other links in these chains of political bondage. Many on the left and the right are so shackled to ideologies that they worship their brand of politics as demi-gods. Politics and party occupy the altars of their faith.

In addition to the age-old addictions to drugs and alcohol, our century has invented another set of chains, shackles for the individual in the guise of a handheld phone. Artificial intelligence, social media, a ubiquitous pornography never seen in human history, and panic attacks if the phone is lost are some of the signs of this self-imposed blind servitude.

Then there is the “present moment” gang, those who believe we live in the best of times or the worst of times. Those who curse the age, especially when complaining how tough kids have it nowadays, might want to read some of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books or study some history about children who worked for pennies a day in field and factory just over a hundred years ago. Those who believe ours is the best of times are just as ignorant of the past, failing to comprehend that our drifting morals and false gods are devouring Western civilization.

While speaking at Hillsdale College, the late British journalist and convert to Christianity Malcom Muggeridge summed up all these movements, ideologies, and secular pleasures in a single paragraph when he wondered what a future historian might think of us:

Looked back across the centuries, it will all seem even more hilariously comical than it does today, though I imagine our historian being somewhat at a loss to understand what lay behind the plunge into sheer fantasy that his researches reveal. They can’t really have believed, he’ll say to himself, that this notion of Progress they bandied about meant anything; that happiness lay along motor-ways, and well-being in a rising Gross National Product; that birth pills, easy divorce, and abortion made for happy families, and sex and barbiturates for quiet nights.

Muggeridge delivered that address almost 50 years ago. Chains, it seems, are always in ready supply.

Yet as Muggeridge knew well, there is a liberator who owns a set of bolt cutters that can break any chain made. Psalm 107:14 declares, “He brought them out of darkness and gloom, and broke their bonds asunder.”

From Augustine of Hippo to C.S. Lewis and beyond, untold millions have been set free by this greatest of all emancipators. Converts like White House aide Charles “Chuck” Colson and writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali make the news, but behind them are the anonymous masses who have, for one reason or another, exchanged their old way of living and their chains for the freedom of faith.

Those of us who have made that leap usually find it amusing when someone comments that Christianity is a crutch. The statement is laughable because those who live their faith know the sacrifices and sometimes even hardships this devotion requires. What is paradoxical, however, is that following divine law and the teachings of Scripture does indeed set us free, whereas following our own will and desires without that faith, whether into personal pleasures or politics, binds us.

As we enter Advent and so approach Christmas, those of us who are believers should consider the covenant we’ve made and refurbish it in the light of the Nativity. We should also pray that those who are thinking of making this leap of faith find the courage to do so and so gain the only freedom worthy of that name.

Remember: you have nothing to lose but your chains.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image credit: Unsplash