The Warmth That Freezes
The weather service has issued its warnings again. Here in the American South, where winter rarely announces itself with the fanfare it commands in more temperate climates, we nonetheless know what is coming. The winter storms are moving in, not the gentle snow of Christmas cards, but the kind of cold that paralyzes and the kind of wind that finds every gap in your house’s defenses. When such storms approach, a peculiar thing happens in communities: neighbors help neighbors. A man will leave his warm hearth to check on an elderly widow. A young family will gather what supplies they can to share with those less prepared. It is in these moments that one perceives something often forgotten in our age of abstraction: the genuine warmth of human beings caring for one another, freely, without compulsion, moved by conscience and by love.
It is therefore with some grimness that I observe the newly inaugurated mayor of New York City, standing before his constituents with the confidence of a man who has not truly reckoned with history, promising to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” The irony, I confess, is almost too perfect for words. For as the winter storms bear down upon us, we are being invited, nay, instructed, to embrace an ideology that, whenever implemented in reality, has consistently produced not warmth but an altogether different kind of cold: the icy blast of coercion, the freezing indifference of bureaucratic systems, the frostbite of a state that claims to love you while it demands your surrender.
These are not simply rhetorical flourishes from a politician seeking electoral advantage, though they are certainly that. They represent, as scholarship has long recognized, the vocabulary of an ideological worldview with a documented and unsettling history, a history written in the lives of millions who discovered, too late, that the promised warmth was a lie. When political leaders invoke such language, Christians must attend carefully, not out of partisan zeal, but because scripture demands that we understand the theological foundations upon which human society rests, and because we are called to discern the spiritual deceptions that arise when those foundations are abandoned.
This meditation is addressed to believers in Jesus Christ who wish to think clearly and biblically about what collectivism truly is, why it has failed wherever it has been genuinely attempted, and how its fundamental understanding of human nature stands in direct contradiction to Christian teaching about man’s dignity and destiny.
The Name of the Thing
Theodore Dalrymple, a man who has spent decades observing the human wreckage left behind by ideological certainty, has written extensively about the peculiar blindness of those who embrace grand social theories without attending to their actual consequences. He would, I suspect, appreciate the necessity of linguistic clarity at the outset. For collectivism is not, and here we must be absolutely firm, simply an appeal to kindness, to community, or to mutual aid. These are the words used to disguise it, the honeyed language meant to reconcile the conscience of decent people to something that is neither kind nor conducive to genuine community.
Collectivism, properly understood by both its champions and its critics, is a social order in which the claims of the group, as defined and enforced by the state, override individual choice, property rights, and voluntary exchange. It is a system in which the productive capacities of society are no longer guided by the distributed knowledge of prices and the voluntary consent of individuals, but rather by the political priorities of those who have seized power. Individual autonomy is permitted only insofar as it serves collective ends determined by those in authority, which is to say, individual autonomy is not really permitted at all.
This is not the caricature of hostile critics. This is the definition offered by political theorists across the entire spectrum, by the very architects of socialist and communist systems themselves, and by those rare survivors who have lived under such systems and retained both the courage and the clarity to testify against them.
Here we must state something that the guardians of progressive sentiment do not wish us to state: every genuinely collectivist regime in human history has required the suppression of individual conscience, the concentration of decision-making power in the hands of the few, and the systematic willingness to employ coercion, beginning mildly, then escalating to brutality as resistance inevitable mounts. The observation is not original; it is as old as the regimes themselves. When individuals cease to be the arbiters of their own choices, someone else must assume that role. And history, that grim and patient instructor, teaches us that the person who accepts such power is rarely the benevolent servant he promises to be.
What Scripture Says About Man
To understand why collectivism represents a fundamental assault on Christian faith, we must anchor ourselves in the biblical doctrine of man, not as an abstraction, not as one element among many, but as the foundation upon which all else rests. The question we must ask is the simplest and most profound: What does God’s word teach us about who we are?
The foundation of biblical anthropology, and John Henry Jowett, that prince of expository preachers, understood this with crystalline clarity, is the doctrine that man bears the image of God. In Genesis, we read: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:26–27)
This is not incidental. It is not a subordinate clause in the biblical narrative. It is the first and most fundamental truth about human existence. Every person, without exception, without qualification, without regard to their status, utility, productivity, or contribution to society, bears the image of the infinite and eternal God.
This image is not earned through performance. It is not granted by governments, philosophies, social contracts, or the approval of one’s neighbors. It cannot be revoked by those in power, no matter how comprehensive their authority or how pure their intentions. The theologians of the early church, the medieval Fathers, the Reformers who reshaped Western Christianity, all recognized that this image-bearing dignity is indelible, inscribed into the very fabric of human existence itself. As the apostle James writes, addressing the tendency of the church toward partiality based on wealth or status: “But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God.” (James 3:8–9)
The very act of cursing someone “made after the similitude of God” is presented in scripture not as a minor lapse but as a profound moral contradiction, a desecration. The image of God is not a commodity; it does not fluctuate in value based on utility or social standing.
What, then, does this image consist of? Scripture reveals that the human being is constituted of spirit, soul, and body. The spirit represents our capacity to be conscious of God and to stand in relationship with Him. The soul is the seat of our self-awareness, our rational faculty, our will, our ability to make choices and to bear moral responsibility for those choices. The body relates us to the physical world. This is not abstract theology, though it is that; it has profound and immediate implications for how we understand human agency and moral responsibility.
The soul, in biblical understanding, is depicted as a decision-making faculty. It has the capacity to yield to fleshly lusts or to praise God. It chooses. God holds the soul accountable for sin. Those who lack God’s Spirit are dominated by their desires, disconnected from the consciousness of God, incapable of discerning spiritual truth. The soul is not a collective entity; it is the irreducible center of individual consciousness and will.
This understanding gave birth to consequences both historical and spiritual. When Martin Luther insisted on sola fide, faith alone, and anchored moral agency in the individual conscience before God, he was not inventing something unprecedented; he was recovering something essential to Christian anthropology that centuries of hierarchical authority had obscured. The freedom of conscience is not a modern invention; it is a recovery of the biblical truth that each soul stands directly before God, accountable to Him, responsible for the choices it makes. No earthly power, however grand its claims, can interpose itself between the individual soul and its Creator without doing violence to what it means to be human in the Christian tradition.
The Incompatibility of Collectivism and Christian Faith
If this is what scripture teaches about man, then we can state with precision why collectivism is fundamentally and irreconcilably incompatible with Christian faith and Christian living.
First, collectivism denies or systematically subordinates the doctrine of the image of God. In a truly collectivist system, individuals are not ends in themselves; they are means to the ends determined by the state or the collective. Any ideological system that conceives of man as pure collective: Marxism, communism, or the softer versions now being marketed to democratic societies, erodes the fundamental dignity of the individual by treating him as an instrument rather than as a person. When a system treats people as components, as tools, as resources for the achievement of collective goals, it has rejected the foundational Christian truth that each person is made in the image of God and is therefore an end in himself, never simply a means.
Second, collectivism requires the subordination and eventual suppression of individual conscience. If the state or the collective is designated as the final arbiter of what is good, what is just, what is true, then individual conscience must submit to that authority. But scripture is unambiguous: conscience is not something to be surrendered, not something that can be legitimately overridden. Paul writes to Timothy: “Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned.” (1 Timothy 1:5)
Conscience is not only an emotion or a whim. It is the seat of moral discernment. It is what permits the individual to distinguish between the command of earthly rulers and the command of God. When conscience is subsumed into collective decisions, when the individual conscience is forced to yield to the dictates of the state or the consensus of the masses, the soul loses its capacity to resist evil, to suffer for righteousness, to maintain fidelity to God in the face of the demands of power. The soul becomes, in effect, a slave.
Third, collectivism rests upon a false anthropology, a fundamentally mistaken understanding of human nature and human motivation. Christian theology teaches that human beings are fallen; that is, corrupted by sin and inclined toward selfishness, deceit, and the desire for dominion over others. This is not pessimism; it is realism rooted in both biblical revelation and historical observation. Now, it is precisely this fallen nature that collectivism cannot adequately account for. The collectivist imagination assumes that if we simply reorganize society, if we strip away individual ownership and individual choice, if we create the proper institutions and incentives, we can engineer a new humanity, one that is naturally cooperative, selflessly devoted to the common good, purged of the desire for personal advantage.
But both scripture and history laugh at this fantasy.
As Lenin himself understood, and here we must credit even the devil with a certain candor, achieving the collectivist vision requires relentless and comprehensive coercion. He stated, with the brutal honesty of a man who did not trouble himself with moral theater: “We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, and lawbreaking, withholding and concealing truth.” This is not an aberration from collectivism, not an unfortunate excess committed by a zealous revolutionary. It is structural to collectivism itself. When the claims of the group override individual choice, when individuals are no longer permitted to make decisions about their own lives and labor, someone must enforce that override. And fallen man, given such power, will use it, initially, perhaps, for their stated purposes, but eventually and inevitably for their own benefit, their own comfort, their own expansion of authority.
The “warmth” of collectivism, in practice, requires the cold and pitiless apparatus of state surveillance, propaganda, and violence.
The Historical Testimony
Here we must attend, with the sobriety that comes only from truth-telling, to the historical record. And the record is unambiguous.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a man who spent years imprisoned in Soviet labor camps and who dedicated his life to bearing witness to the horrors of communism, made a crucial observation in The Gulag Archipelago: the camps were not an aberration from communist ideology; they were the fulfillment of it. The camps existed as early as 1919, well before Stalin’s rise to power. This demonstrates that the connection between collectivist ideology and forced labor, between the dream of the collective and the machinery of terror, is not incidental but integral, not a corruption of the system but an inevitable expression of it.
The numbers demand to be stated, plainly and without euphemism. The Soviet Union, under communist rule, was responsible for the deaths of approximately 61.9 million people, a figure representing roughly 3.4 percent of the entire Soviet population. Some historians, accounting for all forms of excess mortality, place the figure as high as 127 million. These deaths did not result from accidental policy failures or from the unfortunate corruption of a noble and pure ideology. They resulted directly from the ideology itself. Collectivized agriculture led to deliberate starvation. The Great Terror was not an excess of zeal on the part of subordinate officials; it was the logical and inevitable outcome of a system that could not tolerate dissent, that could not permit individuals to maintain loyalty to anything: to family, to faith, to conscience itself, other than the collective and its supreme authority.
China under Mao experienced the so-called Great Leap Forward, which produced a famine that killed as many as 45 million people, a death toll exceeding even the horrors of the Soviet regime itself. Cambodia under Pol Pot witnessed the systematic slaughter of approximately one-quarter of the entire population in the name of collectivist agrarian revolution. These were not distant historical episodes, safely removed in time and space from our contemporary moment. They are monuments, erected in human suffering, to what happens when ideology is permitted to override the fundamental dignity of the person.
And the pattern is consistent, almost mechanical in its regularity: wherever collectivism has moved from rhetoric and theory into actual governance and policy, the results have been catastrophic. As the Cato Institute observed: “The disastrous results were not accidental policy errors. They followed directly from replacing decentralized decision-making and consent with ruthless political command.“
Now, defenders of collectivism sometimes respond to this historical record with a familiar rhetorical move: they argue that what we have witnessed in communist regimes was not real collectivism, or that the collectivism being proposed in places like New York is of a gentler variety, pursued through democratic means rather than totalitarian force. But, buyer beware, this response misses something fundamental and crucial.
The problem is not that collectivism has never been implemented correctly; the problem is that collectivist ideology, when taken seriously and translated into actual policy, requires the subordination of individual will to collective authority. And that subordination can only be maintained through coercion. The form of coercion may vary, gentle at first, then progressively less so, but coercion is not an accidental feature; it is essential to the system.
The Cato Institute also wrote: “Collectivism, by contrast, is top-down. It inevitably requires someone to decree what the collective wants and to compel compliance from dissenters.” The velvet glove of democratic rhetoric does not change the iron fist concealed within it. When government mandates wealth redistribution without consent, when government controls the terms under which individuals may work and live, when government determines what ideas may be discussed and what may not, the machinery of coercion is still there. It is simply dressed in the language of compassion and the rhetoric of care.
The Early Church and Voluntary Giving
At this point, an objection naturally arises, one that must be addressed with honesty and care. It is important to acknowledge what scripture does teach about the Christian’s obligation to care for one another, to share generously, to ensure that no brother or sister lacks the necessities of life. The early church, as described in the Acts of the Apostles, exhibited a remarkable and radical generosity: “And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” (Acts 2:44–45)
Luke describes this again in greater detail: “Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.” (Acts 4:34–35)
Here, it might seem, we encounter collectivism of a sort, a model of shared possessions and communal distribution. But we must observe the crucial and world-altering difference: it was voluntary. No one was compelled. The choice to give belonged entirely to the individual. Ananias and Sapphira faced judgment not because they refused to sell their property or declined to give it to the apostles, but because they lied about what they had done and how much they had given. They had retained the right to keep their property. Peter made this explicit: “Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?” (Acts 5:4)
The early church practiced extraordinary generosity, generosity that would shame most modern Christians. But it was the generosity of free persons, moved by the Holy Spirit, acting from conscience rather than from coercion. It was love expressing itself in voluntary action. This distinction, the difference between choosing to give and being forced to surrender, is everything. It is the difference between virtue and vice, between love and slavery, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man.
Christian charity is the fruit of individual conscience, responding to the genuine needs of others in obedience to Christ and in the power of His Spirit. But collectivist redistribution is the product of state force, of the machinery of governance and compulsion. The former honors the dignity of both giver and receiver; the latter treats both as instruments of state policy, as resources to be managed rather than as persons to be loved. To conflate early church generosity with modern socialist redistribution is to commit a fundamental error. It is to ignore the essential element that distinguishes them: freedom. The apostolic community was free to give or to withhold. A collectivist system permits no such freedom.
The Spiritual Danger
For the Christian, the danger posed by collectivist ideology is not only political or economic. It is fundamentally and irreducibly spiritual. It is a danger to the soul itself, that irreducible center of consciousness and will that stands before God.
When we accept the premise that the individual is subordinate to the collective, that our conscience must yield to consensus or to state decree, that the image of God in each person is of secondary importance to the designs and plans of the collective, we have accepted a lie of extraordinary proportions about human nature and human destiny. We have accepted the proposition that we are not primarily the beloved of God, individually known and called by name, but rather components of a larger machine whose purpose is determined by others, by the state, by the ideology, by the collective will.
This is precisely why the apostle Paul emphasizes so forcefully and repeatedly the doctrine of individual responsibility before God: “So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God.” (Romans 14:12)
Not collectively. Not as members of a group or a class or a nation. Each of us, individually, will stand before the throne of God and answer for how we have lived, what we have done, what we have failed to do. The Christian life is not an escape into collective identity; it is a journey toward Christ undertaken by each soul, each conscience, each person made in the image of God. It is personal, not corporate. It is individual, not collective.
Furthermore, collectivism tends inexorably toward idolatry. When the state or the collective becomes the ultimate reference point for human meaning and purpose, when we look to it for salvation and identity and worth, we have committed the transgression that the ancient Hebrews understood as the fundamental sin: we have made an idol. We have displaced God from the center of our lives and substituted something else, something made by human hands, something finite and fallible, something that claims ultimacy but possesses none. The state is not God. The collective is not God. And to treat them as such is to commit the ancient sin in modern dress.
A Word for This Moment
New York City now has a mayor who has publicly embraced the language and the ideological vision of collectivism. As the winter storms approach, those storms that bring out the genuine warmth of human kindness and voluntary care, we are being invited to substitute for that authentic warmth the counterfeit variety offered by the state.
This development is not cause for despair, nor is it occasion for some Christians to indulge in political rage or to imagine themselves as embattled warriors in some cosmic culture war. Rather, it is an occasion, a solemn and necessary occasion, for careful, clear, biblical thinking about what we believe about human nature, about freedom, about the indelible image of God that no government can erase or subordinate.
The American constitutional order, has built into its very structure certain checks and balances. These were designed, by men who had read their history and understood human nature, precisely to prevent the concentration of unlimited power in the hands of those who would impose their vision of the collective good on everyone else. Federalism, the separation of powers, term limits, the protection of individual conscience and individual rights, these are not obstacles to human flourishing. They are acknowledgments of hard-won historical wisdom: that fallen man cannot be trusted with absolute authority, and that individual conscience and individual liberty are goods of immense and irreplaceable value.
But constitutional protections are only as strong as the people who believe in them and are willing to maintain them. As citizens and as Christians, we are called to think carefully and biblically about the ideologies that claim our allegiance, to examine their historical fruits with unflinching honesty, and to ask whether they align with what scripture teaches about man, freedom, and responsibility.
Will some who live under collectivist governance learn, eventually and at terrible cost, the hard lessons that others have learned? History suggests that this is likely. But Christians are not called to observe from the sidelines, wringing our hands. We are called to witness to the truth. We are called to warn. We are called to offer, in our words and in our lives, an alternative vision, the vision of human beings dignified by their creation in the image of God, free in conscience to follow Christ, living in genuine voluntary community not because the state compels it but because love compels it.
This is the warmth that never freezes. It is the warmth of grace, of genuine liberty, of the cross of Christ. It is warmth that comes not from the state but from God. It is warmth that is freely given and freely received. It is warmth that honors the dignity of the person and respects the conscience of the soul.
It is worth defending. It is worth proclaiming. It is worth teaching to the rising generation, who will see in the collectivist experiment of our time precisely what the prophets and reformers of earlier ages witnessed in theirs: the descent into spiritual and moral darkness that follows when human beings forget who they are and surrender their conscience to powers that cannot love them.
When the winter storms come, we will see again the authentic warmth of human beings caring for one another freely. Let us remember that warmth. Let us cherish it. And let us never permit the state to convince us that its cold and pitiless machinery is a substitute for it.
