The top headlines of 1948 involved the same idea, only back then the issue wasn’t technology but politics, specifically the specter of communism. Cast off religion and tradition, the communists said, and human misery would end. Standing in their way, though, was the United States, and so the communists sought to undermine their democratic adversaries.

The depth of their efforts came to light when Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist, alleged that Alger Hiss, an official in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, had copied secret documents and delivered them to agents of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The Chambers-Hiss case riveted the nation and made Richard Nixon, who led the congressional investigation, a national figure.

Chambers recounted his involvement in the case in one of the greatest books of the 20th century, a book he appropriately titled Witness.

Witness became a bestseller when it was published in 1952, but if you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. Neither have the 20-year-old students I teach at the University of Texas at Austin. They think of the Soviet Union as something from long ago; after all, they were 9 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. But for three reasons, parents of today’s children should be aware of Witness and the issues it raises.

Two Faiths on Trial First, Chambers powerfully explains what lay behind the rise of communism (and some other leading isms): the vision of Man displacing God. Second, Chambers displays moving concern for his children and the need for them to understand why it was essential to fight a protracted war against communism. Third, those who pick up Witness will discover writing as profound and powerful as anything the 20th century produced.

Witness begins with an introduction Chambers wrote in the form of a letter to his two children. "If the Hiss Case were only" a spy story, Chambers wrote, "it would not be worth my writing about or your reading about."

The case was significant, though, because "much more than Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers was on trial. ... Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies. At issue in the Hiss case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it."

That man proved to be Chambers, who called himself "an involuntary witness to God’s grace," which had saved him from another faith. That faith was "man’s second oldest," because "its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. ... The communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world."

Chambers writes movingly of how the Creator’s grace touched him as he watched his daughter eating porridge in a highchair: "I date my break [with his decade-long communist commitment] from a very casual happening..;. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. ... My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear — those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: ‘No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.’"

Chambers tried to ignore that thought, because its logical conclusion — "design presupposes God" — would force him to leave communism, which is based on atheism. But Chambers could not forget: "I did not know then that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead." Witness shows that once God bestows his grace, our foreheads and the brains within are never the same.

The War’s Not Over
But isn’t this ancient history? Communism today persists only in several small dictatorships and one very large and powerful country, China, where it has been conjoined with nationalistic pride and fledging capitalism. Witness is still a great book because it testifies to God’s kindness — but is the enemy Chambers fought against anything like our enemies today?

Witches, as C.S. Lewis wrote, never die; they merely come back in different forms. So it is with evil doctrines, and Witness points to that continuity. Chambers noted that "the enlightened and the powerful," the leaders of media and academia, fell hard for the man-centered approach of Alger Hiss. We still have that problem, and we still see what Chambers observed: that "humble people, strong in common sense," often are wiser than people with Ph.Ds.

The main body of Witness ends with Chambers, after two years of character assassination at the hands of liberal reporters, learning in 1950 that a jury had found Hiss guilty of perjury. He tells of an elderly man immediately calling him on the phone, saying, "I had to reach you first. I had to say: ‘God bless you! God bless you! Oh, God bless you!’"

Just as the pains of childbirth tend to be forgotten quickly once a new mother is holding her baby, so the recognition of God’s blessing heals wounds, a half-century ago and now.