And so we arrive at the present moment.
We've been talking about history — about that old nonsense created by Karl Marx, and then picked up in the middle of the last century by a group of rabid ideologues now known as “The Frankfurt School”. But what’s all this got to do with us? Why should we care? Didn’t all that end with the Berlin Wall? Whom do we, in the West, ever meet who preens himself as a Marxist? So why bother ourselves with dead men and dead beliefs?
Well, because sometimes things don’t quite die. Bad ideas have a horrible way of persisting, and even of being resurrected in new forms. This happened with Marxism, which has now reappeared under the cloak of humanist, racial, environmental and sexual-equality concerns, in what we now know as the “Social Justice” movement. So our subject today is this final switcheroo, when the old dogmas of Marxism got converted into their current form, and managed to seize so much of the public agenda, and even to make serious inroads among professing Christians.
Chapter 2: From Among Your Own Selves (continued)
To the Church
Still, it has not proved easy to convince the vast majority of Westerners to be receptive to neo-Marxist aims and values. When one is selling people a package of radical ideology, one has to sneak up on them undetected; and until the mass media were fully formed, and until the political system was fully staffed with people influenced by neo-Marxist education, and until everybody in society was already grounded in some basic beliefs about the collective good, racism, sexism, liberation, protest, anti-capitalism, pro-globalism, environmentalism and so on, it was not time for the program to break out in public.
However, as a society, we are now pretty much where the Marxist radicals have needed to get us to be all along. The long march through the institutions is now finally reaching the farthest institution from where it began: the church. That is why you are now seeing a kind of special pleading on behalf of Social Justice that you have never seen before.
Social Justice ideology wants the church to stop being the Body of Christ and to start being a useful engine of social reform for its utopian earthly ambitions. The sort of gradual infiltration I’ve outlined above, not open confrontation, is the usual method for getting that to happen. The technical name for the strategy is “entryism”. It means getting somebody “in the door”, so to speak, who can then erode institutional values and change procedures from inside. It works best when it’s gradual and goes undetected long enough to permeate all areas of institutional life; then it can burst out and show itself more-or-less for what it is.
The “nice lady” doesn’t perhaps know she’s playing “fifth column” for the neo-Marxists. But she is. She’s their way in, their voice to the congregation, and their opportunity for infiltration. If they can’t do it personally, that’s no problem. All they have to do is to continue to work on her, and she will remain their agent to achieve their purposes.
Behind the Screen
What actually accounts for the appearance of the “nice person” in our congregations at this point in history is a secular trend in popular culture, education and politics that goes under the general title of the Social Justice Movement. It has different names for different audiences, depending on what sort of public relations strategy fits. It began in law, as a thing called Critical Legal Studies, but instantly spread to education as Critical Pedagogy. In business contexts, you’re most likely to find it framed as something like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, or Cultural Sensitivity training. But Critical Theory has even penetrated the (much despised) realm of capitalist endeavors in such ways. It also got into institutional religion relatively early on, taking a form called Liberation Theology, though until now that has pretty much been only a Catholic thing, and has been most influential in the Developing World. However, the mainline churches of North America have also been very quick to embrace Social Justice measures as a form of public service and activism.
“Critical” is a key buzzword. Whether you see it as “Critical Studies” or “Critical Theory” or political “critique”, it refers to the same group of theories, all governed by a Marxist reading of history, Marxist social and political goals, and Marxist insights and strategies. If we were naming it properly, we’d simply call it what it is: neo-Marxism. But its advocates are way too smart and way too devious to do that; they know the resistance they’d get if they risked linking their agenda with its own history. So they cloak it in a host of other terms: in education, particularly, it’s known as Critical Racial Theory or Social and Emotional Learning or Culturally Relevant Teaching, Character Development, anti-bullying and anti-racism (importantly distinct from “non-racism”).(1)
In all contexts what you’ll find is that Social Justice advocates wrap their incursions in values like “social action”, “inclusion”, “fairness”, “tolerance”, “cultural sensitivity”, “action”, “equity” and a host of other honorific terms. The goal is always the same: to get neo-Marxism inside the door of an institution before it can be recognized as such, and then convert all the functions of that institution to neo-Marxist purposes.(2)
Entering Alongside
Don’t expect Critical Theorists to announce themselves when they arrive at the doors of the church. There are two reasons for this: one is that the aware ones know better than to alert you to their agenda, and the second is that many of their supporters, fooled by the Marxist manipulation of language, are not even aware of what they’re representing. However, the purpose of creating many such charming terms is, of course, to put the best spin on the same agenda: namely, the creating of a particular kind of human future by means of criticizing and tearing down the status quo in its entirety. It’s all about jealousy, about destruction, about division and rage; but it is invariably packaged and sold in the dulcet tones of Christian virtue — of harmony, inclusiveness, charity, mercy, justice and love — all things that, at their mere mention, snap the Christian mind to respectful attention.
Jude tells us that it’s coming in “unnoticed” or “stealthily”, but literally “entering alongside”. These are people who will seem to rise up as helpers and allies of good things, in some cases even arising from among the existing congregation. These will be friendly people, pleasant people, well-intentioned people, nice people — but nonetheless, poisonous in the doctrines they bring with them. Some may not even really know what they are doing; but without anybody saying something, they will simply slide in unnoticed alongside the believers, and start to do their work.
The Lying Tongue
Critical Theory is a chameleon. You’re never going to catalog all the forms it comes in, and its proponents want it that way. But we can simplify. For our purposes in this book, we’re going to refer to the entire package as either “neo-Marxism” when we’re being blunt, or as “Social Justice”, which is the name it generally prefers to go under in contexts like law, media and education. That latter is the name you’re most likely to hear, and least likely to be able to think of a reason to reject. That, of course, is deliberate on the part of the propagandists.
That’s one of the outstandingly obvious facts about Social Justice ideology: its proponents do not want you to understand. They don’t want you to recognize them as advocates for Social Justice ideology, or as neo-Marxists; and that’s why they prefer these many labels. They want to be able to slide from label to label, category to category, each time claiming you have misunderstood who and what they are, so that if you were a bit more sophisticated you would not make that mistake.
You can also see this in the language they prefer: its outstanding feature is its lack of clarity. They love big, impressive, convoluted lines of jargon that lose the reader half way through.
Confusion, you see, is a chief weapon.
Orwell and Squids
George Orwell, the author of such famous books as 1984 and Animal Farm, a lifelong student of Socialists and propaganda, wrote a superb essay on this, called “Politics and the English Language”. One of the things he explains well in it is the link between complexity of language and dishonest politicking. People who have something honest to say can almost always say it simply. They never reach for a big or impressive word when a common-use one is available instead. But people who are being dishonest or trying to sell an idea that would be unpalatable or even hideous if plainly stated will often opt for impressive verbiage as a way of hiding what they’re doing.
Orwell compares them to squids that squirt ink in order to escape — a nice metaphor. But he points out that it’s not only the simple folks who are fooled when language becomes cloudy; often, even the person issuing the propaganda has lost track of his own meaning, and has become a campaigner for something that he or she might actually be quite ashamed of, were it stated literally. Or, to put it biblically, “Evil people and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” Get that? They deceive others, yes; but they are also thereby self-deceived. Dishonesty of this sort harms everyone, not least the person issuing it. We all have a stake in getting people to say what they’re up to honestly and plainly; but to this task, the rhetoric of Social Justice is entirely unsuited.
Simple and Immoral
As James Lindsay has pointed out, the Social Justice strategy is as simple as it is immoral: to “call everything you don’t control ‘racist’ (or sexist, or homophobic, or transphobic, or fatphobic, or whatever) until you control it.” That’s it. That’s all. It’s a pure power grab, dressed up in the mealy-mouthed language of higher learning.
To hide this intention, the Social Justice ideologues find it useful to make everything overcomplicated: they say that racism, etc. are subtle, and multifaceted, and embedded, and hegemonic, and fascist, and latent, and micro-, and systemic, and so on, and you can’t possibly hope to locate them, see them and get rid of them unless you yield control to those who have the special secret wisdom of the Social Justice perspective — in other words, to them. They create confusion (especially moral confusion, but intellectual, social or institutional confusion of any kind is also useful) then seize control. That’s their game.
And the last thing they want you to see is that they’re nothing but neo-Marxists, or as Lindsay calls them, “Race Marxists”.
The Smiling Face
Instead of that, Social Justice presents itself as a movement to put to right many injustices, past and present, which have been perpetrated by the world against vulnerable minorities of various kinds. It parades as the voice of advocacy for the poor, the downtrodden, the voiceless and the unloved, and calls on everyone to an active role in reversing a whole range of social injustices it assures us have not only been perpetrated in the past, but persist today, and persist in even more vile and dangerous forms, because in the modern world, they occur sneakily, surreptitiously, and dishonestly, being no longer merely the products of bad individuals but now also of entire systems in which all people — regardless of their personal attitudes to things like race, gender or politics — now live and move, and to which they contribute without even knowing it.
It is the task of Critical Theory — so the story goes — to uncover this “systemic” injustice, and to destroy the systems that continue to hold it in place. Anyone who resists this process of critique and active destruction is himself implicated in the web of injustice that keeps the abused and victimized in their places. “We’re all guilty,” says this ideology, just for being who we are (Westerners), or for having the color of skin we do (white), because of our gender (male) or our sexual practices (heterosexual) — and just for participating in the success of the modern world, if all of these previous things fail to indict us sufficiently. Most guilty of all are the capitalists, the nationalists or anti-globalists, the conservatives, and above all, the Christians.
But under all this is a truly toxic and evil kind of guilt. It’s really a product of the very secular, God-hating ideology of Marxism(3) which rewrites history in such a way as to reflect only a process of “class struggle”, as if that were the total story of everything. The dull and polemical historicism of the last few decades has given way today to a much more simplistic and lively retelling, as though history is now the story of various subclasses of people — visible minorities, women, sexual deviants, and so on — being oppressed by the white, male, straight upper classes of society … and Christians, this story maintains, are the vanguard of the latter.
The Reigning Ideology and Christian Values
That such retelling in no way represents the historical facts — let alone shows current realities in their true complexity and subtlety — in no way deters these new ideologues. For they ride into social and political battle mounted on a chariot made of pure fictitious guilt — and they invite, nay, they require and demand, that all shall bow and be crushed by its unrelenting wheels.
But all that is after a fashion irrelevant. That the world goes on mad escapades of wild ideology cannot possibly surprise us: the world will go as the world goes in that regard. However, we have just come out of a long period — well over a century in some countries — when public secular values and Christian values seemed relatively peacefully aligned. We got used to being able to make deals and compromises with the dominant secular ideologies of the day, so long as they did not interfere with our private practices or contradict them too graphically in the public square.
The problem is what we do when the reigning ideology of our society no longer fits the Christian pattern of values to any degree at all. At that moment, we are forced to decide whether we would rather remain on good terms with the world, or are really committed to remaining Christian. Such a situation is fast approaching, if not here already; the world is now demanding to be admitted to the church, to dictate its theology and values and to plunder it for adherents to its new pet ideology, Social Justice. Many Christians — at least nominal Christians — are really not so sure which way to go.
Conclusion
The dream of Babel is alive and well. Having successfully conquered every other one of its targets, the long march is now arriving at the doors of the church.
But when it arrives, it’s not likely to appear in the form of some desperate secular propagandist overtly dishing up neo-Marxism. It won’t be in the person of some long-haired philosopher from the 19th century, a screaming Marxist revolutionary of the early 20th, or even as some mustachioed holdover of the Frankfurt School, or Klaus Schwab. It will come in the form of the “nice lady”.
She has to be the subject of our next chapter. To understand where she’s coming from, it will take more than history. It will take some measure of sympathetic psychology, as well. For as we shall see, she’s often not so much a deliberate campaigner for neo-Marxist secularism as she is a product of the environment they have created for her. In many ways, she too is a victim.
Not that being a victim of an ideology is a good thing. In fact, it can make one even more dangerous than if one were overtly propagandizing. An open propagandist is relatively easy to detect and much easier to defend against than a kindly voice speaking from amid the congregation. What lends her moral power is her belief in the innocence of her own intentions and her obliviousness to what has been done to her. This may be quite sincere.
But in her own way, she’s advancing the alternate theology Marxists have prepared for her, and just as they desire, she’s campaigning in her own limited way for the goals of collectivism, ideology and technology that unregenerate man always prizes.
That is what we shall shortly see.
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(1) The Social Justice movement regards them as distinct in this: “non-racism” means the refusal to accept any racial distinctions, and the treating of all as equal; “anti-racism”, by contrast, is the ideology that sees the whole world as divided by race, and claims to fight actively on behalf of the “oppressed” races against “whiteness”. See, for example, Eric Deggans’ “ ‘Not Racist’ Is Not Enough: Putting In The Work To Be Anti-Racist”.
(2) The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as, “the process or policy of members of a political group joining another party or group with the intention, often secret, of changing its principles and plans”.
(3) Marx most famously declared, “Religion is the opium (sleeping drug) of the masses” and that all critique must begin with the criticism of religion.
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