Just Church (6)

In our last instalment of this book, we left off talking about ideologies ... secular ideologies, and particularly the kind of beliefs that have given rise to the Social Justice ideology that’s nowadays making heavy inroads in many local churches. Though the love of a humanistic ideology goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel, there are a few new twists in present case. Some of these twists were introduced by a guy named G.W.F. Hegel, who believed that all history is like a great “god” with its own will, direction and trajectory, and that by releasing the power of this great “History” by busting the shackles of the status quo, we would have inevitable moral and social progress.

We left off last time with Hegel’s much more famous disciple, Karl Marx, who was going to take things to a whole new level, and eventually was to become the true father of the modern Social Justice movement ... even for those who’ve never yet heard of Karl Marx. (So toxic are bad ideas that they often continue to infect us long after their founders are pushing up daisies.)

The Opiate

Karl Marx once said “Religion is the opiate of the masses”. He believed that religion was invented by wealthy men to control the poor. If the lower classes were pacified with the promise of treasure in the afterlife, they would not rebel against their wealthy oppressors. In this way the rich could continue to hoard their wealth, while the poor laboured on under the delusion that they would receive their rewards in the next life.

It is true that some of the world’s religions and religious leaders have done this very thing — some even claiming to be Christians. While they urged their followers to work harder and make greater sacrifices, they themselves accumulated wealth to excess. This bad testimony alone has caused many people to agree with Karl Marx and to dismiss Christianity altogether.