by Deante Hunter
So much of what Karl Marx wrote sounded familiar to me. I was asleep to the systemic oppression of America, but now I’m awake (not "woke"). This started my progression into joining social justice movements on my college campus. It was the norm for students to join or start movements. To speak up for the marginalized. Liberty for the oppressed: “what Christian would say no to that message,” I thought. This changed after I became a Christian in my early college years. Since I became a Christian, I grew in my love of God, so much so that I became driven to love my neighbor. I felt the fire of being the change I wanted to see in the world for the glory of God.
This started my progression into joining social justice movements on my college campus. It was the norm for students to join or start movements. To speak up for the marginalized. Liberty for the oppressed; “what Christian would say no to that message,” I thought. In 2017 I encountered an interview with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson by journalist Kathy Newman. That entire video started emotions of irritation toward this extremist man. What followed after was curiosity; “How can I prove that he is lying?” propelled my research. This turned into a revolution of thinking within myself. I would later renounce my Marxist loyalties for just being liberal and then libertarian followed by anarchism. After all these experiments, I began to see American conservatism as the values I would take on and begin publicly voicing in 2020.
I’ve matured significantly since leaving behind my old thinking. However, my journey revealed a disturbing truth about the social justice movement in modern institutions and churches. That wokeness and the diversity of social justice movements are the product of rebranded Marxism. I’ve noticed it more as I deepen my research and investigate modern social movements around the world. It isn’t just idealistic college students protesting issues they know nothing about. They are merely pieces in a game that is much bigger than them. In this written work I hope to help readers know what this ideology is and how it relates to Christian contexts. This ideology is still relevant for churches and Christians today. I will share the research that I have collected in three points. First, the history of the Marxist worldview, the unifying characteristics of Marxist movements, and how Christians can respond to this worldview.
To understand the history of Marxism as an ideology, I will start with the strongest definition. Communism and Socialism refer to the same Marxism, with some variations, but the same common ancestor. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory, Marxism refers to “The political discourse and a revolutionary social movement inspired by the works of Karl Marx. At its most elementary, Marxism is a science of history premised on the view that the economy, or more precisely the mode of production, determines and decides the conditions of existence for all people.” The best one-sentence summary of this can be found in Marx’s most popular work The Communist Manifesto; it reads “ In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: “Abolition of private property.” In biographical accounts like The Gulag Archipelago and The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, the victims of this ideology being put into practice are believed to be more than 94 million people using conservative estimates. The statistics of victims include deaths through executions, man-made hunger, famine, war, deportations, and forced labor through concentration camps. The average citizen was subject to daily monitoring from their neighbors and family. Everyone was assigned people to report on to maintain constant fear of their neighbor, thus preventing future revolutions. To give a visual, your spouse and even your child could report you to the government and you would be arrested for a type of speech crime, intentional or not. In Socialist countries, it was common for Christians to be arrested and killed for proclaiming Christ, and arrested for not proclaiming the communist party doctrine as sovereign. This has been the consistent pattern for every country that formally embraced Marxist doctrine regardless of the cultural and historical differences since Russia became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922.
Stay tuned for part 2 next week.