What is Marxism?

Marxism as Economic Reductionism

Okay, so let's talk about Marxism. What exactly is it?

Yeah, so let's give a quick summary. So there's classical Marxism from Marx, and then there's the more recent cultural Marxism. Both are very dangerous. Classical Marxism is economic Marxism of the old Soviet Union, of Mao's China, and so on, Pol Pot.

And it's essentially the notion that everything, everything can be reduced to economics. I mean, religion is just basically the upper classes employing a view of God so that they can subjugate the lower economic classes.

And that's true of ideas and everything else. Well, because of that, Marx believed in socialism. Well, if everything's economic, then the way to make everybody happy is to make everything economically equal.

Well, of course, we know that's false. Everywhere it's been tried, everywhere it's been tried, it's been a spectacular failure. There aren't any exceptions to that. That's right. But it's just like, it's a constant temptation because people, a lot of people, I mean, sinful man, let's face it, we want things for free.

And we want to have the good life without working hard for it. And we believe that we should have as much as everybody else. And we don't like the idea of God's providence, which means that there are particular stations in life.

Some people are wealthy and some are not. And you know what the biblical view is? We have to accept that. Now, we can work hard to make more money. There's nothing wrong with that. But, I mean, equality, this kind of Marxist equality is not a biblical notion.

Now, we're all equally made in God's image. We're equally sinners before God. And salvation is equally available within God's elective purposes, of course, to anybody who believes. But that's not the equality, of course, that Marxism is talking about.

It's essentially talking about economic equality, which is not really biblical at all. It's equality of results rather than equality of condition, which is the biblical view. Well, so that in a nutshell is the classical Marxism.

Classical Marxism.

Cultural Marxism and the War on Hierarchy

So, cultural Marxism is broader. It basically holds the cultural Marxist hope that everything should be equalized. Sex should be equalized, not just economics. Sex should be equalized. And condition in society should be equalized.

And age should be equalized. Morality should be equalized. There shouldn't be one morality greater than another. Cultural Marxism is the war on all hierarchies, particularly white males. But, essentially, cultural Marxism is an attack on privilege, just as the original economic Marxism was an attack on economic privilege.

This is an attack on, essentially, all cultural privilege. And you know what God privileges? God privileges His Word. God privileges His Son. God privileges a society given to them, like ancient Israel.

Though it failed, God privileged ancient Israel and His law. They hate that. So, essentially, they want to tear down this entire hierarchy. And for them, that's what statism is all about. And this is what some of our libertarian friends, though I generally agree with them, they don't quite understand.

It's not just raw power that the culturalists mark. Raw state power. They want state power and money to create this perfectly egalitarian society. That's the problem.

What's that mean?

Not just financially. Economic egalitarianism. But everything. Yeah.

So, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Dr. Sandlin. I just wanted to make sure that we could explain that for people who may not understand what that means. What's that mean, egalitarianism? What's that mean?

Oh, yeah, sorry. That's the egalitarianism is the view of there must be the fair society. You know, quote, social justice has to be the equal society. Now, it's important to make this distinction. I said it before.

The Bible teaches equality of processes. That is, if the playing field is the same for everybody, then it's fair. Now, cultural Marxists believe in equality of results. That is, they've got to rig the system in order that everybody else can get the same thing.

So, a good example of this would be like, well, if the Arizona Cardinals football team played a local high school team and beat them, you know, 76 to nothing, as long as the rules were the same for both teams, as long as the field was the same, as long as everything else was the same, the game was fair.

But cultural Marxists would say, well, no, it can be fair, because, I mean, if you can't win by 76 points, then it'd be fair. There has to be some unfairness. Well, biblically, we read about the law of just weights and measures, and so on.

Biblically, it is fair if everybody operates by the rule of law, based on God's moral law. But cultural Marxists want to rig the law and get rid of God's law in order to create pre-established results.

That's a good way to understand it.

Why Cultural Marxism Is Subversive of the Nation and the Kingdom of God

Okay. All right. So, why is all this nefarious, Dr. Sandlin?

Well, so, I've got a two-part answer for that. Less important, though nonetheless important, is our country was founded by people influenced by Protestant Christianity not all Christians, but influenced by Protestant Christianity that believed in what we would today call classical liberalism.

Now, that's not modern leftism. Classical liberalism, which grew out of Protestantism, is essentially the view that we should have the rule of law in society, we should have maximum individual freedom within the boundaries of God's moral law, that basically you're free to follow your own conscience.

If you're a Christian, hopefully you are, but even if you're not a Christian, you're still free to follow as long as you operate within the broad boundaries of the law. The problem with cultural Marxism is it's eroding the foundation of our very nation.

We see it working out right now as I'm speaking this, not sure when it'll be broadcast, but in the Kavanaugh nomination. People trying to subvert this process, a very fair process, but people trying to subvert it.

So, cultural Marxism is eroding the United States of America and our institutions in classical liberalism, taking away liberty again and again. But I would say that more importantly, it's subversive of the kingdom of God.

And of course, that's much more important than the United States is, because it's offering a secular social vision rather than the biblical, the Christian social vision. And it's sad, and we may talk about this more in a minute, to see Christians jumping on essentially the secular bandwagon and putting a nice little Christian label on it.

But cultural Marxism is really a secular version of the good life. We're going to show you what the good life is. The good life is getting rid of God and the Bible. The good life is getting rid of the Church of Jesus Christ, or at least the true Church of Jesus Christ.

The good life is the egalitarian life, the life of absolute fairness, where if you want to be homosexual, have homosexual marriage, if you want to, you can live essentially any way you want as long as you leave everybody else alone.

You're entitled to other people's wealth. The state is here to make sure that you are guaranteed to have a certain standard of living. Other people should pay for that because essentially you are entitled to that.

And I could go on and on, but that is subversive of the kingdom of God, which teaches individual responsibility under God's authority.

Okay. Very good. Guys?

I'm just, I'm loving this.

Yeah, it's great.

Social Justice as Social Righteousness

Okay. So that would bring me to an interesting, I guess, let me do it this way. I'll ask you this question first, Dr. Stanley. I know you have to go soon here, but I'll try to make this quick. Should Christians be concerned with justice in the world?

Should we be concerned about what happens in this world? Should we have some influence on all of this? You've already talked about God's concern for the world, the victory of the Messiah in history, His kingdom, His law, all those things.

But when we think about these things, we see the cultural Marxists very, very concerned about what's going on here and now. And the complaint oftentimes is that Christians, you don't care about justice.

You don't care about these things. It's these liberal millennials and cultural Marxists. They care about the world. They care about people in the world. You Christians don't. You just want to escape. So should we care about justice in the world?

Should we care about just weights and measures? Is that something that we are concerned with in a new covenant under the rule of Jesus? Or was that just an Old Testament thing, like God's specific case laws and concern for justice in the world?

Should we actually fight in this battle? Or is this something we shouldn't care about?

Yeah, great question, Jeff. Yeah, and sadly, that criticism of secularists, in too many cases, is on target. Christians are really, as the old adage, so heavenly minded, they're no earthly good. So let's take the expression that's really prominent today, and has been actually since then.

That's an interesting perversion of a term. It actually was developed in the 19th century by a Roman Catholic, and its use then was essentially pretty correct, basically a biblical understanding. A good way to understand and answer your question is to replace the word justice.

You know, justice has kind of become one of those, what I call, jello words. You know, it's kind of, you can mold it and pour it in anything, meaning anything. In the Bible, the term justice is equivalent to the term righteousness.

In fact, in the Old Testament, it's translated that way in many cases. Now imagine, Jeff, if instead of using the word social justice, we started using the word social righteousness. Well, the liberals would fall off their chair, of course, because righteousness, when we hear that word, that implies a religiosity.

That implies a God. That implies a revelation. That implies an inflexible standard. And frankly, it is, because in the Bible, righteousness is adherence to God's character revealed in His law. So in answer to the question, should we be interested in social justice or righteousness, well, of course, because we're interested in reflecting the character of God.

When we pray, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it's in heaven, we're really praying for social justice understood as social righteousness. The problem with the leftists is not their concern with social justice, per se.

The problem is they don't believe in God's standards. They believe in culturally Marxist standards, which is essentially everybody has to be the same. If somebody wants to be a homosexual, that's okay.

Christians shouldn't worry about it, even if we don't like it ourselves. We shouldn't be concerned about it in society. And abortion, well, that's just sort of a woman's right. We have to kind of protect it.

It's true reproductive justice. Don't you love that language? Reproductive justice.

Reproductive justice.

So let's put the word righteousness. Reproductive righteousness. Well, the Bible does indicate reproductive righteousness, which is that children are a blessing. And to intentionally harm them in the womb is if you harm them to kill them, that's murder, for example.

So yes, Christians must be concerned about, in fact, more than we have been in social justice, but not if we put it in the apologetic quotation marks. Social justice has left us understand it. So we can't have a theology of escape.

We can't have a theology of liberal social justice, but a theology of biblical social justice or social righteousness.

Social righteousness.

I love that.

Isn't that powerful?

Yeah, that's great.

I actually listened to you recently, given that exact conversation, important stuff. I don't want to take over this. So you guys have anything you want to fill in here real fast?

I was just going to say, just kind of add to what you were saying earlier when you asked that question. I think, and Andrew, you kind of touched it a little bit too, but just the fact that I think as a whole, the church in our culture has, with the abandonment of the culture and the waiting to be raptured off, we have also abandoned the issues of social justice that we should be concerned with.

And like you said, we should have a biblical view of that social justice or social righteousness, as you're saying. But yeah, I think the reason we're in the spot we're in is because the church as a whole has completely abandoned these issues altogether.

So you're right, Luke. So let me add something. Here's a little pernicious thing. So here you have groups that essentially don't believe in biblical social justice. They're essentially, let's use the language, a retreatist, a pietist, the view we're talking about, sort of the evangelical aloofness, right?

Yeah, that's a good word.

So they've often said, no, we're not interested in social justice. That's getting away from biblical emphases. That's wrong, but that's what they say. We need to get back to just preaching the gospel, though they don't really understand the fullness of the gospel.

But that's their view. Yet we're seeing something very ironic happen today. And even groups with which we would tend to agree on a number of issues, at least before, like the Gospel Coalition. So all of these people who held this privatistic view, this truncated view of the gospel, now it's just amazing.

We turn around and we see that they've become infiltrated by people who say, no, that's not right, we do believe in the gospel and in social justice, but of course it's a leftist version of it. So we learn an important lesson here.

Quote, social justice will somewhere and always get its revenge. If we don't stand up for biblical social justice, this sort of privatized view of the faith will not long survive. And eventually we've been filtrated by people who at least recognize that the faith, even if it's a perverted version of the faith, must apply in society.

And that's what we're seeing today, I think, in groups like the Gospel Coalition.