Near
the mid-point of the 20th century, writing in the Introduction to Carl
Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, Harold J.
Ockenga wrote the following: “A Christian world- and life-view embracing world
questions, societal needs, personal education ought to arise out of Matt. 28:18–20 as much as evangelism
does. Culture depends on such a view, and Fundamentalism is prodigally
dissipating [wastefully spending] the Christian culture accretion [buildup] of
centuries, a serious sin. A sorry answer lies in the abandonment of societal
fields to the secularist.”1
The
controversy over the role that religion plays in culture and politics is an old
one. Jesus was accused of subverting the political order by “misleading [the]
nation and forbidding [people] to pay taxes to Caesar, and saying that He Himself
is Christ, a King” (Luke 23:2). Christians
were accused of promoting the idea that there was “another king, Jesus” (Acts 17:7).
The
designation of Jesus as “Lord” had significant political implications in the
Roman Empire since the Emperor held the title of Dominus et Deus,
“Lord and God.” Rome permitted and promoted religious diversity, just like
today’s liberals, but it did not allow religious competition with the State,
just like today’s liberals.
For
more than 50 years, from the Scopes Trial in 1925 to the presidential candidacy
of Jimmy “Born Again” Carter in 1976, conservative Christians did not develop a
discernable social or political philosophy.2 The secularists took
advantage of the indifference and moved the country in a decidedly
anti-Christian direction. The major institutions were captured—courts, schools,
seminaries—and turned into secular advocacy groups churning out disciples for
the humanist agenda. As Christians observed this happening, they concluded that
(1) they are just pilgrims passing through, (2) Jesus is going to rescue them
through a rapture, (3) and it’s the Christian’s lot in life to be persecuted
for Jesus.
Those
pushing for an overthrow of the establishment in the 1960s learned a lot when
their radical and often times violent agenda failed to accomplish their stated
goals and turned the majority of the population against them. In his Rules
for Radicals, Saul Alinsky (1909–1972) understood the futility of
their tactics and suggested a different path:
“Power comes out of the barrel
of a gun!” is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns.
Lenin was a pragmatist; when he returned . . . from exile, he said that the
Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider
after they got the guns. Militant mouthings? Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro,
and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological,
computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach
on a jet runway at Kennedy airport?”
The
radicals knew it would be necessary to capture the institutions without ever
firing a shot or blowing up another building. Roger Kimball captures the tactic
well in his book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the
1960s Changed America: “The long march through the institutions
signified in the words of [Herbert] Marcuse, ‘working against the established
institutions while working in them’. By this means—by insinuation and
infiltration rather than by confrontation—the counter-cultural dreams of
radicals like Marcuse have triumphed.”3
Pat
Buchanan described the tactic is a similar way. To change the culture,
Gramsci argued, “would require a ‘long march through the institutions’—the
arts, cinema, theater, schools, colleges, seminaries, newspapers, magazines,
and the new electronic medium [of the time], radio.”4
The
Left learned this from what took place in the 1960s when their radical
political agenda failed to accomplish its stated goals. Their radical agenda
was shot down politically because the majority of Americans still retained a
remnant of the older Christian worldview. The Left knew it would be necessary
to capture those institutions that shape and mold children who would one day
become cultural leaders. Once the heart and mind are captured, everything else
follows, including politics. This is a major tactical maneuver that most on the
Right did not understand.
Antonio
Gramsci’s philosophy for cultural and social change was the model for the new
Leftists. Gramsci (1891–1937) considered Christianity to be the “force binding
all the classes—peasants and workers and princes, priests and popes and all the
rest besides, into a single, homogeneous culture. It was specifically Christian
culture, in which individual men and women understood that the most important
things about human life transcend the material conditions in which they lived
out their mortal lives.”5 Gramsci broke with
Marx and Lenin’s belief that the masses would rise up and overthrow the ruling
“superstructure.” No matter how oppressed the working classes might be, their
Christian faith would not allow such an overthrow, Gramsci theorized. Marxists
taught “that everything valuable in life was within mankind.”6
The
Christian masses rejected the secular foundation of Marx. Perceptively, Gramsci
realized that in the long run what people did not ultimately believe in they
would not fight for. Was Gramsci right? “The only Marxist state that existed”
in Gramsci’s day “was imposed and maintained by force and by terrorist policies
that duplicated and even exceeded the worst facets of Mussolini’s Fascism.”7 The
building of the Berlin Wall was the most visible evidence of Gramsci’s critique
of traditional Marxism. Walls had to be built to keep people from escaping the
“Workers’ Paradise.”
While
Gramsci was still a committed Marxist and “totally convinced that the material
dimension of everything in the universe, including mankind, was the whole of
it,”8 he
believed that the road taken by traditional Marxists to “utopia” was one lined
with formidable obstacles.
A
critic of the use of the Cultural Marxist moniker ignores most of this history
and dismisses its ideological roots:
It is
very hard to explain what cultural Marxism is because the term describes
something that doesn’t exist. It refers to a vast
conspiracy dating back to the early 20th century in which academics launched a
campaign to take over intellectual, cultural, and artistic institutions. Then,
they “promoted and even enforced ideas which were intended to destroy Christian
values and overthrow free enterprise.” What were these ideas? Feminism,
multiculturalism, gay rights and atheism, to name a few.
The problem is that this never
actually happened.
For the
author, Cultural Marxism is about a new form of oppression:
As oppressed groups—women,
minorities, LGBTQ+ folks—gain the tools of liberation, such as the internet and
civil rights protections, they will have an influence on culture. The systems
that were created to oppress them—the patriarchy, the nuclear family, white
supremacy—will then recede. (Daily Dot)
Cultural
Marxism is real. It’s all about the foundational principles and origin of
morality. It’s not about race or gender (i.e., sex). It’s about “by what
standard?” For example, the Faculty of Arts & Sciences of former Christian
Harvard University, “invited left-wing activist and writer Tim Wise to deliver
the keynote address at its Decade of Dialogue ‘diversity
conference’ last week.” Wise said that people who believe in moral
absolutes from the Bible should be “politically destroyed, utterly rendered
helpless to the cause of pluralism and democracy … the world is not theirs.
They have no right to impose their bulls**t on others. They can either change,
or shut the hell up, or practice their special brand of crazy in their homes…or
go away.” (The Blaze)
Of
course, Culture Marxism doesn’t exist! Yeah, right. As Alexander Zubatov writes
in a very helpful essay, “Just Because Anti-Semites Talk
About ‘Cultural Marxism’ Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t Real.”
Cultural
Marxism was no conspiracy, but it is also no mere right-wing “phantasmagoria.”
It was and remains a coherent intellectual program, a constellation of
dangerous ideas. Aspects of these ideas, to their credit, brought the West’s
dirty laundry into the limelight and inaugurated a period of necessary
housecleaning that was, indeed, overdue. But their obsessive focus on our
societal dirt—real and perceived “injustice,” “oppression,” “privilege,”
“marginalization” and the like—quickly became a pathological compulsion. We
started to see dirt everywhere.
We cleansed and continue to
cleanse ourselves tirelessly but are never satisfied, always eager to uncover
more dirty deeds and historical sins and stage more ritualized purges. We end
up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And all our hard-won collective
attainments and achievements, all that is great and good and glorious in our
midst, gets swept up, spat on and discarded with the rest of the trash.
Gramsci
began his re-imaging of Marxism by dropping the harsh slogans. “It wouldn’t do
to rant about ‘revolution’ and ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and the
‘Workers’ Paradise.’”9 Instead,
Marxism would have to put on a new face and talk about “national consensus,”
“national unity,” and “national pacification.” Sound familiar? The democratic
process rather than revolution would be used to bring about the necessary
changes. At first, pluralism would be promoted and defended. Further, Marxists
would join with other oppressed groups—even if they did not share Marxist
ideals—to create a unified coalition of voting power. After building their
coalition “they must enter into every civil, cultural and political activity in
every nation, patiently leavening them all as thoroughly as yeast leavens
bread.”10
Even
after all of these successes, Gramsci still understood that Christianity
remained his biggest obstacle in achieving his newly formulated Marxist goals.
He had to strip the mind of any notion of the transcendent—“that there is
nothing beyond the matter of this universe. There is nothing in existence that
transcends man—his material organism within his material surroundings.”11
The
pagan notion of the separation of the two realms that has dogged orthodox
Christianity since the first century had to be reintroduced.
In the most practical terms, he
needed to get individuals and groups in every class and station of life to
think about life’s problems without reference to the Christian transcendent,
without reference to God and the laws of God. He needed to get them to react
with antipathy and positive opposition to any introduction of Christian ideals
or the Christian transcendent into the treatment and solution of the problems
of modern life.12
The
here and now must be absolutized and made the reference point for everything we
think and do. “Everything must be done in the name of man’s dignity and rights,
and in the name of his autonomy and freedom from outside constraint. From the
claims and constraints of Christianity, above all.”13 Has
Gramsci been successful? Most definitely.
America
is haunted by the ghost of Antonio Gramsci.
1.
Harold J. Ockenga, “Introduction,” Carl F. H. Henry, The
Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1947), xiv.(↩)
2.
Tom Strode, “Abortion issue & Schaeffer
influence pushed evangelicals to engagement, [Richard] Land says,” BP
News (December 6, 2005).(↩)
3.
Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural
Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (San Francisco: Encounter
Books, 2000), 15.(↩)
4.
Patrick J. Buchanan, Death of the West: How Dying
Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New
York: St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne Books, 2001), 77.(↩)
5.
Malachi Martin, The Keys of This Blood: The Struggle for
World Dominion Between Pope John II, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Capitalist West (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 245.(↩)
6.
Martin, The Keys of This Blood, 245.(↩)
7.
Martin, The Keys of This Blood, 248.(↩)
8.
Martin, The Keys of This Blood, 248.(↩)
9.
Martin, The Keys of This Blood, 249.(↩)
10.
Martin, The Keys of This Blood, 250.(↩)
11.
Martin, The Keys of This Blood, 251.(↩)
12.
Martin, The Keys of This Blood, 251.(↩)
13.
Martin, The Keys of This Blood, 251.(↩)
