Do Christians Perpetuate Myths Around Marxism?

Western civilization is rapidly changing. Hostility against Christians is escalating amidst a firestorm of social issues. Many of these issues, from cancel culture to critical theories to attacks on the family, arise from a false gospel rooted in Marxism. This false gospel saturates today’s culture, classrooms, and even churches. How can Christians understand and respond to these issues from a biblical foundation? That’s the question which led to my new book, Modern Marxism: A Guide for Christians in a Woke New World.

When Christian resources address neo-Marxism through a biblical lens, a few common objections are bound to follow. Quick answers to nine of these objections are available in Appendix B of Modern Marxism, as well as in this blog series. While these answers are not exhaustive, the goal is to portray each objection briefly but accurately, sketching a reasoned response in biblical gentleness.

Please join me in praying that God would use Answers in Genesis’ new resources about Marxism to equip believers, advance the truth, and draw people to himself through the gospel.

Happy reading!

Patricia

(P.S.: If you’d like an easy-to-share overview of some key points from Modern Marxism, a 60-minute video presentation is available here.)

Objection 1: “Social Marxism is a conspiracy theory.”

Claim:

The idea that neo-Marxist movements and thinkers infiltrated Western social institutions to promote a “cultural revolution” is a conspiracy theory. Sure, institutions like the Frankfurt School may have drawn from some aspects of Marx’s thinking, but reports of neo-Marxism’s contemporary influence have been greatly exaggerated.

Quick answer:

In order to say whether neo-Marxism’s influence is a conspiracy theory, we first need to ask, “What is a conspiracy theory?” The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines conspiracy theory as “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.”1 This definition raises the question, “What does ‘theory’ mean?”

In science, a theory is a broad explanation shown to be consistent with vast quantities of experimental data.2 But when it comes to conspiracy theories, we usually mean theory in the sense of what the Merriam-Webster dictionary calls “an unproved assumption” or “conjecture.”3 So, a key step in identifying, evaluating, and responding to potential conspiracy theories is separating fact from conjecture.4

In this case, is the influence of neo-Marxism in Western societies an unproven assumption or conjecture? People do at times make unproven or exaggerated conjectures about topics related to neo-Marxism. For communication purposes, such speculation tends to be unhelpful and unnecessary. This book steers clear of unproven conjectures by striving to provide careful documentation wherever applicable, emphasizing a reliance on primary sources, and avoiding unsubstantiated sweeping speculations. The details presented here about the rise and reign of neo-Marxism in today’s culture are not speculative theory, but readily verifiable data.

Objection 2: “Neo-Marxism isn’t really Marxism.”

Claim:

This book isn’t really about Marxism. Neo-Marxists like the Frankfurt School thinkers not only critiqued Karl Marx, but also held fundamentally different views from “classical” Marxism. For instance, Marx primarily focused on economics, emphasized material conditions over ideas as the forces that drive history, and believed in economic determinism. He thought socioeconomic conditions set a predetermined course for history, which must result in workers’ revolutions that create communist societies. To abandon these concepts is to abandon Marxism. The neo-Marxists shared none of these core beliefs, and even criticized communist societies which tried to implement classical Marxism.

Quick answer:

As chapters two and five unpack, it’s true that twentieth-century neo-Marxists generally rejected Marx’s economic determinism. They returned to emphasizing the importance of not just outward material conditions, but also inward ideas, emotions, and mental processes. And they often (though not always5) critiqued hard totalitarian communism. Neo-Marxists also tended to blend Marx’s ideas with those of other thinkers, such as Sigmund Freud.

Although the neo-Marxists recognized the problems with some of Marx's core economic assumptions, they kept many of his faulty worldview beliefs.6 For instance, the neo-Marxists reapplied Marx’s basic ideas that:

• History is the story of class conflict between oppressors vs. the oppressed.
• The present form of society is inherently oppressive.
• Humanity’s hope lies in some form of reorganized society.
• The oppressed must actively work to bring about this new social order.

While it’s important to recognize that neo-Marxism isn’t identical to classical Marxism, it’s also important to recognize the ways neo-Marxism shares basic tenets with—and historically stems from—Marx’s worldview.

You might say that Marxists and neo-Marxists ultimately view society through the same “conflict-tinted” binoculars. These binoculars color everyone as either a powerful oppressor or a disempowered victim, and everything as either sustaining or reversing this power imbalance. Marx had “zoomed in” his binoculars to focus on conflict between economic classes—specifically, oppressive business owners vs. oppressed workers. Neo-Marxists picked up the same binoculars and widened the field of focus to encompass conflict between additional groups, such as men vs. women, “white” vs. “colored,” and colonialist vs. indigenous.

This zoomed-out focus helps explain the main differences between Marx and neo-Marxists. Namely, the neo-Marxists no longer needed to describe history solely in Marx’s narrow terms of materialistic economic determinism. But the neo-Marxists still used Marx’s binoculars. Despite their differences with Marx, neo-Marxists, including Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School founders, expressly based their beliefs on reformulations of Marx’s thinking.