What is this madness?
Since the 1960s there has been a subtle infiltration of ungodliness into Western society. It is time Christians woke up to it.
Back in September, I wrote of the ‘enemy within’, the subtle influence of what is called ‘Cultural Marxism’ in our culture, with the express objective of wrenching Western society away from its JudeoChristian roots, particularly targeting the structures of the traditional family. You can remind yourself of this article here 1.
So here we have an atheistic Marxist plan to strike at the heart of the JudeoChristian structures of society and, amazingly, they seem to have succeeded so far and we ask why nobody saw it coming? Perhaps being ‘hidden in plain sight’ made it possible for them to operate just below the surface of what seemed to be fairly predictable historical processes. It is easy to look at the counter-culture of the 1960s just as a venting of a generation spared the horrors of war with too much money to spend and too much energy to expend. It is beyond belief that this could have been a Marxist manipulation, orchestrated mainly by the thoughts and deeds of a collection of German Jewish academics. Being unbelievable doesn’t make it impossible, though.
But we can’t wish it away and the best we can do, as Christians, is try to understand what we have before us and what the Bible may have to teach us to understand it better. If we look beyond
the ‘victim culture’ that seems to be the preferred mechanism of Cultural Marxism we need to see the ‘big picture’ the ultimate aim of a Marxist state. Apparently there are three aims:
To abolish the injustices of a class system
All people should be equal
Ownership of the means of production and land should be by the state, who will administer it fairly for all.
It’s all an unrealistic pipe-dream and every country that has adopted Marxism/Communism has failed to implement any of these goals for the simple reason that human beings are incapable of creating a fair society.In fact two of the most evil regimes in history, who have killed more of their own people than any other, are Stalinist Russia and the China of Mao Tse Tung, both “communist states”. In both cases you ended up with the State controlling everything but not for the benefit of the people, but rather for those at the top of the pyramid, in a totalitarian state. The class system became even more unjust than before and no-one was equal, apart from the 99% who were equal in their poverty.
So is this where Cultural Marxism is leading? I think not, as the only aspect of Karl Marx’s original ideas that they wish to implement is for the State to control the lives of the population. This is not for the good of the population, but rather because, whether they realise it or not (and most don’t as they are atheists), the whole system is nothing more than a rebellion against God.
Rebels … with a cause!
We open our Bibles to Genesis 11 to the first generations of the rebooted family of man, descendants of the godly Noah and his sons. The impression is that the whole of mankind was living together as a single group. One thing was sure, and that is, it wasn’t a situation that God was happy with, particularly when they planned to build a city, with a tower that “reached to the heavens” in an attempt to make a name for ourselves. It seemed that they were intent, as a group, to invade God’s territory, to take an initiative that clearly wasn’t part of God’s plan. In short, they were in rebellion. Proof of this attitude comes from the name of the King who supposedly was supervising these efforts, Nimrod. He was the great grandson of Noah and his name translates as ‘rebellion’. Here’s what happened next:
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” (Genesis 11:5-7)
So it seemed that God had originally allowed them to communicate with a single language, giving opportunity (after the flood) for humanity to become, quite literally, one [global] nation under God. That this was refused demonstrates the basic inability of mankind to behave itself. God simply couldn’t trust them. Living as a single State inclined them towards rebellion towards their Maker, so God had to thwart them by confusing their language.
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. (Genesis 11:8-9)
A sinister purpose
So they were scattered and we have the Birth of Nations. Globalism is not God’s preference whether then or now. The basic rebellion in the human heart remains and the result of globalism – surely the goal of Marxism– is rebellion against God on a grand scale. We can only be trusted in smaller groupings, albeit nations, territories, regions or city States. Yet, even then, we are not totally to be trusted. This may be better than a Global state but it’s still not the best arrangement. In fact, mankind has yet to find the best way of ruling itself, and we look forward to the only way, a true theocracy, when Jesus rules from Jerusalem in the Millennium. In the meantime we live with the inadequacies of democracies or dictatorships, totally dependent on the moral character of those we choose to rule over us. This is why there can never be a Marxist state. It may look good on paper but we are simply not capable of running it. So our conclusion must be that if anyone is edging us closer to an approximation of a Marxist state, it certainly is not God!
Cultural Marxism is driven by the creation and policing of a set of random values that have no grounding in truth and are designed to cause conflict and division, with the two aims of whittling away of individualism and the growing in dominance of State control. Call me crazy or a scaremonger, but that summary seems to be an accurate pointer as to where things will go if current momentum runs unchecked.
Cultural Marxism is a system which insists that our society is divided into the oppressors and the oppressed. Those cementedinto the first group are those clinging onto a Judeo-Christian framework, particularly white, male Christians (with Jews – particularly those living in or supporting Israel lumped in as honorary oppressors). Those being continuously added to the second group are those who may have been oppressed (admittedly) in the past and are being encouraged to rise up and fight back (shades of ‘workers of the World unite’). There is a third group of those currently in neither group, but the cleverness of Cultural Marxism is that they should live in continual fear of being added to the first group, perhaps through a word spoken in jest, or an inadvisable action or attitude expressed, or any ‘perceived sin’ against the ‘oppressed’.
It’s a ‘Greek’ thing…
As I said before, this is all an artificial construct. It’s not that some groups are not oppressed, but society now has inbuilt controls to protect these people. Instead we have the relativism of postmodern thinking to create little ‘galaxies’ within our ‘cultural universe’, where ‘truth’ is whatever suits that particular group. It’s a denial, of course, of absolute truth and so, as Christians, we can see exactly where this is going.
Strangely enough (though not so for those of you who have read my earlier books) it all goes back to our friends, the Greek philosophersPlatoand Aristotle, particularly the latter. Aristotlespoke of the possibility of many truths, each depending on the “nature”, or feelings, or emotional state of the truth-seeker. For him there was no single truth about anything, but many interpretations of the truth depending on your viewpoint. This may be a simplistic explanation but one can now see how post-modern thinking has fed into this tradition, where your truth may be right for you, my truth is right for me … and never the ‘twain shall meet.
The Truth … and nothing but
Of course we know this to be false, because we follow God’s Word, not the musings of an ancient pagan philosopher, however clever he was. At the centre of our thinking is this simple yet profound statement:
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)
It doesn’t get any clearer … or confusing … than that. Jesus is the truth. What does that mean? At the most basic level it compels us to learn more about what Jesus said and did and take that as our benchmark. Rather than following a set of rules, such as the Ten Commandments, we see, through the life of Jesus, these rules in action, with practical examples that we can apply to our own lives.
So we can now see the conflict between the traditional Christian view that has driven our Western society until around the 1960s and the “progressive” view of the Cultural Marxists that is waging a covert war for hearts and minds. It is a war centred on that age-old question, asked by Pontius Pilate, when faced by that angry manipulated mob in Jerusalem: “What is truth?”
So you should now have a good idea of the scale of the problem, if you indeed see it as a problem. For Christians … this is just the beginning of the story. In the next issue, we will examine how we can adapt our witness to this sinister masterplan.
This article is an abridged extract of Steve’s next book, Into the Lion’s Den,available in March 2018