We recently published a story about an SDA seminarian who was touting “sacred queerness.” That same young man also asserted that Karl Marx got it “mostly right.”
What is being taught to in Adventist colleges and the seminary? Don’t they know that Karl Marx stated that religion was “the opiate of the masses,” designed to focus the lower classes on the life to come rather than on revolutionary social/political change in this life?
By the way, Marx’s assertion about religion remains a fruitful topic of Marxist study and theorizing to this day. Here is the abstract of an academic paper published two months ago by Landon Schnabel, a Stanford post-graduate:
This study considers the assertion that religion is the opiate of the masses. Using a special module of the General Social Survey, I first demonstrate that religion functions as a compensatory resource for structurally disadvantaged groups—women, racial minorities, those with lower incomes, and, to a lesser extent, sexual minorities. I then demonstrate that religion—operating as both compensatory resource and values-shaping schema—suppresses what would otherwise be larger group differences in political ideology. This study provides empirical support for the general “opiate” claim that religion is the “sigh of the oppressed creature” and suppressor of emancipatory political values. I expand and refine the theory, however, showing how religion provides (1) compensatory resources for lack of social, and not just economic, status, and (2) traditional-values-oriented schemas that, rather than just distracting people, shape their politics in accordance with the content of religious belief systems.
Again, this is from a paper published two months ago, so please don’t try to tell me that hostility to religion is not still part of Marxism.
Within a couple of days of reading about Paul-Anthony “sacred queerness” Turner and “his boy Karl,” who was “mostly right,” I happened on a column by William L. Anderson, a Christian and a professor of economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland. Anderson writes that there is little to separate Christian colleges from secular state universities where it concerns distrust of free markets:
Although there are a few Christian colleges where at least the economics faculty might look favorably upon a market economy, the hostility toward free markets is as strong at most Christian colleges as it is in the most left-wing institutions of higher learning.
In the first (and last) meeting I attended of the Association of Christian Economists in 2001, the session was dominated by a panel discussion of hard-left economists who sought to “practice shalom” in their communities in outreaches toward poor people in their area. At one point in the session, the economists all enthusiastically agreed that because of free markets, poverty in the United States had been rapidly increasing, which made it “necessary for the government to step in” with the antipoverty programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative.
That poverty rates were increasing in the USA in the post–World War II era is patently untrue, even if Christian economists swear fealty to such a belief. Indeed, poverty rates were falling rapidly long before Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and the numbers bear out that claim, but these economists stuck to the narrative that the state must forever be rescuing the poor from the hellish existence of free enterprise.
All of this might come as a surprise to people who think of evangelical Christians as being politically conservative (certainly, many, but not all, are politically conservative), and certainly evangelicals have been one of the most important and reliable political bases for the Republican Party since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. That should not be surprising given the absolutist stand by the Democratic Party on issues like gay and transgender rights and the availability of abortion on demand, issues that evangelicals who hold to the authority of the Bible deem to be important.
However, on economics, many evangelicals, while rejecting outright socialism, also have a hard time accepting free market economics and often call for a “third way” to economic life.
More than a century ago, the mainline Protestant churches began drifting toward theological liberalism and also toward the “social gospel,” a mixture of Christianity, good works, and liberal political action. The conservative or “fundamentalist” part of American Christianity reacted by re-emphasizing the spiritual nature of religion, and the precedence of internal, heart conversion over political action. But, as Anderson relates, by the 1970s, even this conservative branch of Christianity was flirting with socialism and the “social gospel”:
[T]here was a split between those who followed what Walter Rauschenbusch called the “social gospel” (from his book written in the 1890s), which emphasized secular progressivism (and later social activism) as the true path of Christianity, and those who called themselves Christian fundamentalists and chose to emphasize a spiritual side of Christianity that concentrated upon conversions to the faith. Not surprisingly, the mainstream Protestants who push the social gospel also gravitated toward progressivism and ultimately socialism, while the fundamentalists (and later the evangelicals) stayed mostly out of political and social disputes.
That would change in the early 1970s as a number of evangelicals tied to the Anabaptist movements and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship began to agitate for what they called “social action.” One of the leaders of this movement was an Eastern College history professor, Ronald Sider, who wrote Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (published by InterVarsity Press [IVP] in 1977), and the book had a major influence in evangelical circles and especially at Christian colleges, where professors quickly adopted it for their classes, and it became the best-selling book in IVP history.
Sider’s book looked at poverty in the world at that time and concluded that the only reason that Third World countries were poor was because North America and Europe were relatively wealthy. These countries were gobbling up the world’s resources unjustly and leaving nothing for the starving masses. Capitalism was the culprit, Sider argued, and while he did not agitate for outright socialism, he did call for a central power in the world to oversee massive wealth transfers, a worldwide welfare state. The book . . . presented a simple, black-and-white view of wealth and poverty; people who had wealth had stolen from the poor, and there could be no other explanation.
Sider’s central message was that unless Americans, Canadians, and Europeans gave up their wealthy lifestyles and agreed to adhere to a simple life—and stop using so many resources—poverty and starvation would expand throughout the planet and rates of poverty would accelerate. He even prophesied that unless this was done immediately, it would be maybe a decade before Third World countries like India that had nuclear weapons would use them to blackmail the West into giving up their wealth.
We know the rest of the story. [The Soviet Union collapsed; it and its satellites joined the capitalist world.] China shed its Mao straightjacket (giving lie to InterVarsity Press’s claim that Mao had performed an economic miracle there) and turned toward a market-based economy, and its poverty rates fell drastically. In fact, poverty around the globe diminished even as the world’s population increased well beyond the limits that environmentalists and doomsayers like Sider had predicted. To put it another way, most if not all of what Sider wrote in 1977 was discredited.
Even as the world became less poor, much of the evangelical world—or at least its academic side—failed to notice. In the mid-1980s, Calvin College (now Calvin University) put out a book, Responsible Technology, which read like a technocratic version of Rich Christians. In the chapter on economics, the authors presented one caricature after another and declared that economists’ tools such as incentives and marginal utility were illegitimate because, well, because people just shouldn’t act that way. As for the basic economic doctrine of scarcity, Calvin’s authors declared that scarcity was a fallacy invented by ignorant free market economists, since everyone knows God has provided the world with lots of wonderful resources.
Regarding the basic assumption of scarcity that underlies all economic thinking, I find it amusing that Christians would deny this doctrine, only because of how one of my law school professors, Lino Graglia, introduced his law students to economic theory: “We’ve been kicked out of the garden of Eden (for reason I always thought were insufficient) and so there is scarcity.”
Continuing with Anderson’s narrative:
Even in recent readings of Faith and Economics, the journal published by the Association of Christian Economists, it is like a 1970s time warp in which nothing has changed, with capitalism gobbling up the resources that should go to the poor, and so on. In the view of many Christian theologians, all economic activity is zero-sum, so any gain by one party can come about only because another party is made worse off. The notion of market exchanges making all parties better off simply is rejected out of hand. . . .
As I noted earlier, a mindset in which poverty is seen solely as a condition brought about by someone else’s wealth is not going to be able to comprehend what actually must happen for a society to grow economically and for the rates of destitution to fall. These things take place over time, and economies grow because entrepreneurs find ways to move resources from lower-valued to higher-valued uses, working within a market system directed by profits and losses. Positive change usually is gradual, and those who believe that people come out of poverty only via wealth transfers are not going to abandon their zero-sum viewpoints.
Socialism has a history littered with a hundred million corpses, and we understand in detail why it doesn’t work. And yet we are now confronted with a Marxist revolution, or civil war, which already has taken over the streets in some heavily “blue” jurisdictions like Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis.
When future historians write the history of the civil war now in its early stages, one thing they’ll easily be able to agree on is where the ideology that drove it was incubated and grown to monstrous proportions: the American academy. We have a terrible problem with higher education in the United States, and it is not limited to secular, non-Christian colleges.
Christians ought to know better. Socialism is a moral issue. It is a sin, an intellectual form of idolatry. It is based upon envy, covetousness, theft, force, the ultimately the threat of murder, to which every socialist country has quickly resorted. Socialism is a form of utopian thinking, and utopianism is a repudiation of the Christian worldview, which explains the world’s imperfection, and scarcity, by reference to the Fall and the pervasiveness of sin. It was no accident that Marx pronounced religion the opiate of the masses; Christianity and Marxism are two separate and mutually exclusive ways of viewing the world.
Christian colleges can and must do better.
Portions of William Anderson’s column are used by permission of The Mises Institute, where it was originally published.