A lot of Evangelical Christians are a bit like Revolutionary Marxists
No, seriously. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for absolutely ages.
See, in the past couple of years, thanks to that internet they have there, I’ve had the opportunity to converse with a number of fellas who would describe themselves as Marxists, and I observed attitudes and behaviour I’d previously - rather naïvely, perhaps - thought unique to Christians. Of course, the things most Marxists and most Christians believe are very different. They’re not wholly incompatible, of course, but they’re actually about different things. But that’s beside the point.
It’s not what they believe that’s so similar; it’s the way they believe it. And there’s a lot of similarities in their approach.
1. There is No Salvation Apart From Us
Communists and Marxist-types in general have this really strong “Either you’re with us or against us” vibe. If you don’t see the worth of the Revolution, you’re out. Damned. First against the wall. It gets worse, though. There’s in-fighting. Terms like “Bolshevik” and “Menshevik”1 get chucked around like swear words, and to be honest, you get the real impression that - despite occasional cries for solidarity and unity - if there’s going to be a Revolution, it’s only going to be us and not them.
Compare with your conservative Christians (like your ultra-conservative UCCF types, or your Metropolitan Tabernacle types): they don’t just think that if you’re not a Christian, you’re damned forever. They think that if you’re the wrong kind of Christian, you’re damned forever. Catholics? Liberal Protestants? Orthodox? Not actually Christian, then - damned like the rest of the heathens.
2. The World Is Worthless
And if everyone who’s Not With Us is damned, then that means that nothing good can come out of the world. So your ultra-conservatives retreat into a kind of ghetto where they only listen to Christian music and read crappy Christian novels (you know what I’m talking about2), and adopt that whole “This World Is Not My Home” philosophy. The very phrase “The World”3 is a kind of Christian shorthand for “all the bad stuff that’s out there”.
Meanwhile, for the Marxist, as long as the System’s in place, as long as Capitalism is still in control, then no development is worthwhile, no news is good. So when I got pleased that Gordon Brown’s4 new government had shut down DESO, several of my Marxist acquaintances basically just said “so what? System’s still in place. Doesn’t change a damn thing.”
It doesn’t matter if minorities get better rights: the System’s still in place. It doesn’t matter if the international arms trade gets reduced a bit: the System’s still in place. It’s all or nothing. There is no middle ground, no hope in small victories.
3. Compromise Is A Really Bad Thing
Which brings us to this.
In my CU days, the worst thing you could ever do was “compromise”. It was the ultimate sin, the thin end of the Wedge of Hell.
And it’s the same with your Communists. There’s no compromise, no “watering down”. You don’t work with organisations who are in cahoots with the System.
4. Don’t Listen To Them, They’re Dirty Splitters
Man, are evangelical protestants fissive or what? They break up into new groups at the slightest provocation.
Now ask a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain about the Socialist Workers Party. Or any of the other parties they have there5. And there are a lot of them.
5. The Whole World Works Like We Say It Does (Even The Parts That Don’t)
The Bible is a book that deals with human experience, specifically human experience as it relates to God and how that relates to the ancient history and more ancient legendry of the Middle East. There are things it doesn’t cover. Like TV. Or a lot of the vagaries of modern living. Or biology. Or geology. Or half as much ancient history as people think it does, to be honest.
But a lot of us Christians shoe-horn every damn thing into it, forcing the world to conform in every respect, in all its messiness and complexity, with the principles found in those sixty-six books of divine wisdom6, even when it doesn’t. Even when it can’t. It’s not an ancient history textbook. It’s not a biology textbook. it’s not for that stuff. it’s not about that stuff.
In the same way, Marxist methodology, which is based upon Marx’s ideas about society and money and poverty and exploitation and all that gets wheeled out to deal with stuff that it’s not for.
A Marxist said to me (while discussing a pop song in erudite Marxist terms7) that it wasn’t about doctrine, it was about methodology, an approach to things. But that’s precisely the point - it’s a pair of glasses through which one views the world.
You decide you’re going to see the world in this way, and so the world looks that way to you. We all do that, to an extent, but it’s your revolutionary Marxists and your conservative Christians who make a conscious virtue of it.
6. We’re Working Towards Our Own Version Of The Apocalypse
So a friend told me once that he flirted with the revolutionary socialists when he was younger, until the day he went to a meeting where someone asked about social problems like, you know, alcoholism, and what a post-Revolutionary state would do about that stuff, and someone said that after the Revolution, no one would be alcoholic, because they’d have Marxism and they’d all be happy and not need alcohol. Which is nonsense, but demonstrates how the revolutionary mindset works.
After the Revolution, it’ll all be perfect. Apart from all the people who have to die.
Which is, of course like the coming of the Kingdom (or, in some churches, Revival!8 — but that’s about the same thing as a revolution, really)
That’s really it. There isn’t really any agenda here9 as such, nor am I setting out to annoy people10. I just thought it was interesting, is all.
Besides, it means I get to have footnotes.
Footnotes:
1 I always had a lot of time for the Mensheviks, actually, on the grounds that they weren’t actually a bunch of psychopaths like Lenin’s crowd patently were.
2 For next January’s issue of Movement, which is, of course, the Hell Issue, I’ve charged one unfortunate student with reading the entire Left Behind series (or as much of it as she can manage) back to back over the space of forty days and writing a diary about her feelings. I wonder how she’s doing. I wonder if she’s started yet. I wonder — if she has — if she’s lost the will to live yet.
3 It’s always said with Implied Capital Letters and a brief — but still pregnant — pause preceding it.
4 I still keep hearing that Stranglers song whenever he comes up in conversation: Gordon Brown/ Texture like sun etc.
5 Blah blah blah Life of Brian blah blah blah People’s Front of Judea blah blah blah. Happy now?
6 Also, a lot of Very Strange and Frightening and sometimes even Gory Things, but that’s not the point.
7 You really had to be there. Honestly. It was interesting. No, it was. Honest.
8 Said with implied capital “R” and exclamation mark. Always.
9 For a change.
10 Oh, who am I trying to kid? The chance to say something calculated to annoy both the Christians and the Commies? Yeah, I’ll take it.
August 8th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Absolutely, I agree with you. It’ll be a toss-up between evangelical Christians and Commies as to who goes up against the wall first, come the Revolution(!). Preach on, Comrade.
(And despite the sarcastic tone of my comment, I do think you’ve hit a rarely-discussed nail bang on the noggin.)
August 8th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
As a member of the RSECPF (Revolutionary Socialist Evangelical Christian People’s Front) it is CLEAR that you are in league with both Old Scratch and the most extreme of the right wing.
I mock and scoff your pathetic attempts to sow division.
Now please excuse me while I go denounce myself.
August 8th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
i had a very interesting conversation once with a friend of mine who was a former so*****st w**k*r about her experiences of leaving, and we compared and contrasted with the christian organisation i worked for for a short time 6 years ago and left because it was sort of bordering on cult-like and manipulative - in my opinion. Our experiences were eerily similar - I think it’s the same in for anything that is effectively a proslytising (ok, sp, i know) body - if you see others (ie outsiders - not just those in a different ball park but even those of the same ball park who are in a different gang) as the enemy and an overarching system (’the rest of everything’) as the problem, you are likely to be defensive and justify your entrenched position with the claim that everything that doesn’t match your perspective is antagonistic to the wider thing - ie christianity or socialism - without recognising that the slice of christianity or socialism to which you adhere is simply a slice in the spectrum, not the totality of understandings of it.
that’s my dirty liberal side. also, post-leaving, you know the script too as you’ve heard it said about others - they can slag you off as ‘disappointing’ and ’she just didn’t engage with the vision’ or ’she really never quite understood’ when you go. No, I did understand. Er, that is why I left the job. 6 years on and it still makes me shudder…!!!
So, yes, I agree.
August 8th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
I understand completely.
It may be apparent to you that I’ve been on something of a journey these last few years.
August 8th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
A fine post which is something I have often debated with my marxist chums. When they rail against religion I tend to respond along the above lines, have finished an intriguing book about the failure of marxism and liberation theology which was rather interesting.
Anyway, shall link to your post from my blog.
Warm Regards
John
August 8th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Thanks, John. I’ve blogrolled you (which I should have done a ways back).
In other news, it’s occurred to me (having re-read Chalky’s comment) that I forgot a seventh point: Lovebombing. I trust you know what I’m talking about here.
August 8th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
There are definitely sociological similarities between fringe religions and fringe political groups; someone should do academic research on this and make their fortune.
That said, any of the people I know in the Swimmers at the moment are relatively normal, though one of them has complained about the party’s open door policy to the mentally ill.
On the Mensheviks - it’s easy to get people to think you are not psychos when you are LuSoRs.
August 9th, 2007 at 3:26 am
Whenever I go with Bob to his socialist / activist meetings, I always get the feeling I’m suspected of being a mole for the petty bourgeoisie.
August 9th, 2007 at 4:10 am
[...] Wood, a Christian, at The John Heron Project. These are his main points, read the whole thing! (my comments are in italics,) It’s not what they believe that’s so similar; it’s the way [...]
August 9th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Perhaps the word you’re looking for is “cult.” Though often misused, this little word represents much of what you describe: strict orthodoxy with some form of enforcement, isolation from others, apocalyptic vision. What’s more, it can apply not only to religious groups, but to “civil religion” as well.
And yes, I would describe Marxism, as practiced by many of its adherents, as nothing less than a religion. As any Buddhist can affirm, a religion need not be focused on God.
August 9th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Is it not more accurate to describe religion as a subset of ideology, rather than ideologies as religions?
As for the question of the word “cult”, the term’s so loaded that it’s impossible to use it without some sort of prejudice creeping in. I mean, I know exactly what you mean. But there’s got to be a better word.
August 10th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Blogrolled always sounds like something to do with the toilet really. Anyway the book I was talking about was
Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology, published by SCM Press circa1990. it looks at how the abandonment of marxism is the reason liberation theology has failed. But it takes it much further than this as well looking at how ideas such as secularisation have ensured the authors view that liberation theology doesn’t cut the mustard any more.
I don’t fully agree with the author but good stimulating reading, and a nice mish mashing of the marxian critique of, as well as Christian living out of, concepts of religion and religious practice.
Regards
John
August 11th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
[...] So says Wood. And I agree with him. [...]
August 13th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Good stuff. Actually, this similarity was one of the things that first made me question conservative Christianity. I remember the socialist worker guy from Swansea Uni standing there trying to bring on the revolution one leaflet at a time and thinking, ‘We do exactly the same thing, and it’s pointless, outdated. Surely God does not want us to live like this.’
I particularly agree with the shared practice of shoehorning every last inconvenient fact into a simplistic worldview.
December 27th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
[...] are the bullet points, read the whole thing. 1. There is no salvation apart from [...]