(This is PART ONE, PART 1.6 and PART 2 are in those links)
This is from Church Militant, and while they focus on anti-Catholicism, one should mind that many of the cultural Marxist positions are in fact just anti-Judeo-Christian… I will follow their excellent video with some Carol Swain.
Here is a 2019 C-PAC interview of Carol Swain and her thoughts on Cultural Marxism.
Identity politics has done little to resolve the grievances of minorities in the United States. Rather a group of individuals is pushing socialist policy to manipulate people for political power. Carol Swain, a political scientist, author, and political commentator, explains the cultural Marxist roots of identity politics, and the harm it has caused black Americans, in a recent interview with The Epoch Times, noting “this socialism that’s on display now, it’s been underground for a long time.”
In taking classes at seminary, one of my professors was Ray D. Arnold… he was one of the 1,000 missionaries that General MacArthur called to go to Japan at the conclusion of WWII. One blog notes this about the endeavor:
- Perhaps General MacArthur didn’t succeed in bringing Christianity to Japan in the institutional sense. But he did bring mercy, forgiveness and respect for human dignity–the heart of Christianity–and these the Japanese graciously accepted.
All that to say, taking his classes he used material that was older, and this excerpt expands Dr. Swain’s mention of the churches being impacted by cultural Marxism (social-justice):
As Dr. Carl F. H. Henry pointed out: “The Chicago evangelicals, while seeking to overcome the polarization of concern in terms of personal evangelism or social ethics, also transcended the neoProtestant nullification of the Great Commission.” “The Chicago Declaration did not leap from a vision of social utopia to legislation specifics, but concentrated first on biblical priorities for social change.” “The Chicago evangelicals did not ignore transcendent aspects of God’s Kingdom, nor did they turn the recognition of these elements into a rationalization of a theology of revolutionary violence or of pacifistic neutrality in the face of blatant militarist aggression.” (Cf. Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, “Evangelical Social Concern” Christianity Today, March 1, 1974.) The evangelical social concern is transcendental not merely horizontal.
We must make it clear that the true revolutionaries are different from the frauds who “deal only with surface phenomena. They seek to remove a deep-seated tumor from society by applying a plaster to the surface. The world’s deepest need today is not something that merely dulls the pain, but something that goes deep in order to change the basic unity of society, man himself. Only when men individually have experienced a change and reorientation, can society be redirected in the way it should go. This we cannot accomplish by either violence or legislation” (cf. Reid: op. cit.). Social actions, without a vertical and transcendental relation with God only create horizontal anxieties and perplexities!
Furthermore, the social activists are in fact ignorant of the social issues, they are not experts in the social sciences. They simply demand an immediate change or destruction of the social structures, but provide no blueprint of the new society whatsoever! They can be likened to the fool, as a Chinese story tells, who tried to help the plant grow faster by pulling it higher. Of course such “action” only caused the plant to wither and die. This is exactly what the social radicals are doing now! And the W.C.C. is supporting such a tragic course!
We must challenge them [secular social activists] to discern the difference between the true repentance and “social repentance.” The Bible says: “For the godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret; but worldly grief produces death” (II Cor. 7:10). This was the bitter experiences of many former Russian Marxists, who, after their conversion to Christ came to understand that they had only a sort of “social repentance”—a sense of guilt before the peasant and the proletariat, but not before God. They admitted that “A Russian (Marxist) intellectual as an individual is often a mild and loving creature, but his creed (Marxism) constrains him to hate” (cf. Nicolas Zernov: The Russian Religious Renaissance). “As it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one…. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:10,23). A complete change of a society must come from man himself, for basically man is at enmity with God. All humanistic social, economic and political systems are but “cut flowers,” as Dr. Trueblood put it, even the best are only dim reflections of the Glory of the Kingdom of God. As Benjamin Franklin in his famous address to the Constitutional Convention, said, “Without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.” Without reconciliation with God, there is no reconciliation with man. Social action is not evangelism; political liberation is not salvation. While we shall by all means have deep concern on social issues; nevertheless, social activism shall never be a substitution for the Gospel.
Lit-sen Chang, The True Gospel vs. Social Activism, (booklet. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co: 1976), 9.
Dr. Arnold’s classes ended up being my favorite… his background in the missions and apologetics of responding to Eastern thought were very impactful. CONTINUING… more from Dr. Swain:
Did you know that the Democratic Party defended slavery, started the Civil War, founded the KKK, and fought against every major civil rights act in U.S. history? Watch as Carol Swain, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, shares the inconvenient history of the Democratic Party.
She also talks about the “PARTY SWITCHING MYTH” I have much more on that in my post here: “Did The Party’s Switch?” And so, we see this is the same all throughout the Left’s history:
- “…virtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat.” ~ Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), ix;
- “…not every Democrat was a KKK’er, but every KKK’er was a Democrat.” ~ Ann Coulter, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (New York, NY: Sentinel [Penguin], 2012), 19.
The south used to vote Democrat. Now it votes Republican. Why the switch? Was it, as some people say, because the GOP decided to appeal to racist whites? Carol Swain, Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, explains.
It was not until the Republican Revolution of 1994 that for the first time in modern American History the Republicans held a majority of Southern congressional seats, a full three decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the South became less racist, it became more Republican (NATIONAL REVIEW).
We should round out the above with this longer presentation by Larry Elder:
As part of CCA III: The Sixties, Larry Elder, host of The Larry Elder Show, gives a lecture at Hillsdale College on the development of the Civil Rights Movement.
