SJWs — Social Justice Warriors — are essentially cultural Marxists masquerading as advocates for the oppressed. They would use the arm of the state to achieve their goals.
A pastor friend of mine recently harped on how he thinks that people in the Church who preach “dominion” are dangerous. They are the “deep state” in the Church. I had to explain that there are true forms and counterfeits in all expressions of Christianity.
Christian Reconstruction in its true form teaches regeneration of the individual first and then the leavening of society through Christian families, churches, and then the civil sphere fourth. So it is all voluntary each step of the way. Obviously, we believe that man’s laws ought not conflict with God’s laws. We avoid the extreme of anarchy while recognizing that someone has got to rule inevitably. That is, we will have either God’s law or man’s law as our civil code. But that’s not to say that the law can be enforced from the top down to create a Christian society.
So what does this have to do with “Social Justice Warriors”?
In the secular branch of this movement, the SJWs are cultural Marxists, who believe much like political Marxists. They identify an oppressor class and an oppressed class. Then they “call out” the oppressors making a big show that they need to corporately repent for past sins against minorities, gays, women, the poor, and so on. Most often the oppressors are religious and political conservatives.
I’m a straight white male, so I am made to feel that I’m an oppressor. And everyone who is not like me is my victim because at one time —- even if it was a century ago — they were oppressed by someone like me.
Unfortunately, this thinking has infected the churches. The Southern Baptist Convention and even many Reformed pastors who make up the The Gospel Coalition are full of SJWs largely because their movements largely abandoned a covenantal worldview back in the 1920s during the Fundamentalist movement.
Fundamentalism was birthed out of pietistic dispensationalism, which does not confront wickedness in our culture. By the time evil had taken strong root, the dispensationalists had already been preaching for 100 years that the rapture was soon to come, followed soon afterward by the rule of the Antichrist. “So why polish brass on a sinking ship?” Now almost 200 years after dispensationalism was first devised, and 100 years after it gained popularity, pessimism about reforming the society has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Evil has become entrenched due to Christians’ inaction. Yet Jesus has not rescued the Church by catching the faithful up to heaven. Now those who lack a full-orbed Gospel worldview are scrambling to find a biblical response that still fits their pietistic feel-goody, do-goody, God-loves-everyone-equally theology.
Instead of re-embracing the covenantal Gospel-for-all-of-life worldview that was prevalent for about 250 years after the Reformation, they have embraced a form of cultural Marxism that would ultimately use the strong arm of the state to enforce “equality” and “justice.” It has an appeal due to the use of catchy jargon and slogans that mimic biblical concepts. Of course, these terms are stripped of their Christian meanings. Think of George Orwell’s “Newspeak” in his novel 1984 and you’ll get the picture.
I’ve seen this for years in the form of postmodernism (sometimes called post-structuralism). I never really got the political connection between postmodernism, SJW and cultural Marxism until a few years ago. They are essentially three different faces of the same monstrous regiment. It shows up in people who ought to know better and is very destructive to Christian relationships in families, communities and churches.
The culture of this collectivist “group-think” often emerges in social media groups. You are either an oppressor of their group or a victim. Even if you have never been personally abusive toward anyone, you will be treated as though you are the oppressor class if you identify with one aspect or idea held by the oppressors. Does that sound familiar? If so, it shows how far cultural Marxism has infected your social circle.
This is how Marxists historically have treated their opponents. First, they find someone in power or influence who has said or done something that they can tar with the oppressor broad brush. In modern cultural Marxism, they are “sexist,” “racist,” “homophobic,” “xenophoic,” “misogynist,” “patriarchalist,” and so on. Second, they vilify this person or group by whipping their followers into a frenzy. In the 1960s, the radicals could do it mainly through direct action protests. They also took control of the media and educational institutions. Today, social media makes it much easier and quicker. It could be through Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Rather than taking months, years or even decades — the short-term goals of dividing and conquering can take only days or weeks. Then once reputations are sufficiently destroyed, they move on to the next target. Sometimes the oppressor identification algorithms of these platforms can shut down their target’s voice and livelihood automatically.
The SJW mentality is insidious and has a way of creeping into our thinking even as Christians. It is seductive because it uses catchy jargon and slogans that mimic biblical language. But it is a counterfeit. It never creates true justice. For example, this way of thinking will never end abortion as a form of child murder. Instead it perpetuates the idea that pro-life activists are the villains due to their “intolerance” and “judgmentalism.” They create a victim mentality toward the wrong people — the abortionists and aborting parents — rather than the preborn child who is the true victim.
I’ve seen this for many years. I call it Christian postmodernism in a book I wrote. Christian postmodernists actually exist under that name, although the term itself is an oxymoron. Until recently, I did not understand that it is a political strategy that had been introduced into our culture back in the 1960s through Marxists in order to undermine Christianity and traditional morality in order to make our thinking more ready for international communism. The cultural Marxists specifically chose words like “compassion,” “justice,” “tolerance,” and “equality” because they knew Christians already agreed with this. Who would not? However, the bad fruit of all of this can be easily and instantly seen — strife, injustice, intolerance, inequality. But the thing to remember is that these virtues are not really the goals of cultural Marxism. The goal is to make Christians susceptible to socialistic control by the state and ultimately replace religion with a government that provides all our needs — a god walking on earth.
So these SJWs in the Church are what the Marxists would consider “useful idiots” in the cause of worldwide communist revolution.
And no, I am not calling Christian leaders who participate in “Social Justice” causes Marxists or communists. There are a lot of self-conscious socialists among the SJWs, but not all are aware of the end goal. This is especially insidious because Christians can fall into this way of thinking without being conscious of it.
So it is the SJWs who might rightly be called the “deep state” in the Church. Their counterfeit idea of equality and social justice emerges in churches who have shirked their true biblical responsibility to be salt and light in the society. The good news is that it’s possible to defeat this counterfeit suddenly and powerfully now that more Christians are becoming aware similarities between this movement with the end goals of Marxism.
Strangely, the anarcho-libertarian branch of the Christian Reconstructionist movement has a small but vocal group of Social Justice Warriors. They like to claim that “cultural Marxism” is actually an oxymoron. For example, Christian economist Gary North explains that cultural Marxism is not true Marxism.
[Antonio] Gramsci argued, and the Frankfurt School followed his lead, that the way for Marxists to transform the West was through cultural revolution: the idea of cultural relativism. The argument was correct, but the argument was not Marxist. The argument was Hegelian. It meant turning Marxism on its head, just as Marx had turned Hegel on his head. The idea of Marxism in the earliest days was based on a rejection of the spiritual side of Hegelianism.
North is correct in his strict definition of Marxism. Cultural Marxism is a spin on liberation theology and is not classic Marxism. First, it is not atheistic. Second, it is Malthusian. The Malthusian theory was supported by many people in the 19th-century. But as a sociologist, Karl Marx claimed that poverty and hunger was a result of the capitalist economy, not population growth. Marx actually understood capitalism better than most capitalists. He wanted to use capitalist principles by turning them around to favor the socialist worker. Ironically, modern day socialists are actually Malthusian and don’t understand how an economy really works. We hear nonsense about the government “creating jobs” and taxation through big government “stimulating the economy.”
Cultural Marxism is a hollow promise. Instead of using the “political struggle” as the fulcrum to achieve communism, they use racial politics and guilt manipulation. For a more thorough refutation of their ideas, David Chilton wrote a book called Productive Christians in and Age of Guilt Manipulators refuting Ron Sider’s neo-Marxist work, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.
The danger is that although neither Marxism nor SJW are viable in the long term, the “social justice” system results in something not sustainable even for a time. It is always DOA. Consequently, it can do greater harm to a society in a shorter period of time as we have ever seen before. To use a Venezuelan expression, Christians who fall into the SJW trap are “as dangerous as a monkey with a razor blade.”
