Neoliberalism and Postmodernism

Between WWII and the end of the Cold War in the 1980’s both conservatism and liberalism would be dramatically redefined to be hardly recognizable. Determining which changed the most is a difficult question to definitively answer but the changes on the left were probably more obvious. For example:

A liberal in 1960 was anti-war and opposed imperialism while a liberal in 2000 was a globalist
A liberal in 1960 was a civil libertarian while a liberal by 2000 would attempt to censor speech and silence their opposition
A liberal in 1960 supported labor while a liberal by 2000 accepted policies resulting in deindustrialization

Tucker Carlson humorously noted this subtle shift in his book “Ship of Fools”

In retrospect it was important to have sincere liberals around. Someone needs to fret about the excesses of capitalism. When liberals stopped doing that, the country lost a needed counterbalance. In an ecosystem, every species has a role to play, even the pests. If you succeeded in eliminating the mosquitos, birds would starve.

When the last liberal stopped sobbing about unfairness, American society became less fair.

It’s hard to know exactly when this happened, though it became obvious during the tech boom of the 1990s. That’s the first time I remember wondering why liberals weren’t complaining about big business. Until then, whining about corporate power had been the soundtrack of the left. Businessmen were bad; the more successful, the more sinister. For one hundred years, from the Progressive era to the second Clinton administration, liberals never ceased making that point.

And then one day they stopped. I remember picking up Newsweek and seeing America’s new corporate chieftains described as heroes. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the Google guys—nobody was accusing them of exploiting workers or getting too rich. Just the opposite. Liberals were celebrating their wealth and assuring us their products would liberate the world. Conservatives didn’t complain. They’d always celebrated business. Suddenly both sides were aligned on the virtues of unrestrained market capitalism. (1 pp. 24-5)

These changes all started with a fundamental shift in the philosophical basis of liberalism

Liberalism and the Church Part Ways

Theological and political conservatism did make a comeback following the war, however conservative movements along with their leadership frequently lacked any real philosophical grounding and, therefore adopted or accepted positions that ran contrary to their Christian and constitutional heritage (2 p. 281). While temporarily sidelined, theological and political progressives readied for battle. The Federal Council of Churches was replaced with the National Council of Churches of Christ in America that was intended to be better organized to support progressive political action and was a form of Christian collectivism intended to bind together all major and some minor denominations (2 p. 284). Long time social gospel activist and editor of the Christian Century, Charles Clayton Morrison wrote describing the progressive view of Protestantism at the time saying, “Protestantism had not learned to live in the modern world. It has carried over from the era of individualism its structure of organization and its simple procedures that seemed appropriate to them. Everything around it had changed, the whole structure and psychology of society, but Protestantism proceeds as if it were still living in the middle eighteen eighties.” (3)

The National Council of Churches (NCC) did oppose the escalating Cold War but it wasn’t based on isolationism or anti-imperialism but rather on ongoing fascination with Communism that remained on the far left spectrum of US politics. It was intended to operate alongside economic, political, and social progressives to help create a collectivist state but they gradually faded from significance due to their inability to influence American protestant believers (2 p. 283) along with the fundamentally anti-Christian nature of the rising postmodernist Frankfort School that was guiding the New Left. The mainstream Protestant churches that had enthusiastically lent their support to progressivism and the secularization of core Christian teachings began to lose not just percentages relative to the national population but to fall off in total members and adherents.

Statistically by 1971 the most politically significant religious group in the history of the republic, the Congregationalists and their offshoot factions, had all but disappeared with membership of less than 0.1% of the population. The other largely elitist denomination, the Episcopalians, was slightly over 1%. By the 70’s all historical mainstream denominations were noticeably falling except for the Southern Baptists in the South. New groups, denominations, and independent churches were growing as were the Catholics, although not as rapidly at this point. (4)

With the rise of the New Left in the 1960’s, aided by the highly unpopular Vietnam War and generational changes, there was to be another dramatic shift leftward in government and in culture leading to our ongoing “culture war”. Progressivism at this point lost nearly all connection to the Yankee Evangelicalism that spawned it as the next generation of Progressive leaders and activists no longer had any real ties to the churches and were, rather, indoctrinated on variants of historical Marxist teachings. In the election of 1960, both Nixon and Kennedy could appropriately be classified as secularists but the Democratic platform, which the NCC and the Christian Century both found cause to admire, gave subtle indications of what was to come. Former New Deal “Braintruster” who became a New Deal critic, Raymond Moley, insightfully analyzed the political spectrum in the country following Kennedy’s inauguration looking back over the preceding decades; “At first there were people who favored over all national planning. Then there were some who wanted government to get into business competition, especially in the electric power industry. There were those of the money magic ilk who believed in making everybody rich by swelling the volume of money. Finally, there were those who believed in more drastic regulation over all business” (5). This last state was different in kind from what had come before it.

As the New Left took shape it brought with it fundamental cultural and moral changes that both conservative and liberal branches of Christianity had been unprepared to react to. The older liberalism generally tried to maintain a traditional Christian morality but that wasn’t the case for the New Left and progressive churches and church leaders were surprised to learn they no longer had a seat at the progressive table (2 p. 302). Conservative congregations were also very slow to realize and adapt to the aggressiveness of an adversary with whom they shared virtually no common cultural or moral perspective. The history of religion in America in this post world war period can be generalized to conclude that the role of the church in any of its forms was dramatically reduced from earlier periods in American history. Political philosophy and changes in culture were overwhelmingly humanistic and secular and the account that follows is overview of how this happened.

Party Realignment

The 60’s and 70’s saw significant party realignments in terms of both philosophy and constituencies. The result of these changes were two progressive parties with somewhat differing narratives that have continually drifted leftward since. One would be openly anti-Christian while the other would simply adapt and pursue a globalist vision that was less obviously anti-Christian. Party realignments happen periodically but are not frequent and aren’t random. In 1944 FDR conferred with former Republican presidential candidate in 1940 Wendell Willkie on a long term plan to reorient American politics. Willkie was a liberal Republican who would not support the 1944 nominee, Thomas Dewey. Roosevelt proposed his vision that all liberals, labor unions, and minorities be gathered into the one party, the Democratic Party, and that the southern conservatives and the (western) Republicans along with the party bosses “go their errant ways”. To this, Willkie said he was very interested and to “tell the President” that “I’m ready to devote nearly full time to this” (6 p. 454). These changes would eventually happen starting in the mid-60’s as the New Left Democrats would attempt to gather into the Democratic tent minority voters and effectively expel Southern conservatives. While labor unions would remain loyal to the Democrats, Democratic policies would become increasingly unfavorable to union voters, especially those working in the private sector, leading to mass defection of white working class voters to Reagan in 1980 and later to Trump.

The New Left was largely the children of the aristocracy of the Old Left, the New Dealers, the Activists and Reformers of another era but they were no longer culturally American and, as opposed to clinging to a legacy of Yankee progressive Christian activism, the Church in all its forms were their adversary representing old power. They were the product of fundamental changes in the educational system driven in large part by a new a growing form of adapted Marxism known as the Frankfurt School or Post Modernism and its key element, Critical Theory that was imported to the US from Germany in the 1930’s when the Nazi’s came to power in Germany.

The Frankfurt School and Postmodernism

While referring to the Frankfurt School as neo-Marxist is common, it could perhaps more appropriately be considered an expression of western neoliberalism. Modern liberalism was forming itself during this period and came to be seen by the public as the anti-thesis to fascism and Marxism while it was really more of a close cousin that gathered to itself elements of both. Another observation that is certain is that Frankfurt School Postmodernism represented the final form of the philosophic movement of nominalism that sought to remove all forms of group identity including culture, religion, and even gender leaving the fully liberated individual to define their own reality (7 pp. 10-15). This objective isn’t practical or possible which has in practice led to a concept of collective man replacing the Christian God. It became the purest form of Nihilism which its creators and advocates understood from the beginning.

After having taken root first in Columbia University followed by the other Ivy league schools and many other prominent universities by 1968, it was set to spread across the country leveraging adherents with missionary zeal as students became teachers, lecturers, media employees, civil servants, and politicians (8). Federal involvement in college accreditation after WWII through accreditation committees allegedly put in place to ensure GI Bill money wasn’t wasted, setup a “gatekeeper” function where control of these groups by the wrong people could cause dangerous ideas to spread very rapidly and be very hard to resist (9). The outcome of all of this, as summarized by commentator Robert Grozinger, “In thousands of more or less important, but always influential, positions of authority they succeed in injecting an entire generation with a disgust for their own culture and history, and a selective inability to think. With their allegedly liberating tolerance, they have torn down natural and culturally nurtured inhibitions and replaced them with state enforced prohibitions on thinking and acting. These in turn have almost completely destroyed the natural workings and defense mechanism of a healthy society.” (8)

To understand Frankfurt school postmodernism we must go back in time several decades to its point of origin but this is far from an academic exercise in that it ties this final piece to a long history of post-enlightenment secular humanism. Postmodernism came from the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) following WWI. The “Frankfurt scholars” the most renown of whom include, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich were ideological communists and predominantly Jewish both of which led to them being forced out of Germany by 1933 and setting up shop in American universities, most notably Columbia University. Amongst the Frankfurt school there were also a significant number of Freudians which was of importance in understanding their acceptance in the US. Adorno and Horkheimer saw their works as “a kind of message in a bottle” to the future. (10 pp. 44-6)

Their belief system called for nothing less than the destruction and erasure of western civilization. Quoting from author Michael Walsh in his book, the Devils’ Pleasure Palace, their “work was grounded on an ideology that demanded (as Marx would say), for philosophical reasons, an unremitting assault on Western values and institutions, including Christianity, the family, conventional sexual morality, nationalistic patriotism, and adherence in general to any institution or set of beliefs that blocked the path of revolution. Literally nothing was sacred” (10 p. 42). They were 18th century romantics with a nineteenth century sense of mission bent on destroying the civilization that gave them their birthright by any means necessary: Here are a couple samples also cited by Walsh:

Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization (Herbert Marcuse from The One-Dimensional Man, 1964) (10 p. 42)

Although most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity (Max Horkheimer from Eclipse of Reason, 1947) (10 p. 42)

In terms of political strategy to bring this about, it required the fostering and expansion of a government dependent and uneducated or mal-educated underclass to act as foot soldiers for what was a movement driven out of academia that couldn’t on its merits otherwise attract any sort of broad support. This was borrowed from the lessons of Marxism and had been done at other points throughout history but isn’t necessarily easy to bring about (11). Borrowing from Fascism on the other hand, neo-liberalism would eventually bring together cooperative and dependent business, media, financial players, and even churches who would be integrated with the government and would act as guardians for and enforcers of the neo-liberal order.

For the Frankfurt School, selling their vision was no small order. This would require rebranding, deception, recasting of history, and collective amnesia to which they proved themselves more than up to the challenge. Starting with the name, they realized that some revised labeling would need to be done. For example “worker” would be replaced with the more generic “oppressed” (for any reason and based on self perception). Instead of referring to themselves as Marxists they bundled their ideas under the name of “critical theory”, which is not a theory at all but a school of thought, and then defined it by their stated goals like, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” and to “reveal the ideologies of the mechanisms of power and oppression” (8) . Note that in these two statements there is a near complete rejection of free will and personal responsibility. For those who seek to project their personal failures on others this can be very attractive but ultimately it only creates a consistent level of misery. Next they moved away from socialist economic theories, which had been refuted by reality and are complex to convey in the first place, and adopted psychology as their new playing field. Any form of historical memory would have to be eradicated or redefined. Time and ignorance would take care of part of this and the “68ers” were the first generation with no direct memories of the calamities these beliefs had already brought.

To fully obscure and redefine history, Horkheimer arrived at the concept of “interdisciplinary materialism.” This was intended to integrate a Marxist philosophy of history with social sciences, economics, and sociology, psychology, and psychoanalysis while excluding all “forms of social control” (12). At this point they have defined their own reality that is not constrained by math or hard sciences or real history. By focusing their arguments outwards, they would not have to defend their positions and could typically avoid explaining them to all but their initiated followers. It is a belief system based on, to quote Marx, the “relentless criticism of all that exists”, that doesn’t define itself because, to do so, would violate the postmodernists premise that, “no definite terms, boundaries, or absolute truths exist” (13). Finally they needed a new strategy recognizing that physical violence and intimidation could not emerge victorious over the “private, middle class, classical bourgeois culture based on Christian values” (8). All of this would have to be destroyed by infiltration of their institutions but this could also be a weakness in that it assumes institutional power can control culture.

This is a brief translated video showing Horkheimer giving his overview of critical theory

Herbert Marcuse and Repressive Tolerance

The most influential member of the Frankfurt school in the United States, was Berlin-born Marcuse who taught at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California, San Diego. He enjoyed a pop culture sort of popularity in the 60’s and saw the student rebellion of the 60’s as a great opportunity to make Frankfurt School Critical Theory the core political philosophy of the New Left in America (14). By contrast, other members of the Frankfurt School who relocated back to Germany in the 50’s were appalled by the student rebellions when they arrived in Europe. When student activists entered Theodor Adorno’s classroom he promptly notified the police and had them arrested (14). His concept of “repressive tolerance” has guided the actions of the Left since he published an essay on the subject in 1965 in titled A Critique of Pure Tolerance, by Marcuse, Robert Paul Wolff, and Barrington Moore Jr. where he wrote:

“The realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. . . . Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e., in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. . . . Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” (10 p. 45)

Conservatives frequently observe that tolerance from the left is a sort of “one way street” that applies only to them as if this is some sort of logical flaw. In reality it is very much by intent. Marcuse became the “rock star” of the academic New Left and could be compared to the “longshoreman philosopher”, Eric Hoffer, who had a similar influence on conservative youth of that day. Left wing icon Abbie Hoffman described this strange scene with Marcuse in 67, “Marcuse was, with the exception of Maslow, the teacher who had the greatest impact on me. I studied with him at Brandeis, and later attended his lectures at the University of California. In the spring of ’67, I saw him speaking –of all places-at the Fillmore East. There he was, white-haired seventy-year old European Marxist scholar, following the Group Image facist-rock band onto the stage, accompanied by the thunderous foot stomping cheers of America’s most stoned-out, anti-intellectual generation…Ben Motherfucker, leader of the Lower East Side’s most nefarious street gang, spat on the floor, raised his fist, and exclaimed, “Dat cat’s duh only fuckin’ brain worth listnin to in de contree!” (15 pp. 84-5)

Marcuse spoke the following definition and vision for the New Left In 67, in a lecture titled “On the New Left”, “We are faced with a novelty in history, namely with the prospect of or with the need for radical change, revolution in and against a highly developed, technically advanced industrial society. This historical novelty demands a reexamination of one of our most cherished concepts. . . . First, the notion of the seizure of power. Here, the old model wouldn’t do anymore. That, for example, in a country like the United States, under the leadership of a centralized and authoritarian party, large masses concentrate on Washington, occupy the Pentagon, and set up a new government. Seems to be a slightly too unrealistic and utopian picture. (Laughter.) We will see that what we have to envisage is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.” (10 p. 66)

This is a longer interview done with Marcuse in 1977

Saul Alinsky

While renowned community organizer Saul Alinsky is not directly tied to the Frankfurt School, conceptually there are many similarities with Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” acting as a sort of instruction manual that could be readily consumed and acted upon by intellectually and emotionally immature audiences. The following are the 13 rules taken directly from Alinsky’s work:

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. (16 pp. 126-31)

The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat. It also means a collapse of communication, as we have noted. (16)

The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat. (16)

The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity. (16)

The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage. (16)

The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.* If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic. (16)

The seventh rule: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings. (16)

The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose. (16)

The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

The tenth rule: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign. (16)

The eleventh rule is: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative. (16)

The twelfth rule: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying “You’re right—we don’t know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us.”

The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. (16)

Rules for Radicals is a short book that could almost be considered more of a paper and lacks any real analysis or significant academic citations. Basically it’s the ramblings of one angry man who is using withering criticism to tear down the society and economy he hates. It is notable primarily because it did describe a successful strategy that is shocking to people who tend to operate from Christian moral perspective and assume everybody else does also. Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909, wound up going to high school in southern California, and then returned to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago where he got an anthropology degree. He became angry at his inability to get a job with the anthropology degree and this, along with the influence of two sociology teachers (Ernest Watson Burgess and Robert Ezra Park) led him to his career as a political activist.

The ideas behind Alinsky’s rules are understandable enough starting with the first rule that is in the background of most of the other rules, that being that everything is driven by power. There is no illusion presented here about a fair or balanced process or intent to arrive at the best common solutions for the larger group. Politics is entirely amoral and the power of government is unconstrained. Rules two and three focus on ensuring the left stays focused on their own experience and knowledge base while trying to force their adversaries to continually adapt. From there he advises that the political process should be interesting and entertaining, all actions and events should be used for political gain, and attacks should be continual and personal. These are all diametrically opposed to culturally accepted standards of political debate in Christian society which is also why they worked so well. With specific relation to the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, however, rule four calling for the opponent to be held to their own standards while the New Left radical has no standards to defend is the most significant direct link. Recognizing that Christianity poses a high and introspective standard of behavior and casting deviations from this as hypocrisy as opposed to human frailty, has consistently caused those who see themselves as Christian or moral people to hesitate and stumble when they should have attacked. (10 p. 45)

This is an older documentary showing Alinsky interacting with his followers. Note the frequent use of the word "establishment" that became common in the 60's and 70's to refer to those who are for the most part their adversaries. In time however, many of the followers of Alinsky and Marcuse would become the establishment.

Students for a Democratic Society and the Enemy Within

For the young 68er’s on college campuses, the Students for a Democratic Society were the unquestioned leader. It was also the student arm of the Social Democratic League for Industrial Democracy, an old-line socialist organization that represented the worst of the Old Left (17 pp. 192-4). Former SDS President Carl Oglesby in 1967, published Containment and Change, a critique of the Vietnam War and the American Empire. In it he called for an alliance with the Old Right which was appealing to some of the Old Right like Murray Rothbard but this never really developed. The Progressive Labor Faction (PFP) and its executive committee were being run in California and New York, by the Leninist-Trotskyite Draperites, International Socialists run by Berkeley librarian Hal Draper (17 pp. 194-201). The SDS reverted to these Old Left creeds adapted to the New Left critical theory and culturally tied to the new “counter-culture”. It was anti-intellectual having replaced economic Marxism with cultural Marxism and so it has remained.

Throughout the history of the country to this point, rightly and wrongly, politicians had attempted to rally their supporters against an external enemy. The New Left represented a shifting towards organizing against an internal enemy made up of their philosophical and political opponents.

This is a twelve minute video from the University of Connecticut in 1969 with some introductory comments from the camera man and film maker

This is a short and generally positive video done on the Students for a Democratic Society that, none the less, points out that they were dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government and society. Mass demonstrations were never a common mode of expression in America and coming out of the 60's they generally had a strongly negative impact on public opinion.

Black Liberation Theology and Critical Race Theory

The next step in the developing neo-liberal philosophy fusing racial politics with critical theory was Black Liberation Theology. Liberation Theology in a broad sense stemmed from Latin America and was a fusion of Christianity and Marxism that originated from leftists priests and nuns and could be appropriately be seen as an internal subversion of the Catholic Church that was tied to revolutionary activities throughout Latin America. The Black Liberation Theology movement is credited to James H. Cone, who was a leftist African-American teacher and theologian at Union theological Seminary in New York. This school of thought sees the Christian mission as bringing justice to oppressed people through political activism and recasts Jesus as the political liberator of oppressed Black masses (18). Black Liberation theology portrays Jesus as a poor black man who lived under the oppression of “rich white people”. The notion of “Blackness” is not merely a reference to skin color, but rather is a symbol of oppression that can be applied to all persons of color who have a history of oppression (who are not white) (19 pp. 17-35). Cone further explains the core beliefs of Black Liberation Theology by saying, “Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community. Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.” (20)

Cone’s book, Black Theology and Black Power in 1968 defined the tenants of Black Liberation Theology. This work closely followed Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man in 1964 which had laid the groundwork for integrating Critical Theory with race and proposing an alliance of racial minorities, liberal academia, and violent outside agitators to acquire power. Cones rejected the authority and infallibility of the scripture stating, “if the basic truth of the gospel is that the Bible is the infallible word of God, then it is inevitable that more emphasis will be placed upon ‘true’ propositions about God than upon God as active in the liberation of the oppressed of the land” (21 p. 88). Cone and other Black Liberation leaders acknowledged that their beliefs were built on hatred of white people but do not hold that this to be racist: “It is important to make a further distinction here among black hatred, black racism, and black Power. Black hatred is the black man’s strong aversion to white society. No black man living in white America can escape it…. But the charge of black racism cannot be reconciled with the facts. While it is true that blacks do hate whites, black hatred is not racism” (21 pp. 14-16). This has some obvious parallels to Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance concept where only one side could be guilty of a sin and only the other side could be a victim of it.

Following Cone was Derrick Bell, who is the second most prominent academic associated with Black Liberation Theology and whom Barack Obama praised at a Harvard protest Rally as being comparable to Rosa Park (22). Bell wrote “Race, Racism, and American Law” in 1970 which is now a standard law school textbook in its 6th edition. Bell was a founding member of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, which describes itself as the “legal arm of the Black Liberation Movement”, and was a contributor to the journal Freedomways. According to declassified documents from a FBI operation to infiltrate the Communist Party (Operation SOLO), Freedomways, which shutdown in 1986, was subsidized by both the Russians and Chinese (22). The last major contribution to this toxic mix of religious and political philosophy was added Kimberle Crenshaw with her theory of intersectionality, which sought to unite all supposedly oppressed and marginalized groups into one united theory of social justice, and held that different parts of one’s identity could intersect to “compound their oppression”.

Most Americans got their first exposure to Black Liberation Theology during Barack Obama’s first campaign where his close relationship with Jeremiah Wright came to light along with Wright’s anti-American sermons. The most well known of which goes as follows: “When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing “God Bless America”. No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America – that’s in the Bible – for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human.” (23)

To most people affiliated with conservative or protestant congregations or traditions, much of the rhetoric of Black Liberation Theology would seem shocking and one could easily simply conclude that this sort of thing would be a fringe position adopted by very few. This conclusion unfortunately would be dramatically wrong both in the case of Black churches and mainstream Protestant churches, groups, and seminaries. Looking first at predominantly Black churches, it is widespread representing app. 40% of Black churches. Quoting again from Samuel Say’s study on the topic, “Black Liberation Theology has infiltrated all types of Black American churches today, and is perceived as orthodox Christianity within all types of Black churches in America. Millions of Black Americans in Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, Episcopalian, Presbyterian and other churches today are subjected to sermons from Black Liberation Theology perspectives every Sunday morning. Approximately 40% of Black American churches identify with Black Liberation Theology. This includes thousands of churches from major Black American denominations like the Church of God in Christ and the African Methodist Episcopal Church” (23). (The Church of God in Christ is Pentecostal with historical ties to the Holiness movement)

What is of even greater concern, however, is the degree to which these beliefs have taken root in mainstream conservative Christian groups and churches. The Southern Baptists, the largest and generally considered one of the most conservative in the country, at their convention in June of 2019 endorsed Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality by a strong majority. They stressed that “critical race theory and intersectionality should only be used in submission to Scripture,” (24). This vote probably represents the best survey of the views of traditionally conservative or fundamentalist clergy on the subject of what amounts to a political puzzle for church leaders and in many cases their responses have not been that different from “woke” corporations. In 2021 an attempt to retake the SBC by conservatives failed. Throughout the history of the church in America, the process of secularization has remained roughly the same whether in the 19th century or the 21st. Church affiliated academics and prominent preachers, fearing their social irrelevance, adopt and propagate extra-Biblical or anti-Biblical teaching by masking their intent and message to their congregations.

Bibliography

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14. Preston, Keith. Lew Rockwell. [Online] January 22, 2007. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/01/keith-preston/the-new-totalitarianism/.

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24. Loudon, Trevor. Marxist Critical Race Theory infiltrates Churches, the Culture. The Epoch Times. August 1, 2019.