Seven Reasons to Reject Marxism
Introduction
Marxism, like the tower of Babel, is a marvelous and impressive work of man. It’s unsurprising that people, including Christians, approach it ready for cognitive bargaining.[1] But it is deathly to imagine Marxism as something alive with the miracle of mysterious vitality. It is spiritual suicide to embrace socialism as a marvelous and impressive work of God.
Marxism is a theory of history that ushers in an economic system, based upon the collective ownership and control of resources, implemented by violent revolution and enforced by a dictator of the proletariat through physical and psychological terror designed to overthrow all existing social conditions, especially those influenced by the Church.
At the center of Marxism is the inexorable proletarianism principle, the IPP, also known as the inevitable existence of equalization, the IEE. This IPP exists in various forms, from Marxism to Communism, to Socialism, to elements of Critical Theory, even down to certain forms of vague “democracy.” This is the man-made element of the IPP. Yes, it is anti-clerical in more or less obvious ways, and this is a manifestation of it being a work of man. But also, the proletariat has been so thoroughly flattered that, as C.S. Lewis put it, “They are convinced that whatever may be wrong with the world, it cannot be themselves.”[2] The fault may lie with capitalism, the church, or the Creator, or some combination of the three, so it all needs to come down. The proletariat functions as the judge of capitalism, the church, and the Creator. Indeed, the whole civilization turns into the courtroom of guilty verdicts. This is the nucleus of the IPP's man-made foundations. It goes by the name revolution, and Marx taught that it was historically inevitable.
What follows are seven quotations that reveal the IPP to be full of the unnatural insensibilities of man.
#1 Pope Pius XI, in the Quadragesimo Anno said, “One cannot be at the same time a socialist and a Christian. The two are incompatible."
Many people are familiar with Marx’s quote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”[3] Marx uses the metaphor to say that religion exploits humans and results in heartless and soulless persons. He says that religion is used by the capitalist ruling class to drive the masses into submission.
Marxism is atheistic through and through. Marx also said, “Communism begins where Atheism begins.” Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, said, “There is nothing more abominable than religion. All worship of any divinity is necrophilia.” A slogan from the Soviet Union’s League of the Militant Godless said, “Whoever is for Easter is against socialism.”
This has been the viewpoint of Marxism from The Communist Manifesto, to the Soviet regime in 1917, to Communist Mongolia, Maoist China, the Eastern Bloc after 1945, Castro’s Cuba, the Khmer Rouge’s “killing fields” in Cambodia, the macabre Juche cult of the Kim Dynasty in North Korea, and the anti-clericism in Albania, where Enver Hoxha executed priests for baptizing children. In sum, Marxism’s response to the religiosity of human nature has been to silence Christian voices. The result has been a cold and compulsory culture of death, decay, and dimness.[4]
We could modify Marx’s quote to make it true. False religions can be accurately described as the opium that drugs and lulls people to sleep. But the resurrection of Christ is like smelling salts that jolts the spiritual sleeper awake.
#2 In the Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn says that the essence of the Soviet plan was that “The peasant’s seed must perish with the adults.” Marxism-Leninism “has shown us how to destroy utterly—down to the very babes.” “Hitler was a mere disciple [of Lenin and Stalin], but he had all the luck, his murder camps have made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all.”
The mass murder committed by the left is largely ignored by historians, Democrats, academics, and the media. Solzhenitsyn traces the blood thirsty behavior of Marxism to ideology. He explains that Shakespeare’s villains stopped short at a dozen corpses, “because they had no ideology…. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience villainy on a scale calculated in the millions.”[5]
Russian literary expert Gary Saul Morson argues that Marxist atheism doesn’t just reject traditional virtues like compassion or benevolence. It’s not just amoral. It is “precisely reverse morality,” meaning compassion and benevolence are vices to be eliminated rather than cultivated. Brutality is the first choice. Since human life is not sacred, and since people are just a random collection of cells, mercilessness becomes a compliment.[6]
R.J. Rummel’s book Death by Government provides a shiver of historical revelations detailing the murder totals of the Left. Over 100 million people in the twentieth century.[7] Zbig Brzezinski puts it in perspective: “It is absolute insanity to condemn the Nazis without recognizing that the Soviets and the Chinese Communists killed tens of millions more indeed, potentially as many as two hundred and fifty million people in the twentieth century.”
Socialists today often talk about how they regret the excesses of past revolutions while affirming the need for more revolutions. They excuse the violence of the socialist revolution.[8] For example, James Cone said, “If the system is evil, then revolutionary violence is both justified and necessary.”[9]
If false teaching on marriage and diet is from demons (1 Tim. 4:1-3), then from where is the false teaching that leads to mega-death?
#3 G.K. Chesterton, “The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life.”[10]
Chesterton goes on to explain that through the course of life, a man’s normal doubts and daydreams are about existence, not how to live, but why we live. When you study the interior of man, it isn’t about economics. It’s about something way more, which means Marx doesn’t just miss the mark. He’s shooting at the wrong target altogether!
Marx believed that matter alone is real, and change takes place as people compete for control of the material forces. As such, Marxists deny the spiritual realm. Jesus taught that if you seek the spiritual things first, then you ought not be anxious about the material things. “Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Mt. 6:31-33)
Isn’t it ironic that those who deny the spiritual realm, those who believe in and seek only the material realm, should, in their denial of the spiritual realm, also be denied basic needs in the material realm? This is predicted in Ecclesiastes. One of Solomon’s main points is that a life devoted to pleasure-seeking results in unsatisfied appetites. This drives the honest philosopher to conclude that the fault must lie with the materialistic worldview, which is entrapment, forcing people to swing between metaphysical dread and the false promise of a totalizing utopia.
#4 Ludwig Von Mises said, “They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.”[11]
Statism is an ideology that places the state in an idolatrous position. The country becomes the center of meaning and the object of highest adoration and obedience. People must obey the state in all things and pledge their ultimate allegiance.
A few years ago, the president of the Chinese Communist Party said, “Active efforts should be made to incorporate religions into socialist society.”[12] He was calling for all religious beliefs to be co-opted by the state for the state. Why do socialist regimes direct special hostility toward Christian churches? Why do they see Christianity as their enemy? The reason is because of what Jesus said in Mark 10:16-17, “And they brought one. And he said to them, ‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?’ They said to him, ‘Caesar's.’ 17 Jesus said to them, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.’ And they marveled at him.”
Jesus is anti-totalitarian to the core. The second command—“render to God the things that are God’s”—is the ground of the first command—“render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” does not exist in isolation. The all-important assumption is that “from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). Not everything belongs to the state. But, everything does belong to God, who has assigned to civil government the roles of punishing criminals, rewarding the righteous, and establishing good order and justice in society through equal weights and measures. The state has no right to set itself against the church or lay claims to total allegiance.
Why does the coin belong to Caesar? Because it has Caesar’s image on it. Caesar can demand his coin, so give it to him. In the Providence of God, Caesar has control over what is supposed to go to Caesar. What is supposed to go to Caesar? That which has his image on it. What is supposed to go to God? That which has His image on it. What bears the image of God? Human beings.
Luther defined tyranny as when the secular authority takes the role of the religious authority.[13] Totalitarian governments always fear religious liberty. They fear the Christian gospel in particular. Christians have to recognize Communism for exactly what it is. It is absolute, unadulterated, unfiltered idolatry. Christians should name it and shame it. The Christian’s that fail to name it properly, unfortunately, do claim it. More on that in quote seven.
#5 Ronald Reagan said, “A Communist is somebody who reads Marx, an anti-Communist is someone who understands Marx.”
What must be understood about the IPP ideology? It is calling for a revolution that overthrows God, God’s Word, and God’s world. In this way, socialism fails because it does not represent, conform to, or address reality. It is a straight edge ruler in a world of circles. Socialism inspires the notion that the fault lies with those who have more than others. Those who have more money, more talent, more virtue, and more hard work oppress those who have less money, less talent, less virtue, and less hard work. As such, Marxist ideology requires that all humanity conform to the oppressor/oppressed dialectic. This trains people to resent the existence of that which is stronger, smarter, and more splendid than themselves. It doesn’t just concede to the insatiable appetite of envy; it endeavors to pick and provoke it.
#6 Henry Hazlitt describes how Marxism is built on envy, “The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects—his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.”[14]
Marxism is the narrative of the victim and victimizer. It assumes the moral guilt of successful people. Achievement is reduced to sinisterism. This is usually done by characterizing non-socialist systems as encouraging people to pursue their own self-interest. Christians admit that self-interest is a sin (1 Cor. 10:24), especially selfish ambition (Phil. 2:13; James 3:16). But we must go deeper. What is behind selfish behavior? Envy, which leads to the sinful pursuit of self-interest.
Envy is not just the desire to have what another has, or to become what another has become. It’s the unresolved feeling of inadequacy working to drag down the rival to your level or lower. The relationship between envy and equality is that envy begins with a perceived inequality. It makes the person feel vulnerable and inferior. Relief comes not by climbing to their height, nor by being happy for them, but by suppressing the success of the rival.
It is the built-in envy of socialism that channels self-interest in a destructive direction. In a socialist system, people squabble over the re-slicing of a shrinking pie. There’s a famous Winston Churchill quote that says that the ostensible problem with capitalism is that people aren’t equally rich, whereas the supposed attractiveness of socialism is that people get to be equally poor.
That being said, in socialist nations, it isn’t entirely accurate to say that the people are equally poor. Sure, the masses are equally impoverished by socialist systems, but a handful of people escape this poverty. The government elites who preside over the socialist system have very comfortable lives. For example, Hugo Chavez and his compatriots became billionaires while the Venezuelan people were starving to death.[15] Talk about income inequality! The same thing happened in the Soviet Union. A study from 1960 showed that in the USSR, the income differential between the highest-paid and the lowest was 40:1, which was four times higher than in Western countries. [16] Whether you are talking about Venezuela, the Soviet Union, North Korea, China, or Cuba, the elite enjoy undeserved and unearned wealth while ordinary people live wretched lives of deprivation. Socialism is organized and coercive poverty for the people and wealth for the leaders. No wonder so many politicians are drawn to socialist policies.
What happens when envy is fomented? Solzhenitsyn wrote in “Reflections on the Vendee Uprising” about the French and Bolshevik revolutions. They “disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population while giving free rein to the worst;…no revolution can ever enrich a nation—but only a few shameless opportunists—while to the country as a whole it bears myriad deaths, widespread spiritual impoverishment, and, in the gravest cases, a long-lasting degeneration of the people.”
#7 W. Cleon Skousen documented that “Churches became a major target for Communist-Socialist infiltration many years ago. These people were successful in capturing many key positions in a number of important religious organizations.”[17]
The Soviet Comintern Archives from the Communist Party U.S.A., now declassified, reveal how cynical and strategic the infiltration was. Herb Romerstein was America’s preeminent insider on Communism. He himself had been a Communist before turning away. Romerstein was once asked which American group the Communists had their most success duping. He answered that the religious left were the biggest suckers of them all. Particularly, the archives reveal that the Episcopal Church, the Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. were the Communists’ greatest successes.
But it didn’t stop there. The Left’s targeting of the evangelical church has been going on, in earnest, for many years, as Megan Basham has documented.
There is a specific reason evangelicals have an appetite for the IPP. It’s not that folks in the Gospel-Centered movement become Marxists, of course. But there is a tendency to utilize Marxist categories as a second level of analysis. Why? It’s because of the incomplete teaching that the gospel is only about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The privatization of religion has been so thoroughly hammered home, from the First Great Awakening, to the Second, to the Fundamentalist resistance to modernism, to the Gospel-Centered movement, that evangelicals are irrevocably the children of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, these evangelicals have a genuine faith in Christ, and this gives them a spiritual intuition, undeveloped though it may be. They have checked all the boxes of privatized Christianity, yet still push back and desire something more, something bigger, a story of a global gospel, a Christ of cosmic concern in addition to their personalized Jesus. Yet, they fail to find a fuller preaching of the gospel in their evangelical hubs. So, in steps the Marxist dialectic, re-packaged as identity politics or wokeness, and there they finally find a vision of remaking the broken world, a vision that satisfies the yearning.
They fail to see that a church offering only what socialism offers is unnecessary. They latch on to what they hear, the promise of a godless, socialistic, utopia of equality. They cleanse it with the comforting words of Christianese. And all this, even while the rewards of socialist sharing are strictly alternative to those of the gospel.
Conclusion
Church history is a study of path dependency, especially in the field of metaphysics. Once a church commits to a path, they don’t go back. Rome is committed to Aristotle and isn’t going back. The Eastern Church is committed to Plato and isn’t going back. The Coptic Church is committed to monophysitism and isn’t going back.[18] And many evangelical churches have committed to a Marxist heuristic, or an identity politics of group sorting, and they aren’t going back from Liberation Theology, Black Liberation Theology, or the Woke Church. The Episcopalians haven’t gone back. The Methodists haven’t gone back. The PCUSA hasn’t gone back.
But the ancient glory shall not abdicate or recede. Not going back is part of the judgment of God. It’s also part of the advance of the Kingdom. Israel didn’t go back. They rejected the prophets, then the Son, and then they were swallowed up in judgment (Mark 12:1-12). Israel’s apostasy was needed to reveal the complete truth of Christ to the world. Israel didn’t go back to Yahweh, and the Kingdom of God came to earth. When those who were once his people turn to the dark and don’t go back (Heb. 6:1-4; 10:26-30), God judges them and advances his Kingdom (Hab. 1-2).
What are we to do? What is the method for drawing the church away from the Marxist desire to remake the world according to the principle of “equality”? How do you topple an urge so strong and so central? The method for dispelling any darkness is always the same. The light draws people not just to something different, but to something more powerful, more worthy, and more Living, namely, a mother church, a glorious narrative, a moral order, and a proclamation of God’s plan to save the entire world through the resurrected Christ. This is the compelling and powerful truth that can squash any church’s tendency to pull in the direction of the IPP, grandiose as it pretends to be.
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the book The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and the book The Making of Evangelical Spirituality (Wipf and Stock).
Other Articles
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2025/08/12/seven-reasons-to-be-informed-by-history
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2025/09/02/seven-problems-with-darwinism
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2023/07/31/the-dubious-diversity-rationale
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2026/04/13/evangelicalism-s-divided-soul-megan-basham-s-shepherds-for-sale
[1] James Davison Hunter's concept of “cognitive bargaining” refers to how individuals or groups negotiate their understanding of the world in light of competing worldviews, often within pluralistic societies. The idea is rooted in the way people navigate conflicting beliefs, values, religions and perspectives.
[2] C.S. Lewis, Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays (HarperOne, 1986), 78.
[3] Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction
[4] To his credit, Billy Graham understood the ideological nature of the struggle from the earliest of days. In his famous 1949 crusade in Los Angeles, Graham proclaimed that “Communism has decided against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion. . . . Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed and motivated by the Devil himself, who has declared war against Almighty God.” Or this from 1953: “Either Communism must die, or Christianity must die, because it is actually a battle between Christ and Anti-Christ.”
[5] https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/solzhenitsyns-gulag-archipelago-at-50/
[6] https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/murderers-row/
[7] http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM
[8] Zúquete, José Pedro, ed. The Palgrave Handbook of Left-Wing Extremism. 2 vols. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
[9] James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 245.
[10] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Watchmaker Publishing), Ch 7.
[11] Qtd. in David L. Bahnsen, 250 Economic Truths (Washington, DC: Post Hill Press, 2021), 265.
[12] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/21/president-xi-jinping-warns-against-foreign-influence-on-religions-in-china
[13] Alastair Roberts et al., Protestant Social Teaching: An Introduction (Landrum, SC: The Davenant Press, 2022), 54.
[14] Qtd. in David L. Bahnsen, 250 Economic Truths (Washington, DC: Post Hill Press, 2021), 72.
[15] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3192933/Hugo-Chavez-s-ambassador-daughter-Venezuela-s-richest-woman-according-new-report.html & http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423011/venezuela-nicolas-maduro-socialism-economics
[16] Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1990), 200.
[17] See W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing, 1958), 289. Skousen outlines the patient strategies of Communism to remake the world. It includes taking control of the schools and churches.
[18] https://americanreformer.org/2026/03/whither-the-reformation-in-america/
Marxism, like the tower of Babel, is a marvelous and impressive work of man. It’s unsurprising that people, including Christians, approach it ready for cognitive bargaining.[1] But it is deathly to imagine Marxism as something alive with the miracle of mysterious vitality. It is spiritual suicide to embrace socialism as a marvelous and impressive work of God.
Marxism is a theory of history that ushers in an economic system, based upon the collective ownership and control of resources, implemented by violent revolution and enforced by a dictator of the proletariat through physical and psychological terror designed to overthrow all existing social conditions, especially those influenced by the Church.
At the center of Marxism is the inexorable proletarianism principle, the IPP, also known as the inevitable existence of equalization, the IEE. This IPP exists in various forms, from Marxism to Communism, to Socialism, to elements of Critical Theory, even down to certain forms of vague “democracy.” This is the man-made element of the IPP. Yes, it is anti-clerical in more or less obvious ways, and this is a manifestation of it being a work of man. But also, the proletariat has been so thoroughly flattered that, as C.S. Lewis put it, “They are convinced that whatever may be wrong with the world, it cannot be themselves.”[2] The fault may lie with capitalism, the church, or the Creator, or some combination of the three, so it all needs to come down. The proletariat functions as the judge of capitalism, the church, and the Creator. Indeed, the whole civilization turns into the courtroom of guilty verdicts. This is the nucleus of the IPP's man-made foundations. It goes by the name revolution, and Marx taught that it was historically inevitable.
What follows are seven quotations that reveal the IPP to be full of the unnatural insensibilities of man.
#1 Pope Pius XI, in the Quadragesimo Anno said, “One cannot be at the same time a socialist and a Christian. The two are incompatible."
Many people are familiar with Marx’s quote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”[3] Marx uses the metaphor to say that religion exploits humans and results in heartless and soulless persons. He says that religion is used by the capitalist ruling class to drive the masses into submission.
Marxism is atheistic through and through. Marx also said, “Communism begins where Atheism begins.” Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, said, “There is nothing more abominable than religion. All worship of any divinity is necrophilia.” A slogan from the Soviet Union’s League of the Militant Godless said, “Whoever is for Easter is against socialism.”
This has been the viewpoint of Marxism from The Communist Manifesto, to the Soviet regime in 1917, to Communist Mongolia, Maoist China, the Eastern Bloc after 1945, Castro’s Cuba, the Khmer Rouge’s “killing fields” in Cambodia, the macabre Juche cult of the Kim Dynasty in North Korea, and the anti-clericism in Albania, where Enver Hoxha executed priests for baptizing children. In sum, Marxism’s response to the religiosity of human nature has been to silence Christian voices. The result has been a cold and compulsory culture of death, decay, and dimness.[4]
We could modify Marx’s quote to make it true. False religions can be accurately described as the opium that drugs and lulls people to sleep. But the resurrection of Christ is like smelling salts that jolts the spiritual sleeper awake.
#2 In the Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn says that the essence of the Soviet plan was that “The peasant’s seed must perish with the adults.” Marxism-Leninism “has shown us how to destroy utterly—down to the very babes.” “Hitler was a mere disciple [of Lenin and Stalin], but he had all the luck, his murder camps have made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all.”
The mass murder committed by the left is largely ignored by historians, Democrats, academics, and the media. Solzhenitsyn traces the blood thirsty behavior of Marxism to ideology. He explains that Shakespeare’s villains stopped short at a dozen corpses, “because they had no ideology…. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience villainy on a scale calculated in the millions.”[5]
Russian literary expert Gary Saul Morson argues that Marxist atheism doesn’t just reject traditional virtues like compassion or benevolence. It’s not just amoral. It is “precisely reverse morality,” meaning compassion and benevolence are vices to be eliminated rather than cultivated. Brutality is the first choice. Since human life is not sacred, and since people are just a random collection of cells, mercilessness becomes a compliment.[6]
R.J. Rummel’s book Death by Government provides a shiver of historical revelations detailing the murder totals of the Left. Over 100 million people in the twentieth century.[7] Zbig Brzezinski puts it in perspective: “It is absolute insanity to condemn the Nazis without recognizing that the Soviets and the Chinese Communists killed tens of millions more indeed, potentially as many as two hundred and fifty million people in the twentieth century.”
Socialists today often talk about how they regret the excesses of past revolutions while affirming the need for more revolutions. They excuse the violence of the socialist revolution.[8] For example, James Cone said, “If the system is evil, then revolutionary violence is both justified and necessary.”[9]
If false teaching on marriage and diet is from demons (1 Tim. 4:1-3), then from where is the false teaching that leads to mega-death?
#3 G.K. Chesterton, “The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life.”[10]
Chesterton goes on to explain that through the course of life, a man’s normal doubts and daydreams are about existence, not how to live, but why we live. When you study the interior of man, it isn’t about economics. It’s about something way more, which means Marx doesn’t just miss the mark. He’s shooting at the wrong target altogether!
Marx believed that matter alone is real, and change takes place as people compete for control of the material forces. As such, Marxists deny the spiritual realm. Jesus taught that if you seek the spiritual things first, then you ought not be anxious about the material things. “Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Mt. 6:31-33)
Isn’t it ironic that those who deny the spiritual realm, those who believe in and seek only the material realm, should, in their denial of the spiritual realm, also be denied basic needs in the material realm? This is predicted in Ecclesiastes. One of Solomon’s main points is that a life devoted to pleasure-seeking results in unsatisfied appetites. This drives the honest philosopher to conclude that the fault must lie with the materialistic worldview, which is entrapment, forcing people to swing between metaphysical dread and the false promise of a totalizing utopia.
#4 Ludwig Von Mises said, “They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.”[11]
Statism is an ideology that places the state in an idolatrous position. The country becomes the center of meaning and the object of highest adoration and obedience. People must obey the state in all things and pledge their ultimate allegiance.
A few years ago, the president of the Chinese Communist Party said, “Active efforts should be made to incorporate religions into socialist society.”[12] He was calling for all religious beliefs to be co-opted by the state for the state. Why do socialist regimes direct special hostility toward Christian churches? Why do they see Christianity as their enemy? The reason is because of what Jesus said in Mark 10:16-17, “And they brought one. And he said to them, ‘Whose likeness and inscription is this?’ They said to him, ‘Caesar's.’ 17 Jesus said to them, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.’ And they marveled at him.”
Jesus is anti-totalitarian to the core. The second command—“render to God the things that are God’s”—is the ground of the first command—“render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” does not exist in isolation. The all-important assumption is that “from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). Not everything belongs to the state. But, everything does belong to God, who has assigned to civil government the roles of punishing criminals, rewarding the righteous, and establishing good order and justice in society through equal weights and measures. The state has no right to set itself against the church or lay claims to total allegiance.
Why does the coin belong to Caesar? Because it has Caesar’s image on it. Caesar can demand his coin, so give it to him. In the Providence of God, Caesar has control over what is supposed to go to Caesar. What is supposed to go to Caesar? That which has his image on it. What is supposed to go to God? That which has His image on it. What bears the image of God? Human beings.
Luther defined tyranny as when the secular authority takes the role of the religious authority.[13] Totalitarian governments always fear religious liberty. They fear the Christian gospel in particular. Christians have to recognize Communism for exactly what it is. It is absolute, unadulterated, unfiltered idolatry. Christians should name it and shame it. The Christian’s that fail to name it properly, unfortunately, do claim it. More on that in quote seven.
#5 Ronald Reagan said, “A Communist is somebody who reads Marx, an anti-Communist is someone who understands Marx.”
What must be understood about the IPP ideology? It is calling for a revolution that overthrows God, God’s Word, and God’s world. In this way, socialism fails because it does not represent, conform to, or address reality. It is a straight edge ruler in a world of circles. Socialism inspires the notion that the fault lies with those who have more than others. Those who have more money, more talent, more virtue, and more hard work oppress those who have less money, less talent, less virtue, and less hard work. As such, Marxist ideology requires that all humanity conform to the oppressor/oppressed dialectic. This trains people to resent the existence of that which is stronger, smarter, and more splendid than themselves. It doesn’t just concede to the insatiable appetite of envy; it endeavors to pick and provoke it.
#6 Henry Hazlitt describes how Marxism is built on envy, “The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects—his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.”[14]
Marxism is the narrative of the victim and victimizer. It assumes the moral guilt of successful people. Achievement is reduced to sinisterism. This is usually done by characterizing non-socialist systems as encouraging people to pursue their own self-interest. Christians admit that self-interest is a sin (1 Cor. 10:24), especially selfish ambition (Phil. 2:13; James 3:16). But we must go deeper. What is behind selfish behavior? Envy, which leads to the sinful pursuit of self-interest.
Envy is not just the desire to have what another has, or to become what another has become. It’s the unresolved feeling of inadequacy working to drag down the rival to your level or lower. The relationship between envy and equality is that envy begins with a perceived inequality. It makes the person feel vulnerable and inferior. Relief comes not by climbing to their height, nor by being happy for them, but by suppressing the success of the rival.
It is the built-in envy of socialism that channels self-interest in a destructive direction. In a socialist system, people squabble over the re-slicing of a shrinking pie. There’s a famous Winston Churchill quote that says that the ostensible problem with capitalism is that people aren’t equally rich, whereas the supposed attractiveness of socialism is that people get to be equally poor.
That being said, in socialist nations, it isn’t entirely accurate to say that the people are equally poor. Sure, the masses are equally impoverished by socialist systems, but a handful of people escape this poverty. The government elites who preside over the socialist system have very comfortable lives. For example, Hugo Chavez and his compatriots became billionaires while the Venezuelan people were starving to death.[15] Talk about income inequality! The same thing happened in the Soviet Union. A study from 1960 showed that in the USSR, the income differential between the highest-paid and the lowest was 40:1, which was four times higher than in Western countries. [16] Whether you are talking about Venezuela, the Soviet Union, North Korea, China, or Cuba, the elite enjoy undeserved and unearned wealth while ordinary people live wretched lives of deprivation. Socialism is organized and coercive poverty for the people and wealth for the leaders. No wonder so many politicians are drawn to socialist policies.
What happens when envy is fomented? Solzhenitsyn wrote in “Reflections on the Vendee Uprising” about the French and Bolshevik revolutions. They “disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population while giving free rein to the worst;…no revolution can ever enrich a nation—but only a few shameless opportunists—while to the country as a whole it bears myriad deaths, widespread spiritual impoverishment, and, in the gravest cases, a long-lasting degeneration of the people.”
#7 W. Cleon Skousen documented that “Churches became a major target for Communist-Socialist infiltration many years ago. These people were successful in capturing many key positions in a number of important religious organizations.”[17]
The Soviet Comintern Archives from the Communist Party U.S.A., now declassified, reveal how cynical and strategic the infiltration was. Herb Romerstein was America’s preeminent insider on Communism. He himself had been a Communist before turning away. Romerstein was once asked which American group the Communists had their most success duping. He answered that the religious left were the biggest suckers of them all. Particularly, the archives reveal that the Episcopal Church, the Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. were the Communists’ greatest successes.
But it didn’t stop there. The Left’s targeting of the evangelical church has been going on, in earnest, for many years, as Megan Basham has documented.
There is a specific reason evangelicals have an appetite for the IPP. It’s not that folks in the Gospel-Centered movement become Marxists, of course. But there is a tendency to utilize Marxist categories as a second level of analysis. Why? It’s because of the incomplete teaching that the gospel is only about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The privatization of religion has been so thoroughly hammered home, from the First Great Awakening, to the Second, to the Fundamentalist resistance to modernism, to the Gospel-Centered movement, that evangelicals are irrevocably the children of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, these evangelicals have a genuine faith in Christ, and this gives them a spiritual intuition, undeveloped though it may be. They have checked all the boxes of privatized Christianity, yet still push back and desire something more, something bigger, a story of a global gospel, a Christ of cosmic concern in addition to their personalized Jesus. Yet, they fail to find a fuller preaching of the gospel in their evangelical hubs. So, in steps the Marxist dialectic, re-packaged as identity politics or wokeness, and there they finally find a vision of remaking the broken world, a vision that satisfies the yearning.
They fail to see that a church offering only what socialism offers is unnecessary. They latch on to what they hear, the promise of a godless, socialistic, utopia of equality. They cleanse it with the comforting words of Christianese. And all this, even while the rewards of socialist sharing are strictly alternative to those of the gospel.
Conclusion
Church history is a study of path dependency, especially in the field of metaphysics. Once a church commits to a path, they don’t go back. Rome is committed to Aristotle and isn’t going back. The Eastern Church is committed to Plato and isn’t going back. The Coptic Church is committed to monophysitism and isn’t going back.[18] And many evangelical churches have committed to a Marxist heuristic, or an identity politics of group sorting, and they aren’t going back from Liberation Theology, Black Liberation Theology, or the Woke Church. The Episcopalians haven’t gone back. The Methodists haven’t gone back. The PCUSA hasn’t gone back.
But the ancient glory shall not abdicate or recede. Not going back is part of the judgment of God. It’s also part of the advance of the Kingdom. Israel didn’t go back. They rejected the prophets, then the Son, and then they were swallowed up in judgment (Mark 12:1-12). Israel’s apostasy was needed to reveal the complete truth of Christ to the world. Israel didn’t go back to Yahweh, and the Kingdom of God came to earth. When those who were once his people turn to the dark and don’t go back (Heb. 6:1-4; 10:26-30), God judges them and advances his Kingdom (Hab. 1-2).
What are we to do? What is the method for drawing the church away from the Marxist desire to remake the world according to the principle of “equality”? How do you topple an urge so strong and so central? The method for dispelling any darkness is always the same. The light draws people not just to something different, but to something more powerful, more worthy, and more Living, namely, a mother church, a glorious narrative, a moral order, and a proclamation of God’s plan to save the entire world through the resurrected Christ. This is the compelling and powerful truth that can squash any church’s tendency to pull in the direction of the IPP, grandiose as it pretends to be.
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the book The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and the book The Making of Evangelical Spirituality (Wipf and Stock).
Other Articles
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2025/08/12/seven-reasons-to-be-informed-by-history
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2025/09/02/seven-problems-with-darwinism
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2023/07/31/the-dubious-diversity-rationale
https://trinityreformedkirk.com/blog/2026/04/13/evangelicalism-s-divided-soul-megan-basham-s-shepherds-for-sale
[1] James Davison Hunter's concept of “cognitive bargaining” refers to how individuals or groups negotiate their understanding of the world in light of competing worldviews, often within pluralistic societies. The idea is rooted in the way people navigate conflicting beliefs, values, religions and perspectives.
[2] C.S. Lewis, Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays (HarperOne, 1986), 78.
[3] Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction
[4] To his credit, Billy Graham understood the ideological nature of the struggle from the earliest of days. In his famous 1949 crusade in Los Angeles, Graham proclaimed that “Communism has decided against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion. . . . Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed and motivated by the Devil himself, who has declared war against Almighty God.” Or this from 1953: “Either Communism must die, or Christianity must die, because it is actually a battle between Christ and Anti-Christ.”
[5] https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/solzhenitsyns-gulag-archipelago-at-50/
[6] https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/murderers-row/
[7] http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM
[8] Zúquete, José Pedro, ed. The Palgrave Handbook of Left-Wing Extremism. 2 vols. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
[9] James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), 245.
[10] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Watchmaker Publishing), Ch 7.
[11] Qtd. in David L. Bahnsen, 250 Economic Truths (Washington, DC: Post Hill Press, 2021), 265.
[12] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/21/president-xi-jinping-warns-against-foreign-influence-on-religions-in-china
[13] Alastair Roberts et al., Protestant Social Teaching: An Introduction (Landrum, SC: The Davenant Press, 2022), 54.
[14] Qtd. in David L. Bahnsen, 250 Economic Truths (Washington, DC: Post Hill Press, 2021), 72.
[15] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3192933/Hugo-Chavez-s-ambassador-daughter-Venezuela-s-richest-woman-according-new-report.html & http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423011/venezuela-nicolas-maduro-socialism-economics
[16] Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1990), 200.
[17] See W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing, 1958), 289. Skousen outlines the patient strategies of Communism to remake the world. It includes taking control of the schools and churches.
[18] https://americanreformer.org/2026/03/whither-the-reformation-in-america/
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