Responding to Social Justice: Building a Better Future
Learn from the Marxists and take back the institutions.
When we try to figure out how to respond to the Social Justice movement to make a maximum, impact, it is important to think long term and build for that. Earlier I wrote about how we need to be willing to think about and build things that might not see fruition until long after we have been called from this life. This outlook must include the global scale as well. We complete this series by looking at the global context in the long term.
Sometimes it helps to take a play out of your opponent’s playbook. There was some strategic wisdom in how this movement was created to take over the West. Therefore, it would be helpful to review what happened to make this type of radical Social Justice common in parts of our society.
How we got here
Karl Marx believed the Proletariat would rise up on their own, throw off the Bourgeois and take over the means of production. Marx, being an atheist, famously argued that religion was “the opium of the people” and really existed only to control the people by making them complacent to their oppression with the hope of reward in the next life. Marx believed once the people realized they were being taken advantage of, they would automatically rise up, unite, and take control from the greedy capitalists.
In early 20th century Italy, Marxist Antionio Francesco Gramsci (1891-1937) realized Marx’s idea that the Proletariat would naturally rise up and take over the means of production was not going to happen on its own. Gramsci looked at Marxism from a more humanistic perspective, trying to understand it more broadly than just materialism. Gramsci also took Marx’s argument against religion and broadened it to the wider culture. His concept of “cultural hegemony” explained that capitalists controlled the proletariat through churches, schools, publishing, art, and other cultural institutions.[1] Therefore, he argued that Marxists needed to create a “counter-hegemony” by taking over or supplanting the cultural institutions. In the 1960’s Rudi Dutschke dubbed this “The long march through the institutions.”[2]
This plan, which was successfully followed, was to infiltrate and take over key institutions in the West, including schools, libraries, and museums. The success of this movement can be seen everywhere. Even businesses have been largely taken over by this movement.
One of the things this movement has done exceedingly well is to exploit the openness and goodwill of our society. Traditionally conservative and classically liberal university faculties would accept Marxists as part of the free exchange of ideas; however, once the Marxists gained enough say and power, they began shutting down free speech and other viewpoints.
The plan was simple: exploit the open and trusting nature of Western society in order to gain a foothold and then gain power. Since so much of Western society has been predicated on the notion of the free exchange of ideas, this created an open door for subversive thoughts. The idea was that when people would debate, the poor ideas would be defeated.
The neo-Marxists then took this openness and argued that they should also have a say in education and other institutions. While Marxism sounds very good on paper, when it has been attempted for real, it has turned into a major disaster! As a result, these neo-Marxist thinkers entered academic institutions and slowly took over by advocating for their own disciples to be added to faculties.
This transition in academic and government institutions was also advanced by the natural inclination of more conservative thinkers to gravitate to the private sector. This left education and the public sector led by those who advocate for more governmental control and oversight. This should not be surprising, but as this progressed the education shifted more neo-Marxist and, therefore, more students graduated with this thinking, causing a slow, but real, snowball effect.
This happened slowly, until recently when they reached critical mass of being able to take over control of these institutions. Once they had the power, then things like “political correctness” and now DEI have been used to shut down the very openness that allowed them to enter in the first place.
The response must be long-term as well
So, how can this be changed? Of course, there are those who are trying to take this on by trying to contain it from the top-down, such as Florida’s anti-Woke law. But, this seems to me to be a holding action, at best.
The real answer must be equally as long-term as the problem, and I think the proper place to start is with the education system. To this end, however, conservative Christians are at a disadvantage. We cannot have our own long march through the institutions, because the now Cultural Marxists will not allow the same sort of welcome and debate they received and leveraged. Rather, I think the answer lies in our own schools.
Education has always been a competitive enterprise, with different schools coming from different perspectives. It is important to keep in mind that the rather monolithic nature of public education is a very new phenomenon. Historically, in North America there have always been Lutheran and Catholic schools as well as public schools at all levels. In certain enclaves Jews and Mormons have also had their own institutions. So, creating a parallel school is not a new idea; it is how it has always been.
The first step includes taking a hard look at each of our schools to see if it is good or not and, if not, if it can honestly be salvaged. This is a hard thing to write, but consider some of the issues within the Concordia University system, most notably at Concordia Texas. Even our elementary schools need to be examined to make sure they are faithful to Scripture and not just mirroring the public school’s curriculum with a dash of Jesus thrown in.
I am a graduate of one of the Concordia Universities, and I remember arguing with an education professor who was a full-on advocate of the self-esteem movement and even argued that every child should be passed every year, no matter what. When I countered that this would mean that a diploma would be meaningless, he argued that they are meaningless, so that is not a problem! This man taught many current Lutheran school teachers. When you add to this that we have a shortage of trained teachers, so we are hiring those who come from secular education programs, we need to admit that we are importing many of the world’s views into our schools.
I also believe we need to build more strong, Christian schools at all levels - elementary on through university levels. These schools, however, will need to be carefully built and protected from being undermined by unbiblical sources.
I am not, however, advocating a pure retreat from the world. Rather, what I am arguing is that we need to create good institutions, first for our own children, but then to help others as well. Imagine 20 years from now, a relatively young Christian university that teaches that there is a God-given order in the world that can be investigated and learned and how that school could compete, in the realm of science, with a secular school that argues that biology (such as the existence of male and female) is not real. It should be clear that over time, the strong, Biblically based school would actually do a better job of preparing people for the real world and, therefore, do far more good.
This does mean sacrifice for us now. But consider how many centuries some of the Christian built institutions, like Oxford and Cambridge, served the world well before they ran off course. We can do something, even if it is small, to help make a difference that could make a far better future long after we have been called to glory.
[1] Karl Thompson, “Gramsci’s Humanist Marxism,” ReviseSociology, 23 June 2016, https://revisesociology.com/2016/06/23/gramscis-humanist-marxism/.
[2] Charles Pincourt and James A. Lindsay, Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond, Kindle. (Orlando, FL: New Discourses, 2021), loc. 148.