To many conservative Christians the belief system known as Cultural Marxism, like its close cousin, post-modernism, is a hateful ideology bent on destruction of our Christian culture. To many on the Left the analysis by conservatives of Cultural Marxism is a type of shibboleth denying progressive forces. Any mention of "Cultural Marxism" is an indication to many on the Left that their interlocutor is really a right-wing extremist, perhaps even a White Supremacist.
It does not help that many of the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, who articulated the key ideas of Cultural Marxism, were Jewish, thus adding to the impression on the Left that those who complain about this philosophy are on the Hard Right and inclined towards anti-Semitic conspiracies. Cultural Marxism being a dog whistle for anti-semites. Nonetheless the Jewish aspect to Cultural Marxism is important, as will be argued here below.
In the West and indeed in the Orthodox East, we live in a Judaeo-Christian culture and the beliefs and values of Christianity, emerging as it did from the Jewish milieu, still set the paradigm within which our ethics and politics are worked out and discussed. Cultural Marxism's power is that it touches on many of these deep cultural-values, while denying and attacking the faith upon which these values were founded.
It was Nietzsche, with his attempt to smash our table of values, who identified an inherent tendency to self destruction in Christianity, which he saw as a slavish and Semitic faith (going back to the validation of slaves as chosen people, not subhuman, and their liberation in the story of Exodus). Other thinkers on the Right, such as Julius Evola utterly rejected the Christian values of compassion and what he saw as a celebration of weakness, looking instead to a religion of heroes as he believed existed in the Aryan world before Christianity. Yet as Rene Guenon pointed out, the Tradition of our ancestors was to be found passed on to us within our traditional Christian inheritance.
To understand the political extremes of Left and Right, we really need to pay attention to the powerful and fundamental cultural symbol of Christ as the victim. Nietszche and Evola were right, without Christianity our moral values would not have been centred on the victim. Instead, more likely we would have looked back to Imperial Rome or even the earlier Dictators, with their symbol - the fasces, which was to give its name to a Twentieth Century ideology.
Cultural Marxism itself is simply what it claims to be. It extends the Marxist economic critique to all aspects of society. Thus it is no longer about dividing the world into economic oppressors of the poor in the form of the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat. Now every relationship is to be understood as one of group oppression. Just as we are defined by our economic identity in the struggle of economic power, so we belong to groups in our social interactions, either as oppressors or victims. As men we inevitably oppress women, as Whites we inevitably oppress other ethnic groups, as heterosexuals we oppress people of non-heterosexual inclinations or passions. From this stems the absurd idea of intersectionality, which leads to the bizarre "oppression Olympics" of groups competing for entitlement to power on the basis of their greater level of victimhood.
Such an ideology is of course destructive, debilitating and depersonalising. The individual person is defined by his power status as understood by the ideological narrative. When revealed as it is , the ideology is about nothing more than power.
While so much is wrong with this ideology, we must understand that it is a phenomenon that only a Judaeo Christian society could spawn. It is a form of heresy and like all heresies there is only a small deviation from truth that leads to major consequences in terms of actions. For Christ is indeed the victim, Who calls upon us to love the victim. On this holy weekend we remember Christ as the sacred victim and scapegoat who suffered and died for us. Weakness, vulnerability and compassion are all emphasised in the heart of the Christian faith as so powerfully attested to by Christ's willing sacrifice upon the Cross.
With the Cultural Marxists however, there is nothing redemptive about being a victim. Instead dependency and wallowing in a feeling of being oppressed is encouraged, with the consequent resentment that causes. It therefore takes us far away from the Christian ethos of forgiveness leading to redemption and towards a revolutionary attitude based upon resentment and self righteousness.
And of course, Christians themselves are ideologically defined as oppressors. This denial of the founding value-system leads to the bizarre situation of Cultural Marxists turning a blind eye to oppression by other faiths, because it is not possible to comprehend in terms of the ideology that other faiths might cause oppression. Thus Cultural Marxists are quick to defend those who carry our violence against Israel, yet the Muslim oppression of Christians is deliberately ignored.
The importance of the victim in Christianity has degenerated into the fetishization of victimhood. The distortion from Christianity involves the denial that Christ redeemed us and was victorious on the Cross, but retains the cultural symbol of the victim. Without that redemption and possibility of eternal life, all is about this passing world. The victory must be achieved in this world, where victims are only ever victims and have no hope of Paradise, but must instead fight for Utopia politically and even on the street. That is the original fall from Christian theology and with a centrifugal force the heresy moves the Cultural Marxists farther and farther away from Christian Truth, until they turn on Christianity itself. Thinkers such as Evola and Nietszche were wrong, Christianity did not contain inherently the seeds of its own destruction. Instead Cultural Marxism is only possible, as with the Left wing ideas of their day, because of a heretical turn.
That turn had its root in a heterodox over-emphasis in the West on Christ's humanity at the expense of His divinity. The Catholic Church focused so much on the suffering of Christ as a victim that it forgot His ultimate victory. The Protestants did not do very much to break away from this fetishization of Christ as a human victim, rather than triumphant Godhead in the flesh. Our art and iconography powerfully portrays Christ as a dying or even a dead man. This is so much so that Fyodor Dostoevsky was shaken on his visit to Europe when he saw Holbein's famous painting of Christ dead in the tomb. As an Orthodox Christian to see Christ in this way had been unthinkable to the Russian writer, who went on to experience a crisis of faith.
The fetishization of victimhood was to be combined with another reductionist aspect we inflicted upon Christianity - justification by faith alone. While faith is central on the journey into the full stature of Christ, if it becomes reduced to justification by adherence to specific statements of a creed, the personal interaction and growth is gone. Being Christian is no longer about becoming a full human being through faith in Christ, but believing a true creed is sufficient. This is not so very different from what Jordan Peterson describes as ideological possession - belief in the correct ideology covers all sins and justifies the means. This is why so many Leftists seem to be so insufferably self-righteous, exhibiting the intolerance of Seventeenth Century Puritans.
There was one key ingredient left before the subversion of our Judaeo Christian culture could begin. To return to our roots - back in the First Century, the Jews rejected Christ for various reasons. For the Pharisees, His teaching they thought would endanger their uncomfortable compromise with the Roman Empire that allowed them a level of religious autonomy. Yet there was another element to Jewish society that became embittered by Christ - the Zionists of the time. Zealots and others foresaw a Messiah who would by military means overthrow the Romans and establish a Kingdom based upon justice for the poor and oppressed. Christ taught instead an internal change manifested in a life of love. This caused severe disappointment and the welcomes of Palm Sunday in defiance of the Sanhedrin led to an unholy alliance of Zealot and Pharisee. It was about political revolution to establish social justice, rather than hoping in faith for Paradise. One can see that combined with Catholic emphasis on the victim and Protestant justification by faith alone, this Jewish emphasis on political rather than spiritual solutions was another key ingredient. First came Marxism and then today, with its long march through our institutions we have Cultural Marxism.
We cannot blame true Judaism any more than true Christianity; yet the Western Churches weakly seem to accept the Cultural Marxist narrative and allow Christianity thereby to be dismissed as oppressive and as rigid tradition. Instead our culture, based fundamentally upon Christianity, must find its voice again, to counter this corrosive ideology of resentment and materialism. The answer is to be found in the Patristic writings, from Chrysostom to the Cappadocian Fathers - all of whom took the plight of the poor and oppressed very seriously. Only then will we again understand that while Christ might have appeared as a victim, a stumbling block and foolishness to many, He is the victor over death and the Church is not a powerful and oppressive institution, but His body on earth.
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