Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: — | Date: December 8, 2019 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

But today on cultural Marxism, let’s begin with a word of prayer. Our Father, we recognize that sometimes in order to be discerning, we have to apply our minds faithfully and diligently in a more exceptional way sometimes to understand the thinking of our society in order to live faithfully in it. We pray that you’ll help us to that end this morning. Make us faithful, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

All right, we’re looking at the subject of cultural Marxism. This is a little bit different from our ordinary type of study. In fact, much of this course has been that. This, I should say up front, this is not an area of specialization of mine, but I have tried to understand it increasingly. You hear the terms that we’ll look at bandied about quite a bit today. And it has become increasingly important to understand it. And whatever else you think of it, please do not think of it as irrelevant. This is the air we breathe today in our culture. And I think it is very important for us to have some kind of an understanding of it. I don’t expect that each of you will go away from this this morning able to recite everything that you’ve heard. It’s going to be a lot that I’m going to throw at you this morning. But I hope it will at least give you a framing understanding of the thinking of our society today.

All right, cultural Marxism and contemporary culture.

Karl Marx And Marxism

I’ll begin with some remarks about Marx himself, Karl Marx and Marxism. Karl Marx lived 1818 to 1883. He was a German philosopher and economist. He was a historian. He was a sociologist, a political theorist, a journalist, a socialist, a revolutionary. He was many things. His life’s goal—his ambition—was the overthrow of capitalism or capitalistic society and the forms of government that allowed it. And his goal then with that was to free, as he understood it, free the working class from what he considered to be economic oppression.

He is understood as the father of communism, the father of socialism. Whatever fine distinctions there are between those two, he is the father of it. He is one who is referred to by David Brees in his book as one of the men who rules the world from the grave. And it’s really not an overstatement. For much of the time since World War II, communism has controlled about a third of the population of the world. One of Marx’s associates remarked at his funeral, “I am confident that when the 200th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx will be observed, the entire world will be socialist.” I’m not sure but that that might be more accurate than not. We haven’t reached 200 years yet, but there are many signs to say that that was an insightful statement.

His ideology and his ideals—I’m going to list here three leading or controlling ideas of Karl Marx.

One is the idea of liberation. I’m not going to expand on that, but you need to hold on to that. We’ll look at it as we go along. What does it mean to be free? He exploited the concept of liberation. It’s huge in his thinking. Keep that in mind as we go along. Number one, liberation.

Number two, inequality. He was concerned with questions of power and oppression and inequality. He was concerned with what he understood as the privileged upper class; he didn’t like to see that and wanted things equalized. So number one, liberation; number two, inequality.

And number three, this was huge: conflict. And the conflict is between the oppressors and the oppressed. Now this dominates in Marxist and cultural Marxist thinking. You’ll need to hang on to this as we go through. He was influenced by the philosopher Hegel. Many of you have at least been introduced to some of that, the conflict of ideas. In Hegel’s thought, this is what drives history. You’ve got these ideas driving history, and you have the dominant idea—that’s the thesis—and you have a contrary idea—that’s the antithesis—and they fight it out, and you come to a new understanding, and that’s the synthesis. And that, in turn, becomes the new thesis, and that’s opposed, and you have the antithesis, and a new synthesis, and so on goes history.

History then is a continual process of change in his thought. And the next stage in history, he taught, would be this kind of conclusion to history, which is the overthrow of capitalism and the establishing of a socialist society. Now in former times, according to Marx, the oppressors—remember that’s the big idea here—the oppressors were the landowners in the feudalistic system. Now, he said, the oppressors are not that, but the business owners. And here you have the famous distinction that he made between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeois, they are the capitalists, the business owners, the ones that own the means of production. The proletarians, on the other hand, are the wage laborers. They have no means of production on their own. And so they are used by the bourgeoisie in an unfair way, according to Marx.

So the proletarians work in the factories but don’t own them. The bourgeois, they own the factories but don’t work. And Marx says that is exploitation, and that’s unfair. And so we have this class warfare. So Marx had an alternative idea and an ideal, and that is to that of complete equality across the board. No upper class, no excessively wealthy, no private property is to be owned. Class struggle would be gone. And the famous line in Marxist thinking then is, “Each works according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And you’ve got this idealistic society where each is working what they can for the good of the whole.

What is needed, he said, is a completely new structuring of society to present—I’m going to get some lights here. I’m sorry, the dimmer, is that it? There we are. These present oppressive structures of a capitalist society, he said, have to be overthrown and replaced. And these present structures include not just things like trade unions and things like that, but all that goes into a capitalistic society: the government that allows it, even the religion. The oppressor is the capitalistic society. Religion, according to Marx, is the opiate of the masses that allows government to get by with this capitalistic oppression. It all has to be replaced.

And so he had this utopian promise. Finally, society will be just, the people will be free, and all will enjoy not equity, but equality. Not just equity, but equality. So the big ideas for Marx are power and oppression, liberation, and equality.

Now to advance all of that, according to Marx, there are natural laws at work to bring about the change, to accomplish socialism, but violence was also necessary. Inevitably, the working class is going to revolt, and it needs to revolt. And in fact, in Marx’s thinking, any means is justifiable to accomplish this greater end. And we’ll have a truly humane society and this utopia will be accomplished, even if necessary, through violence and overthrow.

Also necessary to the accomplishment of this communist ideal is the abolition of religion. Marxist thought is explicitly and vigorously atheistic and anti-religion, and in particular, anti-Christian. Also necessary to carry this out is the abolition of family, which he viewed as foundational to capitalism. So we’ve got to get rid of these ideas that allow capitalism to thrive, according to Marx.

So inevitably, that whole process, according to Marx, is going to need help. And so we have to have a government structure to enforce it. I think in the endgame in Marx, he had a perfectly classless society. But to carry it out, we need the governmental structure to enforce it. And that, of course, is the Communist Party, the new replacement god. And with that, you’ve got a heavily graduated income tax, and you have abolition eventually of private property, no rights to inheritance, free education, the government owns the banks, it owns the industries—a complete leveling of society, which of course becomes the great contradiction for communism. They’re trying to rid society of all of these class distinctions, and it creates this instead, this new ruling class, and that’s the all-owning, all-controlling, all-authoritative Communist Party.

That, of course, was finally realized with Nikolai Lenin, just after World War II, taking advantage of a weakened Russia, and with the Bolshevik Revolution and communism coming to power, and with their promise of utopia. And it’s always this, “for the people.” Their promise of utopia for the people ensued in decades of just hell on earth for thousands and thousands of people, something like 100 million people eliminated who got in the way of these Marxist utopian ideals. And of course, the most famous examples are places like Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and other places as well.

Well, so much then for Marx and Marxism. On a related note, I should mention that even though Marxism is an explicitly and vigorously atheistic system of thought, it does have a Christian, quote-unquote, Christian stepchild, and that’s liberation theology. And liberation theology teaches that Jesus came to effect economic liberation to free the oppressed poor. Still this opposition, oppressed and oppressor mentality. Sin in liberation theology is the possession of wealth when there are poor all around you. Righteousness in liberation theology is the redistribution of that wealth, giving it to the poor. And evangelism in liberation theology is calling people to liberation, give the message of liberation, and calling them to join the revolution. As you may know, liberation theology is huge in Latin America. It has also influenced much of black liberation theology as well.

Cultural Marxism

All right, that’s the background; now cultural Marxism. That is a 20th-century development in Marxist thought that views Western culture—and here’s the catch—Western culture, the culture itself, as oppressive. It’s the culture that is oppressive. And so it’s an application of Marxist theory to Western culture.

Now, though the label cultural Marxism didn’t come until later, cultural Marxism is inextricably associated with the Frankfurt School established in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923. It’s a think tank that was focusing on social theory and critical philosophy. These were intellectuals, academics, political dissidents that were unhappy with the current socioeconomic situation in Western society. And they had given themselves to undermine all of that.

There are several important names associated with that. I won’t give them all, but a couple that I might mention as we go along are Antonio Gramsci—he’s big in this—Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse is another one that’s very important, Wilhelm Reich is another. They became threatened under the Nazi regime, and so many of them came to America at that time to exercise their own freedom and their ideas. And some of them, after the war, returned to Germany, but many of them eventually, at least, settled into academic positions here at various universities in the States.

According to Marxist theory, the overthrow of capitalism was inevitable. That’s the philosophical historical determinism behind it. But the overthrow of capitalism never happened. Why? Why didn’t it happen as it was supposed to happen? And the answer was because of the larger cultural structures were still in the way that prevented the success of Marxist thought.

And here the big idea is to take one of their words that’s so dominant in it: hegemony. Hegemonic structure. This is a word that Gramsci made popular. Hegemony is the dominant set of ideas and norms and structures of thoughts and ways of thinking and the whole society that makes us what we are. This is what maintains this inability to advance Marxist thought. And that’s preserved through social institutions, the media, academia. It’s non-coercive means. It’s just the dominant way that we think. The hegemony. And so with this hegemony, this hegemonic structure in place, you’ve got thought structures, structures of understanding, plausibility structures, as they are called, in the background that keep new ways of thinking, like Marxist thought, from advancing. So the hegemonic structure is what allows us to say, “Everybody knows that.” So when you hear the word hegemony or hegemonic structure, that’s what they’re talking about. The dominant thinking of a culture. That’s just the way it is.

We will see more of that as we go along. But if we’re going to change the economic structure for communism, we first then, they taught, have to replace the hegemony. We’ve got to change the culture. Hence, cultural Marxism. So what they did is developed a new, what’s called neo-Marxist interpretation of Western culture under the rubric of critical theory.

Critical Theory

Now you’ve heard that term bandied around quite a bit. Its goal was not truth, but praxis: revolutionary action. Its goal was bringing current society and culture down through unremitting destructive criticism. That’s their goal, as they stated: to bring down current society and culture through unremitting destructive criticism.

Now you remember we looked at postmodernist thinking some months ago in this series. This has its roots here as well in cultural Marxism in the Frankfurt School. Truth to them was locked into a particular point of history. It is locked into, and truth is specific to that, and this truth that our society has had, that’s a shape, this hegemony, it’s had its day. A new truth that is just as good, or is better, needs to replace it now. A new truth. Now, truth, of course, if it’s historically and group-specific like that, that would apply to cultural Marxism as well, but that’s something they conveniently overlooked.

In brief then, cultural Marxists at the Frankfurt School had a better truth, as they taught it, and they sought by it to establish subverting the hegemony. So it’s a decidedly subversive, revolutionary enterprise. And the goal is to get rid of, to rid society of all of the artificial external authorities, show them to be unwarranted, think for yourself—liberation and a radical kind of individualism. In short, the overthrow of Western society. As Sidney Hook states it—she’s an advocate, he’s an advocate of cultural Marxism—the goal is for man to express his true essence through creative freedom.

Now the idea of liberation sounds very positive, sounds very good, but how do we define liberation? Freedom from what? Now keep in mind the differences here. In classical liberalism, the freedom was one of individual freedom before the law and equality before the law. So there’s equality of opportunity and the law and the whole structure treats everyone individually equally. In classical Marxism, it’s freedom from economic inequality. A leveling of all society to make everyone the same.

In cultural Marxism now, it cuts across the whole of culture and the whole of human experience and speaks of liberation in terms of more latent inequalities: race, gender, sexuality, sexual preferences, relationship structures. All of these are varied, and in all of them we have the oppressors and the oppressed, and that all needs to be rectified. And so it’s often called libertarian Marxism. It’s all about liberating humanity from social institutions and conditions that prevent the individual from realizing his true freedom, however he may want to express that. So liberation from the hegemonic domination in whatever dimension that has. Whatever institutions, whatever structures there are in society that oppress people from doing what they want, feeling what they want, they’ve got to be eliminated. So the guiding consideration still is Marx’s idea of oppressor and oppressed.

Now that brings us then to critical theory. Critical theory, this is a sustained social critique aimed at undermining the status quo. Critical theory—you tell by the name—it’s a negative enterprise. It’s aimed at social change, but it’s essentially a negative enterprise that really offers no positive solution. It’s negative in intent: to critique society, to critique the hegemonic structure, and to undermine it and to destroy it. So find the problems within Western culture, criticize them to see that they are eliminated. Specifically in view in all of that is, again, this Marxist idea of the oppressor and the oppressed. And especially they’re looking at things like cultural and societal structures. So it’s capitalism, anything associated with Western institutions, Western thought, social relations, recognized moral norms. All of those are oppressive. Recognized structures of thought, those are oppressive. And the attempt now is to undermine all of that. We’ve got to subvert it and change it.

So why, for instance, are… let’s back up. What is our cultural hegemony? The hegemonic structure in American society is we are white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered. Do you know what that is? As far as I know, all of you are cisgendered. A cisgendered person is one whose biological sex and gender are the same. So I used to be able to say he’s a man; now he’s a cisgendered male. That is, he’s a man and he’s a man. Okay, so we have white, male, cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, Western, US-born. All of these factors make up the hegemonic structure. These are the ones that rule. These are the privileged ones, the ones that have the advantage in society. And the more of those categories you are, the more privileged you are. And the fewer of those that you have, the more oppressed you are. And so we’ve got to change.

Why would heterosexuals be privileged? Why is that considered normal? Why shouldn’t homosexuality be considered normal? Changing the hegemonic structure, the way society thinks. In Marxist thought, all of this is the oppressed and the oppressors. And they argued strenuously in regard to morals like that to undermine it all. And it became an important part of the advance of cultural Marxist thought. Sexual norms, moral norms in cultural Marxist thought have to be understood as mere societal conventions. It’s something we have constructed ourselves, there’s no reason for it, and we need to question it and critique it.

So as you can see, it’s atheistic, complete rejection of external authority. With this came the teaching that there’s no difference between man and woman. Sexual genders are all the same. You can be what you want, whatever your biology is. And you might be interested to know that Wilhelm Reich, a name I mentioned earlier from the Frankfurt School, wrote a book entitled The Sexual Revolution. You thought that happened in the ’60s. That book was written in 1936. There are the roots of that. And again, all innate sexual impulses have got to be liberated from these artificial norms that have been constraining them. Let people do what they want to do.

The very idea of marital love, that’s oppressive. The idea of fidelity, that’s unfounded. Women were encouraged to ignore their traditional norms. They’re encouraged to rebel against their husbands. The idea of gender, that’s just a human construct. There’s no innate difference between men and women. You be what you want to be. And this was called then “polymorphous perversity.” Sexuality for any kind of relationship that you want. Now their goal in all of that was structural change, the whole hegemonic structure. But this pleasure principle, as they called it, was unleashed to aid in that effort.

The Means Of Advance

All right, the means of advance for all of this. Although these original thinkers described it as cultural terrorism—and for them, any means is justifiable to carry it out—the more common tactic is what’s been called revolution by stealth. I think that’s an apt description of it. That is an exercise in systematic brainwashing of the society, subverting and reversing the thinking of society until traditional values become questioned, and then they become not only rejected, but finally traditional values become despised. That may sound a little familiar.

Now, we’re not going to spend a lot of time on race here, but we should just, as a side here, look at critical race theory as well. It’s another explicitly negative enterprise. Again, critical: it’s a negative enterprise trying to find the problem. Theory: that’s an explanatory structure, a way to explain reality. It’s something that’s derived from postmodern theory that we talked about earlier in the course of study this year. And remember, we saw that in postmodern thinking, knowledge is person-specific, individual-specific. You have your knowledge; I have my knowledge. You have your truth; I have my truth. And all are equally true, and there’s no way to arbitrate between them.

Here in critical race theory, it’s not individual-oriented, but group-oriented. One community has its own experience-based knowledge, its own experience-based truth. Their unique experience, which is viewed as oppressive, produces their unique knowledge, and that knowledge is not available to others who are not in that group. And you cannot question the knowledge and the truth that is from that group because you’re not in it. And for you to question that knowledge of that group and the truth of that group would be to impose your truth on their truth, and that’s more of this oppression. It’s also called standpoint epistemology.

This is where we come up then finally with expressions that you’ve heard today of “white fragility” or “male fragility.” If you question something about another race, it’s because you’re insecure in your whiteness, threatened with the hegemonic structure that you’re benefiting from. Male fragility: you can’t speak to women’s issues. And if you object to what is being taught, it’s because you’re insecure in your hegemonic dominion, and you need to let that go. So how you are situated dictates what you can and cannot know.

Society then has its dominant group, its hegemonic structure—white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered, and all of that. But that hegemonic structure has constructed knowledge and truth in a way that preserves its dominance. And that’s not fair. And it’s not right to question the knowledge or the truth of any others, and completely legitimate then you are being oppressive. Now the oppressed group lives a little bit in both worlds. So there’s a sense in which its truth is a bit superior. And the oppressed group must recognize—you must recognize their truth as legitimate. You simply have to agree. There’s no other option. So you have critical theory and you have critical theory applied to race: critical race theory.

Now the problem with critical theory—and I hope you understand, I’m certainly not encouraging any kind of racism. There are all kinds of biblical reasons to be death on any kind of racism. Certainly the gospel and certainly creation itself and the law of love. There are plenty of reasons to be deathly opposed to any kind of racism. But I am criticizing critical theory. The problem with critical theory at root is it doesn’t acknowledge any kind of absolute truth, no kind of external authority. It doesn’t recognize any kind of God’s-eye view of reality by which we can judge things.

Now all of that then brings us to another term that you’ve heard a lot, and that is intersectionality. Intersectionality, you could just understand it as levels of privilege and oppression. Levels of privilege and disadvantage. So our hegemonic structure: white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied, Western, American-born. Our hegemonic structure. The more you have of those things that I’ve itemized, the more privileged you are. But the more you don’t have any of those—they don’t intersect—the more disadvantaged and oppressed you are. The greater the intersection, the greater the oppression. So if you are not white and not male and not straight, you are a very oppressed person in this culture. And on the other hand, if you are white, you’re a racist, not because you are a bigot, but because you are part of this hegemonic structure that oppresses others. And so we have, then, in what Voddie Baucham calls—he’s a black pastor who’s just excellent on these issues—what he says you have now is “racism without a racist.” And this is where we get expressions that we’re hearing in very recent years, that we need to “repent of our whiteness.” It’s not repent that you have white skin, but repent of your whiteness—that you are part of this privileged, oppressive class.

How do you carry all of this out? What are the key tactics involved? And this, I think, even if you haven’t thought of it in these terms, will ring a bell. To advance the agenda, what we need to do first is to destabilize language. Change the way we think, change the concepts that we have, change societal thinking. And what you do then is you redefine words; you redefine concepts and categories of human consciousness that stand in the way. We’ve got this hegemonic structure—the way we think, the way that it is, everyone knows that—we’ve got to change that. And to do that, we must start redefining words and concepts and categories, reshape them with new kinds of what’s called today plausibility structures.

So let me give you some examples. Talk about all current societal structures, not just in terms of class, but talk about it in terms of oppression. Speak of it in terms of hindering freedom. Now that applies to government, economic structures, church, religion, traditional values. All of that now is subjected to this criticism. And don’t talk about neo-Marxism—that’s frightening. Speak positively; speak of liberation. Speak of equality. But when you speak of equality, make them think you’re speaking of equity. And there is a sharp distinction between the two. Smuggle in, when you speak of equity, smuggle in the ideas of equality of outcome. Instead of just equal opportunity, equal outcomes as well.

Speak of the poor as unfairly poor and the wealthy as unjustly wealthy. Don’t speak of rebellion or revolution; speak of liberation. Define tolerance as approval. So that to be unapproving is to be intolerant. Speak of homosexuals as an oppressed minority. Link it to civil rights. So if you’re unapproving of homosexuality, not only are you intolerant, you are now a fascist as well. It’s like being part of the KKK. Change the meaning of marriage. A man and a man, a woman and a woman—why can’t that be marriage? Change the meaning of words. Separate gender from sex. Make them two different things. Sex is what your body is. Gender is what you think you are or decide to be.

Speaking of American diversity as our strength. But when you do that, ignore that our strength is really our unity in our diversity. Speak of the home as enslaving to women. Speak of women as oppressed in the home. Not fair that she should be the one that has to bear children. Not fair that she has to stay home with them and can’t pursue her own career. Not fair. Speak of abortion as a human rights issue—women’s rights, not the baby’s. Speak of sexual deviance as misunderstood and oppressed. Talk about sexual behaviors and practices that previous generations considered taboo; speak of them now in terms of freedom. Doesn’t do anyone any harm, doesn’t hurt anybody. Why should they be oppressed? So for example, in the 1950s, it was shameful and not acceptable in society to be homosexual. Now that’s acceptable. And the same thing now is being pursued in terms of pedophilia and zoophilia and other things. Speak of them as oppressed until finally it’s accepted.

The point in all of that is establish a new language that shapes the thought structures and plausibility structures by which the power is exerted. As Marcuse said of it, “break the established universe of meaning.” Focus the attack on all of the status quo: authority centers, societal structures, societal norms, the media, academia, entertainment, the arts, political leaders. If you can win society’s cultural centers, you’ve won. You’ll get hold of society. And at that point, you will have changed the hegemony, and finally, the ideology of neo-Marxist thinking becomes so dominant that it becomes, as their objective was, it becomes inwardly compelling because you’ve changed the way we think as a society. And now you can say, if you don’t agree, you’re a fascist.

Political Correctness

That then in turn brings us to the next, and that is political correctness. Political correctness is an idea that is designed to punish all dissent, to stigmatize social heresy. Very much like—not really unlike—the Spanish Inquisition against Protestants. Only now the players have changed. It’s a totalitarian philosophy. We have a new Politburo, if you will, a new ruling communist party. The chief characteristic of it is intolerance in the name of tolerance.

And that then helps us to understand the new idea of tolerance. In your outline, Marcuse argued that the old liberal idea of tolerance is just not warranted. The old idea of tolerance was, “I disagree with you thoroughly, but I would fight to the death your right to say it.” That’s the old idea of tolerance. But no, that’s not good enough. Traditional values have to go because they are intolerable. Some thoughts and some speech just have to be disallowed. And so in the name of tolerance, what they do first is change the definition of tolerance. It doesn’t mean tolerate anymore. It means to approve. And change the point of reference. No longer are we talking about ideas, but we’re talking about behavior. Approve of it, or you are intolerant.

And so to be tolerant under this new structure of thought, you’ve got to be approving of all kinds of things. So under this new regime, no longer is it possible to be tolerant under the old definition of toleration. And so necessarily all kinds of restrictions follow. Certain things can’t be said. Certain ideas can’t be expressed. Certain policies can’t be proposed. Certain ideals can’t be considered legitimate. They are just ruled out of court from the beginning. And this is how, in our society, it has come about that traditional values that we have always enjoyed have become controversial. Tolerance is the new totalitarianism masquerading as liberation. The old tolerance is no longer tolerable.

Until finally then, traditional beliefs become not only controversial, but become heresy—unthinkable, intolerable. And any belief that is, any of the traditional beliefs, are assumed to be wrong from the get-go, dismissed. They don’t have to argue because they can be just dismissed as heresy to begin with. And if you dare propose one of those heretical beliefs, then you are just not allowed a platform or a place in the public square. If you’re concerned with conventional, traditional sexual morality, you’re a fascist. And if you talk about it and try to encourage it, well, that’s violent. Speech is violence, and you’re not being tolerant. At that point, culture and society has been successfully subverted.

Now what’s needed in all of that, of course, is some repressed groups. Some repressed groups in society that need liberating. And so what we have to do is establish some group identity. Minority victims who need and deserve rescue because of their gender, because of their race, because of their sexual preference, because of their class in society—speak of these people as either oppressing or as oppressed. And if we can identify this or that group as oppressed, now they have become immune from criticism. And the more oppressed, the more levels of oppression that they have, the better for the cause. If any minority group actually begins to prosper and succeed, convince them that they don’t, because we need oppressed groups for this to happen. Christianity, meanwhile, is the oppressing, the oppressor group, with all of its traditional ideas and ideals. And rather than traditional American doctrine, e pluribus unum—from many, one—instead of that, we have so many diverse groups that are oppressed. We have oppression and oppressed, privileged and underprivileged, group identity according to race, economic class, gender, sexuality, whatever.

Social Justice

And that then brings us to this idea of social justice. Social justice: what is it? Well, classically and biblically, justice is giving someone what they deserve and what is due to them, both positively and negatively. It views the individual. He must get what he deserves. And in classical liberalism, there was an equality under the law, the same application of the law to everyone. It was a heavy concern in the Bible. You see it in the prophets in particular. You read, for example, of the poor being sold in the gates. The idea is that the gates where the disputes are adjudicated, the rich had an advantage. They could buy off the judges. And the poor are sold. One of the prophets was sold for a pair of shoes. That’s injustice. And the prophets are heavily concerned with that kind of thing. Justice has to be blind. And that’s why you see in our statue of Lady Justice the blindfold. Doesn’t matter who you are, what class, what race—famous, not famous, rich, poor, black, white, whoever you are—justice is the same. Under the law, we have equal opportunity. And it’s the government’s responsibility to ensure that that happens.

But social justice is something different. First of all, its focus is not individual; its focus is group. And second, its focus is not justice, but social. And it views these groups in society as privileged or oppressed. And its pursuit then is to rectify society and adjust society so that those privileged are brought down or the oppressed are brought up in a complete leveling of social justice. Bring down those who make up the hegemony in order to elevate the oppressed. We’re running out of time here.

For instance, let me give a couple of examples of that. If you are a white heterosexual and you come from a very poor, dirt-poor background, but you’ve worked hard and clawed and you’ve made yourself very successful in life, that’s unjust because you’re part of the privileged class. If, on the other hand, let’s say you are a black female lesbian who is the daughter of a very wealthy politician or businessman, and you have it good, well, that’s just. You’re one of the oppressed class. Or if you are Asian and you are excelling academically and economically, that’s just. That’s okay, but not if you’re white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered, and so on. Social justice. It’s not about law; it’s not about justice, but about social equality.

Well, I’ve got to run. Under social justice, you have legal rulings. It’s reflected in that. So tax structures today make the rich pay more in taxes because they can afford it. Legalized theft. In ancient Israel, it was a flat tax. Criminal cases are judged according to group identity. A black guy commits a robbery, and in the aftermath, he confronts a white cop and attacks the white cop, trying to take the cop’s gun and then get shot. It’s still social oppression because it’s the same old thing happening again.

Now, this is just the air we breathe today. It’s the philosophy that’s driving academia, media, entertainment, all the leftist policies, the cultural centers of our society—this is what’s driving it. And I wanted to spend a few minutes on some critical observations of it in a Christian response. I’ll have to do that next time. We don’t have any time for questions either, I’m afraid. All right, thank you.