[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Recently Utah Senator John Curtis in the Wall Street Journal wrote about a survey he conducted after the murder of Charlie Kirk: “Among the hundreds of messages that poured in, an alarming cohort spoke to the vicious cycle of online hatred they see and the isolation they feel on social media.”
These sermons of hate are delivered not by a preacher in a pulpit from which he addresses a congregation seated in pews, a community of other human beings sharing their spiritual humanity and beliefs; but by online apps and algorithms that spellbind isolated strangers with wounded souls who face inhuman screens throbbing with extremism and hate.
They are the “woke” parishioners of a new “black market religion,” French philosopher Chantal Delsol’s metaphor for the deracinated, secularized peoples of modernity who find substitutes for the lost meaning and solidarity of faith in political religions like fascism, ethnonationalism, and communism. For as priest and professor Owen Chadwick observed, “secularization is a religious process rather than an irreligious.”
Of all the black-market religions, Marx’s theories have been the most dependent on Christian doctrine and theology. A critical precursor and model was the French Revolution. Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1856 The Old Regime and the French Revolution described the Revolution as “a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without religion, and without life after death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.”
Similarly, Marx’s financier Friedrich Engles’ claimed that he was a “scientist” who discovered the “science of real men and their historical development.” But rather than an empiricist, Marx was a prophet of his own revelations, who appropriated much from Christianity. As historian Michael Burleigh writes, “It is relatively easy to transpose some of the key terms from the Judeo-Christian heritage to Marxism: “consciousness” (soul), “comrades” (faithful), “capitalist” (sinner), “devil” (counter-revolutionary), “proletariat” (chosen people), “classless society” (paradise.) The ruling class were also going to face a revolutionary form of “Last Judgement.”
But, Burleigh continues, “there were far deeper unacknowledged correspondences, including nostalgia for a lost oneness and the belief that time was linear . . . [and] that the achievement of higher consciousness brought salvation, and that history was progressive with its meaning and purposes evident to the discerning, knowledgeable vanguard.”
Any leftist or “woke” column, speech, podcast, or protest slogan reprises these Marxist clichés.
Though Christianity was Marx’s most pertinent religious influence, we are witnessing today a bizarre symbiosis between the traditional atheist left, and Islamic jihadism still commanded by Koranic doctrines––a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The result is a new version of black market religion.
The points of solidarity are many: for communists, their motivating hatred is of the capitalist, free market West and its most powerful nation, the U.S., which brought down the Soviet Union, Marxism’s greatest success and power. For traditional Sharia-supremacist Muslims, the infidel West is similarly hated, but particularly the U.S or “Great Satan,” for wielding the global power and dominance that Allah intends for Muslims; and for supporting Israel, which according to Islamic myth-history hijacked Islam and occupies territories belonging to the “best of nations,” as the Koran says. Hence the support for Hamas by “woke” leftist college students who protest while donned in Muslim garb, and chant Muslim genocidal jihadist slogans against Israel, the nation of the Jews, the “Little Satan” allied with the “Great Satan” that interferes with Allah’s divine intention.
Another connection is the use of brutal violence against “infidels” and rival ideologies. For nearly two millennia Islam has killed vast numbers of people during their jihads. The communist Soviet Union similarly murdered vast masses of unbelievers in Marx’s tyrannical ideologies. As Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the secret police, wrote, “We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.”
The Ayatollah Khomeini, godfather of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, was even more brutal with infidels than Dzerzhinsky was with Marx’s enemy––the bourgeoise and capitalists. “Those who know nothing of Islam,” Khomeini preached, “[who say] that Islam counsels against war are . . . witless. Islam says ‘Kill all the unbelieves as they would kill you!’ . . . Islam says: ‘Whatever good there exists is thanks to the shadow of the sword!’”
The leftists and “woke” fit the mold of Marx’s version of the “black market religion”: the resort to extreme violence; the amoral “any means necessary” modus operandi; the “no enemies on the left” double standards and its blatantly transparency hypocrisy, the shamefully preposterous “big lie;” and the juvenile hysterical “passionate intensity” that marks the apocalyptic Second Coming. If you want proof, look at the current attempt to weaponize the Epstein files in yet another feeble attempt to wound Donald Trump.
Finally, we must emphasize the “black market religion” of the left’s scientism that has defined Marxism from the beginning: the pretense that Marxist ideology is a species of empirical science rather than an incoherent, malign figment of Marx’s imagination. That’s one reason the left so vehemently supports anthropocentric, catastrophic global warming, and predicate their belief on dubious hypotheses that rely on manipulated computer models rather than real-life evidence, while demonizing anyone––including respected actual scientists––as “deniers,” a smear meant to evoke holocaust denial.
Meanwhile, warmists attempt through Democrat policies to eradicate the abundant, carbon-based energy that created the modern West, while energy poor nations of the developing world are pressured to follow the rich Western left down the green rabbit hole that is wrecking its economies.
Similarly, the Marxist tradition of scientism also explains the leftists’ support for transgenderism pseudoscience––the ridiculous belief that biological sex is an antiscientific construct of the lupine greedy medical establishment, scientifically challenged media, and naive parents of newborns, who are encouraged by the left to choose their child’s sexual identity from a preposterous catalogue of made-up identities, and then have their children poisoned and mutilated in an attempt to make a malign fantasy into a grotesque reality. Having no real science to support these fantasies, in traditional Marxist fashion, the left attacks critics with violence and slander.
Most importantly is the main purpose of contemporary black-market religions: to dismantle our Constitutional order of divided and balanced powers, and protected rights and freedoms that are the bulwark against the tyrannies of black-market religions eager to take control of society and government power, and create their impossible utopias and globalist fever dreams thwarted, for now, by Donald Trump’s restoration of our Constitutional heritage of freedom. But by no means has the job been finished.
