27 October 2021

Barna and Marxism (Part 1)

https://familyliferadio.blubrry.net/2021/10/21/faith-under-fire-ep-74-marxism-in-america-part-1/

George Barna is best known for his fusion of ecclesiology with market analysis. He and those associated with him have pursued models of church growth rooted in surveying and in shaping practice on the basis of the results. His name is usually associated with the Seeker Sensitive Movement because its leaders (men like Bill Hybels and Rick Warren) have integrated the market strategy popularised by figures like Barna into their models for Church growth.


To put it bluntly for the Seeker Movement, the Church isn't built by following the outmoded and antiquated Scriptural model, or through the foolishness of preaching. Rather, they customize the experience to the tastes and wants of the lost in their modern consumer-technological context. They market the message to appeal to the inclinations of lost people – producing churches filled with people, resulting in numbers without substance.

Barna's affiliations fill a fairly broad spectrum, he's even been known to collaborate with the likes of Right-wing activist and propagandist David Barton. I don't follow Barna too closely but it does seem like he's moving farther to the Right. I could be mistaken but his recent appearance on the Family Life Network (FLN) supports this notion. And for that matter Family Life has (with the advent of Trump) itself shifted significantly to the Right and now regularly incorporates Right-wing talk-radio quotes and clips into its news coverage. Mostly driven by something akin to morbid curiosity, I've listened to the teaching programmes on Family Life on and off for over twenty years. The music is awful and has only gotten worse over the past decade. Following the pattern of mainstream Evangelicalism, the network has always been a terrible testimony to the Christian faith and the teaching of Scripture – which it purports to follow, but does not. In fact its whole model is built on a rejection of the Sufficiency of Scripture.

But now, bad music, sacrilegious programming, sloppy amateurish news coverage, and watered down teaching has been augmented by increasingly hard-right political discourse and episodes of blatant propaganda and disinformation. And their influence is growing across the Twin-Tiers region and beyond – into the Wyoming Valley, the Western Reserve of Ohio, Western New York, and both Western and Central Pennsylvania. I count it a tragedy.

I happened to turn on FLN during a recent lunch break and caught this Barna segment. Given the unfortunate reality of Family Life's ever-growing regional footprint I thought it warranted some kind of response.

As usual, Family Life's interviews are less than impressive. The questions are not intelligent and given the format and style of the radio station – nothing ever gets very deep, and thus what you get is a superficial treatment of the subject, even lighter and thus more misleading than what one might find watching something like a PragerU video. It's not meant to stimulate serious thought. It's meant to communicate a couple of points. For those who drink deeply from the network's well, the strategy (if there is one) is more in terms of changing people's minds by the sheer quantity of data bits, a kind of drip feed, rather than any kind of serious qualitative epistemological change.

Whether in ignorance or in an attempt to deliberately mislead, Barna fails to contextualise the rise of Marx. If you don't understand the nineteenth century and the political upheaval which developed alongside the economic changes surrounding the Industrial Revolution – and their moral and social components, then you're not going to be able to interact with Marx. Opposition to the era's unrestrained Capitalism and the social transformation represented by the Industrial Revolution wasn't just about economics or even oppression. There was a moral component to what was happening. In other words many people felt a sense of moral outrage – many of these oppositional feelings were actually conservative in nature, something few Right-wing people seem to understand. Industrial Capitalism was novelty and shattered tradition.

Marx had moved past any kind of nostalgia and as a historicist he saw the need for a new system and viewed it is inevitable. As I and many others have noted, his criticism and acumen are fairly impressive. His solutions were terrible and naive. I do not wish to defend him but I take umbrage at Right-wing Libertarian-style Capitalists engaged in caricature, especially as their system is neither Christian nor moral, and it has also produced a great deal of suffering.

Barna also confuses theories of revolution, the role of the vanguard and the like with some kind of tyrannical oligarchic centralisation of power by design – something Marx did not envision. Though Right-wing people cannot understand this point, socialism was actually viewed as a true expression and evolution of democracy, not its eradication.

Additionally if one wants to seriously engage this topic you must discuss the nature of movements like Stalinism and Maoism vis-à-vis actual or Classical Marxism. Yes, they are related, derivative forms and yet to ideological Marxists these deviationist spin-offs were at key points repudiations of the system, and instead were simply class-oriented dictatorships utilising a Marxist veneer to retain a narrative of legitimacy.

Maybe that kind of degeneration is what Marxism will always end up producing – as it is a failed system in the end. Maybe, but not necessarily. And yet on some level it's also disingenuous to always project (or read back into) these extreme derivatives onto the basic theory itself. It's dishonest in the same way people make connections between Nazism and the earlier ideas of Hegel or Nietzsche. Lexical and ideological overlap may exist but it's sloppy and misleading to draw unqualified direct analogies and apply guilt retroactively. It's valid to tie them together in a larger discussion and in terms of historical development, but to present them as seamless or a monolith is neither honest nor accurate. It would be more honest to say that much of what historically developed under the moniker of 'communism' had little to do with Marx. But this is never said because it would imply that Marx's ideas may still be viable and thus it's politically convenient to present communism as an ideological monolith, a package deal that can be dispensed with. And clearly this tact has worked, as you hear it echoed on the Right-wing street.

Barna's comments regarding the abolition of marriage are somewhat misleading. The interpreter must differentiate between Marx's commentary on the bourgeoisie, its family morality, hypocrisy and its domestic values vis-à-vis his treatment of the workers. One need not agree with Marx but he shouldn't be misrepresented and to couch such questions in sweeping or simplistic terms is once again misleading and less than helpful.

As an aside, there were similar issues raised with Black Lives Matter – which is (despite Right-wing claims) decidedly non-Marxist. They had in their platform some statements which seemed to be critical of the traditional family. Again, one need not agree but at the same time it's necessary to understand the context of what was being said and why – and that's a story related to the collapse of the traditional family among American Blacks. This is due to a host of reasons, some of them rooted in severe social and economic disadvantage. Practically speaking they have become something of a matriarchal society. This is not to excuse these realities or vindicate them but they should be understood before criticism is levied. Caricature helps to whip up your base but it does nothing to help deal with (let alone understand) the situation.

The FLN host (like Barna) is blind to Capitalism's inherent contempt for both the working class and the consumers it depends on. One need only turn on commercial-dominated television and drink in its insulting attempts at manipulation or spend a little time interacting with factory or retail workers and the like. Even white collar workers are frequently treated as next to worthless – paid slaves who are compelled to sell their bodies and souls to the bottom line. Wall Street and its oligarchic allies seek to manipulate and control every aspect of life – our capitalist culture in particular is tantamount to one big advert, or more accurately one big swindle.

Contrary to the FLN interviewer, capitalism does not value a good work ethic. This is just the echo chamber at work, the propaganda machine playing its tape (as it were) through an unthinking talking head. The language of value and dignity are simply masks for what's really happening – the corporation and finance sectors treating people as commodities which can be used or dispensed with apart from conscience or morality. The bottom line is all that matters. It is the determinative ethic.

It was one of the great Satanic swindles of all time – to convince Christians that a system like Capitalism is what the Bible teaches.

And in terms of the dignity of work, the FLN host may echo what she's been taught, but the Scriptures teach the Fall of man and while work is noble, in this world's context, in this present evil age that groans awaiting redemption – it's cursed, a grief, and in the end vanity. We work because even under curse we must, but the work we will pursue in the Kingdom will be of a different nature – and of a different order. And the Kingdom work we pursue now – laying up treasures in heaven – has nothing to do with worldly profits, amassing treasure, or obsessing over Caesar's coin.

Continue reading Part 2