Two years ago, an influential cultural commentator, Dr. James Lindsay, made this stunning statement: “What’s happening in America today is Maoist Marxism with American characteristics. Those American characteristics include identity politics and corporate power as a vehicle.” According to Barna research, 36% of practicing Christians endorse Marxist ideas. I never saw this coming. When I came from England to America in 1964, I thought I had died and gone to heaven: I saw Christian colleges, Christian printing houses, radio and television programs galore, and endless churches. Compared to Europe, America was so Christian! In 1968 I heard Astronaut Frank Borman read Genesis 1:1-3 (a massive statement of biblical Twoism) to the entire planet from his space craft:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Will we ever hear such public and reverent gospel confidence again? The apostle Paul states in Romans 1:25 that there are only two ways to live, one based on the truth and one on the lie:

they exchanged the truth about God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

We either worship the Creator or we worship nature. God the Creator is distinct from nature, which he created. There are only two kinds of beings: the divine and the created. I have called this distinction “Twoism”: two fundamentally different kinds of existence. To worship nature but refuse to acknowledge the Creator blends everything into one, which I have called “Oneism.”

A Cataclysmic Transformation

In my early years of life in the USA, I did not see that a total revolution was beginning. Though heralded in a variety of forms, its most influential was the invasion of Eastern spirituality, dressed in a Western form of Oneism, whose goal was to make us part of God. In 2010, Philip Goldberg, a Western Jewish convert to Hinduism, published American Veda, in which he stated that “large numbers of Americans have arrived at the worldview of Hinduism, where truth is one.” According to Goldberg, “America is engaged in a reconfiguration comparable in power to the Christian great awakening of the 18th century.” He described it as “a cultural cataclysmic transformation” that would shatter the worldview of biblical Christianity.

Goldberg fiercely defends the Hindu notion of “Advaita.” His “non-binary” approach fits perfectly with the non-dogmatic Hindu religion, in which we are a part of God. Although “not two” or the “non-binary” is necessarily in radical opposition to the Christian faith, Goldberg believes that this notion is the “Christian” West’s future spiritual destiny. This is not a new idea. Ancient Hermeticism, a variant of Gnosticism, sought: “to completely transcend duality.” In other words, they wanted to get rid of the uniqueness of God as Creator.

De Tocqueville, centuries ago, saw the implications of this subtle rejection of God as a distinct being.

Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator, man is still embarrassed by this primary division of things and seeks to simplify this conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.

Already in the Sixties, many in the Christian West were toying with Oneism. The “sexual revolution” was accompanied by the “New Spirituality,” as was seen in the Woodstock phenomenon. Sociologists called this religious side of things the “Spiritual Revolution,” which brought to the West New Age mysticism in all its forms. Satan is clever in merging sex and spirituality. Just as the courts began to accept homosexual relations and trans rights, so the culture began to deny the spiritual distinction between God and the creation. The Oneism of sexuality merged with the Oneism of pagan spirituality.

Marxism

I have already dealt with Marxism but here I want to show that it is a classic case of theological Oneism. While proposing to be irreligious, it nevertheless becomes religious by claiming absolute human authority. Famously rejecting the Christian religion as “the opiate of the people,” Marx nevertheless proposed the drug of absolute materialism. Marx may have been motivated by the valid concern to eliminate human injustice in the Western world at the end of the nineteenth century. He saw that the working class (the proletariat) in Britain (and elsewhere) was being exploited by the ruling class (the bourgeoisie). Alas, his “just” solution was a Oneist denial of biblical Twoism. Like Freud of the same era, Marx was an apostate Jew. In other words, this system, like Gnosticism, has all the marks of radical and emotive rebellion against the God of creation, and thus denies the biological and cultural realities that are “natural” to the human condition.

Marx’s materialism is impersonal. Islam and Marxism have a lot in common. Radical Islam treats human life with untold cruelty, which derives from an impersonal Allah, which has no trinity. Lacking any sense of the personhood of God, Marxism cared not a whit about the millions that Stalin murdered or starved to death. (See the Ukrainian Holodomor — “death by starvation”). At the hands of cruel dictators like Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao, human beings the world over were put to death by the millions.

Marx’s view of humanity is egalitarian. Marxists argue that the nuclear family performs ideological, Twoist functions for Capitalism by expressing a certain independence over against the all-powerful state, which is the only form of family allow Moreover, families also pass down their private property to their children, thus reproducing class inequality. 

Marxism is not only theoretical. Ironically, its final expression claims adherence to its own truth. In the end, absolute materialism becomes a de facto religious confession, a statement of faith, for no one, including materialistic Marxists, can get beyond the human scene to observe the whole of reality. Without God, all attempts at putting the world together are merely subjective opinion, an expression of non-objective belief. What is worse, the human claim to political infallibility can allow no breach, no other opinion. It is ideological totalitarianism. Everyone is required to have total faith in the fallible humans who control and oversee the reigning political and cultural Oneist “orthodoxy.” There are, thus, no limitations on human power.

“American Marxism” seems an improbable subject. After all, the USA is considered to be the very heartbeat of successful Capitalism and the very center of free-market civilization. Communism has entered America. I was no doubt right in seeing the effects of the Sixties Revolution and the invasion of Eastern paganism in the form of the New Age Movement. I have sought for many years to show that such beliefs are the very opposite of biblical spirituality. But I failed to see the presence in America of genuine Marxism. I saw progressive socialists, but not convinced Marxists.

Marxism via Stalin and Mao killed millions of human beings during the twentieth century and Marxist Pol Pot in Cambodia systematically murdered about three million of his own people (a quarter of all Cambodians), from 1976 to 1978. Anyone considered an intellectual was targeted for special treatment. Teachers, lawyers, doctors, and clergy were put to death. Pol Pot’s regime of terror even murdered people wearing glasses! One might think that a system so unthinkable would never enter the American system. For the moment, America’s Marxism conceals itself and is generally accepted in its subtle form: Wokism, which I will discuss in my next essay.