The leftist firebrand representative from New York, Andrea Ocasio Cortez (AOC), seems to have identical talking points as woke evangelicals when it comes to branding the term Communism or Marxism as racists epithets. It’s a scary thing when evangelicalism is identical to far-left extremism.
Ocasio-Cortez, who literally advocates for socialized everything and promotes policies designed to redistribute wealth between classes, claimed in a tweet yesterday that calling someone a communist who—you know, advocates communism—is associated with White Supremacy.
Notice that Ocasio-Cortez uses the same language as Russell Moore, JD Greear, Joe Carter, and the Latte Mafia at the Woke Evangelical Headquarters of the ERLC and The Gospel Coalition. What Ocasio-Cortez calls “racial justice” (a term popularized in evangelicalism in the build-up and culmination of the 2018 MLK50 Conference hosted by TGC and ERLC) is best seen in the Green New Deal, which uses environmentalism junk science as the catalyst for wealth redistribution between classes.
Communism typically implies the state-run occupation of business, whereas socialism typically allows the private ownership of businesses and instead settles for the redistribution of private profit; but both ideas are within the realm of Marxism, the communitarian philosophy of Karl Marx. It is not uncommon for today’s Democratic left to literally call themselves Socialists, as does AOC’s friend and presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders.
However radical it may be for AOC to compare those who cry “Communism!” to white supremacists, politicos need to understand that America’s leftist evangelicals have been making this same accusation for the last year.
We first began to see radical fringe elements of woke evangelicalism make this claim last year, when we wrote about Kyle J. Howard—a good friend of Beth Moore (they call each other ‘nephew’ and ‘auntie’ respectively)—claiming that “calling someone a Marxist is the new [n-word].”
However, this accusation—now being used by the infamous AOC—also caught on at The Gospel Coalition. It is almost identical to Howard’s.
Joe Carter, the editor of TGC (also a board member at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission), argued on their website that using the term “Cultural Marxist” (a reference to Marxism that came out of the Frankfurt School, which applied Marxist principles beyond economics and toward cultural identity) was racist.
P&P wrote about Carter’s argument in the posts The Dismantling of Joe Carter’s Racist Conspiracy Theory, and Joe Carter’s Attack on ‘Cultural Marxism’ Term Likely Borrowed from Southern Poverty Law Center. Essentially, the same battle going on in nationwide politics is happening in American evangelicalism, but the mainstream press has not really caught onto it.
A raging battle developed last year when, after years of documenting Tim Keller’s promotion of textbook Marxism, Keller’s friends such as Joe Carter and Carl Trueman had to start defending him from the accusation. Trueman’s defense of Keller was especially unlearned, as he claimed that theists could not be Marxists (the term, Cultural Marxism, was invented by South American Jesuit priests and its founders were all theists).
Carter at TGC insanely argued that the term was racist because a racist person (a mass shooter) had used the term. In fact, the term Cultural Marxism was invented by Trent Schroyer, who was a card-carrying Marxist, and he meant it as no insult at all.
What’s happening in American evangelicalism is a microcosm of the American political system. If you watch the one, you’ll understand what’s going on in the other.
