Today is the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, author of The Communist Manifesto. There are many times I have read through his works and even realized some of his critiques of capitalism. But his approach to solving what he thought were injustices created a philosophy that has been a menace to the world ever since. In fact, more than 100 million deaths have been attributed to the forced implementation of the ideas of communism. Ideas, you see, have consequences.
Recently, I was reading through a sermon by Martin Luther King Jr titled, “How Should a Christian View Communism?” This sermon can be found in a compilation of his sermons that MLK Jr put together in his book, Strength to Love. In this sermon, MLK Jr says that “Communism is the only serious rival to Christianity,” and that “Communism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible. A true Christian cannot be a true Communist, for the two philosophies are antithetical and all the dialectics of the logicians cannot reconcile them.”
To articulate why this is true, King gives his reasons:
“First, Communism is based on a materialistic and humanistic view of life and history.” Since “matter, not mind or spirit, speaks the last word in the universe … such a philosophy is avowedly secularistic and atheistic.” In other words, “Communism provides no place for God or Christ.” In contrast to Communism’s atheistic materialism, “Christianity posits a theistic idealism … man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God.”
“Second, Communism is based on ethical relativism and accepts no stable moral absolutes. Right and wrong are relative and the most expedient methods for dealing with class war. Communism exploits the dreadful philosophy that the end justifies the means.” In contrast, “Christianity at its best refuses to live by a philosophy of ends justifying the means.”
“Third, Communism attributes ultimate value to the state. Man is made for the state and not the state for man.” This means, in contrast to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, with Communism, “man has no inalienable rights. His only rights are derived from, and conferred by, the state. Under such a system, the fountain of freedom runs dry.”
Martin Luther King Jr was a great civil rights leader, but he was first and foremost a Christian – which is what led him to be a great civil rights leader, one who practiced nonviolence in the face of oppression. And when he looked around the world, the greatest oppression was happening under the philosophy of Communism. He urges Christians to “dedicate our lives to the cause of Christ,” with the same zeal that “the Communists dedicate theirs to Communism.” Dr. King understood the communist’s challenge to us of social justice – and the rest of his sermon articulates how Christians must serve the poor – but doing so under a philosophy of communism was not the way to go about it.
For communism “is contrary not only to the Christian doctrine of God but also to the Christian estimate of man,” said Dr. King. “Christianity insists that man is an end because he is a child of God, made in God’s image. Man is more than a producing animal guided by economic forces; he is a being of spirit, crowned with glory and honor, endowed with the gift of freedom. The ultimate weakness of Communism is that it robs man of that quality that makes him man.”