What you believe about human nature matters in everyday life. Your view of what it means to be human will shape your position on the morality of abortion or the death penalty, whether you identify with the sex you were born as or with something unnatural. It will inform your politics and who you vote for. Likewise, what a nation believes about human nature also matters.
A worldview asks three questions: What does humanity look like ‘in the beginning’? Why did it fall? How can it be repaired? The Christian worldview has one set of answers; the Marxists have another.
Competing Views of Humanity Before the Fall
Christians believe mankind was created in the image of God, without sin, with dominion over God’s creatures. Harmony existed in humanity’s relationship with God, one another, and the created world.
For the Marxist, there is no God whose image we bear, no sanctity of human life bestowed by God, and no transcendent moral laws to break. Humanity emerges from the ancient mists of a material world into an early communal society, neither rich nor poor (classless), holding productive resources in common.
For the Christian, both the individual and church community are important. The church serves its members by caring for and equipping them, while also, as a community, glorifying God and bearing witness to the world. We are in Christ as individuals, and also in the body of Christ as a church. Both are sacred.
For the Marxist, the individual is primarily a social being whose identity derives from the social relationships within the commune. Because the good of the individual is inseparable from the good of the collective, in practice, the community’s interests eventually take precedence over individual interests.
Competing Views of the Fall
Christians believe our first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created by sinning against God. That all mankind lost communion with God, came under his wrath, and became subject to the miseries of this life, and to death itself. [1] A broken relationship with God led to every other relationship being broken.
Marxists argue that private ownership of the means of production fundamentally distorted human relationships, producing alienation and class conflict. Human misery is directly related to the oppression arising from distorted economic relationships. Workers became alienated from the products of their labor, from the labor itself, from one another, and from their own human nature.
Christians argue that humanity first lost communion with God, and from this fall every other relationship fractured. Marxists argue that humanity first became alienated through its material and economic relations, and from that alienation all other relationships were distorted.
Competing Views on Man’s Redemption
Who needs redemption? For the Christian, the problem resides within every human heart. For the Marxist, the problem resides within a distorted economic system. Likewise, for the Christian, redemption is in Christ alone. For the Marxist, redemption comes through revolutionary change in the economic system. This includes revolution in the family, where children are primarily under state authority, and where the influence of parents, cultural tradition and the church are discouraged; revolution in education, where all branches of learning must fall in line with communist ideology; and revolution in industry, where large estates, farms and businesses are confiscated by the state, and where free markets are replaced by centralized planning.
Ideas Have Consequences
The Christian worldview will uphold the sanctity of the individual, resulting in protection of the unborn, the aged, and the handicapped. In the Marxist system, the state determines which lives may be rewarded or sacrificed. The policies born of a Christian worldview ground private property in the truth that God owns all things and entrusts human beings with the authority and responsibility to steward what belongs to him. For the Marxist, the state determines who may own, control, and use property. For the Christian worldview, governments are accountable for respecting individuals’ rights and may be held to account when they violate them.
In the Marxist state, individual rights are subservient to and defined by the state and are changeable according to the needs of the state. The Christian worldview affirms an objective, authoritative moral law, establishing the principle that no individual is above the law. In the Marxist worldview, the state is transcendent, and law becomes a fluid tool for achieving the ideal society. If stewardship of private property is a sacred trust for the one, private ownership is the source of exploitation and alienation for the other. One system results in human flourishing; the other poverty, despair, arrest, interrogation, and death.
What a nation believes about human nature matters in everyday life.
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[1] The Charleston Association Baptist Catechism (1813), Qs. 16, 18–19, 22.