Matthew Millsap, Dean of Library Services and Associate Professor of Christian Studies at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, a Southern Baptist school, took to X to criticize the Center for Baptist Leadership for an unrelated controversy at another Christian think-tank. Millsap writes, “The American Reformer who unknowingly published slightly modified parts of the Communist Manifesto as an essay because its argument and structure aligned with their own views is the same American Reformer who is the primary funding source for the Center for Baptist Leadership.” Millsap lacks knowledge of CBL funding and grounds this guilt by association in a misrepresentation of the events that happened at American Reformer.
What happened? An atheist mathematician best known for his work on Critical Theory, James Lindsay, attempted to take the right-wing Protestant Christian organization American Reformer down a notch by submitting an essay to their site under a pseudonym. Years ago, Lindsay, along with several others, submitted hoax journal articles in an attempt to discredit critical social theory, aping the infamous Sokal affair. This time, Lindsay claims to have tricked some editors into publishing the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx. That claim is not actually true, but suppose for a moment that it is.
Drive a Car? So Did Hitler.
Political commentators have long recognized criticisms from Karl Marx that need to be taken seriously on some level while rejecting the underlying ‘positive’ vision Marx had for society. For example, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President, R. Albert Mohler, Jr. (himself a contributor to the aforementioned American Reformer) has said, “Christians can look with interest at Marxist economic analysis of a consumer society, and just to take one dimension, how a consumer society addresses itself to the seduction of children as consumers. There’s some very interesting analysis that’s done there, and Christians, Christian parents in particular, can look at that and understand, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly how my children are subjected to advertising and all kinds of messaging coming from a consumer society, wanting to look to my children basically as consumers.'” Of course, nothing is meant to follow from this use of Marxist criticism in terms of adopting the system of thought as such. One would expect that a Christian website featuring some material critiquing Classical Liberalism, highlighting its failures, and attempting to explain what caused them, as well as the best way forward, might have slight overlap with some of the sentiments of Marx. We aren’t far off here from the old joke that since you rode in a car once, and Adolf Hitler did too, you must be a Nazi sympathizer.
Speaking of which, in the past, American Reformer has been criticized as promoting Nazism, which is wholly inconsistent with this new, implicit claim that it is all about Communism. The commonality between these two angles of attack is merely that they constitute attacks, which is uninteresting, to say the least. Unfortunately, the Internet has made it possible to promote terribly inaccurate claims at the speed of light which tribalists can latch onto and use in attempt to justify their own preconceived notions. Of course, they rarely, if ever, double-check their claims for actual substance.
Playing Unbelievers Against Each Other
In any event, one can attempt to syncretize non-Christian thought with Christian, as someone like Michael O’Fallon has tried to do throughout the years with James Lindsay’s work, or one can highlight the folly of non-Christian thought by playing unbelievers against one another. The latter approach is how I would suggest a Christian uses Marx, if at all, and is also the way I’ve used Lindsay’s work in the past. Lindsay saw through the woke garbage before Critical Theory inevitably took root in evangelical circles, though he has nothing with which to replace it from his own position, except his love for Classical Liberalism as he willingly admits it protects his pornography use. Enemies of the faith frequently provide us with the reductio ad absurdum, and we should take it where we find it, especially when they’re better versed in the pagan philosophy. Marx, and his worldview, are completely opposed to Christianity. So also, is the atheist provocateur James Lindsay.
Lindsey’s Claim Vs. Reality
Still, it would raise eyebrows if a right-wing Christian site actually published a Marxist manifesto, even if they frequently feature essays with opposing viewpoints on particular issues. Thankfully, that did not happen. Rather, Josh Abbotoy explains:
American Reformer has always prided itself on giving a shot to less established authors. We’ve published hundreds of these over the last few years, many of whom have grown into leading voices at the nexus of American Christianity and politics/culture. We undeniably have significant energy and growth on our side. And we are almost alone amongst major Christian outlets to unabashedly support Trump’s agenda and to have standing in the emerging coalition between MAGA, the rising dissident tech world, and the religious right. Obviously, our success has made us enemies, and we’ll have to adjust our screening process. As a vocal (at times belligerent) atheist, James is not eligible to be published in American Reformer. Yes, James, you “got us” there, but we’ll tighten that up.
More important than the less selective screening process at AR is that, “the entire thing was care-takingly rewritten, substantively inverted, and re-packaged into a passable right-wing article.” Jim Hanson, an unbiased bystander, points out how ridiculous the claim is that Lindsay tricked the site into publishing the manifesto and provides a graphic showing how much text Lindsay actually changed, in red:
The form and structure of an argument, as well as the semantics and rhetoric used to express it, are, by nature, generic. In deductive logic, an argument can be valid, but not sound, if one or more of its premises is false. The form and structure of that argument are fine, but the content is not. So also, one could, in theory, borrow the flowery rhetoric of a thinker who is still read today, like Karl Marx, and substitute right-wing ideas for the conceptual content, without changing the “logic” or “structure” or “form” of the essay, and still have a completely different document that argues completely different points without mimicking anything substantial as to methodology or messaging. Anyone who uses the same language or logic as a detractor does this. Everyone does it all the time. And it’s extremely uninteresting that right and left are a supposed mirror image of one another. That’s why the terms “right” and “left” are used in the first place! Something along these lines is what Lindsay did, in an apparent attempt to get a headline he could claim victory over.
Sloppy Thinking
So, to return to Millsap’s misrepresentations, it is false that the document was “slightly modified” and it is false that the “argument and structure aligned with their own views” in any substantially meaningful sense, conceptually construed. Nor does Millsap have the proper position to make statements as to CBL’s funding. What Millsap does have is an ax to grind, as he promotes a far more left-leaning, libertarian approach to Baptist polity and politics, as evidenced in his posturing during discussions over ridding the Southern Baptist Convention of functional egalitarianism and bringing industry, government, and society as a whole under the sway of the principles of righteousness, truth, and brotherly love as in Christian Nationalism. While such bias is not necessarily a problem for professors in and of itself, it becomes one when such poor scholarly sensibilities are put on public display in an attack on a conservative Christian organization and its sister Baptist center. Is this really the type of sloppy thinking, and vengeful ethics, we want to be instilled in seminary students who are planning to enter the pastorate?
As Florida Pastor Tom Ascol writes, “This take by Millsap is a revelation of his ideological repulsion of conservative, Protestant political thought at the expense of any professed scholarly integrity. I expect more from MBTS. Surely this isn’t representative?
