Scott Masson – Repressive Tolerance and Cultural Marxism

In the popular Cultural Marxist account of our day, Christianity is the villain of history.

It is not, as Edward Gibbon once wrote, because it brought the Roman Empire down by fostering a belief that a better life existed after death, and therefore, he argued, militated against any attempt to better this life.

It is because Christian beliefs have (allegedly) historically been used to violate the rights of minority groups such as blacks, women, and the LGBT community.  The dominant majority group in the West – white heterosexual European male Christians – have used their weight in numbers to enforce their power and their privilege.

In our day, the battlefront is in the area of LGBT rights, but those who have been influenced by a Cultural Marxist narrative (as the American New Left has) argue that it is simply the latest battle of a historic march of progressives against Christian oppression that the political left has led.  ‘Social justice’ is the banner under which the marginalized now rectify this historic injustice.

The problem with this account of history is that it is simply false.

The movement to emancipate African slaves, recognizing the rights of blacks, and the suffragette movement, recognizing those of women, were all led by Christians, and those who shared their fundamental belief that every individual ought to have his or her equal rights recognized under the law because every individual person bore the the imago Dei.

The establishment of these individual rights of personhood is the foundation for the push to recognize the equal human rights of enslaved and women.

The LGBT rights movement, on the other hand, is a movement to establish group rights. Group rights are an anathema to the common law tradition precisely because they encourage tribalism and reject the fundamental premise of the sanctity of the human person.

Cultural Marxism not only ignores the sanctity of individual lives, it sees the conviction about it as the primary obstacle to establishing the group rights of the LGBT community.

In the process of liberation, every distinction of human nature is being overturned in the name of ‘tolerance’.

Watch the lecture on video here