Dr. David A. Noebel, president of Summit Ministries in Manitou Springs, Colorado, has been involved in training students in Christian apologetics for more than 30 years.  This article comes from his book Understanding the Times.

Marxism/Leninism is a well-developed atheistic worldview. It is more consistent than either Cosmic or Secular Humanism. Marxist/Leninists have developed a perspective regarding each of the ten disciplines—usually in great detail. Often, Marxism produces a “champion” of its perspective in the various fields (for example, I.P. Pavlov in psychology or T.D. Lysenko in biology). All these things make Marxism worthy of study—but the main reason it is crucial for Christians to understand Marxism is that Marxism is one of Christianity’s most vocal detractors.

This fact becomes all the more sinister when one realizes that some Christian groups have attempted to combine their Christianity with Marxism. Evangelical voices often referred to as the “Christian Left” have been known to support the Marxist position. The World Council of Churches saw no inconsistency in holding its meetings behind the Iron Curtain before it disintegrated. The editors of National Review note that,

Substantial parts of various American churches . . . have been active on the side of communist insurrection. The Maryknoll priests, the liberation theologians, Episcopal and Methodist groups and Jesuits have placed themselves in direct alliance with totalitarianism. . . . With an enormous Christian rebirth taking place in Eastern Europe, it is ironic that so much of the American church is decadent.1

The liberal American churches’ position regarding Marxism does not, of course, take into account the profound incompatibility of their faith with the Marxist worldview. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, described this incompatibility in concrete terms:

The Soviet Union (under Marxist rule) is a land where churches have been leveled, where triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today, people are sent to labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped into punishment cells.2

Obviously, there is a need for a text that delineates the insurmountable differences between Marxism and Christianity. This study, by addressing both worldviews, highlights their incompatibility.

Some might raise the objection that the Marxist/Leninist worldview has already been proved to be a failure and completely incompatible with reality, as witnessed by the downfall of communist countries all over the world. Why, in light of these events, need one study the Marxist/Leninist perspective? Isn’t Marxist ideology dead?

Two words should suffice: Tiananmen Square. While Marxism has crumbled in many countries, it still embraces others in its death grip. And if even one country is held sway by Marxism, people somewhere are suffering. Marxism/Leninism hates resistance and will crush believers in rival worldviews any way possible, even with tanks.