Rylee Free’s article, “The Allure of Belonging to Black Lives Matter and How the Church Can Respond,” in The Christian Post (8/18/20) makes much use of Robert Nesbit’s 1953 book, The Quest for Community. According to Ms. Free (I have not read Nesbit) Nesbit’s thesis is that people become Marxists because Marxism offers a (a) complete world view, (b) offers a chance to belong to a community, and (c) the West has lost its sense of community due to the influence of the Social Contract theory of government.
Ms. Free renders a genuine service by mentioning the self-avowed Marxism of Black Lives Matter’s founders. The BLM website, https://blacklivesmatter.com/, says, “We intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative.” “We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead. We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.” But note the incongruity of BLM’s “beloved community” and the violent actions of some BLM members and their dupes. Ms. Free, writing as a Christian professional, should be alarmed by BLM’s support of violence and sexual eccentricity. She does not say if she accepts or rejects BLM’s advocacy of transgenderism and of violence in order to promote “social justice.” If BLM were a Christian community rather than a Marxist one what would she say?
Government officials today largely ignore BLM’s mayhem. Business executives seeking a bigger customer base announce sympathy for BLM. Madison Ave. gives businesses’ websites a pro-BLM tint. Worse, many Christians, in Ms. Free’s words, “have passed along the Black Lives Matter hashtag in the name of social Justice.” All these entities fail in their responsibility to protect the common good by prompting BLM while mistakenly thinking that they are fighting prejudice and racism. They fail because BLM’s founders have created one more Communist Front organization. “Useful idiots.” That is how the conservative economist, Ludwig Von Mises, perceptively called those non-Marxists who naively support Marxist causes.
Social contract theory holds that autonomous individuals living in a “state of nature” agree to form governments and to live under rules, and that prior to the social contract, this “state of nature,” is said to be without laws or government and where people lead dangerous and precarious lives. In Hobbes’ famous characterization (1651): “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Ms. Free continues, “While social contract theory promised freedom of the individual from any biological or social bonds to other people, it ultimately led to lonely people, lacking any sense of belonging.” She quotes Nesbit, “Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and rights but intolerable loneliness.”
But loss of community and its consequent isolation, loneliness, and alienation need not be the consequence of a social contract. Isolation, loneliness, and alienation are not confined to the post-Seventeenth Century Western world. As Ms. Free and Robert Nesbit acknowledge, humans are naturally social communal animals. Yet from time to time and from place to place, for any number of reasons some individuals have felt a loss of community. And this, long before any talk of a mechanical universe and a social contract: “All they that see me laugh me to scorn, they shoot out their lips and shake their heads . . .” (Ps. 22:7); “My God, my God, look Upon me; why hast thou forsaken me?” (Ps.22:1), and so on.
Nesbit’s thesis is that people become Marxists because Marxism offers a (a) complete world view and (b) a chance to belong to a community. But any number of religious or social systems, including Christianity offer (a) a world view and (b) a chance to belong to a community — and more. Any number of world views offer (a) a complete world view or at least something that people can take as complete, and (b) a chance to belong to a community. There is no necessary connection between social contract theory and Marxism. The causes of loss of community are numerous, and Marxism is just one of many communal alternatives to choose from. Throughout history, numerous people who have been oblivious to the theories of a mechanical universe and social contract theory have lost their sense of community. Whatever the cause of losing it, by adopting Marxism, BLM members are moving from one group of communities to another group that in contemporary America could include Marxism, drugs, sex, video games, spectator sports, or whatever.
A century before Newton and Hobbes, isolation in Western Europe got a boost from Luther and Calvin whose emphasis on the individual’s direct relation to God and on salvation by faith alone, has done much, over time, to dampen that sense of community once strongly present in the Church. In some extreme cases, Protestantism has perhaps even dampened the necessity of the need for a Church since the Protestant individual is seen as dealing more directly with God than had the traditional Christian view that put emphasis on the Church. Protestant theology has probably heightened some individuals’ sense of isolation: “It’s just between me and You, God, and nobody else.” This mirrors Nesbit’s thesis that the social contract with its emphasis on the individual has prompted isolation and suggests, therefore, that isolation can have any number of causes besides social contract theory.
And what about the assumption made by Hobbes and others, that mankind “in a state of nature” is so vicious and depraved? Awareness of human viciousness is in part empirical, but perhaps is more a legacy of the doctrine human depravity found in Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and others. Hobbes mistook this assumption of extreme viciousness and depravity to be a fact and built a political theory on it.
Ms. Free asks, “How then, should Christians respond to people who are hungry for connection, belonging, and a group identity that transcends the individual?” Unfortunately, Ms. Free offers little help. The question is not, How can the Church respond to BLM? It is, What is wrong with the present Church that isolated people seeking community turn to a violent Communist front organization instead of the Church?
Ms. Free ultimately drifts into a theological piety with no clear statement about how the Church should respond to BLM. She writes: “The church is meant to be a reflection of the Trinity. In the solidarity of the church, people can truly be diverse and yet belong. Why? Because race and gender were God’s ideas: He delights in variation and differences. The church should be a beautiful array of people; a place where the uniqueness of human beings is affirmed in light of each person being created in the image of God. Christians also affirm that a person’s identity cannot be reduced solely to race, economic class, or gender. The Gospel transcends all these dividing lines: All can belong in Christ. It is the community of the church that will exist forever in perfect communion with their Creator. . .
Is Ms. Free speaking in code about what the Church accepts? She says: “In the solidarity of the church, people can truly be diverse and yet belong. Why? Because race and gender were God’s ideas: He delights in variation and differences. The church should be a beautiful array of people; a place where the uniqueness of human beings is affirmed in light of each person being created in the image of God.” To me, this says that Ms. Free welcomes “transgender brothers and sisters” who will continue to “do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women.” Yes. Welcome them. But where is any call to repent of violence and weird sex?