Marxism didn’t storm the gates of Evangelicalism with tanks and bayonets—it rolled in quietly, like termites in the woodwork, and by the time anyone noticed, the beams were already hollow. Like the Scriptures warn of false ideologies, it “crept in unawares,” and hardly anyone noticed.
The sanctuary wasn’t conquered by revolutionaries carrying hammers and sickles. It was sold off, plank by plank, to men in tailored suits who smiled while they stuffed the gospel into a Marxist costume. We were told that what we were being sold was a “gospel issue.”
But it wasn’t the gospel. It was a Trojan horse on four squeaky wheels, painted with crosses, filled to the brim with ideological soldiers who had no interest in Christ crucified but every interest in Christ politicized.
The beginning was subtle. In the 1960s, liberation theology was born in Latin America. Priests and professors dressed up Marxist class struggle in priestly robes, and taught that salvation was less about being reconciled to God. They taught that it was more about being liberated from “oppressive structures.”
In America, James Cone took the same playbook and scribbled in boldface letters: Jesus Christ was “black,” not in skin tone but in solidarity with the “oppressed.” Cone successfully weaponized Marxist ideology and disguised it as Christian theology.
But Evangelicals at the time mocked it as ridiculous—that is, until some of their own signed the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern in 1973. Suddenly, evangelical playmakers were confessing collective sins of racism and poverty, laying down the groundwork for the next several decades of ideological compromise.
And so the infection spread.