If Marxism despises religion, why does it take on all the trappings of the most fanatical faith? Bruce Ashford, the provost of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, discusses this in a video released today.

Ashford traces those who view Marxism as an idolatrous religion, not to some backwoods minister, but to French philosopher Raymond Aron, a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre. Aron’s 1955 book The Opiate of the Intellectuals, Ashford says, teaches that “structurally and existentially Marxism functions more like a religion than just a kind of mere ideology. … The critique is really Augustinian.”

“For every major Christian doctrine,” Karl Marx “built a Marxist doctrine that was the inverse, or converse, of it,” Ashford says before detailing the parallels.

In a more personal part of the segment, Ashford notes how a Marxist, identity politics-based ideology erodes our national discourse by sharing a recent encounter with “progressive” activists: “I tried to engage them in good faith, and about half of them ended up responding to me as a human being, but the other half didn’t. They treated me under a Marxist view: I’m determined by my gender, sex, race, and economic class, and I’m somebody to be bullied rather than talked with.”

You can listen to his analysis below. It begins at approximately 5:37 of today’s issue of the Heritage Foundation‘s “Daily Signal” podcast:

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