Here we are at Part 3 of our dive into Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West, by Kevin Swanson, the radio preacher who likes to warn that the Pill leaves women's wombs chock full of tiny dead babies, like some kind of horrifying death-muffin, and that his home state of Colorado has become one big gay pot orgy all the time, just like North Korea.

In Apostate, Swanson sets out to demonstrate that Western Culture has destroyed Western Culture, because Satan. Last week, we looked at his early forays into proving that Western philosophy has been relentlessly pulling us away from God, a theme that gathers steam this week as he really gets his demon-fears rolling, and by the time he gets to Karl Marx, Swanson is really rolling, accusing Marx of literally being possessed and of directly transcribing Satan's own thoughts.

Apostate sets out to dissect the humanist/Satanic (same thing really) assault on Christianity throughout the history of Western civilization, and while the goal seems sweeping enough, Swanson mostly attacks it using the tools of a high school term paper. For scandalous summaries of prominent thinkers' lives, he relies largely on biographical sketches from conservative historian Paul Johnson's 1988 Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, which catalogues the sordid personal lives of any number of allegedly great thinkers. Swanson usually presents snippets from his targets' writings, but he's also just as likely to include summaries cribbed from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or, as we've seen, from a "populist, on-line source," which -- once you look at his endnotes -- turns out to be Wikipedia. And once he's provided a taste of a writer's dangerous ideas, he quickly shifts to tracing their pernicious influence on modern America, inevitably a horrifying example involving witchcraft, abortion, or homosexuality. Then Swanson lobs in, as a corrective, an appropriate Bible passage, and we're on to the next chapter.

And so we find the fingerprints of Jean-Jaques Rousseau (1712-1778) "all over the institutions of the modern world;" we learn that his "revolutionary doctrine" led to the "deaths of hundreds of millions of people" since his idea of the social contract influenced Marx, and that his educational philosophy, as laid out in Émile, laid the foundations for the compulsory state schools that have ruined the West. Remember, the Bible makes clear that all education should be done by the family, but in Émile, Rousseau told fathers they owed “their children to the state,'" after which everything went straight to hell, in a mere 250 years:

You would have had to search long and hard to find any small city state over the 4,000 years of world history leading up to Rousseau’s life that mandated a compulsory attendance law in order to indoctrinate hundreds of millions (if not billions) of citizens in statist ideologies. Rousseau’s ideas provided the fertile ground that the statist educational theory needed to thrive in the 19th and 20th centuries ... It would take another century before America incorporated these compulsory attendance laws -- the modern statist system was finally in place when the state of Mississippi finally adopted the law in 1917.

But if Rousseau's ideas were evil, his life was doubly so, amounting to little more than a record of "serial fornication" and several instances of public urination. He abandoned five children to orphanages, claiming that his work was too important to be burdened by the responsibilities of fatherhood. Swanson leans on Paul Johnson to provide the moral to this story: things.

Concerning this “great” philosopher’s gross moral failure, Paul Johnson writes, “What began as a process of personal self-justification gradually evolved into the proposition that education was the concern of the State. By a curious chain of infamous moral logic, Rousseau’s iniquity as a parent was linked to his ideological offspring, the future totalitarian state.”

Obviously, says Swanson, Rousseau's own failure as a parent are why we now no longer care about our children, not one little bit:

It is fitting that this is the father of the secular state and the modern compulsory public education system. He is the father of the world where 40-50% of children are born outside of wedlock and the state promises womb-to-tomb social security for everyone ... God has a way of teaching His truth by historical object lessons. He makes it easy for us to see why we shouldn’t follow a self-consumed narcissist who urinated in public and abandoned his five children on the steps of an orphanage. What makes the lesson so rich is that it is only learned after test-driving his prescribed social order for three hundred years!

Swanson also doesn't much care for Rousseau's famous beginning to The Social Contract, “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains,” because it is, from a fundamentalist perspective, exactly the opposite of the truth, because "Man is born enslaved to sin," and the only real freedom comes from Jesus. Thus, Rousseau has completely missed the boat by failing to recognize the depraved, sinful nature of humanity. It only follows that when Rousseau calls for human freedom, he really just means license to sin, and so on.

The section on Rousseau ends with another attack on his call for universal education, because of course if the state runs schools, the state will destroy the family -- and it has!

This is the only way in which the state can replace the family, and bring the majority of the population into dependence upon state welfare and state employment. As the state replaces the family by its welfare programs, education programs, medical programs, and economic systems, eventually fathers become obsolete. This destroys family economies and creates a society where the majority of children are raised without fathers involved in their lives and the majority of marriages end in divorce.

And you thought schools were just teaching math and reading! Fools! Now obviously, says Swanson, it's unthinkable that compulsory education could have been adopted so widely when it's so obviously dangerous to the family, so the only possible explanation is that Satan did it:

For these ideas to have borne such enormous influence upon so many nations, so many institutions, and so many humans in our world, there must have been higher, spiritual forces at work.

Much as it pains us to skip over any part of Swanson's brilliant analysis of Western thought, we're going to mostly zip past his discussion of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell, all three of whom he crams into a single chapter; suffice it to say that he sees these three, with their utilitarian philosophies, as the starting point for more damned humanism, atheism, and homosexuality. Oh, and cannibalism. Let's never forget that for Swanson, the imminent widespread acceptance of cannibalism is a very current danger, for some reason. But before moving along, we do have to quote this brilliant metaphor and wonder whether Swanson is really as tone-deaf as he seems, or is perhaps trolling us just a little?

The road to Gomorrah is slippery, and it is coated with the Teflon of utilitarianism and pragmatism, and those who exempt themselves from the slide are few and far between.

How on earth did he leave out the lube in that sentence?

Swanson also devotes a chapter to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who sinned by popularizing Hindu pantheism in America, transforming it first into his own Transcendentalism, which eventually morphed into New Age beliefs. So if you're sick of crystals and dream catchers all over the place, get yourself to Concord, Massachusetts, so you can piss on Emerson's grave (thus channeling Rousseau while you're at it).

Emerson is panned for his Unitarianism and pantheism, of course, as well as for maybe thinking homosexual thoughts at other men. Plus, he influenced Walt Whitman, who somehow doesn't merit a chapter of his own, and so has to be condemned here for "writing poetry that incited these unnatural passions." Swanson is almost not even trying in this chapter, as he uses the merest mention of Emerson's friendliness to the ghey as an excuse to complain that high school students are allowed to access "homosexual websites" -- scary porn sites like the Human Rights Campaign -- or to join one of the "thousands of homosexual clubs" cropping up in schools nationwide. Also, Emerson was a moral relativist, so he's burning in hell, too, as will you if you mess around with him.

After a couple chapters of merely putting in time, Swanson really gets rolling again in his chapter on Karl Marx, where he finally has a genuine case of obvious demonic possession to report. Near the beginning of the chapter, Swanson even posts a warning to the reader, so that the innocent won't be led astray just by encountering Marx's dangerous ideas as filtered through an American fundamentalist's descriptions:

WARNING

The life of Karl Marx is a deeply disturbing tale from the beginning to the end -- a living nightmare, a true taste of hell. In his personal testimonies, we find striking similarities with the Bible’s record of the thoughts, intentions, words, and actions of Satan himself (Isaiah 14: 12-15, Matt. 4: 1-10), Cain (Gen. 4: 1-8), and Judas (Matt. 26: 49). They are not pleasant meditations, so the reader should be careful to place them in the context of Jesus’ sovereignty, His redemption, and His final judgment of all that is evil.

Where many rightwing attacks on Marx emphasize his Jewish roots, Swanson doesn't even mention that Marx's father converted to Lutheranism to avoid persecution. Besides, Swanson is genuinely uninterested in pursuing anti-Semitism here; he can get far more mileage for his purposes by emphasizing that Marx was an apostate from the supposedly deep Protestant faith of his childhood.

Swanson has turned up plenty of evidence in Marx's writing to prove that the man consorted with The Dark Lord. Not so much in Marx's political writing, but in his plays and poetry, which, if you learned about Marx solely from reading Swanson, you could be forgiven for thinking made up the bulk of Marx's thought:

A dark spirit shrouded his poetry and plays . Gross blasphemy poured from his tormented heart and pen. “I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above,” he wrote. At first pass, it appears to be the words of the devil himself. More rational minds might conclude that these are words of a madman in an insane asylum screaming incoherencies, but reliable sources have it that these words came from Marx ... Could this most influential social thinker of the 19th century have been possessed by the god of this world, the prince of demons himself?

Our Magic 8-Ball -- another device of the Evil One -- says, "It is decidedly so." Swanson practically salivates as he explains:

Marx dreamt of destroying the world that God had created. In another poem, fittingly named Human Pride, he wrote: “Then I will walk triumphantly , like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom. Every word of mine is fire and action. My breast is equal to that of the Creator.” It is blasphemy of the highest order, reminiscent of the thoughts of Lucifer in Isaiah 14:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.” (Isaiah 14: 12-15).

Swanson isn't content to dismiss any of Marx's literary fulminations as the product of youthful angsty self-importance, because nobody ever wrote about such stuff without literally having danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight. Oh, sure, maybe some people would make that excuse for Marx, but Swanson's not buying it:

Any student of Marx’s life and work must grapple with the spiritual and moral implications of these dark sayings. Is the author sincere as he expresses these wildly angry sentiments? Why does he announce his evil intentions to the world? Why do political leaders, the university elite, and billions of people around the globe still accede to his basic agenda? Some have passed these poems and plays off as vindictive hatred for the “idea” of God on the part of an atheist.

By golly, when people talk about Marx as a great thinker, why do they only look at his political stuff, and not his truly important youthful output of demon worship? Besides, Kevin Swanson has some pretty damning (ha! ha!) evidence that these writings are in fact central to understanding Marx: Somebody hosted them on a website!

Most scholars would dismiss these concerns as merely conspiratorial and superstitious drivel. However, the poems are apparently important enough to be included on Marxists.org, a website dedicated to the “rebirth” of Marxism. There is no reason to doubt that Marx took himself seriously as he wrote these words. As far as history records, he never recanted these works or corrected himself. If hundreds of millions of dead bodies may be counted the fruits of this man’s work, does this not prove the legitimacy of these early writings, and the compact that the young Marx made with the devil?

Oh, sure, nobody in a political science class reads this stuff, and it's not in the Marx-Engels Reader. But it's on the website, so now we know the REAL truth. Snap! Karl Marx, Ya Burnt -- in Hell!

Next Week: More Marx, plus Charles Darwin and some other guys who also definitely got the Devil inside.