Christian Reaction to Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
Why would I—believing no serious moral change can come via secular politics—care about Saul Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules for Radicals? Maybe because so many Christians today are umbilically attached to their smartphones and drenched in a torrent of constant politicization.
As William T. Cavanaugh helps show in his book The Myth of Religious Violence, the Marxist and secular political movements now rising effectively are secular religions. They replace belief in a personal deity with a kind of belief in the state and the collectivity. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals has been highly influential in this strange worldview. What is inside the book and what is our response?
Alinsky is a relativist: “all values and factors are relative, fluid, and changing. . .” (xiv-xv). At the same time, he claims to believe that people are basically good and “that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions” (11). He believes that people want “a chance to strive for some sort of order” (xvii).
And yet, Alinsky also says that people prefer to see things as they want to see them rather than as they truly are (12). Consequently, much of his program has to do with changing people’s perception. “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so future-less in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. . . . a reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values” (xxii).
That is, these people, which are basically good, are living in illusions. The “community organizer” “Begins his ‘trouble making’ by stirring up these angers, frustrations, and resentments, and highlighting specific issues or grievances that heighten controversy” (118).
His business is to change perception and to heighten as many points of friction as he can. Alinsky points out that “A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order or the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage – the political paradise of communism” (10). Alinsky declares, “In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power…” (3).
There’s not much to like about Alinsky but at least he does not hide his goals. He is at war with the way the world is ordered and intends to bring it down and replace it with his communist vision.
As Christians, we also disagree with the world the way it is, but we recognize in the Bible God’s plan to grant free will forever while eliminating evil forever, and to bring into being a moral universe of unselfishness and goodness. Jesus made clear that His kingdom was “not of this world” (John 18:36). The Christian mostly keeps aloof from the strife of state versus state, and focuses on embracing heaven’s principles and power to live with kindness and appreciation for others.
If God and His Christians take a high road, Alinsky takes the low. How low? Let’s sample a few specific points from Rules for Radicals.:
Alinsky, like all Marxists, is anti-individualist and pro collectivist. He says “In action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. The action is for mass salvation and not for the individual’s personal salvation” (25).
In civilization as you and I know it, the individual has rights, conscience, freedom to think and do. Everything is calibrated on these premises. Individual action, individual responsibility, and individual potentiality is highlighted. Alinsky’s vision diminishes all these, replacing them with a collectivist understanding. The “good” of the collective is of higher value than the conscience of the individual.
But what role could individual conscience have when the world is boiled down to a socially constructed hodgepodge of competing power relations as articulated by Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci? In a godless world, what is conscience? What is salvation? In such a world humans are trapped on earth alone with ourselves. There is nothing transcendent, no God to worship, no higher moral purpose toward which to aspire, and no selfless personal divine being to emulate.
It should be noted that the will of the collective never really exists; it has no conscience-processed unitary will. What there is, is the will or purpose of the tiny cadre of persons who lead the mob, who tell it what it thinks. In a mob, the God-given conscience of the individual is replaced by the notions its leaders proclaim to it. “Mass salvation” is whatever the mob declares it wants or needs, and what that is, is whatever the leaders say it is.
And this is anticipated to be an improvement over governments which respect individual rights, and which erect checks and balances precisely to diffuse state power? As imperfectly as the theory of republcan democracy operates in real life, it is by almost any measure an infinitely better plan than the dictatorship of the party by a handful of atheists convinced that humans are the product of evolution, little more than animals smarter than most other animals. Animals are regarded as disposable.
In another statement, Alinsky writes “You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral arguments” (36). This is admission that moral pronouncements on behalf of the movement are mere window dressing. They are lies and justifications. They are presented in hopes of enlisting or at least eliminating the resistance of the population they are attempting to disillusion. For most people it is easier to sleepwalk through the busy mundane-ness of life than to admit that agents like Alinsky are engaged in bending minds and attempting to drill holes in the foundation.
On page 78 Alinsky points out that “Before men can act an issue must be polarized.” It is the task of the “community organizer”” to agitate, to heighten friction, to change perception, so that people reach a position of exhaustion and disillusionment and stop resisting particular changes needed to bring about “the political paradise of communism” (10).
We err in passing by Alinsky’s relativism too quickly. Everything is relative, says he. There are no absolutes; there really is no individual conscience, or individual salvation. All that is, is the collective project to attain to the siren call of the rainbow socialist solution shimmering just the other side of the revolution.
What might we say to this? Rules for Radicals is not so much a book about ideology as about tactics, lists of principles guiding one in how most effectively to lie, and how to highlight grievances real or imagined. It is a guidebook on how to enlist people in a mass movement to overthrow the present material world with the imaginary perfected material world of Marxism.
Marxism is a religion, only a religion without a God. It is a dismal set of ideas having cost the lives of countless millions. It’s in attempted implementations always end in the murder of Christians and anyone else seen to stand in the way of the people’s utopia.
Alinsky wrote, “Large parts of the middle class, the ‘silent majority,’ must be activated. . . . all this and more must be grasped and used to radicalize parts of the middle class” (184, 186). Looking at the 2020 riots in Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta and so on, we see groups at work burning, despoiling, and enacting violence against others. While Alinsky was about infiltrating, radicalizing, and enlisting the middle class, the behavior we now see is consistent with stages when more violence is employed in pushing toward the revolution. There are in the West today numerous disillusioned persons turned from the values of conscience and individualism to those of the discontented mob.
But at the point of actual revolution, the same mob will have to comply with the dictatorship they have created or be added to its body count. Alinsky quotes Lenin approvingly: “They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet” (37). In this mindset, people are merely useful tools. As the leaders of the French Revolution were in due course themselves ushered to the guillotines, similar disposal has been seen in Communist revolutions.
The thoughts of Marx and his admirers has become strangely prominent in universities and school systems in North America and the western world. Nor have Christian colleges and universities been spared. The latest iterations of Marxistic thought are being transmitted, in the moment you are reading this, to smartphones, digital televisions, and computer screens bathing our evening bedrooms in cold blue light. The world rushes, byte by byte, into the space between our ears, until our perception goes awry. We fall into the present, and begin to see the way forward as necessarily discarding our own individualistic blindness, that Christianity is merely another manifestation of the injustice of hegemonic power, and that what matters are the cries of those we have become strangely convinced we are oppressing.
Alinsky would be tickled red.
Christians and non-Christians alike, wake up; You’re being played.
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Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. Engaged in pastoral ministry since 1994, he has been a featured speaker in several countries and venues. He has operated the GreatControversy.org website since 1999, and is the author of the books Real Grace for Real People, and, Cleanse and Close, Last Generation Theology in 14 Points. Since 1997 he has published numerous sermons, articles, and videos. He publishes a short daily devotional every day on his YouTube Channel: Larry the guy from Michigan.