Missouri Neighbors
Two Missourians grew up to be Marxist. In one, the seed of Christianity bloomed into the Tree of Life. Without Christ, Marxism strangled faith and reason in the other’s mind. Christ matters.
In neighboring towns in Missouri, where traditional values, summer roads bordered by green fields, and black ribbons of asphalt often define community life, two individuals embarked on divergent journeys that reflect the broader tensions between 20th-century progressive thought and the renewing power of Christian faith.
One, a woman from a progressive family, became the end-product of dialectical Marxism, her intellectual dead-end a cautionary tale for would-be giants. The other, a man from a background of poverty and exclusion, wrestled with the same injustices but found redemption through a personal relationship with God, showing you can’t get to heaven/utopia through Communism. This is the story of contrasting roads—a story that lays bare not just different beliefs, but the failure to leverage a bourgeoisie backing to craft a Marxist persona to become a socialist Messiah.
The Woman’s Path: A Progressive Upbringing and Marxist Ideals
Our woman was born into a family known for its progressive leanings in the Ozarks, growing up in a home that pushed back hard against the conservative ways of the region. Her early life was steeped in an intellectual tradition that likely shaped her developing opinions—her uncle, a professor at East Coast University, was part of that world. This family background set her on a road that would take her far from Missouri, both in miles and mindset, as she chased higher learning and activism down in the South.
She attended a prestigious Catholic university—a Jesuit school with a big focus on social justice—where she earned a degree in the Social Sciences. At this renowned institution, she almost certainly ran into the ideas of Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, who painted Christianity as a tool of ideological control, baked into systemic violence and oppression. Those ideas likely hit home with her family’s progressive outlook, shaping her belief that Christians who stand for their values aren’t just backward—they’re oppressors, carrying a hidden violence against folks fighting for freedom.
Her academic journey kept rolling in the South, where she worked as an anthropologist at well-known universities, digging into the history of Black communities, and later teamed up with researchers at another liberal Catholic university’s library, where she threw herself into social justice projects. That world likely locked in her belief—straight out of Marcuse and Horkheimer—that societal norms, especially the ones Christians hold up, are the root of systemic violence against marginalized folks.
Activism in the South: A Marxist Fight Against Injustice
Her activism down South showed the dialectical Marxist idea of taking on power structures head-on. For over a decade, she was part of a legal defense outfit, fighting for racial justice in cases that would echo forward like an Oracle to the future conflicts of Ferguson and George Floyd more than ten years later—think issues like racial profiling and unfair incarceration that sparked national outrage.
She’d call a notorious prison a place where “slavery really occurs,” a jab that lines up with the Frankfurt School’s take on institutions keeping historical oppressions alive. She went toe-to-toe with the warden of that prison, a man known for his Christian-based rehabilitation programs, which just cemented her view of Christian norms as flat-out oppressive. Her passion ran so deep that she even started her own LLC, being the sole proprietor, and likely used it to pour resources into her activism, funding efforts to shake up the status quo.
When she came back to Missouri in 2019, she brought her progressive ideals into a professional role that put her at odds with her community’s conservative values. She leaned hard into intellectual freedom—not because she thought it was some sacred right, but as a tool to tear down traditional religious authority and stir up radical beliefs among disenfranchised groups. She put their inclusion over any worry about potential harm, reflecting her dialectical Marxist worldview where the majority’s exclusion is the biggest sin, far outweighing any real look at what folks might do with that freedom.
The Irony of a Bourgeois Marxist
Here’s the irony: for all her Marxist revolutionary behavior, she presents herself as polished and bourgeois—a carefully curated image of an established intellectual that doesn’t match her ideology. Marxists claim to champion the working class, but her demeanor screams a hunger for the prestige and position so many Marxists secretly crave, despite all their talk about equity.
She’s blind to the contradiction, embracing the trappings of the elite she claims to oppose, from her prestigious education to her high-and-mighty attitude, all while railing against privilege. She can’t see beyond the drab brutal real—she’s trapped in a materialist worldview that keeps her stuck in a concrete mixer of what she can sense right in front of her, unable to dream up a world past the pain and heartache of this one. Marxists are empirical prisoners, you see tumbling around in materials in a mixer never allowed to form or to be beautiful.
Her faith in dialectical Marxism, rooted in the material world, shows its bankruptcy. Limited by one person’s imagination, sight, taste, touch, and hearing, her epistemology shrivels up like dried-out banana fibers left in the sun, starved of new ideas beyond dialectics. They wax weakly poetic about dialectics and cook up new words that sound complicated but don’t mean much. Only the new matters because they are desperate to create even if they create feces.
If you need a dictionary to slog through a Marxist sentence, then its very incomprehensibility is a shield for how little value it has. Value comes from understanding and sharing. Hiding your knowledge behind academic jargon is a sign you don’t have much to say and you’re scared folks will see you’re a fraud. It’s the verbal equivalent of a magic trick.
She claims a special knowledge for all of mankind, driven by a need to be right—to be the most brilliant person in the room—but that intellectual arrogance blinds her to a kid’s cutting reason.
Her witting or unwitting clinging to thinkers like Marcuse, whose ideas she likely bought into, held back her intellectual growth. His framework was just too small to wrestle with the big, messy stuff of human experience, leaving her mind in a constant state of ideological decay—rot.
Marxism, with its need to conquer and feed its materialist appetite, kills its own generative ideas and generations. It doesn’t produce miracles of bread and fish—it steals everyone’s bread and fish, hoards it, and then burns it down when anybody dares to complain about being hungry.
My Journey: From Poverty to Faith
Now, let’s look at my story. I grew up in Missouri with no influence, in a world miles away from the intellectual privileges she had. Raised red clay dirt-poor, I graduated from a school with a class of just 15. I was so broke I’d skip meals at home often than not.
I couldn’t afford fancy universities like hers, so I went to the colleges I could manage, scraping by without the chances to grow my intellect in elite academic circles. Still, I ended up in New Orleans at the same time as her, fighting against the same systemic injustices—racism, inequality, and the heavy-handed ways of Christian institutions that often fell short of their own ideals.
Like her, I hated racism and pushed back against those wrongs, and for a spell, I found myself drawn to Marxism and anarchy as ways to shake things up.
But deep down, I had a kernel of faith that put me on a different road from her that had placed roots in my soul. My journey took me to the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, hoping to dig deeper into Christianity.
After two years, I got kicked out—maybe because of my radical leanings or because I wouldn’t stop questioning the way things were done. I’d buried Marx on a train ride in Croatia as I saw the remains of Marx scattered across the country, realizing his ideas couldn’t carry me to the truth I was after, but I still had a heap of distrust for Christians. They’d hound me for my beliefs, seeing me as a threat to their traditional values. Like the woman, I didn’t find much comfort in Christian communities, always battling their resistance to change. But instead of turning my back on faith, I went to a secular school to keep learning, gaining more knowledge while growing in wisdom as I read folks like Lewis and Augustine. I didn’t pick the Frankfurt School for my education—I chose the church’s best thinkers.
Growing in Faith, Not Secularism
Unlike the woman, whose dialectical Marxist worldview led her to ditch Christian moral lines, I didn’t get more secular as my knowledge grew. My critical thinking didn’t fail because I disagreed with Marcuse; rather, it grew because I saw Marcuse as too small a thinker to handle the depth of human experience. His materialist ideas, which held the woman back, didn’t have the breadth to cover the big stuff—faith, morality, redemption—that I found on my journey. My faith got stronger, not because of any institution, but because of a personal relationship with God that meant more to me than any knowledge man could offer.
When I came back to Missouri, I faced academic trials that tested my grit, but they made both my knowledge and my faith stronger. Over time, I moved on from my Baptist roots and joined the Catholic faith, fully aware of the Jesuit history and its complications with truth—its past struggles with intellectual honesty and moral clarity. Still, I found in Catholicism a renewed connection to the sacred and the Divine, a faith that grew through life, not stuck in stale promises.
A Contrast in Sensibility and Hope
My rougher, working-class sensibility stands in sharp contrast to her polished, bourgeois presentation. I’m not proud to be a thinker or an academic. What saved me wasn’t reason, which has diminishing returns when left to its own devices. Reason like all things must be planted in rich soil to grow. If you starve it of light, nutrients, and water, it will either die and wither or never grow and shrivel.
Anselm of Canterbury posited that Fides Quaerens Intellectum, which means Faith Seeking Understanding. This is a concept that faith will seek a deeper understanding of the world, building a repository of knowledge as faith grows. I would tweak this ancient wisdom that informs the relationship between faith and intellect and state that Fides Praecedit Intellectum or Faith Precedes Understanding. I would say this is as universally true as children need the love of their mother or support of their father. It’s built directly into the DNA of Reason.
When Hegel tried to wrongly assert that adults grow out of their faith when they leave childhood, he asserted reason could survive on its own starved of oxygen and light. Dialectical history and reason has to make aggressive and unprovable claims about faith to distract from how quickly it withers away the intellect.
It perverts not only the focus of the intellect, but the heart of those who are possessed by a fractured mind. They seek things that are not of this world, but of this world—petty, narrow, jealous things and tell you that things like human posturing and privilege are good because they are so limited.
Some folks—especially Marxists—crave that privilege, chasing the prestige and position that come with being seen as an intellectual elite. But I’d be thrilled to just fade back into anonymity. I don’t need anything from this world—it just offers pain and heartache.
My faith tells me to look forward to the world I can’t see, where there’s no more pain and tears—a hope that goes way past the material limits of this life. Where my neighbor saw Christianity as a repressive force, I found in it a source of renewal—a faith that will let me grow in both knowledge and faith, even through hard times. Christianity, for me, isn’t a religion of intellectual arrogance or materialist decay, but a living relationship with God that goes beyond the limits of human knowledge, giving a wisdom Marcuse’s narrow materialism could never touch.
A Dual Lesson for Intellectuals
The story of two neighbors, echoes of each other are a double lesson for intellectuals.
The woman’s path, marked by the irony of her bourgeois presentation despite her Marxist ideals, demonstrates you have to examine where progressive ideas lead, or you’ll end up sacrificing the good of communities for abstract notions. She started with a genuine desire to fight injustice, but her journey down the Marxist road led to ideological decay, a cautionary tale for those who’d follow in her steps. Marxists don’t just lose communities, they sacrifice their own good and reason for the smallest gains this world has to offer. It is akin to being told you can trade your soul for petrified scat and dementia of the mind.
My journey’s a reminder that faith, rooted in a personal connection to the divine, can renew and grow both knowledge and understanding, even when you’re facing exclusion and hard times. Even though I started with poisonous ideas—the same ideas, the light of faith wouldn’t give them space to develop or grow. Their toxicity couldn’t poison me or my view of the world. My journey shows critical thinking comes alive not by holding onto small thinkers like Marcuse, but by stepping past their narrow ideas and rooting your life and mind in the wisdom of faith—a faith that looks beyond the pain of this world to the hope of the next.
You can’t build a worldview by shrinking it down to just what you can sense. Materialism denies almost everything in this world but the self and the sin of self. Its faith shrivels your mind and your heart, leaving you a shade haunting your former life.
In Marxism, you are reduced. Every day that came before, you were more whole than the day that follows—you’re just a smaller version of yourself as you keep going in the cult of Marxism. But Christianity offers growth, redemption, and renewal of your knowledge, your mind, and your heart. There isn’t less of you once Christ starts with you—He’s like the bread and fish, leaving far more than can be explained by the humble ingredients He started with when He first worked that miracle. That’s how the miracle of faith works. It’s why materialism cannot work.
Materialism, as my neighbor believes in, holds there is always less than you started with—it is consumed with the death cult of entropy. When it sacrifices, it takes away and reduces.
However, Christian faith is life giving. When Christ asks for the sacrifice from the poor young boy with his fish and loaves, he turned it into something that could feed thousands. It’s not about the boy, his poverty, or what he offered. It was always about Christ and what he could do through our willingness to plant ourselves in him, including our intellect.