Murray N. Rothbard, “The Menace of the Religious Left” (1994) — Summary

This file is a short 1994 political-theological polemic, reprinted as a standalone Rothbard essay. Its scope is expansive: a genealogy from medieval millenarian Christianity to Clinton-era liberalism. The occasion is liberal alarm over the “religious” or “Christian” right, but Rothbard reverses the charge. The real threat, he argues, is the “Religious Left”: a postmillennial effort to build a perfected kingdom on earth through collectivism, egalitarianism, vanguard rule, and coercion.

My contention is that, bizarre and weird and horrifying as all this may be, we are not dealing merely with erratic oddballs or with irrelevant history.

The first movement supplies the genealogy. Joachim of Fiore is made the prototype; after him come the Amaurians, Brethren of the Free Spirit, Hussite radicals, Thomas Muntzer and the Anabaptists, English Civil War sects, and revolutionary socialism. Rothbard is not writing neutral church history. He reads these episodes typologically: saints or vanguard, messianic leader, communized persons and property, and violence against dissent. The Reformation matters because, in his telling, it loosened fanatic forces that Catholic and Lutheran rulers only narrowly repressed.

Indeed, the Marxist Communist utopia is virtually a replica of sixteenth-century Anabaptism: once again, private property is stamped out, all resources—and people—are owned in common by a cadre of “saints,” a vanguard headed by a messianic leader, and all dissent to this collective organism is crushed.

The crucial conceptual bridge is secularization. Marxism appears not as a break with apocalypse but as its atheized double. Marx, unable to invoke Providence, substitutes “material forces”—class struggle, productive forces, dialectical history—as the mechanism of redemption. Rothbard’s references to Ernst Bloch, Christian socialism, the Social Gospel, and left Protestant theology reinforce the claim that religious and secular communisms share a salvific grammar. The target is politics imagined as redemption through total power.

The second half turns to the Clinton years. Rothbard argues that the 1992 Democratic convention, the inaugural, Hillary Clinton’s theological influences, and Michael Lerner’s “politics of meaning” reveal a modern religious-left formation.

The Kingdom, of course, is not the orthodox Christian Kingdom: it is collectivist, egalitarian, multicultural, and "multi-gendered"; it deliberately overthrows and "transvalues" our entire structure of traditional or "bourgeois" Christian values and principles.

Multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and sexual radicalism are treated as contemporary forms of antinomianism, not as departures from the pattern; older “saints,” he says, also claimed exemption from ordinary moral law. Hillary becomes the ideological center: Tillich, Niebuhr, the Social Gospel, and virtue language are read as permissions to wield state power.

Armed with an all-encompassing ideology, and with what many interviewers have noted as her arrogance and complete self-assurance and self-righteousness, Hillary was now ready to wield total Power in the service of her own hellish conception of The Good.

Bill Clinton is folded into the same indictment. Rothbard’s libertarian criterion is simple: whatever the public label—crime, welfare reform, community, morality—the substance is an expansion of federal power and a reduction of liberty and property rights. His most charged evidence is Clinton’s Maryland church speech, where Rothbard says the president fused legislation, ministry, and millennial language.

He said that the goal of his “ministry” was to bring about no less than the “Kingdom of God on Earth”!

The essay’s relevance lies in its fusion of culture-war polemic, anti-statism, and political theology. Its historical claims are sweeping and accusatory, but its core move is clear: Rothbard redescribes left-liberal reform as a recurring millenarian temptation, the urge to save humanity by remaking society through coercive institutions. The structure—genealogy, secularization thesis, Clinton indictment—serves one warning: when politics becomes salvific, the state becomes a church armed with police power.