The False Prophet of the Great and Abominable Church

Greg Matson, of CWIC Media, had a conversation with Dan Ellsworth, who has written a book defining Marxism so that Church members can recognize it for what it is: Marxism: A Latter-day Saint Perspective. While this is aimed at a Latter-day Saint audience, I think most of it would be fully applicable to other Christian readers as well. Ellsworth has been frustrated with Church members (few, but still too many) who, for whatever twisted reasoning, espouse and support Marxist ideas—some knowing the roots of their ideas, but also many not knowing. He wanted a way to give them the knowledge they needed, so he wrote a book to make that information dump in the simplest way.

Greg Matson (left) and Dan Ellsworth talk about Marxism,
screenshot from here

About fifteen minutes into the video, there’s a two-minute segment I want to share, and then we’ll talk:

Dan Ellsworth: Antonio Gramsci, he was he was an Italian socialist activist after Marx, who just fell in love with Marx's theories, also traveled to Russia and saw what Vladimir Lenin was doing with the Russian Revolution and you know the Bolshevik Party and stuff. And he thought a lot about, you know, what is really going on. OK. Marx offered—he functioned kind of like a prophet, like, you know, foretelling the future of the world and society.

 

And so, after he died, you know, you have people like Gramsci who had come to follow his teachings. They're sitting there saying, “Wait a minute.” OK. “This is not all happening the way he envisioned. So how do we make sense of this?” Right? And he looked to Russia, to what they were doing, what Vladimir Lenin was doing, and he saw that there was a contradiction between how Vladimir Lenin was doing Marxism versus how Marx taught Marxism.

 

And here's what Antonio Gramsci said; he was talking about the Russians, and he said, “They are not Marxists. That's what it comes down to. They have not used the Master's works.”

 

OK, I'm gonna stop right there. He calls him the master.

 

Greg Matson: Yeah.

 

DE: So let that sink in. Right? To draw up a superficial interpretation, dictatorial statements which cannot be disputed. Now pay attention to what he says here: “They live out Marxist thought, the one which will never die. The continuation of idealist Italian and German thought and that in Marx had been corrupted by the emptiness of positivism and naturalism.” So Gramsci is saying Marxist thought didn't originate with Marx, will never die. It's going to keep going after Marx, did not originate with him either. And in Marx, he said, it had actually been corrupted by some of his biases.

 

So Gramsci saw that there's this pure kind of current of thought that is actually the real Marxism. OK? That's amazing for a Marxist to admit, right? Because, when you understand what Gramsci is saying there, then the word Marxism, like the real meaning, starts to become clear. It's not, you know, it's not Karl Marx's economic theories about communism. Those are part of how he envisioned, you know, this Marxism playing out in kind of the economic sphere. But Marxism is something different. It's a whole— It's kind of a formula that predates Marx and will always exist.

 

GM: Yeah, that's interesting, because—and we've had this discussion before—going back into, you know, let's call it gospel history, scriptural history. I think we've talked about Cain and Abel before. I can't remember.

 

DE: Yeah, we might have.

 

GM: Yeah. And then, of course, the war in heaven.

 

DE: Yes.

 

GM: And what you have there. And I've got, you know, some interesting thoughts there also. But it's almost as if, as you say, you're—when you talk about Marx's interest and veneration of—honestly, veneration of Satan—then and you get this idea with the restored Gospel of, well, he's kind of in tune with him, right, in a sense of how—what is the philosophy of Satan.

 

DE: Yeah.

 

GM: Right? And what does he want. It's, if you parse out, if you critically think about the war in heaven and the plans that are presented there, it's hard not to draw a conclusion that this, as you're describing, this undercurrent that Gramsci is speaking of, is way— You know, it existed way before we even had the Earth.

 

DE: Yeah. Absolutely. That's what becomes clear when you dive into this stuff.

Karl Marx didn’t invent Marxism? No. Karl Marx was an admirer, a disciple, you might say, of Satan. He wasn’t an atheist; he knew God existed but supported Satan’s intention to thwart God.

This seems insane, and you could probably argue that he was. But there are things in his society that Marx used to develop his own sense of justice. Ellsworth talks about how, during the 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution, conditions were pretty ugly:

DE: You have a lot of families being broken up to work in factories. You have child labor. You have a lot of actual, like, real exploitative business practices going on in Europe and other places. And so—I think it's important for us to recognize that people like Karl Marx saw those things in the world and hated that unfairness.

Ellsworth points out that, you can’t go thinking Marx was this benevolent guy trying to make humanity better. His personal life shows a mean, vicious, often vindictive person. With all his notoriety, only a dozen or so people were willing to show up at his funeral.

Karl Marx in 1975, image from Wikipedia

But for many people, they’re drawn to Marxism still, not because they’re outright satanists, but they are drawn to Marxism as a possible solution to terrible conditions. For most of us, working conditions have improved since the early Industrial Revolution, but people still react to what they view as unfairness. People in poverty-stricken countries are often susceptible to a Marxist regime coming in and promising a better world. Mao did that in China, for example. Then, of course, because Marxism isn’t just a proposed economic system, because it’s actually satanist, the revolutionary force turns on itself. The disciples who dedicated their lives to the cause are tortured and killed. You might say, that’s not a bug; it’s a feature. Marxism ends in misery and massive death. Always. Because it is actually an evil thing. It just disguises itself as caring, to lure people in.

Today, people who’ve been indoctrinated with Marxism in college think it’s new, edgy, and cool. And they say things like those former Marxists just didn’t do it right. Just like Gramsci said of Marx himself.

What caught my attention in the conversation was that the idea we call Marxism is older than Marx, older even than our world. Ellsworth supposes that, during the War in Heaven, which Satan waged and lost, causing him to be cast out of heaven for his rebellion, that even then Satan (he was called Lucifer then) used the benevolent lure: “I’ll make sure no soul is lost” and then under his breath, by taking away their ability to choose and replacing it with coercion; and “I’ll make everyone equal,” no matter whether they do work or do nothing. For some reason that appealed to a third part of the spirits in Heaven, who chose Satan even when they had lived in God’s presence. And maybe even then they told themselves they were the good guys.

"Paradise Lost" by Gustave Dore,
I previously used this in a post called "Agency"

Ellsworth boldly calls Marxism the Great and Abominable Church. This is a term used in the Book of Mormon [1 Nephi 13:6]. I think it can be used interchangeably with other terms for the same thing: the Whore of All the Earth [1 Nephi 14:10], the Revelation 13 beast rising out of the sea, the beast from Daniel’s dream [Daniel 7:7] with the ten crowns, secret combinations [Ether 8:24]—along with more modern terms such as the worldwide cabal, or the Deep State. (I wrote about the Rev. 13 sea beast here, as well as a couple of times this year.)

While Marxism may be only a part and not the whole of this beast, I think these all refer to the same thing. In Revelation 13, the sea beast has one head that is mortally wounded, and yet the beast revives. This is symbolic, and there are various theories as to the meaning. But I have speculated that we thought we had given a death blow to Marxism in World War II; the Nazis were defeated, along with Axis powers of Italy and Japan; communism was an enemy to the free world and utterly shamed in pretty much all social circles; the Soviet Union eventually collapsed and released its various states from its total domination; even China entered into trade with the world. And then, in this century, it has revived. Emphases and forms are slightly different, but Marxism is fully alive again. 

So it might be useful to look at what qualifies Marxism as a church that is Great and Abominable. You may have noticed that Satan is a counterfeiter. If Christ’s gospel is the true Church, Satan’s church is going to have parallels. Wherever Christ builds and grows, Satan’s way will tear down and destroy. 

We’ll do a side-by-side comparison in a bit, but first, Ellsworth explains the Marxist process. Marx started with property: some people had it and some people were oppressed, obviously by those who had property. He wanted to do away with property, to flatten everything, not of course really understanding that humans have a God-given right to the fruits of their labors; to steal the fruits of their labors is to steal the portion of their lives spent building up that surplus over their subsistence. But Marx hated that some people could gain property while other could not or would not gain as much.

The pattern is to find something and tear it down. Ellsworth outlines the formula:

Marx had a formula. He said there's property—and in his case he was talking about capital and private property ownership. That's this thing that is kind of exclusive. And then society builds this thing called a superstructure—that is, you know, all of our customs and traditions, and our ideas about economics and law and religion and those things. And we protect the ownership of private property, right, through this ideology, this system called capitalism that “maintains oppression of ordinary people.”

So the formula is to take the thing that seems to benefit some and then call those that have it the oppressors. Gramsci suggested, instead of just property, use culture. Out of this comes the Frankfurt School. Ellsworth continues:

And then you have it branching into these fruits of Critical Race Theory and Queer and Gender Theory, where now the property is being normal in the case of Queer Theory. Queer Theory hates the idea that anything is considered normal, and so they have this ideology of, okay you know, “They're trying to protect normal, which is a thing that only some people have access to through an ideology called heteronormativity,” right. And with Critical Race Theory, “They're trying to protect racial privilege using white supremacy,” right. So it's this formula that Marx established, he kind of synthesized, that is now applied to all of these different other things. And in the case of feminism, well, what is the property? It's male privilege or male power or things like that, and the ideology is patriarchy. It's the Marxist formula.

So the purpose of Marxism is to tear down whatever can be considered an inequality, so that those with whatever it is are oppressors of those without that thing—and the only cure is to tear down the society that has these inequities.

Now, for the comparisons (based mainly on their conversation, with a few things I may have added):

 

Christ’s Church—the Real Church	Satan’s/Marx’s Church—the Counterfeit
Conversion—an awakening, coming to know it’s true.	Conversion—an awakening, “wokeness” to awareness of patriarchy or heteronormativity or whatever.
Rituals: baptism, sacrament, temple covenants of obedience, sacrifice, purity, consecration—showing dedication as a disciple.	Praxis (action oriented toward changing society): Pride parades, for example, or displaying BLM stickers, pride flags, and symbols. Abortion—child sacrifice—is considered a sacrament; live children can also be sacrificed to the ideology (transgender surgeries, for example).
Confess and repent of sin; become a better person.	Denying power greater than self, denying authority beyond self—However, there must be submission to the ideology. Sin is to be the oppressor, as defined by the ideology, from which there is no repentance, but there must be continual confession of this sin with accompanying expressions of guilt.
Love one’s neighbor.	Attack and criticize relentlessly in the service of Marxist ideology.
Love God with devotion.	Love the Party and specific authoritarian figures with full devotion.
Spread the gospel; share the gospel, the tenets of the religion; invite others to come unto Christ.	Spread the new Godless covenant of relentless political activism. Inculcate the tenets of the religion through all forms of communication and education/indoctrination—and shut down (censor) all opposing words.

Ellsworth wrote the book for Latter-day Saints that have been seduced by this counterfeit religion—to give them a better view of what’s happening, and maybe change their minds, to re-convert to Christ. Marxism—in any of its forms—is completely incompatible with the Gospel of Christ. It is anti-Christ.

Ellsworth mentions a talk at a recent conference by Faith Matters, their Restore Conference 2024, intended, as they say “to inspire and nourish faith.” I’ve heard the occasional podcast and think they’re probably sincere. Anyway, one of their speakers, Neylan McBaine, he says “takes a feminist approach to the gospel and talks about patriarchy.” He says,

 

You know, I read her talk. And I don’t know if the people who heard her talk understand that they were being invited on the Marxist covenant path in that setting.

Marxism tears down; if they are saying Church leaders are patriarchal oppressors, they are saying the Church—the restored Church of Jesus Christ—should be torn down. That is the end point; there is no other eventual conclusion.

Greg Matson mentions a professor who was invited to speak at BYU (he’d done a podcast on this some time ago) who took the Book of Mormon and suggested that the word iniquity should be interchanged with the word inequity; the implication is that only inequity is a sin, and all else who could do wrong doesn't matter. Matson says, “I just want to pull my hair out, that this is being taught to these 18-22-year-old students.” Parents do not spend their savings to send their kids to the Church’s flagship school to have them indoctrinated into the Marxist covenant path. That absolutely must not happen.

Three years ago, Jeffrey R. Holland talked to the BYU faculty about the need to teach clearly the prophetic truths in “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” I heard his words and recognized truth and love. But he got way too much pushback from those who have entered that Marxist covenant path and probably don’t even recognize that they have been seduced by lies.

If you think that socialism, communism, Marxism, Critical Race Theory, the LGBTQ agenda, DEI, abortion, feminism, or any other branch of this Great and Abominable Church is too political for you to deign to discuss, you may want to rethink that. Politics is just one place where it plays out. But it is the War in Heaven continued right here. And you really don’t want to be on the wrong side of that war; we know Christ wins, and we want to be on His side. Sitting on the sidelines is not an option; you must declare your team, and be a player on that team. At the very least speak up and cheer for the winning side.