A Theological and Moral Response to Rafael Holmberg’s Dialectics of Destruction
Rafael Holmberg’s article, Love as a Communist Deviation, is one of the most beautifully constructed essays I’ve encountered in recent political literature. Though poetically compelling, it is also, fatally flawed. And yet, it is absolutely worth reading, though only with extreme caution, and with full awareness of its emotivist framing and subversive ideological architecture.
Why should we engage with Holmberg’s argument at all?
As I waited for my car to be serviced, a single line caught my eye: “On the destruction of personal identity in the service of otherness.” For someone investigating identity dysphoria in my academic work, the subheading was irresistible. Here was a perfect intersection of philosophy, culture, and ideology. And yet, what I found was not a neutral inquiry, but a poetic attempt to reframe love through the dialectics of nihilism and Marxist metaphysics.
As Paul Kengor warns in The Devil and Karl Marx, that Barack Obama’s 2008 promise to “fundamentally transform the United States” echoes Marxism’s central goal: to dismantle traditional institutions, family, religion, property, and replace them with a new, state-defined order. While Obama’s transformation focused more on cultural shifts, especially in sexuality and gender, Kengor argues this reflects Marx’s call for the “ruthless criticism of all that exists.” Modern identity politics, then, are not liberal progress but ideological revolution, rooted in Marxist ambitions to redefine human nature itself.¹
Kengor, further elaborates, “There are so damned many. And damned they were by what they inflicted on themselves, on the young they miseducated, and on the world they infected. They are legion. And communism was a giant collective petri dish for cultivating them and their virulent concoctions. Some of these individuals delved into the occult, particularly those in the intellectual cesspool that was Germany, but also in the United Kingdom and the United States. They began their vulturous descent in the late nineteenth century, following the Communist Manifesto, in some cases as an alternative to the failure or abandonment of the revolutionary dreams of Marx and Engels. ‘Things changed in the second half of the 19th century, after the disappointment of 1848,’ writes Stephen Schwartz. ‘Radicalism in politics and occultism intersected in the UK and US for some time, exemplified by Annie Besant, who began as a fighter for the rights of working women and ended up in Theosophy.’ (Theosophy- another absurd idea).”²
Holmberg’s entire piece, against this backdrop, is steeped in emotionalism, romanticised marginalisation masquerading as insight. It presupposes love as emotive and fractured, rather than moral and volitional. Its lens is nihilistic, its mood post-hopeful, and its tone, despite the academic phrasing, deeply religious, only not in the Judeo-Christian sense. Rather, it is religious in the vein of occult anarchism: the sacramental undoing of social order through negation.
And here lies the irony: to proclaim meaninglessness as a pathway to truth is to make a deeply meaningful claim. To exclude the divine yet moralise from an impersonal cosmos is a contradiction. Nihilism has no authority to judge, unless it borrows from the very metaphysical grounding it denies.
But, God speaks of pure religion outside the bounds of political framing.
Holmberg as Unintentional Expositor of the Occultic Imagination
Though he does not admit it, Holmberg’s conflation of love and revolution reveals the seductive structure of occultic logic: destruction of the old, exalting of the fluid, and displacement of authority in favour of unbounded self-definition. The refusal to submit to transcendent moral order is reframed as liberation. But this is not a new insight, it is the oldest lie in the human story.
His subheading, “On the destruction of personal identity in the service of otherness”, inadvertently undermines contemporary ideologies built on identity self-determination. LGBTQ+ politics, race essentialism, and postmodern performativity all insist that identity is self-authored. Holmberg admits the opposite: that identity, in its highest form, is surrendered, dissolved, for the sake of an Other. This is not liberation; it is erasure.
And in a beautifully paradoxical twist, Holmberg unintentionally affirms the Christian view of love, not as emotional indulgence, but as ethical sacrifice. “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). Love, in Christ’s definition, is not self-negating for its own sake. It is self-giving for the sake of another’s good, under the moral command of a just God.
That is what separates Christian love from nihilistic passion. It is moral, not impulsive. It is covenantal, not chaotic.
The satanic Architecture of the Beautiful Lie
Holmberg’s poetic dismantling of identity and morality may seem intellectually compelling, but Scripture already describes such movements:
“You belong to your father, the devil… he was a murderer from the beginning… when he lies, he speaks his native language.”- John 8:44
Satan’s deception is not crude. It is sophisticated, seductive, and aesthetic. The Nazi propagandist Goebbels understood that lies, repeated poetically, become familiar, and thus believable. Psychologists call this the illusion of truth effect. The enemy of God doesn’t only deal in ugliness; he traffics in beauty weaponised against truth.
Holmberg’s dialectic is not neutral theorising. It is the logical flowering of the “angel of light” Paul warns about in 2 Corinthians 11:14: “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.”
Holmberg does not write from theological illiteracy, but from theological rebellion. He mimics the patterns of transcendence while rejecting their divine Source. In doing so, he offers the metaphysical structure of love, sacrifice, surrender, self-giving, but displaces the moral God with revolutionary otherness. In so doing reveals the undercurrent found in “Ezekiel 28:12-19 which describes a beautiful and powerful angel, often interpreted as Lucifer, who fell from grace due to pride and corruption. He was created with perfection, wisdom, and beauty, adorned with precious stones, and given roles in God’s service. However, his pride led to his downfall and transformation into Satan.”- https://ebible.com/questions/24114-when-lucifer-was-created-he-was-described-as-the-most-beautiful-angel-adorned-with-precious-stones-did-he-lose-this-body-after-the-fall#:~:text=Ezekiel%2028:12%20%2D%2017,June%2006%202023%20•%20Clarify
Love, Reclaimed
Holmberg speaks of love as destruction. But the gospel presents love as redemption. Love is not a communist deviation. It is the incarnational logic of God: justice kissed with mercy, truth enfleshed with grace. Its telos is not the erasure of self, but the transformation of the self in service of a greater good.
The claim that communism and love are ontologically parallel, because both require the destruction of one’s prior coordinates, is ultimately hollow.
Revolution kills the self to serve power.
Christ transforms the self to serve others.
That difference is eternal.
The warning, critical…
Nancy R. Pearcey writes in Love Thy Body, in the section titled: We Are Not Robinson Crusoe, “What makes social contract theory so corrosive? The central problem is that it favors acts of consent over natural or organic bonds. It is therefore yet another expression of Western society’s negative view of our embodied existence – its Gnostic devaluation of the body. As Oliver O’Donovan says, liberalism ‘has followed the path of devaluing natural communities in favour of those created by acts of will.’”³
The alarm calls us to awaken our discernment and not be persuaded by concepts, no matter how poetically or trendy they are. D.J. Moran writes for Psychology Today, in an article titled, ‘10 Psychological Lessons From the Ten Commandments’, “I’m a psychologist and natural scientist who studies behavior in context, particularly how language shapes both human suffering and flourishing, and how subcultures reinforce behavioral repertoires. So why would I write about the Ten Commandments?
Because even from a secular, science-based perspective, they offer a surprisingly functional framework for living a values-driven, prosocial life.”- https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/commit/202506/the-ten-commandments-a-behavioral-science-view/amp
There is value to be rediscovered in God’s lens of why, how, what constitutes living righteously by upholding God’s authoring of social norms and holy justice. Unlike Holmberg’s clever sleight of hand, God is not subversive. God is love, but He defines those terms; not us.
Practical Application: Learning to Love in Truth
In a world that increasingly distorts love as a feeling, a wound, or a revolt, followers of Christ are called to recover and embody love as a moral action grounded in truth. Rafael Holmberg’s vision of love as violent, self-negating, and politically anarchic, reveals the danger of divorcing love from its transcendent source. When love is reduced to a force of destruction or romantic despair, it ceases to be love and becomes idolatry of the self.
The Christian is not called to flee from love’s complexity but to redeem it by rooting it in Christ. The Cross is not the destruction of personal identity for the sake of abstraction’s “otherness,” it is the voluntary, redemptive gift of the Given-self to redeem the other in truth. This is why Scripture speaks of love as patient, kind, and enduring, not as self-erasure, but as self-giving. Not as self-defined, but as a givenness from the Author of love.
So what does this mean practically?
Guard your heart against philosophies that glorify emotional chaos as authenticity. The enemy always packages deception in poetic beauty (2 Corinthians 11:14).
Refuse to conflate love with anarchy, sentiment, or power. Love is not the destruction of self, it is the fullness of self given in truth.
Love with clarity. Let your affections be governed by what is true, not merely what feels “passionate” or “radical.” True love may require suffering, but never confusion, compromise, or chaos.
Engage culture with discernment. Read what the world writes. But read it through the lens of Scripture. Some ideas need not be censored, but they must be confronted.
Reclaim your identity in Christ. When false ideologies tell you that freedom comes through self-destruction or self-definition, remember: your life is “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).
Prayer: A Cry for True Love in a Disordered World
“Lord, anchor our hearts in Your love, not the world’s illusions.”
Father God of Truth and Love,
In a world that calls disorder authenticity and betrayal freedom, we confess our need for You.
You are Love, not in abstract, not in theory, but in Person. You wrote what love is or isn’t, so help us align to Your Truth.
Jesus, You did not destroy to love us, but created The Way out of our delusions of love, life, and identity.
You gave Yourself, wholly and willingly, in love that redeems, restores, and resurrects.
We reject the lie that love is anarchic violence. We reject the idea that love must negate the self or sever truth from grace.
Holy Spirit, teach us how to love in a way that reflects the cross, not as sentimentalism, but sacrifice; ot as passion unhinged, but passion purified.
We pray for discernment in the age of persuasive lies.
Help us to read with wisdom, to resist with conviction, and to love with integrity.
Forgive us for when we have loved falsely, either too timidly, or too fiercely for the wrong reasons.
Reform our minds, reshape our hearts, and root our lives in the only Love that saves.
In the Holy Name of Jesus Christ, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life,
Amen.
Footnotes
1. Paul Kengor, The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration (TAN Books, 2020), 318–322.
2. Ibid., 273.
3. Nancy R. Pearcey, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2018), 233.
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