Marvin’s Metamorphosis

If you’re actually interested in defending free enterprise, a big corporation is not necessarily the best place to do it.” Text from The Nation? No, it’s from a local source. Perhaps The Texas Observer, then? Wrong again. The speaker is Marvin Olasky, University of Texas professor of journalism and the Austin American-Statesman‘s Op-Ed voice of the extreme right. It’s a surprising, almost refreshing thought from a man whose mug shot no doubt graces the dartboard of a leftist or two here in town. And it’s probably not the only paradox about Olasky that would shock those who vilify him.

Marvin Olasky has almost circled the globe — figuratively and literally — in his path to Austin. Literally, on a bicycle across the United States and a Soviet freighter across the seas; and figuratively in his ideology — Olasky is a former member of the Communist Party. When he speaks of the evils of big corporations, it is from a viewpoint that is informed by Marx and Lenin.

This is the same man who also has written, “When we talk about poisoning our environment, let’s remember that the most poisoned environment today is the womb,” and who has described sending one’s kids to “liberal” colleges as spiritual “slaughter.”

Marvin Olasky was raised in the Jewish faith in the Boston area. Early in his youth, however, the man who would one day become a fervent advocate for Jesus lost faith — completely. “It’s not that unusual a pattern — bar mitzvah at 13, atheist at 14,” Olasky says with a smile. “I think I had been reading, when I was 13 or 14, H.G. Wells’ History of the World, [which was] based on a thoroughly atheist conception, and that made a lot of sense to me. And I was reading other books at that time, and I said, `This is true, this religion stuff is just superstition, man has invented God and so forth, and I am above all that.’ It was that type of teenage pride that led me in this direction.”

From there, Olasky became a comrade in the Communist Party. “I’m not at all saying that atheism necessarily leads [to communism], but it did in my instance and I think it’s logical. If there’s no God, then we are either in a tale of sound and fury, a story of meaninglessness, or there’s some purpose in this. Communist doctrine was one assertion of purpose, and that appealed to me… probably because I went to college in the late Sixties, early Seventies, graduated in ’71, and this was the era of protest concerning the war in Vietnam, a lot of concern about American imperialism and capitalist oppression and so forth. I was going to college at Yale, and there were two political parties at Yale: radicals and liberals. I could see that liberalism wasn’t working… and the alternative offered in that era was to go further to the left.”

After graduating from Yale, Olasky bicycled across the United States to Oregon, where he got a job with a small newspaper. He left that job after a year, read more Marx, and joined the Communist Party. But after that, Olasky “just came to believe that there is a god of some kind. Lenin said atheism is the basis of socialism, and when I was no longer an atheist, I no longer thought it was consistent to be in the Communist Party and I resigned from the party.”

The tide turned yet again for Olasky when, during his graduate studies at the University of Michigan, events led him to not only believe in a god, but to embrace Christianity. One such event came near the end of 1972. Needing to acquire reading fluency of a foreign language, he studied Russian and crossed the Pacific on a Soviet freighter.

“I was looking around my room one night and the only thing I had in Russian that I hadn’t already read was something that had been given to me as something of a kind of a novelty item out in Oregon,” he recalls. “There was a Russian commune out there and I had been given a copy of the New Testament in Russian. Just for reading practice I started reading it, very slowly, and starting realizing, `This is very interesting, and this is true. And this is true. And this is true.’ That was one aspect of what led to this change.

“Another thing,” he continues, “was that I was a teaching assistant and had to teach a course in early American literature, Puritan sermons. So here, in a very roundabout way, I was reading the Mathers, and John Cotton, and Jonathan Edwards. Again, this wasn’t something I set out to do, but it was in order to teach this course, and these guys made enormous sense to me. They have pointed out to me the big vacuum and also pointed to the solution.” This discovery left Olasky hungry for more knowledge. He found his way into a church after a search through the Yellow Pages.

At the same time, the now Ph.D’d Olasky also began to regard free enterprise as the way out of many of the world’s problems. He landed a job in the DuPont Corporation’s publicity department and studied up on American business. However, he says, working at DuPont only served to harden the anti-corporate attitudes that Marxism had fostered in him. Corporations, he could see, care little for competition.

“DuPont, in Washington and elsewhere, was particularly interested in lobbying,” he says. “DuPont was not anti-government; DuPont was interested in using the government for its own purposes. I learned a lot about the way the Environmental Protection Agency and other groups, OSHA [Occupational Health and Safety Administration] and so forth, work. DuPont’s very happy to have those groups as long as they can do the regs so that it will hurt their competitors more than it hurts them. And this is the way it often is — big companies try to do that.” Hence, Olasky’s belief that large corporations do little to boost free enterprise.

“This is one of the things that led me to think that it would be good to have a smaller government, a decentralized government. This would make it more difficult for big companies or big bucks generally, from other interest groups, to sway things,” Olasky says.

After five and a half years at DuPont, Olasky ended up back in academia, at UT in 1983, and preaching a socially conservative agenda. One former student says that Olasky begins the semester by telling his pupils that his class, Central Ideas in the Development of American Journalism, will be taught “from an evangelical Christian perspective.”

Since his return to university life, Olasky has written several books, most notably The Tragedy of American Compassion. In it, Olasky posits that the American welfare system has failed because it is a faceless bureaucracy which makes no value judgements about who is deserving of welfare and who is not, and creates no incentives for the able-bodied to become self-supporting. Olasky argues that we should look to 19th-century welfare models that relied on private efforts, usually church-based, and were more discriminating about who received public assistance.

While there is logical merit in much of what Olasky says, his analysis is ultimately flawed by a failure to acknowledge that, in fact, the current American labor market has changed significantly since the 1800s (Olasky claims the differences aren’t that great). There is no real discussion of jobs being taken overseas by the very corporations Olasky claims to hate, or how those companies often engage in massive downsizing while simultaneously enjoying record profits.

Whatever you make of his argument, however, one comes away from it with a sense that Olasky is truly motivated by compassion, rather than simply a cruel desire to kill off welfare. The professor devotes two chapters to a denunciation of social Darwinism, which he describes as a “poisonous ideology,” and instead holds up the Christian principle that all humans have worth and can be saved.

As might be expected, the book has drawn rave reviews from the likes of Newt Gingrich and other right-wingers eager to show that conservatives really do care about human suffering (never mind that Gingrich has never been anything more than a lapdog for big business, nor has he himself ever exhibited a great deal of concern for anyone other than the exorbitantly wealthy).

Some conservatives do embrace social Darwinism, Olasky says. But “Biblical conservatives would denounce it very vigorously. And there’s a history to this — the Biblical anti-poverty fighters a century ago had to fight hard against social Darwinism, and it’s the same battle today.”

In a 1995 guest editorial published in the American-Statesman, Olasky and the prominent conservative, Arianna Huffington, argued that Republicans were blowing the chance of reforming welfare by sending out a tax-cutting message rather than a life-saving message. About a month later, Olasky pitched his regular column for the World, a Christian newsweekly, to the Statesman, and “basically the same column” began running in the daily every other week, he says.

Olasky describes his relationship with the Statesman as “very good. There’s almost no personal contact.” (In fact, Olasky met Statesman editor Rich Oppel for the first time just a few hours after this October interview was conducted.) “Essentially,” he continues, “a year and a half ago I had lunch with [editorial page editor] Arnold Garcia and [opinion page editor] Diane Ollis, and I haven’t seen them since. I just send in my columns by e-mail.”

Olasky’s relationship with readers has been more tempestuous, however. He has become Austin’s very own Cal Thomas, laying down his ways to right the wrongs of the world with Christian doctrine presented as the inarguable truth. He regularly inspires passionate letters to the editor, almost none of which are lukewarm. He is either praised as a visionary or blasted as an intolerant holy-roller ideologue. As is usual for columnists, Olasky tends to notice the attacks more. Despite being in a Texas bastion of liberalism, Olasky says, he has been surprised by anger directed at him.

“I shouldn’t have been,” Olasky says, “but I have been. I look back now and say, `Well of course.’ This is what I should have expected. I didn’t expect quite the level of vitriol. But it goes with the territory. I guess I was in a sense thinking of Austin as a pretty tolerant town. I didn’t realize the full extent of intolerance toward certain views.”

Of course, every columnist wants to be persuasive. Is Olasky concerned that his religious message will fall on deaf ears with those who consider Biblical teachings to be an insufficient argument?

“Yeah, some people, it’ll just turn them off automatically. Other people, it will get them thinking about the connections in ways they hadn’t thought before. Win some, lose some. But the essence of my thinking, the way I come at things, is, I hope, from a Biblical perspective. So there’s really no other way I can write.”

This article appears in December 19 • 1997 and December 19 • 1997 (Cover).