Can Christians Use Critical Theory?
Critical Theory can be a legitimate and powerful tool.
The theologian Carl Trueman has a gift for taking complicated scholarly ideas, synthesizing them, and then representing them in a form ordinary people can take in and understand. He did this, for example, in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
He has a brand new book that does this for Critical Theory, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse. While I have not yet gotten a chance to read it, he did just record a very interesting podcast about it with Kevin DeYoung.
I want to interact with one particular four minute segment of it, in which he argues that Christians cannot make use of Critical Theory. The context is the use of Critical Theory by people on the right, not the left.
Although I have no reason to think he’s speaking about me in this video, since I’m someone who has multiple times said that we can learn from the critical theorists, I wanted to give my position on this. In line with DeYoung’s question, I’m emphasizing the political right here but it could apply to the left as well.
Near the end, Trueman says:
If you’re a conservative, and you want to engage in Critical Theory stuff, then you’re engaged in a raw power struggle where truth doesn’t count. You have chosen the game that you are playing at this point. Circling back to the Christian dimension of this, I don’t think that’s an option for a Christian.
In addressing whether it’s ok to use Critical Theory, Trueman effectively equates it to lying in order to win in a cultural-political conflict with the goal of destabilizing the status quo. Is that accurate?
Lying Is Wrong
First, I agree with Trueman that it is not acceptable for the Christian to violate the ninth commandment and bear false witness against his neighbor. I’ve said many times that a proper definition of what it means to be on the Right is the desire to discern and align oneself with the Truth. As I wrote in my very first newsletter, “A quest for truth, regardless of whether pleasant, will be our North Star.” This obviously rules out lying.
I think it’s also very much the case that many political conservatives, some but by no means all of whom are self-identified Christians, don’t seem to be very interested in the truth. I find it personally distressing to see the number of people online who are in thrall to conspiracy theories and hucksters, who are “trusting the plan.” Even worse than believing lies is that they don’t seem interested in the truth.
My thesis has been that in a growing low trust society, people will turn to the trustworthy. In a world of lies, that people will be drawn to those with the courage to tell the truth.
But maybe I’m indulging in wishful thinking myself, and people actually love the falsehoods and conspiracy theories. After all, there is an old saying, “Tell lies to people who want lies and you’ll get rich. Tell the truth to people who want the truth and you’ll make a living. Tell the truth to people who want lies and you’ll go broke.”
That’s a depressing thought, but it’s a real possibility. We have to be willing to confront truth, even when it’s not pleasant or what we want to hear. That’s what I’m going to continue seeking after.
Destabilizing the Status Quo is Ok
But there are some problems with Trueman’s formulation.
For one, according to this very podcast, Critical Theory is actually a bundle of things. There’s nothing that inherently links wanting a revolution, or destabilizing the status quo, with lying. Making that linkage implicitly delegitimizes the very idea of pursuing fundamental change in society.
This linkage is wrong. While lying is not an option, the pursuit of the destabilization of the status quo very much is. Whether that’s actually wise or right in particular circumstances is another question that has to be answered, but in principle destabilizing the status quo ok. (Seeking a total revolution is something I’d be more skeptical of, as it is probably some variation of the proverbial “immanentizing the eschaton.”). The linkage is also false the other way: just because someone is lying doesn’t mean he is doing Critical Theory. For that matter, just because someone wants to disrupt society doesn’t mean he is doing Critical Theory either.
I think everyone agrees that destablizing fascism and American slavery were good things. The question isn’t whether destabilization is legitimate but whether it is warranted. As I wrote in newsletter #32, how bad you think things are in our society determines a lot about how radical a change and which methods to achieve it you are willing to support.
I don’t think it’s any surprise that it’s the most successful segments of our society are most wedded to the status quo and thus most supportive of Kamala Harris, while many of the least successful are supporters of the more disruptive vision of Donald Trump.
Trueman’s formulation is very pro-status quo. It’s interesting that rather than fighting with powerful tools like Critical Theory, he argues Christians should instead endure suffering. The podcast references martyrdom in the Bible. Because these are Biblical concepts, they make his position seem like the common sense answer.
What he doesn’t do is discuss this stance in terms of it being a choice to allow the other innocent victims of our society to continue suffering, and evil to continue. But that’s also implicit in his choice. We shouldn’t lose sight of that, or its own moral implications. Is that loving our neighbor, for example?
My view:
Seeking to destabilize the status quo is valid, but advocates should be able to make the make the case why that’s the right and wise move in particular circumstances.
Every society has a mix of good and and bad, and even the best are admixed with some amount of evil and injustice. While this is inescapable, just as those who want to overthrow the status quo should justify themselves, those who are ok with preserving it should be honest and transparent about the evils they are willing to tolerate in doing so.
Some of these debates are not actually about whether people are lying or particular tactics are legitimate but a simple difference of opinion about whether society has reached a point where it needs to be fundamentally disrupted or not. The question of what time it is is actually an important one, and more time should be spent explicitly debating this proposition.
Attempting to link disruption of society, or elements of it, to Critical Theory is a rhetorical attempt to discredit opponents by associating them with a term that has negative connotations without addressing all of the, as it were, critical questions. It’s similar to calling them the “woke right,” which is another popular online insult.
Using Critical Methods Can Be Ok
Baptist political scientist Benjamin Mabry wrote an article for my newsletter talking about why we need critical theory:
Mabry writes:
Christians have been so long in the majority in the West that we’ve lost the ability to think critically, that is, to think about the definitions of things as they connect to reality rather than how they connect to contingent cultural superstitions. Without a dedication to a Critical Theory that actively questions criteria of meaning, it is very easy to forget the extent to which our worldview is socially constructed from media consumption and contagious social attitudes. For most people, the assumptions at the root of our worldview don’t actually represent real-world experience but were imparted to us by people with whom we associate or whose media we consume….
Because Christians outsource the problems of thinking about the world to secular sources, the “world” that they speak about is not the real world but a reality entirely constructed according to the standards and criteria of secular ideologies. Even Marcuse was correct about one thing: when you take the world for granted, you’re giving others the power to define reality and normality for you. Social existence is culturally constructed, but Christians have abandoned the work site and let secularists build according to their own ideological blueprints.
Much of what we think is true is actually not Truth in an objective sense. It’s socially constructed cultural truth. And much of it does in fact serve to legitimate incumbent power structures. There’s not nearly as much distance between the “divine right of kings” and “meritocracy” as we’d like to believe.
As James Davison Hunter put it about cultural power:
Like money, accumulated cultural capital translates into a kind of power and influence. But what kind of power? What kind of influence? It starts as credibility, an authority one possesses which puts one in a position to be taken seriously. It ends as the power to define reality itself. It is the power to name things. [emphasis added]
By the way, Hunter also notes that culture changes largely via institutions, people, and networks at the cultural center (higher status). To reject attempting to climb the right hierarchies, as many Christians do, is to give other people the power to define your reality.
Critical methods help us to deconstruct this superstructure of culturally determined truth, this false reality created by others. This is necessary for everything from destabilizing the status quo to maintaining the purity of the church.
I am hardly an expert in critical methods, and have not been significantly influenced by these thinkers, but let me give one personal example. Reading Herbert Marcuse, I saw that there’s great power in a willingness to take a fundamentally critical stance towards society. In One Dimensional Man, he admits that capitalism had delivered the goods, materially speaking, to a broad swath of society. He thought this was a bad thing, not a good one because it drained away the impulse for revolution. Marcuse saw, correctly, that technical progress and economic prosperity do not make a society moral. He wrote, “The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible.” He was wrong about capitalism, but the same perspective might be applied to America today in at least some respects.
I have noticed that modern evangelicals tend to treat sins that the secular world condemns as sinful absolutely, whereas those of which the secular world approves are only sinful therapeutically. By therapeutically, I mean that they are viewed as simply suboptimal choices that are not the best path to personal happiness and human flourishing, as opposed to being evil or offensive to God. Racism is evil and the racist must be cast into the outer darkness, whereas sexual sin is just “brokenness.”
The same often applies to society at large. The gross injustices and evils that are systemically present in our society and often promoted by a bipartisan leadership class are often seen as merely regrettable elements of an otherwise great society whose continuation should never been put at risk. We are not willing - and in the absence of something like Critical Theory, not even able - to fully take the measure of the evils inside our own country.
His moral system may have been warped, but Marcuse didn’t make that mistake. He was willing to question every presupposition of the capitalist West. How few of us are willing to question anything significant about our world.
I’m in broad agreement with many of Trueman’s approaches to our circumstances today. I think we need to be realistic that the changes we want to see are not going to fully happen within the span of our lives (at least not mine and Trueman’s). We should put a greater emphasis on being a Christian counterculture than doubling down on culture war. We should put an emphasis on change through aesthetics. If you don’t have beauty, then do you really have as good a grip on the true and the good as you think you do?
There are things I’m sure Trueman and I would disagree on, many of them probably arising from the fact that I’m an American and he’s British. My impression is he’s very influenced by the British evangelical tradition that’s much more culturally and politically accommodationist. Nevertheless, his work is very valuable and there’s a lot to agree with.
But if we want to be a counter culture, then we have to sharpen our distinction versus society, and undertake a large project of internal reform. We won’t be able to accomplish either of those without “critical” tools.
The Personal Roots of Political Disputes
Since we are about truth here, I have to talk about the elephant in the room.
Trueman’s engagement on Critical Theory comes against the backdrop of an acrimonious personal dispute with some people broadly aligned with “new right” perspectives. A key part of this was a major debate involving them and Trueman over whether the college where he teaches was promoting Critical Race Theory and “wokeness.” Like so many others, much of this played out on social media, especially X. This conflict is the context of his arguments.
I wrote an entire longform newsletter devoted to how we need to be careful about how online disputes and critiques can affect us. I highly recommend reading it:
These disputes not only affect us psychologically, they also affect our intellectual positions, political positions, the tribes we associate with, etc. Seldom are the results for the better. As someone once told me of the David French-Sohrab Ahmari feud, “It turned both of them into worse versions of themselves.” They would surely disagree, and you can draw your own conclusions about that, but undoubtedly both of them significantly altered their trajectory after that.
The key is that this can happen to us without us even being aware of it.
I’m hardly immune here. Conflict is a part of life. Men don’t run away from conflict and even initiate it when called for. I certainly get in debates on X all the time. But I also try hard to avoid getting into these kinds of feuds. I very frequently let things pass without commenting on them or responding to them. I often adopt a posture of de-escalation. When I do disagree with someone, I try to focus on the substantive issue, and look for positive things I can say about the person.
While there are people who aren’t going to like me, I’d rather make friends than enemies, especially gratuitous enemies. And the enemies or people I do strongly critique I try to make sure are bigtime people for whom public criticism comes with the territory.
For the people involved in this feud, or any similar online feud, I’d strongly encourage them to try to end it by pursuing reconciliation. Reach out, have an off the record meeting in an undisclosed location, clear the air, bury the hatchet, come to a working arrangement going forward, and move on. Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe there are conflicting goals or such fundamental differences that it makes reconciliation impossible. But I think reconciliation is worth pursuing.
Have you ever noticed that many alpha male types often, after a very public conflict with someone, get it settled and and move on? Sometimes they even strangely end up as friends. Republican megadonor Paul Singer was a Never Trumper in 2016. I sat at a gala and personally listened to him say that neither Trump nor Clinton were the right choice. But after Trump won, Singer went to Trump and made up with him. Why? Because he’s a smart, tough businessman who deals in reality. He didn’t let his pride marginalize him inside of a Trump administration. Similarly, we just watched Trump and Chuck Schumer getting along at the Al Smith Dinner in New York. That doesn’t mean Singer and Schumer are capitulating to everything Trump wants. They are going to keep fighting for what they want. But they see the value in not letting feuds compromise that.
The higher you go in society, the more likely people are to end feuds and work productively with - and even be somewhat friendly with - people on the other side. Even those with whom they might have even just have had a knock down, drag out fight.
Reconciliation isn’t a sign of weakness or admitting the other person was right. It isn’t always possible, but it’s something we should pursue and be open to. It’s what I’d encourage people to seek in this case.
I agree that we should make room for some of the theses of critical theory. My critique is that it often doesn't go deep enough. Is racism structural? Of course it is. And so is greed, lust, and host of deadly sins. These sins are woven into the very fabric of our society, and it is difficult to even notice them or notice how they shape our thinking and actions. Thus, I think Christians have a much more radical critical theory in this regard, because we have a much more profound and complex view of sin. Ah yes, and forgiveness, which from what I understand, isn't of much interest in critical theory circles. Happy to be shown on that last point.
Christians can't use Critical Theory because such tools are part of a total system where Truth is not the goal (perhaps not even possible) instead power is the goal. Christian dont need Critical Theory in order to challenge the status quo where the status quo is unjust. The Bible is full of such challenges long before Critical Theory was ever dreamed up.