Christianity Is The Cure For Critical Theory

No one reads critical theory. It took over anyway.

As Carl Trueman puts it in his new book, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, the ideas of critical theory “are the instincts of the political and cultural discourse of our age.” From the Biden administration to HR departments to corporate media, the idioms and ideas of critical theorists routinely erupt into everyday life.

Critical race theory went from academia to the streets with the Black Lives Matter riots — and then back to the classroom again as activist educators seized the moment. Corporations adopted critical gender and queer theory as they obsessed over pronouns and sponsored the new national holiday that is Pride. There is no getting away from it; as Trueman observes, “You may not be interested in queer theory, but queer theory is interested in you.”

Trueman, an intellectual historian and professor at Grove City College (and full disclosure, a colleague of mine at the Ethics and Public Policy Center) has read the sources of critical theory, and To Change All Worlds is an excellent introduction that walks readers through its development. This is necessarily condensed, but it rarely feels rushed or lacking in essential points. He writes clearly, in contrast to the often-opaque stylings of critical theorists, who, as he notes, seek to discomfit and destabilize through their very writing style.

Starting with Hegel and Marx, Trueman works through the intellectual history of critical theory (especially the Frankfurt School) and out the other side to where we can see the origins of the critical race and gender theories that trouble us today. Trueman is fair to his subjects; he is not polemical nor does he rage against wokeness or cultural Marxism. This restraint makes his verdict on critical theory, and his explanation of why Christianity cannot appropriate or absorb any of its varieties, all the more convincing. Critical theory is fundamentally opposed to Christianity, and has been from its Marxist origins.

Incapable of Offering Solutions

The development of critical theory was prompted by the failures of prior iterations of Marxism, which could not explain why a communist revolution triumphed in Russia while failing in Germany, and later why so much of the German working class favored the Nazis over the communists. Trying to address these challenges led to refinements of the role of theory in revolution, the nature of alienation, false consciousness, reification, and more.

The resulting theories were more sophisticated, and more cultural and psychological than the crude economic obsessions of “vulgar Marxism.” Liberation was no longer just about freeing labor from capital, but about sex, family, race, colonialism, mass media, and, well, anything and everything. Sources of oppression were discovered everywhere, as all aspects of life came under revolutionary inspection.

These critiques sometimes have a point; the world is a target-rich environment for criticism. But critical theory is incapable of offering solutions, for though it “is clear on what is wrong with society — pretty much everything,” it “lacks the ability to articulate in clear terms what should replace it. It ultimately offers no vision of what it means to be human.” Critical theory has no positive vision of the true, good and beautiful, of what it means to be human, or what constitutes a good life. Its normative anthropology is either deferred to the future communist eschaton, or absent altogether.

As Trueman puts it, the most critical theory can offer is “the pious hope that an unalienated humanity will emerge from the historical process, though we have no way of knowing in advance of that moment what such might look like.” And that is the hopeful iteration of critical theory, for “with Foucault and company, there is no such eschatological fulfillment or revelation, only the constant flux of discourses of power.” This is why critical theorists so often seem hateful and hopeless — they literally have nothing good to say; they have only bitterness and despair with academic jargon on top.

The self-conscious task of critical theory is not truth-seeking in the classic philosophical sense of rightly understanding the world, but to instead enable revolutionary action to change the world. Trueman explains that the “theorist’s task is to make social change possible by making it conceivable.”

And the change sought will always be radical because critical theory does not seek limited but real improvement via prudent reform. Rather, it relentlessly critiques the “contemporary system with a view to overthrowing it entirely.” Its champions are not, Trueman observes, “pushing for justice or equality in terms understood by the current dominant society; it is that they are pushing for a complete overhaul of that dominant society, including those very concepts (such as justice or equality) as they are understood by the dominant society.”

We may add that this is why committed critical theorists appear uninterested in governing well. They have no conceptual framework for what good government would look like, other than that it would be radically different from that which already exists. Furthermore, their revolutionary commitments make them antagonistic toward even the most seemingly obvious and mundane aspects of good government. After all, having safe streets, effective fire departments, happy families, and so on would only legitimize and strengthen the system that critical theorists want to overthrow. As far as their revolutionary aspirations are concerned, the worse the better.

And things often are worse. Because critical theorists lack any vision of the good, their advances are destructive. An example is provided by the sexual revolution, which was championed by critical theorists. This was, Trueman notes, “an anthropological revolution” that has radically changed our understanding of what it means to be human. Yet far from true liberation, it is “clear that sexual freedom has, perhaps more than anything in today’s world, turned people into things.” Pornography and hook-ups treat people as objects to be used for selfish pleasure. Transgenderism treats people as meat puppets to be hacked up and remade. And amidst it all, Americans are lonelier, having less — and less satisfying — sex.

The catastrophe of the sexual revolution demonstrates why Christians must not adopt critical theory, which leads to ruin because it denies the reality of our God-given human nature. Though Christians and critical theorists may sometimes have overlapping critiques of the world, these critiques are based on very different foundations. As Trueman explains, “The Christian’s critique of power must arise from a normative understanding of human nature. We cannot simply be engaged in the game of showing the immanent contradictions of any given social arrangement, still less engage merely in negation.”

A Better Way of Life

It is not enough just to criticize critical theory in its turn, for it will not be defeated by arguments alone. (Besides, critical theorists will simply dismiss Trueman’s arguments as the products of a cis-hetero white male Christian conservative.) Nonetheless, Christians should be confident that we have something better to offer. Our response to critical theory is not just theoretical. Similar to Socrates’ appeal to Callicles at the end of Plato’s Gorgias, we offer a better way of life, a life in Christ and His church.

Critical theorists and their woke acolytes need Jesus. As Trueman observes, the “underlying problem” of alienation that critical theorists struggle with is “already overcome in Christ” and “the church is the place where alienation is overcome.” It is “God’s grace, not the economic transformation of society” that “alone can overcome the problems of the alienated human condition.” Christians must show in our lives that “alienation is not inevitable and insoluble.” Instead of despairing rebellion, or hopes for some distant Marxist eschaton, there is a better way of life even in this troubled world, as well as hope for that which is to come.

To take one example, Trueman argues that “the answer to the sexual revolution is not an argument. It is a community where properly ordered, functional sexual relationships take place within a broader context that acknowledges the broader responsibilities that sex involves, particularly toward the children who are begotten thereby.” The cure for the evils of the sexual revolution is Christian marriage within the community of the church.

Critical theory hides what little hope it has behind a revolutionary eschaton. Christians, in contrast, can point to the continuing instantiation of Christ’s kingdom through the church. And despite our frequent failures, this work continues, providing the answers to human sorrow and sinfulness that critical theory cannot. Trueman is right that “all of the central challenges in human existence identified by the critical theorists are resolved in Christ.”

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.