Tag Archives: DEI

Identity Politics and the People of God (Part One)

Today I want to reflect critically on a thesis argued by some (mostly progressive) Christians that the basic principles of identity politics (DEI, CRT, SEED, etc.) embody the teaching of Jesus. Such a thesis is not altogether implausible, for certain of Jesus’s teachings seem to support it:

“So the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16)

²⁰Looking at his disciples, he said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,
    for yours is the kingdom of God.
²¹Blessed are you who hunger now,
    for you will be satisfied…

²⁴“But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have already received your comfort.
²⁵Woe to you who are well fed now,
    for you will go hungry (Luke 6:20-25).

Of relevance also are the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16) and the Book of James’s severe rebukes of rich oppressors (2:5-6 and 5:1-6). I believe, however, that the resemblance between the moral principles taught by Jesus and his apostles and identity politics is superficial. At a deeper level they are profoundly at odds. Perhaps at a later time I will examine these passages in their contexts, but in this short series I will limit myself to contrasting the vision of identity politics with that of 1 Peter 2:9-10.

Identity Politics and Intersectionality

In my recent review of Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution, Chapter 7, we learned a bit about the background of what are now called “identity politics” and “intersectional identity.” In the early 1970s, Angela Davis asserted that oppressed groups possess greater insight into the true nature of freedom than oppressor groups do. At the bottom rung of the ladder of oppression is the black woman who is doubly marginalized by being both black and female. In 1977, drawing on Davis’s theory of privileged knowledges, a group of black lesbian activists composed the Combahee River Collective Statement. The Statement coined the term “identity politics” and laid out the logic of what came later to be called “intersectional identity.” “This focusing upon our own oppression,” explains the Statement, “is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially radical politics come directly out of our own identity.”

Identity politics asserts that the knowledge possessed by the marginalized—black, female, LGBTQ+, etc.—should serve as the standard by which to criticize and reconstruct the current social order. In the light of this alternative knowledge, the dominant social order appears as racist, colonialist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc. Guided by the privileged knowledges of the marginalized, the social order should be reconstructed by turning the identity/oppression ladder on its head and reordering society according to the oppressed groups’ views of justice, equity, freedom, and fairness. The last will be first and the first will be last.

Analytical Observations

Division, Hostility, and Shame

Identity politics divides society into oppressors and oppressed and further sub-divides them into other identity groups ranked hierarchically from most privileged to the least. Those at the top of the oppression ladder are the enemies of everyone below them, and their only acceptable response is shame and confession of their undeserved privilege. Those at the bottom are the bearers of truth unalloyed with the blindness of even the slightest privilege. They alone have nothing of which to be ashamed and no sins to confess.

The identity of those in the top group is “pure oppressor,” and that of the bottom group is “purely oppressed.” Everyone in between is both oppressor and oppressed and experiences hostility from below and harbors hostility to those above. Division and infighting are the constant challenges to the collective identity of those on the oppression ladder; for there can be no solidarity between the oppressed and the oppressors. Only when all levels of the oppression hierarchy direct their common hostility to the most privileged (i.e., white, straight males) can their identity as “oppressed” be felt as a common consciousness. That is to say, the feeling of solidarity among the “oppressed” is forged by common hostility toward the group viewed as the most privileged.

Moreover, in the upside-down world of identity politics the most oppressed is treated as the most privileged; consequently, there will always be competition and conflict among “the oppressed” over where one stands in the hierarchy. Because identity politics defines identity solely within the oppressor/oppressed dialectic, it can never produce a society wherein the hostility between the two is overcome in a higher solidarity. Without an oppressor the oppressed cease to exist.

The New Hierarchy

Supposedly, the goal of identity politics is exposing and correcting systems of oppression. It cries out against the order of domination and subordination, privilege and marginalization. One might think that the answer to such systemic inequality and alienation would be equality and reconciliation. However, this is not the agenda of identity politics. It is rather to flip the order upside down so that the top becomes the bottom and the bottom becomes the top. Identity politics replaces objective truth with ideology in service of power and common humanity with group identities. It replaces white/male/straight privilege with Black/woman/lesbian privilege. But the oppressor/oppressed privileged/marginalized structure of society remains in place. Even if they are called by other names—social justice, respect, inclusion, reparations, truth, and equity—power, wealth, privilege, and honor are the chief ambitions that drive this community. These are of course the same ambitions that drive the society it seeks to replace. Not surprisingly, the two societies share the same vices: greed, envy, resentment, pride, and jealousy. And both societies hide their true ambitions and vices under clever euphemisms.

Next Time we will see just how great is the opposition between the social vision of Jesus and his apostles and that of identity politics.

The Christian College* and the New Left

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This essay concludes the seven-part series containing my review and reflections on Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution. The series began on May 03, 2024. Look for it: in a few days I will post a compilation of the whole series so you will have access to the entire review in one document.

The Collapse of the Modern Liberal University

In the previous essay we learned why the era of the modern liberal university, which began around 1870, came to an undignified end around 1970. The modern university adopted a critical, skeptical, never-ending research model of academia and exempted no moral tradition or religious dogma from critical scrutiny. Though it praised the quest for truth, progress and scientific discovery as its founding principle, its operational values were completely negative. Modern academic leaders were especially on guard against Christian fundamentalism and cultural conservativism; hence they focused exclusively on the dangers from the Right. This one-sided focus, however, made them vulnerable to criticism from the Left. When the Left accused the liberal establishment of not being radical enough in its criticism of the forces of conservativism, the establishment could make no reply. For though it examines everything, it believes nothing. Because it could not appeal to positive political, moral, historical, religious or metaphysical beliefs, the modern liberal university collapsed like a house of cards.

The Christian College: A Place to Stand

In contrast to the modern liberal university, the Christian college, if it takes Christianity seriously, can draw on a worldview authoritative for the Christian tradition and integrated into the charter and mission of the school. It can resist the critical, skeptical, know-nothing philosophy of the modern liberal university as well as the New Left’s subversive combination of criticism and dogmatism. The modern liberal university founded itself on the illusion that perpetual criticism of tradition will eventually generate scientific truth. The post-modern leftist university justifies its existence by repeating the groundless dogma that destruction of every actual thing will bring about utopia. The Christian college is founded on faith in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, the authority of the canonical Scriptures accepted by the ecumenical church, and respect for the two-thousand-year Christian tradition.

The Christian college can assert with confidence that world history cannot be explained with the simple formulas of the neo-Marxists. The true human situation cannot be illuminated by dividing people into the villainous oppressors and the innocent oppressed, and it cannot be improved by instigating an endless war of liberation from ever smaller micro aggressions. For the Christian, violence, hatred, envy, greed, division, and all other sins against human community derive from abandonment of obedience and worship of God the Creator (Romans 1:18-32). There will be no reconciliation among human beings until there is reconciliation with God. Liberal platitudes and leftist threats cannot overcome division between races, classes, nations, sexes, or any other binary. Hatred cannot overcome hatred, racism cannot expel racism, violence cannot end violence. Satan cannot cast out Satan. Only the Holy Spirit can do that!

The Christian College: Friend of Truth

The liberal university argues that truth is illusive, and the post-modern university asserts that there is no such thing as truth and reason is a slave to self-interest; power alone is real and acquiring it is all that matters. The Christian college rests in the truth of faith and finds this truth reliable in producing light, love, joy, unity, and peace. Its knowledge grounded in faith gives the Christian college the right, the confidence and the determination to assert truth claims against liberal quibbling and leftist intimidation. Its faith knowledge bestows on the Christian college a mandate to establish and enforce community standards. The open secret is that liberal faculties perpetuate themselves by hiring and retaining other liberals and leftist faculties hire and promote their fellow-travelers. With much more integrity, Christian colleges have the right to hire and retain administrators, faculty, and staff who affirm Christian faith. Moreover, they have the right to define in statements of faith and codes of conduct what they mean by the “Christian faith.”

The Christian College: Courage to Push Back

Academic freedom and tenure are not absolute even in the most liberal and leftist universities. Those institutions have the right to define the boundaries of academic freedom and, under certain conditions, the right to revoke tenure and terminate employment. Like other colleges, Christian colleges do not acknowledge unlimited academic freedom or irrevocable tenure, but they define the limits differently. Christian colleges encourage faculty to speak about their faith in and outside the classroom and commend the Christian faith to their students. Professors are free to critique anti-Christian philosophies and lifestyles. In contrast, these activities are restricted by law in publicly funded universities and by custom in elite private universities. At the same time, liberal and post-modern universities give faculty unrestricted freedom to affirm atheism, Marxism, and libertinism. As long as they do not engage in sexual harassment, they are free to live immoral lives. Christian colleges deny faculty members these freedoms. Faculty members who feel restricted by this denial do not belong in Christian colleges. If they are serious about maintaining their Christian identity, Christian colleges should make clear to faculty members that academic freedom and tenure will not protect them if they violate their contractual obligation to abide by the college’s faith statements and codes of conduct.

The Christian College: Its Critical Principles

Every academic endeavor must employ critical principles; otherwise, it has no criteria by which to distinguish possible from impossible, true from false, valid from invalid, probable from improbable, good from bad, wise from unwise, right from wrong, and just from unjust. For an academic community to exist and work together, its basic critical principles must be accepted by all members of that community. Christian colleges no doubt share many critical principles with other colleges, especially in the areas of logic, mathematics, and other hard sciences. In areas of morality, history, theology, and metaphysics, however, they differ dramatically. The liberal university denies that it gives any positive belief, moral, historical, theological, or metaphysical, the status of a critical principle by which to judge other beliefs of this type. The post-modern university, in contrast, asserts the morality of diversity, equity and inclusion and the narrative of oppressor versus oppressed as critical principles by which to judge other moral beliefs and narratives. The Christian college asserts the morality of faith, hope, and love and the biblical narrative of God, creation, sin, incarnation, reconciliation and redemption as critical principles by which to judge other moral beliefs and narratives. And it may in good faith exercise this power with boldness.

The Christian College: Learning to Say “No”

Most Christian college professors and administrators received their terminal degrees at universities dominated by the New Left. Having been immersed in Critical Theory, CRT, DEI, and Critical Pedagogy throughout their graduate studies—especially those studying education, social sciences, religious studies, literature, and all identity-based programs—new professors bring these theories and activist teaching methods with them to the Christian college and begin employing them in their teaching and institutionalizing them in training programs. These programs, sponsored by various administrative offices, often appear on the academic agenda without any justification at all. When questioned, their sponsors appeal to “best practices” or the latest educational literature. Or, they attempt to justify these neo-Marxist programs on Christian grounds, arguing that standing up for the poor and oppressed, working for social justice and against racism, and seeking diversity, equity, and inclusion embody the highest ethics found in the Bible and the Christian tradition. Who could object to that?

If you read the previous essays in this series, you won’t be surprised to learn that I completely reject these arguments. They are usually made by people who have only a superficial understanding of Critical Theory—of Marcuse, Davis, Freire, and Bell—and even less understanding of Christian doctrine and history. They mistake a small linguistic overlap between Christian vocabulary and neo-Marxist vocabulary for substantive agreement. The words diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism, oppression and justice as used by the New Left possess no more than verbal resemblances to Christian concepts, and sometimes they mean the direct opposite.

Suggestions for Christian Colleges

1. Don’t allow programs based on Critical Theory, CRT, DEI, intersectional identities, and Critical Pedagogy to be instituted. Discontinue them if they are already in place. Beware: these neo-Marxist programs appear under a variety of innocent sounding names. Read the fine print.

2. Replace teacher workshops rooted in Critical Pedagogy with workshops firmly centered in Christian Pedagogy, and discontinue programs that train faculty and staff in diversity, equity, and inclusion and institute programs that teach faith, hope, and love.

3. Institute continuing education programs that help your faculty and staff understand the Christian worldview at a deeper level.

4. Scrutinize every program and office in view of the critical principles listed above, and make sure that every other narrative and identity is thoroughly subordinate to the Christian narrative and identity.

*This essay focuses on higher education, but it applies equally to primary and secondary education.

Wake Up, Push Back, Speak Out: A Review of America’s Cultural Revolution (Part Five)—Conclusion

Conclusion: The Counter-Revolution to Come

The “Long March” of the New Left through American institutions is almost complete. The critical theory of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis’s politics of violence, the critical pedagogy inspired by Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell’s critical race theory dominate American education from kindergarten to graduate school, government agencies, and corporate America. Has the revolution succeeded? Have the neo-Marxists won? Have we reached the point of no return? In his final chapter, Rufo counsels against despair and charts a course for counter-revolution.

1. Counter-revolutionaries must expose the theoretical weaknesses of neo-Marxist critical theory. Marcuse, Davis, Freire, and Bell devised plans for destroying the traditional institutions of free enterprise, property, family, and religion, but they offer nothing but utopian dreams to put in their place. They divide people into evil oppressors and the virtuous oppressed according to race, sexual orientation, and gender. But they cannot summon a moral force strong enough to reunite what they have torn apart. The New Left can destroy but it cannot build. Their motto is “destroy it, and something better will come.” But it never does.

2. Marxism has failed everywhere it has been tried: Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cabral’s Guinea-Bissau, and Castro’s Cuba. Human beings resist giving up property, family, religion, merit, and privacy. Only a ruthless, totalitarian dictatorship can enforce such an anti-human regime. In the end, the supposedly idealistic revolutionaries, observes Rufo,

simply want their cut. The looters get a box of sneakers and a flat-screen television. The intellectuals get permanent sinecures in the universities. The activists get a ransom payment, disguised as a philanthropic contribution, from corporations and the local government (p. 275).

3. The New Left’s hold on American institutions, Rufo reminds us, “is a creature of the state, completely subsidized by the public through direct financing, university loan schemes, bureaucratic captures, and the civil rights regulatory apparatus.” Its power does not arise from the hearts of the people. “With sufficient will they [the institutions] can be reformed, redirected, or abolished through the democratic process. What the public giveth, the public can taketh away” (p. 270).

4. The New Left proclaims itself the champion of “the people.” In fact, however, the neo-Marxist elites despise “the people.” According to Rufo, the New Left is not really the champion of the oppressed against the oppressors. It is the champion of an “ideological regime” of gnostic-like arbiters of privilege over against the common “citizen.” It is to the “citizen” we must look for counter-revolutionary energy. The counter-revolution, explains Rufo,

is a revolution against: against utopia, against collectivism, against racial reduction, against the infinite plasticity of human nature. But it is also a revolution for: for the return of natural right, the Constitution, and the dignity of the individual” (p. 280). The counter-revolution must champion the “values of the common man: family, faith, work, community, country (p. 281).

The counter-revolution must assert “excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos” (p. 281). “The anti-democratic structures—the DEI departments and the captured bureaucracies—must be dismantled and turned to dust” (p. 281).

Next Time: I will bring a Christian perspective to bear on America’s cultural revolution, exploring some possibilities for counter-revolution in higher education, with Christian colleges and universities leading the way.

How the American Education System Became Anti-Family, Anti-Capitalist, Anti-White, Anti-Western, Anti-Christian, and Hopelessly Utopian: A Review of America’s Cultural Revolution (Part Three A)

Introduction

I come from a family of educators and have been involved with education as a student or a college professor for most of my life. I’ve thought a great deal about education and have written extensively about it on this blog. To an extent far beyond animals, human beings are capable of learning from their individual and collective experience and of passing this knowledge and skill to the generations that follow. Culture is that body of knowledge, skills, practices and creations accumulated and passed down through time. Human beings begin learning the minute they are born and continue the rest of their lives. Education is the process of “passing down” human culture to succeeding generations and is an intentional activity involving teaching and learning. Because acquiring the knowledge and skills available in one’s social world is necessary for survival and enjoying the goods of life available in a particular culture, education is valued by parents for their children and by individuals for themselves. For most people, individual and family interests are the driving forces for expending huge amounts of time, energy and money on education, kindergarten through college. But educational institutions often subordinate family and individual goals to other interests. This is especially true of institutions that are in some way (e.g., government funding) insulated from market forces and answerability to parents.

The state has always had an interest in education, and its interests are determined by its understanding of its scope and goals. There is no guarantee that the interests of the state will coincide with those of parents and individual students. As the United States of America transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial, and finally to a technological society, the government’s economic interest in education changed accordingly. But producing skilled workers for industry and technology is not the only reason for state involvement in education. Producing “good” citizens has always been a major goal, and a “good” citizen is defined as one that accepts and supports the basic values that the state holds necessary to its stability and to the general welfare. State funded and administered schools have never been value neutral.

If government schools champion values that are widely held, traditional, and limited in scope, most people hardly notice, because they, too, hold them. A list of such values might include individual civil liberties, economic freedom, hard work, respect for law, social peace, reward for merit, majority rule accompanied by minority rights, respect for marriage and family, religious liberty, etc. There have always been minority groups that dissent from many values held by the majority of people, and in response they’ve founded Christian and other private schools or educated their children at home. But what if the government with its vast system of bureaucracies gets captured by a small group that champions a value system very different from that held by the vast majority of people? What if the American educational system came to be controlled by a philosophy that taught that the value system that privileged individual civil liberties, economic freedom, hard work, respect for law, social peace, reward for merit, majority rule accompanied by minority rights, respect for marriage and family, and religious liberty was systemically racist, heterosexist, homophobic, colonialist, and sexist? And what if the new education regime taught that the only way to reform this corrupt society was to transform all the values that legitimate it by subordinating them to the New Left’s Neo-Marxist values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Moreover, what if these transformed values were taught to every child in America from kindergarten through graduate school by means of a method called “Critical Pedagogy”?

Dystopian? Nightmarish? Orwellian? Agreed!

But according to Rufo, this nightmare is now our new reality. Whether you send your child to kindergarten or to college, you can expect that your values—the ones mentioned above—will be attacked, subverted, and if possible, replaced by values of the New Left.

Next time we will let Rufo tell us how the nightmare became a reality, how a small group of Neo-Marxists gained almost total control over the American educational system.

Counter-Cultural Christianity for an Upside Down, Inside Out World (Part One)

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Today I will begin a series in which I interact with a new book by Christopher F. Rufo: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023). The book documents the growth in influence of the radical left, that is neo-Marxism or Critical Theory, from the 1960s to 2023 in American higher education, government, and corporations. Rufo uncovers the origins of the now familiar leftist theories and programs: Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Critical Pedagogy, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Identity Politics, and many others. He introduces us to the most influential theorists and activists of the radical left: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, Derrick Bell, and their students and allies.

In America’s Cultural Revolution, Rufo describes, analyzes and criticizes the radical left from a traditional and conservative position. I will evaluate the radical left from a Christian perspective. Like Rufo, I am skeptical of socialism and don’t want to live under the rule of neo-Marxist politicians and I lament the destructive impact of the radical left on American education. I am grateful to Rufo for his efforts to inform the American people about the dangers coming from the Left. In this series, however, sticking to what I know best, I want to warn individual believers, the church as a corporate body and Christian educators about the radical left’s pervasive influence on the cultural air they breathe.

The book is divided into four parts with four or five chapters within each part. The parts cover roughly the same span of time (1968-2023) but from different angles. Each part centers on a theme and a person: 1. Revolution and Herbert Marcuse; 2. Race and Angela Davis; 3. Education and Paulo Freire; 4. Power and Derrick Bell. I will review one part in each post and follow these essays with some applications to the church and Christian education.

Part I: Revolution

1. Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was born in Germany of Jewish parents. During World War I, Marcuse joined the Social Democrat Party, but soon became disillusioned because of the party’s accommodation to the old establishment. He pursued a doctorate at the University of Freiberg, studying under Martin Heidegger and writing a dissertation on the philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel. With the rise of Adolf Hitler, he fled first to Switzerland, France, and then to the United States. He taught at Brandeis University and then at the University of California, San Diego. Marcuse never wavered from his commitment to socialism as the most democratic form of political society and the most fitted to human nature. His main intellectual project for the rest of his life was creating a form of Marxism responsive to the new conditions of the post WW II situation in the Western world. Classical Marxism theorized that the working class, oppressed as they were by the capitalists, was the natural place for the socialist revolution to begin. By the 1950s, however, labor laws, unions, and increases in productivity, had transformed the Western working class into the comfortable and conservative middle class. Bitterly disappointed, Marcuse had to look elsewhere for potential revolutionaries. His “new left” had to be an alliance between the class of (mostly) white “intellectuals” and the black urban population. Race rather than class would be the new dividing line between oppressor and oppressed.

Marcuse articulated his “New Left” theory in a series of books: One-Dimensional Man (1964), Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965), Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1968), An Essay on Liberation (1969), and Counter Revolution and Revolt (1972). In these writings he argued that the masses of people can be awakened to their oppressed status only by destabilizing the social order. Revolutionaries have every right to use violence to disrupt and protest the systemically unjust order. Generations of revolutionaries from the Black Liberation Army (1970s) to Black Lives Matter (2020) and from the Weather Underground (1970s) to the contemporary Pro-Palestine student protests look to Marcuse and his theories to justify burning, looting and murder in the name of liberation. Marcuse, then, is the intellectual father of today’s radical left.

2. The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy”

This chapter tells the story of the Weather Underground organization and its founder Bernadine Dohrn. Acknowledging Marcuse as her inspiration, Dohrn led the Weather Underground to join with other militants a four-year terror campaign designed to provoke the long-anticipated revolution. The Weather Underground’s part in the campaign began on June 9, 1970 with the detonation of 15 sticks of dynamite in a New York Police Department headquarters. Between January 1969 and December 1970, the Weather Underground and like-minded organizations carried out 4,330 bombings. Forty-three people were killed. Dohrn and her friends gleefully celebrated the murder of police officers (a.k.a. “pigs”). But by 1972, the public had had enough and the FBI and President Nixon had decimated the ranks of the Weather Underground. Their reign of terror was a complete failure.

3. The Long March Through the Institutions

After the failure of the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army and other violent groups, Marcuse was forced to rethink his approach to revolution. His German admirer and student activist friend Rudi Dutschke suggested that the New Left movement return to the universities to regroup. Dutschke used the metaphor “the long march” to describe this strategy of retreat and consolidation, borrowing an expression originally used to describe Mao Zedong’s year-long, 5,000-mile retreat to the mountains after his 1934-defeat by the Nationalist Chinese Army. Marcuse agreed with Dutschke and advised his students to join university faculties with the aim of training new recruits and eventually taking over education from within and from there other social institutions. From positions in literature, journalism, and education, these radical professors railed against capitalism, sexism, colonialism, and racism. They invented new theoretical concepts such as “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “neocolonialism,” “patriarchy,” “anti-racism,” and a thousand other terms. Marcuse labeled this process “linguistic therapy.” Leftist theorists generate these ideas out of their Marxist ideology, which explains every less than utopian state of affairs through the lens of the oppressor/oppressed dialectic.* The process of “linguistic therapy” works like this: invent a term useful to the cause of revolution and use it over and over with confidence and people will begin to believe it refers to a real state of affairs. To draw out the social implications of their oppressor/oppressed ideology, the New Left academics lobbied for the creation of a host of new “studies” programs: Black Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, Whiteness Studies, Critical Race Studies, and the list grows every year. In these “studies” programs, theory held dogmatically and applied with methodological rigor determines the meaning of every fact. As a sign of the pervasive priority of theory over fact, consider how frequently you hear the adverbial phrase, “As a (an)…feminist, gay man, black woman, trans man, etc.” used to condition a person’s expression of an opinion in academic and popular speech.

Contemporary diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training can be traced back to the work of Marcuse’s third wife, Erica Sherover-Marcuse. Theory needed to be operationalized in practice. How do you get white people to recognize and confess their racism and privilege and black people to become conscious of their internalized oppression? In the 1980s, Sherover-Marcuse developed workshops designed to facilitate this new consciousness. The most well-known exercise in these workshops is the “privilege walk.” Participants divide into groups based on where they stand in the hierarchy of privilege and oppression. The privileged, then, must acknowledge and apologize for their racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. This exercise has been incorporated into many institutional programs designed to promote DEI. These programs are administered by armies of bureaucrats, adding millions of dollars to institutional payrolls. They act as modern-day inquisitors to sniff out hidden biases, intimidate dissenters, and punish offenders.

4. The New ideological Regime

This chapter documents the culmination of the “long march” through the institutions. The legacy media, government agencies, and most large corporations have adopted the critical theory and DEI programs, hiring thousands of DEI administrators and paying millions to outside anti-racist and DEI consultants.

Preliminary Reflections

I will save my comprehensive critique until I finish reviewing the entire book. But I will make some preliminary remarks. (1) I don’t see how a Marxist or Neo-Marxist theory of social relations can be separated from Marx’s atheism and anti-religious stance. For Marx, and apparently Marcuse, the possibility of thorough revolution depends on completely limiting one’s hope to this life and relying on human power alone to bring about the ideal society. Marxism encourages envy and discontent and justifies violence against the “oppressor” class to bring about its vision of justice. (2) It views evil as residing in systems and thinks human nature can be redeemed through social reordering; that is to say, it is utopian. It can dream and destroy, but it cannot build. (3) It has never worked anywhere it has been tried. (4) Hence Christians, churches, Christian non-profit organizations, and Christian educational institutions should be highly skeptical and very cautious of adopting any theory or program that finds its origin in the New Left: DEI, CRT, SEED, Critical Pedagogy, and the whole series of “Studies” academic tracts. Nor should we adopt the subversive vocabulary of New Left academics: “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “neocolonialism,” “patriarchy,” “anti-racism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” and the rest. As I argued above, the truth of these terms depends on the truth of the (neo)Marxist theory out of which the terms are spun. Accepting the terms implies accepting the theory.

*“Dialectic” refers here not to logical contradiction or friendly debate but an intractable social conflict that can be resolved only by establishing socialism as the political order.

To be continued…

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