Tag Archives: Neo-Marxism

The Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory

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Today we continue our review and dialogue with James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory. In the two previous essays we defined and set forth CRT’s twelve central beliefs. In this essay, we will turn to the story of its origins. In Chapter Three, Lindsay uncovers “The Proximate Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory” (pp. 87-158). The sheer number of authors, books, papers, and different movements covered in this long chapter is overwhelming. I will do my best to summarize it concisely, accurately and fairly. But I cannot help but oversimplify. There is another complicating factor I must mention. Attempting to discover and describe the origins of any historical phenomenon is fraught with many dangers. Among the most obvious are (1) the past is too complicated to describe completely and (2) historians, despite their best efforts, harbor their own prejudices.

The Two Main Sources

According to Lindsay, “Critical Social Justice Theories, including Critical Race Theory, arise from a deliberate fusion of Critical Theory (neo-Marxism) with postmodern Theory” (p. 89; emphasis original). This fusion was accomplished in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in academia. At a minimum we need to understand the essential features of three things: Critical Theory, postmodernism, and the process of their fusion.

Critical Theory, Or Neo-Marxism

Karl Marx (1818-83) claimed to have discovered the true science of history. History began with the communism of tribal society and passed through two other forms of society until it arrived at capitalism. The capitalist system will inevitably reach a crisis point wherein the exploited workers will revolt and take over the means of production to institute socialism. Socialism will naturally transform itself into communism similar in form to tribal communism but now worldwide. That was the theory.

But by the 1910s and 1920s it had become apparent that something was wrong with Marx’s theory. Capitalism had raised the standard of living in Europe to the point that workers no longer felt themselves miserable and exploited. The workers had adopted what Hungarian Marxist György Lukács (1885-1971) called a “false consciousness,” that is, they thought they were free and happy when in truth they were enslaved and miserable. The neo-Marxists realized that the socialist revolution was not inevitable. They held on to the Marxist belief that capitalism was unstable, but experience had taught them its advance toward socialism was but one possibility. It could also slide into fascism. Hence, the neo-Marxists developed an agenda of “consciousness raising;” that is, a program to convinced people who are relatively satisfied with their condition that they were oppressed in ways of which they were not conscious.  Marxist theorist Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) named this new approach to revolution “Critical Theory” in his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.”

For the process of consciousness raising to succeed, the “cultural hegemony” of capitalist society must be challenged. Marxists must pay attention to the places in culture where identity, consciousness, and values are formed. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) named five cultural institutions that Marxists need to infiltrate to cultivate a “counter-hegemony,” that is, an alternative narrative favorable to Marxist revolution: religion, family, education, media, and law. Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), in the 1950s and 1960s, despaired of awakening the satisfied American middle class to revolutionary consciousness. He looked instead to urban blacks, the unemployed, and university students to form the vanguard of a revolutionary coalition. In his books, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Counterrevolution and Revolt, An Essay on Liberation, and One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse outlines an ideological strategy for completing the Gramscian project of creating a Marxian consciousness as a challenge to the dominant culture. Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire (1921-97), in his highly influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, packages Critical Theory in a form designed to liberate students from their “false consciousness” and create in them a revolutionary consciousness.

Critical Social Justice theories, including CRT, incorporated neo-Marxism’s critique of capitalism and liberalism, its theory of false consciousness, its strategies of institutional infiltration and consciousness raising, and its ideal of communism—all while re-centering its social critique on race.

Postmodern Theory

Whereas Marxism and neo-Marxism critique the values and knowledge claims of liberal capitalist society in view of their own truth-claims about a truly just society (Communism), postmodernism debunks all truth claims and grand narratives—including Marxist—as expressions of power. They are in effect post-Marxist as well as postmodern. The most famous postmodern thinker Michel Foucault (1926-84) underlined the ideological nature of all knowledge claims by using the term “knowledge-power” whenever speaking about assertions of truth (p. 127).

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) considered language a prison from which we cannot escape into truth. Words refer only to other words and can never take us to real things. For postmodern thought, linguistic expressions, culture, social order, and law are “constructions” created consciously or unconsciously to acquire or retain power. To the unknowing, these constructions have the appearance of truth, fact, and reality. Hence the task of postmodern criticism is to unmask, to “deconstruct,” these deceptive structures. All of them! Those trained to think in postmodern terms see a power play, a conspiracy, in every assertion of truth, value, or fact. In Lindsay’s words, “It isn’t clear that postmodernists had much interest in doing anything further than taking things apart and playing in the wreckage, however” (p. 132).

At this point we are left asking how CRT can benefit by incorporating postmodernism. For in postmodernism, CRT’s central concepts—“race,” “systemic racism,” “Blackness,” “Whiteness,” “justice,” “equity” “diversity,” “inclusion,” etc.—are just as much power constructions as are rights, free markets, merit, and other liberal values, facts, and truth claims. They too must be deconstructed to reveal cynical masks for power, which would empty CRT’s rhetoric of its moral force.

Fusing Neo-Marxism and Postmodernism

Lindsay takes Kemberlé Crenshaw’s 1991 paper “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” to be a pivotal text in the creation of CRT. As Crenshaw sees it, postmodernism’s assertion that all group identities, values, and cultures are socially constructed—a view called antiessentialism or constructivism—can be useful to critical social justice movements such as CRT. Incorporating postmodernism into CRT enables it to expose and deconstruct hidden systemic racism. But Crenshaw also sees the need for marginalized groups to maintain a strong sense of group identity. She says, “At this point in history, a strong case can be made that the most critical resistance strategy for disempowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate and destroy it” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 139).

The dominant group (white people) intends the categories “black,” “woman,” “queer,” etc. to be negative and disempowering. Crenshaw welcomes the postmodern insight that these labels are pure power constructs with no basis in the essence of the people to whom they are attached. Nevertheless, these categories possess a sort of reality that must be acknowledged. Crenshaw observes, “But to say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that that category has no significance in the world” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 137). Identity categories “are imposed, thus made meaningful and real, by systemic power and those who hold and wield it” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, pp. 139-40; emphasis original).

In this way, Crenshaw can embrace postmodern constructivism as useful in critiquing the dominant group’s justifications for maintaining its privileges without giving up the reality of marginalized group identities useful in the quest for liberation. There is a huge difference, says Crenshaw, between saying “I am a person who happens to be black” and saying “I am Black.” To say “I am Black” accepts the imposed identity but transforms it into “an anchor of subjectivity…a positive discourse of self-identification’ (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 138). Think of the way certain gay people have embraced the insult “queer” and turned it into “Queer,” a proud assertion of identity. For Critical Race Theory, Black identity is a “matter of lived experience no one has standing to challenge” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 137).

According to Lindsay, Crenshaw’s contribution to CRT was to figure out a way to incorporate the advantages of postmodern constructivism while making the category of race-identity immune from deconstruction. The assertion “I am Black” is irrefutable. Thanks to Crenshaw and others, CRT is Critical and Constructivist, that is, neo-Marxist and postmodern. It can exempt itself from the critique it makes of others. Liberal accusations of racism in CRT or postmodern attempts to deconstruct it will be interpreted as manifestations of systemic racism and white supremacy.

What Do Critical Race Theorists Believe?

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Today we continue our review and dialogue with James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory. In Chapter Two, Lindsay lays out CRT’s core beliefs under twelve headings. The precise wording is not as important as the picture they paint of the CRT worldview and agenda.

The Twelve-Part CRT Creed

Racism is the ordinary and permanent state of society. The whole system of society has been constructed to benefit white people and disadvantage people of color. In examining any situation “The question [under CRT] is not ‘did racism take place”? but ‘how did racism manifest in that situation” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, p. 7; quoted on p. 32). Racism is so woven into the system that it cannot be rooted out apart from a complete transformation of society.

White people do not act to benefit people of color unless it is in their interest. This thesis was popularized by Dereck Bell in 1970 and is known as the “Interest-Convergence Thesis.” Under this thesis, school desegregation (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954) and other civil rights “advances” were enacted primarily to serve the purposes of whites. The system cannot act otherwise than to benefit those in charge of the system. The effect of this thesis is to cast a pall of suspicion over every interaction between whites and non-whites no matter how innocent it appears to those not sensitized.

Material conditions determine one’s character, values, and choices. The problems that beset minoritized communities today—crime, poverty, illiteracy, etc.— are the legacy of past racism. They are not the result of character flaws.

Race is socially constructed—not biologically given—and imposed by white people to maintain white dominance. Though CRT denies “race essentialism,” it nevertheless affirms that imposed race categories create a “structurally real” racial identity in a way that determines the lived reality and identity of minoritized groups.

Social structures—law, customs, policies, values—determine the positions of different groups within the power dynamics of a society. Lindsay explains, “While there is nothing [biologically] essential to being black or white, there is something structurally essential to being black or white in a white-dominant system” (p. 47; emphasis added). That is to say, “Whiteness” and “Blackness,” though features of an artificially constructed social order, determine the feelings, place, and identity of every black or white individual within this order as unavoidably as if they were written into the biology of each. As Lindsay points out, this belief grounds the logic of identity politics.

People of color—the oppressed, the minoritized—possess privileged access to knowledge white people do not have. One’s oppressed position within the power structure of society “brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism” not possessed by whites (Delgado and Stefancic, p. 9; quoted in Lindsay, p. 49). This positionality within the system gives minorities a “unique voice of color” that “is deemed to be authoritative and beyond contradiction” (p. 49). It is impossible for a white person to disagree with CRT, because CRT claims to be the authoritative source for the authentic “voice of color.”

CRT privileges storytelling, narrative-weaving, and counterstorytelling above rational argument and fact-based reasoning. CRT uses fictional stories, allegories, and parables to create narrative realities that “challenge prevailing narratives, stereotypes, and expectations…about race” (p. 52). Though such a storytelling approach can be persuasive to a receptive audience, it can be abused. Lindsay observes, “As a result of leaning upon storytelling…Critical Race Theory often presents claims of racism in situations where the evidence doesn’t support it and then considers requests for evidence to be evidence of further racism” (p. 56).

Standard narratives of American history are written from the perspective of the dominant group and must be subverted and revised to favor minority perspectives. Quoting Critical Race Theory: An Introduction: “Revisionist history examines America’s historical record, replacing comforting majoritarian interpretations of events with ones that square more accurately with minorities’ experiences. It also offers evidence, sometimes suppressed, in that very record, to support those interpretations” (Delgado and Stefancic, p. 20; Lindsay, p. 57). This belief is clearly a subcategory of the one above. CRT constructs revised historical narratives that subvert the legitimating narratives of the dominant (white) order whether they are plausible by the standard methods developed by professional historians or not.

Such liberal principles as color blindness, individual rights, equality under law, economic freedom, freedom of speech, reinforce and perpetuate the status quo of white supremacy. In their critique of liberalism, Sensoy and DiAngelo assert that “The logic of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism…[keeps] the marginalized in their place by obscuring the larger structural systems of inequality. In other words, it fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow” (Is Every one Really Free? p 5; quoted in Lindsay, p. 60). Liberalism provides excuses for white people to benefit from the racist system with a clear conscience and constructs convenient explanations for why inequality among racial groups persists. As long as the liberal order remains, white people will never freely give up their privileges to create racial equity. Hence CRT favors socialism above liberalism.

In CRT, whiteness is a kind of property—equivalent to “private property” in Marxism—which must be abolished if true equality is to be achieved. Whiteness—a rather diffuse concept—is the sum total of the exclusive privileges white people give to themselves along with their justifications and the mechanisms for their preservation. Whiteness is held as a kind of property justified in law by a right of exclusive use. Whiteness must be abolished. According to Lindsay,

“Critical Race Theory regards ‘whiteness as a property’ because it enables them to transition the Communist Revolution out of the economic sphere and into the racial-cultural sphere—with race made the central construct for understanding inequality. To become ‘less white’ and to ‘disrupt whiteness’ is to attempt to fulfill Marx’s Communist vision of the abolition of bourgeois private property in a new domain to which the American culture is more sensitive” (p. 67).

Intersectionality: people within oppressed groups must not be identified primarily as unique individuals but as members of intersecting groups. A person may be black and female or black, male, and gay, etc. and be oppressed from more than one angle. The point of intersectionality is to open the eyes of all oppressed groups—so different in many respects—to their common identity as oppressed and generate a common front against systemic oppression.

Antiracism is the practical strategy for implementing CRT. The first thing to get clear is that “antiracism” does not mean color blindness or race neutrality. It means replacing policies that promote inequality with policies that institute equity among groups. Ibram X Kendi proposes enacting a constitutional amendment establishing a Department of Antiracism. He describes its work as being:

…preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure that they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas (Interview with Politico Magazine, 2019).

The Department of Antiracism would be independent of Executive, Judicial, and Legislative oversight and would be staffed by “formally trained experts on racism” (Interview with Politico Magazine, 2019).

Kendi says elsewhere,

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination (How to Be an Antiracist, p. 19; quoted in Lindsay, p. 75).

Two-Sentence Summary

CRT’s belief system can be summarized in three words:

White America stinks!

Summarizing its agenda takes thirteen words:

Burn it to the ground and build a Socialist order ruled by Antiracists.

Is God Always on the Side of the Oppressed?

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In my previous essay I recounted my failed search for the Social-Justice Jesus. In reading through the Gospel of Matthew, I did not find a social revolutionary protesting systemic injustices or an advocate of the economic interests of one class in preference to another. Jesus was not a royalist, democrat, republican, anarchist, or a libertarian. In fact, I did not find Jesus preaching a worldly sociopolitical order at all. What I found was Jesus’s indictment of the greed, envy, lust, pride, and idolatry that corrupt every world order. And these vices find their home in every human heart.

Superficial Plausibility

Before I subject the assertion that “God is always on the side of the oppressed” to criticism, let’s consider its superficial plausibility. Interpreted in the most generous way I can imagine, the statement could be saying that God judges justly between the victims of injustice and their persecutors. God always rules in favor of the victim and against the perpetrator. Or, just as in a natural disaster, first responders help the worst injured before attending to the walking wounded and unscathed, God attends to those with the greatest need before he turns to those who need less. The former act embodies the principle of equal justice and the latter the principle of just proportionality or equity.

Liberation Theology

Unfortunately, those who assert that “God is always on the side of the oppressed” cannot be interpreted as merely asserting God’s justice and equity. That God favors the oppressed was a central claim of Latin American Liberation Theology, a creative fusion of Christianity and Marxism that became popular in North America in the 1970s. In the form I see it most often today, it replaces the economic categories of Karl Marx with those of race and gender.

“God [is]”

In the assertion that “God is always on the side of the oppressed,” we find at least four significant components that need to be clarified: (1) “God,” (2) “always,” (3) “on the side of,” and (4) “the oppressed.” Let’s assume that the “God” spoken of here is the God of the Bible, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must not, then, derive our picture of God from our own subjective ideals or a cultural image of a liberating power. We must, instead, examine the narratives and teaching of the Old and New Testaments. I do not have space here to construct a complete picture of the God of the Bible. But I think such a study would conclude that God is faithful, just, knowing, and merciful. God judges justly between the victim and the perpetrator of injustice. But there is more to consider.

“Always”

To say that God is always on the side of the oppressed is a bold claim, and I think it goes too far. Does “always” mean under all conditions, thoroughly, and in every respect? Even if an individual is treated unjustly in one respect might they not in other respects be guilty of sin, of injustice, greed, hatred, envy, lust, etc.? Is God a mere partisan who overlooks the sins of his friends because they are mistreated in some respects by individuals whom he does not favor? This “always” obscures the perfect unity of God’s judgment and mercy. Perhaps in human courts we must distinguish starkly between innocent and guilty parties, pure victims and pure perpetrators. But God judges the human heart, and no one is purely innocent.

“On the side of”

What does it mean to say that God is “on the side of” the oppressed? In the preceding paragraph I raised the possibility that this assertion makes God a mere partisan, motivated not by justice but by favoritism. What does the assertion say about the speaker? It sounds high-minded at first, but then you realize that implicit in the statement is a claim about the speaker: “I too am on the side of the oppressed. God and I are on the same side!” This claim does not place you in good company. During the American Civil War both the North and the South claimed that God was on their side as they slaughtered their brothers, sisters, and cousins. The present Russian Patriarch claims that God is on Putin’s side in “liberating” Ukraine. Iran, ISIS, Hezbollah, and Hamas cry “God is great!” as they slit the throats of pregnant Jewish women. For some, God is white. For others, God is black, or gay, or lesbian.

Sadly, history shows that when people claim that God is on their side, they often do so to justify using extralegal and immoral means to achieve their ends: violence, theft, genocide, betrayal, murder, rape, lying, and deception. In the Bible, God is the judge of all the earth; it is spiritually safer, then, to assume that God is not on anyone’s side! Perhaps we should focus on striving to be on God’s side, without, however, presuming that we actually are!

“The Oppressed”

Who are the “oppressed”? What does it mean to be oppressed or to be an oppressor? Each of the other terms in the sentence, “God is always on the side of the oppressed,” opens the door to mischief. But the concept of “the oppressed’ blows a hole in the wall. In contemporary progressive culture, the official list of the oppressed grows longer every day. It seems that everyone wants to be oppressed. People of color, black women, black lesbians, white lesbians, gay people of all colors, trans and bi, questioning, nonbinary, fat people, short people, indigenous people, differently abled…God is on your side always! In the case of these groups, what does oppression mean? Are they legally proscribed or stripped of civil rights? Have they had their goods confiscated unjustly? Are they prohibited from pursuing the professions or attending university? What makes a black, lesbian professor of law at Harvard or a gay Secretary of Transportation one of the world’s oppressed?

Again, what does it mean to be oppressed? What do all these people and groups listed above have in common that makes them oppressed? Of course, you can find instances, past and present, wherein members of these groups have been treated unfairly. But you can also find among these “oppressed” people rich, famous, powerful, and glamorous individuals. It seems that what they all have in common is that they are not white, straight, and male. Perhaps I am oversimplifying matters, but it seems to me that the ideology that determines who gets recognized as oppressed has been designed with one purpose in mind; to dethrone the group it views as having at the beginning of Western civilization illegitimately acquired hegemonic power to which it still clings.

What does it mean to be an oppressor in contemporary social theory? It does not mean that you cheat widows out of their houses and orphans out of their inheritances. Nor does it mean that you enslave people on the official list of oppressed groups. In fact, you may be a benefactor to widows, orphans, the homeless, and the poor. Or, indeed, you may be among the poor yourself. Nonetheless, if you are white, male, and straight you are an oppressor. And if God is on the side of the oppressed, God is not on your side. The only option for you is to engage in perpetual confession and continual penance for being born into privilege. And one of those penitential exercises is to repeat the assertion, “God is always on the side of the oppressed.”

Tear Down this Wall (Ephesians 2:14)

The New Testament envisions a community of brothers and sisters under Jesus Christ, indwelt, transformed, and made one by the Holy Spirit, forgiven, reconciled, and directed to the Father from whom all good things flow.

As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. 2 Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. 3 Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all (Ephesians 4:1-5).

Judged by this standard, the assertion “God is always on the side of the oppressed,” as it is used by contemporary liberationist theologians is profoundly heretical; for dividing the church into oppressors and the oppressed is a grave sin against the unity of the body of Christ.

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.

What Went Wrong in American Higher Education and What to Do About It

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In the previous six essays I summarized Christopher Rufo’s account of how the New Left came to dominate American education, government agencies, and corporations. I will devote this essay to higher education.

Christian Faith versus The New Left Philosophy

Before I discuss higher education, I want to assert briefly and bluntly that neo-Marxist philosophy is incompatible with Christianity. You cannot be a disciple of Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse and be a Christian in any sense close to orthodoxy. Marcuse was an atheist as are most other New Left leaders. As we saw in our previous essays, neo-Marxists are willing to destroy a relatively just, admittedly imperfect, social order in a despairing hope that a perfect one will take its place. The New Left divides human beings into oppressors and oppressed; it further divides the oppressed into a hierarchy of ever more marginalized identities. It explains all human relationships by this narrow category. Moreover, it justifies violence as a means of bringing about its vision of justice. CRT, DEI, and Critical Pedagogy make no sense apart from neo-Marxist critical theory. They cannot be adapted to serve a Christian purpose.

In contrast to the New Left philosophy, Christianity proclaims that God exists and is known truly in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. God is the creator and lord of the world. Human beings are God’s creatures made in his image and subject to sin, corruption and death. There is no hope for salvation except in God. People find their true identity in faith and union with Christ. Jesus calls on his disciples to live in peace and joy, to be peacemakers and extend mercy, to love their neighbors and enemies. There is one church, inclusion into which depends on faith and baptism. Class envy and racial animus are forbidden. Violence in service of supposed just causes is prohibited. In both spirit and letter, Christianity and neo-Marxism could hardly be more antithetical. You cannot serve two masters.

Why American Universities Fell So Readily to the New Left

Why were American universities so easily and so thoroughly conquered by the New Left? Why could they not resist such an anti-Christian, anti-democratic, anti-American, and divisive philosophy?

The New University

The short answer is that in the late 19th century the old American colleges began their transformation into modern universities by adopting the research model of the University of Berlin (1810). They cease assuming the truth of Christianity and argued for professorial and student freedom to teach and learn unencumbered by confessional restrictions. They viewed academic freedom and professional competence as essential because the new idea of the university centered on critique of old ideas and the production of new knowledge. Hence any force that resisted those new goals was considered anti-progressive. And progressive academic leaders thought that orthodox Christianity and conservative politics were the most counter-revolutionary forces they had to fear. To guard against these reactionary forces, modern academic leaders institutionalized such strong protections as near inviolable academic freedom and career-long tenure. The enemies of critical scholarship, value neutral research, and the progress of science, they thought, were all on the right, that is, among those wanting to turn back the clock. Hence all modern academia’s defenses were directed to its right. The values academic leaders asserted were critical, skeptical, purely methodological, liberal, and supposedly metaphysically and religiously neutral; all were designed to defend against traditional religious and political dogmas. Modern academia could not assert positive beliefs, truths, and values without sounding dogmatic and hypocritical. Its only commitment was to make no commitments. It never imagined that it would be attacked and conquered from the dogmatic left.

The Dilemma

As we learned from Rufo, the New Left turned modern academia’s progressive rhetoric, critical methods, and institutions of academic freedom and tenure against it. Because the New Left was neither conservative nor Christian, it caught the liberal establishment off guard.  The New Left painted the liberal order of the modern university as sold out to the white capitalist establishment. The liberal university establishment, in the leftist critique, was not critical enough, not neutral, and not progressive. Liberal academics and university administrators were face with a dilemma. They could admit that they have positive commitments after all and assert those beliefs, values, and truths in its defense against the leftist critique. Or, they could give in to the New Left as the logical outcome of their critical stance toward traditional Christianity and conservative politics. Not wanting to give ground to their old enemies, they chose the latter. To escape Christian dogma and reactionary politics, the nightmares of the liberal establishment, the university mortgaged itself to tyrannical, dogmatic leftists.

Is Reform Possible?

According to Rufo, the only possibility of overturning the neo-Marxist hold on the American university—if there is a possibility at all—lies in the democratic process. The public must reassert its control and reimpose its values on the education system. It will have to insist that primary, secondary and college education should stop working to create activists for the left’s utopian vision of social justice and take up again its traditional task of preparing productive and informed citizens for the constitutional republic of the United States of America. The value of tenure for securing the quality of education and as protection from arbitrary dismissal should be obvious, but it must be granted and maintained only under specific and clearly stated contractual obligations consistent with the stated mission of the university. The protection of academic freedom should not be extended to efforts that subvert the academic mission of the university by redirecting the educational process toward non-academic purposes. Moreover, universities should make it clear that freedom of speech applies not to the classroom but to public spaces. In staff, administrative, and bureaucratic positions, where academic tenure and academic freedom do not apply, legislatures, Boards of Regents, and administrators have much more freedom to reorganize and reform the educational bureaucracy. Shutting down all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices would be a good start.

An Uphill Climb

But I am skeptical that the public, elected officials, and Boards of Regents will carry out these measures. I could list many reasons for my pessimism, and so could you. But from an insider perspective, this one stands out: there is a deeply rooted assumption in higher education that there should be a single academic culture that sets the standards for the whole nation. Each university, it is assumed, should embody those standards. As long as this assumption holds sway, it is impossible for any one university to assert positive beliefs, values, and truths against the New Left. In a diverse society like ours, it is unlikely that a set of beliefs, values, and truths strong enough to resist the New Left can emerge as a national consensus. The only way forward is to reject the assumption of the necessity of one uniform definition of sound education. Individual universities must assert their right to define their own standards.

Next Time: The New Left and The Christian College