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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.

The Contemporary Moral Crisis (Part 2)*

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This series deals with the creeping moral crisis that is engulfing modern Western culture and the challenge progressive culture’s moral nihilism poses to the Christian vision of human life. In my experience, contemporary discussions of morality consist of incoherent assertions of prejudice and outbursts of emotional anguish, mixed with rude protests and not so veiled threats of violence. Hence my approach will be to search for what went wrong and to clarify the alternatives that reveal themselves in that search. I think we will discover that the loss of Christian doctrines of God, creation, sin, and salvation preceded and facilitated the loss of a coherent moral vision. And only by regaining a deep understanding and belief in these Christian teachings can we successfully weather the storm about to break on the gates of the church.

Is Christianity Good?

Christianity has its critics and always has. From the beginning it faced opposition from religious and political authorities, from cultural arbiters and grassroots society. Paul noted that many of his fellow Jews considered the message of the cross unworthy of God and the Greeks dismissed it as foolish (1 Cor 1:18-25). The Romans disparaged Christians as “atheists” and “enemies of the human race.” And the cultured elite of the Empire considered it superstitious. Depending on the spirit of the times, the Christian faith has been attacked as rationally incoherent, historically false, politically subversive, and morally bankrupt.

Christians have been characterized as backward, snobbish, clannish, cultish, and self-righteous. If I may be allowed a broad judgment, it seems to me that in the first three centuries of the church the major criticisms of Christianity were moral in nature. Christianity was attacked as a corrupting influence on society that produced political subversion, social conflict, and moral decline. And many of the early Christian apologists dealt with these charges in their writings.

At least since the Enlightenment, the dominant challenges to Christianity have been intellectual. Philosophers challenged the possibility and need for revealed religion. They focused their critique on biblical miracles, dismissing them as myths, legends, or lies. Historians challenged the authenticity and historical accuracy of the New Testament writings. After Darwin, many critics challenged the truth of divine creation and even denied the existence of God, urging that the theory of evolution removes the need for a supernatural explanation for life. Understandably, most modern defenders of Christianity dealt primarily with these intellectual challenges. Answering the question “Is Christianity true?” has been the dominant concern of modern Christian apologetics.

It seems to me that since the middle of the 20th century the apologetic situation of Christianity in the Western world and particularly in the United States has changed dramatically. The most urgent question has shifted from “Is Christianity true” to “Is Christianity good?” Could we be returning to the situation that characterized the first three centuries of the church in which Christianity’s opponents ignored the question of truth and challenged Christianity’s goodness? Even in the modern era, there has been an undercurrent of moral criticism of Christianity. Deism denied the need for a divinely revealed morality, and the Romantic Movement developed an individualistic and subjective definition of the good that justified transgressing moral conventions.

Karl Marx argued that Christianity justified suffering and oppression and robbed the majority of humanity of well-being in this life by promising rewards in the next life. Friedrich Nietzsche accused Christianity of being a slave religion, contending that its teaching about sin, compassion, humility, and the need for forgiveness kept people from achieving their natural excellence. And Freud explained moral rules as rationalizations of irrational impulses buried deep in the human psyche.

The so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s brought to the surface the undercurrent of Romanticism that has always been just under the surface in American culture. It rebelled against the conventional moralism of respectable society, adopting the Romantic definition of the good as individualistic and subjective. It manifested itself most visibly in the youth culture of drugs, free love, and rock ‘n’ roll. And the postmodernism of the 1980s borrowed from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to ground the instinctive moral rebellion manifested in the sexual revolution in a theory of deconstruction and suspicion. This theory interprets all truth claims, social structures, moral rules, esthetic norms, and religious beliefs as manifestations of the hidden desire for domination, as strategies to enable one person or group to set the rules for other persons or groups. In a climate of suspicion where every truth claim is viewed as a quest for power, how is a rational discussion of the issues confronting church and society possible?

Is Rational Discussion Possible?

“Discussion of theology is not for everyone,” warned Gregory of Nazianzus in the heat of the late 4th century controversy over the Trinity. It is for serious minded and thoughtful people. It’s “not just another subject like any other for entertaining small-talk, after the races, the theater, songs, food, and sex: for there are those who count chatter on theology and clever deployment of arguments as one of their amusements” (Oration 27, Chapter 3).

Basil the Great describes the controversy of his day (late 4th century) as like a great naval battle:

Imagine, if you will, the ships driven into confusion by the raging tempest, while thick darkness falls from the clouds and blackens the entire scene, so that signals cannot be recognized, and one can no longer distinguish friend from foe…Think of the cries of the warriors as they give vent to their passions with every kind of noise, so that not a single word from the admiral or pilot can be heard…they will not cease their efforts to defeat one another even as their ships sink into the abyss (On the Holy Spirit, Chapter 30).

In a very different setting, Matthew Arnold spoke of his age as dwelling on “a darkling plane, Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night” (Dover Beach, 1867).

As I look out on the moral crisis that has engulfed our culture, I see the trivialization of serious matters of which Gregory complained, the explosion of violent passion Basil describes, and the ignorant, nocturnal clash that so troubled Matthew Arnold. My first inclination is to stay out of it and let the enemies vent their passions on each other. Recoiling from the combatant’s sword and the referee’s flag, I prefer to carry the medic’s bag. And yet, perhaps, there is something I can do even during the heat of the battle. For not everyone is enraged all the time. Some have not yet joined the fray, others are resting on the sidelines, and still others wish to stay neutral. And some, only a few perhaps, long to understand what is happening and why and what to do in response.

In riots participants use sticks, broken bottles, and bricks as weapons. In moral controversy combatants use words. Words can convey information or express feelings. They can illuminate the mind or evoke emotion. And the emotions they instill can be positive or negative. Many contemporary discussions of moral issues consist primarily in emotional expressions of approval or disapproval in the absence of conceptual clarity and precision.

*This is part 2 in the series on “The Christian Moral Vision and the Ironies of “Progressive” Culture.” It begins the reblogging of a revised and edited series from 2014.

“That is Your Reality” and Other Silly Expressions

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The 2020/21 school year has ended. Exams have been checked and grades have been posted. I finally have time to write about some issues that have been on my mind for the past year.

No Nonsense Allowed

As readers of this blog know, nothing gets under my skin more than illogical, irrational, and unclear assertions presented as axiomatic truths. I do not like it when this type of speech is used to discuss any subject area or to communicate any message. It offends my aesthetic sense.  However, when such nonsense appears in theological or moral contexts, it awakens my prophetic ire. In my very first post on this blog on August 08, 2013, I made this clear when I said:

I really don’t like...

Dishonesty, hypocrisy, double-speak, self-deception, narcissism, cynicism, misrepresentation, confusion, ignorance, humbug, obfuscation, deception and other intellectual and moral vices.

I really like…

Clarity in thinking, precision in speaking, honesty, truth, common sense, intellectual humility, thoughtfulness and fairness.

So, at least for the first part of the summer I plan to unmask, deconstruct, and poke a bit of fun at some of the humbug, ignorance, and obfuscation that has plagued us for the past year.

“That is Your Reality”

Many expressions current in popular culture drive me crazy but none more than “that is your reality” or some variation thereof, such as “that is your narrative.” Like all catchy expressions, it contains a grain of truth. But it is the effect of combining that grain of truth with a bucket full of nonsense that gets to me. In any proper use of language, the words “real” and “reality” refer to the way things are in themselves apart from perceptual distortions, imaginary constructions, or wishes. Reality serves as the objective standard, the judge, and the reference point for all fact and truth claims.

All assertions are judgments about what is or is not. A judgment always takes the form X is Y. Hence to refute someone’s judgment that “X is Y” by dismissing it with “that is your reality” fractures language and insults logic! Instead of agreeing with the judgment or asserting the contradictory judgment, “Not[X is Y”], it says, “For you but not for me [X is Y].” What does that mean?

Is this just another way of saying, “That is just your opinion, so I am free to ignore it”? I think this is the effect. You get to dismiss the force of an argument without going to the trouble of refuting it. Strictly speaking, to assert that a judgment is an opinion is to assert that the judgment in question is supported only by probable arguments about which reasonable people could disagree. This is a sophisticated distinction. I doubt that most people rise to this level of logical sophistication. Most people use the word “opinion” to mean no more than a subjective preference, unexamined prejudice, or unformed impression.

Reality as Metaphor and Ideology

But why use the word “reality” in the current expression “That is your reality”? I can think of two possibilities. (1) Perhaps this expression is designed to escape the force of an argument without insulting the person making the argument. You can acknowledge the other person’s rationality, sincerity, and their subjective certainty without accepting the objective truth of their judgment. In this case you are using the word “reality” metaphorically to signify the practical certainty with which the other person holds the belief in question. For them it seems so real that they are willing to act on this basis. You are acknowledging their certainty as a sincere driving force in their lives. Still, it seems a bit condescending to soften your rejection of their judgment with a verbal pat on the head.

But there is another less benign possibility. (2) The expression could be a popular derivative of the postmodern theory that reality, truth, knowledge, good, and beautiful are merely conceptual instruments of oppression invented by the dominant class or race or gender to gain and maintain their dominance. According to postmodern theory, those who have power and privilege determine what is taught as real, true, and known. And these concepts by definition demand submission of mind and body. But these definitions are merely ideologies whose sole purpose is to express and preserve the power interests of the dominant class, racial, or gender.

When a thoroughgoing postmodern thinker says to you “That is your reality” they are charging you with living according to an order of moral and aesthetic values and assumed truths designed and constructed to reinforce your position of power and privilege. This order seems real to you because it tells you what you want to hear, and it tells you what you want to hear because you and people like you wrote the script to fit yourselves. And it is so persuasive that you think your own propaganda perfectly reflects reality, the way things are apart from perceptual distortions, imaginary constructions, or wishes

Why Silly?

Why, then, does my title label the expression “That is your reality” as silly? The word silly applies to judgments or behavior that sets forth absurdities so obvious that they evoke riotous laughter. Using the word “reality” metaphorically to mean “illusion” with a straight face is indeed silly to the point of the farcical. But using the word “reality” to mean an “illusion constructed for an evil purpose” presses irony into the service of sarcasm. And sarcasm unlike irony aims to destroy rather than instruct. It’s too serious, to be silly.

Understanding Academia’s Obsession with Race, Gender, and Identity (Part Two)

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In the previous essay I promised to complete my description of Theory (or Critical Theory), which is the framework that makes sense of the “crazy talk” about race, gender, and identity we often hear emanating from the modern university. The original postmodernism, with its two principles and four major themes—discussed in the previous post—takes a playful, skeptical, and ironic stance toward all truth claims. It affirms nothing and criticizes everything. Pure postmodernism cannot function as a philosophy for political activism. For it deconstructs everything and constructs nothing. Whereas science aims to describe the world and radical politics wants to change it, postmodernism wishes only to criticize it.

Social Justice Theory as Applied Postmodernism

According to Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, between the 1980s and 2010 race, gender, and identity theorists drew on postmodernism for the critical parts of their activist theories. Theory uses postmodern knowledge principle to create suspicion of the knowledge claims and narratives of the dominant groups in society. And it uses the postmodern political principle to expose the pervasive presence of power in society and its control over what counts as truth and justice. However, in contrast to the original postmodernism, Theory uses postmodernism’s critical tools only against ideologies and narratives it deems supportive of the oppressive forces in society. It does not turn them against the narratives of society’s oppressed and marginalized.* The latter are treated in practice as true and expressive of justice. The former are treated as false and expressive of injustice. Postmodernism’s universal deconstruction of all truth claims, every power center, and each assertion of stable identity, was transformed into a binary order–a new metanarrative–defined by the division between oppressor and oppressed.

*I don’t have space to define the “marginalized.” As the term indicates, the marginalized are defined by what they are not. They are not the dominant group. Look up Cynical Theories in your favorite search engine.

Social Justice Theory as Reified Postmodernism

After 2010, Theory (Social Justice Theory or Critical Theory) confidently asserted the truth of its critique of knowledge and the political order. The mood is no longer skeptical and playful but cynical and dogmatic. Pluckrose and Lindsey speak of this shift as the “reification” of postmodernism. Within the world of contemporary Theory it is presupposed that any moral or scientific justification of the status quo (the oppressors) is merely an ideology originating from desire to maintain dominance over people with marginalized identities. In contrast, narratives that free and empower marginalized people are by definition true. Social Justice Theory is a strange combination of cynicism and dogmatism, which makes sense only as an arbitrary decision to apply postmodern cynicism to the narratives of one group and superstitious credulity to the other. What motivates this seemingly arbitrary decision? Lust for power, guilt, resentment, and envy or passion for justice?

Ironically, because of Theory’s dogmatic assertion that truth and right are always on the side of the marginalized, a marginal identity has become a coveted possession within the Social Justice universe. And the more marginalized your identity, the higher your status in the new order will be. A person’s identity as marginalized is enhanced when it is constructed by the intersection of two or more marginal identities. In a reversal of postmodernism’s universal suspicion of power, contemporary Theory uses its claims of truth and right to demand submission from the heretofore dominant group. Theory, then, flips the social order on its head. The oppressors become the oppressed, truth becomes falsehood, good becomes evil, and right becomes wrong. And there is no arbiter, via media, no common ground. There are only winners and losers.

Classical Liberalism as the Response to Applied and Reified Postmodernism?

As their response to the irrationality and socially destructive effects of Social Justice Theory’s activist and reified postmodernism, Pluckrose and Lindsey urge a return to classical liberalism, that is, to reason, truth, freedom of expression, civil liberty, common humanity, debate, and evidence-based knowledge.

Next Time: I will explain my partial agreement with Pluckrose’s and Lindsey’s proposal and offer a Christian response to the view of freedom common to both postmodernism and liberalism.

Forget Truth!…Is Christianity Even Good? Faith and the Contemporary Moral Crisis (#1)

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Christianity has its critics and always has. From the beginning it faced opposition from religious and political authorities, from cultural arbiters and from grassroots society. Paul noted that many of his fellow Jews considered the message of the cross unworthy of God and the Greeks dismissed it as foolish (1 Cor 1:18-25). The Romans disparaged Christians as “atheists” and “enemies of the human race.” And the cultured elite of the Empire considered it superstitious. Depending on the spirit of the times, the Christian faith has been attacked as rationally incoherent, historically false, politically subversive and morally bankrupt.

Christians have been characterized as backward, snobbish, clannish, cultish and self-righteous. If I may be allowed a broad judgment, it seems to me that in the first three centuries of the church the major criticisms of Christianity were moral in nature. Christianity was attacked as a corrupting influence on society that produced political subversion, social conflict and moral decline. And many of the early Christian apologists dealt with these charges in their writings.

At least since the Enlightenment, the dominant challenges to Christianity have been intellectual. Philosophers challenged the possibility and need for revealed religion. They focused their critique on the biblical miracles, dismissing them as myths, legends or lies. And historians challenged the authenticity and historical accuracy of the New Testament writings. After Darwin, many critics challenged the truth of divine creation and even denied the existence of God, urging that the theory of evolution removes the need for a supernatural explanation for life. Understandably most modern defenders of Christianity dealt primarily with these intellectual challenges. Answering the question “Is Christianity true?” has been the dominant concern of modern Christian apologetics.

But it seems to me that since the middle of the 20th century the apologetic situation of Christianity in the western world and particularly in the United States has changed dramatically. The most urgent question has shifted from “Is Christianity true” to “Is Christianity good?” Could we be returning to the situation that characterized the first three centuries of the church in which Christianity’s opponents ignored the question of truth and challenged Christianity’s goodness? Even in the modern era there has been an undercurrent of moral criticism of Christianity. Deism denied the need for a divinely revealed morality, and the Romantic Movement developed an individualistic and subjective definition of the good that justified transgressing moral conventions.

Karl Marx argued that Christianity justified suffering and oppression and robbed the majority of humanity of well-being in this life by promising rewards in the next life. Friedrich Nietzsche blasphemed Christianity as a slave religion, contending that its teaching about sin, compassion, humility and the need for forgiveness kept people from achieving their natural excellence. And Freud explained moral rules as rationalizations of irrational impulses buried deep in the human psyche.

The so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s brought to the surface the undercurrent of Romanticism that has always been just under the surface in American culture. It rebelled against the conventional moralism of respectable society, adopting the Romantic definition of the good as individualistic and subjective. It manifested itself most visibly in the youth culture of drugs, free love and rock ‘n’ roll. And the postmodernism of the 1980s borrowed from Marx, Nietzsche and Freud—the so-called “masters of suspicion”—to ground the instinctive moral rebellion manifested in the sexual revolution in a theory of deconstruction and suspicion. This theory interprets all truth claims, social structures, moral rules, esthetic norms, religious beliefs—that is, any objective construct whereby one person or group sets the rules for other persons or groups—as manifestations of the hidden desire for domination.

This is the situation in which Christians must proclaim, explain and defend the Christian vision of life today. You may think I am too pessimistic, that there are many people in the United States, perhaps the majority, who have not adopted moral nihilism as a philosophy of life. You are probably correct about the number of thoroughly consistent nihilists: there are relatively few. But the metric by which I am measuring the moral situation is different. I am gauging the situation by two symptoms that I think indicate an underlying crisis:

(1) How many people do you know who can give a coherent moral explanation for rightness or wrongness, goodness or badness of a particular moral belief they hold? Don’t most people, Christians as well as non Christians, simply appeal to their feelings and choices to justify their moral beliefs? But such justifications merely imitate the nihilistic culture; for that is how it justifies its rebellion against moral rules it doesn’t like!

(2) Imagine yourself standing before a group of your contemporaries, whether the group is chosen at random from society or is comprised of people from your church. Now what reaction would you expect to receive if you argued from a natural or revealed moral law that a certain behavior—especially if it is connected to the sexual revolution in any way—is immoral, that measured by an objective moral standard the behavior is wrong and bad? I think you know the answer to these questions. Modern people, including church-goers, have lost confidence that there is a moral order, that there is a way we are supposed to live our lives.

And, if Christians nevertheless assert such a moral order we will likely face something like what our brothers and sisters faced in the first three centuries. Are we ready?

Next week we begin to explore the vocabulary in which moral discussions are conducted: good, bad, right, wrong, justice, and more.