Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What is Critical Theory? And how it's redefining "justice."

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

We explain the worldview redefining social justice and fueling movements like Black Lives Matter, Transgender rights campaigns, and more. If you don't know what "Critical Theory" is and want a primer into an ideology that is reshaping our political and theological landscape this episode is for you. Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/how-do-you-define-social-justice-questions-youre-asking-job-29-17/ (How Do You Define Social Justice?) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/does-the-bible-advocate-for-social-justice-questions-youre-asking-amons-5-24/ (Does the Bible Advocate for Social Justice?) Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to Tim Minna Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. My name is Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. Do you ever feel like you're being pulled in two different directions, this kind of dissonance in your life, in your mind, and your heart? I know that I'm for justice in this world, and I bet you are too. You want everyone to be treated equally. You want everyone to be treated fairly. You don't want anyone to be left out or marginalized or discriminated.

against. And yet when you look around at people who are fighting for justice or who are protesting for justice, if you look about how some people are trying to advocate for justice, you find yourself if you're like me going, well, I'm for justice, but am I for that justice? And there's just kind of this confusion. It's like we're using the word in two totally different ways. And I don't know how I'm supposed to react. Is that you? It's definitely me right now. And something that you might not think is the same thing is you've probably heard the word critical theory thrown around. You can hear it in the news, you hear it in interviews, you hear it all over the place. And again, if you're anything like me, you're not really sure what that means or maybe you think you know what it means. But as it turns out, this dissonance that Keith is describing, I'm for justice, but I don't know what to make of what I'm seeing out there. And this word, critical theory, they are one and the same. So that's going to be our topic of discussion today. We want to talk about what is critical. theory. Seems like everybody's talking about this. Don't you think, Patrick? I mean, this is a question people keep asking us. Oh, yeah. In fact, I just told Keith before we recorded, I don't think I have been

asked to teach on any topic more in the last six months than critical theory. And I'll be honest, when I heard this term critical theory being thrown around for the last, I know, a couple years, I guess. I didn't really know what it meant. And I still feel like I'm trying to get my arms around it. Patrick and I have read some things, both books, articles, all kinds of stuff. But you're a little bit further down the road on this issue with me, Patrick. Yeah. So I graduated from college in 2010, which might seem very near to some people and very far for others. But in 2010, critical theory was a word that you would only hear in academia. And you would really only hear it in certain circles of academia, gender studies, English, philosophy, and I happened to be an English major.

And so by the time I graduated from college, I'd taken about six different classes in critical theory. So when I started seeing some of these ideas crop up in popular thinking about two or three years ago, it was a little bit alarming because as a college student, I was learning this stuff, and I was able pretty early on to identify and see something doesn't add up here. This doesn't fit with a biblical worldview. And now I'm seeing a lot of Christians and a lot of people all over our country buying into these ideas that are rooted in, really a kind of far out there academic discipline called critical theory. Yeah, one of our friends even majored in critical theory.

Imagine that. So some of you are probably more like me, where you've seen this word being tossed around and you're not sure exactly what it means, but you're trying to learn. And others of you are maybe more like Patrick, who are pretty used to it. You're comfortable with it. You've got some ideas of how it relates to our worldview. Either way, whether this is new or old hat to you, we're going to process this kind of slowly in this podcast. And I'll just warn you, this is going to be the longest episode that we've ever done at 10-minute Bible talks.

And so maybe you want to speed us up to 1.5, or maybe you just want to take it in chunks, or maybe you're driving somewhere and you've got time just to process it all at once. Yeah. So let's begin to talk about critical theory. And just to land this on the ground, I don't care who you are. over the last 10 years, just think about the amount of protest movements that have happened. When I was in college, Occupy Wall Street, or maybe it was right after I graduated, but Occupy Wall Street became a big thing.

We've seen the Me Too movement, BLM, we've seen rallies for gay rights and trans rights. We've seen protests across the board on all of these topics. And what we are not saying is that in every instance and every way, those are wrong things that we want to criticize. But what's interesting to me is that you will find Christians who will tell you that if you don't participate in these protests, you're not really for justice. You're not really for the things that Jesus was for, because Jesus was for justice. Well, and I can understand how you come to that conclusion, because I've wondered, am I for justice? Because the people in the streets seem to be

advocating for justice, and justice is a biblical concept. And I want to be for justice, because I think God is for justice. God is a just God. His kingdom is a just kingdom. But I'm not sure that people are using the word to mean the same thing, right? Yeah. In fact, the word justice has a lot of different meanings depending on your perspective. And the most popular perspective right now, especially in kind of mainstream media, when people talk about justice today, is a perspective that's grown, again, out of critical theory. So let's hop in and to ask the question, what is critical theory? And I think it's helpful to think of critical theory like a set of glasses that allows you

to see things that you couldn't see otherwise. So a kind of fun example of that would be infrared goggles, you know, night vision goggles. You put them on, and even though it's pitch black outside, the infrared lenses allow you to see things that you wouldn't be able to see otherwise. And critical theory is the exact same kind of thing. It allows you to see things in the world that you wouldn't be able to see otherwise, namely power differentials. This is at the heart of all critical theory is the ability to see differences in power, which cut across like a matrix, all of society. Yeah, so when people put on these glasses, like a worldview. What is it that they see? What is it that they see that they wouldn't normally

see without those glasses, without that critical theory worldview? And what they see is that the world is divided into the powerful and the oppressed. And all this comes from a guy named Michel Foucault who is a Frenchman. Yeah, so Michel Foucault is a philosopher in the 1960s, and he's one of the most famous postmodern philosophers. But he became a famous for his ability, again, to see these power differentials, which cut across society. In fact, he said power is everywhere, in every relationship, in every conversation, in every discourse, and even in our language itself, the way that we speak, the words that we use, power is everywhere. In applied critical theory, so when you take these ideas that this guy had and

then you actually put them to work, you begin to use them, when you apply critical theory, it's all about dismantling power. You want to tear down the power of the powerful because power itself is evil. Power itself is oppressive. And the Bible would agree with some parts of that, right? I mean, for example, the Bible sees that there are people who are oppressed in the world. Jesus comes and says and look forward that he has come to free them, to liberate those who are oppressed. Or in Ecclesiastes 4-1, it says, I saw the tears of the oppressed, and they have no comforter. Power was on the side of their oppressors. We know that the proverb says that one reason people are in poverty is because of injustice. They have been taken advantage of by those in power.

So there's some parts of this that the Bible agrees with, and we'll get into some more of the good things about critical theory before we finish this. Yeah, and our goal is not just to tear down critical theory. We think that we have common ground almost with any living human and almost any philosophy out there. And so there's going to be aspects of critical theory that we ought to affirm. And this is fundamentally one of them. The Bible, is clear there is such a thing as a power differential. And those power differentials, not always, but can be used to oppress and hurt people. And the Bible's very serious about not just seeing those things, which both those passages do, but doing something about it. Two quick things, though,

Patrick. One is I notice how much what happens in the academy eventually gets played out on the street. So you have Michelle Foucault, who is an academic in the 1960s. And it takes what? few decades. Now we're having to deal with the ideas there. And so sometimes Christians write off what's happening in the academy as something that's unimportant or irrelevant. But those ideas have a way of rolling downhill, don't they? Yeah, ideas have consequences. And we are living with the consequences, ironically, of a white Frenchman who really, I don't think, had much social consciousness himself. And so that's where we're at. And the problem that we face, yes, critical theory is fine as an analytical tool. In other words, it's a fine way to help you see things that you might not see

otherwise, but it's pretty terrible as a worldview. If it's the only way that you see, you're going to see things that don't exist. Well, another thing that I thought of when you were talking about how critical theory allows you to see power differentials and that those power differentials are seen as bad, inherently wrong, I just think of Jesus. Jesus is powerful. It's said about him that all authority belongs to him. And so power can't be all wrong. I mean, immediately, when we hear power differentials and this is bad, it's just the first pushback that comes in my mind is I'm not sure that squares with what Jesus taught. We worship the most powerful person in the universe. So if power is bad, we have to begin de facto by admitting the fact that Jesus is a

problem. The Bible is not anti-power. The Bible is almost always asking the question, how will you use that power. Okay, let's keep going. If we want to understand critical theory, we need to begin by understanding, like we were just saying, some of the philosophy behind it. What are some of the capital T truths that people who buy into critical theory? What are the capital T truths that they take for granted? They never prove these points. They just believe them. These are true statements. And the first thing that I think we could say is that all knowledge is socially constructed. So that's kind of a big lump of words. What's that mean? It means that all of our categories, all of our language, all of the discourses that we use,

including things like science and mathematics and logic, all of these are social constructs. They aren't real. They aren't rooted in reality. They are just constructed by societies. Now, right there, let's just stop for a second, because that blows me away. You're saying that critical theory says that there is no such thing as objective truth that we have to conform our life to. that there's no such thing as capital T truth that's independent, regardless of what we believe about it. Yeah, again, all knowledge is socially constructed. It's inventing. It's made up. And it's not just invented for no reason. All knowledge is constructed for the sake of power.

In other words, why do we invent things like science and mathematics and language? Well, it's to keep the powerful in charge and to keep the oppressed people oppressed. That's the goal of these knowledge forms that we've created. You're right. That's a completely different worldview than I think most of us hold. I mean, we believe that there is a such thing as truth, whether it's mathematical truth, two plus two equals four, whether it's historical truth about what really happened, whether there is moral truth about what is right and wrong that transcends cultures. So, for example, we might think of Nazis in Germany. And let's say you took a pull of everyone in Germany back during World War II. And they all agreed that what they were doing is right. Well, we'd say, you know what? I don't care how many polls you took. And what they said,

what happened there was wrong. But I think what you're saying is that whether it's mathematical or moral or historical, that there really is no objective truth that we all have to abide by and submit to, that there is no ultimate truth, no ultimate right and wrong. Yeah, and to push it one step further, the truth that we claim to believe in is for the sake of power. In other words, my truth claims are for the sake of empowering me. I just have to say some people hearing this are going to think that we are straw manning people, that we're exaggerating and taking things to ridiculous ends. And I think I can say with a high level of confidence, nothing that we're about to say,

we can find people and show you books, show you quotes, show you resources, where people say exactly what we're saying. So we're not making stuff up. We're not trying to put things in people's mouths. I have no interest in doing that. But let me give you one example. Let's talk about science and reason. There's a lot of writing out there that has begun to argue that science and reason are socially constructed and they are socially constructed in particular to keep white males in charge. So there's a branch of critical theory called fat studies, which might sound like you're studying the health of people who are overweight. That's absolutely not what it is. FAT studies is about how we have socially constructed the category and concept of fatness. So think about it this way.

What do you think about a doctor who warns a massively obese person about the risks of their health? They say, hey, if you're not careful, you could have heart disease, kidney failure, liver problems. Do you think that the doctor is trying to oppress the fat person? Well, not how I think about it. I mean, I think the doctor is thinking that they're trying to help that person who's overweight because they are putting themselves in danger by living in a way different than our bodies were designed to live. Yeah, and I think that's how most people would think about it. But again, in the world of critical theory, it goes a very different direction. They would say that actually medical knowledge has

been constructed in order to oppress overweight people by calling them unhealthy when the actual reality is that they aren't unhealthy at all. You can't trust the doctors because the doctors are trying to keep obese people oppressed and non-obese people not oppressed. Yeah, one of the things about critical theory is that it rejects what we might think of as objective knowledge, objective truth, and it replaces it with personal experience. So everyone's personal experience becomes their truth. And you've heard people talk about that, right? You've heard people say, well, that's your truth or this is my truth. Tell me your truth. Not the truth. I think what's happening here is up until recently, most people agree that there were some firm growth. that everybody could agree upon as a root of knowledge, right? Most people would agree, yes, we can trust science as a good resource for knowledge. Yes, we can agree that there's such a thing as moral truth out there. There's such a thing as right and wrong. You had these kind of foundations on which

we all could stand. And critical theory denies those foundations and says, actually, in fact, the best foundation is personal experience. And not just any personal experience, but it would really be the personal experience of people who have experienced oppression. And we're going to get more into that later, but I can't help. I think examples illustrate the point. Another great example here is transgenderism. If you read the actual research about transgenderism out there, it's pretty clear that both from a scientific and psychological perspective, transgenderism is a dangerous thing. If you undergo gender reassignment surgery, the research out there is very clear. You're not going to be happier. It may end up sterilizing you, and it can often create lifelong health complications.

These are just the facts on the ground. But when people critique those who are saying, hey, maybe this is not the best thing for our society, they don't critique using science. They don't critique using reason. They critique using personal experience. Perhaps you heard that Lisa Littman, who's a professor at Brown University, published a study, and they posted on their website. And essentially the study said that when girls especially, right around the age of puberty, begin to flock toward transgenderism, that one of the driving factors there are social forces, social contagion, peer pressure. And Brown University pulled that down. Why did they pull it down? Because of science? Yeah, because there's some new research, new data. They had to say there's a correction. No,

they pulled it down because there was a lot of political flack for posting it. And so that study didn't conform to people's experience what they wanted to be true, and therefore they harassed Brown University until they withdrew it. So science and research, less than personal experience. Another amazing example of this was a New York Times op-ed by Andrea Long-chew, and the name of the editorial is, my new vagina won't make me happy and it shouldn't have to. And she goes on to admit that she knows the science. She knows the research. She knows that sexual reassignment surgery will actually probably not make her happier. In fact, it will probably make her less happy. But she says on the basis of her own experience and on the basis of her own opinions that she should be able to, she should have the right

to be able to go forward with this, that no one should stop her. And again, you see the pattern there. science and research, that's a way of keeping a certain kind of person in charge, and it's a way of oppressing others. And the only way that we can set oppress people free is by privileging instead personal knowledge and personal experience. So just to make sure we're all still on the same page, when you put on the glasses of critical theory, you say all knowledge is socially constructed, all knowledge is constructed for the sake of power, and the next you say all unequal outcomes, wealth, power, well-being. They're not because individuals made different choices or individuals have different abilities. No, all unequal outcomes are the result of unjust structures and systems.

So there's a popular book out there called How to Be an Anti-Racist by a guy named Ibram X. Kendi. And I really enjoyed it, not because I agreed with it, but because he is a clear writer and intelligently makes his argument. But here's a line from it. There is no such thing as a non-racist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution, in every community, and every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups. So Kendiar argues in this book that every inequity that exists is because of a racist policy. So again, his issue here is critical race theory, a specific application of the overall critical theory formula. And he's saying that every inequity is due to inequality is because someone has chosen to enact a racist policy.

It is not because of individual actions. Okay, let's focus the point. I want you to imagine two people, and these two people have two different experiences. One is cancer-free, and the other person has cancer. Why does the person who has cancer have cancer? The answer, according to this view, and again, I'm not straw manning here. It starts to sound ridiculous, but it's true. the answer is that the person who has cancer probably didn't have great access to health care,

and they didn't have great access to health care because there were social inequalities. And so the outcomes that they're experiencing in their life in terms of their health are not the result of any personal decisions. Yes, they might have lung cancer because they've smoked their whole lives, but that's not why they have lung cancer. The reason why they have lung cancer is because of our health care policies. Now, of course, everybody wants to say, well, this is a complex issue, and health care might play a role inside of that complex issue.

This view simplifies things and says if you see an inequality in outcome, that is because there is a inequality that came beforehand, somewhere in the policy, somewhere in the system that shaped those two different lives. So in the last couple days before the election, Kamala Harris, the vice presidential candidate for Joe Biden, and as we record this, we don't know exactly how that election is going to turn out, but it looks like the Biden-Herance ticket is, ahead at this point in the vote counting. But they issued a little commercial, you might say,

on Twitter. It was an ad that was her speaking and then some video that accompanied it. And we're going to play this ad. And it's about, I don't know, about a minute 20. So listen to the whole thing and listen to how she makes her case and especially listen to the very end about how she describes the reason that there are inequities in the world and what the goal of our. society should be. So there's a big difference between equality and equity. Equality suggests, oh, everyone should get the same amount. The problem with that, not everybody's starting out from the same place. So if we're all getting the same amount, but you started out back there and I started out over

here, we could get the same amount, but you're still going to be that far back behind me. It's about giving people the resources and the support they need so that everyone can be on equal footing and then compete. on equal footing. Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place. Okay, let's start with what we agree with inside of this clip. And I just have to say, if you haven't listened to our past podcast, this is your first time engaging with us. We have a great podcast where we talk about six facets of biblical justice. We tried to be really clear that the Bible is for justice. We also have some great podcast about how racial inequality has become a part of

American society. And one of the things we said, I think it was an illustration you used actually, Keith, is if you've got two teams playing a baseball game and the first team cheats for the first seven innings, you can't come back in the eighth inning and say, well, okay, we're not going to cheat anymore and we'll just see who wins. Well, that's not going to work because the other team was cheated against for seven innings. They can't just catch back up. And we have to admit the fact in America that with slavery being a part of our history, there is a portion of our population, which was playing from behind from the very beginning. And it's not just simple enough to say, okay, we all get to be equal.

now, the answer is going to be more complex. There are a lot of reasons that people have different starting points in life. Some of them are what family they were born into. Some of them are their own talents and abilities. Some of them are due to past corporate injustices. But my question is, can we really socially engineer the world so that those different starting places disappear, so that we all start at the same spot? And I think the answer to that is, no, we live in a a fallen, broken world, and there's no hope that we're ever going to create a world this side of heaven in which everyone has the same sort of advantages. I think that's exactly right. And I just want to repeat the final line that we get at the end of that little speech.

Equitable treatment means that we all end up at the same place. What you're hearing here is that apparently, you know, in this case, the Harris Biden campaign have bought into this idea that outcomes. We can look at where people end up in life, and that is a sign of whatever's happened beforehand. It's a sign of unjust policies that shape their lives so that some people ended up advantage, and others ended up disadvantaged. And again, I mean, I just have to say the obvious. Of course, that's a true statement, but it's not the only true statement. Outcomes in people's lives, like Keith just said, are based on a tremendous number of factors. Were you born as someone who's a hard worker or someone who's not a hard worker? Are you someone who's naturally intelligent?

or someone who's not naturally intelligent? Are you gifted athletically? Are you not gifted? There are so many different things in life that produce different outcomes in life that it is, again, it is incredibly simplistic to say that we can look at the outcomes in someone's life and say that is because of a system.

So we've been looking at capital T truths in critical theory. We started by saying all knowledge is socially constructed for the sake of power and that all outcomes in the world are the result of unjust policies and systems. The next capital T truth is that all cultures are relative. Now, on one level, again, what you'll find is there's truth in all of these things. It's true to say that cultures are different and that there are some aspects of

cultures which are not better or worse than other cultures. But within critical theory, the idea is that there is no such thing as shared norms or shared values which should be elevated above others. So at the Smithsonian Institute, there was a poster that was put up that defined whiteness or white culture in the United States. I think Patrick, this is going to be so hard to believe we need to link to it in the show notes. Yeah. Because when I tell you this, I think you're going to say, this is insane. They are making this up. But I promise you, I promise you. I promise you. You've probably been saying it the whole time. We're not. We're not. So here is part of white culture, according to the Smithsonian Institute, self-reliance, hard work, the belief that you

get what you deserve. The nuclear family. Monotheism? Emphasis on the scientific method, like objective, rational, linear thinking. Evidently, according to the Smithsonian Institute, that is part of white culture. Now, there are a lot of scientists out there who aren't white, who are going to be really surprised to hear that the scientific method is part of white culture. Can I add to that? Hard work is part of white culture. I know a lot of white people who are not hard workers. I know a lot of white people who are not very self-reliant. They don't have a get yourself up by the bootstraps kind of ad you. I know a lot of white people who do not live in nuclear families. And by the way, the opposite is true as well. I have known many black people who are

tremendously hardworking, who are self-reliant, who might even be called rugged individualists. So to say that these are aspects of white culture is a bit of a monolithic statement. Oh, I got to keep going. I just can't stop myself. How about this one? Part of white cultures you planned for the future. Delayed gratification. I mean, come on. That's possibly true. I personally think that this poster is unbelievably racist. Oh, it's terribly racist. It's not only not descriptive of many white people. It's actually descriptive of many non-white people. Again, at the time of recording right now, we're still in the middle trying to figure out who's going to win this election. But one of the big news stories that's come out of this election is that Donald Trump,

a lot more Latino votes than he did in the last election. For example, in the state of Texas, it looks right now like somewhere between 41 and 47 percent of Latinos who live along the Rio Grande. So they're living at the far southern end of the border that 41 to 47 percent voted for Donald Trump. And there's been a lot of interviews asking people why. And you know what they said? Well, we like that he has a pro-growth message. We like that he's entrepreneurial. We like that he's anti-socialism. those are some of the answers that are coming out. Well, hold on, I thought that those were white culture. And of course, those things are not simply white culture. They are norms that can be shared across many cultures. I think even more importantly, what's disturbing about this view is that as Christians, we would say that there are values which should transcend any culture.

Love your neighbor as yourself. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your strength. that's a norm that should be a shared value that again transcends any race, any ethnicity, any gender, and it is a norm which is better than its opposite to treat your neighbor poorly or to not love the Lord your God. Yeah, the next truth claimed by critical theory is that there are no shared universals. There's no universal truth that transcends all people, all culture, all races, that justice is not going to be achieved by appealing. or basing itself on some universal truth. And this even goes to how we think about ourselves as people, that what we share in common is not as important as what makes us different.

The problem from the perspective of critical theory is that if we say that there's something essential which all humans share, we somehow end up writing some people out of existence. That doesn't quite make sense to me, but I want to try to explain it the best I can. So think about someone like me who is part Jewish. In the view of critical theory, it would be inaccurate of me to say that I am a human first, so I'm appealing to a universal, I am a human, I'm a human first, and I am Jewish second. Well, why is that? Well, it's because of the phrase, I'm Jewish, it appeals to an oppressed identity, and it doesn't try to strain for universality. It doesn't try to strain to say what I share in common with others. Let me read you a quote by Kimberly Crenshaw, who is black. She

says, we can all recognize the distinction between the claims, I am black and the claim, I'm a person who happens to be black. I'm a person who happens to be black, achieves self-identification by straining for a certain universality. In effect, I am a person first. Now, I want to be really, really clear here. I'm not saying that it's wrong to say I'm Jewish or that it's wrong to say I'm black. Of course that's okay to say. Of course, that's a statement that makes sense. In fact, the Bible values the beautiful parts of every single culture. So we can celebrate our cultural and ethnic identities without any embarrassment. What's wrong with the quote, what I'm saying is wrong here, is the denial of the universal. It's the denial of universal humanity. It's wrong because it's saying

that to emphasize what we all share in common, that that is a strain. That just strikes me as an incredibly dangerous statement. I thought that's what we were supposed to do. I thought we were supposed to as good human beings to strain, to work hard, to find that which we all share in common and build our life off that. And what I think she's saying is that we should find the areas that we are the most different and then build our politics or build our worldview or build our identity off of what is different. And it just seems to go completely against something like Galatians 328. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, nor is there male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Now, obviously that verse is not saying that there is no difference

between Jew and Gentile or male and female. It's just straining, to use her words, to find that which we have in common and build off of that. There's nothing new, by the way, about Kimberly Crenshaw's idea. Her idea is that we should emphasize the particulars. That has characterized almost every human culture and society throughout human existence. One of the greatest innovations of the Hebrew scriptures was Genesis 1, where it makes this radical claim that all humans are made in the image of God, not just the rich ones, not just the poor ones, not just the ones that look like me, not just the ones who don't look like me. No, all humans are made in the image of God. And so perhaps it's no surprise that we in Western culture have used this, our shared humanity,

as the basis for every great stride that we have made in improving the welfare and life of all people. Yeah, isn't that why the abolitionist rooted their work, a lot of them, not all of them, in Christianity, because Christianity taught that all people are made in the image of God and therefore are worthy of value, dignity, and respect. And you can even hear it in Dr. King's speeches when he's saying, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons, of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice,

sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. That whole speech, that whole idea, this whole principle that has, has driven racial reconciliation and racial justice from a Christian perspective is built on this idea that we all have something, the most important part about us in common, that were all made in

the image of God. It is so easy to forget that the first society in human history to ever abolish slavery, ever abolish slavery, to ever end that horrible and awful practice, those were societies in the West, and they did it because of what the Bible said about people being made in the image of God. And the people who resisted them were people who wanted to say that what separated us, what made us different, was more important than what we shared. Yeah, almost every society has had slavery, ownership of other human beings at some point. That's common. That's normal, unfortunately, in a sinful broken world.

What's different, what's unique, is ending that, recognizing that what we have in common is what's important. Okay, so we've been laying out what critical theory takes for granted as capital T truth. First of all, that knowledge is socially constructed, science, math, language, everything you believe that you know about reality that has been constructed socially. Why? For the sake of power. To keep the powerful in power and to keep the oppressed oppressed. Because remember, critical theory is all about seeing power, dismantling power, overthrowing power, and giving power to those who do not have it. we saw that all unequal outcomes in life, they can be explained by looking at systems and policies,

which are designed to keep the oppressed out of power and the powerful in power. We saw that according to critical theory, all cultures are relative. There's no such thing as shared norms and shared values that can transcend cultures, because a shared norm and a shared value would be to privilege one culture and to give it power over a different culture. There are no shared universals. We don't have a shared humanity. Instead, we should emphasize the particulars that separate us because it's only in the

particularities that we will be able to see the people who are oppressed and to be able to dismantle the power of people who are oppressing them. These are the capital T truths that lie behind critical theory. Wow, that's a lot, Patrick. I feel like we need a nap or musical interlude or something before we just plow into more stuff, but we're not going to take it. We're just going to keep on going. This is, again, I think we've made a specialty out of short form content.

So we've probably made a terrible decision on this podcast going this line. But I think this stuff is so interesting. And I think that if you understand it, you are going to understand what's happening in our world much more clearly. And you aren't going to get snuckered into believing something out of good intentions and a good heart that could be really dangerous for your soul. More good illustrations and examples of how all of this affects your life. So let's get into it. How does critical theory think about social justice? Yeah, so we've been looking at the philosophical foundations of critical theory, and now we need

to transition and talk about how does that get applied? How does that actually land in real life? And like Keith just said, the phrase that critical theorists will use for this application of their ideas is social justice, which is a bit confusing because it wasn't a phrase that they invented. Social justice goes back, I'm not sure how long, but people have talked about social justice well before critical theory was even an infant. Goes back to the Bible at least, right? The Bible talks about social justice, doesn't it? Couldn't you say that? Yeah, I mean,

the Bible clearly talks about justice and it shaped our conception of justice. And again, I've already said it, but go back and listen to our episode about six facets of biblical justice. Today, what I want to do is look at seven facets of social justice according to critical theory. Wow, six facets of social justice, seven facets of social justice of critical theory. Very, man. That is a total of 13 facets. 13 facets, but we've already done six, so we just have seven of them today. But I want you to catch what's saying here is that we've changed the definition of what words mean. So you're coming to this conversation, and by I mean this conversation, just mean your life, your approach, your

involvement in the world, you're coming with a definition of social justice in your mind, whether you can articulate it or not, and you're hearing social justice on the news or in protest. And my guess is that you're just assuming that what you're thinking in your head matches what other people mean when they use that same word. And that's not true. You always have to go, well, what do you mean by that? In fact, if somebody says, are you for social justice anymore? What I do is go, well, why don't you define what you mean? And then I'll tell you whether I'm for that or not. That sounds like a great conversation. They love me. People really love the guy who has to caveat when are you for justice. Well, you know, could you, uh, explain that? No, I don't want to be that person.

And I want to say, yes, I'm for justice, but I just don't know what they mean by it. So let's get after it. What is the first facet of social justice, according to critical theory? So the first facet is that one must be woke. That's a phrase that I think most people have heard or engaged with now. But awoke is about being awakened to seeing these power differentials in society, which are absolutely invisible without this worldview. It almost sounds like someone is getting saved.

It almost sounds like someone's converting to, to Christianity or something, except you get woke. It has very religious overtones. Instead of repentance, you get repudiation. I will repudiate my past privilege, my past statements. And again, part of being woke is now, you know, in Christianity, there's a great author that Keith and I both like who used to say, be killing sin or sin will be killing you. John Owen. John Owen, the old Puritan guy. And there's kind of a similar attitude and wholeness. You need to be fighting injustice or injustice will be killing you and all society. So according to social justice in critical theory, we get woke when we put on those glasses

you talked about earlier, right, and see the world in a new way. Yeah. So it's no surprise that what can come along with it is a kind of religious Phariseism, even at times. You know, the Pharisees were famous for seeing the world in a particular way, and they would draw lines of exclusion and embrace. You are in and you are out based on whether people fit into their moral reform program. And you see the exact same things happening in woke. that there's certain perspective, certain ways of thinking, certain ways of speaking, which are accepted by the group and those which must be excluded and thrown out. Yeah, I don't know how much we should keep going here, but let's just think for a second. I think most people think of Pharisees as being religious conservatives.

And now you're saying that the Pharisees are more like the, I guess we'd say liberals who have bought into critical theory social justice. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think I used to think it that way, too, because I associated their self-righteousness and moral policies, which by a progressive standard would be sexually repressive. They would not agree on morals, I'll put it that way. And I simply assume that, well, those sexual morals sound a lot more like a modern conservative. Therefore, the Pharisee must be conservative, but that's exactly wrong. The Pharisee was a progressive pressure movement, which was designed to shape society in its own image to get people to think like they did. They wanted to bring the justice of God's

kingdom on earth is in heaven. They had a social justice movement that they were leading and that they were trying to bring about even by revolution, even by rebellion. It's very similar to modern progressive politics and its methodology. It's not conservative at all. In fact, there was a conservative group called the Sadducees. They were laissez-faire. They said, hey, let's just keep things the way they are because we kind of like the way they are. That's kind of classical conservatism. Yeah, so all this blew my mind when I first heard it. I think a guy named Lee Camp who wrote a book that Patrick and I read and enjoyed was the source of it. But it just blew my mind to think of Pharisees as the liberals who are holding people to

some kind of rules or ethical standards in order to bring in God's kingdom. And it made me rethink Luke 18 in that little parable that Jesus tells, where he talks about a Pharisee and a tax collector who both go to pray. and the Pharisee is virtue signaling about how good he is. He's kept all the religious rules, and he's not like that despised tax collector. I mean, he literally calls out the tax collector. He says, thank you in a prayer. Thank you, God.

I'm not like that guy. And it sounds like a lot of Twitter. It sounds like a lot of people who are on the left politically and religiously, who are saying, I thank you that I'm not like those people. And those people are those who disagree with them about whatever social. issues they think are important. And Jesus finds that kind of self-righteous hypocrisy, which everybody I find tempting, you find tempting, everybody finds tempting in our own ways. He finds it repulsive. The tax collector is the one who ultimately says, God, I don't even deserve to look up to

heaven. He beats his chest. He admits the fact that he's a sinner, that he has a problem, which is, of course, the last thing that you would do in today's world. You don't admit anything that you've done wrong. You only point thinkers at the people who did things wrong. So just as the Pharisees were trying to bring in God's kingdom through a moral reform program, so I think that people in critical theory are trying to bring in God's kingdom with a moral reform program. They're trying to, in both cases, they're trying to have the kingdom without the king. So let's go to the second facet. The second thing is that knowledge is rooted entirely in your own experience as a part of an identity group, not your experience as an individual. So what we're trying to get out here is that, of course,

everybody has experiences. And maybe you're prone to think that your knowledge is just based in your individual experience. But in critical theory, there's a different idea. It's that individual experience doesn't matter so much. What matters is your experience as a part of an oppressed group. Because when a group is oppressed, they are enabled to know things and see things and experience things that unoppressed people don't experience. And again, I just want to say that's patently obvious. Yes, people who have different experiences have different sets of knowledge than those who don't. But the point here is that true knowledge, the knowledge that needs to be privileged is the knowledge of the oppressed. So this is where intersectionality comes in, right, Patrick?

That there's a sense in which people have different places on the power spectrum. And the less power you have, the more moral authority you have. So if you think, about a person who is a white man, cisgendered, heteronormative, I'm trying to use all the right lingo, then that person is at the top of the power grid. And then you can work your way down to a person who maybe is a black woman, transgendered, you know, whatever, might be at the bottom. And depending on where you are on this intersectional power grid, you have more moral or less moral authority. And it's one reason that people with more moral authority, at least as defined by critical theory, are pushed aside, aren't listened to, are marginalized, or they're saying, well, you can't listen to that white

man because all he's doing is constructing truth for his own power advantage. So you're saying that all oppression creates interlocking identities and that if I am a part of multiple groups of people who are oppressed, my experience is going to be. different. And again, that's obvious. You and I both say, well, yes, you're going to have a different experience. And yes, you might see things and know things and be able to draw my attention to the things that I couldn't otherwise. The thing that we have a problem with is the idea that that makes you morally superior or that your knowledge is always to be preferred over someone who doesn't have those same interlocking oppressions. Yeah. So it's not that there are people who have different amounts

of social capital or different experiences. It's that the more of a victim you are of society's power structure, the more right you have to speak, the more authority you have, the more you're apt to see things clearly. Yes. And what I'm about to say is going to sound ridiculous, but it's true. There are a lot of corporate seminars out there now that are trying to train people in, it's usually called diversity. And one form of training, which is becoming more common, is called brown privilege. And brown privilege is for people who are black, but they're lighter skin than darker skin black people. And because they have lighter skin, they've experienced less oppression and therefore have privilege over those who have darker skin. And when you start

researching this stuff, again, you almost get into wars of people saying, well, I'm XYZ and you're this. And clearly my interlocking oppressions are superior to yours. And so I know more than you know. And it's a game that no one wins in the end. Yeah, so colorism does exist. I think there have been plenty of studies that show that there are advantages accrued to people because of the lightness or darkness of their color, and it differs depending on which culture, which society you're talking about. The interesting thing is that people are arguing to try to be the greater victim because it gives them greater authority and greater standing. Yeah, it's that second fact, which is a key part of applying this social. justice stuff into real life, is that you have to privilege people who have more interlocking oppressions over those who don't. So remember, we're in the seven facets of social justice

according to critical theory, and we're ready for the third one. Okay, so the third one is this. You must, if you want to apply critical theory, you must subvert categories and language, which is designed to oppress others. So the most obvious example here comes out of gender studies or queer theory. And historically, most cultures and societies, have said that there are only two genders, male and female. But there are a gender theorist who they want to apply critical theory, and they say that the way that you do that is by dismantling these categories of male and female, because according to them, there are people who fall outside of those categories. And because they fall outside of the categories, they are oppressed.

Ergo, we need to move past male and female. There's a middle school in town a year or two ago, one of the teachers wanted to kind of push this agenda. And so what she did, with the help of course of others, and the approval of the school administrators, is put up posters all over the school with different celebrities attached to different gender identities. How many were there? I don't know how many there were, because I didn't walk through the school, but there were plenty of news reports and friends who did walk through it. And they were quite a few, I think 30, 40, 50, somewhere in that range. And my understanding is even on Facebook, you have those options, right? When it comes to your gender identity, there's a lot you can choose from. And so by having all these gender identities out there,

part of what the goal is is just to confuse people and to disrupt the idea that there are two genders that God made us male and female, which, by the way, not only is said in Genesis, but then reaffirmed by Jesus. But I want you to catch Keith's last point there. The point, point is that there is an intentional effort to confuse people by confusing categories. You say, well, that sounds a little bit nefarious, Patrick. This sounds like a straw man. I'm going to read you a quote that you might have a difficult time understanding. There I say, it is intentionally confusing. But I will underline the last line. What you have to understand, if you know anything about philosophy, you will realize what this author is doing, she is taking

antithetical concepts and mashing them up together and saying that in our movement, we need to take these two things which cannot fit together and intentionally fit them together for the sake of confusing people for the sake of irrationality, because when we confuse people, we confuse their categories, we destroy the categories. So you ready for this, Keith? You're going to read it? I'm going to read it. If you're out there, understand what this means. The prescription for a practical politics. So she's saying, I want to apply my critical theory is a multi-pronged movement. Ah, it's got several prongs. Let's talk about those. First prong, who's idealist and materialist, whose minority model and universalist model.

And for that matter, whose gender separatist and gender integrative analysis would likewise proceed in parallel. So she just took, that sounds like word salad. It actually does make sense, but it does.

Good luck. But she's taking things that don't fit together. She's saying, hey, you need to, in our movement, we have people who are gender separatists who want to say,

oh yeah, there's lots of definable genders and people who say, you can't separate genders at all. There's no such thing really as gender. She says, you want to take people who are idealists,

who believe in kind of a spiritual non-material reality and materialist. You want to take minority. She says, let's mash all these things up and catch what she says, and we shouldn't do it without any high premium place on ideological rationalization between them. Did you catch that? She says, our goal is to not rationalize. Our goal is to put these things that are confusing and mash them up because the more

people are confused, the more they let go of their categories. I have seen this happen time and again, where there's people who, again, let's talk about male and female. They believe in male and female, and then they watch a YouTube video. or they watch an interview and they listen to someone who says things that really deeply confuse them. And they don't realize. And I'm not saying that the person is intentionally trying to confuse others, but they bought into an agenda which is designed to confuse others. And they are repeating it. And no surprise. What does it do? It confuses people. That's the goal.

After that quote, I've got nothing to say. I'm confused. If the goal was to confuse me, mission accomplished, public school kid was confused. So keep going. Fourth, fast, of social justice according to critical theory. The fourth thing that you need to do is deprioritize individual rights and individual identity. In the world of critical theory, group identity and group rights are supreme. They are much less interested in what happens to you or me as individuals than they are in what are the results for groups and communities. Now, again, I feel like I keep saying this, there is some good here. The Bible clearly has an idea that part of justice is communal and that we need to work for the welfare of community and

the welfare of particular groups within the community. So there's nothing that I want to disagree with there. It's throwing out individual rights. It's throwing out individual identity as a salient category. That's where we start to have the problem. So in 1996, California passed a state constitutional amendment. And I'm just going to read it. Just a couple lines. And the question is, do you agree or disagree with this? The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin, in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting. Do you agree or disagree with this? My guess is that you agree with it. That's pretty standard language,

non-discrimination language, and I think that it makes sense. I want to live in that state. I want to live in a state where I can feel confident that people are going to be treated equally and fairly, and that their race, their sex, their ethnicity, their color, national origin, all those things, that those aren't going to be a factor in how they're treated by other people. So it might surprise you, then, that the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature in California voted this past summer to repeal that, to repeal that non-discrimination clause, and to put it on the ballot for the people of California to also repeal it. And based on what I've seen, I'm pretty sure that it was upheld. In other words, the attempt to repeal the non-discrimination clause was defeated

by the state voters. So it turns out that critical theory has infected the state legislature, but just not all the people living inside of the state. So with the people living inside the state don't understand, which apparently the policymakers did understand, is that in the world of critical theory, your individual rights, me as an individual, and I would say I individually don't want to be discriminated on the basis of those things, don't matter. What matters far more is bringing about equality for groups. And you cannot bring equality for groups unless you discriminate. Yeah. So the reason that the legislature wanted to overturn the non-discrimination clauses in the state constitution is because they wanted the freedom to discriminate based on those very factors, race, color,

ethnicity, national origin. Yeah, so to let people into schools on the basis of it, to award contracts for public works on the basis of someone's race. Now, again, I have sympathies here. There's something that I kind of like about saying, hey, maybe this goes back to the whole, the first seven innings of the game, if you cheated, maybe a way to give a different group a leg up is by giving them a special opportunities. Part of me that likes that. But totally writing something like this out of your Constitution seems incredibly dangerous. So I just want to make sure you get it. The Democratic State Legislature in California wanted the ability to discriminate.

Therefore, they had to get rid of the non-discrimination clause in the state constitution. And this fits exactly with the book that we mentioned earlier by Ibram Kendi, how to be an anti-racist. Catch what he says here. The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. So there's this desire to say that every inequity is evidence of some sort of racist policy and that we must discriminate in order to correct for past discrimination. What I find is that there are a lot of people who, and you might be one of them listening to this, and it's okay, who really don't find this.

offensive at all. They like it. But what I find is that they like it as an idea. They don't like it in practice. Oh, sure, it's fine for the government to pick winners and losers. Because remember, power will always exist. Michelle Foucault, power is everywhere. We cannot actually create a world where there are all people not being oppressed. That's not possible. And so then it becomes, according to Ibram Kendi, the job of the government and policy makers to decide who are the most oppressed people and how do we prefer them over other people. And you might again like that an idea until it's your uncle who doesn't get the contract, even though he probably really deserved it, because they gave it to someone who maybe didn't deserve it, maybe isn't even capable of doing the

job because they had the right boxes checked off. We like it in the ideal, but when it starts getting really practical that the government is picking winners and losers, my guess is most of us were not so excited about it. Again, and it doesn't matter what's your race is, because when you start looking at these interwalking injustices, there's a good chance that there's someone farther down the proverbial ladder than you are. So another example of this is the New York Times Writers Guild, their union, tweeted out a statement saying that all the jobs in the New York Times should be handed out according to the racial makeup of the city. So, for example, if the racial makeup of New York City is 30% Latino, then 30% of the jobs in the New York Times should be given to Latinos.

And so there's a sense of which individual merit is considered part of white culture or Western culture or something that was constructed by people in power to keep out the people oppressed. And then now what we need to do is to reverse that by intentionally discriminating based on the very things that we thought we weren't supposed to discriminate based on. So again, individual rights, individual merit, individual identity, they are. not primary. What matters most is what groups are you a part of? And this is part of applying critical theory. And again, Keith and I aren't trying to be simplistic here. We're not saying that there aren't groups that have had past historical experiences that we might want to do something to write. But this can create all kinds of problems. Just imagine if you're hiring writers for the New York Times. Well, we've got three positions, but we don't have any

Republican, Latino, gay females to hire today. So we're going to have to leave the positions open, otherwise we'll break our demographic rule. Or more importantly, what about someone like me? Let's say that they needed to hire a young, 32-year-old, part-Jewish male who is kind of middling politically, okay? Let's say that's what they need to hire. And so I put in my application. I check all the boxes perfectly. They bring me in. I can't believe it. I'm working at the New York Times. There's only one problem. I cannot write well enough to write at the New York Times. Sorry, the news quality is going to go a bit down if I become your new favorite journalist. And so what will happen?

Well, either they'll have to fire me, which puts me in a worse situation in my life than I would have been if I just would have done things that I knew how to do. Or it puts their people who are buying their newspaper in a bad situation, in which case, what happens? They stop buying it. So my only point here is saying is that these things sound really nice in theory. You might be like, oh, I like that in theory. just think really hard in practice. If you had to do it, does it work, and do you still like it? And my guess is you will say, not so much. Let's get to the fifth. Okay.

Number five. Individual transformation is not possible because oppressed and oppressor identities, which we all have, those things are fixed. I can't unwhite myself. That's something that I will be for the rest of my life. In fact, you can go even further. How you act as an individual is irrelevant because no matter what you do, you are unconsciously or consciously invested in a system of oppression.

So it doesn't matter what I as a white person do. I am always benefiting from my whiteness. I can't transform myself. I can't change the situation. I can't do anything because I am always, no matter what, invested in that system. So Robin DiAngelo in her very, very popular book, White Fragility, says this, being good or bad is not relevant. Racism cannot be avoided. Whites are, I am, she says, unconsciously invested in racism. The question is not, did racism take place, but how did racism? racism manifest in that situation? So, see, she has just assumed that in every interaction, in every conversation, in every school, and every church, and every workplace, racism is

manifesting itself everywhere. We just don't have the eyes to see it. But if we could see racism, if we put on the right side of glasses and could see it, we'd notice it everywhere. So we don't ask, did racism take place? We just say, how did it manifest itself in that relationship? and that environment and that situation. Now, as Christians, we recognize that all people are born sinners and that all of us are tempted to all kinds of sins that we may or may not be aware of. But we do believe that we can be redeemed, that God has come to save us and to change us, and that we can grow so that we are more humble and less prideful, or that we are more kind

and less rude, or that we are more kind and less rude, or that we are. are less racist and more willing to accept people wherever they are, giving people the benefit of the doubt, loving people as God has made them. But in critical theory, that kind of redemption can't take place. You can't unwhite yourself. You might become a better white person who's an anti-racist fighting against racist policies and systems. But if you read really carefully, there are also a lot of writings out there critiquing the good white person and all the problems that come along with that. So again, individual transformation, it's not possible. Let's move on. Number six, challenging critical theory is an oppressive act. Anybody who's invested in critical theory,

and this could be you, has already written Keith and I off. You probably haven't even gotten this far, because what we're doing is de facto an oppressive act. Why? Well, remember, if all knowledge is socially constructed, then Keith and I right now are using our socially constructed knowledge to deconstruct the system of true justice, which is critical theory. So how could it not be oppressive for us to sit here and have a critical conversation about it. It's kind of convenient to say that disagreeing with me is is oppressive like you are taking advantage of me. Well, and this is why people in the critical theory camp almost always refuse to do public debates. Two reasons. Reason number one, the debate format is a white format which privileges people who think in a certain way. I don't even

have words. But the second reason, I think, is because when you start talking about these ideas, again, the facetilness of them becomes patently obvious. Here's a good example of someone saying that challenging critical theory is an oppressive act. This is from Barbara Applebaum. She is a professor, and this is what she tells college students in her class. She wrote this in her book, Being White, Being Good. She said, resistance to white, resistance to her ideas to critical theory.

Resistance will not be allowed to derail the class discussions. Of course, those who refuse to engage might mistakenly pursue. that this is a declaration that they will not be allowed to express their disagreement. But that is only precisely because they are resisting engagement. That's amazing right there. Now, I hate to use my discourse, but that's called circular reasoning. But let's stick to this. What she's trying to communicate here is she's saying, if you resist my ideas, you must not

actually be engaging in my ideas. If you're not engaging in my ideas, it's because you are engaging in oppression. Ergo, I do not have to allow you to resist in my class. I do not have to allow you to even voice your opinion because your opinion, by its very nature, is oppressive. Everybody who really engages will agree with me. And if you don't agree with me, it shows that you aren't really engaging. I mean, it's just so convenient. You ever watch Star Trek?

I know. Well, this is for all my Trekkie fans. You're a Treki? I have a little bit. I grew up watching it. But there's these kind of aliens called The Borg, and they come. in and they assimilate people so that they all think with the same hive mind. And they have this phrase. It's called resistance is futile. And I just can't help. But think that. Yeah, I get it.

I can't help. But think about the Borg when I'm listening to this stuff. Okay. Number seven, society needs a fundamental revolutionary reboot. A revolution. It needs a revolution. No peace, no justice. Karl Marx. He was a philosopher in the 1800s who has had a very negative impact on the world by any human definition if you care about lives. His ideas that he expressed in his communist manifesto have been, to some degree, taken over by critical theorists. They agree, just like Karl Marx did, that there's a class of oppressed and oppressor. Now, Karl Marx made those economic classes. That's what he cared about. And one of the things you'll notice in critical theories is that there isn't much actual talk about economics. In other words, I could be the poorest white guy

living in a trailer and addicted to drugs, and yet I still have more privilege than a black man who's making a six-figure salary. Because economics aren't really in the picture. This is actually, arguably, one of the reasons why the left has lost a lot of kind of blue-collar white workers. Because they aren't speaking to their needs anymore. But that's besides the point. Carl Marx believed that you had to have a revolution. The only way society would change was if you burned it down and started it over again. So this is why people refer to some on the left, I don't mean liberal people, I just mean some who are purporting to hold the critical theory as cultural Marxist, right? Because they're saying that there needs to be a revolution

where the people on the bottom, not of the economic ladder, but on the identity ladder, need to overthrow those people in power. And so they're cultural Marxist. Yes, and again, this is deeply rooted in applied critical theory. The idea that there needs to be a cultural, maybe even political revolution. If you read critical theorists, you will quickly come to discover that they are fundamentally opposed to Western systems of governments like democracy or the classical term would be liberalism. It's not talking about being liberal. It's just the way that we run our government. They are fundamentally opposed to how it works. Again, why? Because all knowledge is socially constructed. That system is socially constructed to keep certain people in power

and other people out. Okay, so let's look at the seven facets of social justice according to critical theory. First, one must be woke. You need to be awakened. You need to put on the glasses. You need to see these power differentials and how they shape our world. Second, you have to accept that knowledge is rooted entirely in your experience as a part of a identity group. Your experience as an individual is not important. And that is a form of knowledge which should be privileged in the public sphere. Thirdly, you need to subvert categories that everybody might agree with, like male and female. And you need to subvert language that's used to oppress others, which simply means create power differentials. Number four, you need to deprioritize the rights of individuals and the value of

individual identity. Fifth, individual transformation isn't possible because everybody is already consciously or unconsciously invested in a system that either benefits them or doesn't benefit them. You cannot change yourself. There is no hope for redemption. Sixth, challenging critical theory is an oppressive act. It's a discourse. It's a conversation that's being used. to oppress others. Number seven, and lastly, society needs a fundamental revolutionary reboot. Okay, we have gone through a lot and we aren't done. No, no, no. We still have to think through how we should respond to critical theory. And again, more good stuff, I think, lays ahead. More good stories about how this applies to your life. But let me just say one thing real quick.

What Patrick just went through were the seven principles of social justice, according to critical theory. Now, remember, we see. said. If you have someone ask you, are you for social justice? Well, what if they mean critical theory social justice? That's way out of step with biblical social justice. So saying that you're for social justice, well, that's complicated. What do you mean by social justice? But just want to make sure you're catching that, that people are using the words in different ways and you've got to be careful before you sign on for what they're selling. Okay, you just made a bold statement, which is that critical theory and its definition of social justice does not line up with a biblical

definition of social justice. And I think it's where we need to go next. We need to, on the one hand, affirm and say, here's what's good about critical theory. Here's things where the Bible agrees. And I hope you've heard us throughout this trying to say aspects, hey, this is right. We agree here. But then we also need to critique. We need to say, where does the Bible critique critical theory? So let's start with the positive. What do we share in common with critical theory? Yeah, I know Patrick has already mentioned this, but if this is your first introduction to 10 minute of Bible talks, you might come to the conclusion that we're against social justice. We are 100% for biblical social justice. We get ourselves in trouble for no topic more than being for justice.

Most of the negative feedback we get about some of these topics are from people who think we're too much for social justice. but we're for biblical social justice, not critical theory social justice. So one of the things that we can say positively about critical theory is that it really does value diversity. I think God values diversity. I think that it's smart for us to look around and realize that men and women, people in power and out of power, people who are from different places, different races, all have a different perspective, and they're all valuable, that we all have something to learn from listening

to people who have different experiences. than we do, to see the world like they see it. For example, we've been talking a little bit about the book on some of our previous episodes, A Reading While Black. Well, the whole idea is there is that Issaam Akali is reading the Bible from the perspective of a Southern black man who holds tightly to the core convictions of Orthodox Christianity. Well, I've learned so much by listening to him as he experiences the world. So yes, pro-value diversity. Critical Theory does. We do. I think the Bible does. That's a good thing. I think another good thing is that it seeks to elevate voices that are made in God's image, which are often left unheard. Again, this seems obvious to me. People who are in power, people who have wealth and influence, have a much easier time making their voice heard than those without.

I don't know who's going to disagree with that statement. I mean, even in today's social media world, I think that that's That's a true statement. And notice what Proverbs 31.8 says. It says, speak out on behalf of the voiceless. I think that's one of the motivations behind a lot of people who bought into critical theory. They really do want to speak out on behalf of the voiceless and for the rights of those who are vulnerable. Speak out in order to judge with righteousness and to defend the needy and the poor. We should be doing that. People shouldn't be offended when we critique critical theory because hopefully on the flip side of that, they've heard us being voices for justice. critical theory can be a helpful tool to allow us to see that there really is corporate responsibility in sin, that we all have a role to play in those structures and systems of our world,

and that those structures and systems are as open to sin in corruption as any human being is. Critical theory helps us to identify, see and identify real problems in our world. affirms that there are the oppressed and the oppressors. And sometimes we are blind to that because we sit in a particular place. We have a certain set of experiences and we're blind to the needs of other people because we just can't see them, not because we're against them, but we just can't see the world from their perspective. And so you'll find critical theory uncovering truths that we all need to be able to see and embrace, that they're allowed. us to see the world from other people's perspective and to identify real problems.

Lastly, and this connects to what we've already said, so I won't make a long point out of it, but critical theory encourages advocacy. And I think advocacy is something that a lot of people get freaked out by, but let me read Job 2917. This is where Job is defending his own righteousness in a good way, saying this is the right thing to do. I broke the fangs of the wicked and snatched the victims from their teeth. It's a classic trope in the Bible to describe not actually oppressive people, but oppressive systems, nations, communities as wild animals that are devouring and victimizing their victims. And Job describes himself as the one who comes along to not just stand up and say, hey, you need to stop. It says, I broke the fangs. I snatched them from their teeth.

Yeah, Israel is judged because they aren't willing to advocate for those in need. And I think our church, you know, we as Christians will be held accountable and whether we advocated for those in need. So there are things that we can learn. Every Christian, every person can learn from critical theory, but there also, as you can tell, where we're headed. There are also some critiques of critical theory that we have to walk through. And the first one is one that we've already mentioned a little bit, so we won't spend too much time on. And that is that it preys on people with good intentions by redefining words. Who wants to be against social justice? No one. I don't want to be. So I hope you don't want to be either. But when we redefine the word, then what we're doing is we're praying on someone's good intentions. We're tricking someone. We're deceiving someone. We're loading in new content, new meaning into an old word. And to be honest, I just think it is unethical. Come up with a new word. Be clear on your terms. But you don't get to take social justice and completely redefine it and then accuse people of being.

against social justice. I mean, it just doesn't work that way, or it shouldn't, at least. Another problem is that it tends to claim that it has the monolithic, singular, true perspective on various identity groups, as in, if you are gay, you must think whatever we think gay people think. So a great example of this. I read a book by a gay man who is challenging the transgender movement. Douglas Murray. Yeah, Douglas Murray. And gay people came back at him and said, Douglas Murray, you are not gay because you think those things about transgenderism. And Douglas Murray says, well, I've checked and I'm pretty sure I'm pretty gay. He's married to a man.

There's no questions here. I think another example of that came during the election when Joe Biden said to black voters that if they couldn't figure out who to vote for between him and Donald Trump, you ain't black. Yeah, that's a quote. You ain't black. Yeah, that's not me. I would never say something like.

It was on a podcast. I think it's called The Breakfast Club by Charlotte Maine the God. And he received some criticism, I think pretty mild, too mild. I can't imagine that Joe Biden gets to determine or anybody gets to determine whether or not someone is really black based on who they voted for. I know black people who voted for Donald Trump. Yeah, no words like you said earlier. So Nicole Hannah Jones, who is part of the 1619 project. In fact, she's the main driver of it at the New York Times. It carries a lot of weight and authority at the times. During the election night, tweeted out that after the election was over, she was going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category. So what she's saying is that because if you're following the election results carefully, you know that Latinos took a big step toward Donald Trump and away from the Democratic Party. And what she's saying is that I'm going to write a piece that shows how Latinos are not a real ethnic category. And the reason why they aren't, the reason why they're not their own. an ethnic category is because they didn't vote the way I think they should have voted. Therefore,

I'm going to erase them. So you might start catching the equivalence. In critical theory, identity equals ideology. That is incredibly problematic. It's not only a monolithic way of viewing the world. I think it's deeply offensive because there are a lot of people who don't think the same way as everybody who looks like them. And if I were one of those people, in fact, sometimes I am one of those people. I wouldn't like it very much to have someone tell me I'm not what I am because I don't agree with them. Critical theory, I think, can also be psychologically destructive. You've perhaps heard of cognitive behavioral therapy, and it's kind of somewhat rooted in the philosophy of stoicism, and it's really helpful. It has been used in a lot of ways to help people break habits or overcome

fears or anxiety or PTSD. I've been one of the most successful. I mean, clinically proven ways to overcome PTSD. It's an interesting theory. I'm not saying, saying it lines up with Christianity, but it definitely has some overlap. Well, one of the things that cognitive behavioral therapy teaches you is that if something doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger, not weaker. And what critical theory is, is it says that if it doesn't kill you, it actually does make you weaker. So you think about people talking about words as violence, for example. If you say something that offends me or challenges me, you have done violence to me. What you said, even if it was hard for me, hasn't made me stronger. It's actually made me much weaker. It's made people

more fragile. This is the campus snowflake idea. Another thing in cognitive behavioral therapy is training people how not to trust their feelings. And what does critical theory tell you? It says always trust your feelings. If you feel that that person has done something racist or sexist or fill in the blank, it must be true. Don't question your feelings. Don't ask if you're assuming the worst. And again, we're talking about cognitive behavioral therapy, but I hope you see these ideas really clearly line up with the Bible. The Bible warns in countless places about assuming the worst about others. It actually challenges us to assume the best. And that leads us right into the next point, which is that critical theory teaches us that life is always a battle between good people

and evil people. And so there's not a sense of which I'm going to see that my opponent has some of the same struggles that I do, or I have the same struggles that they do, maybe a better way of saying it, but that I'm going to say that I'm good and they are bad. And doesn't that sound a lot like our political discourse on both sides today is that we are the righteous fighting the heathen masses? And obviously the Bible just gives us the far more sad note that we're all bad people. There is no good and bad. There's just people who've rebelled against God and people who've rebelled against God.

Another problem is that the Bible does not demand equal outcomes. nowhere in the Bible will you find signs that if someone has different outcomes in their life, that is a sign of them being treated justly or unjustly in their past. In fact, when Jesus tells parables and stories about what it's going to be like in the renewed creation, he has the boldness to claim that some people will have more and some people will have less. And it's not just one time. He does this consistently again and again and again.

And might I suggest to you that what makes heaven heavenly isn't that it's a communist utopia where we all have exactly the same thing. It's that I could live in a world where I have less than you, and I'm happy for you. Yeah, so in the Bible, equality is not equal outcomes. It's just non-preferential treatment. God says that people have been given different gifts, different abilities. So it's not just in heaven that we have different abilities. It's even here on earth. Another part of critical theory that we want to push back against is that it is incoherent, that it's incoherent, that it is a truth saying there are no truths. That critical theory says that all truth is socially constructed to keep people in power.

Is that true of critical theory also? In other words, it's somewhat self-refuting, because if all truth is socially constructed to keep people in power, then doesn't that apply to critical theory? And isn't it just a truth that's being socially constructed to? keep a different group in power? And Christians should recognize that critical theorists have identified Christianity as one of many truths out there, which has been designed to oppress people. In other words, I don't know how you can hold critical theory and hold to Christianity

because at its root, it looks at the truth claims of Christianity and says, those are not for justice, they are not for love, they are not for mercy, they are to oppress people. Yeah, I don't know how you can be a Christian and hold a critical theory because critical theory says that power is evil, and yet we worship the most powerful person in the universe, that is Jesus. Christianity says that power is good when used the right way, the appropriate way, which is on behalf of other people, like we read earlier speaking up for those who are voiceless. So if critical theory is anti-power, then that makes them anti-Jesus. I think another problem is that critical theory is simply too simplistic. The Bible is clear.

why do people have different outcomes in their life? Well, sometimes it's because of injustice. Sometimes it's because of bad decisions they've made. Sometimes it's just random and you don't really know why. The Bible is incredibly complex when it deals with the reality that people will have different experiences in their lives. And so there are many things about critical theory where they're going to say, well, it's because of this. The Bible's going to say, well, yeah, perhaps it's because of that, but it could also be those things. And it's that second half that critical theory lops off. It's a simplistic way of viewing the world, and the Bible wants us to be more complex in our thinking. Critical theory denies our common sinfulness. It says that those who are at the bottom

of the intersectional power grid are right or good, and that the people on top of this world's intersectional power grid are evil. But what it's doing is is saying that some people are sinless by nature of their status, their identity, their skin color, their orientation, their orientation, their orientation and that others, based on the same thing, are evil. But the reality, as we've said over and over, is that in the Bible, all we have is one category for human beings, apart from God, and that is sinful, sinners. So we don't gain righteousness by being more of a victim. Along the same lines, critical theory tends to make forgiveness, peace, reconciliation virtually impossible. Why? Because the categories of

of oppressed and oppressor, they always remain fixed. There's an author named Miroslav Volf. He teaches at Yale, and he is Croatian. And he experienced some pretty terrible things in his life, foreign people coming into his country, killing family members, sexually assaulting, loved ones. And he writes a lot about forgiveness and what it looks like to forgive your enemies who have done terrible things to you. And he writes from personal experience. But catch what he says. He says, forgiveness flounders, because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans. And even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. If there are only two categories and they are oppressed and oppressor, and you can't really leave what category you've been put in, it's almost

impossible to find forgiveness because we don't share a community with one another. Unfortunately, one thing critical theory does is it causes us to censor other people. It causes us to shut down. It is the driving force of cancel culture because what it says is that I don't want to hear other people's views that are different from mine. And the way I dominate, the way I get my point across, the way I win is by shutting other people down. There's a video of a police officer in Portland, and he's an African-American man who's been on the force for a while. He is giving testimony in court. And he's talking about an episode he had in which he was trying to talk with a person of his own race when he was interrupted.

I'll just let him explain what happened. He does a great job. They don't even know the history. They don't know what they're saying. Coming from someone who graduated from PSU with a history degree, it's actually frightening on how, you know, they say if you don't know your history, you repeat it and watching people do that to other people

just because of what they decided to do with their life. What are some of those interactions that you're... So a lot of times someone of color, black, Hispanic, Asian come up to the fence and directly want to talk to me. Hey, what do you think about George Floyd? What do you think about what happened about this? I go up to the fence. Someone white comes up.

F, the police, don't talk to him. That was the most bizarre thing because I could see it coming. I even had a young African-American girl. Tell me, why is it you guys aren't talking to us? I said, honestly, this is now the 20, I think it was 23rd day of doing it, every time I try to have a conversation with someone that looks like me, so when white comes up and blocks them and tells them not to talk. And then right when I said that, this white girl popped right in front of her, she said, he just said that was going to happen. I said, told you?

I told you. She looked at the girl and why did you do that? And I straight up, I said, you know, I've been called the N-word. She's been called the N-word. why are you talking to me this way? Why do you feel that she can't speak for herself to me? Why is it that you feel you need to speak for her when we're having a conversation?

And she couldn't answer my question. All she said, someone told me to do it. So that has been a very strange thing to watch. I'm cool with, you know, people feel like they want to help a movement. But then when you go to a gentrified community, and one of the first pictures I saw that one of the business that was looted was a black-owned business. I'm like, they're not from here.

They don't even know what they're even doing. It says something when you're at a Black Lives Matter protest. You have more minorities on the police side than you have in a violent crowd and you have white people screaming at black people. officers, you have the biggest nose I've ever seen. Anna, you hear these things and you go, where are these people going to, are they going to say something this person?

No. So, and that's just one example. Having people tell you, you know, what to do with your life, that you need to quit your job, that you need to, you know, you're hurting your community, but they're not a part of the community. And once again, you, you as a privileged white person telling someone of color what to do of their life. And you don't even know what I've dealt with, what these white officers that you're screaming at, you don't know them. You don't know anything about them. And there are racist people out of the world. Absolutely. There are bad cops out there in the world. We don't associate

with those people. They make us all look bad. That's not something that I stand for. That's not something that my coworkers stand for. If you have time after this very long podcast episode, you should go listen to his whole testimony because it's actually very insightful. But one of the things that I think anybody would agree with

is that the way he was treated by the white protester, yelling at him to shut up, making fun of his physical appearance. That was a terrible way to treat someone. In fact, it was a kind of racist way to treat him. But they were out there protesting against racism, protesting for social justice by yelling racist things at a black police officer who was trying to dialogue with a person that he said who looked like him. But again, this is a very coherent episode because identity is ideology. In the minute he put on that police uniform, he ceased in some senses to be black anymore.

He was a part of a different ideology, a different way of thinking. And again, what has to happen, categories have to get wrecked, confusing things have to happen. You have to have a revolution. I mean, there's nothing incoherent about what happened if you understand critical theory. So this white woman protester is woke, according to her. I'm just trying to think through how she sees the world. She's woke. She is protesting social injustice of racism, among other things. Which she can see because she's woke, which he apparently can't see. So here's a black police officer who's given up in her mind his black identity because he's put on the uniform and he's not woke because he doesn't see the same things that she sees. So she's justified in yelling these racist things at him. Is that what I'm supposed to believe? It's just so confusing. It is confusing. Again, this goes back to the simplistic good and evil way of seeing the world. It's not a healthy way of seeing the world. It's not a complex, disciplined, thoughtful way. of seeing the world. And I know people will hear this and they'll think that I'm being mean, and I'm being pompous, and I'm looking down at people. But there's times where truth needs to be spoken and we need to be challenged. Social justice, according to critical theory, is all about seeing these power differentials that we're talking about. And it's not just that,

it's applied when people start trying to dismantle that power and overturn that power in any way possible. Now, we as Christians, we should be disturbed by this because we believe that God is the creator and that he has established many categories like male and female. He's established many truths that he is God. We are not. He knows what's best for the world. We don't always. He's given us things that critical theory would say those are oppressive and they must be rejected. And yet the very ground upon which critical theorists stand is the ground formed by the Bible. The Bible is one of the first and earliest documents that clearly defends justice, clearly defines justice, and clearly says that people should be treated equitably. Critical theory starts there, and in some senses, it cannibalizes

itself and ends up in a very different place. The Bible cares tremendously about justice. You haven't read your Bible if you don't believe that, but the Bible also has a definition of justice. You cannot import critical theory into the Bible's definition of justice. And so if you care about justice, you're going to find that at times you are deeply aligned with people who are identifying themselves within this critical theory camp, and then you're going to find times where there's incredible dissonance between the two of you. In fact, you should find times that that's the case. You may feel like a political orphan because you won't find a home on the left. You're not probably going to find an easy home on the right. But that's okay, because you've been adopted

by a Heavenly Father who has a home for you forever. Yeah, we waited until after the election to do this episode, and we've had this episode on our mind for a while now. But we intentionally did it after the election because we didn't want it to be seen through a political lens as if we're advocating for one group or another. We're trying to help us as Christians have a biblical understanding of social justice because it is so incredibly important in the Bible and the church cannot miss out on it. On the other hand, we can't adopt the critical theory version of social justice. We have to walk this fine line. I find it very difficult. I'm for biblical social justice, but I want to push back against a large part, not all, but a large part of critical theory social justice. And that's a hard place to be for an individual Christian or for the whole church right now. We're going to have to really think hard about this. We're going to have to understand what these different worldviews are saying and try to follow Christ, try to navigate the way of Christ in an incredibly confusing world. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating.

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