Book Review: Critical Dilemma

The Rise of Critical Theories and Social Justice Ideology - Implications for the Church and Society

Note: My book reviews are typically for paid subscribers only, but I am opening this one up because it covers an important, and urgent, topic.

Critical Dilemma is both helpful and exasperating. I would recommend it to anyone seeking to understand the origins of Critical Theory and how it intersects with every aspect of normal life. Or to someone whose children have said something that intrigued or troubled them and want to know more. I would even recommend it to people who want to lead a study with members of their church.

Critical Theory is part of the water we swim in now. Younger generations have been taught to sort people into classes of the “privileged” and the “oppressed”, and they spout off slogans like “Black Lives Matter” or “Whiteness is oppression” uncritically.

Any resource that equips us to understand Critical Theory and fight against it is a net positive. This stuff can tear through churches like a bullet through tissue paper, and too many people remain naive about it. Or worse, people think it’s a useful tool and have no problem grabbing a wolf by the ears while its teeth are bared toward their enemies.

But sometimes, the book trips over its own feet. It inserts asides and shibboleths for an audience that will probably never read it and which might turn off people who would benefit the most. It has too many target audiences.

So I recommend the book. But I have some qualifications.

A Great Summary and Reference

The book goes through a history of Critical Theory and its Marxist origins, and it does it by quoting, at length, primary sources. They let the other side speak in their own words. Exhaustively.

If you don’t know what Critical Theory is, this book will fix that for you. If you want a good reference book to pull off the shelf to find a definition, this book will fill that need.

The authors track the history through Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory and then dedicate long chapters to each one in turn. This is where the book is at its best. The authors are not content to stroke their chins and describe terrible ideas with cold dispassion, however. They also critique and dig into the problems, and they do this without resorting to name-calling or pearl-clutching.

Advocates of Critical Theory are given plenty of snacks in the green room, offered plenty of time on the stage, and once they have their say, dropped through the trap door of their own ideas.

The last section of the book is all about engaging with people who hold these ideas and how to spot them in the wild. This is important because, as they say:

The ideas of contemporary critical theory are absorbed via platitudes and slogans that gain the status of conventional wisdom through repitition, not through careful analysis.

“Ideas That Will Devastate Your Church” goes through many of these platitudes and dismantles them one by one. “Justice is part of the gospel,” “Sin is oppression,” “People of color in the US are oppressed,” and many more. If you have found yourself exasperated by these platitudes but unsure of how to answer them, this chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

The chapter “Moving Forward” is less helpful. It offers some good advice but uses phrases like “racial justice” without defining what success would actually look like. This ambiguity is where advocates of Critical Theories live, move, and have their being, always moving goalposts, always throwing accusations, and always casting guilt onto the shoulders of others.

This leads to some of my reservations about the book.

Understanding the Times, Past and Present

In a book so meticulously researched, I was surprised at the naivety shown on some topics or throwaway lines that seemed nothing more than a wink at a certain audience. At best, these were attempts to make a hard pill go down smoother for some readers, to assure them that the authors are reasonable so that certain readers would be more open to persuasion.

At worst, it shows severe blindspots in the authors, blindspots that show they still don’t understand the times they are living in.

For example, in the second chapter, “How Did We Get Here?” they complain that Donald Trump failed to “send an unmistakable message that racism is a heinous evil.”

While President Trump had repeatedly on record condemend racism, the overall tenor of his actions and comments ended up leading a majority of Americans to believe he is racist.

This betrays no awareness of media manipulation and propaganda, both primary weapons of Critical Theory advocates. The American public was subjected to years of Clockwork Orange-style brainwashing, complete with eyelids held open by force, fed a constant diet of misframings, omissions, and outright lies. Despite this, the authors come very close to saying, “Because Orange Man Bad.”

An example they give of our failure to accurately teach the “racialized history of the United States” is that most college students haven’t watched Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” and they know little about its content or themes.

But K-12 students barely listen to, read, or study any great speeches of history, except maybe Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Public education in this area is indeed terrible, but not for the reasons the authors claim, and so they fall into the same habit as Critical Theory advocates.

The authors also use terms like the “LGBTQ+ community” and the “gay community” when addressing certain issues. They are unwaveringly polite and, many times, buy into the framing of these “communities.”

The authors open their chapter “Problems with Queer Theory” with this:

From the start, we want to make this point unequivocally clear: Bigotry against the gay community is a sin. It is a tremendous evil that should not — indeed, cannot —be tolerated. Queer theory as an area of knowledge exists partly becuase of this historic marginilization and disenfranchisement of the same-sex attracted. The church as a whole and individual Christians have often failed to love gay people as they should. We lament this fact.

This reeks of “We’re not like those Christians over there. We promise. Listen to us. Please?” If barbarians are flooding over the walls to enslave your children and rape your wives, should you spend time lamenting about the supposed historic grievances committed against them by your third cousin, twice removed?

One wonders what the authors think of the penalties of the Mosaic Law. Would they call them a form of “disenfranchisement” or “bigotry?”

They would have been better served taking off the velvet gloves and engaging in some bare-knuckle brawling.

They certainly know how to do it. Throughout the book, they offer no such patience or special pleading toward racists or slaveholders of the past. No special call-outs for the “racist community.”

To be clear, I’m not saying they should have done that. However, the discrepancy in how they handle fashionable sins versus unfashionable sins is blatant. Dead slaveholders are easier to scold than modern sodomites.

And when dealing with the history of slavery, they are as averse to nuance as a Millennial is to talking on the phone. Anything short of abolitionism was a sin.

…we must face the fact there were real Christians who were guilty of chattel slavery and/or who were guilty of aiding and abetting chattel slavery by looking the other way or not fighting to end it.

Not “the abuse of slaves” or “the mistreatment of slaves.”

Was Paul guilty of aiding and abetting chattel slavery for sending Onesimus back to Philemon?

“But wait!” you might say. “Paul was really engaging in an act of subversive, counter-cultural genius. The gospel…”

Oh, so you mean it’s a little more complicated than how I presented it? We should approach it with more nuance? I agree.

In their rhetoric, the authors have swallowed abolitionist propaganda, which has been heated and refined and adopted as another gospel ever since the American Civil War. In doing so, they tip their hats to the same type of religious zeal they seek to critique.

For more reading on this topic, I recommend A Disease in the Public Mind by Thomas Fleming.

There is also an entire excursus that introduces Protestant theology, the worldview it typically represents, and why it cares so much about sexuality. It made me wonder, again, who this book was written for. Who was the primary audience? It comes close to landing on one several times but then shifts as suddenly as a professional running back dodging a tackle.

Its confusion does it a disservice.

Verdict

8/10

Buy the book for its wealth of truth and helpfulness. It is needed in the libraries of Christians and churches. But don’t expect the authors to properly guide you in applying these truths.