Critical Social Justice
August 9, 2022 🕑 31 min.
Note
This piece is not a finished work in an of itself. Instead it is a section from the first draft of Counterfeit Worldviews Invading the Church that was removed before the publication of that piece. In that work, it served as the third and final worldview under consideration, but it was ripped out because
initial reviews indicated that it was too hard to understand, given the deep dive into philosophy, and to do it justice (hah!) would’ve required substantially more space, making the intended piece unbalanced,
I realized that the worldviews of emotionalism and authoritarianism are actually more fundamental, and contribute to the development and promulgation of a whole host of others (feminism, environmentalism, scientism, etc.), including this one, and
with this section out of the way, that left space to further develop the remaining sections by detailing how the worldviews tend to play themselves out in the life of the church.
However, in the time since the counterfeit worldviews piece was published, I’ve often enough found myself wanting to refer back to things I’d written, or resources I’d linked to, here. I grew tired of rewinding the repository history to find what I was looking for, so instead I’ve reproduced the section, unedited, here, for my own reference.
With all that said, here are some final disclaimers:
This work is incomplete.
It’s not nearly as refined as the piece from whence it came.
Pieces of it were integrated into that finished work, so you may recognize bits if you’ve read the other one.
My understanding of the historical developments that have contributed to critical social justice as we see it today has grown since this was written, but those details are not reflected here.
It would probably benefit you to read Counterfeit Worldviews Invading the Church first to have an understanding of both the tools being employed and the overall structure into which this fits.
Introduction
The final worldview we’ll discuss today is that of critical social justice (CSJ). This is a hard one to talk about at this particular time, because (1) people think they know what it is, and (2) we think we have it on the retreat. At this point, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, we’re all familiar with organizations like Black Lives Matter and Antifa and their “mostly peaceful” protests. We’ve heard of how the CSJ propaganda is being pushed on various branches of the U.S. government and military. We’ve been told of various corporate leadership teams being put through white privilege training. However, we’ve also seen parents pushing back against this in school board meetings all over the country, and occasionally we see church leaders speaking out against it too. Some are inclined to think Satan pushed too far, too fast on this one, such that we wizened up to what he’s been up to, and now we can effectively deal with him. Such thinking is optimistic, at best. I’m much more inclined to suspect he pushed so hard, so fast to fool us into thinking we’d foiled his plans.
It’s easy to think of CSJ as the new kid on the block, as far as worldviews are concerned. After all, I hadn’t heard of terms like critical race theory or intersectionality until a few years ago. However, to think of it as a novelty is one of its many dangers. You may be surprised to know that some of the ideas underpinning CSJ (e.g., equality vs equity) have actually been hotly debated in North America since long before the United States was even founded. Then in the mid-1800s you have the development of conflict theory with folks like Marx and Engels. When their ideas of economic class revolution never really played out as they’d prophesied, that led folks at the Frankfurt School in the early 1900s to posit that Marx was right in principle but had simply misunderstood the cultural hegemony, and thus critical theory was born. They then hopped the pond, and this infection began to fester in the American academy to the point where ~30 years ago we added intersectionality to the mix. You and I might’ve been caught off guard by CSJ, but I’m afraid the water’s been heating for a good long time, and at this point the frog is about cooked.
“But wait,” you say, “that’s not what I mean. God commands us to work for justice (Micah 6:8), and he created us as social beings, so any working out of justice in the world will be social in nature. Therefore: ‘social justice’.” While it’s true that when the term was coined ~200 years ago, it meant something closer to what you have in mind, the term was redefined ~100 years ago to be the nice, warm, fuzzy synonym for the more accurate term “distributive justice”. When you hear “social justice” in use today, the chances that the speaker is referring to the original definition are somewhere between slim and nil. It reminds me of this line from Iñigo Montoya:
“You keep using that [term]. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
~ The Princess Bride
You wouldn’t use the term “gay” today to mean simply characterized by cheerfulness, would you? Many who speak of “social justice” today without actually knowing what it means do so simply out of ignorance; however, there are many others, even within the church, who confuse the term intentionally because it’s part of a disingenuous rhetorical tactic known as the motte and bailey. Using the term “social justice” loosely and without definition is dangerous—stop it.
“How did this happen, though?” you may wonder. “Was no one standing guard to fend off this incursion?” Actually, yes, but generally speaking no one listened to them. In the early 1900s you had folks like Ludwig von Mises with his Human Action, among other works, arguing that free market economics are not only essential to a healthy capitalism, but are indeed the bedrock of human civilization. To begin to engineer society toward producing particular outcomes, then, is to being to chip away at the foundation of society until one day it collapses. In the 1970s you had Friedrich Hayek and what is likely the most comprehensive refutation of the arguments in support of social justice in his Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice. A decade later Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions describes the paradigmatic disconnect between diametrically opposed visions of human nature in society, illustrating why it’s so difficult to talk about this subject and have all parties accurately understand each other. Most recently Voddie Baucham Jr has demonstrated the Fault Lines that have been building over the past few centuries, to warn you such that when the tectonic plates finally slip, you’ll be standing on the right side. People have been fighting the good fight—we’ve just been unaware of it.
This worldview is often easy to see, even within the church:
If your church is sending out reading lists or organizing small groups to read works by authors like Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo, make for the door, posthaste. I’m one to almost never say, “Don’t read this book”—indeed, I recommend voracious reading from a wide variety of sources—but if your church is doing this it probably indicates your church leadership is compromised.
If your church leadership preached sermons, authored blog posts, or recorded videos in support of George Floyd in the weeks after his death, and they have not yet repented of being led astray by and propagating lies, that’s another reason to look for leadership who are more faithful to truth. I’m not saying there’s no room for forgiveness, but when there’s no repentance, what wisdom is there in staying under a commanding officer who refuses to admit and learn from his mistakes? In battle, that’s practically a death sentence.
If your church starts doing anything even remotely resembling corporate diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives, get out of Dodge.
Note
Please don’t mistake me here. In the statements above, I’m not advocating for leaving a church over some minor quibble. Rather, this worldview is so corrosive, and so completely antithetical to the gospel, that I don’t think it wise for you to waste another minute in such a community. Life is too short, and our mission too urgent.
You may think it worthwhile to stay and fight, that you might win back your brother (Matthew 18:15; James 5:19–20; 2 Timothy 2:24–26), and you might be right. Keep in mind that I’ve fought this particular fight three times in the last three years and I’m batting 0 for 3. My opinion here is definitely colored by my experience, so take it with a grain of salt.
On the other hand, there are times when it’s much better-camouflaged:
We believe that engaging the inner journey of spiritual transformation leads to the outward growth of global community health and reconciliation.
We’re going to be creating a co-ed advisory board that will be in close communication with the elder board, because we want to include more diverse perspectives in the decision-making of the church.
We’d like the congregation to prayerfully consider how we might be able to reach out to those in our community, particularly those that don’t look like us.
We want to make sure we’re not allowing pride to blind us to truths that the broader culture has figured out but historically the church has turned a deaf ear to.
“WHEREAS, Critical race theory is a set of analytical tools that explain how race has and continues to function in society, and intersectionality is the study of how different personal characteristics overlap and inform one’s experience;” (from SBC Resolution 9).
What’s Wrong with This?
If your only exposure to CSJ has been the outlandish things that hit the news, it may be difficult to see what the prior examples have to do with it. We know God has given us the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:19). We know it’s good to get input from a variety of sources. We know we’re supposed to reach out to those who aren’t in our same situation (Matthew 25:35–40). We know all truth is God’s truth. We know tools for analyzing things aren’t inherently good or bad. It seems like these are just a handful of good reminders—what’s wrong with that? To answer that question, we need to realize that CSJ is built on a number of false assumptions: that ideas must be refined over time, that who you are impacts what you can know and how you can know it, and that we can’t know the whole truth without listening to perspectives other than our own, among a whole host of others. Let’s dive in and see what these have to say.
Ideas Must be Refined Over Time
This first notion makes some intuitive sense. As fallen, finite, and fallible human beings, it’s not possible for us to be entirely correct in our thinking at all times, so some refinement is obviously necessary. Before we accept this claim without question, though, let’s figure out what exactly is being said here, where the idea comes from, and what its purpose is. We’ve intimated before that it’s important to examine the consequences of ideas when evaluating them, and now we’ll add that the provenance and purposes of ideas must be factored into our evaluation as well.
First let’s add some specificity. Are we saying that some ideas need refinement, or all ideas? We know from experience that some ideas are incorrect and could use some improvement, but the assumption here is that’s true for all ideas. We know that isn’t right. After all, \(2+2=4\), and that’s always been true and always will be true, anywhere in the universe—no refinement needed. Unless of course your local school is one teaching that things like objectivity are racist characteristics of white supremacy. Wait, what? Where on earth did that come from? Well, it’s a bit of a long story.
If we take a trip back to antiquity, the classical Greek philosophers used a form of reasoning known as dialectic, which consisted of putting forth an argument (or thesis) and then rebutting it with a counter-argument (or antithesis). Depending on how the argumentation went, you either showed one side or the other, or perhaps a combination of the two (a synthesis), to be correct. Fast-forward about two millennia, during which a handful of other philosophers used the methodology, and we get to Immanuel Kant, who rediscovers it and introduces it into modern philosophy in the late 1700s. From there it gets picked up by a fellow named Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who not only puts a different spin on it in his Phenomenology of Spirit, among other works, but also makes it the fundamental driver of his metaphysical understanding of life, the universe, and everything.
In terms of form, the Hegelian dialectic differs from the classical one in three fundamental ways: a thesis necessarily gives rise to an antithesis, and the two must produce a synthesis, which is better than what came before. These may seem like subtle distinctions, but their inclusion transforms dialectic from a mere method of reasoning into the foundational principle upon which a comprehensive worldview is constructed. Whereas in the classical form, the antithesis is any argument that can potentially counter the thesis, for Hegel it’s something that’s constructed from the thesis itself through a process of negation. Whereas classically the synthesis is one of three possible outcomes, and may not necessarily be an improvement on the two arguments that generated it, for Hegel it’s assumed that it’s the only possible outcome and is indeed progress in the right direction. Let’s unpack these differences a bit.
The process of generating the antithesis from the thesis through negation is known by the German word aufheben. Though this literally means “to lift up,” Hegel extends the definition to mean both to preserve and contradict, and thereby transform. His thought was that every idea contains its own contradictions, and you can arrive at the antithesis by deconstructing the idea. If the original idea is racism, then its antithesis is anti-racism. If you start with the idea of Christianity, then the antithesis is whatever set of beliefs you arrive at after deconstructing the faith you’ve known from childhood.
Hegel’s assertion is when you contemplate these ideas of thesis and antithesis in the right way, you end up with a broader understanding of the greater total, which is the synthesis. When this is done at the societal level, this synthesis you arrive at is known as the weltgeist, which literally means “world spirit,” but figuratively was used to indicate “the way in which the world is currently moving.” The process doesn’t stop there, though. After ideas and their contradictions give rise to the world spirit, this then gives rise to new ideas, and the process starts all over again. Baked into this meta-narrative of history is the assumption that each step of the way we are progressing in the right direction, perfecting ideas as we go. Eventually we’ll reach a point where we finally have all the contradictions exposed and synthesized, where ideas are perfected, and then the world spirit becomes self-aware, and is actualized as the absolute spirit. Now I know that last line may sound way out there, but Hegel was very intentionally building a systematic philosophy to underpin a transcendental religion.
Okay, what on earth does this mind-bending trip through 18th-century German idealist philosophy have to do with anything? Let’s trace the influence of these ideas through history and see. A prominent thinker strongly influenced by Hegel’s dialectic and metaphysics was Ludwig Feuerbach, and he in turn influenced a great number of people, including Darwin, Freud, Engels, and Marx. Whereas Hegel argued that to save the world we must perfect ideas through his dialectical process driven by aufheben, Marx argued that we do it by perfecting the economy. Marx’s ideas are eventually appropriated and extended by the critical theorists at the Frankfurt School, but then their argument was we need to perfect culture to save the world. For them, your life is the thesis, making you miserable about it (e.g., making you despise the “privilege” you now enjoy that past generations worked so hard to give you) is the antithesis, and the liberation you find on the other side is the synthesis. In order to achieve that liberation, we must deconstruct and supplant all ingrained ideas from our current world spirit, ideas like objectivity and right answers in math class. If we don’t, we’re getting in the way of the progress of history, and are therefore on the wrong side of it.
This is starting to sound all too familiar now, isn’t it? Though it’s true that sometimes ideas are wrong and need to be corrected through a process of examination and contradiction (classical dialectic), over the last 200 years this notion has, more often than not, referred to the Hegelian understanding, particularly in conversations at the societal level. This isn’t just a neat way of thinking about things that someone cooked up recently. It has a particular past and a particular purpose. In service of that purpose, we are to use any means necessary, because the utopian end goal is infinitely better than any finite sacrifices we might need to make in the near term. Such a mindset has wrought incalculable havoc on mankind in recent centuries, and it will continue to do so if we don’t stop it.
Who You Are Impacts Your Determination of Truth
This next assumption supporting CSJ is another one that makes some intuitive sense. What I know currently depends on the sum total of my past experience, and that necessarily informs what I’m able to figure out next. If I haven’t mastered arithmetic, chances are I’m not going to be able to understand calculus, right? Sure, no argument there. Unfortunately that’s not what’s meant by this assumption, though this misconception is one of the reasons it endures.
The problem boils down to what exactly we mean by the word are when we say who you are influences what you can know and how you can know it. If we mean how you think, speak, and act is influenced by all the experiences you’ve had throughout life, then there’s no issue. If, on the other hand, we mean that your identity, in terms of your membership in a variety of demographic categories (gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc.), dictates what information you have access to and how you respond to it, that’s a very different matter.
This latter meaning, which is the prevalent one in recent decades, assumes that all members of a group think, and therefore speak and act, in the same way. There’s some truth to this—it may be the case that most members of a particular group tend to think similarly in most situations—but it’s yet another example of taking what’s true of a subset and contending that it’s true of the whole as well, without any qualifications. In Intellectuals and Race, Thomas Sowell tells the story of children of black American servicemen in post-WWII Germany. Growing up in the absence of the black American subculture, they saw completely different outcomes in terms of common success markers (educational achievement, financial prosperity, family stability, etc.). In Black Rednecks and White Liberals, he shows that a common southern subculture tends to produce unsuccessful outcomes regardless of ethnicity. The culture in which you’re immersed contributes to your experiences, and they play into how you think, speak, and act. Your identity in terms of demographic categories does not.
Given that this notion is so pervasive in society, though, where on earth did it come from? If we turn back the clock, we actually find that the first seeds of this idea can be seen in the master-slave dialectic developed by none other than Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, which we referenced earlier. The struggle between lord and bondsman would inform the thinking of Marx in his analysis of class conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, where the ruling class couldn’t possibly understand the plight of the working class, because they hadn’t lived it. Hegel’s and Marx’s ideas were then inspiration for Nancy Hartsock’s essay The Feminist Standpoint, which then catalyzed the formalization of these ideas into what’s now known as standpoint epistemology. The purpose in each instance is to galvanize the oppressed group into cultural revolution: for Hegel, to achieve the liberation to be found in the synthesis and drive history toward its inevitable conclusion; for Marx, to overthrow the ruling class and establish the communist utopia; for feminism, to uproot the established patriarchy and supplant it with an egalitarian paradise.
The thought that knowledge is derived from your lived experience as a member of various identity groups has most recently been extended to the concept of positionality. This latest iteration, which functions effectively as the engine driving intersectionality, formalizes that each of your intersectional identities has a particular relationship to the supposed power dynamics that govern reality. As this idea has permeated society in recent decades, it’s given rise to what’s been dubbed ethnic gnosticism. Whereas gnosticism, which was a heresy battled by the early church, posited that there was special personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) that could trump orthodox teachings, ethnic gnosticism claims you have access to special personal knowledge by virtue of your lived experience via your intersectional identities, and those truths can’t be contradicted. When it comes to your ability to determine truth, conflating past personal experience and categorical identities is both wrong and dangerous.
We Can’t Know the Whole Truth Without a Plurality of Voices
This final assumption we’ll tackle today under CSJ is really just the logical implication of the prior two. If I’m not right all the time and my ideas need refinement, and if who I am determines what information I have access to, then in order to work my way to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I’ll need to engage with other people in conversation. If I cut myself off from other perspectives, I could wind up in an echo chamber and be dead wrong.
As we’ve noted before, really effective lies have a whole lot of truth baked into them, and this one is no different. Listening to other people’s perspectives, particularly if they disagree with you, can be a very good thing, as they can help you to refine your ideas (Proverbs 27:17). Indeed, whenever I write something like this, I run it by a half-dozen trusted believers with the express directive, “Tell me where I’m being an idiot.” To think yourself right all the time and not consider the counsel of others is foolishness (Proverbs 12:15). So where’s the problem here?
The problem is this assumption goes far beyond, “Make sure you’re open to correction from others (Proverbs 12:1).” Instead, the claim is that it is impossible to arrive at the complete truth of a matter without first synthesizing all other contradictory viewpoints. Did you catch Hegel in there? I can’t know if I’m right or not, and I have no way to evaluate whether what you say is true, but we need to put our heads together. That doesn’t mean what we have at the end of our interaction will actually be true, but rather we’re slowly progressing toward the end of history where wrongs will no longer exist (Revelation 21:4) and we’ll know all truth (1 Corinthians 13:12). It’s no wonder this thinking is so seductive—Satan’s game all along has been to steal ideas from God and then to distort them to serve his own purposes.
This actually goes further than requiring that you work with someone to develop your ideas, though. No, instead we are required to “elevate the voices” of the marginalized and oppressed. If you recall our definition of cultural hegemony and discussion of intersectionality from earlier, you need the input of all those various people groups before you can really get at the truth of a matter. For expediency’s sake, it seems like it’d be nice if everyone had one poor, black, female, lesbian, transgender, handicapped, immigrant friend to consult so you’d get all the necessary perspectives in one shot, but even that’s insufficient (though it seems to be how the Biden administration is going about hiring these days). After all, your diversity, inclusion, and equity poster-child friend only comes from one country. What about the perspective of someone living half-way across the world? It’s simply not possible, nor is it reasonable, to fulfill this requirement to incorporate a plurality of voices when attempting to ascertain truth.
Let’s Pull All This Together
Now that we’ve examined some of the major assumptions underpinning CSJ, let’s return to the concept of it being a comprehensive worldview. In the prior cases, we’ve focused solely on the five-fold breakdown, but in this case it’s easy to see how this contradicts the biblical worldview no matter how you slice it. In terms of the four fundamental questions:
Who am I? I am a representative of a number of intersectional people groups, all members of which think, speak, and act identically.
Why am I here? I’m here to do the work of aufheben, of elevating the voices of the oppressed, of racial reconciliation and anti-racism, of overthrowing the cultural hegemony, of revolution.
What’s wrong with the world? Our ideas are not yet perfect, and people are clinging to old ideas and preventing the progress of history.
How can what’s wrong be made right? Everyone needs to embrace why we’re here, such that we can drive history toward it’s inevitable utopian conclusion.
In terms of the historical meta-narrative:
Creation: In the beginning, everything was perfect, as postulated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “state of nature.”
Fall: Certain people groups began oppressing other people groups.
Redemption: There’s no true fix to the fall, except to continually do the work of aufheben, etc., in a perpetual pursuit of improvement.
Consummation: Eventually—and we have no idea when we’ll get there, or how we’ll know we’re there when we do—we’ll get to the place where all ideas are right and the world spirit has fully realized itself.
In terms of the five-fold breakdown:
God: God is defined not in a theistic, but rather in a transcendental, sense, being this concept of the world spirit, which grows in self-awareness and actualization as time progresses.
Man: Man is necessary to the refinement of ideas, and therefore contributes to the creation of the god-concept through his driving the progress of history.
Truth: Your truth depends on your intersectional standpoint, meaning it varies from person to person and throughout time.
Knowledge: You can come to a fuller understanding of truth by contradicting what you know with the lived experience of others.
Ethics: Right and wrong are whatever the oppressed say they are. The more oppressed you are, the more authority you have in determining right and wrong.
Now let’s go back to those more subtle examples from earlier and see if we can pick out where things are going wrong:
For the community health folks, what kind of reconciliation is being pursued, and for what purpose? Is it possible to engage in the inner journey of spiritual transformation without the inclusion of diverse perspectives?
For the co-ed advisory board, is the purpose to elevate women’s voices? If so, why? Is it possible for an all-male elder board to accurately discern God’s will for the church without this?
For the congregation reaching out to its community, what’s the motivation? Is it that members don’t feel any burden for evangelism and need to be encouraged, or is there a felt need for diversifying the viewpoints within the body? If the latter, what motivates that?
For the church wanting to listen to truths from the broader culture, is it possible that culture has hit on something that God has not already revealed to you? Is your motivation to be seen as righting the wrongs of historical injustices?
For Resolution 9, is critical race theory merely a set of analytical tools, or is it a comprehensive worldview? Is intersectionality only the study of overlapping characteristics, or is there a particular end goal in mind?
What are the Consequences?
I don’t know if you’ve realized it yet, but this last worldview is one that can only thrive in a society in which the first two have had substantial influence for many years. Emotionalism set the stage for lived experience being a primary conduit of truth, and authoritarianism hammers home that if you don’t agree with any of this, then you’re on the wrong side of history. We can therefore cross-apply all the consequences of the first two here as well, as these days CSJ is often the context in which they act. In addition, though, I see this worldview negatively impacting the body of Christ in at least three distinct ways.
In the first case, we’ve traded in classical biblical interpretation for woke hermeneutics. What on earth is that? First, hermeneutics is the science of biblical interpretation, or how to handle the word of God accurately (2 Timothy 2:15). When studying a passage of scripture, there’s lots to do, including:
Figuring out who the author was and learning about his life.
Determining when and where the book was written, and what the overall context of that period in history was.
Ascertaining the author’s purpose in writing to his original audience, and understanding how they would have interpreted his message.
Understanding what kind of passage it is: narrative, poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, etc.
Seeing how the passage fits into the book as a whole, and how the book fits into the Bible as a whole.
Figuring out how the truths communicated apply to our lives today.
Woke hermeneutics, on the other hand, instead of starting with scripture and historical evidence, starts with you and what you think and feel. You read the Bible in your own particular way, influenced by your cultural standpoint. That’s going to be different from someone else’s understanding of the Bible, so to reach a fuller understanding of a passage, we need to engage a multiplicity of perspectives. However, if we were to raise the alarm bells regarding where such thinking comes from, we’d be rebuffed with, “This isn’t any of that; this is just hermeneutical/epistemic/interpretive humility.” To be humble, as we are commanded (Ephesians 4:1–3), we must rigorously study scripture with people of different ethnicities, etc. We call their unfounded assertion, though, and then we wind up accused of epistemic injustice, oppression, or violence.
Part of the problem here is just plain cluelessness. Ideas aren’t independent—they have particular histories and purposes attached to them. Language isn’t neutral either. To think that you can use the language and ideas of CSJ and not be influence by the history and philosophy that spawned it is folly. The other part of the problem here is that words like humility, unity, and love are being weaponized to silence the Holy Spirit speaking through believers, and to push a very intentional anti-biblical agenda. What does this lead to? It means not being able to understand Abraham and Sarah’s sojourn in Egypt without a modern Latin American immigrant’s perspective. It means considering polygamy as a remedy for divorce in the African context. It means twisting the immutable word of God to mean whatever we want it to mean. Far from humility, this is hubris.
“Wait a second, though. I’ve not seen anything near this egregious.” Perhaps not, but when was the last time you were in a Bible study where a handful of people got together, someone read a passage of scripture, and then the conversation was kicked off with something like, “What does this passage mean to you?” For a long time we’ve often been approaching Bible study by starting with the reader as opposed to the text.
I was a part of just such a group this past year where our study materials were the Bible Project videos, which are short, well-animated, informational videos that help you understand that the Bible is a unified story that leads people to Jesus. In terms of what they attempt to achieve, they are both excellent and unparalleled; however, problems became apparent very early on in the series. In some cases the concerns raised were along the lines of, “I don’t think I would’ve said it quite that way.” In others, “I disagree with your interpretation, but I understand how you got there.” In still others, “This is just plain wrong. The Bible says one thing, the video says another, and the two do not agree.” If our starting point had been the videos instead of the scripture they summarize, we wouldn’t have caught these discrepancies. We were eventually counseled by the leadership to take what was good from the videos and comment on the positive for the edification of others, but to keep our concerns to ourselves, as they were negatively impacting some members of the group (emotionalism).
More pertinent to our current discussion, though, was the subtle presence of CSJ infused throughout. Though it wasn’t present in every video, it showed up originally in their summary of Exodus, and then continued to make an appearance, sometimes fairly hidden, other times more blatant, and is perhaps epitomized in their thematic video on justice. Perhaps this was just a fluke, though. After all, it’s been very easy to get caught up in the language of social justice in recent years. Maybe these were just small mistakes of saying something that wasn’t intended. That may be the case in other scenarios, but in this case it’s possible to track down a sermon series on justice from a decade ago by Tim Mackie, who’s the voice behind the Bible Project videos, and you can see the trajectory of his thinking coming more and more in line with the CSJ narrative over time. As we continued to pursue the issue with leadership, we eventually reached the pointed where they just kicked some of us out, and then defended their actions to the remaining members of the group with unsupported claims that we were being prideful, divisive, unloving, discouraging, etc. (authoritarianism). When we abandon biblical hermeneutics, the consequence is we are unable to stand firm for truth (Ephesians 6:13–18), and are instead blown about by every wind of false doctrine (Ephesians 4:11–16).
Finally since we have abandoned revelation, reason, and reality as the bedrock of knowledge, and since we regularly employ emotionalism and authoritarianism to cow our brothers and sisters into submission, the church has been helping to set the stage for, and is now helping to usher in, a worldwide “soft” totalitarianism. Back in 2015, people from around the world started reaching out to author and editor Rod Dreher with concerns that the changes they were seeing in the culture closely mirrored what they had seen decades prior immediately before the people of their countries embraced totalitarian rule with open arms. His curiosity piqued, Dreher dug in and researched the matter and eventually published Live Not by Lies, in which he tells stories of the horrors of life under totalitarian regimes, and shares practices that helped the faithful preserve Christianity throughout.
In the past, these counterfeit worldviews have often resulted in a “hard” totalitarianism, in which dissenters are dealt with by force. Within the 20th century alone, estimates of the death associated range from about 100 to 170 million. These days, however, the force is softer in nature, though no less real, as dissenting opinions are unable to be voiced, let alone heard. Most of the time you’re not even able to ask the question. Do you question the validity of critical theory as an analytical tool? You’re both arrogant and a racist. Do you question the danger of COVID-19? You’re a science denier, and you’re trying to kill grandma. Do you question the integrity of the 2020 election? You’re anti-democracy at best and an insurrectionist at worst. Do you question whether man-made climate change poses an existential threat to mankind? You’re a conspiracy theorist who’s out to destroy the planet. It seems liberty of conscience has left the building.
Where are we today? I’ll borrow and augment a phrase from Michael O’Fallon and say the war for epistemology is well underway, what’s at stake is the future of the Christian church and civilization as we know it, and much of the church unknowingly finds itself on the wrong side. We are now reaping the consequences of having been asleep on the watch for centuries. Christians, it’s time to pull ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and get back in the game. Faithfulness to our Lord demands it.