Critical theory hides what little hope it has behind a revolutionary eschaton. Christians, in contrast, can point to the continuing instantiation of Christ’s kingdom through the church. And despite our frequent failures, this work continues, providing the answers to human sorrow and sinfulness that critical theory cannot. Trueman is right that “all of the central challenges in human existence identified by the critical theorists are resolved in Christ.”

No one reads critical theory. It took over anyway.

As Carl Trueman puts it in his new book, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, the ideas of critical theory “are the instincts of the political and cultural discourse of our age.” From the Biden administration to HR departments to corporate media, the idioms and ideas of critical theorists routinely erupt into everyday life.

Critical race theory went from academia to the streets with the Black Lives Matter riots—and then back to the classroom again as activist educators seized the moment. Corporations adopted critical gender and queer theory as they obsessed over pronouns and sponsored the new national holiday that is Pride. There is no getting away from it; as Trueman observes, “You may not be interested in queer theory, but queer theory is interested in you.”

Trueman, an intellectual historian and professor at Grove City College (and full disclosure, a colleague of mine at the Ethics and Public Policy Center) has read the sources of critical theory, and To Change All Worlds is an excellent introduction that walks readers through its development. This is necessarily condensed, but it rarely feels rushed or lacking in essential points. He writes clearly, in contrast to the often-opaque stylings of critical theorists, who, as he notes, seek to discomfit and destabilize through their very writing style.

Starting with Hegel and Marx, Trueman works through the intellectual history of critical theory (especially the Frankfurt School) and out the other side to where we can see the origins of the critical race and gender theories that trouble us today. Trueman is fair to his subjects; he is not polemical nor does he rage against wokeness or cultural Marxism. This restraint makes his verdict on critical theory, and his explanation of why Christianity cannot appropriate or absorb any of its varieties, all the more convincing. Critical theory is fundamentally opposed to Christianity, and has been from its Marxist origins.

Incapable of Offering Solutions

The development of critical theory was prompted by the failures of prior iterations of Marxism, which could not explain why a communist revolution triumphed in Russia while failing in Germany, and later why so much of the German working class favored the Nazis over the communists. Trying to address these challenges led to refinements of the role of theory in revolution, the nature of alienation, false consciousness, reification, and more.

The resulting theories were more sophisticated, and more cultural and psychological than the crude economic obsessions of “vulgar Marxism.” Liberation was no longer just about freeing labor from capital, but about sex, family, race, colonialism, mass media, and, well, anything and everything. Sources of oppression were discovered everywhere, as all aspects of life came under revolutionary inspection.

These critiques sometimes have a point; the world is a target-rich environment for criticism. But critical theory is incapable of offering solutions, for though it “is clear on what is wrong with society—pretty much everything,” it “lacks the ability to articulate in clear terms what should replace it. It ultimately offers no vision of what it means to be human.” Critical theory has no positive vision of the true, good and beautiful, of what it means to be human, or what constitutes a good life. Its normative anthropology is either deferred to the future communist eschaton, or absent altogether.

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