. . . Critical theory can be seen as having its own understanding of creation and reality, its own understanding of sin and the human dilemma, and its own understanding of redemption, history, and eschatology. This is not to say that critical theory is somehow covertly Christian. Rather, it is to suggest that critical theory is—like Marxism in general—parasitic on Christianity. Critical theory—again like traditional Marxism—is a kind of Christian heresy. It takes (even if at times somewhat unintentionally) Christian categories and realities and reshapes and reinterprets them—at times in quite perverse ways.

It seems unlikely to me that every progressive on the street today espousing things that sound like the early critical theorists are sitting around reading Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse (though if they are reading anyone, it is likely Marcuse). But ideas are funny things. They travel, and they get embedded in literature, in pop culture, in popular idioms, and elsewhere. They metastasize.

This is similar to what C. S. Lewis argued in The Abolition of Man. In that classic work, Lewis looked at a common English grammar book of his day, what Lewis called The Green Book. In this grammar book, the authors (almost as an aside) said that the statement “That waterfall is sublime” is not really saying anything about the waterfall. Rather, when someone says, “That waterfall is sublime,” that person is really simply saying something about one’s own feelings. Sadly, the school boy has no idea what is being done to him. He is being “conditioned” by a certain view of the world, a view of the world in which one is unable to come into meaningful contact with the world outside oneself and in which one is also unable to speak meaningfully about that world. This boy thinks he is simply being taught grammar, but really, the young boy is being catechized, in a sense, into a certain fundamental metaphysic and epistemology without knowing it. And this young boy becomes a man who twenty years later is voting a certain way and thinking a certain way and speaking a certain way. He has been—even if he thinks he is “autonomous”—conditioned to think, speak, and act in a particular way.

I turn to Lewis here simply as an illustration. The boy become man is most certainly influenced by The Green Book, even if he has not picked it up in several decades and even if he has not intentionally and seriously reflected on the worldview central to that dusty, old grammar book. But the philosophy of that book, the metaphysical and epistemological vision of the world communicated in that book, is very much alive and well in the mind of Lewis’s boy become man.

I want to argue something similar with the influence of critical theory. Ideas migrate, they travel, they change, and they metastasize. They do not necessarily remain the same. But they do get embedded in a culture, and they have ways of making it into the conscious (and subconscious) of people. It is easy to see conceptual similarity between the ideas of the early critical theorists and the actions and thoughts of certain progressives today. But a clear genealogical connection can be discerned as well—certain people have quite explicitly (and sometimes implicitly) carried the baton of the earlier critical theorists on to today.

So I want to try to articulate that the critical theorists (the early ones) do have an influence today, even if it is a circuitous route that is not always “clean” and easy to trace.

The strongest case for arguing that the influence of our four key and early critical theorists is alive and well today can first and foremost be seen in the influence of one of these men in particular: Herbert Marcuse. James Lindsay likes to say that we are now living in Marcuse’s world. I suspect Lindsay is very much correct. Particularly with Marcuse’s emphasis on sex and on (virtually) unfettered sexual freedom, expression, and experience, it is almost as if Marcuse wrote the script for what has been playing out in my entire lifetime (I was born in 1965).

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