If Christianity does not authentically inform your entire worldview, including the criteria by which you judge the most important things of this world, then how can you say that you’re any different than the unbeliever? 

“Hi, my name is Dr. Benjamin L. Mabry, and I’m a Critical Theorist.” It sounds to many ears like the kind of thing I should be confessing to a pastor or therapist, but in fact there’s nothing anti-Christian about Critical Theory. It is probably the lack of Critical Theory that is more problematic than its presence. The reason most people resist this conclusion is that they’re used to people using Critical Theory to push divisive, racist blame rhetoric, and therefore associate an important science with race-baiting and political opportunism. Critical Theory is one of the core sciences of philosophy, and the neglect of critical theory leads only to confusion about the most important issues facing orthodox and faithful Christians today.

Let’s start with the most basic question. What is Critical Theory? Critical Theory is so basic to philosophy that it doesn’t need to be named in most of the Western tradition. It is the science of criteria for judgment. Critical Theory became important in the 19^th Century as the fundamental questions about the criteria of definitions were questioned by scientific worldviews that tried to reduce reality to physical bodies or sense perceptions. Philosophers struggled over the fundamental question of Critical Theory: how to define a thing, and on what basis can a judgment be called true or false. Before the members of the “Frankfurt School” were ever born, philosophers like Edmund Husserl wrote volumes over the questions of justifying their definitions for the basic elements of reality. Catholic philosopher Max Scheler argued for a return to the basic sciences of Man, ethics, and virtue, which built on Husserl’s principles to clarify and sometimes correct the definitions inherited from the Christian medieval tradition. The modern-day dispute over the definition of a human being, of Man and Woman, is not unique to our decadent generation.

Why do criteria matter? Let me use an example. When “deconstructionists” criticize the Word of God on the basis of so-called justice or love, their thought process is to judge the Word on the basis of their pre-existing definitions of justice and love. Where do they get their definitions of justice or love, however? They get their definitions of those things from the culture in which they grew up. The criteria they use to define those words are the culturally contingent assumptions, prejudices, and stereotypes of the society, time, and culture of the present day. Deconstructionist arguments basically begin with a set of modernist prejudices, which they use as criteria to define justice and love, which they the use as criteria to judge the Word of God as false. It rests on the assumption that the ideological fashions and opinions of the current time are the final word on the ultimate questions of life, and not merely the fickle and silly vacillations of popular opinion and elite interests in the moment. Is it not absurd to try to judge God and his timeless, ageless, universal Word by the unserious, erratic, temporary fashions of the present age? Isn’t it more rational to define justice and love based on something eternal like the Word of God, and then judge this shifting sands culture against the Solid Rock?

Critical Theory gets its dirty reputation primarily from the dominant “Frankfurt School” of the post-World War period. Herbert Marcuse, most famously, used the techniques of Critical Theory to weaponize the definitions of words for the benefit of his Communist agenda. Whereas Max Scheler attempted to derive objective meanings for value-words like justice, nobility, and utility, Marcuse invented the notion of “transvaluation,” in which the definitions of value-words were inverted in order to pervert the moral order of society.

Why do high-school television dramas make the athletic, beautiful, or congenial characters into moral monsters, and only ascribe moral goodness to unattractive, unathletic, and socially maladapt characters? This association of natural gifts with moral depravity is a “revenge” that TV writers play on the people whom they envied in high school. By tracing the criteria that they use to judge their characters, they reveal key characteristics of their worldview. The typical writer of such a show was probably middle class but felt poor in relation to the popular kids. They envied the kinds of people they demonize in their stories but were probably ignored rather than tormented. The characteristics which they pretend to have are transferred to the heroes: intelligence, disdain for conformity, a secret hero complex or for females a secret beauty complex. However, the key tell is the way their negative attributes, like abrasiveness or antisociality, are transvalued into a false virtue of honesty or resistance to injustice.

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