Critical Dilemma
Critical Dilemma: The Rise of Critical Theories and Social Justice Ideology— Implications for the Church and Society
By: Neil Shenvi & Pat Sawyer
“We want to show Christians that the Bible offers better answers to questions about race, class, gender, sexuality, justice, oppression, and a host of other hot-button issues.”
“The attraction of critical theories for Christians lies in the fact that they grasp an aspect of the truth. The problem lies in the fact that they press this to the point where other truths are marginalized, subverted, or even rejected.”
Critical Dilemma is a fantastic book and resource for all people to better understand what critical theory is and how it has subtly (and not so subtly) pervaded our culture and our own beliefs in ways we may not recognize.
It takes similar paths to the book Cynical Theories, but Shenvi and Sawyer approach from a biblical perspective and explain how entertaining critical-theory-based beliefs can hurt the church and ultimately put one at odds with the teachings of the Bible.
Although it’s written to compare critical theory beliefs with Christian beliefs, this book is not necessarily just for Christians. The authors propose that all readers would benefit from seeing this comparison to better understand what a lot of people believe, to help them identify some of their own discomfort with ‘woke’-ness, and because, whether we realize it or not, a great deal of people in the West have “inherited a distinctly Judeo-Christian way of thinking about identity, value, compassion and justice.”
Shenvi and Sawyer have written this book very carefully, intending (and succeeding) in presenting critical contemporary theory (CCT) fairly and accurately to how they present themselves, quoting at length from the most prominent primary sources and offering disclaimers and caveats where needed. They wrote specifically to be long in scholarship and short on criticism, avoiding oversimplification. You won’t find straw man arguments here, though I’m sure there will be reviewers who still claim this as it is popular to do so.
It is not a politically driven book and they don’t broach the threshold of politics in general. Their concern is a theological one. While many may protest that CCT is simply an analytical tool and no one even knows what critical theory is, let alone purposely tout its principles, in reality, it often functions like a worldview which implies a lot of serious theological issues.
“CCT is rightly viewed as a worldview or metanarrative. It is not a narrow analytic tool. It makes sweeping assumptions about human beings, purpose, lived experience, meaning, morality, knowledge, and identity that inevitably bring it into conflict with Christianity.”
This book is also not a trophy for the anti-woke camp of people that may come to read this thinking they’ll feel triumphant in their woke-bashing tirades. To be clear: Shenvi and Sawyer do not even condone a ‘eat the meat, spit out the bones’ approach to CCT, but the heart of this book is the truth.
And the truth is that CCT is attractive to so many people, including Christians, because it touches on true things. We lose our credibility when we take such staunch stances that we are hesitant to give any ground in places that we should. If you’re confused about what ground that is, you won’t be after reading this book.
No reader should read this book and come away feeling completely justified or free of conviction. These issues are too important to take lightly or with a hard heart.
There is so much information in this book that I cannot do it justice in a book review. I’ll touch on a few things, but to truly grasp the logical string of arguments and the intended path the authors have written to take you on, you must read the book yourself.
The term critical theory along with a whole host of other terms in this category can come with a lot of baggage. The authors take care to be clear in what they are and are not referring to when using certain terminology.
Thus, they have chosen the term ‘critical contemporary theory’ as opposed to just ‘critical theory’ in their book. They identify four main ideas that are housed within this term:
the social binary
“society is divided into oppressed groups and oppressor groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, physical ability, age, and a growing list of other identity markers”
“If these claims are to be believed, then the only non-oppressed people in the United States are middle-aged rich, White, heterosexual, cis-gendered, male, able-bodied, non immigrant Christians. Everyone else, upwards of 95% of the US population, is oppressed in some way.”
(Important here is the discussion on intersectionality and how various markers play into someone’s identity and status as oppressed or oppressor)
hegemonic power
“‘The dominant group maintains power by imposing their ideology on everyone… ideology refers to the stories, myths, explanations, definitions, and rationalizations that are used to justify inequality between the dominant and the minoritized groups… the minoritized group accepts their lower position in society because they come to accept the rationalizations for it…’” (Robin DeAngelo)
(Also referenced in this section is the myth of meritocracy, and how hegemony plays into heternormativity and ableism)
lived experience
“Lived experience gives oppressed people special access to truths about their oppression. Therefore, they have the innate authority to speak to these truths, and people from oppressor groups should defer to their knowledge.”
“ [CCT believes] Knowledge is socially constructed; it is generated by particular groups working in particular cultures and therefore reflects the particular conditions of the society that produced it.”
(Also referenced in this section are standpoint theory, false consciousness, and microaggressions)
social justice
“Social justice is principally concerned with the emancipation of marginalized groups out of structural domination, out of oppressive societal systems and institutions… Social justice advocates are concerned about power: who has it, who doesn’t, and why. They use this knowledge to effect social change.”
(They are careful to communicate the different ways this term is used/meant; also referenced in this section is equality vs equity, discrimination vs disparities)
The book is divided into three parts: Understanding, Critiquing, and Engaging.
The chapters within ‘Understanding’ give a run-down of history in terms of slavery and racism, as well as talking about the scholars who have shaped CCT over the years. Then they look at both Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory and what their tenets, central ideas, definitions, and goals are. They wrap-up by identifying the positive things or the ‘truths’ that hide within these concepts.
The chapters within ‘Critiquing’ spend some time looking at Christian Protestant Theology so we know what beliefs we are comparing to. There is a brief disclaimer on what is meant by ‘evangelical’ because these days that term can mean a lot of very different things (don’t even get Kristen Kobes Du Mez started on this…). Then they look at the problems with CCT as a whole, and then with Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory individually. They also tackle the concept of ‘ancestral guilt’ and whether white people as a whole can be (socially or otherwise) ‘charged’ with the sins of our ancestors in terms of racial discrimination and slavery.
The chapters within ‘Engaging’ take everything talked about thus far and then explain how it affects the church body and the unity of God’s people. They include a list of ideas that “will devastate your church.” [i.e. the idea ‘straight white men need to listen’ hurts the church because lived experience becomes the arbiter of truth rather than the gospel and hinders the church’s ability to shepherd their church and offer theological discernment.] Then, unlike a lot of books, they present the reader with a path forward. Action steps to take to have better dialogue, deeper contemplation, and actually do something helpful as an individual and as a church.
An important point the authors make, which is central to any discussion really, is about how we identify what is true.
“Every truth claim must be evaluated on the basis of whether it corresponds to reality and not on the basis of the identity of the person making the claim.”
That goes for people on all sides of these worldviews. We don’t just outright reject any claim made by a ‘woke’ person just because of who they are. That is not how open and honest dialogue happens.
“Christians cannot be so opposed to contemporary critical theory that they deny true claims simply because they sound woke. Not only will that tendency make us liable to the criticism that we value our tribe more than the truth, it will warp our perception of reality.”
So they identify several ‘affirmations’ of critical social theory, things they ‘get right.’ I won’t list all of them but some of them include: “Race is a social construct”; “Colorblindness is not the best approach to racism”; “Some aspects of gender expression or gender roles are socially constructed”; “Hegemonic power exists”; and “Unjust systems can exist.”
“We should be self-critical, open to correction, and willing to grant the valid points that critical social theorists make. We can do all this while being absolutely clear about contemporary critical theory’s many errors and its fundamental incompatibility with Christianity.”
There are many ways in which CCT diverges from Christianity.
Christians operate from a lot of moral or basic norms, but we receive these boundaries or norms by God who is our authority for morality and truth. The idea of lived experience promoting one voice over another in terms of what is true usurps the Bible’s role as final authority in our lives.
Christians identify humanity’s primary problem and that problem’s solution very differently than CCT.
In short, CCT says the main problem in the world is oppression. The solution to that problem is liberating marginalized people from that oppression.
As Christians, we know that the main problem in the world is sin. This sin and rebellion to God actually unifies humanity. We also know that the only solution for this problem is a Savior. Jesus died to pay the cost of our sin, freeing us from the bondage of our sin and making a way for people from all tribes and tongues to spend eternity unified with a holy God in heaven.
Sin manifests itself in oppression and injustice. But if we misidentify the problem, we misidentify solutions, and then we aren’t really helping anyone.
I like how Shenvi and Sawyer point out the logical inconsistency of picking and choosing parts of critical theory to promote. Some people may say that they just align with some of critical race theory or whatever Black Lives Matter means, but that they would still believe that transgenderism is outside of God’s design (or whatever mixed bag one may claim).
But CRT and BLM (if you read their tenets on their website) demand that all of these pieces (CCT, CRT, Queer Theory) are interlocking pieces to the puzzle. They require dependence on each other.
This is why ‘eat the meat, spit out the bones’ is not a valid method of interacting with critical theory. I was a little taken aback at this claim by the authors because this method made sense to me as Mama Bear Apologetics used it. But as they laid out their arguments here, I understand their adamancy for Christians to reject CCT.
They change the analogy from eating the meat and spitting out the bones to saying the meat we’re starting with is poisoned and one can’t simply spit out the poison.
“Telling an unprepared Christian to eat the meat and spit out the bones of CRT is like handing your kids a bowl of Skittles mixed with colorful cyanide pills. While it is possible to separate the poison from the candy, no responsible parent would take that chance.”
More and more I feel like so many Christians are ill-equipped to navigate the cultural minefield of morality and social and sexual ethics. Because the best lies have an element of truth. But a half-truth is still a lie. Even if there are elements of truth to the CCT worldview, we are not wrong to reject it. Those truths will not get lost. Those truths still reside under the umbrella of Christianity (God’s Truth) where we must plant our feet.
This book is an essential resource to help people understand that which is hiding in plain sight, that which masquerades as ‘no big deal’ or ‘no one really thinks that’ but in reality is everywhere.
“most evangelicals are not equipped to distinguish between the manifold, fundamental errors of CRT and its usually vague and unspecified positive elements…the doctrinal decline [is] unavoidable when someone embraces the basic outlook of CRT.”
“The average person in your church is not being influenced by the law reviews of Kimberle Crenshaw or the postructuralist theorizing of Michel Foucault. Instead, they’re being influenced by the tweets of their favorite lifestyle blogger or last night’s monologue from The Daily Show. The ideas of contemporary critical theory are absorbed via platitudes and slogans that gain the status of conventional wisdom through repetition, not through careful analysis.”
They spend time going through 8 of these ‘slogans’ that have become popular and normalized. This section may be helpful for some readers to identify areas they have begun to compromise God’s Word and Truth.
There are many takeaways from this book, but one of the main ones is to consider the beliefs of CCT and how they would play out in the church. Think about whether they would unify or divide.
“CRT can lead Blacks to be suspicious of Whites as a matter of rule, believing that every White person has an asterisk beside them signaling they cannot be fully trusted. It can lead Whites to be suspicious that Blacks are always thinking negatively about them. It can lead Blacks to feel hyper-visible in every situation, believing that they are constantly being judged. It can lead Whites to think they always have to approach Blacks with kid gloves lest anyone get offended.”
The authors hit on a lot of the feelings and struggles that I’ve had surrounding these topics. As a follower of Christ, I know my charge is to love all people because we are all created in God’s image. And it’s hard to walk that path when the definition of ‘love’ or what is ‘loving’ differs so drastically from one person to the next.
It’s hard when we’re being bombarded with accusations, admonitions, protests, boycotts, labels, assumptions, and the like. When we speak, we are wrong; when we are silent, we are wrong; when we lament about those two things, we’re not understanding. It’s complex and unstable.
I want to be sensitive to the unique hardships others have endured that I have never and might never experience. But the way these issues are handled these days really forces people’s hands to choose between two things they don’t actually have to.
We can uphold God’s Word AND love others.
“The notion that someone can disagree with another’s ideas and/or behavior and at the same time genuinely care about their person and flourishing is real.”
“Biblical love is always rooted in reality.”
“It is doubtlessly true that some Christians are, in fact, bigoted in the traditional sense, meaning that they have a deep-seated, immovable sinful antagonism toward some specific group of people. However, it’s also true that we can uphold a traditional biblical sexual ethic not out of hatred or fear, but because we recognize that God’s design for everything, including gender and sexuality, is good. Any rejection of this design will dishonor our Creator and will ultimately hurt human beings.”
It is essential for the church to not play into culture’s false dichotomy of God’s Word vs loving people. Reflection and examination and repentance are also essential, but when we discern the truth, we need to hold fast to it, not with our backs turned away from those who disagree, but facing them with the invitation to join us because we genuinely care for them.
Sidenote:
If you come to this book with a belief that the Bible is false and untrustworthy, you won’t really find a case to defend the Bible itself. The authors write from the basis that it is true and trustworthy. There are many other resources that can travel that path with you if you need to start there first. In fact, Neil Shenvi wrote the book Why Believe? that addresses those concerns with the same academic and logical writing voice you find here and I would highly recommend it.
Recommendation
I’ve read a lot of books on these topics, some Christian, some secular, and this is one of the longer ones, but it is one of the best ones. The writing voice is clear, logical, compassionate, and focused. The authors don’t make sweeping statements that are hard to defend. They carefully address specific claims in an intellectually honest way.
[Many of the books they reference in their book are ones that I’ve read. I’ve included a list with links to my own reviews of them below. Following that are a bunch more quotes from the book that stuck out to me.]
These topics are complex and often delicate because behind the ideologies are real people with real hurts. The authors take care to take on ideas, not destroy people. But because culture has tried to attach these ideas to people as identities and core facets of themselves, it is undoubtedly going to still cause some emotions for a lot of readers because they can’t help but feel personally attacked.
I hope that readers can hear the compassion in the voices of the authors and know that their heart is for truth and for people. Because those are the only two things on this earth that will last forever. It is not a destructive book to tear everything down. It is a book to offer honest critique to public ideas and help people understand a complex and manipulative worldview that influences a lot of people and by default, society at large.
You may want to just ignore all of this ‘critical theory stuff’ or you may just be angry that someone would even think to write this book. But I urge you to read it and consider what Shenvi and Sawyer have to say.
I’ll leave you with these two quotes that capture their heart for kindness and truth and the urgency for the gospel message.
“Too many of us in the anti-woke camps are attempting to perform open-heart surgery with a hand grenade rather than a scalpel. If we sweep harmless or even valid ideas into the trash bin, it will damage our credibility. And it should go without saying that if we throw around the ‘heretic’ label carelessly, we will not only be taken less seriously, but we will be guilty of a grievous sin.”
“The solution is not to divide the body of Christ into the Woke and the Anti-woke! The solution is to call everyone back to Scripture— to tell a better story, the old, old story of Christ’s love for sinners and his redemption of people from every tribe, and nation, and tongue… if we lose the gospel, we lose everything.”
Books Referenced in Critical Dilemma That I’ve Also Read:
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman (He wrote the foreword to Critical Dilemma)
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting a Generation For Failure by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff
Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell
The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby
Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Kobes Du Mez
How to Fight Racism by Jemar Tisby
Reforming Criminal Justice by Matthew T. Martens
Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier
Tactics by Greg Koukl (on my TBD)
The Rise of Victomhood Culture by Bradley Campbell
The Reason for God by Tim Keller
More Quotes
“The Bible is radical not because it abolishes hierarchies, but because it redefines them in terms of love, service, and sacrifice.”
“If we commit to seeing all theological truth claims as mere bids for power, what claims will be left? What doctrines cannot be deconstructed?… If sola scriptura is replaced by sola lived experience, we’ll be left with the twenty-first century American version of the book of Judges, in which ‘everyone did what was right in his own eyes’” (Judges 17:6)
“it’s exceptionally hard to draw any firm ethical lines once all lines are theorized as the repressive products of a patriarchal, cisgender, heterosexist society.”
“One of the major demographic predictors of an individual’s success is their family structure— that is, whether they were raised by two married biological parents. Study after study shows that this family background is strongly correlated with the avoidance of negative outcomes, including teen pregnancy, incarceration, behavioral and emotional problems, drug use, and abuse, neglect, and mistreatment. Yet CCTs, taken as a whole, don’t often comment on or incorporate into their analysis the tremendous positive role that family structure plays on life outcomes, except to problematize the heteronormative or patriarchal or Western assumptions that are supposedly baked into the nuclear-family model.”
“We care very little about how Christians build political coalitions and far more about how CCT will affect interpersonal relationships, especially within the church.”
“This ideology will have devastating consequences. A Christian simply cannot walk into church each Sunday, look around, and label people ‘Oppressor Christian’ or ‘Oppressed Christian’ based on nothing more than their inborn physical characteristics. This attitude flies directly in the face of New Testament teaching and makes a mockery of the unity that Jesus purchased for his people on the cross.”
“[Non-Christians and Christians alike] should recognize the kind of paranoia, resentment, and enmity that CCT will create when it is whole-heartedly embraced.”
“Even from a secular perspective, it seems tremendously unwise to jettison legal framework that produced tremendous racial progress in favor of a dubious, controversial, and untested theory that will haphazardly deconstruct foundational legal norms and principles in the name of liberation.”
“Christians must insist that every doctrine should ultimately be judged on the basis of whether it is taught by Scripture, not on the basis of the supposed privilege or oppression of its proponents.”
“If we see a man dying of pneumonia, we might deplore bystanders who pass by on the other side of the street doing nothing. But their neglect does not mean that we ought to amputate his arm just so that we can say, ‘I tried.’ In the same way, those who are most zealous for ‘racial justice’ ought to be equally zealous to identify the right problem and implement the best solution.”
“All of us tend to listen to like-minded voices and to block out those who disagree with us. Groupthink is real. But CCT makes people particularly susceptible to echo chambers because it can dismiss counter arguments as mere mechanisms for oppression.”
“The central question is never Am I comfortable? But Am I honoring God in how I approach this issue?”
“A solely negative critique of CCT will not be as effective as a positive alternative. The Bible offers us rich theological resources for thinking about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and politics. Silence on these issues in order to “just preach the gospel” can leave Christians vulnerable to secular voices that offer them false and deeply unbiblical perspectives. Instead, we should apply biblical categories and principles to these topics, with the confidence that Scripture is sufficient to address them.”
**Received a copy of this book from Harvest House Publishers in exchange for an honest review.**
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