I was amazed, though probably shouldn’t have been, upon learning that a candidate for ordination in one of the major historic mainline churches today is required to answer the following question: “What is your understanding of racism and Euro-American privilege”?
What this has to do with the gospel is not immediately apparent. Neither racism nor Euro-American privilege fit into biblical or Christian categories. In fact, as I hope to establish, they’re alien to the gospel. The reason is that they come mostly from secular academia and are intended for purposes incompatible with the Christian witness.
One can see this incompatibility in the implicit rejection of at least two of Judeo-Christian tradition’s most foundational tenets: the belief in heaven and the doctrine of Original Sin.
Beginning in the early 20th century, the West started to shed these and other Christian beliefs in favor of new ones, a process that has only accelerated in recent years.
By eliminating a belief in heaven, the innate human desire to seek and know perfection is redirected away from the heavenly realm and toward building an earthly paradise. The promised perfections of heaven no longer provide the rationale for a well-lived life. Henceforth, all desire for perfection can and indeed must be realized in the here-and-now.
Here’s where Original Sin comes into play. If, as Judeo-Christian tradition maintains, we all fall short of the glory of God, that we are all indeed sinners, and that we live in a fallen world, how is earthly perfection to be achieved? If the vehicle for attaining such perfection is a flawed humanity, how can we expect anything other than a less than perfect result?
As we know, or should, utopian efforts at achieving heaven on earth have proven somewhat less than impressive, to put it mildly. History is littered with failed human schemes aimed at eliminating the most vexing of human problems. Much of contemporary thought, however, has forgotten this history, if ever it knew it.
The problem, in some sense, boils down to expectations. If we work for good, mindful of the timeless frailties of the human condition, we may achieve a measure of good.
But if our expectation is that human schemes can produce perfection this side of heaven, something approximating the demonic will likely follow.
The difference is of kind. While one humbly seeks the good, taking account of the mixed motivations and weaknesses of human nature, the other acts from arrogance, naively or willfully ignorant of both human nature and the history of human activity.
One anticipates future perfection; the other demands it now. One faithfully waits for God to provide, in God’s time and in God’s fashion; the other impatiently relies on novel and ever-changing human schemes to fix what ails us.
One looks to God; the other to the Self.
In a brilliant new book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, British author Douglas Murray argues that the “grand narrative” provided by traditional Judeo-Christian tradition has been effectively replaced in the West by a new “metaphysics,” a “new religion.”
Like the old grand narrative, it too provides meaning and purpose for life, but in a radically new way. “The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice,’ ‘identity politics’ and ‘intersectionalism,’” he writes, “is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.”
The roots of this ideology, however, go back as far as Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. More generally, Rousseau notwithstanding, one could define it as “German idealism.”
The idea is that human society can and will be perfected. Over time, employing the latest insights from reason, science, and political oversight, society will progress to its logical and inevitable endpoint: perfection.
Before this can happen, however, the current and hopelessly imperfect social order must be destroyed. As Rousseau argued, human beings are innately perfect, sinless. It’s society that has produced all that is wrong in this world. But with enlightened management, the latent perfection of humanity cannot help but blossom forth.
Of course, the reason society is imperfect (here’s where Marx comes in) is because of the misuse of power by those who happen to be in charge. For Marx it was capitalism that allowed the powerful to exploit and oppress those lower on the economic stratum.
His solution? To empower the “worker class,” the “proletariat,” to rise up and defeat the forces of evil (the wealthy and powerful). The purity of the proletariat is, curiously, implicitly assumed, as if all victims are necessarily virtuous. In any event, it is they who would lead us to the promised land, eliminating all of life’s injustices. Unfortunately, something wholly unexpected happened on the way to Marx’s certain utopia.
Instead of overthrowing the capitalist system, the “proletariat” embraced it and began to achieve increasing success. This disappointed the Marxist intellectuals to no end. For apparently selfish reasons, the workers had let them down.
So what to do? For it certainly couldn’t be that Marxist analysis is wrong. The solution? Find a new class of victims! Here’s where intersectionality comes in. (This is, by the way, exactly what its early proponents explicitly have argued.)
Intersectionality, broadly defined, is an artificially constructed grouping of all those presumably oppressed by race, class, and gender. Their job? To form a new, politically active victim class prepared to pick up the mantle the earlier proletariat had dropped unceremoniously and tear down the existing social order.
The implication, of course, though largely untested, is that the new society that would replace the old one would be nothing short of heaven on earth.
This is, on many levels, a dangerous game. And a fool’s errand. For one, it ignores the ways in which sin distorts even the best laid plans. Somehow, it is blithely assumed, the victims of today, having once gained power, will be as pure as the wind-driven snow, their judgments Solomonic and unimpeachable.
“[The] most likely explanation of human motivations in the future,” however, writes Murray, “is that people will broadly go on behaving as they have done throughout history, that they will continue exhibiting the same impulses, frailties, passions and envy that have propelled our species up till now.” (These are, by the way, the very spiritual and moral issues traditional Christianity has always sought to address.)
Another problem, and perhaps the most pernicious of all, is that dividing people into sub-groupings of race, class, and gender accomplishes precisely that, division and, inevitably, discord.
In an effort to lay claim to their argument, says Murray, the “woke” or “social justice warriors” must exaggerate their oppressions. And “because the most extreme claims keep getting heard, there is a tendency for people to believe them and their worst-case scenario.”
The social justice critics, in other words, “make their case at its most inflammatory” and thus offer an analysis”‘not in the manner of a critic hoping to improve, but as an enemy eager to destroy.”
Thus their desire is “not to heal but to divide, not to placate but to inflame, not to dampen but to burn.”
“Few people,” he admits, “think that a country cannot be improved on, but to present it as riddled with bigotry, hatred and oppression is at best a partial and at worst a nakedly hostile prism though which to view society.”
“In a society that is alive to its faults [as ours is]…you sow doubt, division, animosity and fear.”
The end result? People come to “doubt absolutely everything,” so much so that they “doubt whether the society they live in is good at all.”
Of course, having effectively dismantled the moral validity of the culture, these social justice critics present themselves “as having all the answers: the grand, overarching, interlocking set of answers that will bring everyone to some perfect place, the details of which will follow in the post.”
More often what is being offered, he argues, is a utopian project that presents itself as “scientific,” but “more closely resembles an advocacy of magic.”
When confronted with intersectionality’s radical critique, Murray urges us to ask this simple, though salient question: “Compared to what?” While simultaneously tearing down the existing structures of Western society, its critics fail to explain what we should compare its sins to, other than some impossible utopia to be established sometime in a never-defined future bliss.
The fact is, Western culture is a remarkable accomplishment that over centuries has provided unparalleled freedom and justice for its citizens. Is it perfect? Of course not. But the many mechanisms inherent within it for attaining the greater good remain in place. (Indeed, its inherent fairness is precisely what gives those who are oppressed the freedom to protest their oppression, a freedom not afforded in most cultures around the world today.)
In sum, the basic problem with a campaign focused on “racism and Euro-American privilege,” as well as the varied critiques of the intersectionality army, is that they ignore, as I’ve said, both the Judeo-Christian doctrine of Original Sin as well as the practical and spiritual implications of a heaven that lies beyond all worldly knowing.
Intersectionality, in the end, effectively ignores the fact that no society, including our own, will ever be perfect, and that the proper impetus for the human heart’s innate desire for perfection lies beyond this earthly veil.
Why the mainline churches fail to see this remains a mystery. Perhaps in their studied naivete they do not wish to admit that the intersectionality project itself would seek to replace the church and deny it its historic mission of tending to the spiritual and moral problems that, at root, are the true source of all societal injustice, the same spiritual and moral problems human beings have always faced, and, for that matter, forever will.