Are the people from which CT* in general and CRT** in particular originated credibly Christian?
*CT = Critical Theory
**CRT = Critical Race Theory
The Facts: Critical Theory
Let’s begin by excerpting the top-level summary from the Britannica site:
Critical theory, Marxist-inspired movement in social and political philosophy originally associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. Drawing particularly on the thought of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, critical theorists maintain that a primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help overcome the social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed. Believing that science, like other forms of knowledge, has been used as an instrument of oppression, they caution against a blind faith in scientific progress, arguing that scientific knowledge must not be pursued as an end in itself without reference to the goal of human emancipation. Since the 1970s, critical theory has been immensely influential in the study of history, law, literature, and the social sciences.
Let’s pause to focus on the first word to be associated with Critical Theory: Marxist. Marxism is an atheistic, materialist ideology that has delivered over 100 million corpses and billions of ruined lives in its bloody pursuit of utopia. In a sane world my work would be done now. But, it is not, so on I go.
I have focused on two people: Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse to represent Critical Theory because they are cited early in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as founders of CT.
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer
A good summary of Horkheimer’s views on religion can be found in this paper (emphasis added).
As such, this study is a content analysis of the critical theory of religion of Max Horkheimer, the Director of the so-called Frankfurt School, which was developed throughout almost all of his writings and later interviews from 1926 to 1973, the year of his death. According to Horkheimer, religion is the expression of human anguish and suffering that contains an implicit if not explicit indictment of the existing antagonistic social totality. Religion thereby also gives expression to the human longing for that which is beyond the existing socio-historical totality. Rather than projecting this cry of agony and hope of a better future society or life into the abstract form of a God, Horkheimer materialistically redirects such religious expression back to the economic mode of social production and the social structures from which such suffering comes. Religion as the expression of human misery thereby becomes a practical historical force of resistance against all forms of social exploitation and domination in the hope of creating a better, more reconciled future society.
It is the conclusion of this study that Horkheimer’s dialectical, materialistic critical theory of religion can help reconcile the modem antagonistic dualism between the secular and the religious dimensions of human consciousness and action through the dialectical negation of religious longing for the totally Other into a critical social theory and praxis that seeks a more free, just, rational, and happy future society.
Note that while Horkheimer acknowledged the power inherent in religion, his intention was to redirect and utilize that power to advance the atheistic materialism of his Marxist ideology.
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
First note that this is not the first time that I have discussed Herbert Marcuse, as he is the originator of “Repressive Tolerance.” Note that Marcuse considered Christianity to be a fundamental source of oppression that had to be destroyed to enable the revolution.
And, if necessary, education and indoctrination must be supplemented by revolutionary violence. Marcuse is quite clear about this. He refuses to posit a moral equivalence between the violence perpetrated by classical liberals and the violence committed by subversives. The former is evil; the latter is justified. In fact, he argues that since history is not made by ethics, ethics are of no importance. In other words, might makes right. The ends justify the means. He writes that oppressed minorities — and this means people who lack wealth or prestige or acceptance — have the right to extralegal violence if they exhaust all legal means. No one has a right to judge them immoral or unethical. (Think: Black Lives Matter and the call to kill cops.) Marcuse offered a program for annihilating Christian culture and classical liberalism and replacing it with Libertarian Marxism. He had takers.
Those takers became college professors and journalists and foundation presidents and “community organizers” and artists and musicians. They have wielded massive influence on the West from 1960-2016. Their vision is the commanding social vision of our time, working out its implications right before our eyes.
We should not be surprised that an atheist Marxist materialist would seek to annihilate Christian culture. However, you may be surprised to learn that far beyond the “college professors and journalists and foundation presidents and “community organizers” and artists and musicians” many pastors who call themselves “Christian” support this same godless revolution from within the church.
The Reformed Sojourner 