Critical theory has in recent years become a major bone of contention in American culture. The term has taken on a life of its own, such that it functions as a kind of shibboleth for both conservatives and progressives. Are you for it or against it? That is the blunt either-or test of loyal membership on both sides of the political divide, typically played out at levels of sophistication dictated by the character limits for a tweet.
In particular, critical race theory has become a focal point for Americans eager to litigate the country’s racial divides and the long shadow of slavery and segregation. Rather like those other buzzwords or phrases — cultural Marxism, white privilege, heteronormativity — the vocabulary has taken on a life of its own. It is often wielded with utter conviction in the battles that take place online among those on both sides who have mastered the moralizing rhetoric without ever having reflected upon the theoretical background from which it emerged.
I am by trade and training an intellectual historian. That means that my primary interest is in how ideas and schools of thought come into being, what their origins are, what claims they make about the world in which we live, and what their significance — cultural, intellectual, historical, ideological — might be. I am not concerned first and foremost with the truth or coherence of the ideas and movements I study so much as with the various aspects of their historical and cultural significance. And so this essay is an attempt to expound the critical theoretical ideas of a few chosen thinkers associated with the early development of critical theory in order to help us engage with more clarity on some of the most pressing issues of our own age.
And what are those issues? An immediate response might well point to the use of critical theory in schools, colleges, public policymaking and the media. That certainly covers some of them, but I want to suggest that there is a much deeper issue in our modern world that makes some knowledge of critical theory important in ways that go beyond what we might call these broadly political concerns. It is the issue of anthropology, the understanding of what it means to be human.
This is where critical theory becomes important. Once we step back from pressing political concerns, it is clear that the critical theorists, from an early figure such as Theodor Adorno to later figures such as Gail Rubin, are all wrestling with the question of what, if anything, it means to be human. Critical theory is, of course, an umbrella term for a variety of different and even incompatible approaches. The Marxism of an Adorno is not the queer theory of a Rubin. But all share this in common: a basic preoccupation with anthropological questions.
This is not to defuse the contemporary political significance of critical theories. All truly critical theories are revolutionary. But it is to set them in the context of our times and to see them as one set of responses to that age-old question: What is man? Is he defined by making and producing or by consuming? Are biological relationships important or not? How has technology changed our understanding of human nature? Is sexual desire part of our core identity? Does the universe have a moral shape? Are we free agents or merely functions of broader cultural forces? And, of course, the pointed question so succinctly expressed by Pilate: What is truth?
If the challenge facing Western society today comes down to basic questions such as these, questions that all touch on the deeper issue of how we define human nature, then it behooves us to be aware of the manner in which the discussion is being pursued.
Understanding the early development of critical theory can help us engage on the issue of using it in schools, colleges, public policymaking and the media.
My own interest in critical theory dates to the 1980s when I was first introduced to aspects of Marxist theory with reference to ancient, and then Reformation, history. At the time, the ideas fascinated me but they seemed to be fading in significance, replaced by the new forms of critical theory emerging under the influence of French thought, specifically that of Michel Foucault, who eschewed the grand schemes that underlay the Hegelian Marxism of earlier critical theorists. And so for some decades critical theory, as I understood it, seemed to be something of historical interest and part of a bygone, late modernist age. And then 2020 happened, Black Lives Matter hit the prime-time headlines, critical race theory gripped the popular imagination and every virtue-signaling Twitter warrior felt the need to opine (in 280 characters or less) in support or opposition to critical theory.
In February 2021 I published an essay, “Evangelicals and Race Theory,” in First Things, a journal of religion and public life, reflecting on the appropriation of critical theory, specifically critical race theory, by elements within the evangelical Protestant world. I connected the contemporary debates taking place in America to the earlier work of a group of European thinkers who were connected to what is known as the Frankfurt School — the name given to those involved with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt in the late 1920s.
The early members of the Frankfurt School were entrenched in the Western philosophical tradition. They were familiar with the work of the German idealists Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling and Georg Hegel. They understood Marxism against this background and had a grasp of the various problems and questions the tradition raised. There is a real irony to advocates of postcolonialism or critical race theory, who criticized my essay, not being aware of this. The notions of historical change, for example, or of political revolution to which they are both beholden are products of this Western thinking. Intellectual expressions of anti-Westernism in the West are deeply indebted to Western patterns of thought and political tastes. Yes, Hegel was by today’s standards a racist and Western chauvinist, but that very critique of Hegel rests upon Hegelian foundations of critical philosophy.
His emphasis upon the historical contingency of thought gave a solid philosophical grounding to the distinction between nature and culture and to the fact that societies change over time. One might describe him as offering a philosophical account of historical consciousness. That has become a commonplace in modern discourse. We are today familiar with the idea that things change over time, that one cannot simply compare the fourth, the 18th and the 19th centuries without taking account of the wider historical contextual differences between them.
The early critical theorists were not simply more self-conscious (and often more sophisticated) in defining themselves with reference to the broader philosophical tradition; they were also addressing a far more substantial question than many of their heirs and successors today. Marx once cited Hegel as saying that all great historical events occur twice, to which he added the sardonic comment that he failed to realize the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. There is a sense in which I believe the same can be said about critical theory. Its origins lie in attempting to explain the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust and the self-inflicted horror which Europe endured in the 20th century. The big questions continued in the years after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when critical race theory was used to make arguments about the long-standing effects of slavery and Jim Crow in the broader cultural mindset of the United States.
Today, however, critical theorists deploy their skills in defending drag queen story hour, the use of preferred pronouns, and pressing for a more inclusive Oscar ceremony. One might be forgiven for thinking that a school of thought that began as a serious attempt to think through issues of life and death, of what it meant to be human and to be free, and which produced dense articles and thick tomes that drew deeply on profound philosophy has degenerated into an idiom that rather neatly expresses the therapeutic concerns of Western capitalism — often via X — and is frequently put to the service of self-indulgence and manufactured victimhood.
The early categories and claims of critical theory are to a large extent the intuitions and instincts of the political and cultural discourse of our age. Social relationships are reduced to matters of power and manipulation. Traditional morality is seen as a smoke screen for one group subordinating another. Stereotypes are understood as turning others into objects. And claims to truth are treated with suspicion. We instinctively ask not what is true, but who is making the truth claim and what ulterior motive they have for so doing.
This is why having some grasp of those theoretical foundations is important. To echo Hegel, if you want to know about a given culture or society, you need to understand the philosophy that it embodies. When you do that, you can also come to see the broader significance and deeper implications of patterns of thought and behavior that might otherwise be hidden from view.
The challenge to which critical theory therefore summons the faithful is to show, not merely to argue, that they have the answers.
We live in a world where politics is polarized. We live in a world where powerful personalities on the right and the left have emerged as messianic figures. We live in a world where it is increasingly clear that arguments purporting to be based on science and reason can be used to curtail personal freedom. The entertainment industry is more and more obviously engaged in shaping cultural values and expectations. Consumption of goods has become the purpose of life. And behind all of these lurks that question of what it means to be human, if indeed it means anything at all.
On all these questions and more, the early Frankfurt School has something to say, and in a typically deeper way than their contemporary successors. The relevance of these questions is thus not in doubt. The pressing issue is the extent to which critical theory can be a useful source for answers.
Even though the Frankfurt School has insightfully framed questions about the human condition and has legitimate concerns about objectifying persons, it does not offer compelling answers to the anthropological problems that it raises. It is clear on what humanity is not — the alienated individuals that capitalism has produced. But what humanity is is not so clear. Indeed, at the end what emerges is something akin to Mephistopheles in Goethe’s great drama, “Faust.” Here is how the demon describes himself to Faust:
“I am the spirit that always negates, and rightly so, since everything that comes into existence is only fit to go out of existence and it would be better if nothing ever got started.”
Sadly, this is the impression that critical theory leaves in our minds. It is clear on what is wrong with society — pretty much everything — but it lacks the ability to articulate in clear terms what should replace it. It ultimately offers no vision of what it means to be human, whether because (as with the Hegelian Marxists) human nature has yet to be realized or, with the more postmodern critical theorists, it is ultimately a meaningless question.
Therein lies its tragedy.
Once we step back from pressing political concerns, it is clear that the critical theorists are all wrestling with the question of what, if anything, it means to be human?
If the approach of critical theory is always to probe behind the constructions of any system of truth to allegedly manipulative cultural structures that naturalize or legitimate such, how can people of faith like myself respond in a manner that is compelling to those tempted by the spirit that negates?
Take the Marxist notion that humanity is something to be realized in the future, where the terms of being a free individual and belonging to a community will be overcome. We can respond by making the claim that that is already realized in the here and now in how we forgive each other, give ourselves in service and love to each other, and realize here on Earth what a nonalienated human community should look like. When I ask God for forgiveness, when I forgive others, I drop my own claims to power. When I love and serve others regardless of the cultural categories of the world around us, I treat them as persons, as subjects, even as I act as a free subject myself. My actions defy the reifications that the world demands. I respond to the claims of critical theory in ways that far surpass in plausibility and power any book I might care to write in their refutation.
Yes, the critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School saw something important, that humanity was not what it should be. They recognized how the forces of modernity, with its industrialization, its bureaucracies, its exaltation of efficiency, productivity, and profit margins, and its addiction to the cheap products of the culture industry ultimately prevented human beings from being truly free. And religious people surely have no quarrel with the central claims of such analysis.
But they see these things as the result not of bourgeois culture created by capitalism but of human fallenness. Thus, they paradoxically see real hope, not in making Earth into heaven, as the Marxists wished, nor in an endless dethroning of the powerful, but in embodying a little bit of heaven on Earth in their congregations and communities. The challenge to which critical theory therefore summons the faithful is to show, not merely to argue, that they have the answers. Critical theory does not so much provide people of faith with a useful tool to think about the world as clarify a set of questions to which we have the answers already, if only we open our eyes to see them.
Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. This essay is adapted from his latest book “To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse” with permission from B&H Academic, © 2024 by Carl R. Trueman.
This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.