The News, Postmodernism and Faith

Last week our Prime Minister was asked if new US President Jo Biden was “woke”. His response “There's nothing wrong with being woke” attracted attention for many reasons. I suspect that none of his Conservative Leader predecessors would have described themselves as “woke”, and probably only one, possibly 2, previous Labour Party leaders would have embraced the term. 

I have been spending much of my spare time over recent weeks mugging up on the origins of “woke”, postmodernism, Critical Theories and why Liberals and “woke” hate each other. 

Postmodernism 

Postmodernism brought about the most significant change in thinking for over 300 years, but no one is able to clearly define it. The change seems to have originated with French philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in the 1960’s who proposed a totally different worldview changing the way people thought, spoke and related to each other. 

Foucault and Derrida led a, largely theoretical, philosophical movement which focussed on endless criticism of past ways of thinking including old belief systems, science and religions. There was an overall objective of seeking to dismantle or “deconstruct” the previous “Modern” way of doing things. Scepticism reigned. 

Applied Postmodernism 

By the early 1990’s a new generation of activists were applying postmodernist principals in practical ways. A diverse set of highly politicised and actionable theories developed from postmodernism. This became known as Applied Postmodernism. The aim was to reconstruct society in line with an ideology which became known as Social Justice. No longer were they talking about how things “are” but how things “ought to be”. 

As an aside, I need to point out that postmodern Social Justice was not the same as the social justice most of us, including most Christians, had held to be a tenant of traditional Christianity. In Matthew 25 Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and goats and emphasises the practical aspects of Christian discipleship. Concern for the poor and disadvantaged was central to the outworking of personal salvation, found through faith in Christ’s death and resurrection. Sadly, that social justice was a million miles from the new postmodern Social Justice. 

The starting point of what came to be known as Theory was the understanding that objective reality cannot be known; “truth” is constructed by societies. So “truth” is specific to a particular culture and knowledge is used to protect and advance the interests of the privileged. 

Theory has continued to develop so that new areas of study have started within Universities providing numerous opportunities for criticising existing social arrangements and proposing new forms of Social Justice in accordance with Theory. So, areas of studying Theory included Postcolonialism, Black Feminism, Intersectional Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory and Disability and Fat Studies, all seeking to change the world we live in. 

The Amateur Christian used to think that it was the job of lecturers to present lectures in an impartial manner pointing out alternative ideas and the strengths and weaknesses of a case. However, it is important to note that Theory is never taught in this way. Theory (or Social Justice) is taught as a moral crusade, a cause to be followed with its basic tenants unquestioned. More on this later. 

Basic Principals 

Let me explain what I mean by quoting and briefly summarising two principles of Applied Postmodern thought: 

• The postmodern knowledge principle – a belief that it is impossible to obtain objective knowledge or truth. All knowledge is constructed by society. The postmodern approach denies that objective truth comes from evidence, hence a deep scepticism of science, instead truth comes from what a society chooses to agree.
• So, for example, a society may agree that gender is a social construction, not an absolute truth. With this in mind it is not unreasonable for a person with a male body to describe himself as a woman. So, we have the roots of transgenderism.
• Last week I viewed an interesting Channel 4 documentary film Are Women the Fitter Sex investigating the different responses to medication between males and females. Clearly there is a need to prescribe differently according to the patient’s sex. However, in this brave new world, should medicine be prescribed in accordance with sex, or gender and which counts as reality?
• A second example is that of Rachel Dolezal a university lecturer and Social Justice campaigner. Dolezal had two white parents and was undoubtedly white genetically, however she took on the identity of a black woman for many years until she was found out. Interestingly she continued to claim that she was black with a white body, the colour of her skin was not what mattered but how she chose to self-identify.
• The postmodern political principle - a belief that society is formed of systems and hierarchies of power which decide what may be known and how. So, for example it is often said that “history is written by the victors”. This is a splendid excuse to dismiss the truthfulness of any history. But is it true? How about these examples:

 Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (431 BCE) was an Athenian’s account of a long war (431–404 BCE) between Athens and Sparta. The Spartans won. Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) was not written by one of the victorious barbarians. Friedrich Meinecke’s The German Catastrophe (1946) was a hugely influential work, nationally and internationally, by a German thinker grappling with his homeland’s disastrous record. American examples would include the many histories written by southerners after the Civil War and the outpouring of post-Vietnam War books by U.S. historians. 

Campaigners came to understand that knowledge came from power which occurs through people talking about things. Thus, if you change the way people talk about things you change the power relationships. So, we have come to see in recent years: 

• Changes in the meanings of words e.g., social justice, gender, black, gay
• An intense scrutiny of language relating to identity often known as political correctness.
• Control over those holding contrary views resulting in “no-platforming” and “cancelling”. Victims of this have included feminist Germain Greer, gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, and Christian evangelist Franklin Graham. All of these had openly supported the concept of “free speech,” a heresy that had to be shut down by university student unions, as well as local councils.

 Critical Race Theory 

In recent months there has been much discussion of Critical Race Theory with the UK Government making it clear that it should be seen as illegal for teachers to teach it in schools. None the less it is an important area of study influencing most humanities subjects studied in today’s Universities and as a basis for Diversity Training by many larger employers. Further information may be found here, and I will attempt to summarise: 

In ‘Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,’ 2001 Delgado and Stefancic introduced critical race theory based around the following premises: 

Racism is ordinary, not aberrational – everyone is a racist 

Racism serves important purposes. 

Race and races are products of social thought and relations [and] categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient’. 

Intersectionality: ‘No person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity […] everyone has potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties and allegiances’ 

More recently, Bonilla-Silva in ‘More than Prejudice: Restatement, Reflections, and New Directions in Critical Race Theory,’ 2015 has redeveloped the tenets of CRT to the following: 

Racism is ‘embedded in the structure of society’.

Racism has a ‘material foundation’. 

Racism changes and develops over different times. 

Racism is often ascribed a degree of rationality. 

Racism has a contemporary basis. 

Campaigners for Social Justice have continued to use CRT as the basis for thought over recent years and as pointed out earlier it has become an area of political conflict. When the activist campaigners claim to be seeking a fairer world why should this be a problem? 

My understanding was that the most helpful way of dealing with racial issues was to seek to treat all men equally, to be “colour blind” valuing all men as created equal by our loving God. 

Sadly, this approach has been totally rejected by advocates of CRT who have followed the path of intersectionality.

Intersectionality 

This concept follows from the idea that a person my have more than one identity and suffer discrimination or disadvantage for both. So, a black woman may experience a different loss of power in comparison with a white woman. 

This leads to complicated debates about the relative disadvantages of different group identities: 

• Light skinned black people are privileged over dark-skinned black people.
• Asians and Jews are not seen as lacking privilege due to the economic success of their peoples.
• Apparently trans men have now got male privilege!

 CRT is a complicated hierarchy of relative privilege with positions in the pecking order always moving and a struggle for position being the very essence of how to relate. 

Liberal race campaigners such as Martyn Luther King would be so saddened by the new campaigners as they sow division and hatred among, particularly, disadvantaged people who have enough problems to deal with already. One identity competing with another.

King had a vision for a society where character and not race was important. 

“I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.…I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream that…one day right there in Alabama, little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”          Martin Luther King 1963 

King’s vision of people joining together in a “colour-blind” world in peace and harmony has sadly been rejected by todays Social Justice campaigners who prefer a doctrine of division.  

Trevor Phillips was appointed the first chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission by Tony Blair and as such was seen as the nation’s chief upholder of racial fairness and enemy of racial discrimination from 2003-2012. 

Phillips had been among 24 public figures who wrote to the Guardian in 2019 declaring their refusal to vote for Labour because of its association with anti-Semitism. Many regard the Labour response at that time as trivial. 

In March 2020 The Times newspaper reported the anti-racism campaigner was being investigated. Phillips was then suspended from the Labour Party over allegations of Islamophobia after expressing concerns about Pakistani Muslim men sexually abusing children in northern British towns. 

Trevor Phillips was a black member of the Liberal establishment campaigning for a just and peaceful society. It is the new postmodern Social Justice that has brought division and conflict against a man who had been seen as one of the chief advocates for social justice over the last 20 years. 

Standpoint Theory 

Pluckrose and Lindsay in Cynical Theories explain how “Standpoint theory is at the roots of identity politics and it is the main thing that fundamentally differentiates it from the liberal civil rights movements”. Standpoint theory suggests that each person has their own standpoint from which they view the world and that this heavily influences how one person understand the viewpoint of another. 

Particularly, privilege leads to “blindness,” so in a multi-coloured world, the more privileged a person the fewer colours they see. With each oppression further colours are revealed. A person with many oppressed identities such as a gay, disabled, black, woman may experience many problems which are unseen by a white man. However, it is taught, the oppressed are in a favourable position in that they understand their own and the privileged persons experience, their eyes are not blinded as the privileged person’s are. 

Furthermore, the knowledge produced by dominant groups, including science and reason, is seen as the product of their cultural traditions and is not deemed superior to the knowledge produced by other cultural traditions, including experience, emotions, cultural beliefs, traditions and religions. This idea from Kristie Dobson, a prominent black feminist author does not help one little bit towards healing divisions between groups, it doesn’t seek to. 

Christian Perspective 

It seems to me that the whole objective of postmodern Social Justice is to establish difference and engage in conflict between identity groups on a never-ending basis. Furthermore, no longer is the place of the individual, with their personal strengths and weaknesses, good and bad points a consideration, but everything is subservient to identity group characteristics. Wo betide you if you fail to match the characteristics expected of your identity group! 

The Amateur Christian is depressed at the absence of hope, at the lack of aspiration for anything better in what would appear to be a secular doctrine of despair. 

From a Christian perspective, it seems to me that the absence of absolute truth is central. The suggestion that all knowledge is created by a society removes from mankind the ability of persons to understand, reason and “know” truth with impartiality. It also seeks to undermine much of science, or at least to hold it as no more “true” than cultural beliefs held by those from a non-scientific culture. As Christians we do believe that we know truth from the Bible and also have had truth revealed to us in Jesus Christ, “the way, truth and the life”. 

Secondly, the principal that power decides which truths are known is a sad comment on how the world is being viewed by these people. For nearly 2000 years Christians, have travelled the world to places where they have no power, sharing the truth of Jesus. Amazingly, and by the power of God, not man, truth has been accepted and peoples lives changed such that today a third of the world is nominally Christian. People have come to understand truth irrespective of the power they possess and indeed God frequently chooses to use the weak and not the strong. 

Thirdly, an analysis that condemns the world to perpetual conflict over identities, might happen, however this is far from God’s design for mankind. James the Apostle reminds us of the teaching of Jesus to love our neighbour when he says “it is good when you obey the royal law as found in the Scriptures: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” But if you favour some people over others, you are committing a sin. “. Far from life being a competition between identities, God’s way is for it to be a cooperation between all, not favouring one identity over another. 

I do believe that God has something to say to us today about the times in which we live. I intend to continue my studies in this area, and you may expect further articles shortly. 

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