Reclaiming the Pre-Political

Two Carls, Christianity, and Getting Unstuck from the Neo-Marxist Matrix

Dec 13, 2023

Carl Trueman in his book “The Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self” makes a comment about Karl Marx that has plagued my mind for the last year or so. He writes that Marx “abolished the pre-political”. What he means by this is that Marx did not simply want to explain a particular social or political phenomenon, but that he sought to redefine the human experience to be solely and predominantly about a power struggle between classes of people. In Marx’s reimagining of the world, nothing sacred or transcendent exists before, above, or outside of this class-struggle paradigm. All of life is to be understood by categorizing people into two groups that exist in a persistent state of conflict: oppressor and oppressed. Today, if you look closely, Marx’s paradigm appears omnipresent in our modern discourse. The narratives surrounding white and black, Israel and Hamas, man and woman all get hijacked and eclipsed by this oppressor/oppressed metanarrative. Binaries have become quite unfashionable and “problematic” in our modern imagination. But for all the endless discussion of spectrums that are “complex” and demand “nuance” and “context”, Marx’s binary appears to be an uncomplicated and unquestionable exception.

For Christians this is a real problem considering the realest and truest things that we believe are manifestly pre-political. Truth, goodness, and beauty are transcendent realities that inform the seen and tangible situations of our world. This is why MLK Jr.’s words had such wide and strong appeal when he said things like “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” To King, there were clearly universal, transcendent truths that pre-existed the political and even the historical blemishes of slavery and Jim Crow. He believed these universal truths were capable of reshaping and reforming the political situation of his day. He also located some of these objective moral principles in the founding documents of our nation and believed that rediscovering them could help America break free from a paradigm that categorizes people by their skin color. I’m afraid that many people today view King’s words as either outdated and irrelevant or simply a convenient manipulation of the oppressor class to keep oppressed people down and without power.

For example, consider that many major universities today provide what are called “Critical Whiteness Studies” courses. The University of Minnesota describes their CWS course as “Understanding the invisible structures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege, and its effect on education.” I usually try to avoid the “what if the shoe was on the other foot” game, but I think it may be useful here. Imagine for a moment that a major university created a critical “Blackness” or “Brownness” or “Yellowness” studies class and branded the class in a toxic way as Minnesota did above. The course would be canceled in minutes and the professors and deans responsible for its creation would be banished to St. Helena. To be clear, I am not arguing that historical racism does not influence our political and social life today, I firmly believe it does. What I am arguing is that critical whiteness studies courses branded in this way only make sense and are only culturally appropriate within a neo-Marxist oppressor/oppressed binary. The minute one starts to think outside of this binary and considers something universally true, like MLK’s words that our character matters more than our skin color, grouping people and attributing toxic traits to them based on their skin color no longer makes sense and can be seen for what it truly is: regressive at best and outright racist at worst.

Consider this alongside Oxford dictionary’s recent augmentation of the definition of the word “racism”, it states racism is “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.” (Emphasized is the augmented portion of this newer, revised definition published in 2020). Consequently, you will find many people today who understand racism to be one-directional, for instance that black folks cannot truly be racist towards white folks, and the reverse of this being a fundamental assertion of the “anti-racist” movement: that white folks can’t not be racist. This reimagining of racism is a product of the abolition of the pre-political. When there is no universal, objective morality that guides and informs social life, we end up stuck in the neo-Marxist matrix. Everyone is either a colonizer or a de-colonizer, a settler or a native, an oppressor or oppressed. We are spinning our wheels in mud; how do we get unstuck?

Carl Trueman in the forward to a new book about critical theory titled “Critical Dilemma” begins the book by discussing heresy. I want to quote him at length here but take a look and you will understand why,

“Take Pelagianism, the fifth-century heresy that tended in some of its more extreme forms to reduce God’s grace to God’s law. One of the important questions it asked was that of the moral responsibility of human beings. That is a question that no true Christian can avoid. And the answer it gave accented human responsibility. It did so in a way that tended to annihilate the biblical notion of God’s grace, but nobody could deny that some emphasis on human responsibility was important if the Bible’s teaching was to be taken seriously. The problem was not that the Pelagians saw human responsibility as important. It was that they emphasized it in a manner that distorted or displaced all other truths relevant to the question of the divine-human relationship. Why do I begin the forward to a book on critical theory with this reference to heresy? Because I see a similar phenomenon has emerged within Christian circles with regard to the various methodologies grouped together under the umbrella term critical theory, and most specifically, with regard to critical race theory. 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.” (Emphasis mine)

My pastor once told me that “heresy is always the over-emphasis of one truth”. The first step to getting unstuck from the oppressor/oppressed matrix is to consider Trueman’s warning and to be able to both acknowledge the misplaced truths that critical theory over-emphasizes, and be able to place them into a broader, truer biblical framework. You may be thinking, this sounds nice but how do we apply this to everyday, real-life conversations with our friends, family or even people at work?

Dr. John Seel from Covenant Theological Seminary recently did an interview with Aaron Renn and discussed cultural engagement challenges for Christians in our post-Christian culture. Seel argues for a three-step approach to rehabilitating our modern discourse: elevate the conversation, reframe the conversation, and ground the conversation. One way to elevate the conversation is by remembering a simple truth: that if politics is downstream from culture, then culture is downstream from religion. This means that all of the most important questions are religious or ethical questions: “what is good?” or “what is true?”. Now more than ever this is true, for example Ron DeSantis governor of Florida wants to “protect kids” from LGBTQ indoctrination in schools, and Gavin Newsom governor of California wants to “protect kids” from not being able to express their “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” even if that means “protecting” them from their own parents. This begs the question “what does it mean to protect a child?”. Another good example of elevating the conversation is introducing Trueman’s insight about Marx and heresy; it lifts the conversation above the Marxist frame and helps us see a deeper flaw within it. We need to elevate the conversation from only the political/cultural to the religious or moral root issues at play. When we do that, we can then reframe the conversation. Often Christians assume that the person they are talking to is operating in the same frame as they are, and that is often not true. For example, in conversations about sexuality we are usually dealing with two very different frames. In one frame, sex means something and is for something and has some deeper, sacred, cosmological purpose. Or we could be talking with someone who frames sex as simply about pleasure and happiness between two consenting adults. These are two very different frames. Find the frame that is operative, and remember, the one who controls the frame controls the conversation. After we reframe, Seel advises that we ground these frames in what is biblically and objectively true. He uses an example of a plant with sunlight. If you put a plant in a window it moves towards the sunlight, it expresses dependence on something outside of itself. All of nature tells us that we are dependent on something outside of and larger than ourselves. Nothing in nature says “I am independent. I define myself. I am an autonomous creation”. So, after we have elevated and reframed the conversation, our goal is to ground our conversation in something that is fixed, true and objective. Elevate, Reframe, and Ground.

Remembering Trueman’s warning about the heresy of critical race theory and practicing Seel’s three-step model can help us break free from the neo-Marxist binary and reclaim the pre-political. In our conversations today, these tools can help us become messengers of hope to a uniquely disoriented and hurting world. Using this approach, we can deconstruct this counterproductive and truncated neo-Marxist framework and build a truer, more beautiful picture of reality for people in our world.

G.K. Lewiston

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