By Emily Pelley
“Check your privilege!” “Speak truth to power!” “Smash the patriarchy!” You don’t have to go far today before you hear these calls for a power realignment. The ills of society are often blamed on the dichotomy of “the haves vs. the have-nots.” Those parts of society that hold some type of power or influence are argued to be the problem. However, does this condemnation of power accurately address the core problem in our culture today? What power are we talking about? And how do we help people find justice?
Many Christians are finding themselves grappling with the challenge of not whether God exists, but whether Christianity is the moral solution our world needs. As followers of Christ, we are called to take care of the poor, to speak up for the oppressed and the marginalized. God demands justice. Injustice is a sin. Micah 6:8 says, “To do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” We must do justice. To fulfill this mandate, we must clearly define our terms and align ourselves with what God deems right and wrong.
Definitions Matter Because Clarity Matters
Justice, as described in the Bible, is a characteristic of God himself and cannot be separated from his righteousness. This means that justice is defined by what God says is good and evil. God’s holiness is the cause of his justice. Justice is an overflow of his character. So many Bible verses call us as believers to stand for the oppressed, to speak up for the voiceless, and to do justice.
The current definition of justice in our culture is dependent on the distribution of privilege and equitable outcomes for all.1 When social justice is talked about today, we have to acknowledge that we are operating under different definitions. It is not a list of issues about which we can disagree. It is a worldview that determines what we call good and evil.
Are we saying there is no inequality? Of course not. What we are saying is that inequality is the symptom of other sins. This is important because solving the problem of inequality requires us to go deeper, to get to the root of the problem. The root is not found in the identity politics that the current social justice movement would like to suggest, but rather in our fallen nature as humans. In Christ, there is nothing that divides us. We have all sinned, and we depend on Jesus for our salvation (Rom. 3:23). It is from this foundation that we can work together, with God’s help, to live at peace with each other.
This is quite possibly the most sinister form of deceit: to take words we have known for generations, especially the good things that God defines, like justice, and change their meaning to accommodate a different agenda. The social justice movement of today is built on a different foundation than the justice and righteousness of God. It is a theory rooted in critical theory. So let’s take a moment to understand what this means.
What Is Critical Theory?
Max Horkheimer, the director of the Frankfurt School, was the first to coin the phrase “critical theory” in the 1930s.2 He was not talking about “critical thinking,” but rather critical in the sense of exposing problems to facilitate change (i.e., revolution). The other word “theory,” as it’s used in this context, is a set of ideas, thoughts, ethics, and methods that form the center of an idea.3
Horkheimer used his interdisciplinary research to forward the idea of a social philosophy that could be used to interpret social reality as a whole—this is referred to as social totality.4 The Marxist commitment to liberation and the throwing off of oppression was thus transferred from the economic and political to the social and cultural spaces. Hierarchies of any kind are characterized as inherently oppressive and must be rejected. By nature, the ruling class—referred to as “cultural hegemony” by scholars like Antonio Gramsci—subjects all of society to its cultural norms, holding all the power to define reality. This idea of intersecting identities presents people as primarily social constructs rather than individuals who were made by a creator and whose identity rests in God. And what solution does critical theory offer for the social injustice that this inequality presents? Revolution. Overthrow. It offers very little constructive guidance for long-term solutions.5
According to critical theory, any claim of a universal truth is seen as a power play that actively works to oppress people who believe something else to be true. Postmodernism found its home here in critical theory, where truth is relative and subjective to the individual.6
Why Did Critical Theory Gain So Much Traction?
You may wonder how this theory gained so much traction in Western culture over the last century. After all, Marxism failed to predict the uprising of the working class—why should we thus apply a failed prediction to our social lives? The fact is, these scholars taught at academic institutions across North America and mentored generations of students who have taken critical theory into almost every space in our culture today. One important example is Paulo Freire, who introduced a critical pedagogy that calls for “the pursuit of educational practices beyond white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, and heterosexual educational norms and is intentional in elevating subjugated knowledge of women, minority groups, and indigenous groups.”7 This is a significant area because we all, by law, go to school. Who teaches us? Teachers. What qualifies them to be teachers in our schools? A teaching degree. Where do they get teaching degrees? Universities, where the majority today teach critical pedagogy as the gold standard.8
What Does This Mean for the Church?
In his letters from prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “For evil to be disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.”9
We are steeped in critical theory, often without even knowing it. A lot of what I have described in critical theory almost sounds right, doesn’t it? If people are oppressed, we should help them. God is just; therefore, we need to stand up for justice in our society!
Most people can agree that many of our systems are broken. But if we misdiagnose the problem, we will apply a misguided solution. The foundations of our system were found in the Word of God. If we then work to overthrow the system, we attack the wrong problem. The fact is that the further away we move from God’s justice, the more certain we are to have a broken system, because we will always have broken people. The social justice movement posits that all evil arises from oppression and the unequal distribution of power and resources. However, our problem is sin. The solution to our sin is not the redistribution of resources. It is Jesus Christ. The reconciliation we have with God through Jesus is the foundation of our reconciliation with each other. Once we operate from God’s definitions, we are in a stronger position to bring real healing, restoration, and justice to our world.
Three Things You Need to Remember to Avoid This Critical Theory Trap
1. Truth Matters
The first thing to remember is that truth matters. Is this a question of semantics? I think we can agree that most people, particularly in the church, are not necessarily advocating for the influx of Marxist ideology like critical theory. The problems arise when we neglect the different definitions of terms and ideas that are shared in Christianity and critical theory. These different definitions point to different foundations of truth. One postmodern writer, Frank Lentricchia, explained that postmodernism “seeks not to find the foundation and conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”10 This foundational rejection of objective truth is the pivotal difference that causes a biblical worldview to diverge from critical theory.
2. Definitions Matter
Second, definitions matter. We are often warned in the Bible about deception (Eph. 5:6, 1 Cor. 15:33, Gal. 6:7). We have to acknowledge that people are operating under different definitions of the same words, which has caused significant confusion. We can clarify when we are speaking with people: “So, you are talking about justice. What exactly do you mean by that?” This can go a long way in bringing clarity to your conversation. Being scared into silence by an ideology that has made language evil and oppressive is not showing love to those caught in it.
3. Our Identity Matters
Finally, our identity matters. While our frustration with this poor ideology may be justified, we have to remember the people in this movement are broken and in need of a Savior, just like us. Can we approach people as fellow image-bearers who deserve to be heard? It doesn’t mean we will agree with everyone, but we can do a better job of treating people with respect. From this place of “civility,” we are in a position to show love and grace while speaking truth.11 We are called to love people and tear down arguments that are set up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10:5). What we do know is that we are all made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26), even if our behavior doesn’t match that identity.
Closing Thoughts
As followers of Christ, we need to pray for more compassion for people in need and opportunities to serve and advocate for them.12 Standing up for justice in the social sphere does not belong to a culture that despises truth. This is the space we were made for. We must be courageous enough to reach out to the poor and the hurting with the truth of God, spoken in love.
1. O. Sensoy and R. DiAngelo, “Developing Social Justice Literacy: An Open Letter to Our Faculty Colleagues,” Phi Delta Kappan 90, no.5 (January 2009): 345-354, accessed July 7, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170909000508.
2. Max Horkheimer, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6, no.2: 245–294; Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory” in, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1972), 188–243.
3. Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer, “Critical Theory and the Social Justice Movement,” Journal of Christian Legal Thought 10 (2020): 10.
4. “Social Totality and Max Horkeimer’s Philosophy,” Philosophiesoflife.org, accessed July 3, 2025, https://philosophiesoflife.org/social-totality-and-max-horkheimers-philosophy/#What_is_social_totality.
5. Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, (Pitchstone Publishing, 2020).
6. Stephen RC Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004).
7. Paulo Freire, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Revised),” New York: Continuum 356 (1996): 357-358.
8. Olena Budnyk, “(Un) Critical Pedagogy: Current Priorities and Prospects of Development,” Journal of Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University 10, no. 1 (2023): 7-23; “Guide to Critical Pedagogy,” Harvard University Graduate School of Education, 2004, accessed July 3, 2025, https://guides.library.harvard.edu/criticalpedagogy.
9. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Isabel Best, John W. De Gruchy, and Lisa E. Dahill, Letters and Papers from Prison: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 8 (Fortress Press, 2010), 4.
10. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, 3.
11. Tim Muehlhoff and Richard Langer, Winsome Conviction: Disagreeing Without Dividing the Church (InterVarsity Press, 2020).
12. Thaddeus J. Williams, Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask about Social Justice (Zondervan Academic, 2020).