By Tim Gamble
The Center For Renewing America (CRA) released a 14-page white paper on postmodern Christianity earlier this month that is well worth reading, in my opinion. Here is a direct link to the .pdf of that paper: https://americarenewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Postmodern-Christians-and-Their-Nice-Arrangements-of-Epithets.docx.pdf
Here are the opening paragraphs:
As two recent popular books show, progressive Christians are trading traditional rational argument for postmodern irrationality and rhetorical sleights of hand.
In recent years, evangelical Christian America has seen the rise to prominence of a particular flavor of progressive Christianity animated by a commitment to what Robin Diangelo calls “Critical Social Justice.”1 Diangelo and her coauthor, Özlem Sensoy, explain that “A critical approach to social justice refers to specific theoretical perspectives that recognize that society is stratified (i.e., divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Critical social justice recognizes inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e., as structural), and actively seeks to change this.”2 Recently, an entire cottage industry of books advancing social justice in the language of progressive Christianity has emerged, and many of these books have become prominent in evangelical circles.
The authors of these books appear to be motivated by a deeply held set of ethical and political convictions held together by a moral vision centered around social justice. That in and of itself is not a problem; Americans are free to espouse whatever views they wish. The problem is that in almost every case the authors, while claiming the mantle of Christianity, advance their views by use of a series of methods and strategies which are intellectually bankrupt, with the unhappy consequence that the sorts of bad methods and strategies used in these books are becoming commonplace in the academic and intellectual areas of evangelical culture.
To state the matter succinctly, many of these books use rhetorical and social maneuvers to advance their moral and political positions without providing the necessary arguments needed to justify those moral and political positions. The result is a set of books that seek to advance a moral, social, and political agenda, but which fail to provide normative reasons why that particular agenda ought to be advanced. In lieu of a normative argument which justify their normative agenda, popular progressive evangelical authors increasingly adopt a pair of rhetorical and social strategies drawn from the postmodern philosophical literature in an attempt to persuade the reader to accept their moral and normative claims.
These rhetorical strategies can be traced to Richard Rorty and Michael Foucault. From Rorty comes the use of rhetorical maneuvers to make an opponent’s argument look bad. From Foucault is taken the strategy of “cryptonormativity”: using morally loaded vocabulary to smuggle in a set of moral value judgements without justifying them, and without making explicit the criteria by which those judgements are made.
Let us look at these strategies in turn.
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Download and read the entire white paper, which is heavily footnoted, at the above link.
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