Podcast: Unpacking Critical Theory with Dr Sharon James

This article is part of the Affinity Talks Gospel Podcast series.

In this episode of Affinity Talks Gospel, Graham Nicholls and Lizzie Harewood are joined by Dr Sharon James from the Christian Institute to explore the pervasive influence of critical theory in society.

From decolonisation and critical race theory to educational policy and cultural narratives, Sharon offers a compelling critique of the ideology underpinning much of today’s social justice discourse. Together, they discuss how Christians can respond to these challenges with biblical clarity, resisting fear while upholding the transformative power of the gospel.

This episode is a call to equip ourselves and our churches to proclaim truth in an era of confusion and cultural upheaval.

Dr Sharon James works for The Christian Institute and lives in London, where her husband, Bill, is principal of London Seminary. Sharon is the author of several books, and she writes at ⁠her website⁠ – www.sharonjames.org.

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Topics addressed in this Podcast:

• Introduction to Critical Theory: Exploring the origins of critical theory, including its philosophical roots in Marx and Freud, and its rejection of a transcendent God.
• Impact on Society: Analysing how critical theory influences areas such as sexual ethics, race relations, and societal power dynamics through concepts like the oppressor vs oppressed narrative.
• Decolonisation: Unpacking the term ‘decolonisation’, its use in historical contexts, curriculum changes, and its more activist-driven applications in education and culture.
• Biblical Justice vs Secular Justice: Contrasting the biblical understanding of justice – rooted in God’s character and universal moral law – with the relativistic and power-driven framework of critical theory.
• Implications for Education: Highlighting how critical theory manifests in schools and workplaces, including DEI policies, curriculum content, and the push to ‘raise activists’.
• Christian Responses: Discussing how Christians can engage with these ideologies, equip themselves with truth, and remain confident in the gospel message.
• Encouragement for Leaders: Offering advice to pastors, parents, and educators on navigating these challenges and equipping others to stand firm in their faith.
• The Hope of the Gospel: Reaffirming that the gospel provides a solid foundation for truth, redemption, and the unity of the human race.

Transcript

[AI generated]

[0:10] Welcome to Affinity Talks Gospel Podcast, another episode where we think about how our faith affects our thinking and affects our lives,

[0:21] and we talk to various agencies and friends of Affinity to kind of work through some of those issues. I’ve got my co-presenter, Lizzie. Welcome, Lizzie. Hi, Graham. Reintroduce yourself, just in case anyone’s listening for the first time. So I’m Lizzie Harewood. I work for the Association of Christian Teachers and we’re an organisation that seeks to support and equip teachers and other educators who are Christians and who want to be salt and light in their places of work. And do you want to introduce our guest? I would absolutely love to. This is Dr Sharon James. Am I correct in giving you that title, Sharon?

[0:59] You are correct, but please call me Sharon.

[1:03] And um sharon james works for the christian institute as policy analyst i’m i believe and and has quite a lot of specialist expertise on quite a few different issues um and is also married to um bill james who has quite a um renowned history in in ministry quite um yeah sorry if i’m not making renowned no renowned makes perfect sense he’s a man of renown um across the the christian world um any other gaps you want to fill in about yourself sharon i’ll just fill in the personal detail really that i printed from uh ministry i was a uh involved in women’s ministries writing pastor’s wife many years it’s more policy areas simply because of a real deep concern about what was going on in our society particularly with regards to families, women and children, that policy is driving a lot of the injustice and suffering. So I went into studying that and then working more in policy issues and ended up working full-time for the Christian Institute. But back of all of the work that I do, it’s very much a pastoral concern for real people who are suffering in real-life situations because of thoroughly bad policies which are driven by, anti-god and appalling ideologies. Yeah, I mean, we’re going to get into a little bit about.

[2:28] Decolonization, critical race theory, and so on, but just helpful maybe if you can think of an example, what was concerning you pastorally that you could think this is the fruit of lots of secular thinking? Are there some sort of examples of that? Well, two things. One was the very obvious thing of family breakdown. When you’re involved in pastoral work for longer than about five minutes, you realize the human cost of that. There is a human cost. The longer I went on, and I was traveling across different countries actually speaking in situations of women’s ministries, seeing this was the same for women in many different contexts where radical feminism had God said that the family is a patriarchal construct only there for the benefit of men, and women need to be liberated from it.

[3:20] On the ground, the evidence was showing something very different, that as the family broke down, it was women and children who really suffered. So that was a thoroughly bad ideology driven by the idea there’s no God, no creator. The family is not a natural construct. It’s not divinely constructed. We construct it because we don’t think it’s exactly fair between men and women, reconstruct as we please. And that bad ideology led to the bitter fruit of suffering, as actually some non-Christian feminists like Louise Perry are now pointing out. Another area is child protection. Why is it that we see globally unprecedented levels of child sexual abuse, pornography,

[4:04] fueling people trafficking, so that there are more slaves in the world than ever before. It’s an ideology of sexual liberation that was driven by a series of individuals who, when you get down to studying them, were all deeply implicated in child abuse.

[4:22] From Kinsey onwards, John Money, William Reich, you look at all of them, and even down to Michel Foucault implicated in child abuse. So why are children globally now being subjected to comprehensive sexuality education, which tells them they have sexual rights? That’s being imposed on them by the West, which is a reverse colonialism that is truly atrocious. That was driven by a bad ideology. It’s led to policy impact internationally, and it’s children who suffer. I’m at the stage now where I’ve got eight little grandchildren.

[4:58] I’ve always been passionate about child protection. But I suppose I get more passionate about child protection with every succeeding day. Well, I think it’s significant, Sharon, that you kind of bring education and

[5:11] children into this so early on. And certainly from my perspective, we see ideologies infiltrating curriculum at quite an early age. So you mentioned feminism, perhaps the, you know, the backlash against patriarchy or what they perceive to be patriarchal society.

[5:37] How does that relate to the decolonization, the problems with our kind of colonial heritage in the West? Are these kind of two sides of the same coin? It’s all joined up around the back, Lizzie, because back of all of this is a version of history and reality that sees everything through the single prism or lens of power and those without power or the privileged and those without privilege or the oppressed and the oppressor class. So in that very, very cartoon-like version, you have a pyramid of oppression and you have wheels of oppression. I’ve seen some of these that are sent around various schools. Yes, I have as well. So basically, the oppressors are male.

[6:35] Heteronormative, as in heterosexual, cisgender, as in they’re not identifying as trans or queer. They’re always white. They’re able-bodied. They’re educated. They have citizenship. And then when you flip the coin, those who are oppressed are viewed as people of color.

[7:00] Female, transgender or queer, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they’re the train shall meet. And this reduces everything to absurdly binaries,

[7:12] which is something they’re very opposed to, of either side of the privilege or not. Now, what that means is that only people with knowledge of oppression have knowledge of certain things. So you are now denying the universality of human knowledge. Knowledge is not something objective that is universal and all of humanity can seek it, find it, and share it. No. Knowledge is something that is possessed by certain groups.

[7:41] And if you are in a particular group, only you have that kind of knowledge. Now, always with all of these things, I don’t need to patronise you by telling you that there are grains of truth. Obviously, if I take the example of children, there’s a great grief associated for some people with not being able to have children. So I can’t personally claim knowledge of that particular grief because… I had children. But it’s very, very wrong to say that I have no right to even think about or comment on that as if I can never have knowledge. They’re muddling up personal experience with something called knowledge and saying that there are classes of knowledge that certain groups of people cannot have, and that goes straight to the decolonization narrative, which says that there are groups of people who have knowledge of having experienced colonialism and they are in a particular category and the colonised cannot know what the colonised are feeling. And we’ll go further into what the implications of that are. But it’s all part of this viewing society through the oppressed-oppressed grid.

[8:51] Yeah. Just to connect it back just before we go forward, as it were, that connects to sexual ethics but not not fully i mean there are other um things flowing into to to our view about sexual ethics to do with personal freedom as though so it’s not all about critical race theory is it there’s kind of feeding into or is it when you go back to the source of critical theory if you go back to the frankfurt school you look at the architects of critical theory um and what they deliberately set out to do was to perform an unholy marriage yeah which was between marx and Freud, and that’s out there in their foundational documents. You’ve got with Marx the liberation of economic classes, et cetera. With Freud, you’ve got the liberation of the individual to fulfill their sexual selves.

[9:40] There was a deliberate bringing together of those two strands. So you have sexual liberation and liberation of the authentic identity very much at the heart of critical theory. That’s why all the different iterations of critical theory, whether critical

[9:55] gender theory, critical race theory, whatever.

[9:58] They all have this similar thing, but at the heart of all of it is rejection of the transcendent truth that there’s a God that defies reality. Right. Our selves, our sovereign self, our authentic self, we are uh we have the absolute sovereign right to say what reality is for us and what our authenticity is what our identity is and so forth yeah and is it cashing out that in popular culture and in because obviously in cultural marxism and other things intellectuals talk about or christians talk about and critique and everything else but um the the average person is not thinking about those things are they uh as they’re walking around doing that doing their doing life but they are obviously making life decisions different to previous generations have been influenced by that thinking aren’t they in in that they’re having relationships that they wouldn’t previously had or wanting to change their identity or having aspirations that they probably their grandparents wouldn’t have had and so on how is that how is that filtering through i know we haven’t done definitions yet but we’re doing it slightly backwards but you know how does that filter through to ordinary people wandering around haywards heath or doncaster or somewhere.

[11:11] Okay well when your ordinary people in haywards heath go into the workplace there will be probably given on the first day perhaps a policy regarding pronoun politeness yeah you’re going to tell them to tell lies yes that is big not just for christians but actually for for many people who who are very uh instinctively not happy with that but then put their head above the pyramid because they don’t want to lose their job. Well, that’s just one manifestation of DEI policies that force people to see everything through this grid of oppressed or oppressed. And what it means is that it sows an attitude of, suspicion where we are genuinely forced to look at other people, not as individuals with their particularly individual capabilities, capacities, gifts, abilities, characters, but which group do they belong to. We end up walking on eggshells in case we transgress one of these ever-changing.

[12:15] Sins against a particular group. The definitions are changing almost every day. The vocabulary is changing almost every day. If you use something which in vocabulary was perfectly acceptable a short while ago, you may be hauled up to a disciplinary committee. So these understandings are being very, very embedded in the workplace, but also in all areas of academia. It’s really tertiary education, but even secondary education. Of course, even absurdly, in primary schools, sometimes this is introduced. So are you Lizzie? Sorry to have interest. Yes, you will. Yeah, sorry to cut across you there. Are you, Lizzie, experiencing in your school teachers Is critical race theory being sort of actively spoken about, that kind of oppressed oppressor narrative?

[13:18] So I would say, obviously, it ranges from school to school. But I have certainly seen quite an array of materials that have either been sent to me or that I have found just through my own research. Whereby critical theory in its more kind of broad sort of definition is certainly embedded within curriculum. So, for example, one of when I was looking through some of the curriculum providers when they were…

[13:51] Putting stuff into schools about sex and relationships education one of the foundational documents there said that we seek to combat the colonization of all curriculum including sex and relationships education and we seek to be anti-racist and I think they even use the words um we seek to roll back on the kind of the the christian normative um expectations around relationships and sex and so that was quite explicit i would say that there are other more implicit or perhaps more of that subtle drip feeding um bits of um information in in curriculum them um i mean for example and you know that there’s some stuff that i i look at and i think actually there’s there’s a lot of there’s a lot of uh there are some little pearls of truth here for example you know we we think about in religious education um we think about the historical kind of the cultural dominance of like fair-skinned blue-eyed pictures of jesus of mary And absolutely, you know, we’ve got to bear in mind that a lot of these images were made in a particular context, in a particular country to relate to the indigenous people at that time.

[15:19] And I don’t think there’s anything wrong in drawing attention to that. However, if that becomes the focus and the rationale and the reason for teaching a lesson, I think that’s where you err over into quite dangerous indoctrination. Um but there’s there’s a couple of things I’d really like to ask you Sharon so one of the the um words that we’ve been using a lot is that of oppression so where you’re coming from and I’m probably going to ask a bit of a an awkward question here would you say then that the idea this this oppression or the idea that certain groups have have experienced more oppression than others is not accurate. And what does the Bible say about oppression? Are you oppressed simply because you belong to a particular demographic or is there real oppression that does exist or has existed but is the fault of individuals doing particular things that are sinful and wrong? Yeah, so the Bible is passionate about injustice, but the Bible always defines justice as who God is. God is the God of justice. By definition, God is just.

[16:46] And the biblical worldview says that God created human beings in his image, and when he gave human beings in his image reason and capacity to know him and to relate to others, He embedded a conscience in them, which is effectively his moral law written on the human heart. So you’ve got God’s eternally beautiful righteous character encapsulated in his eternally beautiful moral law, which is engraved in turn upon the human hearts of people made in his image, which is a beautiful gift. So we all have a God-given conscience. And I suppose the first headline thing you could say in terms of relating to people who are profoundly anti-Christian is to say that if they get aerated about oppression, we can internally smile and give thanks to God because that’s an expression of the fact that they’ve been made in God’s image, that they even care about that. If they were just a biological or chemical accident, why would they even say they care about stuff like oppression?

[17:47] But how do you then define oppression? Well, it’s sinning against fellow image bearers in ways that go against God’s moral law. And then a really important aspect of biblical justice, as defined by God, is that nobody is above the law. The king as well as the subject, Ahab as well as Naboth, we’re all under the same law because God at the final judgment will judge us all according to the conscience that he has given us. Now, when you come to the current discourse.

[18:20] You have a God-given awareness that there is often in a fallen, sinful world, inequality, injustice, oppression, suffering, some people being treated badly. We accept that. In fact, we absolutely humbly put our hands up and say, evil runs through every human heart, including mine. So we all stand guilty before our Creator. We fortunately believe in forgiveness and redemption, but we do see the reality of sin. But we say, who defines that? Where do you define it? And what do you do with it?

[18:59] So it’s all of that side of things. As you say, there might sometimes be little nuggets, little pearls. That’s because of common grace. That’s because we’re all made in the image of God and got that awareness. Where does critical theory veer away from an image-bearing Christian godly view about bad things happening to people being sinful, people oppressing other people being sinful? Where does it veer away? Is it in the categorization of it, the generalization of it? It’s in the foundation. So if you deny that there is a creator God, which they all did, it’s in the foundational documents, Max Hallkeimer, they deny the transcendent out there. So if you shut the windows and say there’s no God.

[19:47] Then you’re left with human beings and we all decide for ourselves what we do. There’s no absolute morality because what right would a human being have to tell another human being what’s absolutely right or absolutely wrong? It’s absurd. I can’t tell you what’s absolutely right. So if there’s no external source of authority, we all make our own morality.

[20:09] So you’re now in the world of complete, if you like, relativism. And in that world, all you’ve got left is power. and then look out on the world and you say oh but these powerful groups repressing those powerful groups and those powerless groups have to fight back but where’s the standard for how you would do that there’s no external standard there’s no rule no forbidding so you end up with a foundational text let’s get to decolonization the foundational text is the wretched of the earth by franz fanon where he effectively dehumanizes all of those who he calls the colonizers. They are subhuman and they need to be exterminated.

[20:49] Because you’ve got no external authority, no external rules to tell you what to do, you then make your own rules to get rid of what you perceive as oppression, and the whole thing goes very, very badly off the rails. Just help me with someone who is captured as a slave in Africa, where from a Christian point of view, we would say they’re made in God’s image, they deserve the dignity and respect, and morally they’re both capable and responsible before God. So we’d have all those arguments for why that they shouldn’t be oppressed.

[21:34] But to be fair, you know, those who have critical theory would say they shouldn’t be oppressed, but they’re arriving at that from a completely different point of view, which sounds to me as though it collapses under its own weight. But they would say it’s wrong because a powerful person has captured a less powerful person, and the only moral value is weakness. I don’t understand on what basis you’d even argue that was a bad thing. Well, you got it right, Graham, because critical theory, effectively, when you look at some of the proponents of critical theory, there’s more about that in the Christian Institute resources on critical theory, they say that even the concept of universal humanity is a false construct. Equality under the law, that’s a false consciousness, false construct. They question all All of these big picture claims, because they say these are the claims that have been used by the powerful to prop up their privilege. So the classic liberal thing is to build on the biblical worldview and say, equality of all humanity, rule of law.

[22:47] See every side of the argument, look at somebody’s character rather than the colour of their skin. All of these kind of claims that have been assumed, that’s all part of the false consciousness that’s keeping the bourgeois in power and it just needs to all be overturned. But why is white heteronormal bad? Why is it bad? Because there’s no moral standard for it to be bad. Well, that’s precisely right. But you know what? You’re trying to be logical. That’s a male construct used to keep other people in power. I first came across this in 1986, Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy. This was a classic radical feminist text that said that all of the tools of male oppression, such as logic, need to be subverted and we need new forms of experience, female experience to come in and thwart it. So the trouble is we are still wanting to play by the rules and play a straight bat and all the rest of it and use these.

[23:55] Convictions such as rule of law, dignity of all humanity. But when you look at the architects of critical theory, they frame those claims as, in themselves, ploys to keep the oppressed groups in power. Three of us, in our own ways, would be regarded as members of oppressor groups, even though Lizzie and I have got a bit of amelioration in the fact that we are female as well. Logic and reason, you’re looking for the logical reasons and logical arguments, Graham. Right.

[24:33] That’s ruled out because those are the master’s tools. Logic, straight-line reasoning, those are the master’s tools. You’ll never break down the master’s house with the master’s tools. You have to get rid of those. So again, back to decolonization, you have other ways of knowing. You look at other cultural traditions outside the West, say they have not used the same ways of knowing that we have. And when we, the saying is, exported Western education and so forth to these other traditional cultures, we killed their ways of knowing. There’s a technical term for that, epistemocide. I don’t know how you said that, but it’s killing a way of knowing. And so that’s why when you got the church commissioners, the Church of England, getting their report, one of the reports called the church to repent of calling people of traditional African religions. Because effectively, this was seen as a colonialist, oppressive going in to kill other ways of knowing. And we have to repent of that.

[25:47] I mean I find it quite chilling that what we see in kind of workplaces and schools some of which not all but some of which could be seen as the kind of the thin end of the wedge but it actually stems from this really all-encompassing worldview that kind of, that ties into our deepest level of existence our relationship with a creator god and although Although this theory may at times overlap with Christian ideas, which you referenced earlier, I just think that many Christians are not cognizant of the fact that this theory, which underpins most EDI policies, or at least some of them, or some of their iterations, this theory renders…

[26:43] It renders the Christian understanding of humanity and responsibility almost silent. And I wonder if we could move on perhaps from kind of taking critical theory as the broad, overarching sort of reason for a lot of these outworkings and actually sort

[27:07] of hone in on what colonisation is. Because we’ve used that word quite a few times can you explain um what it means what it means historically to have colonized somewhere and what decolonization means because that’s that’s a bit of a buzzword isn’t it as well yeah i think this is really important lizzie so decolonization is the word that we need to look at but it’s a word that is completely muddled and confused because it’s used to refer to lots of different things but that was actually part of the tactic of critical theories, blurring the boundaries so that you end up not sure what you’re talking about. The most easy-to-understand sense, and the sense that most people would jump to immediately, would be the historical fact that in the past, some powers, nations, colonized, if you like, took control of others.

[28:04] There are lots of arguments to be had about that. And then, historically, decolonization would be the process whereby power was either given back to those previously colonized nations or taken, back by those previously decolonized nations. Sometimes it was voluntary, sometimes it was violent. Okay, so that’s decolonization as a process. Now, that very word and that very definition carries with it a huge freight, a huge weight, a lot of baggage of Western feelings of guilt and of shame and of horror.

[28:40] Okay, so now just hold all of that association of guilt. Now, there’s a completely different sense of the word decolonization, which is another a fairly popularly understood one, which is when you approach decolonizing a curriculum, which is of interest to you, Lizzie, the most superficial way of understanding that, the most innocent way of understanding that would be to say, well, in a globalized situation and in a situation where we want to appreciate and understand different cultures, it’s really important to widen out what is represented in the curriculum to take account of the different viewpoints, different ethnicities, and so forth. Okay. That’s a very, very superficial understanding. There’s something in that. That’s been happening for years.

[29:34] Okay. But no, the real current iteration of decolonization. It’s much more to do with challenging power. If you look at education, you’re not really looking at the content of the curriculum in terms of knowledge. In a sense, that’s passé anyway. You’re looking at the overall.

[30:01] Message that is given to students. And in the past, the hidden curriculum was critiqued as saying, oh, but that’s just what produces submissive cogs in the machine. People have been taught about things like duty and responsibility and hard work and cleanliness and Christianity and morality and horrors, sexual restraints and all of these damaging things. No, what we need to do is raise the consciousness of students so that they are aware of all of the hidden oppressions which are keeping many people in our societies oppressed without them even knowing it. And it’s this raising of consciousness, it’s this production of activists, essentially, which is what the proponents of that kind of decolonization are looking for. Then it goes even more sinister in the sense that the next sense of decolonization is very much on the surface of that text I referred to earlier.

[31:06] Franz Fan on the Wretched of the Earth. It’s even more on the surface in the 30-page forward written by Jean-Paul Sartre, where they effectively divide humanity into colonizer and colonized, and they associate colonizer with the West. And both Fanon and Sartre call for the destruction of the West. And they say that by colonizing, people in the West dehumanize themselves, and they are subhuman because of that.

[31:38] Endorsement of evil, and they do not deserve to live. The colonized need to reclaim their humanity, and they will do that. They will be born again, and it’s religious language, they’ll be born again into a real humanity from being slaves by violence. But are people who are writing educational policies or curriculums, are they actually thinking that, what you’re just saying? That’s a really interesting question. Not all of them. Some of them, in good intent and sincerity, want to address what they would regard as issues of discrimination. Some of them would. But in the higher levels of academia, there are, I regret to say, people who are fully aware of the true Jean-Paul Sartre, Stroop, Frantz Fanon, discourse on this subject. I would simply say, look at the Twitter feeds of those academics after October 7th, some of which said things along the lines of, what did you all think decolonization meant? Essays?

[32:57] Join the dots. There are those who are celebrating violence because they genuinely genuinely have bought into this idea that injustice can only be overthrown by violence, and they’re celebrating violence. That does not represent the majority of headteachers in England at this time. I absolutely know that. But the trouble is that there’s an awful lot of blurring, I’ll go back to the blurring of the boundaries, an awful lot of muddling on this. There are some who are being if you like, groomed into activism, I would say. When you look at the theory of education of decolonization, there is a lot about raising consciousness and, effectively, when you look under the surface, under the bonnet, raising activists.

[33:50] Then when you let that particular genie out of the bottle, it’s quite difficult to control precisely what way and shape that activism will take in the future when we see future trigger points. And that’s why you do get some people such as Douglas Murray writing books with a title like War on the West. And those books need to be taken seriously. You have an academic like Douglas Stokes, who’s written a book against decolonization. He’s not a Christian, but he is seriously worried about societal stability because he sees, as an academic. He sees decolonization as a deliberately subversive force. And I would simply name a name that I think most of our listeners will be aware of, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, formerly from Somalia, who saw Somalia utterly destroyed by communism. And she speaks out very, very, very clearly now about what she sees as the subversion of free societies by these kinds of discourses. And it It comes very powerfully from somebody like that who’s been through a whole lot of experiences herself that I think fully qualify her to comment on these things. So there’s a spectrum. Many people, mercifully, because of common grace, would not want to celebrate murder and violence.

[35:14] But we need to be deeply concerned that there is a minority and a vocal minority and a minority who are not being shut down. I find it very ironic that universities are safe places, so-called, and certain kinds of microaggressions get slammed down very hard, but other calls to violence do not. But that’s part of intersectionality, where wherever you find oppressed, you have to lift them up and give them a voice. But if anyone is classed to be an oppressor group, you can shut their voices down. There’s a lot of incoherence there. I realize that, but that’s part of the path. That must mean for the ordinary person as well, though, as well as those particular flashpoints of policies in their workplaces and so on, they’re also…

[36:05] Wandering around feeling confused about truth confused about authority claims um quite conflicted and maybe sometimes nervous to assert anything um uh they’ve got the general narrative that the

[36:22] victim is the only one that has the voice um and so they can’t speak authoritatively into anything. It is quite an oppressed kind of world in which our sort of teenager and young people are growing up, where they don’t really have any sure footing points. So I think that’s probably where it cashes out to the ordinary, because they’re not reading all this kind of literature, and they’re not necessarily at university. They’re kind of doing their jobs. But from everything they’re hearing in popular culture is just making them nervous. And the best they can do is just enjoy the experience of the moment but with without much solidity is that fair i think that’s brilliant i think it really captures this graham and there’s a book title the anxious generation at the moment by john it captures that sense of anxiety too another brilliant current book bad therapy by abigail schreier captures the anxiety of youth where they’re all being encouraged to self-diagnose all the time because one of the oppressed groups are people who are fit and well, and you actually gain cachet in terms of becoming a victim, the more diagnoses you have on yourself. It’s an absolutely tragic world.

[37:31] I think here, as Christians, we have to say, seize the moment into this moment of division and toxicity, and people being encouraged to view other people through

[37:44] the prism of group identity. We have this marvelous opportunity to say look the biblical worldview asserts the unity of the human race we’re all from the same first parents it asserts the dignity of every person in the human race because we’re all created in the image of god it affirms the fact that we’re all on a level playing field in terms of guilt but we are all equally able to receive full forgiveness and i think at this moment what ordinary people if you like if there are such things maybe that we shouldn’t even use that but what they’re crying out for is confident proclamation of good news and yeah ministers should be absolutely proclaiming truth in a world that says it’s an oppressive thing to do that and even with this fret of conversion therapy coming down the road says preaching repentance is a spiritually abusive thing to do well i tell you what let’s keep on preaching repentance. We need that message. We need to be released from ourselves, and we need to be released to know our Maker and be forgiven. So I think that culturally it’s a dark and miserable moment, and non-Christian commentators are wringing their hands about the.

[38:58] The way in which culture is unravelling, but we need to just be standing up and speaking out clearly and graciously that there is such a thing as truth, there is such a thing as reality, there is a creator God. All of those foundations of critical theory are actually wrong. Not that we would use that language to people who don’t engage with it, but we just speak the truth very, very boldly, I think. Sharon, do you think that perhaps Christians or the church in general has been a bit slow to the party on this.

[39:29] It hasn’t even tried to get in most of the time because the architects of this had a genius way of redefining language and they, classed as phobic anybody who didn’t agree with them. And people are terrified of being homophobic, transphobic or racist or sexist. And all of these slurs, all of these things mean that people are scared to speak out. And I think that the other genius thing they did was to hijack the phrase social justice, as if only they knew what it was, believed in it, and promoted it. And that means that well-meaning Christians don’t dare touch any of this. They’d just rather keep their heads down and stay quiet, because who wants to be taught to oppose social justice? Not me. The trouble is they’ve got the wrong definition of it, and the Bible has the wrong the definition of it. So we just need, again, to be saying, biblical justice is real justice. I’ll give you one example of how appalling this is. Social justice is now saying that every woman has the right to bodily autonomy and to kill her own children. And if you dare to question that, you’re on the wrong side of social justice. Yeah, yeah. Say, what about justice for the unborn? Oh, no, that’s disallowed. But they’ve captured the language and that’s why many Christians are either slow to the party or not even trying to get in.

[40:55] In terms of, I’m thinking, I’ve got, say, a teacher in my mind, and I know I keep bringing it back to education, but, you know, that is my particular area of interest. So I’m thinking of, say, a history teacher, because this is often where this kind of topic might arise. Would you say then a Christian history teacher might think twice about, I don’t know.

[41:23] Considering teaching alternative histories or, I don’t know, revealing processes that have constructed historical narratives? Is that something is that a bit of a dangerous route to go down or is that something that they can kind of enter into knowing that if they’ve done that in good conscience and um if they’ve been very judicious about the kind of the the texts and the the sources they’re using that that’s absolutely fine and actually they have to trust their own kind of professional judgment i guess yeah i’m just wondering because although that a lot of that extreme stuff that happens at in tertiary education although that might filter down actually when it comes to the cold face you know kind of everyday stuff a lot of teachers will just be thinking oh should i be teaching this new unit of work that is um um just that presents an alternative view of i don’t know say the history of india or something else well that’s an interesting one i think we’d almost need a completely separate program to talk about. I was a history teacher by profession.

[42:33] And I vividly remember one of my early jobs back in the 1980s as head of history at a particular school having to throw out the old curriculum and bring in the new curriculum. The new curriculum was all effectively about celebrating communist China, the PLO, and various other oppressed groups. I look back and I join all the dots now and I see precisely what was going on, but it was difficult for the young head of history to, to question what I was being told to push in. It’s a really tricky one.

[43:04] I’ve written a book, How Christianity Transformed the World, that argues that through history, the historical reality is that real living Christianity has had a transformative impact on areas such as dignity of women, education, philanthropy, healthcare, and such.

[43:19] But you know what? In some particularly extreme situations, particularly in tertiary education, you would be told, well, my feelings don’t respect your facts. You’re looking at evidence. You’re looking at facts. That’s disallowed. Fortunately, Lizzie, you know and I know there are still teachers with a measure of sanity, and they’re willing to look at facts. So I’d look at the brilliant two-volume.

[43:46] Series put out by Cambridge University Press, Christianity and Freedom, back in 2016, which is just two great big volumes of the evidence on the positive impact of Christianity and freedom, which effectively puts bonds under a lot of the decolonialism. History teachers should be aware of those two volumes. It’s quite expensive, but worth it. So I think be faithful as a history teacher as much as you can. Do not tell lies. You may not be able to tell all the truth that you would like to tell, and we have to be wise within our professional situations. You can advise, we have a Department of Education at CI that can advise Christian Concern, also have an education officer. Take advice if you want, think about it, be careful. You may not be able to tell all the truth that you could or would like to tell, but do not tell lies. That is an absolute minimum for Christian, whatever professional or educational field we’re in.

[44:44] Another book that I would heartily recommend is Dominion by Tom Holland. Another good one, probably a bit cheaper than the two volumes you were talking about, but not written for teachers in mind, but certainly a very useful resource. It’s very interesting when Tom Holland says, look at this narrative where you say, well, you want to end oppression. He says, what is the only basis for human dignity?

[45:09] Well, the only conceivable, real basis is Genesis 1 and 2, and certainly when he wrote Dominion, he would not have said he was a Christian, but he’s absolutely honest about it. And then he says, well, look at the whole basis of critiquing oppression and saying, well, we want people to be well treated. What’s the other great basis of that? It’s the example of Jesus of Nazareth, who came not to be served, but to serve. So he’s done our work for us in some regards, and very, very well. I think people like him are part of common grace. I don’t think they’re converts. I don’t think they’re particularly any closer to being converts than anyone else that we’re talking to in our churches. But in God’s common grace and the image of God, they’re seeing something and able to articulate that. So I think it’s been a blessing in that sense. People get too excited sometimes about Tom Holland. But I think seeing it as just a gift of God in his common grace that we can see things and we can invent things and sometimes we can see historical facts and string them together in a way that’s helpful. And I think that’s what he’s done. Sometimes when you get a non-Christian speaking the truth, it has more traction. I mean, when speaking to headteachs about gender, I would personally recommend someone like Abigail Schreier, who doesn’t say she’s a Christian. Her irreversible damage is great.

[46:32] Because these are people who are just speaking truth as they see it. I mean, Douglas Murray is not a Christian, but he has been in Strange Death of Europe. He said, why the church is empty is because of liberal theology, the teaching of evolution, the denial of the fact there’s even a creator God. He was absolutely right. And sometimes it comes more clearly when it’s somebody outside our doors telling us the truth about ourselves. We’re going to have to stop in just a moment. just any kind of final things Sharon you’d want to say to church leaders and.

[47:08] Parents really but people in kind of positions of authority obviously we’ve tried to make people aware by this podcast and we’ve talked about the gospel but anything else you’d particularly like to say, please make sure you do this as a Christian I think that pastors need to be looking at ways that they can make church members aware of the uh, minefield out there. We have free resources on critical theory available through the Christian Institute website online and free paper resources that people order if they want or watch videos.

[47:43] People need to be aware because there is a lot of anti-Christian animus in all of this that can be quite intimidating if people are not prepared. If people are prepared, you know what? There are so many internal contradictions and so many nonsensical things about this, I don’t think we should be afraid. And then we should have lines and messages to riposte with, to come back with. What about the neo-colonialism that is pushing permissive sexual so-called Western values onto countries that do not want it? There’s a lot of that going on. There’s a brilliant book by an African woman called Target Africa, which is all about that neo-colonialism. And what about the selective outrage? There are many human rights abuses going on now because the worst human rights abuses are going on in countries which are not Christian at all, and I won’t name them. You know well. So I think pastors, if you can be equipping your people not to just lie down dead because they’re scared at all of this, but to be able to know where they can find resources, some of them quite simple, to help them be ready and be prepared.

[48:52] Yeah and be confident that the gospel is true but also the gospel is good uh and that both being forgiven and redeemed and having new life and knowing how to live is is a good thing not an oppressive thing uh it brings freedom uh so yeah um we will have to stop um so uh thank you for listening and thank you sharon for sharing your insights and for lizzie too thank you very much and uh join us again on affinity talks gospel thank you.