A Critique of Dawson Vosburg’s Critique of Neil Shenvi’s Critique of Critical Theory
Inception anyone? For the past few months, Sean DeMars and I have been trying to help Christians think better about Critical Theory. Our podcast, Defend and Confirm, has been helped by the work of men like Neil Shenvi. So to see a critique of Shenvi’s work described as “devastating” by a pastor friend caught our attention. In short, Vosburg’s critique is a swing and miss, and I’d like to help you see why.
Vosburg’s critique takes aim at Shenvi’s description of Critical Theory as a “worldview.” He argues that this approach is unique to “American-style evangelical apologetics” and ultimately fails to effectively engage CT.
But it’s worth pointing out that Shenvi isn’t the only person pointing out that CT is a worldview. In reality, Shenvi may be late to the party. I first saw Critical Theory (in this case Critical Race Theory) described in these terms by Coleman Hughes. Hughes (a black, atheist, democrat) used the language of “religion” instead of “worldview”, but the terms overlap significantly. In other words, recognizing Critical Theories as comprehensive, all-encompassing philosophies of life is not merely a novelty of christian apologetics.
Vosburg doesn’t seem to deny that Critical Theory is a worldview, but argues that “the apologetic worldview paradigm is about as blunt a conceptual instrument.” He goes on to claim that virtually anything can be painted as a worldview. This simply isn’t true. Germ theory isn’t a worldview. Neither is free market economics. Nor is the libertarian party platform. These ideas and values can all be components of a person’s worldview, but they all lack the comprehensive scope of philosophies like Marxism or Buddhism, or Critical Theory.
Why does this matter for Vosburg? Because, as he puts it, this worldview approach “must inflate everything it sees into a total theory.” He goes on to ask “How does Shenvi substantiate the claim that critical theory thinks oppression is the only possible problem with the world?…He does not.” Here Vosburg is misrepresenting Shenvi. First, I’ve never heard Shenvi argue that CT says “oppression is the only possible problem with the world.” Rather, he has rightly pointed out that CT views oppression as the primary problem with the world. This is an accurate description of CT, and it comes directly from Marx’s conflict theory of society. The argument that the “worldview approach” is responsible for inflating “everything it sees into a total theory” is a misjudgment of cause and effect. Critical theory inflates simple truths (i.e. “oppression is bad”) into total theories (i.e. “oppression is the bad thing behind almost every bad thing in all of human history). Shenvi is not reinterpreting the ideas of CT into total theories, CT scholars have been producing total theories and Shenvi is pointing it out.
Vosburg also argues that treating CT as a worldview leads to erroneously rejecting “compatibilities” between CT and Christianity as “incompatibilities”. The example he gives is that Christians, like critical theorists, believe oppression is bad. But this is not a genuine compatibility because “oppression is bad” is not an accurate representation of CT’s teaching. As pointed out above, what distinguishes CT from Christian thought on this subject is CT’s claim that the oppressor/oppressed relationship is the force behind all of human society. Just because a critical theorist and a Christian can agree on the statement “oppression is bad” does not mean we have real agreement with Critical Theory because there is nothing uniquely critical theoryish behind that statement. We could also agree with atheists that oppression is bad, but that doesn’t give us compatibility with atheism. We could agree with an atheist and a critical theorists that ice cream is good, but in neither case would we be finding common ground with atheism or Critical Theories. Finding points of compatibility with non-christian individuals is much easier than finding points of compatibility with their underlying worldview.
On epistemology, Vosburg misreads Shenvi. Shenvi is not adopting a Baconian epistemology. In fact, there is no such thing. Bacon was a professing Christian (like most men of the scientific revolution) and he grounded his method of scientific inference on the epistemic assumption that God has revealed the world to be rationally ordered, given us minds that can perceive this, and therefore given us the ability (though imperfect) to apprehend objective truth. I’m almost certain Shenvi would agree with this view, though I don’t recall him talking much about christian epistemology.
Next, Vosburg critiques Shenvi for his appeal to “objective evidence.” Vosburg argues that objective truth is dubious because our positions in society (and therefore experience) limit our access to knowledge. He gives an example of a slaveholder and a slave having different knowledge about slavery. This seems plausible, but it fails to note that humans can learn from one another, and it is perfectly possible for a slave to gain knowledge of slave-holding and vice versa. Thus, our experiences certainly shape our knowledge, but they are not impenetrable barriers to knowledge as Standpoint Theory would claim.
Vosburg does argue for the value of Standpoint Theory of epistemology, but what he ends up defending is decidedly not Standpoint Theory. Standpoint Theory makes the bold claim that oppressed people have unique access to the truth and oppressors do not. Vosberg refers to this as the “identitarian deference” form of Standpoint Theory, and denounces it. This gives readers the impression that there are many competing flavors of Standpoint Theory, and implies that some may even be compatible with Christianity. This is false. Around 2017, Matt Brueing coined the term “identitarian deference” to describe the fatal flaw in Standpoint Theory, and has since written: “What’s wild about [identitarian deference] is that it has won a complete and total victory.” In other words, the “identitarian deference” understanding of Standpoint theory that Vosburg is denouncing is both the historical and contemporary definition of standpoint theory.
So what version of Standpoint Theory does Vosburg argue for instead? As with the example above, he argues for the very basic (and obvious) moral truth that people from different segments of society have different perspectives that should be considered. Once again, Christians should agree with this position, but it is also not distinctive of Critical Theory. He goes on to say, ironically:
“Since there is a real world independent of our knowledge, we can employ rational arguments with one another about which fallible knowledge best fits the real world, since that real world remains even as our theories and positions change.”
Ironically, this is exactly what Shenvi argues for when he appeals to the use objective evidence.
Is this a “devastating” critique? I don’t think so.
