Faith Works 5-20-22

Faith Works 5-20-22
Jeff Gill

Socially constructed reality, ethical decisions
___

It's hard to sum up anything of consequence in 750 words, but that's what a columnist is supposed to do.

Where I had been going was to ask some questions about a way of looking at the world called "critical theory." It's many things, but at the core is the idea that reality is largely a social construction. Different theorists will concede various amounts of irreducibility to the hard sub-stratum of non-negotiable reality, but critical theory is known for making some pretty dramatic claims about just how much of what we see and sense and know is created for us by social structures.

And let me be clear: critical theory is at minimum a very useful challenge to lazy assumptions. A favorite example is your left leg. Assuming you still have yours, you probably haven't thought about it most of the day until you read that sentence. Now you are conscious, you are aware of your left leg. Previous to your consciousness, you had a left leg, it was there, you might even have used it to walk to the coffee pot, but you probably didn't take it directly into account.

Critical theory wants to ask these kinds of questions about many aspects of conventional wisdom, and especially about social roles and power and control. The assumptions we make about who is in charge. When I was young, in the 1960s, I got a book about the U.S. Capitol which was fascinating to me. Looking back at it years later as we took apart our family home, I noticed that all the men in it were, of course, men, and mostly pretty old looking Caucasian males, wearing dark suits and serious expressions. The only exception in the book full of pictures was one where Jackie Kennedy in a bright pink dress stood in the middle of a group of Congressmen, her exceptionality almost affirming the idea that people like her didn't really belong there.

That's critical theory at work, friends. As a child, I just absorbed the silent message of this book: elderly white males in suits and ties are the leaders of the nation. Women in pink are decoration who talk about decor. As an adult, I thought differently, questioned assumptions, challenged received wisdom, critically viewing how power and authority are distributed. At eight or nine I didn't see what was right in front of me, and now I see different messages on the page and draw very different conclusions.

I'm a bit more on the fence about an aspect of critical theory called "the hermeneutic of suspicion." Again, to boil down harshly what's meant here, the point is that power tends to protect itself, and that's almost conventional wisdom, isn't it? Where it can get into overkill for me is that the hermeneutic of suspicion asks us to assume there is always oppression, always injustice, always an attempt to exclude someone, and so to aggressively interrogate every social structure and cultural form.

In college and in seminary, I found critical theory to be a very interesting test of my Christian faith. In part because they share assumptions: about the unexpected role that the weak and dispossessed play in God's intention as seen in scripture, regarding how Jesus and his followers were condemned for trying to turn the power structures of the world upside-down, and even correlating interestingly to the idea that we are all of us sinners in need of redemption.

Yet I think there's a place to offer some critical thinking about critical theory, and to apply the hermeneutic of suspicion to being suspicious of everyone's motives all the time. Keeping everyone uneasy and off balance all the time carries certain agendas that I am not comfortable with, and in sum I wouldn't call myself a critical theorist, even though I believe it has taught me much.

Would I ban critical theory, in favor of a consistent, chipper, upbeat narrative, with all questions about who's been left out and what's being ignored left for office hours and private reflection? No. For me, bans of certain theoretical perspectives is like trying to make atheism illegal. It doesn't work that way, and that's me as a preacher talking.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's always interested in the margins of a story. Tell him where you see things being missed in the big picture at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Twitter.