Through his sacrifice Christ brought the offer of reconciliation to the world, tearing down the dividing wall of hostility. Christ appointed his children as peacemakers; his children have now put to death their hostility (Romans 14:19). Despite their many blind spots, faults, and failings, it has been Christians, the new humanity, who have fought to end racism, slavery, inequality, and every kind of injustice throughout the world for the past 2,000 years. 

First and foremost Critical Theory is, as its name implies, critical of something. But before we get into all of the details we need a little history.
Karl Marx, in his 1848 book, The Communist Manifesto, was critical of the social, political, and economic systems in his day. He simplistically divided the world into two artificial categories. The oppressors were the wealthy people who owned factories and businesses, in other words they owned the capital. The oppressed were the poorer people who worked for the oppressors in the factories and businesses. Marx envisioned a world where the oppressed would rise up in rebellion and take over the factories and businesses so that both groups would be socially, politically, and economically equal.
In addition to his writings on economics Marx was openly a disciple of Lucifer, writing many works in his praise:
“Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know full wellMy soul once true to God, Is chosen for hell”(“The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long march of Death, Deception, and Infiltration,” Paul Kengor, August 18, 2020.)
Marx taught that because economic and political systems were flawed they needed to be torn down.  He believed that these systems were rigged by the powerful and wealthy to their advantage, keeping the underclasses in subjugation. His solution was to stir up disunity and resentment in the oppressed so that they would rise up and tear down the existing system. The old system would then be replaced.
Marx’ society did not value freedom or equal opportunity, rather he envisioned a society of equal outcomes. No matter where you started out in life and no matter how much effort you put into your life, everyone ended up with the same amount of money, possessions, education, freedom, etc. To make this possible an all-powerful government would be established to redistribute all the resources necessary for life equally to everyone.
The problem that the Communists faced was that everywhere Communism was tried it was discredited as a violent, non-functioning, failed economic system, that brought the world nothing but servitude, genocide, and crushing poverty. And this makes sense because God designed man to be free and God designed an industrious and entrepreneurial economic system that included private property rights. As a result, the masses of people that Marx identified as oppressed never rose up, as envisioned, against the people and systems that he identified as oppressors.
To make Communism more acceptable it was repackaged in the 1930’s as Critical Theory. Like Marxism before it, the Neo-Marxists, teaching Critical Theory, seek to deconstruct and tear down all of the traditions and norms of society including systems of power: government, courts, family, religion, individual ownership, and private business. This time, instead of violent revolution, Marxist Philosopher, Antonio Gramsci planned for “a long march through the institutions… Socialism is the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of school, universities, churches, and the media to transform the consciousness of society.”
This process was helped along by Saul Alinsky. In his book, “Rules for Radicals, Alinsky, a Marxist community organizer, laid out the steps necessary to successfully dismantle competing social and economic systems, making way for the Marxist system to be built in its place. This would be accomplished through the use of community organizers. He wrote, “In the beginning the organizers job is to create the issues or problems.” In other words, to dismantle a functioning but flawed system the organizer must sow disunity. Perhaps you have heard the Critical Theorist’s political maxim, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” The organizer, seeking to “create issues or problems” is taught to seize upon any crisis that can be used in disrupting the existing system. The goal is to create a class of people who see themselves as victims. The victims are taught to fiercely covet whatever their “oppressors” have: wealth, power, privilege, property, education, freedom, etc. so that they will tear the existing system down.
Critical Theorists are currently seeking to divide and exploit people by dividing them into many different victim groups. Perhaps you have heard of Critical Race Theory, or Queer Theory, or Post-Colonial Theory, or Fat Studies, or Disability Studies, or Gender Studies, or ageism, or economic justice, or racial justice, or environmental justice. I could go on but though their speech is as smooth as butter, there is war in their hearts (Psalm 55:21). The point is that they want to dismantle the foundations that society rests upon, including the concept of truth.
Interestingly, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer, “the first radical… who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he won his own kingdom.” Lucifer rebelled against the God of truth, and Lucifer’s followers, Marx, Gramsci, and Alinsky, have continued in that rebellion. Objective truth does not exist. In fact, truth is defined as an artificial system, put in place by the oppressors, to keep the oppressed in line.
The new subjective “truth” is whatever advances the Critical Theory narrative. Perhaps you have begun to notice this double standard in regard to truth. When Critical Theorists riot, loot, occupy buildings, and burn, “creating issues and problems” their actions are reported as peaceful speech. In contrast, those who speak up against such behavior are condemned for hate speech and de-platformed from popular social media sites. Or perhaps you have heard that gender is just a social construct, meaning that you may choose your own gender. Or perhaps you have heard that both the family and marriage are social constructs, meaning that anyone or anything can be married; two men, two women, two men four women, a woman and a horse, or any other combination that you may want. Or perhaps you have heard that punctuality, knowledge, reason, loyalty, reliability, science, facts, math, evidence, productivity, virtue, freedom of speech and Christianity are all inventions of the oppressor class and must, therefore, be overthrown.
You don’t believe this? While I could show you many examples, because this is the subject of an ongoing national debate that is infiltrating the church, the following is taken directly from the official Black Lives Matter website:
“We do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege. Everybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind. Everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and no one else gets to choose for them. We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,.. We demand the defunding of law enforcement.”
Because the Critical Theorists in the leadership of Black Lives Matter have a catch phrase that everyone can agree with (of course black lives matter!) and because they cleverly claim that they are seeking Social Justice, many Christians are deceived. Social Justice sounds good but because it is really a Marxist term it is counterfeit justice. It opposes God’s true justice at every step, preaching a gospel of hatred against marriage, family, patriarchy, private property, free speech, binary genders, and much more, opposing truth and God’s created order. This amounts to reimagining the world in the image of the father of lies, Lucifer (John 8:44).
Alinsky was correct in connecting Lucifer’s rebellion and the necessity for sowing division in bringing down a society. Lucifer sowed rebellion, convincing Eve, “You shall be like God” (Genesis 3:5). Covetousness is breaking the Tenth Commandment of God. Desiring what you don’t have and feeling like a victim is the path to resentment: the perfect emotion to use in building the angry mob necessary for revolution.
Christians must never make common cause with those Marxist organizations seeking to sow division. In ‘Strength to Love” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” And what does that look like in practice? Forgiveness. As Christ taught and as James urged his congregation, we must forgive others as God has forgiven us (Matthew 6:12). Christians must never harbor resentment or nurture hatred because of wrongs suffered (1Corinthians 13:5).
Sowing disunity cannot bring unity. Dwelling on hate will only produce hate. But remember, Critical Theory is all about criticism. The Social Justice that the official BLM organization seeks can never produce unity. They intentionally and deceptively use great sounding catch phrases like social justice, racial justice, and black lives matter to gain support for their cause. But they have redefined the meaning of these phrases. “Their paths are crooked, they are devious in their ways” (Proverbs 2:15).
In reality, they don’t want solutions. The Critical Theory end game is tearing down society so that another can be built on the ashes. If they have to foment a race war, recounting past sins and present failures to reach their goal they are willing to do so. They depend on the historical fallacy, re-litigating the historical sins of the past. They do this, not to build unity but rather to destroy. Remember: “The organizers job is to create problems.” They are not reformers seeking to “strengthen what remains” (Revelation 3:2), they are revolutionaries seeking to “destroy even the foundations” (Psalm 11:3).
And not surprisingly, like both Marx and Alinsky before her, BLM founder and avowed Marxist community organizer, Patrisse Cullors, worships Lucifer. Further, contrary to Deuteronomy 18:11, she has stated that she calls on the spirits of the dead victims of racism to give her supernatural guidance in tearing down the system. She reports that she has developed close relationships with the spirits of these people that she “never knew in this life.” She has gone so far as to admit that the chants, “Say her name” and “Say their names” are acts of worship. She stated that when she is able to coerce people to chant the names of her spirit guides she “pours out libations in the street” in worship, to gain “spiritual power and guidance” (The Occult Spirituality of Black Lives Matter, including video interviews with Patrisse Cullors, Melina Abdullah, BLM cofounder, and Nissy Tee).
In contrast, Christians, because we are unified in Christ, are instructed how to work together for true justice, seeing to it that racism and injustice of all kinds come to an end in our lives, in our churches, and in the world. As Paul taught:
“Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility…” (Ephesians 1:12-19).
Through his sacrifice Christ brought the offer of reconciliation to the world, tearing down the dividing wall of hostility. Christ appointed his children as peacemakers; his children have now put to death their hostility (Romans 14:19). Despite their many blind spots, faults, and failings, it has been Christians, the new humanity, who have fought to end racism, slavery, inequality, and every kind of injustice throughout the world for the past 2,000 years.
Christians should continue to follow the teaching of Christ, who entered into our world showing us the way to life: forgiveness, mercy, reconciliation, and peace. We should pursue Christ’s path of love rather than joining with Critical Theorists, whose goals include destroying Christ’s Church. Christians, of all people, are no longer strangers but are fellow citizens, members of the same household. As such, Christians should build up with the truth; not tearing down the culture by embracing the guilt and victimhood based on the Satanic Marxist lies of Critical Theory. To make common cause with Critical Theorists is to throw fuel on an arsonists fire; exactly what they want.
Richard Loper is a member of Chapelgate Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Ellicott City, Md.

If we are seeking to equip our children in kingdom service, then our children will need to be adequately equipped for the kinds of battles that they are going to be facing. We owe it to our children to take these matters seriously. We may be dead before the full weight of these shifts are felt culturally, but they will be the lived reality for our children and grandchildren. We owe it to our prodigy to speak up and to shout a warning. If not now, when; if not us, who?

We are not in an age of change, but a change of age.
We are amid a 500-year historical geo-political inflection point. The world as we have known it is changing, so profoundly that our histories going forward are going to be altered.
We are not talking here about the accumulation of incremental changes, but the wholesale changes of assumptions, global actors, and personal experiences. We are facing a paradigm shift—the likes of the fall of Rome (475 AD), the collapse of Constantinople (1453 AD), and Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521 AD).
The issues facing the church are significantly deeper and longer lasting than the shift from a Neutral to a Negative World. We are shifting from a Negative World to an outright hostile world.
This hostility is not conscious or explicit but implicit, not personal but foundational, and not political but cultural. It is an invisible hostility that makes it even more dangerous. This makes the new social reality the church is facing far more significant than we have previously imagined.
The first step is to wake up to the depth of the situation facing the church and to get our diagnosis aligned to reality. In this process of diagnosis, you cannot trust the mainstream media or the normal purveyors of academic insight as the elite culture is complicit and sometimes even the source of the disease.
The Four Civilizational Shifts
There are four primary shifts that we are currently facing as believers: from Christian to post-Christian, from classical liberalism to Nietzschean nihilism, from Global West to Global East, and from Enlightenment rationalism to post-Enlightenment re-enchantment.
Shift One: Christian to Post-Christian. We are living in a world that is functionally divorced from any reference to the sacred. We have shifted from societies based on fate and faith to one based on fiction. Moreover, the foundational basis of society, namely traditional marriage, has been rejected. The fruit of marriage, namely the procreation of children, has also been rejected. Replacing these historic foundations to social life is an unchecked hedonism reinforced by a world without boundaries, that is unchecked license.
The late University of Pennsylvania sociologist Philip Rieff described our contemporary world in this manner: “No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of sacred order. There, cultures have not survived. This kind of society where the notion of a culture that persists independent of all sacred orders is unprecedented in human history.”
In the past cultural conflicts were between competing sacred symbolics. Not so today. What makes our contemporary culture war distinctive is that it is a negation against all sacred orders and the verticals in authority that mediate the sacred to society. This is an entirely new historical situation. What this means is that we cannot simply return to older approaches as they are no longer relevant to our cultural situation.
Shift Two: Classical Liberalism to Nietzschean Nihilism (Individual Rights to State Power). The assumptions of the Enlightenment which gave rise to the political ideology of classical liberalism have been rejected by the leadership class. There is a much-debated question whether a democratic society can survive when its underlying assumptions are no longer believed by those who are being governed by it. Social solidarity requires shared social beliefs. When these are abandoned, as is increasingly the case by the political elites, then politics naturally defaults and devolves to the will-to-power in a world where the leadership class believes in nothing.
This is the experiential definition of nihilism. We have today a competition between left wing and right-wing forms of nihilism. Classical liberalism is defunct. By elevating individualism and progress into guiding social values, liberalism destroys the traditions and norms that allow human beings to make sense of life and find their place in the world.
American Christianity is on the decline, small-town America is hollowed out, drug abuse rates are rising, suicide is an accept outlet for many, particularly men—all symptoms of a spiritual crisis brought on by liberalism’s philosophical assault on the sources of social stability.
This is the combined argument of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity. No one has yet provided a meaningful future political solution to this problem apart from doubling down on past assumptions in an ongoing culture war between populism and elitism. What concerned analysts have agreed on is that there is no easy or quick fix. This reality is going to be with us for some time.
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At some point, we have to recognize that even if you embrace the limits of pop music, the distance between middlebrow entertainment and the lowest common denominator is enormous. Our need for shared artistic connection cannot be allowed to overwhelm a duty to also collectively seek out music that takes us places and challenges us with insights into the human condition, revelations about ourselves we didn’t know (or maybe didn’t want to know), and otherwise produces insights into the problems of others. And I, for one, already know enough to know Taylor Swift just doesn’t have it in her to do that.

After Tayor Swift’s massive “Eras” tour is packing stadiums to the point her shows are causing earthquakes (even though bad seats are often going for $1,000 or more), Swift isn’t just resuscitating the post-Covid live music industry, she’s threatening to help rescue America’s flagging theater business.
It was recently announced that she struck a deal with AMC theaters to show a three-hour concert film from her smash tour for the millions of people who couldn’t get tickets. It starts showing in October, AMC is charging higher ticket prices than normal — which are already absurd — and the presale figures for the movie tickets are already breaking records. Based on some back-of-the-envelope math gleaned from some speculative news reports, Swift might make something close to half a billion dollars off this tour and all the related revenue.
And it’s not just that Swift has conquered the unwashed masses, America’s elite tastemakers have also become unrepentant Swifties. This summer, The New York Times covered Swift with an enthusiastic zeal not reserved for any other figure since maybe Obama — even going so far as to publish a distasteful meditation on internet randos’ lesbian fantasies about her.
Most recently, The New Yorker issued its high-toned blessing by publishing a remarkable essay, “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison: Her music makes me feel that I’m still part of the world I left behind.” There was a time when we imagined that everyone in the prison yard would stand around overwhelmed by the sheer emotion and elevation of the soul produced by hearing “Sull’aria” from Mozart’s Le Nozze Di Figaro, even though they had no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about. But if “Blank Space” is what you’ve got on the cheap commissary radio to help you count the days, I’m not going to begrudge you.
Still, someone who truly, deeply cares about the state of popular music has to stand athwart Taylor Swift, yelling “what is this @#?!,” and it might as well be an intellectually dyspeptic Gen X guy with nothing to lose.
To be clear, I’m not so hostile or out of touch that I don’t get important aspects of her appeal. I think she’s worth paying attention to because something about Swift resonates at the frequency of America. But I’m genuinely not sure her popularity is a testament to her talent, and I can’t think of another major post-WWII music figure I’m honestly this conflicted about estimating their gifts. Swift is a phenomenal marketer, she works very hard, and from what I can tell, almost no one at her level cares about her fans and reaching out to them personally the way Swift does.
Further, while a lot of positive developments came out of the internet destroying the cabal of corporate music executives and radio programmers that previously controlled popular tastes, we’re now coming to terms with how resulting fragmentation has been detrimental to society. We hardly have anything in the way of a shared common culture, so people tend to cling to anything that breaks through the din and consolidates any pop culture support like it’s some kind of life raft. Music has the power to connect people through shared experience, and people desperately want that connection in this polarizing age.
In the case of Swift, however, that connection has to be interpreted, like everything else these days, through a political lens. Thus New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg declares, “After years of Covid isolation, reactionary politics and a mental health crisis that has hit girls and young women particularly hard, there’s a palpable longing for both communal delight and catharsis.” While there’s some truth in this observation, I regret to inform Goldberg that Swift’s fanbase is so massive that a huge part of it agrees with the reactionary politics New York Times readers seem to deplore.
The best pop stars simply transcend pedestrian political concerns, explaining Swift’s appeal doesn’t have to be done through the lens of feminism. Six years ago — long before, say, the Dobbs decision or the New Right writing essays about “The Longhouse” — I observed after Tom Petty’s death, “a huge swath of America, across beliefs, cultures, generations, and races, would want to claim Tom Petty’s music and feel some solidarity in his loss. We need unifying cultural figures and artists now more than ever.” Petty was obviously very masculine and a baby boomer, but his massive appeal over several decades — at the time of his death, one out of every 40 songs played on classic rock radio was Tom Petty — and Swift’s appeal are both born of a universal desire for human connection.
The Rise of “Me Music”
What has changed is the overall cultural milieu that produced Swift, compared to popstars of previous generations and how they reflect changing values. Ironically enough, Tom Wolfe coined the phrase “the Me decade” to refer to the 1970s when artists such as Tom Petty rose to stardom. The idea was Americans were starting to move away from having an identity rooted in community and moving toward atomization — and certainly, a big part of that development was the ability for individuals to find meaning outside local communities and identify with distant pop culture figures whose identity and branding were created by relatively new mass media technologies.

But this development, however startling it was to astute critics such as Wolfe, was embryonic 50 years ago. With Taylor Swift we see it in full flower; maybe it took 30-some years, but the cultural trends that emerged from the ’70s finally produced an artist almost wholly dedicated to “Me Music.” This finally brings me to my actual gripe, the specifics of why and how her music sucks: It’s utterly defined by self-obsession rather than introspection. Where other artists will occasionally do a Christmas album, it seems like every Taylor Swift album is a Festivus record devoted to the airing of grievances and feats of artistic strength.

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