One of the themes that characterized the initial media coverage of Donald Trump’s victory in last year’s election was that of disbelief. The question progressive pundits kept asking was “Why did so many people vote for him?” As with Hillary Clinton in 2016, there was little self-reflection and no hint of what might truly be responsible for the results.
This attitude is not new. It has been a feature of certain partisan thinking for a century. To cast it in general terms, it is the question of why people willingly vote against their own “best interest,” at least as those interests are understood by particular partisan thinkers. This was at the core of the early development of critical theory, an approach to culture that made cultural analysis a central part of revolutionary politics. In the 1930s, it emerged as a force among the thinkers of the so-called Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist theorists based at the Institute for Social Research that had been founded at Goethe University in Frankfurt in 1923. Key figures associated with the Institute were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse.
The particular problem that preoccupied these men in the late 1920s and 1930s was the rise of Nazism. Why, they asked, were many of the working class supporting the nationalist parties of the right, particularly the Nazis, rather than the communists and thus voting for their own enslavement, at least according to the Marxist understanding? Part of the answer the Frankfurt School offered was that the workers were subject to what they called false consciousness, whereby they had internalized a false view of the world and thus genuinely believed the lies the Nazis told them.
The origins of the idea of false consciousness can be found in the early writings of Karl Marx. In the 1840s, Marx developed his notion of ideology. Although he did not coin the term, he gave it a distinctive political flavor. An ideology involved a way of understanding the world that served to normalize the status quo. It involved a set of ideas and values that reinforced (and was reinforced by) the social practices that served the economic structure of society. The most obvious example of this was religion. Marx’s most famous statement on religion, that it is the opium of the people, occurs as part of a larger argument that religious beliefs arise out of the fact that this world is full of suffering. They then serve to reconcile men and women to that suffering on the grounds that all will be put right in the afterlife. Workers should therefore not protest the frightful working conditions and poverty that industrial capitalism has imposed upon them but rather see their suffering as preparing them for a heavenly reward. Religion is therefore ideology: It involves the internalization of beliefs and attitudes that lead people willingly to behave in a way that does not serve their interests but rather those of the capitalist factory owners and the stock market investors.
The question of how Christians should think about the concept of false consciousness is a pressing one, given the recent prominence of various critical theories in public life.
As the idea developed in Marxist theory, particularly in the hands of the Frankfurt School, it was deployed to cover things other than religion. Thus, for example, Nazism offered redemption via myths of the strong leader, racial superiority, and nationalism. These myths were internalized by the working class through various cultural means, from traditional family structures to law codes to Nazi propaganda movies. All of these served in “naturalizing” Nazism, to make it seem obviously truthful, and to present it as the answer to Germany’s (and the working class’) problems.
The language of false consciousness has fallen out of favor in more recent iterations of critical theory (queer, race, gender, etc.) to be replaced with terms such as “discourses of power.” But the basic dynamic in these later theories remains consistent with that of the early Frankfurt School. They all see culture as promoting beliefs and social practices that lead to people internalizing values that serve the interests of the powerful and reinforce the exploitation of marginal groups. Terms such as “white gaze” that point to the way in which someone’s perception of the world is radically subordinated to that which serves white people (even if the one perceiving happens to be African American or Hispanic) is one obvious example.
The question of how Christians should think about the concept of false consciousness is a pressing one, given the recent prominence of various critical theories in public life. It is also one that requires careful parsing because some of the claims of critical theory find close analogs in biblical teaching. Romans 1 presents a picture of fallen human beings willingly engaging in behavior that is self-destructive. Paul’s theological point is exemplified throughout the biblical narrative, where human beings, as individuals, tribes, and nations, engage in such things as idolatry to their own hurt and yet do so in the belief that this will serve their best interests. The Israelites worship the golden calf, Ahab promotes the cult of Baal, and, most notoriously, the religious authorities in Jerusalem conspire to have Christ crucified and mobilize the masses in support of their plan. One might argue that sin, therefore, is a form—perhaps the ultimate form—of false consciousness.
This continues to the present day in our world, where individuals and whole societies are willingly committed to patterns of thought and behavior that are deeply self-destructive. The sexual revolution is one example. The idea that human freedom is realized in sex without any moral limit beyond the notion of consent is clearly wrong, when the human carnage that this causes is examined, from broken homes to sexually transmitted diseases. And yet, such is the grip of the idea of sexual liberation that society repudiates the obvious solution (a return to Christian sexual morality) as oppressive. As with false consciousness, we willingly walk the path of our own destruction, rationalizing it to ourselves as we do so.
Critical theorists saw false consciousness as cultivated by what it dubbed “the culture industry,” that network of institutions that created cultural products that (often subtly) encouraged, reinforced, and led to the internalization of its values. For the early Frankfurt School, this involved a focus on the moving image and its penetration of culture via movies, commercials, and television. Nazi propaganda was an obvious example, but Adorno and Horkheimer also pointed out how apparently nonpolitical films helped create normative views of bourgeois life and of gender roles, racial stereotypes, and sexual morality. Today, the culture industry is more diffuse but also more comprehensive in its reach. The internet has reshaped how we think about personal interaction, the ubiquity of the smartphone and the rise of social media have all but destroyed any private space, and apps such as TikTok have demolished old hierarchies of power and influence, replacing them with new, more anarchic forms of influence. All of these phenomena serve to shape the moral imagination of individuals and of whole societies. They can be said to serve the cause of false consciousness (for the critical theorist) or a sinful way of thinking about ourselves and the world (for the Christian).
Despite this analogy between critical theory’s false consciousness and Christianity’s fallen human mind, there are a number of important differences. At root, these connect to a difference in anthropology. For the old-school critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, shaped by Hegelian Marxism, human nature is something to be realized in the future, after the collapse of capitalism. For the critical theorists of our day, there is not and can never be a true human nature, only concepts of human nature that reflect the manipulative power relations of society at any given point in time. For the Christian, there is a normative human nature: We are made in the image of God for certain natural ends (e.g., procreation) and one ultimate supernatural end: to glorify God and enjoy him forever in the beatific vision.
In a brief article, we cannot address all the consequences of this image-bearing, but noting two should be sufficient to alert us to the problem of false consciousness as conceived by critical theorists. First, rational dialogue between human beings, though twisted by sin, is possible. Critical theory presses against this. “You disagree with me? That is because of your class bias, your white gaze, your male privilege.” When such terminology is deployed, there can be no rational dialogue or indeed any self-criticism. Human rational agency is denied and only those critical theorists with access to the Gnostic knowledge (of Marxism, of gender, of race) are allowed to speak.
Second, as creatures made in the image of God, we are made to recognize and respond to God’s truth as he has revealed himself in creation, in the Bible, and in Jesus Christ. True, that capability is darkened and perverted by sin. But grace interrupts and breaks through, not denying our human nature but beginning to restore it, both intellectually and morally. We are not benighted functions of an irresistible system of power (as critical theorists assert) but rational agents, liberated and enlightened through the action of God. False consciousness makes us passive tools of the system whose redemption lies with the revolutionary intellectual class. Christianity sees that we are bound under sin but delivered by God in a manner consistent with our status as image bearers—an image which we, although fallen, still bear and which therefore grants us agency. The critical theorist’s false consciousness and discourses of power offer no positive vision of what it means to be truly human. By contrast, the Bible’s teaching on the fallen, deluded human mind serves to strip us of our sinful pretensions and point us to redemption and the consummation of humanity in communion with God.