Carl R. Trueman’s To Change All Worlds traces critical theory from Marx’s revolutionary call to modern movements like the 1619 Project, exposing its focus on destabilizing norms over constructive solutions. He links its influence to transgender debates and Western iconoclasm, arguing it reduces humans to objects by rejecting biological or traditional authority. Contrasting this with Christian dignity—rooted in God’s image—he warns of polarization where both sides prioritize destruction over shared goods like education or peace. Trueman urges Christians to reclaim transcendence and beauty, balancing heavenly truth with earthly engagement, as a counter to cultural depersonalization. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clayman with this week's interview with Carl Truman.
He has a new book out.
We've had Carl on before, but he's got a really terrific new book out called To Change All Worlds, Critical Theory from Marx to Makusa.
There's been a lot of histories.
I've talked about this before.
There's been a lot of histories about how we got here.
Michael Knowles, I know it's hard to believe, but Michael Knowles actually wrote one.
Christopher Ruffo wrote a good one.
Katie Gorker wrote one.
What kind of philosophy brought us here?
I think the best one is by Carl, actually, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
Beyond asking how we got here, I always wind up wondering how do we get out of where we are and how do we move on?
And to change all worlds sort of begins to discuss that.
This is how we got to critical theory, which I all know you know something about, but you're about to find out a lot more.
Carl Truman is doing spectacular work.
I would even say it's unique.
He is a teacher at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.
He's a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which I think is in DC.
And Carl, it's great to see you.
It's always good to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
Thanks for having me on again, Andrew.
It's always fun to see you and interact for a while.
Yeah, no, it's always good talking to you.
I've just, I read this book and I was muttering compliments to you all through it.
And it's just a, it's really interesting.
One of the things I like about it so much is that it's not a political book.
It's not a book that says, these are the enemies and we're the good guys and we're going to take this on.
It's a book that actually takes these theorists seriously, which sometimes can be the most damaging thing you can do to them.
But it understands that they are addressing things that are real in the world.
And I appreciate that.
So maybe let's begin by explaining to people what critical theory is exactly.
Yeah, I mean, the term, of course, is bandied around a lot today and it's more used than defined often.
But I would go to, if I wanted to define critical theory, I would go to a statement of Karl Marx that Marx makes in some notes that weren't actually published during his lifetime, but were published afterwards.
They're called the Theses on Feuerbach.
And they're just a series of notes that he makes on an influential German philosopher, Ludwig Feuber.
And the 11th thesis, which is actually engraved on Marx's tomb in Highgate Cemetery in London, says something like this.
It says, the philosophers have thus far only described the world.
The point is to change it.
And there you get the great distinction between what critical theorists would say is between what they call traditional theory and critical theory.
And traditional theory is that the sort of the way we typically understand philosophy as describing the world, helping us to understand why the world is the way it is.
It's a descriptive analytic discipline.
Critical theorists, though, they want to change the world.
And what distinguishes a critical theory from a traditional theory is that critical theory is designed to revolutionize what's going on in society.
And I could perhaps illustrate that for listeners.
So when we think of the notion of truth, for example, most of us default at some point to what we would call sort of referential theory of truth.
The statement, the cat is on the mat is true if the cat is actually on the mat, or it's false if the cat isn't on the mat.
Critical theorists would say, no, that's a traditional notion of truth.
Truth is actually that which moves history in a revolutionary direction.
So you could tell a lie, but that would actually be true for a critical theorist if it destabilizes the status quo and moves things in a revolutionary direction.
So take, for example, the 1619 project that was all the rage a few years ago.
A lot of conservatives responded to that by pointing out the many historical errors that were in the book.
Well, a critical theorist would say, but actually, that's irrelevant.
Of course, there are historical errors in the book.
Why?
Because the aim of the book is not to recapitulate true history.
The aim of the book is to destabilize the American status quo, to destabilize the dominant American narrative in order to open the way for revolution.
So critical theory isn't just social criticism.
It's not just digging below the surface of why we do things.
It's digging below the surface of why we do things in order to revolutionize the way we do things.
So the flaw to this, and when you say this, I have to stop my eyes from bleeding because it does sound insane.
But the flaw that I immediately see in this is that even our ideas of what is good and what is wrong with the world come from the world.
They come from our culture.
They come from our traditions and history.
It's kind of an Edmund Burke's idea that these things are what we are.
So is there part of critical theory where they say we know what the world should be because X?
Well, this is a very interesting question because the problem that critical theory faces is that it wants to push towards a utopia, in the terms of the Frankfurt School, a kind of Marxist-socialist utopia.
The problem is, of course, it's hard to articulate that from a dystopian perspective.
So one of the interesting things about critical theorists is typically they're very clear on what they want to destroy or tear down, not so clear on what they want to build in its place.
And a good example, a good recent example, would be if you were to go to the Black Lives Matter website, I haven't checked it for a year or two, so it may have changed, but in its heyday, the Black Lives Matter website had a sort of vision statement, and it had a series of things that it wanted to get rid of.
It wanted to get rid of the police.
It wanted to get rid of the justice system, a whole heap of things that needed to be destroyed.
When it moved into, well, what are you going to replace these things with?
It became, I say to students, it became really rather poetic at that point.
It started to use language like, you know, of course we want to live in a village.
And you say, well, yeah, but don't villages require police force, you know, police forces.
You've got to put some flesh on this utopian skeleton that you are poetically pointing towards.
So I think you're pointing towards one of the great weaknesses of critical theory that I think the assumption of critical theorists tends to be if we can tear everything that is down, utopia will naturally emerge from the ruins.
That seems to be the idea, because they're not reformists.
They don't want to reform the system.
They want to destroy the system, but they don't have any real positive proposals with what to replace the system with, other than vague talk about socialist equality, villages, et cetera, et cetera.
So now, the thing, as I said at the beginning, the thing I really like about this book, To Change All Worlds, Critical Theory from Marx to Marcus, to Marcus, right?
There's an actual, pronounced that E.
That you have a certain amount of acceptance of this theory.
Not that you accept the truth of it, but that you understand where it's coming from.
What the hell is wrong with you, Carl?
No.
No, what I really want is, I sympathize too, because you point to this feeling of alienation that these guys are addressing.
Can you describe what that is, where that comes from, and why we should have sympathy for it?
I mean, on one level, the critical theorists are onto something.
They realize that, you know, industrial and post-industrial modernity has not delivered on its promise.
And one might even say that, you know, think about alienation.
Marx, I think, makes, you know, when Marx talks about alienation, he talks about different kinds of alienation, but they all track back to really how we make things.
And again, we might express it in a way that's sort of fairly easy to grasp and say, you know, if you think about somebody, you know, the blacksmith in the Middle Ages, he's making the shoe for the horse.
You know, he's softening the metal.
He's hammering it.
He's styling it.
He's probably putting his own distinctive mark on it.
And then later he's walking around the village and he sees one of his clients riding a horse through the village and he takes some pride and thinks that's only possible because of me.
Only I could have made those shoes for that horse.
If you jump forward to the 19th century and you have some guys working in a factory and he's pulling a lever that's stamping out horseshoes, he's never going to take pride.
He's never going to pass a horse and say, I made that shoe.
And Marx would say he's become alienated really from the means of production.
He's become alienated from the things he produces.
And that leads to this vacuum at the heart of modern life.
And I think the critical theorists are onto something there.
Most of us experience this world in a way that, you know, consumerism does leave us with a hollow feeling.
We don't take the same satisfaction, perhaps, in our work.
I'm privileged as you are, Andrew, to have work that I really enjoy doing.
But when I was a student, I worked in a factory for a summer on a production line.
And years later, I drove past the factory and saw the women I work with clocking out at clocking out time.
And I suddenly realized, wow, I have a job now that gives me a sense of value.
Would I have that same sense of value if I was just taping up a box on an industrial production line day after day after day?
So the critical theorists are really pointing to something, you know, that vacuum at the heart of modernity that so many of us feel, even if we can't fully articulate it.
So as I say sort of in the book on a number of occasions, the problem with critical theorists is not that they're asking the wrong question.
They're often asking the right questions.
The problem is they give the wrong answers.
Yeah.
You know, I know we've talked about this before, but I think it's worth going back over how this became so much a part of our world that we're actually talking about, you know, they're actually arguing in front of the Supreme Court that it's unfair to treat boys and girls as if they were boys and girls and that we're saying that you can just essentially change your sex by thought.
How did we get that far?
Could you just explain how that infiltrated our system?
Yeah, I mean, I can give a number of answers to that.
One, I would say that when you start to believe that human beings, the essence of a human being is to be an autonomous individual, all forms of external authority start to feel oppressive.
And when we think about the trans issue, one could make a case for saying, you know, the body is the last barrier of external oppression.
You know, as much as I might want to self-identify as immortal, I have a feeling my body is going to impose its will upon me at some point and I'm going to die.
So we could certainly see the trans issue as arising out of that, that Western focus on autonomy.
I would also say that, you know, this is more from a Christian perspective.
There's a certain, you know, in fallen human beings, we like iconoclasm.
We like to smash stuff up.
When I teach Reformation at Grove, I sometimes make the point that one of the reasons the Reformation succeeds is it encourages young men to go around smashing stained glass windows.
That's a winner with young guys.
You know, if you're a 20-year-old guy and you give the guy a brick and say, go and smash a window, there's nothing great in smashing a window.
And we look at critical theory as a highly sophisticated form of smashing stuff.
So I think there's something in human nature.
We don't like external authority and we like smashing stuff up.
And that's in some ways, it's more complicated than that.
But I would say those two things play very much into the trans issue and into the popular reception of critical theory.
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Response to Human Alienation00:15:03
So at the end of this book, one of the things that has bothered me, as I said at the beginning, by all these histories of how we got here is they just raise the question naturally, how do we move on and what's our response?
And it does seem to me that the response, which is at the very least, a theistic, has to be a theistic response at some level.
But I think it's a Christian response.
I know you think it's a Christian response.
And you start to address that into change all worlds.
But I'm wondering if you can give me a plan.
I mean, an idea of what it is we should be saying, because it feels to me that even those who oppose this are a little lost in those questions of alienation.
As you say, those are fair questions.
They're real questions.
And we all love our computers and our cars and all those things.
But they have seemingly emptied the world of wonder and mysticism that has a grounding in truth.
So what is the response when we're talking to people who say, you know, slavery is wrong, bigotry is wrong, capitalism is unfair, therefore tearing them down is at least a place to start.
What is your response to that?
Yeah, well, I think in some ways, one way to answer that, you know, it's a huge and complicated issue, but we can boil it down somewhat.
I think, you know, what is the thing that critical theory is concerned about that's a really legitimate concern?
I would say the big thing they're concerned about is we as human persons and subjects tend to treat other people as things and objects.
And we see this, you know, with the sexual revolution.
The idea of the sexual revolution was it was going to be liberating.
What has it actually done?
It's created societies where women are more objectified than they ever have been in the history of humanity.
So that's a legitimate concern of critical theory.
So I would say, if I want to answer critical theory, I've got to answer the question of how do we produce a society where people are treated as people, as subjects, and not as objects or things.
And I would say then I get to the issue you sort of hinted at in your question that I think one way of doing that is clear, you know, traditional Christianity teaches that all human beings are made in the image of God.
In other words, we all image the ultimate subject in some way.
And when that grips our imaginations, we should treat all other people made in the image of God as subjects, not objects.
So the person with Down syndrome is not just a thing, a Downs thing.
It's a person who has Down syndrome.
The woman is not just a lump of meat for me as a man to extract my sexual pleasure from.
She's a person.
Sexual relations become not about me taking something from somebody else, but about me giving myself and in so doing, acknowledging the other person as a person.
So I'd say we need to think in those terms.
And then I would say as a Christian, where is the place where that can be most effectively started?
And I would say it's the church.
I go to church on Sunday.
I don't get to choose who I hang around with at church.
It is a cross-section of the local community.
I don't get necessarily to sit by the person I like on a Sunday.
I might have to sit by the person I don't like on a Sunday.
What do I have to do in that context, though?
I have to treat them as a person.
You mentioned computers and tech.
I would say, think about how tech has depersonalized us.
I love using Uber because it's so convenient, but I try to strike up a conversation with the Uber driver now because if I don't do that, then all of my interaction with him is mediated through a screen.
He is just something that drives the car and that gets money from a button I press on my screen.
Technology has taken away so many interpersonal human tasks and assumed them that even in our routine daily interactions, we can miss that interacting with the other person.
So I would say we need to think about how to do that, how to recover the idea that we are persons.
I think the church is a great place to do that, but not the only place to do that.
When you're talking about this in the book, To Change All Worlds, you quote Charles Taylor saying that opposing critical theory is not just a battle between theists and atheists.
And coincidentally, I had just finished reading Taylor's book on the Romantic poets, who I love, you know, and he's written this book, Cosmic Connections.
I was joking about it with my son because he says at one point, you know, something like, I'm paraphrasing, but something like we have to connect with the cosmos, what I would call God, he says, and my son said, well, apparently not.
He wouldn't call it God because he's not calling it God.
And this actually points to something that genuinely bothers me, that even believers have a very hard time talking about God as God, have a very hard time talking about what we now call the supernatural, but once seemed to be simply the real nature of the natural, seemed to permeate the natural.
That wonderful sentence or passage in Owen Barfield, where he points out that the word for breath did not mean breath and spirit.
It meant breath and spirit at the same time, which is a life-changing paragraph to me.
I mean, you read that and you think like, oh, of course that's the answer.
Is there some way to recover this sense?
I was talking to Rod Dreyer about it.
He has a new book about recovering wonder.
And I really find this difficult because I get very uncomfortable when people start talking about demons, say, or angels or things like that, things I've never seen.
And yet, and yet I have experienced forces, invisible forces for the good and for evil.
And so is there some problem that we all have, I guess is what I'm saying, with this world?
Have we been made?
What Rod points out, which I think is great, he's quoting a psychiatrist, I think, that we have lost the ability to see what is actually there.
Yeah, I think Rod's really onto something.
You know, we live, to use sort of Taylor's kind of terminology, we live in an imminent frame.
And social imagining, even of Christians, is shaped by imminence rather than by transcendence.
And I say to the students, interestingly enough, for a medieval man to cease believing in God is virtually impossible because everything changes.
Everything, the way he interacts with everybody changes.
Whereas for me, okay, I teach at a Christian liberal arts college.
If I cease believing in God, I'm honest, I've got to find another job.
But I'm not going to worry that the sun isn't going to rise tomorrow morning.
That kind of thing.
And I think you're pointing, you know, how, because this is the air that we breathe, how do we get around this?
And again, I would go back to the church and say one of the things the church has to do is to set a transcendent vision.
And my own tradition, I think you're the same, Andrew.
We're both Protestants.
You know, Protestantism does, it does, I think it does the truth well.
It does the good quite well.
We often fall short on beauty.
Rod is an Eastern Orthodox guy.
And I think it's, if I was Eastern Orthodox, that sense of the transcendent permeating the imminent would probably be more intuitive for me.
And I think what Protestants have to do is think about how do we give people a vision, how do we give them the vision of Christ transfigured, you know, the transfiguration, which is big in Eastern Orthodoxy and is in three of the Gospels.
And I think isn't in the Gospel of John because the whole of the Gospel of John is about the light shining through Christ's flesh.
How do we give them, how do we get people to, in church, to begin to realize that, yes, the supernatural permeates the natural?
It's very counterintuitive.
And that I think we need to start by, yeah, maybe we need to, as Protestants, think about where does beauty feature in how we think about worship and how we think about the world around us.
To take this from another angle, the political angle, and I'm a conservative person in the Edmund Burke sense of that word, but I'm deeply disturbed by this kind of what I call the Ayn Rand strain in conservatism.
Here's a woman who replaced her cross with a dollar bill sign and is a very, very big proponent of abortion and who writes a story in which the hero in the fountainhead destroys an orphanage because it didn't work to his specs.
It wasn't to his architectural specs.
Where I would think an orphanage is actually about the orphans in it.
And maybe you shouldn't destroy it just because it doesn't look the way you do.
And that's a very, very different thing.
Money, which is mentioned in the gospels far more than sex, is a problem.
Capitalism has been a wonderful thing.
It has driven, brought people out of poverty.
It has increased creativity.
It has inspired people to build spectacular things.
And it has turned us into beasts.
And I think that that's a real conflict.
How do we disengage those two things?
How do we make it so that people can have the wonderful things?
Is there a way to make it so that people can have the wonderful things capitalism gives?
I mean, you're putting your finger on something.
And of course, as you say, that's right at the heart of much of the tension in the gospels.
From a Western perspective, some of the hardest sayings of Jesus are the ones where he's dealing with wealthy people and how they use their money.
I think it's, and again, going back to the critical theorists, one of their big things is money is the thing that has really facilitated the changing people into objects.
And when I teach this at Grove, I use Christmas Carol and I say, you know, think about the contrast between Fezziwig and Scrooge.
Fezziwig spends his money on this party for his employees at Christmas because Feziwig thinks of them, maybe paternalistically, but he thinks of them as people.
And his money is used to enhance, acknowledge, touch their humanity.
Whereas, you know, when Cratchit wants a day off for Christmas, Scrooge's response is, you know, poor excuse for picking a man's pocket on the 25th of December.
Right.
Cratchit, all Scrooge, when he looks at Cratchit, can think of is how much money is this man worth to me and his time worth to me.
Cratchit's a thing.
And so again, I would go back to that and say, you know, how do we solve this?
Well, we can't solve the problem overnight.
But every individual can start thinking about how do we use our money?
Not every, you know, and I wrestle with this as a pastor because there were some very poor people in my congregation and they couldn't give to the church because they were poor and they needed to feed their family.
There are others who have money to spare.
And, you know, we certainly don't want to stop people enjoying the fruits of their hard labor and their good fortune.
But there's a sense in which we should also think about how can we use this money to enhance the humanity of others, others we know?
How can we use the tools of capitalism, if you like, to re-humanize those around us?
My financial advisor always says, you know, save some, spend some, give some.
He said to me, and the giving is important because the giving is where you acknowledge and enhance the humanity of others.
So that's a small thing, but that's what I would think about on that front.
Just as a comment on your comment on conservative, you know, isn't it interesting how on the radical right now, the language of critical theory is appearing?
Is it?
You know, critical theory is not just a left-wing monopoly, but that tear-it-down edge has migrated to the right as well.
Fascinating.
You know, what I and I know I'm asking you impossible to solve questions, but I'm doing it because I don't always get to talk to you and I enjoy your work so much.
One of the things that happens on the right, you know, I once made a joke, and I think in my memoir about conversion, that I truly believe in three, that God is three persons, you know, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
But if he turns out to be five guys named Moa, I'm not going to cancel my vacation.
And that is addressing what you were talking about before is that sense that the actual nature of God is not in front of us and is not affected.
What you said about a medieval person, if he loses his faith, the whole world falls apart, but it's not true of us.
And yet, on the other hand, on the other side of this, I am beset by people who on the right who feel that if you lose any or take the doctrine lightly so that you can accept other people with other doctrines, if you open the door of your heart to people with other doctrine, you have somehow betrayed the truth of God.
And a lot of these people are virulent anti-Semites and people who actually repulse me.
I'm just repelled by them.
What is this flaw in the symbolic life, if you want to call it that, or the sacramental life that it drives us apart so that we wind up with 30 years wars and things like this over questions that can't be decided?
Yeah, well, I mean, I think in terms of 30-year war and that you're going back to a European society that's never had to deal with any kind of religious pluralism, what you see there really are the birth pangs of that kind of modernity.
For us, I think the question is different.
I think here it comes.
I've just actually, just before I signed on to the Zoom chat, just finished teaching a class on Augustine's City of God.
And one of the things I like to draw out of Augustine is: you know, Augustine is, you know, the city of God is aimed for his congregation in North Africa, and he's trying to reorient the way they think and imagine the world to realize that, yes, the city of man is not the city of God.
We don't look to the city of man for salvation.
And yet, we share many common loves with those who live in the city of man.
And my own personal experience of being challenged on this was when I was interviewed by Andrew Sullivan a couple of years ago, and sort of the end of the interview, he kind of, you know, in a friendly way, was sort of gloating.
He said, okay, we won the gay marriage thing.
You lost.
Where do you go from here? kind of thing.
And my answer to him was, yeah, yeah, okay, we lost.
I'm in exile, I feel, as a Christian in this world anyway.
We lost that one.
Shoulder to Shoulder00:01:59
I said, but you know, Andrew, you and I share many things in common relative to the loves of this world.
Well, we can stand shoulder to shoulder.
You know, we want our kids to be well educated.
We want the streets to be clean and safe.
We want peace.
We don't want nuclear war.
There are all kinds of common goods.
And I think one of the things that we seem to have lost at the moment in some of our politics is any sense that there are common goods that bind us together in this earthly sphere.
We've allowed, if you like, the, and again, I don't want to relativize the things of eternity, but we've allowed the things of eternity to so reshape the thing, the goods of this earth, that we've lost what I think is that biblical balance between being a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, but also a citizen of this world.
No, that's it's built into the uh the tension is built into the religion.
The book, again, Carl R. Truman, To Change All Worlds, uh, Critical Theory from Marx de Makuza, wonderful book.
All your books are just terrific, Carl.
I'm really, I'm thrilled with the stuff you're doing.
And it's, you're, you're welcome here anytime.
And it's always great to see you.
Good to see you too, Andrew.
Thanks so much for having me on.
Thanks a lot.
Always great to talk to you, Carl.
And there are a certain number of people.
I won't say there are so many people.
There are a certain number of people doing really excellent work.
And a lot of that seems to go on to most people.
It seems to go on behind the scenes because they're going to the latest movie and all this stuff.
But it actually does change the world.
And the ideas that were put forward by the critical theorists have changed the world, I think, in many ways for the worse.
But the ideas that are being worked on by people like Carl and others couldn't possibly change the world for the better.
So it's always good to have them on, always good to talk to them, very hopeful.
Also, one of the best things you can do to change the world is come to the Andrew Clavering Show on Friday for the simple reason that I'll be there and I enjoy seeing you.