The Hate Delusion Blog 3.A: Ideas That Shape the Debate

How can Christians love people while hating evil in a culture that equates disagreement with hate?

This is Blog 3 in The Hate Delusion series, and over the next two posts we’ll build on our first two conversations: the shooting of Charlie Kirk that sparked the series and the biblical framework for loving people while hating evil.
Now we move from theory to practice, applying that framework to the flash-point issues that trigger accusations of bigotry, racism, and every new “-phobia.”
Racism, LGBTQ+ debates, and “woke” controversies dominate the headlines, making many of us cringe before the conversation even begins.
Yet most people don’t realize that Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and DEI provide the intellectual framework that fuels much of this hostility.
If you feel that tension, you’re not alone. My hope is that by the end of this post you’ll feel more open to conversation, have a clearer grasp of the key terms, and perhaps see less hate where you once assumed it. Before we dive in, a few personal notes may help you understand where I’m coming from.

Why I’m Writing—and Why It’s Hard

I’m an apologist—a fancy word for someone who gives reasons for the Christian faith.
I spend a lot of time on philosophy and the Transcendental Argument for God (TAG), following thinkers like Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen.

I also spend time examining critical scholars who challenge the authority of Scripture and the Biblical Jesus. Most people would not consider those focuses especially helpful in the arena of political or social analysis.

Yet those very convictions force me into conversations I would rather avoid. What truly makes these topics so difficult—and why even speaking about it feels uncomfortable—is that I believe, as every Christian should, that I am a deeply flawed sinner saved only by God’s great mercy and grace.
I am under no delusion. My failures are real and ongoing, and the fear of sounding like a hypocrite often paralyzes me.

Even so, Scripture does not permit silence.
Jesus commands, “Take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5).
Paul urges, “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness” (Galatians 6:1).
At the same time, we are told to “take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them” (Ephesians 5:11), and warned against the danger of “not only practicing evil but giving approval to those who practice it” (Romans 1:32).

Silence may feel safer, but obedience calls for courage.
God’s people must confront evil carefully and humbly, guarding our own hearts so that personal sin never turns into the approval of another’s.

Why My Background Matters Here

Despite those limits, I believe I still have something worthwhile to contribute to this conversation.
I’m not a political analyst or a social scientist, but my training as a presuppositional apologist gives me a unique angle on these issues.
Much of my study centers on the preconditions of belief—the basic assumptions every worldview must account for if knowledge, morality, and meaning are to make sense.
Using the Transcendental Argument for God (TAG), I spend my time boiling down why we think the way we think and testing whether a worldview can actually support its own claims.
My goal is to use the skills from my background to explore the hidden presuppositions that drive today’s most divisive arguments—the very ideas that keep turning honest disagreement into accusations of hate.

The Framework Behind the Fury

The Framework Behind the Fury
If we trace today’s accusations of hate back to their intellectual foundations, we quickly encounter two influential frameworks: Critical Theory, developed in the early 20th century by the Frankfurt School in Germany, and Intersectionality, a later development coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.
These ideas do not preach hatred themselves, but they have profoundly shaped the way many people interpret power and identity, often producing resentment, fear, and the sense of being hated.”

You don’t have to know the names of the Frankfurt School or Kimberlé Crenshaw to feel their impact—these ideas have filtered into classrooms, entertainment, and everyday conversation. Critical Theory began as a way to expose hidden power structures, arguing that culture, law, and even language are never neutral but always tilted toward those who hold power. Intersectionality extends this analysis by examining how overlapping identities—race, gender, sexuality, class—combine to create unique experiences of oppression or privilege. Together, these concepts provide the lens through which many Americans now interpret disparity: if outcomes differ, hidden oppression must be at work.

The Core Assumptions of Critical Theory

Critical Theory and Intersectionality rest on a few shared convictions. First, they assume that power, not truth, shapes society. Social outcomes—differences in wealth, education, crime, or representation—are read as evidence of hidden systems of domination. If outcomes differ, the default explanation is oppression, not individual choice or cultural complexity.

Second, these frameworks insist that intent is irrelevant; a person or institution can participate in injustice even without conscious prejudice.

Third, these theories treat morality itself as a social product. Words like ‘good,’ ‘just,’ or ‘fair’ are not fixed truths but community decisions that can be redefined whenever the balance of power shifts. For example, university speech codes now treat certain opinions as “harmful” and therefore unjust, even when they contain no threat or profanity.
Likewise, in countries such as Canada and the Netherlands, euthanasia—once condemned as killing—has been reclassified as compassionate “death with dignity,” even extending to people with non-terminal conditions.

These assumptions drive today’s debates about race, gender, and sexuality and help explain why disagreement is often treated as harm rather than dialogue.

Correlation or Causation?

A fourth assumption often follows from these foundations: disparity equals discrimination. If one group is wealthier, healthier, or more represented than another, Critical Theory treats that gap as self-evident proof of systemic injustice. In this view, unequal outcomes are the evidence of oppression—no further investigation is needed.

But a difference in outcomes does not automatically reveal the cause. Culture, personal choices, complex historical developments—including undeniable evils like slavery or red-lining—and countless economic factors can all produce uneven results without any hidden conspiracy. Social scientist Thomas Sowell has documented numerous cases where disparities persist even when discrimination is absent or reversed. Past injustice sets the stage; it does not dictate every scene that follows, and each generation still bears responsibility for the choices it makes today.

Because Critical Theory places power, not objective truth, at the center, it tends to infer intent from outcome and dismiss alternative explanations as mere “cover stories.” This mindset explains why public debate so quickly moves from statistics to moral accusation. If disparity itself proves oppression, then disagreement with the diagnosis is interpreted as defending injustice.

Why Christian Warnings Sound Like Hate

If you begin with the assumption—drawn from Critical Theory—that certain groups are inherently privileged or oppressive, then any moral claim from those groups is automatically read as an attempt to maintain power. When Christians say things like, “Sexual immorality or theft through taxation is sinful,” the modern ear hears the Christian trying to control people.  Especially if they are Male, Caucasian, and Heterosexual.  People are so often unable to hear the love in these warnings.  They find are confidence as arrogance and our certainty as pride.

Christians spend their lives calling out their own sins and urging fellow believers to repent. So when we speak to the wider culture, we carry the same concern. But to a worldview trained to see all moral language as a power play, our call to repentance looks like oppression. Because many former believers now tell their stories of “escaping” the church—sometimes in viral posts or podcasts—our very practice of self-critique is recast as evidence of harm. They describe discipline and correction as spiritual abuse, portray repentance as control, and warn others that evangelical faith is a system run by “white, cisgender males” who maintain power through guilt and shame.

These ex-Christians often become evangelists for their own deconversion, building platforms and “ministries” aimed at persuading others to leave. In that narrative, every confession of sin inside the church is not a sign of humility but a public admission that Christianity itself is toxic. If we call ourselves sinners, critics claim it proves our environment is abusive. If we call the world to repentance, they hear a bid for domination. If we do not bow the knee to their social justice we are cancelled, viewed as ignorant, and often publicly criticized.  In a culture where disagreement equals harm, the very practice of loving correction becomes its own accusation, and Christians face a hill that only grows steeper.

If what we’ve explored so far doesn’t raise concern on its own, let’s trace these ideas back to their roots and see how they developed—and what happens when they are carried to their logical end.

Tracing the Roots: From Marx to Modern Movements

The conviction that morality is socially constructed and that disparity proves oppression didn’t appear out of thin air. These concepts were first systematized in the early twentieth century by the Frankfurt School—thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—who drew heavily on the ideas of Karl Marx. Marx framed history as a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, but the Frankfurt scholars extended his analysis beyond economics to culture, law, and education. In their view, everything from language to family structure served the interests of those in power. Critical Race Theory inherited this framework and shifted the focus from class to race, while Intersectionality multiplied the analysis across race, gender, sexuality, and more. The same logic that once divided society into bourgeoisie and proletariat now divides it into overlapping hierarchies of privilege and victimhood.

When Theory Turns Deadly

So why is the ties to Marxism so scary?  This Theory may be fun to think about in a class room or in a lecture hall, but history shows what can happen when Marx’s vision of classless equality is put into practice.

• Soviet Union (Lenin and Stalin): Efforts to abolish private property and collectivize agriculture triggered famine and political purges, killing millions—including the Holodomor famine in Ukraine.

• Mao’s China: The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution sought to reshape society through forced labor, re-education, and violent suppression, causing tens of millions of deaths.
• Cambodia (Khmer Rouge): Pol Pot’s push for an agrarian utopia led to the deaths of roughly 1.5–2 million people through executions, starvation, and forced relocation.

Each movement began with promises of justice and equality, but the drive to eliminate hierarchy justified state seizure of property, suppression of dissent, and lethal force.
Critics of modern critical theories point to these examples as a warning: when the pursuit of perfect equality is unrestrained by objective morality or individual rights, it can quickly become a justification for coercion and violence.  The Bible offers a vision of society very different from Marx’s call for forced equality.
Scripture repeatedly affirms private property and voluntary generosity—not state seizure—as the pattern for human flourishing.

• The eighth commandment is explicit: “You shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15), a principle that assumes the right to personal ownership.
• In the New Testament, when Ananias and Sapphira lied about a gift to the church, Peter reminded them, “While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal?” (Acts 5:4).
• Paul instructs believers to “work with your own hands…so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one” (1 Thessalonians 4:11–12).
• And generosity is always to be voluntary: “Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7).

These passages show that biblical justice protects ownership while calling for free, willing charity.
Taking property by force, even in the name of equality, is condemned as theft, not celebrated as progress.

Closing Thoughts and What Is to Come

Ideas don’t stay in ivory towers. Critical Theory and its Marxist roots have already jumped from lecture halls to laws, shaping how companies hire, how schools teach, and how governments regulate. Christians cannot afford to treat this as a passing fad, because the reshaping of cultural instincts happens slowly—one policy, one training, one definition at a time. Movements like this grow by inches until the new normal feels inevitable.

If we hope to see change, we must begin by sharpening our discernment and strengthening our resolve. That means being willing to sacrifice comfort, to find creative ways to work and provide when cancellation or ridicule comes, and to see through initiatives that wear the language of care and compassion while producing the opposite of justice.

In Part 3b we’ll trace how these theories surface in DEI mandates, marriage redefinitions, and the gender debates—and consider how followers of Christ can respond with both truth and grace.

Until next time, stay shaped by reason, guided by faith, and grounded in Christ.