“Intersectionality:” The New Secularist Religious Orthodoxy?

“Intersectionality” is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, it’s a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity — such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. — but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. At least, that’s my best attempt to define it briefly. But watching that video helps show how an otherwise challenging social theory can often operate in practice.

It is operating, in Orwell’s words, as a “smelly little orthodoxy,” and it manifests itself, it seems to me, almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained — and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., “check your privilege,” and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.

Andrew Sullivan, “Is Intersectionality A Religion?”

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  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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4 comments

  1. Ah, so that is what this is. The way it was being pronounced I thought it was another ‘I’ in the ever growing list of LGBTQ letters.

  2. Oh please.
    This is too rich.
    Our precious little liberal snowflake and sodomite on steroids has looked into the abyss of where the “smelly little orthodoxy” of progressivism leads and doesn’t quite like it.
    Horror of horrors, it might even be a religion expletive deleted.
    Well yeah, Snow White. Ever heard of a mirror?

    (Progressivism = Because Christianity is a lie, civil government can build utopia/heaven on earth if only the right laws are passed, never mind natural law or human nature, which is infinitely malleable, if not perfectable. Much more, virtue can be legislated, not just wickedness outlawed. Theme song for the same: “Imagine” by John Lennon.)

    But hey, Robespierre didn’t quite like where the Revolution ended up in his day either and what it looks like from here is that both he – and his virtuous little ideological clones of our day – can only learn things the hard way.

    True, intersectionality is among other things, self justifying and immune to criticism, as well as irrational and therefore intellectually suicidal, but where was Andrew when all the caterwauling smears and subsequent beatdowns, legal and literal about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia etc that preceded it – and upon which intersectionality is built – took place?

    In other words, is Andrew’s analysis really recanting all the despicably hypocritical and self righteous slop we have had to put up with recently from our coercive cognitive elite, for one instance the unbearableness of being white, male and heterosexual?

    No, those labels rather seem to be still firmly in place in our Secretary of Intellectual Virtue’s psyche as can be seen from above, if not the rest of the article.

    But if he doesn’t like intersectionality’s take on original sin, in the final analysis who’s version will he plump for, when his in principle differs from it not at all? The original Christian and biblical view of the same? We think not.

    Consequently while it may be a (word for female dog here) when the chickens come home to roost, Andrew has got no business asking who let the dogs out or decrying the results. Rather he owns it lock, stock and barrel of insane monkeys that it has become.

    After all, Andrew is not just a sorcerer’s apprentice in training, he’s one of the high priests, if not a court prophet for LibProgressivism. And if he of all people doesn’t know the proper exorcism to chant, why should he expect anybody else would?

    On the other hand, maybe we really have reached Peak Big Lies and Mr. Sullivan is fixing to apostasize.
    Ya think?
    Otherwise, what’s all his squawking about?

    cheers

  3. Intersectionality is an offshoot of identity politics. Identity politics is the product of materially pagan and animistic (i.e., dialectic matter) Marxist cultural determinism and group solidarity (pagan oneness). Cultural determinism is,

    “…identity politics—the politics of radical feminism, queer revolution, and Afro-centrism—which is the basis of academic multiculturalism..a form of intellectual fascism and, insofar as it has any politics, of political fascism as well.” Mussolini and Neo-Fascist Tribalism, David Horowitz, 1998)

    In its turn, cultural determinism was birthed by the idea that man is the product of creative evolutionary energies acting on dialectical (thinking) matter, therefore man’s identity is wholly determined by, for example, skin color (biological race theory) or erotic appetites (varying and ever evolving ‘genders’). In this way of thinking, man is a bio-machine.

    Intersectionality is the invention of American professor Kimberle Crenshaw. In essence it is the view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees:

    “Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated, but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.” (wikipedia)

  4. A rather perverse thing, and Hobbes in reverse: back off from political society and turn everyone back into a rival of everyone else. Everything’s either being an oppressor or the oppressed, so is it any wonder that there comes a group of people who figure that the chief end of man is to become oppressors by whatever means they can?

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