… How have we arrived at a place where students on elite college campuses perceive objective truth as a threat to personal safety and authentic selfhood?
The answer is intersectionality, an analytical tool introduced in humanities and social science departments in U.S. universities in the 1990s. Intersectionality creates a metanarrative (grand story) out of oppression. It maintains that the world is made up of power struggles, and that white male heterosexual patriarchy must be destroyed in order to liberate those who are oppressed by it. It understands the biblical complementarity of husbands and wives as perverted and “weaponized.” It believes that if we can expose the myriad ways in which people suffer down to the smallest detail and then rearrange the power-oppressions, we have the ability to reemploy a person’s history (of oppression) and destiny (of liberation). Suffering in this worldview includes both material and perceived suffering: the “dignitary harm” clause of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in all fifty states, expanded the concept of harm to include harm to one’s dignity and identity. Thus, any perceived rejection of personal identity based in LGBTQ+ affirmation constitutes harm. Harm, then, is both material and psychological, both real and perceived.
Rosaria Butterfield, “Intersectionality and the Church,” Tabletalk March, 2020. (HT: Todd Pruitt).
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R. Scott Clark
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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