Political correctness (PC) is a movement whose roots are in Marxist-Leninism and the Communist Revolution in Russia of 1917. According to this dogma, speech is said to be “politically correct” when it conforms to the dictates of the party. In its original setting and use, “the party” referred to the Community Party, the only political party in the former Soviet Union. Political correctness is a political-cultural orthodoxy. Under Communism, politically incorrect speech brought punishment by the state. Writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) were arrested by the KGB and shipped to prison camps merely for dissenting from this orthodoxy. William Deresiewicz defines it as “the persistent attempt to suppress the expression of unwelcome beliefs and ideas.”1 It is not, as he notes “the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency, like refraining from derogatory epithets.” It began to gain a foothold just as Modernity was morphing into Late or Liquid (Z. Baumann) Modernity, the subjectivist phase of Modernity. It was facilitated by the Western academic fascination with Desconstructionism, wherein most everything (including sexuality) is to be considered a mere social construct to be “deconstructed.” This was a war against sense experience, against history, against norms, against nature and, to borrow a phrase, “nature’s God.” As “Postmodernism” (or radical subjectivism) swept through the university, rendering authors mute (what do they know?) and empowering “reader response” (wherein the reader may make a text to say whatever he will) in the 1980s, near the end of the Cold War (though few knew it was the end), just before the Soviet Union would collapse and the Berlin Wall would be taken down, the ideology that fueled political, cultural, and social oppression during the Soviet Union was gaining momentum in the West. By the mid-1990s a debate was already raging in the academy whether political correctness was real or a fever dream of paranoid conservatives. Today, 25 years later, it can hardly be doubted that political correctness is real. Critical [fill in the blank] theorists abound and their books are best sellers. It is now considered politically incorrect to acknowledge that political correctness exists. It does and here are some resources to help you navigate the maze:
Resources On Political Correctness And Free Speech
Resources
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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