What does the Bible say about intersectionality?

Question 60044.

Intersectionality theory began life as a technical term in American legal scholarship and has since become a whole way of seeing the world. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it in 1989 to describe a real problem: a black woman suing for discrimination could find that the courts recognised race claims and sex claims but had no category for the particular disadvantage of being both at once. As a narrow observation about how categories can fail people, that was fair enough.

What we are dealing with now is much larger than that original point. Intersectionality theory has become a framework for analysing society, distributing moral authority and adjudicating disputes, and it is worth asking a Christian question of it. Where does it agree with Scripture, where does it diverge, and what does it do to the gospel when it is imported wholesale into a church?

What intersectionality theory claims

The framework holds that society is structured by overlapping systems of oppression, and that a person’s experience is determined by where they sit at the crossing points of those systems. Race, sex, class, sexuality, disability and other markers combine, and the combinations produce distinct kinds of disadvantage that cannot be understood by looking at any single category on its own.

Two further moves usually accompany that description. The first is epistemic: those with more experience of oppression are held to see social reality more clearly, so their testimony carries a special authority. The second is moral: those nearer the privileged end of the axes bear a responsibility to defer, listen and make room. Together these turn intersectionality theory from a description into a procedure for settling arguments.

It is important to see that the framework is not primarily about individuals at all. It is about group location. A person is understood first as a position within a structure, and only secondarily as themselves.

Where intersectionality theory and Scripture agree

Let me start with the agreements, because they are real and Christians who ignore them lose the argument before it begins. Scripture is emphatic that oppression exists, that it is often structural, and that God notices. The prophets attack rigged legal systems and dishonest weights, not simply personal unkindness. Amos denounces those who trample the poor, and Isaiah condemns lawmakers who write oppressive decrees.

Scripture also knows that disadvantages compound. The Old Testament repeatedly names the widow, the orphan and the sojourner together, precisely because being any one of those was hard and being more than one was ruinous. Deuteronomy commands justice for exactly those combinations of vulnerability. If someone tells you the Bible has no concept of layered disadvantage, they have not read Deuteronomy 24.

And Scripture insists that people can be blind to injustice they benefit from. Nathan had to tell David a story before David could see his own sin, which suggests that the powerful do not automatically perceive what they are doing. That much of the intersectional critique is simply true.

Where the framework departs from Scripture

The divergence begins with the diagnosis. Intersectionality theory locates evil in structures and in the groups that benefit from them. Scripture locates evil first in the human heart, and then explains that hearts build structures in their own image. Jesus said that out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, theft and slander, which you can read at Matthew 15:19. Change the structures and leave the heart alone and you will simply get new structures with the same disease.

The second divergence concerns identity. Paul writes that in Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for we are all one in Him. That is Galatians 3:28, and it does not abolish the differences; it abolishes their power to determine standing. Intersectionality theory does the opposite. It makes those markers the most important thing about you and hardens them into a permanent hierarchy.

The third divergence is about knowledge. If moral insight is distributed according to social position, then argument becomes impossible, because a claim is assessed by who made it rather than whether it is true. Scripture will not allow that. Leviticus forbids partiality to the poor as well as deference to the great, which is a startling command to modern ears and a necessary one.

The question of redemption

Here is the deepest problem. Intersectionality theory has a doctrine of sin, a doctrine of the fall and a demand for repentance, but it has no atonement and no forgiveness. There is no mechanism by which a person on the oppressor side of the ledger can ever be reconciled, because the offence is located in an identity that cannot be laid down. Confession leads to further confession rather than to absolution.

That is a heavy load to place on anybody. It also explains the atmosphere the framework tends to generate, which is anxious rather than joyful. A system that can convict but cannot pardon will always end in exhaustion or in the search for someone lower down to accuse.

The gospel does what the framework cannot. It convicts everybody, of the same fundamental problem, and then it offers everybody the same remedy at the same cost, which is nothing to us and everything to Jesus. The word Paul uses for the barrier that came down is a dividing wall, and he says it has been broken in His flesh, not by our efforts. I have written more on this ground in how Scripture addresses critical race theory and in the Bible’s view on systemic racism.

What this means for a local church

A congregation that adopts intersectionality theory as its operating system will find its fellowship reorganised around grievance rather than around the Lord’s Table. Members will start relating to each other primarily as representatives of categories, and the mutual submission the New Testament commands will be replaced by a one directional deference determined by demographics.

That does not mean a church should be deaf. If members from a minority background say they have been treated shabbily, the right response is to listen hard, investigate honestly and put right what is wrong, because that is what love and justice require. You do not need intersectionality theory to do that. You need James 2:1 to 4, which addresses partiality in the assembly with more force than any modern framework.

The Greek word James uses is prosopolempsia, receiving the face, judging by appearances. God does not do it, and neither may we, in either direction.

The problem of the unfalsifiable

There is a feature of intersectionality theory that makes honest debate difficult, and it needs naming. Objections raised by someone in a privileged position can be attributed to that position rather than answered, so disagreement becomes evidence of the very blindness being alleged. That is a closed loop. Any theory constructed so that no evidence could ever count against it has left the realm of argument.

Christians should be uneasy about this quite apart from politics, because Scripture keeps insisting that truth is public and testable. Paul invited the Corinthians to check his claims against five hundred living witnesses. The Bereans checked the apostle himself against the Old Testament. A framework which insists that only certain people are qualified to assess a claim runs against the grain of how God has always dealt with us.

The way through, in a church setting, is to keep asking for the specific. Not what does the framework predict, but what actually happened, to whom, and when. Specifics can be investigated, put right and forgiven. Abstractions can only be endlessly asserted.

Identity and the Christian

Underneath the whole discussion is the question of what makes you you. Intersectionality theory answers with a list of coordinates. Scripture answers with a relationship: you are a creature made in God’s image, fallen in Adam, and, if you have trusted Jesus, hidden with Him in God. Every other description of you is real but secondary, and none of them is your foundation.

That is not a way of ignoring the coordinates. My background, sex and circumstances shape me profoundly, and pretending otherwise is a form of dishonesty that usually comes most easily to those with the least to lose. The claim is narrower and stronger than that. Those things do not decide my worth, my guilt, my credibility or my future, because a verdict has been passed on me at the cross that overrules all of them.

A church that gets this right will be visibly diverse and strangely unbothered about it, because the thing its members have in common is so much larger than the things they do not.

So, now what?

Take the truth and leave the framework. Believe that injustice is real, that it compounds, and that comfortable people are often blind to it. Refuse the idea that your standing before God or your credibility in an argument is fixed by your demographic position, because Scripture will not have it and because it leads to a bitterness that helps nobody.

And then do the harder work. Get to know people in your church who are unlike you, well enough that they will tell you the truth. That relationship will teach you more than intersectionality theory ever could, and it will do it without dividing the body of Jesus into ranks. Who in your congregation have you never actually had a conversation with?

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:28, ESV