Everyone is talking about Critical Race Theory.
Never mind that most of us hadn’t even heard about it till, like, last week. Folks are talking and pontificating and bloviating about this complex subject as though they’ve been experts all their lives.
White evangelical leaders, in fact, are stumbling over themselves to denounce it. Consider this:
• The Southern Baptist Convention teed up CRT as a subject of debate during this week’s annual meeting, and some white pastors made plans to assail it, going so far as to rally under a pirate banner with the slogan “Take the Ship!” (I couldn’t make this stuff up.)
• In Denton, Texas, 1,600 people registered for a conference on “Wokeness and the Gospel” that took place last weekend. Then on Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill into law banning the teaching of CRT in the classroom, without ever defining what CRT is.
• You’ll find dozens of articles smacking down Critical Race Theory in publications such as The Christian Post, virtually all written by conservative white evangelicals.
I’m really tempted to go up to some of these leaders, pastors, and friends who are frantically denouncing CRT and ask a snarky question:
“Wow. I didn’t know you were so interested in racial justice issues. Has God been speaking to your heart since the murder of George Floyd?”
Now imagine if someone hosted a conference in Dallas titled “Loving Our Neighbor Well: How to Answer the Biblical Call for Racial Justice.” Do you think 1,600 white evangelicals would show up? Do you think even 16 would sign up for that?
There exists a blatant hardness of heart concerning racial justice among white evangelicals. As each week passes, I am astonished by how my brothers and sisters are digging their heels in, plugging their ears, and stamping their feet like spoiled children rather than asking God what to do and how to respond to the cry for justice among Christians of color.
Now to understand this hardness of heart and the terror CRT brings, we’ll have to look briefly at what it is. Critical Race Theory, as summarized in Christianity Today, “…is not a static thought, but an ever-evolving practice of critiquing how race and racism is perpetuated by our legal system and other institutions…CRT can’t really be labeled as one particular theory, but more as a movement.”
One assumption shared across this movement is that systemic racism is a thing, and that people of conscience are obligated to uproot it.
As I mentioned in my last post, systemic—or structural—racism looks beyond personal interactions based on prejudice to how white supremacy is reflected at a systems level. It takes in the big picture of society, examining the everyday actions—in legal justice, health care, education, the church, you name it—that consistently produce negative outcomes for people of color.
Of course systemic racism exists.
Would any reasonable person deny that?
While CRT freaks out wide swaths of the white evangelical churches, many Black evangelical leaders consider it a useful tool for analysis. Like all theories, they say, it must be viewed through the lens of Scripture and balanced with the law of love.
Dwight McKissic, a Black Southern Baptist pastor of a large church in Arlington, Texas, Cornerstone Baptist, expressed this position in a recent post, outlining several areas of CRT that are beneficial to Bible-believing Christians who care about racial justice. “There is value in acknowledging where systemic injustice exists and is embedded in societal structures,” McKissic writes, “and applying biblical principles to root it out.”
Answering a comment to his post, McKissic pointed out the hypocrisies underlying white Southern Baptists’ opposition to CRT. “The question is…why can’t we affirm these tenets [of CRT] and acknowledge that they don’t contradict the Bible? We’ve not denounced The Lost Cause Theory of the Civil War that’s still taught in some Christian schools, Christian Nationalism, or Q-Anon. Why then would we single out CRT to denounce?”
Good question. What’s so scary about CRT?
To answer this question, one must examine the psyche of white evangelicalism. Conservative white evangelicals see themselves as the good and godly, upholders of Truth in a society increasingly bent toward wickedness and the abandonment of traditional values.
Because they are good and godly and the bulwark against wickedness, they cannot imagine themselves participating in the sin of racism, or discriminating against someone on the basis of color.
While there are many excellent and praiseworthy things about white evangelicalism—including its heritage of Biblical teaching and effective children’s ministry, to name just a few strengths—most white churchgoers live, work, and worship in white environments. Many find it difficult to conceive that racism goes beyond the interpersonal level.
Acknowledging that systemic racism is a thing obliterates their self-concept as The Righteous. Systemic racism posits that all white people are complicit in racism, whether it be through actions or silence. We all benefit in some way from the oppression and exclusion of certain population groups and the elevation of others—namely, white people like us.
Systemic racism also acknowledges the dynamic of internalized racism—that we as white people have absorbed the stereotypes of Black criminality and presumed intellectual and cultural inferiority, among other myths, that are part and parcel of growing up white in the U.S. of A.
These messages have pervaded politics, media, education, science, and the Church in innumerable and insidious ways since the 17th century, and they are the basis of what we call white supremacy. This doesn’t mean you wear a white pointy hat and burn crosses; it means you consciously or unconsciously harbor assumptions of racial and cultural superiority.
So yeah, if you acknowledge that systemic racism exists, and that Critical Race Theory holds some important lessons even for Bible-believing Christians, you come up against a stronghold in which white people trust, to paraphrase Proverbs 21:22.
This irrational fear of CRT is preventing the Church from doing what discerning Christian leaders have done through the generations: Examining all things, hating what is evil, and clinging to what is good.
We evangelicals have applied this exhortation of the Apostle Paul with cynicism, decrying the evil of a few select sins (such as abortion) but refusing to examine racism at all under the guise of resisting the supposed “Marxist roots” of CRT.
Just remember that you might fool your fellow pew-sitter, but you’re not fooling God. He sees our selfishness. He sees our heart. And racism is indeed a matter of the heart.
It’s unfortunate, too, because there are some aspects of “wokeism” and CRT that Christians should filter, and others that should be adopted conditionally, applying the Christian doctrines of original sin as well as the Biblical truth that every human being is made in the image of God.
By the way, this is what leaders do.
They don’t react by engaging in pre-emptive smackdowns.
They listen. They educate themselves. They examine all things in the presence of God.
They refuse to protect sacred cows, including politically conservative white church members—or tithe-paying Black congregants in Black churches.
They never say “I get it now. I’ve got the truth, and I don’t need to listen anymore.”
They allow others to point out their blind spots. They’ve cultivated the habit of humbling themselves, knowing we are all “missing it” somewhere.
Hey, whatever happened to leaders?
In what I see as a hopeful coda to this post, Southern Baptists rejected the ultraconservative “pirate” faction and elected as president a moderate white pastor from Alabama named Ed Litton. Litton is reportedly committed to racial reconciliation within the Southern Baptist Convention.
