Note 1: While I've defined Critical Race Theory (moving forward within the article it will be referred to as CRT) previously, I will strive to do so in each post I write so that people who do not read multiple posts are given the full story each time.
Note 2: This post is written for people who believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. It does not make a case for whether or not Christianity is true, it assumes that it is. If you desire posts making a case for the truth of Christianity, you may want to browse other posts.
Throughout churches today, within the spotlight of the "black lives matter"-led protests and mainstream attention, many church leaders from establishments both big and small are - whether they realize it or not - taking a strong stance on whether they believe wholly and unwaveringly in the word of the Lord our God or if they believe God's commandments could use a little augmentation from "worldly wisdom".
The concept of CRT is the cause of the highly racialized atmosphere we are experiencing today, where white people are innately racists despite any actions they take or do not take. It is the assertion that the suffering of all minorities and all the ills of the world at large are explicitly due to white people. The buzzwords of "white privilege", "white fragility", "white supremacy", and so forth are born from the ideology of CRT.
To define it more specifically, the parent ideology Critical Theory is about viewing the entire world and all its history and events through a lens of oppressors and the oppressed. Critical Race Theory takes that concept fully, but adds an additional lens to it that focuses on race. Thus CRT is the focus of viewing the world and everything within it with focus on "who is the oppressor and who is oppressed, and what color are they".
CRT is not taught this way in school, it is not taught as a lesson plan titled "Critical Race Theory" where students learn about it and consider it as one of many options for how they desire to view the world. CRT has merely been fully adopted as the backdrop for most primary and formal education in our country, and thus every subject the student learns and every fact they learn is underscored by ensuring that they have taken note of whether anyone was oppressed and by whom, and what color they were. Subjects are not taught objectively - this is who this was, this is where they were, this is what they did, etc. Subjects are taught and then students are directly instructed to view this new information through a racialized lens - "why did this person oppress minorities when they did this?", "in what way do minorities still suffer today for the actions of this person?", "explain in detail why this person was a white supremacist", and so on.
To put this into terms that may be more easily understood, this would be analogous to back in the day when school was taught to children within a frame of Christianity. Human biology taught and explained within the understanding of the existence of a Creator who intentionally made us a certain way, historical figures explained with a focus on the presence or absence of their spiritual strength, perhaps a brief tangent in math class on how the existence of a measurable and quantifiable universe is evidence of an intentionally created existence reflecting God's infinite wisdom and knowledge. While there are surely "race studies" classes that focus explicitly on the gospel and tenants of racial awareness, they are not presented as being simply one of many possible beliefs, but rather the truth of the world.
In contrast, if you were to take a Christian religious studies class at a secular college, they do not teach you about Christianity as it is - the truth of the world, the fact that the spiritual world is real, that our universe was in fact, truly created. They teach instead that it is merely one way of viewing the world, they discuss our worlds' truths through Jesus prefaced by "Christians believe...", and they present alternative beliefs - even so far as intentionally having students describe counter arguments to Christian thought, ensuring as carefully as possible that they view Christian truth itself as something that can be argued against, something that could be falsified.
CRT is not treated this way - it is taught as the truth. They very idea that they would present counter arguments to it would be a case of secular heresy. They do not preface their statements as "Critical Race Theory argues that...". As Christians, we should know that the word of God within the Bible is the actual truth, the bare basic actual reality of the world, and not merely a fanciful way of viewing it. Thus, when CRT and Biblical concepts contradict, one must be right and one must be wrong, as there is a definitive objective truth that exists on this planet. Two contradictory things cannot be true at once. While it is possible that many Christians have simply been hoodwinked by the similar-enough-to-biblical sounding gospel of CRT, it doesn't excuse the fact that they will eventually be faced with an issue where the gospels of these two worldviews contradict. Many of them have already - any one of them who has gone so far as to write an article or blog post about "white privilege" has already contradicted God's word, and it is devastating each and every time to read through it. The devil is picking away at your armor of God, finding weaknesses you have left uncovered.
This is the problem and this is why CRT cannot be adopted by churches, because it is antithetical to the Christian truth. Churches who adopt and preach within the lens of CRT will find themselves contradicting God in small but insidious ways. This would be as harmful as a pastor declaring that the Quran is actually also fully true alongside the Bible - they contain contradictory information. One says Jesus is the only way to heaven and the other says Jesus is a guaranteed route to eternal damnation. They both attempt to describe God, and each one gives Him different characteristics that explicitly conflict with one another. Two contradictory statements cannot both be true at once - one of them must be wrong.
There are many similar-enough sentiments within CRT that first begin to lead Christians astray. Surely it is good and right to love others, think of others, help others. The broad concept of an innate badness exists in both. A broad concept of actively working toward being a better person exists in both. The problem is in the details, and this is perhaps one of the easiest ways that the heretical positions within CRT sneak past our Christian radar. I could not possibly hope to identify and explain every conflict CRT has with Christianity, and frankly I should not need to. The following three are, at least in my opinion, the most volatile and dangerous conflicts.
1. Attributing Blessings to Privilege
The issue I have noticed the most often lately is from white Christians who want to show their solidarity by "recognizing their white privilege". They write long articles about the general timeline of how things occurred in their lives, and then they attribute each "good thing" and each "bad thing that could have/almost happened, but didn't" to their whiteness. This is so painful to see each and every time, and I see it as nothing short of spiteful toward our God. The blessings and mercies we receive are from God and God alone. (James 1:17; John 1:16) Absolutely nothing good happens in this world without God. Without an ounce of exaggeration, every good thing we have is because of God. This world is broken, evil, terrible, and seemingly always out to get us. It's terrible here. Every time we evade suffering, it is the mercy of God alone. A realm absent of God would be endless misery without relief of any kind - which is why hell is so terrible, as it is a realm without God. As long as God is present there is mercy and grace. Every time we make it to another day, it is the grace of God alone. When we succeed, when we gain, when we are fruitful and joyful, it is because of God's love and kindness alone.
To attribute these things - good things happening, bad things not happening - to the happenstance of the color of our skin is so antithetical to Christian thought it should be an obvious warning sign. Without God we are nothing, all of us, each person of every race and nationality equally subject to the maximum amount of endless torture. We are equally and infinitely loved by our God, and thus all mercies come from Him. (Psalms 145:9) All blessings are from above. God has worked all things for our good, and to turn around and declare your avoidance of jail, or significant raise at work as happenstance due to your color should be a clear and obvious affront to the truth our Lord has told us.
To further complicate things, the unanswered question from the assertion that all of our blessings and mercies are due to our skin color remains - from where comes the blessings and mercies experienced by people of color? What about all of our sufferings? Biblical truth answers these questions consistently and without issue. Deeper questioning into CRT reveals holes and errors. To attribute all of our blessings and mercies to white skin would insist that dark skin does not experience blessings and mercies at all - and yet they do. Clearly there must be another source for blessings and mercies if people of color experience them. We should be aware that source is God - so how is the source of blessings and mercies for people of color God, while the source of blessings and mercies for white people is whiteness?
The problem occurs most clearly when people attempt to simply meld these two things together without realizing they are antithetical. "God is real and our blessings and mercies are from Him, but white people simply still benefit disproportionately within the world due to being white, because of how the world works," and then declare that this is consistent. It is not - it still directly conflicts with the truth that all our blessings and mercies come from the Lord. They cannot come both from the Lord and from being white. What happens when you do this is you are essentially claiming that God blessed you because you are white. This cannot be true, because God does not work that way. He does not favor any of His children over another due to their physical appearance. (Acts 10:34-35)
By attempting to allow these statements to work at the same time, you don't simply misattribute the source of your blessings, you make a declarative statement about the way in which God chooses to bless people that goes directly against the truth of His character. This is blasphemous and absolutely dangerous. This is something an actual racist would believe. Remember, please, that this current culture's racialized ideology is not "the truth of the world", but part of the theory of CRT. The idea that we are benefiting disproportionately due to being white is not a statement that must be true, you do not need to attempt to reconcile it with Christianity. It can simply be discarded wholesale. It is an ideology, a worldview like any other, like people who believe their day to day lives are directly influenced by the alignment of the stars and planets, and like astrology it can be (and is) wrong. It is wrong because all blessings and mercies are from God.
2. White People Burdened Unequally with "Original Sin"
While I do not see this discussed as much by white Christian virtue signalers, and I can only imagine why not, this is a very prevalent tenant of CRT. White people are innately racist and white people are unavoidably guilty of perpetuating white supremacy, even if it is not intentional. The CRT tenant that white people benefit disproportionately from being white is paired with this tenant, that due to the idea that white people are benefiting disproportionately, they are therefore disproportionately guilty. The burden of white guilt flows explicitly from the thought process behind white privilege.
While it is not discussed very openly on church-sponsered blog posts and articles from Christian leaders who have yet to become fully radicalized into CRT, let me assure you this is part of CRT and it's part of the current hyper-racialized cultural focus. If you are willing to embrace the concept of "white privilege", you will be pressed by CRT ideologues to accept this belief as well. It appears on the surface to meld well with the Christian belief in original sin, but again, it is contradictory. The concept that white people are more guilty than other people is a bastardization of the core belief in original sin. We are all equally guilty and we are all equally in desperate need of a savior. (Romans 3:10-12)
The CRT belief in excess white guilt further strays from God's truth in that simultaneously, people of color are actually not guilty of anything. The idea that white people could be "more guilty" downplays the inherent
sin in others, and that sin is just as deadly as any other. This
particular CRT tenant is actually particularly harmful to people of
color - if led to believe they are not guilty they may not see their
need for salvation through Jesus. People of color, however, can become guilty if they decide to "perpetrate white supremacy" themselves via support of beliefs that oppose CRT or flat out rejection of CRT. (Remember, Critical Race Theory is an ideology presented as factual. It is possible for it to simply be wrong.) This is in direct opposition to original sin, wherein every last one of us inherit original sin from Adam and Eve and never "gain", or even lose, it. We are, however, redeemed by Jesus' sacrifice. (1 John 1:8-9)
CRT's concept of original sin is in no way congruent with Christian original sin. Each and every aspect of it creates a contradictory belief. CRT posits that we inherited our excess white guilt from our white ancestors who benefited from the oppression of minorities, and that sin alone makes us more guilty than people of color. It disregards that at all sin, even if it does not involve the oppression of other people, is deadly. It ignores that there are other bad things that cause harm, guilt, and shame for humanity. CRT's concept of white guilt ignores that guilt can come from things other than race-based enslavement and oppression. Christianity posits that no person is less guilty than any other person, and to suggest otherwise is thus contradictory.
To hyper focus on white people's guilt due to oppression of people of color is unhelpful. Please note that I don't think it's wrong to mention or acknowledge - slavery, Jim Crow, et. al. were sinful and harmful. Modern day racism is sinful and harmful. The issue lies in losing the bigger picture and zeroing in on this one fraction of the problem of sin as if it is the number one issue of our time. As murder rates skyrocket and cities are on fire, to lecture about microaggressions is blatantly insulting. As a whole, humanity has an unfathomable lack of respect for human life, of all races and nationalities, and we march in with the audacity to preach about how to avoid ever offending anyone ever again? The "soft racism" we are taught is just as damaging and wretched as true hatred does nothing but skirt around the actual issue at hand.
The truth, of course, is that we are all equally guilty "due to our ancestors", but what causes that guilt is not that we oppressed one another, but rather that we directly disobeyed God, from the very beginning. This direct disobedience to God is actually what caused our poor treatment of one another to begin with. Once cast from the garden, one of the first terrible consequences of our disobedience to God was that a man murdered his own flesh and blood brother. (Genesis 4:8) There was no racism then, as there were only a handful of total people in all of existence, and I'd presume they all looked pretty similar. Attempting to fix the sins against our brothers and sisters without acknowledging that they are but a symptom will produce nothing. You cannot treat a symptom, you must cure the disease. The disease suffered by people of all races is a propensity toward a disobedience to God - due to the mistakes of our ancestors, the original first two humans, the ancestors we all share.
The third and final contradiction I will go into ties directly into this second one, as where there is a doctrine of original sin, there is, in Christianity, redemption. But first, I would like to take the time to explain why CRT's white guilt claim and Christianity's original sin doctrine do not even separately exist - and attempting to make them exist simultaneously requires a logical failure. You may try to say, "we all have original sin, but white people just also have white guilt," but the concept of white guilt as it ties to the actions of our ancestors becomes superfluous in this context. The "sins of our ancestors" are the same sins as everyone else's ancestors, and all our sins are all bad sins. No sins are more sin than other sins - they are all sin. Sin is disobedience to God, sin creates a rift between us and God, and it all leads to the same destination. To attempt to make any distinction at all that we have this unique, collective white guilt for the specific sins of the "ancestors" that are all the same color of us is already encompassed by the Christian doctrine of original sin, but unnecessarily racialized - easily a sin in its own right. Surely you must acknowledge sin (Jeremiah 14:20) but this does not apply uniquely to white people and attempts to make it so downplays other, just as deadly sin.
The fact of the matter is that we are all equally condemned for the sins of our ancestors. We suffer individually for the various sins of our fathers, and all of humanity surely suffers in unique and terrible ways for the sins of all of our ancestors. To put a hyper focus on white people's historical sins specifically is little more than a strange obsession, the gospel of a foreign religion that rests in firm opposition to Christianity's teachings. It is fine and good to acknowledge and seek to right race-related sin, but this hyper-focus does not merely acknowledge and seek to right, but creates a vast network of insidious tendrils, slipping into each and every aspect of our lives to tear focus away from anything else and lead us away from the truth. We will see the true danger of all of this in the next topic.
3. No White Redemption is Possible
The final issue I will address is CRT's lack of redemption for and dehumanization of the people it declares guilty. According to CRT, white people are to atone for the sins of their ancestors, but there is no redemption waiting for them. They are simply always racist, they always perpetuate white supremacy, and they are to simply give up their presence and voices entirely to people of color. CRT insists nothing short of the idea that things would be much better if white people simply did not exist - and many adherents will not be shy to admit this. White people are to use all their talents and resources to the benefit of people of color, to toil endlessly toward a goal they are told is in all actuality not even possible. It specifically aims to take the humanity away from white people in hopes that all they will feel is guilt and shame forever for actions outside of their control. CRT demands white people dedicate their entire lives toward making everything less about themselves, and more about people of color.
The wording of that last sentence was intentional - this is yet another bastardization of a Christian truth. John 3:30 states, "He must increase, but I must decrease." CRT yet again exhibits trace amounts of reality, but skews them in a nasty way. We are surely to make an effort to improve as a person. We are to make things less about ourselves, to deny ourselves, and to take up a greater cause. That greater cause is Jesus. To adhere to the tenants put forth by CRT means that you hear God's commandments, but have decided to listen to the worldly voices of a secular movement that operates absent of the acknowledgement of God's love, and dedicate yourself to their cause instead of to God's cause.
To make matters worse, the biblical reality of our Christian life doesn't demand a life of endless toil and sacrifice just for us to be yet cast into hell. It does not strip you of everything and leave you to die in guilt and shame. We are redeemed through Christ, entirely made new. (2 Corinthians 5:17) We are "born again". Our old selves literally die. There are some people who have turned to Jesus whose previous lives are absolutely devastating - let's cut to the chase, here. You can be a straight up serial murderer and be redeemed through Jesus. CRT insists that all white people are perpetually guilty because of slave owning ancestors regardless of their own personal sins. There is no "born again". There is no death of the old self because the ancestral slave ownership induced white-specific guilt is affixed permanently. We are to suffer unabated shame for the sins of our ancestors.
This is such a wildly disfigured doctrine of atonement, that it even insists that despite the inability for us to ever shake our guilt, we should work endlessly to atone for it regardless. Who would ever sacrifice themselves to such a degree to simply be eternally damned anyway? Christian truth doesn't posit anything anywhere near this unreasonable. We are redeemed through Christ alone, but we show and prove our love and fellowship with God by following His commandments. We willingly become less while He becomes more because He loved us first, and because we feel His love, we desire willingly to share His love with others. (1 John 4:19) When we follow Jesus through love, we are saved and we are allowed to be in the very presence of God, the Creator of all things, our Lord God who loves us. If God demanded we follow his commandments, but that we would be cast into hell regardless, what motivation would we have to turn away from the sins of the flesh? Why stop your lust and gluttony if the final destination is unchanged? Not even God Himself asks us to do something so absurd, for broken, sinful humans to demand such a thing of us is bold indeed.
What CRT pretends to be full of, but what this makes abundantly clear it lacks, is actually love. It's full of demands, coercion, and eternal damnation with no escape. We love God because He loved us first, but we are demanded to love people of color and quite blatantly expect no love in return - even to expect to still be fully hated. While it's not biblical to expect people to love us when we love them, God always loves us. This is of course absent from CRT, as CRT is not a biblical ideology. White people are fully demanded to atone endlessly, give up everything about themselves, and feel eternal shame - for nothing. Christians tie God's love into this racial doctrine to attempt to feel better about what is truly being demanded of them by CRT, but we must recognize that the ideology behind CRT does not coincide with Christianity. White racial atonement is absent of love when viewed as it is described by its adherents, absent of the flailing attempts to rationalize it through a Christian lens.
You may try to say, "We all have original sin, but white people just also are responsible for atoning for the unfair advantages they have today due to their ancestors", but you are mandating that while we are redeemed through Christ and we should focus our hearts and our minds on becoming more like Him, we just also need to focus on racial justice as prescribed by secular ideologues. You attempt to follow two masters. You are saying that despite being born again in Jesus, (1 John 1:9 again) we should remain guilty for our ancestors' sins. You believe we need to atone for our sins and born again in Jesus, but never be forgiven for this particular sin. You believe we should be focusing 100% on becoming more like Jesus, but also focus on this other, secular "self-improvement".
Jesus tells us "If you love me you will follow my commandments". (John 14:15) If you feel led to love your neighbor by improving minority neighborhoods, that's great, but you should focus on what God's calling is for you and not be worried about what the world thinks you should do. God will surely call many to right racially-influenced inequities in our societies, but there are still widows and orphans in need as well - and they might be white (you'll note the absence of a racial identity of the widows and orphans mentioned in James 1:27). Furthermore, if you believe we are born again through Jesus, you cannot in good conscious espouse the idea that we are perpetually guilty for our ancestors' transgressions. The idea that we should atone for the sins of our ancestral fathers while also being white and being aware that our ancestors were white is not explicitly unbiblical, but within these terms, it becomes so, due to the reasons stated.
The terms as outlined by CRT insist that we benefit due to whiteness, we are innately and specifically responsible for the suffering of people of color due to our whiteness, and we must dedicate ourselves fully to whatever are the whims and desires of people of color because of our whiteness. As I have made abundantly clear, these are ideological claims that do not coincide with biblical truth, and thus, they are simply not true. Attempting to adhere to them while also believing in a biblical reality will expose cracks in your armor and open you up to corruption.
If you are racist, then surely it is good and right to repent for this sin and change your ways, which may take time and effort. It is also not wrong to work toward fixing true inequities and disadvantages faced by minorities that undoubtedly stem from the sin of racism in society's past and present. But if your position is that you are naturally and unalterably racist due to your skin color, you could never hope to "repent" for this, as you are seeking atonement for being born the way God stitched you together in your mother's womb (Psalm 139:13) - yet another affront to God. If we were not to have different physical appearances, God would not have given them to us. I could not even begin to hypothesize on His purpose for it, but clearly here we are, different colors. It's been made abundantly clear that we are to love one another regardless of our ancestry, which actually includes that people of color are to love their white neighbors as well - something CRT insists against explicitly. This is yet another of the many, many ways that CRT conflicts openly with Christian truth, but I won't be going in depth into anymore examples.
If you choose to believe CRT, you will be forced to choose between God's good and holy word and the claims of a secular and broken world's ideology. If you attempt to allow yourself to believe they are both true at once, you are explicitly harming yourself by blaspheming against God's truths in ways that may not be readily apparent. I cannot stress enough that this is dangerous. Cling tightly to Jesus and Jesus alone. The world is not your friend and you will not be spared from the wrath of secular ideologues by compromising on biblical truths. (John 15:17-18)
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