Presidents of the six Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) seminaries have issued a statement rejecting Critical Race Theory (CRT) as antithetical to Baptist Christian faith and doctrine. The seminary leaders met together recently to affirm the doctrinal and confessional status of the “Baptist Faith and Message 2000,” a document that, according to the statement, “unites and defines Southern Baptist cooperation and establishes the confessional unity of our Convention.”
Notable in this statement was the direct and unequivocal rejection of “Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality and any version of Critical Theory” as “incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message.” The report of the SBC house organ, Baptist Press, can be found here along with the full text of the statement. Particularly objectionable to at least some of the presidents was the association of CRT with Marxist analysis. The presidents associate Marxist analysis with atheism and rule it categorically out of bounds for Baptist Christians. Yonat Shimron reports for Religion News Service on the details of the statement.
CRT developed out of critical legal studies and, most notably, the founding work of Derrick Bell. CRT has five “tenets”: counter-storytelling; the permanence of racism; Whiteness as property; interest conversion; and the critique of liberalism. I have found a series of youtube.com videos to be the most effective and concise description and application of CRT. The videos are entitled, “What is Critical Race Theory…Really?” Click on the title to get the first session and go from there.
The SBC presidents land, as do many other critics, on the last tenet as the most problematic. CRT offers a cogent and cutting critique of political liberalism (not to be confused with “liberal” in the current partisan sense) as a system that promotes hierarchy under the guise of equality of opportunity. More to the point, this critique calls into question the role of western capitalism as the source, partner, and beneficiary of race-based chattel slavery, beginning in the 1500’s. Marxist class analysis plays a role in this critique as a tool, but not as an ideology. So, for my money that criticism of CRT is a red herring.
Instead, we can apply the “white evangelical cultural tool kit,” as described by Robert P. Jones in White Too Long to the SBC statement for a clearer understanding. It’s helpful to rely on Jones for this since he grew up in the SBC and spends a large part of his book assessing the racist history, legacy and continuing policy of the denomination.
Jones relies on the work of Emerson and Smith (2000) for the identification and description of the white evangelical tool kit. “Specifically, Emerson and Smith discovered that the white evangelical cultural tool kit contained three main tools that are all interconnected by theology,” Jones writes, “freewill individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism.” (page 97).
In sum, freewill individualism asserts that there are no structures and institutions, no larger social movements, no cultural or social constraints, nothing bigger which controls or influences individuals. People are responsible for their own situations and accountable for their own freely chosen actions. Relationalism builds on this by asserting that poor relationships between individuals are the root of all problems rather than any systems or institutions.
Antistructuralism, then, is the necessary result of the first two tools. It “denotes the deep suspicion with which white evangelicals view institutional explanations for social problems, principally because they believe invoking social structures shifts blame from where it belongs: with sinful individuals” (page 98).
CRT demonstrates the role that communal realities play in determining individual behaviors. It sees systems and institutions as embodying and underwriting racism in our society. It describes “whiteness” as a role people are trained to perform and then claim as inherent to themselves. And it sees the individualistic bent of liberalism as a tool for those in power to maintain their privilege and position. In Christian terms, we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.
What strikes me is that the SBC arguments have the same odor as theological pronouncements made at the founding of the denomination in the 1850’s. Jones describes that theological history in precise detail. The SBC was founded in the fervent belief that Christian theology supported and even required race-based chattel slavery. For the representatives of that denomination now to attack a theoretical framework that continues the anti-slavery fight is just too rich for words.
It’s so easy, for me as an ELCA Lutheran, to throw stones at the SBC folks. That’s not my biggest concern. Instead, I am deeply troubled by a sentence from White Too Long. “Over the last two decades,” Jones notes, “there is increasing evidence that this cultural tool kit, developed primarily in the context of white evangelicalism, has become embedded across white Christianity more generally” (page 98). He notes that the three parts of the white evangelical tool kit have become embedded in large parts of white American Christianity in general.
In the mid-1800’s, old line Protestant denominations in the North were, I think, quite content to allow their southern counterparts to do the theological heavy lifting when it came to the scriptural and doctrinal underpinnings of Christian white supremacy. This had the virtue of allowing the northerners to continue occupy the moral high ground without sacrificing any social, economic or political power. Even many abolitionists in the North were white supremacists in their social theory and theology.
That has not changed for 150 years. Northern white churches did not, for the most part, release attack dogs to keep blacks out of their buildings and services. But the effect was equally as powerful. The documentary, A Time for Burning, demonstrates how that worked among LCA Lutherans here in Omaha in the mid-1960’s. Lest you think I am again name-calling, ALC Lutherans were even less engaged in the issues.
After that time, white flight and de facto segregation solidified the process to the point that white Lutherans in most of the Omaha metro don’t have to think about race (or ethnicity or poverty or class) ever — unless it happens to pop up in unflattering terms in the local paper. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is a powerful report on how that has worked out every in this country. It is, with notable exceptions in some of our east Omaha ELCA congregations, a chapter of history left unnoticed and un-discussed.
CRT challenges the assumptions of the white evangelical tool box. That’s a good thing. CRT is much closer to the analysis we find in the prophets and in the Sermon on the Mount than anything we might find in the Baptist Faith and Message or in most mission statements of ELCA congregations. It won’t happen, but I do wish that our denominational leadership would state publicly that CRT is not contrary to Lutheran theology and social teaching.
After all, if you want to find a critic of capitalism, you need look no further than Martin Luther. He was no friend of rich people and no naïve advocate for greed. Of course, that element of Luther’s writing is typically suppressed. I did not hear about it in my seminary training and was surprised to discover it later on in life. So, our Lutheran theological heritage has resources to analyze and critique modern (neo)liberalism, if only we put them to use in order to attack our own institutional racism and reject our capitalistic understandings of mission and service.
The alternative is to hope that 1850 comes around again. Because if it does, boy howdy, are we ever ready!
Reference: Jones, Robert P.. White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
The Acedic Lutheran 