What are your thoughts re Hegelian Dialectic & CRT in the Church?

[HondurasKeiser]

Ken & Boot, I read you both as asserting that either Critical Theory is a useful tool for uncovering hidden injustice in society or that it's an esoteric, dusty old philosophy that isn't even operant in 2022 so why are we arguing about it; it must be because someone named Chris Rufo...yadda, yadda, yadda.

Ken, I haven't begun to look for CRT in the Church yet but I just happened to be reading Nellie Bowles's piece in The Atlantic from a month ago about the decline of San Francisco and the last segment stood out to me as an example of how CRT, Intersectionality and Critical Queer Theory, while obviously distorted from their pure, theoretical forms in the academy, are nevertheless working themselves out in certain segments of society that have accepted as axiomatic, certain premises of Critical Theory.

I'd remind you that Bowles is a writer of the Left-persuasion:

The anger directed at Chesa Boudin probably could have been contained. The petty crime was frustrating, but it wasn’t what lit the city up for revolution. The housing crush is miserable, but it’s been that way for more than a decade now. The spark that lit this all on fire was the school board. And the population ready to rage was San Francisco’s parents.

The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.

One night in 2021, the meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent committee.

Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white.

“My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”

Someone else called in, identifying herself as Cindy. She was calling to defend Brenzel, and she was crying. “He is a gay father of a mixed-race family,” she said.

A woman named Brandee came on the call: “I’m a white parent and have some intersectionality within my family. My son has several disabilities. And I really wouldn’t dream of putting my name forward for this.” She had some choice words for Cindy: “When white people share these kinds of tears at board meetings”—she pauses, laughing—“I have an excellent book suggestion for you. It’s called White Tears/Brown Scars. I’d encourage you to read it, thank you.”

Allison Collins, a member of the school board, dealt the death blow: “As a mixed-race person myself, I find it really offensive when folks say that somebody’s a parent of somebody who’s a person of color, as, like, a signifier that they’re qualified to represent that community.”

Brenzel remained mostly expressionless throughout the meeting. He did not say a word. Eventually the board agreed to defer the vote. He was never approved.

The other big debate on these Zoom calls was whether to rename schools named for figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein, the first female mayor of San Francisco. The board labeled these figures symbols of a racist past, and ultimately voted to rename 44 “injustice-linked” schools—though after a backlash, the board suspended the implementation of the changes.

The board members were arguably doing what they had been put there to do. Collins and her two most progressive colleagues were elected in 2018, the year before Boudin, and it was a headier time, when Trump’s shadow seemed to loom over even the smallest local office. Collins had a blog focused on justice in education, and there was a sense that she would champion a radical new politics. But during the endless lockdown, enthusiasm began to wane, even among many people who’d voted for her. They found themselves turned off by the board’s combative tone—as well as by its actual ideas about education.

That same month, the board voted to replace the rigorous test that screened applicants for Lowell, San Francisco’s most competitive high school, with a lottery system. López had explained it this way: “Grades and standardized test scores are automatic barriers for students outside of white and Asian communities.” She said they “have shown to be one of the most effective racist policies, considering they’re used to attempt to measure aptitude and intelligence. So the fact that Lowell uses this merit-based system as a step in applying is inherently racist.”

Collins echoed that: “‘Merit’ is an inherently racist construct designed and centered on white supremacist framing.”

If you didn’t like these changes, tough. A parent on Twitter accused López of trying to destroy the school system, and she replied with the words “I mean this sincerely” followed by a middle-finger emoji. In July, on the topic of the declining quality of life in San Francisco, she wrote, “I’m like, then leave.”

This is what a Critical Theory and Anti-racism, sprung from the academy and turned loose on society looks like. You can hem and haw and say 'That's not true CRT' but then I ask you, whence come those actions and words, what animating philosophy gives life to speaking about one's physical characteristics as though they are wholly determinative of one's acceptability for a position on a school board or that they, and not one's merit and effort, should determine who receives acceptance letters from top schools?

[Ken]

Ken & Boot, I read you both as asserting that either Critical Theory is a useful tool for uncovering hidden injustice in society or that it's an esoteric, dusty old philosophy that isn't even operant in 2022 so why are we arguing about it; it must be because someone named Chris Rufo...yadda, yadda, yadda.

Ken, I haven't begun to look for CRT in the Church yet but I just happened to be reading Nellie Bowles's piece in The Atlantic from a month ago about the decline of San Francisco and the last segment stood out to me as an example of how CRT, Intersectionality and Critical Queer Theory, while obviously distorted from their pure, theoretical forms in the academy, are nevertheless working themselves out in certain segments of society that have accepted as axiomatic, certain premises of Critical Theory.

I'd remind you that Bowles is a writer of the Left-persuasion:

The anger directed at Chesa Boudin probably could have been contained. The petty crime was frustrating, but it wasn’t what lit the city up for revolution. The housing crush is miserable, but it’s been that way for more than a decade now. The spark that lit this all on fire was the school board. And the population ready to rage was San Francisco’s parents.

The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.

One night in 2021, the meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent committee.

Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white.

“My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”

Someone else called in, identifying herself as Cindy. She was calling to defend Brenzel, and she was crying. “He is a gay father of a mixed-race family,” she said.

A woman named Brandee came on the call: “I’m a white parent and have some intersectionality within my family. My son has several disabilities. And I really wouldn’t dream of putting my name forward for this.” She had some choice words for Cindy: “When white people share these kinds of tears at board meetings”—she pauses, laughing—“I have an excellent book suggestion for you. It’s called White Tears/Brown Scars. I’d encourage you to read it, thank you.”

Allison Collins, a member of the school board, dealt the death blow: “As a mixed-race person myself, I find it really offensive when folks say that somebody’s a parent of somebody who’s a person of color, as, like, a signifier that they’re qualified to represent that community.”

Brenzel remained mostly expressionless throughout the meeting. He did not say a word. Eventually the board agreed to defer the vote. He was never approved.

The other big debate on these Zoom calls was whether to rename schools named for figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein, the first female mayor of San Francisco. The board labeled these figures symbols of a racist past, and ultimately voted to rename 44 “injustice-linked” schools—though after a backlash, the board suspended the implementation of the changes.

The board members were arguably doing what they had been put there to do. Collins and her two most progressive colleagues were elected in 2018, the year before Boudin, and it was a headier time, when Trump’s shadow seemed to loom over even the smallest local office. Collins had a blog focused on justice in education, and there was a sense that she would champion a radical new politics. But during the endless lockdown, enthusiasm began to wane, even among many people who’d voted for her. They found themselves turned off by the board’s combative tone—as well as by its actual ideas about education.

That same month, the board voted to replace the rigorous test that screened applicants for Lowell, San Francisco’s most competitive high school, with a lottery system. López had explained it this way: “Grades and standardized test scores are automatic barriers for students outside of white and Asian communities.” She said they “have shown to be one of the most effective racist policies, considering they’re used to attempt to measure aptitude and intelligence. So the fact that Lowell uses this merit-based system as a step in applying is inherently racist.”

Collins echoed that: “‘Merit’ is an inherently racist construct designed and centered on white supremacist framing.”

If you didn’t like these changes, tough. A parent on Twitter accused López of trying to destroy the school system, and she replied with the words “I mean this sincerely” followed by a middle-finger emoji. In July, on the topic of the declining quality of life in San Francisco, she wrote, “I’m like, then leave.”

This is what a Critical Theory and Anti-racism, sprung from the academy and turned loose on society looks like. You can hem and haw and say 'That's not true CRT' but then I ask you, whence come those actions and words, what animating philosophy gives life to speaking about one's physical characteristics as though they are wholly determinative of one's acceptability for a position on a school board or that they, and not one's merit and effort, should determine who receives acceptance letters from top schools?

I'm quite familiar with San Francisco and the San Francisco school board. That's just a lot of performative idiocy and all of those idiots like Allison Collins were soundly defeated and tossed out last winter in a recall election. Collins (who is cited in your article) was defeated by 76% of the vote which is pretty resounding. So this stuff is self-correcting. Even in liberal San Francisco. Had I lived there I would have voted to toss them out too. They were as equally stupid as those who find a Marxist under every bush or who think the only thing wrong with public schools is that we no longer open each school day with state-mandated school prayer.

That is not to say you can't dissect each individual issue like grading and admissions to competitive magnet schools and find inequities. But the problems are often complex and nuanced and the solutions should be too. The way that highly-competitive magnet schools in cities like San Francisco and New York operate is inequitable. But the solutions should be more nuanced than simply a lottery.

[HondurasKeiser]

Have been watching this thread with the same question Ken raises, where is CRT directly entering or altering the church.

So here's Neil Shenvi:

I’ve encountered a few evangelicals who are skeptical. They usually agree that critical theory and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible as worldviews and that the acceptance of critical theory will have devastating effects on core Christian beliefs. Yet they deny that critical theory is influencing evangelical thought. Instead they see accusations of ‘critical theory’ (or, more commonly, “cultural Marxism”) as disingenuous attempts to shut down important conversations about race and justice. In their view, ‘critical theory’ is a bogeyman used by critics to silence evangelicals who are broaching difficult subjects.

In this article, I want to address this concern. It’s certainly true that the accusation of “cultural Marxism” can be used as a conversation-stopper. But it’s also true that critical theory is an extremely serious problem among evangelicals that needs to be explicitly addressed and repudiated.

In what follows, I will provide examples of prominent evangelicals making claims that are 1) false and 2) rooted in critical theory. I have removed identifying information from these quotes because I have no interest in ‘calling out’ certain Christian leaders (if you would like links to all of these quotations because you doubt their veracity, please email me privately). If you recognize the origin of some of these quotes, I am not giving you license to dismiss these teachers as ‘Marxists’ or ‘Social Justice Warriors.’ I merely want to demonstrate that critical theory is a growing threat to biblical theology.

Critical theorists insist that our individual identity is inseparable from our group identity as members of oppressed or oppressor groups. Consequently, there is an inherent moral asymmetry between individuals from different groups. For example, Stephanie Wildman and Adrienne David write: “All whites are racist in this [systemic] use of the term because we benefit from systemic white privilege.” – Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, p. 56. Critical race theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic concur: “The narrative behind this assumption [that affirmative action is unjust] characterizes whites as innocent… By contrast, many critical race theorists and social scientists hold that racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained. If we take this perspective, then no white member of society seems quite so innocent.” – Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, p. 91.

Compare these ideas to the following quotes from prominent Christians.

Here is an evangelical author with 10k+ Twitter followers:

“Racism isn’t only a part of who we’ve been [as white people]. It is, in ways we don’t even comprehend, who we are.” And “White people suffer from a malady [called] ‘shriveled-heart syndrome.’ It is rooted in the experience of white people enslaving black people.”

Here is an evangelical author with 40k+ Twitter followers:

“Without confession to the sin of white racism, white supremacy, white privilege, people who call themselves white Christians will never be free — free from the bondage of a lie, a myth, an ideology, and an idol. White Christians, since the founding of America have been living a lie. What does that do to your soul — to live a lie? Confession means to tell the truth — to God and to the world — so Jesus can set us free.”

Here’s a popular blogger and evangelical seminary student with 3k+ Twitter followers:WhitesplainTweet

“The cult of personality that has developed around certain theologians is evidence that white people don’t believe anything that hasn’t been thoroughly whitesplained by a white man.“

Here is a Christian professor with 20k+ Twitter followers who teaches at a Christian school:

“black people in America have relied on God’s word to help them survive white people. When you’re white & in the dominant culture, you’ve never needed the Old Testament covenant-keeping Redemptive God. Yours became a Christianity of moralism & your kids walked. Evangelicals will be confused by the black church because they’ve never needed the God who acts through miracles to redeem them from something that’s not their fault. So of course they will eventually question the reliability & veracity of text. Life’s been pretty easy. One of the privileges of being white in America is never needing God to stop a society from trying to destroy you & your family. So the Bible is a book for evangelicalism, disciple-making, & teaching morals. Not a book for personal AND social, cosmic survival, so your kids walk. As such, Great Commission Christianity doesn’t know what to do with they [sic] Old Testament. They have to make Jesus (& Paul) appear in the OT in order for the text to have meaning. The traditional black church is far more Trinitarian about the whole counsel of God than evangelicals.”

Commentary: Racism was and is a grievous sin, but it is untrue that we are morally stained by our membership in particular demographic groups (Ez. 18:1-24, Deut. 24:16). Moreover, the Christian’s ultimate identity is found in Christ, not in demographic markers. Fellow believers should be primarily viewed in terms of our common salvation in Christ, not in terms of their group identity (Gal. 3:26-29, Col. 3:11, 2 Cor. 5:16, 1 Pet. 2:9-10).

Shenvi has a 4-part series on CRT & Christianity: The 3rd part is probably the most relevant to our discussion though I found it hard to embed a lot of the images with quotes that he has.

[HondurasKeiser]

Another example I see is a growing hesitation to evangelism in the name of decolonization. I read this article by Casey Chalk a few days ago and the one of his links led me here.

[HondurasKeiser]

Ken & Boot, I read you both as asserting that either Critical Theory is a useful tool for uncovering hidden injustice in society or that it's an esoteric, dusty old philosophy that isn't even operant in 2022 so why are we arguing about it; it must be because someone named Chris Rufo...yadda, yadda, yadda.

Ken, I haven't begun to look for CRT in the Church yet but I just happened to be reading Nellie Bowles's piece in The Atlantic from a month ago about the decline of San Francisco and the last segment stood out to me as an example of how CRT, Intersectionality and Critical Queer Theory, while obviously distorted from their pure, theoretical forms in the academy, are nevertheless working themselves out in certain segments of society that have accepted as axiomatic, certain premises of Critical Theory.

I'd remind you that Bowles is a writer of the Left-persuasion:

The anger directed at Chesa Boudin probably could have been contained. The petty crime was frustrating, but it wasn’t what lit the city up for revolution. The housing crush is miserable, but it’s been that way for more than a decade now. The spark that lit this all on fire was the school board. And the population ready to rage was San Francisco’s parents.

The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.

One night in 2021, the meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent committee.

Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white.

“My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”

Someone else called in, identifying herself as Cindy. She was calling to defend Brenzel, and she was crying. “He is a gay father of a mixed-race family,” she said.

A woman named Brandee came on the call: “I’m a white parent and have some intersectionality within my family. My son has several disabilities. And I really wouldn’t dream of putting my name forward for this.” She had some choice words for Cindy: “When white people share these kinds of tears at board meetings”—she pauses, laughing—“I have an excellent book suggestion for you. It’s called White Tears/Brown Scars. I’d encourage you to read it, thank you.”

Allison Collins, a member of the school board, dealt the death blow: “As a mixed-race person myself, I find it really offensive when folks say that somebody’s a parent of somebody who’s a person of color, as, like, a signifier that they’re qualified to represent that community.”

Brenzel remained mostly expressionless throughout the meeting. He did not say a word. Eventually the board agreed to defer the vote. He was never approved.

The other big debate on these Zoom calls was whether to rename schools named for figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein, the first female mayor of San Francisco. The board labeled these figures symbols of a racist past, and ultimately voted to rename 44 “injustice-linked” schools—though after a backlash, the board suspended the implementation of the changes.

The board members were arguably doing what they had been put there to do. Collins and her two most progressive colleagues were elected in 2018, the year before Boudin, and it was a headier time, when Trump’s shadow seemed to loom over even the smallest local office. Collins had a blog focused on justice in education, and there was a sense that she would champion a radical new politics. But during the endless lockdown, enthusiasm began to wane, even among many people who’d voted for her. They found themselves turned off by the board’s combative tone—as well as by its actual ideas about education.

That same month, the board voted to replace the rigorous test that screened applicants for Lowell, San Francisco’s most competitive high school, with a lottery system. López had explained it this way: “Grades and standardized test scores are automatic barriers for students outside of white and Asian communities.” She said they “have shown to be one of the most effective racist policies, considering they’re used to attempt to measure aptitude and intelligence. So the fact that Lowell uses this merit-based system as a step in applying is inherently racist.”

Collins echoed that: “‘Merit’ is an inherently racist construct designed and centered on white supremacist framing.”

If you didn’t like these changes, tough. A parent on Twitter accused López of trying to destroy the school system, and she replied with the words “I mean this sincerely” followed by a middle-finger emoji. In July, on the topic of the declining quality of life in San Francisco, she wrote, “I’m like, then leave.”

This is what a Critical Theory and Anti-racism, sprung from the academy and turned loose on society looks like. You can hem and haw and say 'That's not true CRT' but then I ask you, whence come those actions and words, what animating philosophy gives life to speaking about one's physical characteristics as though they are wholly determinative of one's acceptability for a position on a school board or that they, and not one's merit and effort, should determine who receives acceptance letters from top schools?

I'm quite familiar with San Francisco and the San Francisco school board. That's just a lot of performative idiocy and all of those idiots like Allison Collins were soundly defeated and tossed out last winter in a recall election. Collins (who is cited in your article) was defeated by 76% of the vote which is pretty resounding. So this stuff is self-correcting. Even in liberal San Francisco. Had I lived there I would have voted to toss them out too. They were as equally stupid as those who find a Marxist under every bush or who think the only thing wrong with public schools is that we no longer open each school day with state-mandated school prayer.

That is not to say you can't dissect each individual issue like grading and admissions to competitive magnet schools and find inequities. But the problems are often complex and nuanced and the solutions should be too. The way that highly-competitive magnet schools in cities like San Francisco and New York operate is inequitable. But the solutions should be more nuanced than simply a lottery.

Again Ken, you wave this example off with a 'nothing to see here' rhetorical flip, because Collins was tossed out last year by the voters of SF. I agree that a lot of this stuff may be self-correcting but I posted this as an example of CRT/Anti-Racism, come down from the Ivory Tower and at work, in real-world events; that it's not just some stuffy academic argle bargle or a cute lens to view the world through.

[Ken]

Again Ken, you wave this example off with a 'nothing to see here' rhetorical flip, because Collins was tossed out last year by the voters of SF. I agree that a lot of this stuff may be self-correcting but I posted this as an example of CRT/Anti-Racism, come down from the Ivory Tower and at work, in real-world events; that it's not just some stuffy academic argle bargle or a cute lens to view the world through.

I disagree. Critical Race Theory is a useful tool that can be used to examine inequities that appear in a school district like San Francisco. Just like the example I cited upstream where I tossed out 5 separate theories that might explain differences in discipline rates between Black and White children.

But it doesn't presuppose that you jump to stupid solutions to those problems like mandating the ethnic and gender composition of school board committees, wasting your pandemic time renaming closed schools rather than getting kids back into school, or coming up with a lottery-based admissions system for highly competitive magnet schools. Those are just as stupid as the people on the right who think you can fix education by implementing 1950s style mandatory school prayer or not talking about race. Or by closing public schools and giving every child a voucher. There is nothing about CRT that says we must take the most stupid and politically performative solutions to problems rather than rolling up our sleeves and trying to do the hard work of finding useful and equitable solutions to real problems.

I could go onto YouTube and find and endless array of ridiculous and outrageous examples of performative Christianity and preachers doing and saying over-the-top crazy stuff. There are whole YouTube channels devoted to that stuff. But I don't treat that as an indictment of Christianity. Just like I don't treat examples of lefty idiots like the former SF school board as evidence that racism or system racism isn't actually a problem in education. Or that examining educational issues through the filter of race isn't a valid and useful exercise.

[Bootstrap]

Ken & Boot, I read you both as asserting that either Critical Theory is a useful tool for uncovering hidden injustice in society or that it's an esoteric, dusty old philosophy that isn't even operant in 2022 so why are we arguing about it; it must be because someone named Chris Rufo...yadda, yadda, yadda.

Is CRT a useful tool for uncovering hidden injustice? I'm not sure. And people who say they believe in CRT seem to have pretty different beliefs from each other. Juries determined that George Floyd was murdered. Breona Taylor was murdered. Ahmad Arbery was murdered, I could go on with this list. They didn't need CRT to reach those judgements. Police murdering civilians is injustice. The jury is now in. Literally. Policemen lost their jobs. Policemen went to jail.

These kinds of things are often swept under the rug, and some of these cases probably would have been swept under the rug if there hadn't been protests. They weren't protesting because they had read Hegel.

To me, some of Derrick Bell's explanations of how racism works have been helpful for answering a different question: how is it that people who say they are not racist sometimes do things that have racist outcomes? One example: as soon as we learn that a black man was shot by police, everyone jumps in and claims to know what the jury should decide, claims to know the real evidence. And to me, at least, it often seems like some people almost always conclude that it was the black man's fault. Even in cases where the jury decides the police committed murder. And in those cases, some people insist that the trial was a sham, that the police were innocent, without even looking at what was presented in court.

Imagine that you are a black person who identifies with a recent victim, and everywhere on social media you see claims that black people are just making a big deal out of nothing, and perhaps tying this to claims they are trying to engineer a Marxist revolution. And you know that if you push back against that, you may well be attacked on social media, you may receive death threats. Same thing happens with a bunch of other issues related to race.

Clearly, this has racist effects that affect people's lives. Talk to my neighbors. Talk to some people in my church. Talk to some of my relatives.

So why does this happen? That's where I think some parts of CRT become useful. Who benefits from this? Who makes money from it? Who gains in power? Why do people join in?

[barnhart]

Another example I see is a growing hesitation to evangelism in the name of decolonization. I read this article by Casey Chalk a few days ago and the one of his links led me here.

This is an interesting topic that probably deserves it's own thread. Two observations, first, those who are apologetic for the gospel lack confidence in it, which by definition moves them toward the category of unbeliever. We should not be surprised they are hesitant about evangelism. Second, many of the things they are apologizing for were likely not the gospel of Jesus but cultural or governmental baggage that deserve an apology.

[Ken]

Another example I see is a growing hesitation to evangelism in the name of decolonization. I read this article by Casey Chalk a few days ago and the one of his links led me here.

This is an interesting topic that probably deserves it's own thread. Two observations, first, those who are apologetic for the gospel lack confidence in it, which by definition moves them toward the category of unbeliever. We should not be surprised they are hesitant about evangelism. Second, many of the things they are apologizing for were likely not the gospel of Jesus but cultural or governmental baggage that deserve an apology.

I do find some of it a little off-putting though. Like going into indigenous areas and expecting converts to dress in Menno cape dresses based on Northern European peasant fashions from the 1600s rather than their own perfectly modest and appropriate indigenous dress.

[Bootstrap]

Racism was and is a grievous sin, but it is untrue that we are morally stained by our membership in particular demographic groups (Ez. 18:1-24, Deut. 24:16).

I certainly agree with that. It's not always easy to live that out. Israel struggled with it. So did the New Testament church.

Moreover, the Christian’s ultimate identity is found in Christ, not in demographic markers. Fellow believers should be primarily viewed in terms of our common salvation in Christ, not in terms of their group identity (Gal. 3:26-29, Col. 3:11, 2 Cor. 5:16, 1 Pet. 2:9-10).

I agree with that too, and I really have little patience with people who imply that there's something wrong with me because I'm white. Or with people who are constantly portraying black people as a scary threat or an unwelcome burden on our society.

But on MN, these issues are rarely discussed based on our Christian identity. These other group identities are extremely prominent. It's best to keep taking things back to our identity in Christ: As Christians, how do we respond when we see injustices like the police killings that spawned these protests? I don't think we respond by knowing all the answers, but when we see people feel endangered by this kind of thing, perhaps we can respond with sympathy, understanding their concern, instead of casting them as an enemy to be shut down?