Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 275 | Critical Theory: A Disastrous, Unbiblical Worldview

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

You've probably heard the terms "intersectionality," "white privilege," "white fragility," "heteronormativity," and "antiracism." But you may not be familiar with the insidious social philosophy from which these terms are derived: critical theory. Today Christian apologist and theoretical chemist Dr. Neil Shenvi joins Allie to break down the complexities of critical theory and the ways it's destroying cultural dialogue and infecting the evangelical church. Today's Link: https://shenviapologetics.com/

Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. I am so pumped for you to listen to this conversation that I'm having today with Dr. Neil Shinvi. We are going to talk about critical theory. And y'all, it is about to blow your mind. So this is a longer episode and we honestly could have gone on for maybe another hour or two. You just don't realize how insidious critical theory is until you listen to this conversation. You are going to want to pause. You're going to want to take notes. probably going to want to listen to it twice. You're going to want to send this to your pastor. You're going to want to send it to your Christian friends, your secular friends, your mom, your dad, your brothers, your sisters, your boyfriend, your spouse, everyone you know you want to listen to this episode. It's absolutely fascinating and I'm just so excited for you to listen to it.

Okay, since I think I've hyped it up enough without further ado, here is Dr. Neil Shenvi. Neil, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Allie. Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Oh, my name is Dr. Neil Shenvi, and I am actually a stay-at-home homeschooling dad at the moment, but I am trained in theoretical chemistry and worked in academia for about 15 years. Awesome. And can you tell everyone how you came to study critical theory and maybe more specifically critical race theory?

Yeah, so we have to go back a little bit. I became a Christian in graduate school. I grew up in a very loving home, but not in a religious household. And I came to faith through knowing my future wife, Christina, through reading C.S. Lewis, through going to church. And kind of realizing that I built my life on being the very best and the very smartest. And then you come to me and say, actually, you're a sinner who needs forgiveness. And your belief in God is just this vague build a bear God that you've never really wrestled with

the real God. That was devastating to me initially, but I realized I had to follow him if he's real. And so I trusted in Jesus. And that began my Christian walk, but then I became interested in apologetics because I was in grad school, stranded by very intelligent, smart people, many of whom were atheists. So I wanted to share with them. How do you convince them that Christianity is not just a fairy tale, that it's true, the Bible is reliable, God exists. So I began reading about apologetics, kind of the really standard stuff like CS Lewis. I read a lot of Tim Keller's work. And I was really interested in the intellectual side of my faith and sharing the gospel with my colleagues who were mainly atheists. So I was very apolitical. I was not interested in how you

voted. I was not interested in a lot of these social issues. Cultural apologetics was not on my radar at all. Right. So that was what I was doing for like a decade after becoming a Christian. And then about five years ago, I began noticing both people I knew personally and even public Christian leaders beginning to drift theologically. And it would often begin with an interest in social justice, which I assumed meant applying biblical principles. to our laws. But that's not what was meant because these same people began espousing beliefs that were farther and farther away from orthodoxy.

But I couldn't figure out why. How do you go from saying, I want to care for the poor and I want to oppose racism? I'm like, of course, sure, we should do that as Christians. Right. But then they were saying things like, well, I don't think Jesus is the only way to God. Or I think we need to embrace all forms of sexuality as beautiful. And I was like, how do you go from point A to point B? I just couldn't figure out the connection.

So about four or five years ago, providentially, I met my really good friend now, Dr. Patrick Sawyer, who has a PhD in education and cultural studies and teaches at UNC Greensboro. And he was writing his dissertation on the social foundations that are related to critical theory. And when he described his work to me, a scientist, I said, man, this sounds a lot like what I'm hearing, even within the evangelical community. And he was just incredulous. He said, I got into this area to share the gospel with my super secular progressive progressive progressive progressive progressive progressive religious. But there's no way that conservative evangelical Christians are adopting these ideas. That's crazy. They're so wildly unbiblical. So we actually have this. this sort of semi-heated conversation for a few weeks.

And then we came to agree that actually, yes, these ideas are finding their way into Christianity. And people are not just adopting a few new beliefs about politics. They're adopting a new worldview. And that's why we're both very concerned. So you would say that the bridge from Christians and maybe formerly conservative evangelical Christian saying, hey, I care about racism. I care about injustice. We should apply social justice to these areas in order to solve problems. The bridge between that and saying, hey, maybe other religions

can also find their way to have and find their way to God and we should celebrate all kinds of sexualities. Is critical theory that that's the bridge between those two things? Yeah, at least for many people today. I think that's the water that we're swimming in right now has been really. I want to say polluted. It's been tainted or by this ideology that derives from critical theory, which is a very broad area of knowledge. So we have to be a little bit more precise. But that's, yeah, that's why today people are going from point A to point B in their theology. And tell us what critical theory is. And I know we'll spend a lot of time talking about this. But first, if you could kind of just give a brief summation of what it is.

Yeah, I like to. And people say, well, just. give me a one-sentence definition of critical theory. It's like saying, give me a one-sentence definition of, say, feminism or a one-sentence definition of science. Right. Well, that's pretty complicated. I'll try to boil it down, really in a brief synopsis. So people pretty much agree that Karl Marx alone invites consensus as the first true critical theorist. That's a quote from Bradley Levinson's book, Beyond Critique. And critical theorists in later decades didn't adopt his ideas about economics per se. They were more interested in his ideas about how power operates to create social inequalities, right? How does power function our societies?

So the term critical theory was coined by a guy named Max Horcomer in a 1937 essay, and he and other philosophers were trying to apply Marxist theories more broadly than just economics. They wanted to apply it to things like culture and mass media. But that, That was in the 30s and 40s, mainly a little later by Marcuse and people like that. But the field of critical theory has grown tremendously. So if you look at like a genealogy of critical theories, critical social theories, it includes entire disciplines like second way feminism, black feminism, post-colonial studies, critical pedagogy, queer theory, critical race theory.

These are all examples of critical social theories. and they're all concerned with understanding how power produces domination and oppression and social inequality. Okay, gotcha. And how is that manifesting itself? First, let's talk about how it's manifesting itself in evangelicalism. Okay, well, let's back up a little bit. So, although we go, that's where critical theory comes from, but what are we seeing today?

So today you hear terms like, you may have never heard the term critical theory. Like, what's critical theory? Well, you've probably heard these terms. Intersectionality. White privilege, white fragility, heteronormativity, colorblind racism. So you're like, oh, I've heard those terms. In fact, they're on the news pretty much every night. I hear my senator using terms like that.

I see it in everywhere. If you've been on a college campus in the last five years, if you walk past one, you've seen people talking about these ideas. So those terms come from what, what I like to call, but Pat and I like to call contemporary critical theory. That's just this manifestation of critical theory that you see today that's influencing everything from politics to academia to the church today. And people label it with things like cultural Marxism, identity politics, critical social justice.

Peter Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose coined the really funny term grievance studies, all these fields that are unearthing these grievances regarding race and sex. and sexuality and physical ability. So whatever you want to call that ideology, that's what we're seeing in our culture today. And it's based around sort of four central ideas. I'll really quickly run through them. And when I get through them,

I'm going to read just a few quotes from the primary sources and you'll say, oh, man, yeah, I totally recognize that thinking. I didn't know what to call it, though. So here's one quote. This idea is the idea of the social binary. Here's a quote from the Cento and DeAngelo. They write, for every social group, there's an opposite group.

The primary groups that we name here are race, class, gender, sexuality, ability status, religion, and nationality. So they would view society divided along oppressor groups and oppressed groups along the lines of race, class, gender, et cetera. So there are all these different groups and you're either a privileged oppressor or you're a subordinate oppressed group. And there are just charts and figures and lists of these various oppressions. That's one piece that, again, we've recognized that's why it's often called a cultural Marxism. I dislike that term. But you're kind of seeing how they're taking Marx's idea of class warfare and applying

it to other identity markers like race and sex and sexuality. Another key idea is oppression. So you hear oppression today. and it doesn't really mean what the dictionary says it means. The dictionary defines oppression as cruel and prolonged unjust treatment and control. That's oppression in the dictionary. But the word oppression, like many other words, has been redefined. Here's a great quote.

In its new usage, oppression designates the disadvantage and injustice some people suffer, not because it tyrannical power coerces them. It's not what it means. It's because of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society. So oppression is not about, you know, coercion, violence, cruelty. It's about these subtle, insidious ideas that have shaped our culture and that we accept as common sense. According to critical theorists. According to critical theorists, yes.

So they're trying to unearth the ways in which quote unquote oppression influences everything. It's, but it's subtle. It's insidious. You don't notice it. You think what's common sense and normal things like, you know, object. objectivity, the meritocracy, hard work, those ideas that we take for granted as normal. And we see other things as strange or wrong or abnormal. Those ideas are actually forms of oppression.

Right. Yeah. And can you tell me where does it come in? Is it just strictly from the collectivist nature of Marxism that in analyzing this so-called oppression or this new definition of oppression that they define oppressors and the oppressed, not by any action that they have done or even any attitude displayed, but strictly by, typically like immutable characteristics. Like you would be part of the oppressed class just because you're a white male.

It doesn't matter if you are also poor. Does it matter if maybe you've actually literally been oppressed your whole life? How did they come upon these categories of who is the so-called oppressed and who is the so-called oppressor just based on your group identity? Yeah, it's very complicated. So the idea is kind of go back to Marx and also a man named Antonio Gramsci, who's an Italian neo-Marxist thinker. But his idea was that he was asking, Grange he was asking, why haven't the workers revolted

yet? Why hasn't there been this glorious communist revolution? And his answer was because the workers have, and this is back to Marxist you, they have absorbed the ideas of the bourgeois. They have adopted these ideas like, well, if I work hard enough, then I can make it. I can, I can succeed. I, if I, or I deserve to be a worker because I'm not as smart as the ruling class. So he said, Ramshy said, that they are actually participating in their own oppression because

they have absorbed this false consciousness. And they need to be liberated in their thinking. So they need to achieve what was, what's now called a liberatory consciousness where they wake up to their oppression. and then they can actually work against the oppression that's that's creating this injustice. And that again, and then you had Foucault much later saying that all truth claims are essentially bids for power. And so whenever you make any claim about what's true, you're actually getting people to buy

into your, it's a bit, it's a way to gain power over them. So that's why you'd have people that say, well, I'm a white male, but I've never actually oppressed people. I am not racist. they say yes, but you're complicit in this regime of truth. You're complicit in this racist culture, and you are part of this collective oppressor class not based on their actual behavior, but based on their social location. And similarly, you can have a person who's actually quite privileged in terms of their

educated, they're rich, they're powerful, but because of their race or their gender, with their sexuality, they would still be considered part of an oppressed group. Now, you say that's, that makes very little sense, although I'd actually add that the idea of intersectionality says that, yeah, you actually can be both an oppressor and an oppressed person at the same time. So a white woman like you, you'd be oppressed with respect to your gender because you're a woman, but you'd be an oppressor with respect to your race because you're white. So that's, again, the idea of intersectionality is that we can have overlapping identities

that contribute to our experience. And how do these intersectionalists or critical theorists, I guess, whatever you want to call them, how would they rank? Because so we've talked about intersectionality on this podcast that you're not just saying, okay, here are your different axes of oppression or here are your different oppression points,

but they actually afford you some kind of social capital or they affords you some kind of platform that, okay, if you have this race, this sexual orientation, then you are trusted the most to talk about racism or whatever. But you, for example, you don't have any credibility whatsoever, even if you've studied critical theory forever, you're not as trusted as the person who has the lived experience of someone

who apparently gives them the oppression points to be able to credibly talk about this stuff. How do these critical theorists kind of rank the oppression? Because in the conversations about race that we're having right now, I am considered, you know, the most privileged, even though I technically have an oppression point from being a woman. So who decides, who decides, who gets the social capital based on their oppression points to be able to talk about certain things? What a great segue.

So to understand that the critical theorists will actually dispute the idea that there's a hierarchy of oppression. They'll say there's no fundamental oppression or they'll generally deny that. So they don't really, they claim to not rank oppressions. However, you're absolutely right that they do believe that your social location, so where you are in terms of your race or your gender or your sexuality, that does indeed give you authority based on your oppression. Now, why is that? Well, this sort of third idea has to do with a lived experience. The idea of lived experience is that, you know, we're all, we're all socialized into these oppressive ideologies, right?

we all buy into the patriarchy, just from our daily interactions. We buy into white supremacy. We buy into heteronormativity. That's just, we're inculcated into these ideas constantly because of the media, because of education, whatever. That's like what the book, White Fragility argues, right? That it's just in us. It's just in us.

We're as a white person in the society, you are, she would say you are just, you have a racist worldview by the fun, by the function of being a white person in a white supremacist society. Now, but that's true. Now, critical theories would say, but that's really true of all people. So everyone imbibes these ideas with their sort of mother's milk. However, a person of color experiences life as a person of color. They can, and because of that, they experience systemic racism, the experience being treated

wrongly. And because of that lived experience, they can achieve what's called a liberatory consciousness where they see through these lies, these arbitrary bids for power that is imposed on them by the ruling class. So that they, so that's how colloquially they get woke. They wake up. They say, wait a minute, I can see through these lies now. And now they have what's called a double consciousness.

They can see themselves both from the perspective of the oppressor and also they have this oppositional consciousness and say, I now know that I have a better grasp on reality because you, oppressor, you are blinded to reality because you have both conscious and subconscious reasons to ignore the reality of your oppression. But as a person of color, as a woman, as an LGBTQ person, I can see through my lived experience I have a better access to the truth than you do. And so I have with that knowledge comes authority. I have the authority to speak on my oppression in a way that you shouldn't really contradict. So this is a phenomenally amazing quote from the book, race, class, and gender. The author is right, the idea that objectivity is the best

reached only through rational thought is a Western and masculine way of thinking, and that we will challenge throughout this book. And they challenge that idea of objectivity through the testimonies of oppressed people. Through lived experience. Because their lived experience gives them access to truths that you are blinded to as an oppressor. So is this the same thing as I have a very rudimentary understanding of this, but standpoint epistemology, is this similar to that? Can you explain what that is? Yeah, standpoint epistemology also is a pretty broad collection ideas, but in the way to use

by critical theory, it would say that, yes, again, your perspective on truth is conditioned by your social location, mainly whether you're... you're an oppressor or an oppressed person. And crucially, they're not just saying, well, it's all relative. They're not saying that. It's not postmodernism. They're saying there is an objective truth out there, but people that are at the bottom, people at the margins, people that are oppressed, are better able to see that truth

because the privileged person is blinded by their privilege. So that's the difference. So it's not just that, oh, you have your truth, I have my truth. They actually would say, no, there is a truth, but some people are uniquely equipped to see that truth because of their oppression. And when they're talking about truth, they're not, they're obviously not talking about, like, data, for example. Like, for example, we hear a lot from, you know, far left feminist or I guess just feminist in general that there is a gender wage gap. And no matter how many times you tell them, okay, but if you control for all of the factors between a male and a female, they actually, don't make, you know, different salaries. They actually make the exact same. But if it's

uncontrolled, that's where the gap is. Whatever, they reject that data to continue to insist that we are oppressed by a patriarchy. Is it because in this kind of standpoint epistemology world or this idea that the oppressed has a better understanding of what this so-called truth is than the oppressor, that they reject conversations about, um, about data. And, or about numbers or about things that whether you're an oppressed or an oppressor, you can see because the truth that they're talking about is it really, is it, I don't know. I guess you said it is objective truth, but it can't be actually revealed by data. Does that make sense what I'm saying?

Is that what they're saying? Yeah, no, so it's interesting. It's a great question, Allie. So what they would say, this is going to sound wild, they would say that when you appeal to data and evidence and science, you're actually appealing to the master's tools. So you're appealing to a system that's been devised to justify white supremacy and the patriarchy. So when you start quoting these so-called studies, these so-called scientists, they are saying, well, we reject that whole way of talking as a way to justify oppression. They would say there are other ways

of knowing. So this is going to say how I want to quote to you from Ricky Wilkins' book, Queer Theory, Gender Theory. She says that of all the, okay, this is, let me find it. This is interesting. He's talking about gender, but she says, objectivity is meaningless when it comes to gender and queerness because the very notion of queerness, the production of some genders is queer, and the search for their origin and meaning are already exertions of power. So that's gender and sexual. there, but she would take that sort of postmodern approach and say, all of your claims, all of your appeals to evidence and science and reason are just a way for you to justify why,

oh, there's not really a wage yet. Well, yes, there is, and you can't see that because you're relying on Western male forms of knowledge. But there are other ways of knowing that are intuitive, emotive, that those are feminist ways of knowing, or those are indigenous ways of knowing that are equally valid. So then it's a weird kind of objectivity. They're saying there is truth, but we're not going to accept the normal definition of truth. Well, yeah, they would say that they're not, they're rejecting the enlightenment model for how we know the truth.

They reject that. They may think otherwise. Even going to, I've seen this going around. You talked about James Lindsay. I've seen him retweet a lot of this stuff. Obviously, he's a math guy. Obviously, I know that you, your expertise is chemistry, but that requires you to deal with a lot of math. you've seen so-called math educators on Twitter saying, well, two plus two doesn't always

necessarily equal four. It depends on what two is and what the other two is. And I play this game that I am not a math expert. That's what I do what I do now because I like kind of subjectivity. I like being able to reach different conclusions and things like that. But even I seem to recall something about units. So what these people do is they say, okay, well, two cats and two dogs doesn't equal for cats. And so two plus two doesn't always equal four. But again, we know that. It equals four animals. I mean, so how are they people who claim to be experts in math? How are they arriving at these conclusions? And what is the end result to pushing objectivity, even mathematical objectivity, into the realm of critical theory and

total subjectivism? Right. So that you have to understand the great question. What's the motivation? Why would you want to dispute the idea that two plus two equals four, right? Isn't that good for everybody? Shouldn't we all want to affirm that logic is it? I mean, logic is in a Western contract. I seem to recall like non-Western culture is dealing with things like syllogisms and logic. They might have not formalized it. But the point is, why do that? And the answer is the end goal of critical theory kind of from the beginning was the transformation of society. And today, the term that's usually used is social justice. Their goal is to, to disrupt and deconstruct and dismantle these oppressive systems and structures in order to create society in which social justice can be achieved. Now, that term is kind of slippery because it can be used in a biblical way. You can say, I define social justice as biblical justice. Well, okay, you can define it that way, but the way that they're defining it is not that way.

So here's a quote from Mary McClintock. She writes, social justice is the elimination of all forms of social oppression. where social injustice takes many forms based on a person's gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, et cetera. So she said she defined social justice as the dismantling of all these oppressive structures based on these axes of race, class, gender, et cetera. So that's what critical theorists mean today when they talk about social justice. They mean undoing these oppressions as they're defined by critical.

theory. And so why play these games with 2 plus 2 equals 4? The answer is they're trying to dismantle colonialism. They're trying to dismantle this Western way of approaching everything, because in their minds, we'll only get real social justice when we've torn down, you know, the idea that Western thought is supreme, the idea that whiteness is supreme, the idea that that men are supreme, that we have to, and we have to, there's a term, there's a technical term for it, which is they, The queer theorists want to queer the space. They want to queer these ideas to basically destabilize these values and norms and point out, yeah, this so-called objective knowledge is not so objective as you think.

That's why they're playing these games because they want to challenge what in their mind, oppressive systems. I'm not seeing the connection between masculinity and objectivity or colonialism and objectivity, Because like you said, two plus two equaling four is not an exclusively Western concept. I would have thought. And I think most people would have thought that that's just a universal concept. So who made that connection? So they, okay, again, that's complicated.

The idea is just that they tend to look at society today. So they would say that the way these, so they would say maybe you twist their arm. They're like, okay, fine. We admit it that people besides the Greeks believed that, or the Egyptians believe that 2 plus 2 equals 4. They, okay, fine. But today, society is functioning today with certain values that are considered universal and good and right, like math or science or logic or reason. And they're trying to see the ways in which those supposedly objective values are actually justifying oppression. So take the example of the gender wage gap, right?

You know, if you ask a feminist, if you press them really hard and say, are you really claiming that reason is a masculine domain? Because that actually sounds pretty darn sexist. Right. They would say, well, they're not exactly saying that. They're just saying they want to knock the weapons out of the hands of these people that are oppressing us. They're using reason and study. in science to create, to justify this oppressor-oppressed dichotomy, we want to dismantle that that power. So, but again, it's not, we could go a long time here. They're very pragmatic.

Often if you press on some of these ideas, even a little bit, they just collapse. Right. But the goal is not to create this long, careful syllogism, this long deductive argument. Their goal is, very practical. They want to get rid of oppression and they will kind of do what it takes to get rid of depression. And by oppression, they might not necessarily mean tangible oppression. Because again, you could point at the data and say, you know, women are sometimes they're making even more than men are. And you could talk the same about some areas of systemic racism that people claim are there. But when you look at the data aren't. They're not necessarily talking about that. they might just be talking about a oppression of, of consciousness that, again, you can't really

argue against because you don't know someone's consciousness. But if the oppressed say that, well, the consciousness of my particular, or my particular oppression group is oppressed, then the oppressor, the privilege just kind of has to agree with that because they haven't lived that experience. And so you get something called, for example, like white guilt where, okay, we say, okay, well, what can we do? Like, how can we help you? And some critical theorists, I guess, would say, well, we need to up end the entire system and flip this over. And I don't know, move this into a socialist society that they see as an egalitarian utopia. I don't know. Yeah, I think Christians are often get, I don't say sucked in, but they get confused at a minimum

because all of these words have been redefined. Oppression we saw has been redefined, very explicitly. words like white supremacy, racism. These words have been white, whiteness, another one you'll see it in a second maybe, but whiteness, that word does not mean what you might think it means, not at all. And so Christians will hear things like we need to stand up against oppression. They'll say, absolutely, I mean, the Bible calls Jesus oppressed and afflicted. Of course, right? So as Christians, we say, absolutely, I'm going to get behind your anti-oppression efforts.

I'm going to get behind your anti-racist efforts. I'm going to get behind all these different efforts for social justice. We don't question what those words mean until maybe a year or two later down the road. We're like, wait a minute, what did I sign up for? Because we realize the way they were using these terms all along is not how we as Christians or even just the dictionary understand these words. Right. This reminds me so much of, I've read some of James Cohn, who was the father of Black liberation theology.

and I was reading a quote from him the other day that was saying, you know, one of the goals that we have to accomplish is, or one of the obstacles that we have to get over is what he called, you know, the white middle class resistance to what he probably would have described as, you know, anti-racism or whatever. And he said, what we have to do is to make these people hate their whiteness and see their blackness, which doesn't make sense until what you just said that whiteness and blackness in the kind of critical theory world, don't necessarily mean just your skin color. It's a state of oppressed or oppressor consciousness, right? Yeah, so there's an incredible, there are examples from within the church of people using this language. And I'll just read the quote to you now. Keep in mind, the word whiteness has been redefined in this entire book.

But this is a book that was put out in 2018 by a major evangelical publishing company. It grew out of a lecture series at a major evangelical seminary. but there are statements like this. It's going to sound wild. Keep in mind they're redefining whiteness here to mean something like a system of white supremacy or an oppressive culture of racial supremacy. Okay, but here's what they say.

Whiteness is best understood as a religious system of pagan idol worship that thrives on mutually reinforcing circularity between the image, the ideal or the form, and the social construction of those who worship it. As idolatry, whiteness must be dealt with like any such cultic system. Its high places must be torn down and its altars laid low.

Christian discipleship that entails a deconversion from whiteness is necessary. If any true experience of reconciliation with God, others, the creation, and ourselves, it's a take place. That is an evangelical author writing it an evangelical book, sponsored by an evangelical seminary. and there are just dozens of quotes like this I could give you where they have just completely absorbed this way of thinking. Yes. Yes, I can think of someone there was actually there was a women's conference a couple years ago in which there was a female speaker.

It caused quite the stir online where she was telling her audience that they had to quote, divest from their whiteness. Now, of course, when we hear the word blackness, typically in context, it is associated with terms like black excellence or almost kind of a connotation of royalty. But when we hear whiteness, we just know, even I know and feel when I see that word that it is a very negative connotation. And we are being told even implicitly that that's something that we have to repent of. But blackness is something that has to be manifested and lived fully. I don't even know necessarily what my question is about that. I guess I want to know how this started to infiltrate,

this absolute craziness, started to infiltrate evangelical circles. How did it start? I think it starts with appealing to people's compassion, or even maybe they're good theology. If you hear someone say, I want to fight oppression, you know, what Christian is going to step up and say, no, we need to be for oppression. No, Christians should say, man, the Bible commands me to seek justice, to love mercy, to care for the widow and orphan.

So if you want to fight oppression, I'm behind you, I'm for you. So it starts that way. And then you see people that are actually hurting and experience racism. There is actual racism in our society. There really is. I can show you data on the alarming number of people, even today, who are opposed to interracial marriage. You can talk to your Black or Hispanic friends and talk about what they've experienced personally. And again, I, you know, I talk to many people, but friends who are super conservative politically and theologically who are black and are no way interested in complaining all the time about racism.

And they're on the other end of the spectrum. But you talk to them, they'll say, yeah, man, I have experienced some really nasty stuff from professing Christians. And so we can't ignore that. So when you hear those stories, you say, yeah, man, I want to be an anti-racist, too. So that's how people get drawn in. Right. But then you don't realize these terms have been redefined. So here's a great example of redefining a term like anti-racism.

Ibrahim X. Kendi is a very, very prominent author. His book, How to Be an anti-racist was like number one, number two on Amazon, number one, and number two on Kindle for weeks, right underneath Robin D'Angelo's white fragility. But here's what he says in his book about anti-racism. He says this, anti-racist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anti-capitalism policies. To truly be an anti-racist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be anti-racist. We cannot be anti-racist if we are homophobic or transphobic.

To be queer anti-racist is to understand the privileges of my cisgender, my masculinity, my heterosexuality of their intersections. So when he's defining the term anti-racist, he's bringing in all kinds of other assumptions and other ideas from essentially his worldview that Christians should say, wait a minute, that's not what I signed up for. I thought I was just going to oppose racial prejudice.

And so the one big way people get sucked in is by feeling compassion, wanting to help, and then not realizing that there's really, an entire worldview behind these ideas. The second way I'd say is, is frankly, through its coherence. So people will think they can just, well, I'm not going to, I ought to read, I'll read DeAngelo, I'll read Kendi, but I'll just pick up, I'll just filter it through my Christian worldview. I'll just pick up things I think are useful. And I don't really think this is a book that has an underlying ideology or viewpoint.

And I'd say that's so naive. There is a worldview out there. Right. And telling, and I've seen, I'm trying to calm down, I've seen well-known evangelical pastors, well-known evangelical organizations recommending two people positively to read white fragility, to read how to be an anti-racist. Yes. And so have I.

And I think in their minds, if they've read those books, they're thinking, well, Christians can just, you know, kind of eat the meat and spit out the bones. Right. And I want to say that's a bad analogy. It's more like trying to eat the meat and spit out the poison. Right. Because people don't know where the poison is. They don't know they're reading a book that's essentially, I might this is going to sound provocative.

This is almost like a religious text. Right. It's like saying, it's like handing someone and saying, you know, I see that you're very anxious as a Christian. I recommend you read this book on Buddhist meditation. right because and well and you're assuming that the person is going to have the wearathal and the you know reflectiveness to say wait a minute some of this is Buddhist I can't accept that right I noticed that you're not very interested in appreciative of science because science is a beautiful wonderful gift that God uses for us to appreciate his creation to build technology

to to wonder at what he's made so I think you to appreciate science better should start reading some Richard Dawkins some Jerry Coyne right and the new atheist to combat your scientific illiteracy. So wait a minute here. Some of the, they're scientists, there's some ideas they believe they're good. Right. But other, this is built on a really rotten foundation.

So I think that's the other big way that Christians are getting sucked in. And then I guess the final way is through social pressure. I mean, no one wants to be called a racist. No one wants to be called a sexist or a bigot. And so, you know, young kids especially, you know, you're in high school or college today. it's hard when all your friends are, you know, wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts and all your friends are, you know, putting on safety pins and, you know, rainbow stickers to say, you know, I do love you. I do love all people. You're all made in God's image. But I can't get behind this worldview.

Right. That takes courage. Yes. And I understand how hard it is. And I think that there is also a little bit of false adverse. advertising going on in this peer pressure. So we talked about how a lot of these terms have all of these unbiblical assumptions packed into them. So for example, being a feminist, there are a lot of assumptions that are packed into being a feminist, at least today, that, okay, you can't be a

feminist unless you believe in abortion. You can't be a feminist unless you are going to fight against the gender wage gap. And unless you're going to fight against patriarchal oppression, whatever that might be, even if it's just in your, in your consciousness. You have to believe in all of these things in order to truly be a feminist. And yet, when these young people get the peer pressure saying, you know, aren't you, aren't you a feminist? They're told, well, a feminist just means that you believe that women are equal to men. And so they say, oh, well, yeah, I do believe that men are equal to men. Okay, I am a feminist. And I am going to repost that. And I am going to talk about that. Maybe not even realizing that the assumptions are

packed in or maybe eventually accepting the assumptions because they want to accept the basic premise that women are equal and men, equal to men in value. And it's the same thing with being an anti-racist. I have a lot of genuinely Jesus-loving Christian friends who have posted a lot of the Black Lives Matter rhetoric about being anti-racist, anti-oppressive, because when they are talking to a friend who is either experienced racism themselves, they feel compassionate, and then they read some of the materials that they've been given and they hear, okay, to be anti-racist, it's just like standing up to a bully. That's what they hear. It's just like, you know, if you see someone being bullied in class, it's not enough for you to just walk away and not bully them. You have to stand up

and say, hey, stop bullying them. That's what they think anti-racism is. They think that oppression is actually, you know, some kind of physical or systemic oppression. So they say, okay, yeah, I'm going to fight against that too. They accept the advertising or the basic premises of these things without realizing that by propagating some of these terms, they are also, you know, whether they know it or not promoting all of the assumptions that are packed in that they probably wouldn't agree with. Like they probably don't agree with Ibrake's Kendi and, you know, all that intersectional whatever he was talking about in his book. But in order to accept the basic premise that they believe that all people are equal in value, they feel like they have to take this terminology. Sorry,

I know I'm talking a long time, but I just thought of something that the phrase, Black Lives Matter, is the same is the same way there's this quote by noam chomsky who i obviously don't agree with politically but he says the point of good propaganda is to pick a phrase that no one can disagree with that's true about black lives matter do you believe the black lives matter of course i do but do you believe in dismantling the the western prescribed nuclear family do you believe in being anti-capitalist do you believe in being pro-abortion all the things that they agree with will know so christians have a battle, whether or not to use the terminology as they objectively know these words to mean, or whether to not use the terminology at all and be at risk of being called anti-woman,

anti-black or whatever, just realizing that people are going to castigate them for not using the right language. Yeah. And I think oftentimes you begin by mouthing the phrase and not subscribing to the worldview, but you end by embracing the worldview, right? I think it was it, is it Orwell? He said you, you don the mask and your face grows to fit it. So I think people should be very careful that they're not just trying to use these hip terms because they get more and more comfortable. I'm not saying the terms are evil or sneaky. I'm just saying, be careful trying to just fit in and not being willing to say, it's so simple. Like, can you just tweet Black Lives Matter? Well, I know I tweeted a half,

hashtag like Black Lives in, or made in the Amago Day or some long phrase like that, because I want to absolutely say, I know you're hurting. I know my friends are hurting. How can I show them that I care about them, but just not just fall in with the easy, take the easy way and say, just, just tweet. It's not going to hurt. Yeah. I just want to make clear to them that, hey, I absolutely affirm the sentiment. Of course I do. And yet I really am concerned about these other ideas that are out there that I want to make clear I do not affirm, not because I'm a terrible bigot, I guess, but because I think they're genuinely bad for people. I want to do what's good for you, and I don't think it's good for you to say want to dismantle

the nuclear family. I think that actually would hurt people. So I think that's a good way to frame it in terms of I'm not refusing to tweet this or to say this because I'm just a nasty, hardened, a stick. I'm doing it because out of love, I want to be very clear on what I believe is good and beautiful as a Christian. Yes. Yes.

So it's a better way to just frame that why are you being such a prude or why are you being so stickler? Hopefully out of love. Right. Can you talk a little bit more building off of that why critical theory and Christianity are incompatible? I mean, the big one is that it's. It is a, what functions as a worldview. What do I mean by that? And then I'm talking about contemporary critical theory.

These ideas, not going back to Horkheimer. I mean, no one's out there on campus quoting Walter Benjamin and Horkheimer. They're quoting DeAngel and Kendi and other people, Trudgeon Collins. They're quoting contemporary critical theorists. But why is it so incompatible these ideas with Christianity? Well, why I would just say it is a comprehensive, coherent worldview? You can't have two worldviews, right? They answer fundamental questions about, like, so, for example, identity.

Who am I? Christianity says, fundamentally, you are a creature of a holy, loving, and good God. That's fundamentally where identity is. What is contemporary critical theory says is that your identity is found in different groups that are vying for power. That's the core of who you are. You are, first of all, a black woman or you first of all, a Hispanic, a poor Hispanic man. or you're first of all, whatever.

But Christianity would say, no, first of all, primarily you are a maiden gods, a image, number one, number two, you are a sinner, and number three, you're needed of a savior. And those are core parts of our Christian identity that will conflict with someone who says, no, you're primarily, you're based on your, you're defined by your race, class, gender, et cetera. And then things like ethics, you know, what is. is oppressive.

Is God's design for gender or sexuality oppressive? Is the gender binary itself oppressive? Queer theorists would say, yes, the gender binary, by definition, by existing is oppressive, because it marginalizes people that are non-gender binary. Whereas for Christians, we'd say, no, that will never be part of our core ethical beliefs, because we think God created gender, and it's a very good thing.

A big one is epistemology. That is how we know the truth. According to critical theory, you know the truth largely because of your social location. So if you are an oppressed person, you have this unique authority to speak on the truth of social reality. And what's interesting is people say, wait a minute, if you think that lived experience is so important, then why doesn't my live experience as, say, a white male? Why doesn't that matter? And the answer is because you're a oppressor who's blinded by his social location. So it's very asymmetric.

And then the other thing that happens is, say, wait a minute. Well, I understand that as a white male, I am blinded my oppressiveness. Fine. But why can't I quote Thomas Sol? He's a super renowned black economist. And they will say to you because he's speaking from a position of a white adjacency. He is speaking from a perspective of whiteness, even though he's a black economist, he has absorbed. He's internalized oppression.

And that's why he's saying what he's saying. So there really is no response. If you say, well, I think the Bible teaches this, they'll say that is your perspective as a white male. So, well, my friend Vody Bakum says the same thing, and he's black. Yeah, but he's speaking from a position of a white as he's internalized his oppression. So there's no, there's no way to appeal to scripture even or to evidence or to reason because your lived experience as an oppressed person gives you authority to stand on. Yes, and that is un-debiblical because we know that there is an objective truth.

That doesn't mean that experiences and emotions don't matter because they do matter. And of course, they can reveal things to us. There are things that I know from my experience that you don't know from your inexperience and vice versa. All of that is true. But that doesn't amount to absolute truth. And all of our experiences and emotions are subject to the Word of God and his definitions of things.

And even I think what we're realizing and what I hope someone, for example, like, you know, James Lindsay realizes is someone who believes in math, that two plus two equals four is actually, it's a theological statement. It's, yes, it's a mathematic statement, but it's a theological statement. If God doesn't exist, objective truth doesn't exist, mathematic truth doesn't exist, or it at least can be, it can at least be malleable to what people want. Because if God isn't God, then we are all God and we can define what truth is and what it's not based on our, based on whatever. aims we desire. Does that make sense and do you agree with that? No, it's exactly right. No, it's exactly right. Because the idea is, and this is what Foucault is saying, because in the post-structuralist, we're saying because there is no God's-eye view. There is no God. There's no God's eye view of

reality. Therefore, it's all about your own power to impose this, goes back to even Nietzsche, I guess, but saying you're just imposing your power on others, who has the most power to impose their truths on everyone else. Again, a critical theory would actually pull back on that because It's complicated why, but they would say, well, there is truth, but the people that are oppressed have better access to it. Ethnic Gnosticism kind of what Fulty Giac talks about. So, yeah, so there, I would just say it, you can look at my website, but there are lots of examples I give of how if we really imbibed these ideas from contemporary critical theory,

it will just wreck our theology in any number of places. And it really also, I think people, to go back to the idea of harm, it's going to hurt people. It's going to hurt the church and cause incredible division. Just to pick on Robin DeAngel, who's so popular right now. She says things in her book that are just so, if you accept these ideas, they will just wreck your church. They will tear it apart from the inside. So she says, basically, first she says, white fragility is when whites just can't handle the truth about

racism in society. So they get, they're fragile, defensive. So what are some symptoms of white fragility? Well, it includes things like saying, you're generalizing, feeling like you're being attacked or singled out, withdrawing, arguing, disagreeing is a sign of white fragility. So you can either agree that you have white fragility or by disagreeing, prove that you're white fragility. Then she goes on to say things like this.

A positive white identity is an impossible goal. identity is inherently racist. White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy. And does not mean you should stop identifying as white and start identifying as Italian or Irish. To do so is to deny the reality of racism in the here and now. And this denial would be colorblind racism. So you can't deny being white and be Irish. No, you are white and you're racist. So what does she do? She says, I strive to be less white. To be less white is to be less racially oppressive. So, and then she says in a paper called addressing whiteness in nursing education,

she starts with this quote, the question is not, did racism take place, but rather, in which ways did racism manifest in this specific context? It's everywhere. And even she says in white fragility, it's part of every interracial friendship. She's emphatic. You cannot have an interracial friendship that is not colored by racism. And white people are constantly trying to achieve what she calls a white racial equilibrium. They're trying to reassert their dominance.

They use their white women tears to research their right supremacy. So can you imagine if a person of color actually believe those ideas that every friendship I have was colored with a white person, was tainted by racism, that everything they do is a way for them to reassert their dominance over me. Can you imagine how paranoid and bitter and just miserable you'd be all the time? Yeah. And hurt. And hurt. Yeah. That's what you're you're letting this into the church when you're recommending these books as positively.

I think it's great to read them sort of evangelistically to figure out. Yeah. But when you're saying this is a good way to think about race, what is a, what I'm curious, what does DeAngela think about a, like my parents, my dad's Indian, my wife's, my mom's white, or. a couple, a black man and a white wife. How do they navigate their relationship if they really believe that every day, you didn't take out the trash, it's because you're trying to reassert your white supremacy. It's madness and it's going to eat us alive if we embrace it. Right.

How have pastors? And I just have a couple more questions because I know we've kind of got a long time, but are pastors just, are they not thinking critically? do they not know what's behind these? Have they fallen into that Kafka trap of thinking that, okay, well, if I get defensive about white fragility, it's just because I'm racist and I don't want to be racist, so I have to embrace white fragility the book, which, by the way, is written by a white woman who is making probably millions of dollars on what she would call anti-black oppression.

So if we want to talk about racism, we can talk about that. But the pastors, are they just not being discerning? giving it into peer pressure? I mean, these are evangelical pastors who I know preach at otherwise very conservative churches embracing things like white awake, white fragility and things like that. Yeah, I'm not sure why. I think charitably, I think pastors are just trying to, they're trying to reach out to white pastors, are trying to reach out to blacks, Hispanics, people of color. The evangelical church for a while was actually making a lot of, uh, gains in terms of multi-ethnic churches, people were actually looking more and more like the

actual kingdom of God, meaning a multi-ethnic kingdom. It's just true. The kingdom of God is bigger than, you know, North Carolina, where I live, or the United States, or any country, right? The kingdom of God is made of people from every nation, tribe, and tongue. It is. And so it should bother us that we have an incredible amount of racial segregation in our churches. That should, That should bother us. We're like, that's not what heaven's going to look like. It's not what the new heavens and new earth is going to look like. So people want to see multi-ethnic churches as a witness to non-Christians that, you know, out there in the culture.

There is ethnic strife. There's, you know, there's gender warfare. There's class warfare out there in the world. But in here, we are brothers and sisters in Christ. We want to show the world. Jesus said, they'll know you by your love for another. They'll know you by your unity. So the pastor is looking out and saying we see a racially segregated church historically and even today.

We want to overcome that. So we want to make sure that people of all ethnicities, all races feel comfortable here. Wonderful. I mean, I'm like, amen to that. But then we're imbibing how do you get ethnicity in your church? How do you fight racism in our culture? It exists there. How do you fight it?

What is it? And there they're looking to second. voices that are growing increasingly influential and loud in our culture. I mean, we're not saying that white fragility is only being based by evangelicals. White fragility was like the number one best selling book in the United States for three weeks. And it's been on the bestseller list for two years. So I think they're just trying to achieve a good goal, but aren't thinking about the means that they're using to get there and they're not being reflecting critically on what people were actually saying. I think this is all quite new. So the social justice scholarship,

they will actually see themselves really only took off about 20 years ago. So if you went to seminary like 30 or 40 years ago, you maybe kind of knew about postmodernism. You might have known about, you know, atheism, but you weren't really trained to recognize contemporary critical theory at all. It didn't really exist in its modern form. So that's probably a big reason why. And these theories and these books like white fragility are actually pushing churches and congregations away from the goal of unity. If your goal is unity and for us to all see each other within the church as brothers and sisters in Christ to tell someone that a white person is always wrong and is always secretly racist no matter what they're saying to you. and a black person is always right because of their lived experiences or whatever it is, then you're just creating more division.

You're going to create fear around having friendships and relationships with people who don't look like you from both races. White people don't want to, you know, they don't want to, they're afraid of saying the wrong thing of coming across as racist or being seen as racist no matter what. They might even assume that a person who doesn't look like them resents them because of their whiteness. And then the other way around as well, black people might start thinking, that about white people because this just kind of infects your mind, like a mind virus. And I would say

that for, you know, I'm not a pastor and I can't give advice to all pastors. But if we believe that God is who he is, that he is good, that his gospel is good, that his gospel is good for everyone. If we believe Jesus when he says, my burden is light and my yoke is easy. And part of that is what, you know, we're called to do in Ephesians, to leave all bitterness and wrath and anger along with all malice. to replace those things with love and unity and Thanksgiving. If we believe that those things are good, and that is the way to true liberation and freedom and to a life of joy and happiness. And if we love our brothers and sisters in Christ who are black, who are brown, then don't

we want that gospel for them? Like don't we want that message of reconciliation and forgiveness to also extend to them? And that's not to say, hey, you should just forget about all of your, you know, experience. with racism, let's just not talk about those. You just need to get over it because that's what the Bible says. I'm not saying that. But it seems like too many white pastors think that preaching perpetual grievance to their darker-skinned congregants is more loving than preaching than the gospel of peace and reconciliation and unity in Christ. And I think that if we love our brothers and sisters in Christ to our black, we would be preaching the gospel. Yeah, I think that,

there's a lot of the best thing we can do to combat critical theory in the church is dialogue. Dialogue is like kryptonite to critical theory because the very premise is there's not a dialogue, there's a monologue. There's the people that are oppressed telling the people that are oppressors all about how bad oppression is. Whereas a dialogue is like actually we, and this is the way that Christian church should operate. We're all sinners. We're all blinded not by our race, but by our sin. And so I need to hear, okay, I'm half Indian, so it's complicated for me, but I need to hear from whites.

I need to hear from blacks. I need to hear from Hispanics. I need to hear from everyone and say, am I reading scripture rightly? Do I understand how weight? I don't know. So we need to gather around the scripture as a family in Christ and say, my bond to you is unconditional, number one. It doesn't depend on you doing certain things or behaving a certain way. It depends on what Christ is done for us, number one.

And number two, how can I as your brother in Christ lay down my rights and listen and empathize and then come together as a family and say, now what does scripture say? How should we be viewing race or gender or justice from a biblical perspective? And you might disagree, but as long as you're willing to listen and you're committed to an actual dialogue, the hope is that God, the Holy Spirit, would lead you into all truth. But that's not the way critical theory is very much totalitarian in the sense. It tells you the solution and you're going to obey or if you don't, you're a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot. Right.

Whereas we have to say, no, as Christians, we're commanded to think the best of our brothers and sisters in Christ. We're commanded. So if I harbor resentment and bitterness and mistrust them, I have to question my own heart first. That goes for everybody. And I would say one more thing. This is important. the best thing that Christians can do to combat the growth of critical theory, especially critical racery within the church, is to resist racism and to resist what I see as a racial

backlash where white Christians are like, I'm sick and tired of being told I'm racist. You know what? I'm going to be racist. I'm like, I'm sorry, that's on you. Racism is a sin. And so you don't get to pay them back for singing against you by singing against them. We have to resist this backlash. We have to resist racial apathy saying, you know what, forget it. I'm just going to not care at all about anything except for reading my Bible and praying. So no, Christians have always been called to care for the widows and orphans, to care about the pro-life movement, to care about. So we can't neglect our duties as followers of Christ. And then the last thing I would say is, again, mainly to white Christians who are listening.

Like you said, Allie, listen to people's experiences. You don't have to subscribe to this whole worldview. you can just listen to what they've actually experienced because I, you know, they're so such sad stories. I'm not reading a really one quick quote from Eric Mason's book, Woke Church, which I know those people are, I think it's controversial, but there's some great passages in it. And one, he talks about how his own father was beaten beyond recognition by a bunch of white men for a crime he didn't commit.

And he, that story, he heard that story growing up from his dad. And he said, he said this, the story of him being beaten by white men. unfairly. So these and other experiences colored how I was raised to deal with whites, whether Christian or not. Just as my father's experiences

impacted my perceptions about race, so my perceptions will mark those of my three sons. This is how it works. One generation's pain and fears are passed onto the next. Doesn't mean that we have to

repeat the sense of racism and bigotry of the past, but it does mean that they impact us in some way. Right. That understand when people are, have experienced real hurt, real hurt.

My friend Nerva Reddy talked about, she's a immigrant. She was, grew up in Chicago, and she remembers the day when she was in school and she heard some girls behind her making fun of her black skin and saying how ugly it was. I was so, I was like, that's so messed up. For a little girl, I have to experience that. And if she wasn't bitter, she was just like, it hurt me. And we have to white Christians say. This hurts us too.

This is not right. And we want to work against that. And don't assume that talking about race and caring about racism is equivalent to critical race theory. It's not. It's totally different. So listen to people, empathize, and then come together as brothers and sisters in Christ to fight this with the gospel. Right. It takes so much effort to do exactly what you said to not allow the culture, whether it's secular conservative

culture, a secular or liberal culture, to sway what we care about and to determine how we confront injustice and discrimination. Because like you said, I do think that there can be a backlash from people who say, you know what, it all seems like critical theory. Because, I mean, just to give them a little bit of benefit of the doubt, when they have a pastor, for example, who is promoting things like white fragility and how to be an anti-racist, they assume that from the people who they trust to be their evangelical mentors that this is the only way to care about racism. And they're thinking, okay, but I'm not anti-capitalist, but I don't believe that everyone is just racist no matter what. They don't even know from their own pastors what it looks like to,

in a godly and biblical and gospel-driven way to confront real prejudice and to confront real racism. And so there are a lot of Christians who are unfortunately, because they don't buy into critical theory, they don't know what to do. So they assume that they should just forego the conversation altogether. And then you've got people who also say, okay, well, if this is the only way to confront racism, reading white fragility, and to upending the systems of oppression that we don't even know what it is and just embracing subjectivism and queer theory and all this stuff, then some people say, Christian say, okay, well, I guess I'm, I guess I'm on board with that because I don't, I don't know how else to do it. But I think our obligation is Christians, which you said so well,

especially as pastors who are shepherding flocks, is to make sure that we are cutting through the noise and that we are looking to the objective truth of the word of God to confront real injustice, to confront real prejudice, to confront real unfairness, not with the strategies of the world, not with the strategies of the flesh,

but with the strategy of the gospel, realizing that that does bring reconciliation. And that doesn't mean that there aren't actions associated with those things in the same way that we try to fight against abortion. But it does mean that we don't forego our base and our foundation and our worldview that is founded on the Word of God. Do you agree with that? I totally agree.

Yeah, absolutely. I think there are dangers on both sides. I just want people to be aware of both and to preach explicitly about both. For pastors, I just say no more dancing around the edges, no more just using vague language about, you know, injustice in general. We have to call out explicitly what are these ideas in our culture? What are they? And why we reject them?

I also would avoid just using jargon. Because people would just say things like, well, we're against cultural Marxism. Okay. But what does that even mean? You have to be specific because otherwise they'll just relabel it and repack. package it and sell the same lies. You have to say, this is why we don't believe that race and gender and sexuality are all identical. They're not just different forms of oppressive axes. This is how they're different. This is the basis for solidarity as Christians. God's creation

of us, God's redemption of us, not our solidarity primarily in race, class, and gender. We have it in our creation in God's image. We have it in our sin. We have it in our redemption. So we have to do more than just making these vague statements about how we disagree with these different movements. But why? Christians are, I think, desperate for clear teaching that, again, will, I think, take a middle road between, I think, of, well, two totally godless worldviews, one, based on things like actual white supremacy, which, thank God, our country has, truly thank God, God,

God has purged us to a large extent of those ideas that are so wicked. And yet there's another error too, which is to embrace this very equally unbiblical idea around creating oppressors and oppressed classes. I think we have to, again, say both of those are wrong. And here's what the scripture teaches about are fundamental solidarity as believers. Yes, I think that it would be so helpful. If pastors, you know, I've talked about this on the podcast, pastors want to talk about, you know, racism from the pulpit.

I think that that is a worthy subject. But rather than just parroting the things that we read from critical theorists and these kind of just very vague and nebulous terms like systemic racism define those things. Like tell your congregants. I mean, there's a lot of controversy around whether or not systemic racism actually exists. but if you're talking about injustice, if you're talking about discrimination, if you're talking about prejudice, it's not enough. And I think ultimately it's divisive just to throw out these terms without telling your congregants what they mean, how you see them manifesting themselves, what the Bible most importantly has to say about these things, and what can actually be done.

I mean, that's what we do about, you know, the injustice surrounding abortion. We know exactly what it looks like. We know where it happens. We know why it happens. We know the systems in place that are continuing and the philosophies in place that are continuing to allow abortion to persist. And we do tangible things. If racism exists in that way, it's a little bit more complicated because so much of, you know, hatred just exists in the human heart. It's hard to define how it manifests itself. But if that is your endeavor to talk about racism as a pastor, I do think that it is incumbent upon you to know specifically what these terms means. and to not let critical theory define oppression, define racism, and define those things.

But to look at the objective truth, and I do think that while it is so important to listen to experiences, I do think because we believe that there is an objective standard-bearer in God, it is important also for Christians to know the data. So is a narrative that a conservative or a liberal person in the media telling you is true. Is it true? Like, is it true based on the numbers that a certain narrative? a certain thing is happening all the time. Is that really true? It might be true that some people feel that way. But if it's not true according to the data, then it's not something that we need

to be blowing out of proportion either. We just don't need to be taking cues from the world, is what I'm trying to say. Do you agree with that? Yeah, definitely. I think I also appreciate pastors in general try to be apolitical, but then I would say then, but here's a thing. Well, I do too, actually, when I talk about critical theory, you know, I'm a political conservative. I'm not going to pretend I'm not, but I try to show people that rejecting this ideology, this is a worldview. This has theological implications. You can be extremely politically liberal, as many like James Lindsay, for example, a lot of these atheists are politically liberal and are still totally rejecting this, what they view is a dangerous, pernicious religion based on critical theory. So the point I'm trying to make is you don't have don't turn this into a political debate.

It's from for me, my motivation is almost entirely theological. I'm seeing people's theology being wrecked by these ideas. Right. And so I understand that obviously politics should flow from our theology, but the politics are downstream. I want to attack the headwaters. Where are these? Why are we having such, again, bad politics? And often it's because you can trace it back to what I care.

much more about bad theology. So I want to tackle the problem there. And I understand, I understand some pastors don't want to be political. But my point is these ideas are not political. These are deeply, they will affect how we do things like, who is God, what is our purpose in life, who am I as a person? How do I relate to other people? You have to speak on those questions because that It's the entire biblical narrative. Yeah, you will destroy it if you give into these ideas. Yes. And when you hear things, like I've heard, for example, that believing that the Word of God is inerrant and authoritative is in itself a white supremacist idea. Well, when you take that way, then, you know, we don't have any basis from which to have conversation. So again, I would encourage, like you've just encouraged Christians to know the fundamental.

of our faith. That's what all of this is built off of. If you know who God is, who Jesus is, the nature of the Bible, the authoritative and inerrant nature of the Bible, these are all the things that we need to know that we are building a worldview off of. And if we have those blocks, if we have those founding blocks, then we can answer the other questions. It makes it a lot easier, I think, to navigate these very confusing terms in the very confusing world of critical theory. But if you don't have those foundational theological views locked in, if you don't know whether or not you trust the Bible, if you're not really sure who the nature of God is, if Jesus really is the only way, truth in the life, if you don't really understand the gospel, then it's

going to be very easy to make critical theory your religion because a lot of the language of critical theory almost echoes Christianity with oppression and justice and words like that. And like you said, that is destructive, not just to your faith, but I would argue for entire societies. So can I say two things quickly. We've gone around forever. This is great. I could talk about this for hours. But can I say just two things people before we finish up?

One would be to if you're a Christian who is listening, who is a person of color and who has been hurt by racism, either outside the church or even within the church, what I would just really plead with you to recognize. is that while critical theory and critical race theory is its claims to care about you, to want to give you, to make you flourish, to want to fight for you, it claims those things, but it's not based on the gospel.

And so I understand the pain that you probably might feel, but this is not the way to solve it. And the church as broken as she is, as full of sin as she is, they're God's people. They're your siblings. And so I again, I want to say I understand and empathize with your hurt, but don't give up on the church. Don't give up on the gospel. And the church and the scriptures have rich resources to fight against the very things that you hate. And I just would just plead that you would stay the course. And then if they're non-Christians, you're listening to

this show. And this might be a little bit, for them, like, why don't I get critical theories a problem. But I want to also point people back to the alternative, which is, again, Christianity is the true and good worldview. And it's not because, so critical theorists would say that their worldview is for justice and against oppression. And Christianity is just another form of oppression, actually. And I would say, no, no, you don't understand. Christianity, because it's true is the way to find what you're looking for, which is true justice. But here's the hard part. Christianity starts with not seeking justice, but with your own injustice. All of us are actually on the wrong side of history. The history ends with God

winning. And you want to be on the right side. Well, the only right side of history is God's side. And all of us are on the wrong side. Matter how hard we try, we are all sinners, we are all wicked, And there's only one righteous person who is Jesus, and he came to rescue bad people like us. And so I think while your thirst for justice is commendable, remember that you yourself are just as bad as the people you despise. Jesus saw a really great parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector. And his parable, the Pharisee was this really religious person. The tax collectors were actually traitors. They were oppressors.

They would rob their own countrymen. and give to the imperial colonialist Romans the taxes. So you have a religious guy and an oppressor. And in the temple, they're both praying. And the religious Pharisees says, thank you that I'm not like this guy. He's wicked. He's a thief.

He's immoral. I think you God, I'm not like him. And the tax collector, the oppressor said, Lord have mercy on me a sinner. He knew how messed up he was. And Jesus said, the tax collector, the sinner, the sinner, the bad guy went home justified. Because the person who exhaust themselves will be humbled.

The one who humbles himself likes the sinner, like the taxler, like the prostitutes. They will be exalted. So Christianity begins the opposite way. It says you start by realizing that you yourself are unjust and throw yourself at the mercy at the feet of the just one. So that's just a message to people. There's a way, a better way to approach reality in critical theory.

Amen. And you tweeted the other day, and I'm paraphrasing, you know, praise the Lord that when he died on the cross, he didn't say do better. He says, it is finished. Like how much more of a satisfying and peaceful message can you get than that? Thank you so much for taking the time to have this wonderful, long conversation. But I just know that God is going to be glorified through it. And he's glorified through your study and your work in this field that not enough people are talking about. Can you tell everyone where they can find you? Sure. So the best way probably is Twitter. I'm just at Neil Shenvey, N-E-I-L-S-H-E-N-V-I. And my collaborator, Dr. Pat-S-H-E-N-V-I-R. Also on

Twitter, R-E-A-L-P-A-W-Y-E-R. But I have a website. I'm like the only Neil Shenvi in the world right now, I think. If you Google, and it's kind of a rare name even for an Indian. But if you Google a Neil Schenvi, Shendee. You'll find my website. You'll find my Twitter handle. So you can go there. And there's lots of resources. We have an article at the Gospel Coalition. We have a booklet on critical theory through Rachio Christie. It's free. It's 30 pages long. Lots of footnotes, lots of primary sources. So yeah, that's Twitter or just Googling my name is the best way. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Shinby.

Thank you, Allie.