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Critical Race Theory Goes Mainstream

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

• John Maynard Keynes

I’m not one to quote John Maynard Keynes favorably.  Were you to ask me to name my least favorite intellectuals of all time, without a doubt Keynes would be on that list somewhere.  But as much as his theory of economics is opposed to the economics of the Bible, he was not a man lacking insight or the ability to phrase his ideas in memorable ways.  Certainly, the quote at the top of this section about the hidden influence of defunct academic scribblers is on the mark.     

Ideas, as Richard Weaver pointed out, have consequences.  But many times, those who are most taken with ideas have little or no understanding about the origin of the nations they hold so dear. 

In the case of Critical Race Theory (CRT), the term was coined in 1989 and generally credited to Kimberlé Crenshaw, a graduate of Harvard Law School.  One of the first, perhaps the first, public use of the term “Critical Race Theory” was a name given to a retreat organized by Crenshaw called “New Developments in Critical Race Theory.”  This title is a lie.  As Kimberly Crenshaw herself said, “So Mari was one of the very few who knew the truth, when in 1987 [sic, it appears that Crenshaw here misstates the year as 1987; the conference to which she refers was held in 1989; one possibility is that she sent out the invitations in 1987 for the retreat which took place in 1989] I sent out a call to attend a retreat called New Developments in Critical Race Theory.  Only she, Neil Gotanda, Chuck Lawrence and maybe a handful of other people knew that that there were no new developments in critical race theory, because CRT hadn’t had any old ones—it didn’t exist, it was made up as a name. Sometimes you gotta fake it until you make it” (YouTube, “#2019ASA Presidential Session: Intersectionality and Critical Race Theory,” 45:37, accessed 6/13/2021).

Some may suppose that I’m making too much of Crenshaw’s admission by calling her title of the original conference that established CRT as a discipline a lie.  But what else are we to call it?  God commands us not to bear false witness. “Speak each man the truth to his neighbor,” wrote the prophet Zechariah.  But by her own admission, Kimberlé Crenshaw did not speak the truth to her fellow academics when she advertised the title to her retreat.  It was a deliberate deception, “It was a made up name.”  If someone will so easily insert a lie at the very beginning of an intellectual discipline, it is reasonable to ask what else she and her CRT followers are lying about.

As is the case with many new philosophical movements, CRT remained confined to ivy covered walls of academia before exploding into the public conscience in recent years.  In my case, I ran into CRT very early on when I was a student at UC, but it was only years later before I knew the name for it.   Perhaps it was the 2014 riots in Ferguson, MO and with them the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement that first drew public attention to CRT. 

In the years since, CRT has found it’s way into nearly every crevice of American life.  The press, churches, even putatively conservative Evangelical churches, corporations, Big Tech companies, movies, TV shows, museums and government officials have all advanced CRT over the past several years.  To give you a sense just how far CRT has penetrated into American culture, in 2019 the Southern Baptist Convention, a church with a public reputation of holding to Biblical doctrine, issued a resolution that approved the use of CRT as an analytical tool subordinate to Scripture (“On Critical Race Theory And Intersectionality,” https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/on-critical-race-theory-and-intersectionality/?fbclid=IwAR2U-ZzfsAA1lgIJkdIIMgkM3jRuCClpbe0yCb9wNq1q25s6rb8v51hnvdY, accessed 6/13/2021).  In fairness to the SBC, this resolution set off a firestorm of protests.  But the simple fact is there are those within the SBC who approve of and actively work to advance CRT in the denomination.      

Plan for This Series     

This the first of what, Lord willing, will be an extended series on CRT. 

One admission that I have up front is that I am still very much a learner when it comes to CRT and find writing on the subject to be a daunting task.  Not only must one understand postmodernism – postmodernism is, as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay put it in their book Cynical Theories, “difficult to define, perhaps by design” (Kindle, Chapter 1); As Pluckrose and Lindsay go on to write, postmodernism is radically skeptical, denying, “the very possibility of obtaining objective knowledge”; this is the very problem addressed by John Robbins in his essay “The Trinity Manifesto: The Crisis of Out Time” (https://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=355, accessed 6/13/2021), wrote Robbins, “The Christian at the beginning of the twenty-first century is confronted with an overwhelming cultural consensus – sometimes stated explicitly, but most often implicitly: Man does not and cannot know anything truly” (emphasis in the original) – a subject with which I have only a passing acquaintance, but also what it for many people an entirely new vocabulary of the sort used by CRT advocates.  Add to that the need to refute the main tenets of CRT from the Scriptures, and I have before a task to which, on my own, I am inadequate.

But while acknowledging my own inadequacy, there is a crying need to refute from the pages of the inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word of God, the 66 books of the Bible the poisonous doctrine of CRT.  For if this noxious vine is left to its own, it will choke out truth justice and liberty from our land and replace it with a tyrannical skepticism horrific in theory and practice. 

It is my plan for this series to next examine some of the better-known manifestations of CRT. This can be both interesting and educational, as it will highlight for the reader, it he is not already aware, just how overgrown nearly all our public institutions are with the noxious vine of CRT. Following that, I plan to define CRT.  As John Robbins said, if you don’t define your terms, you don’t know what you’re talking about.  As Gordon Clark noted in his book The Incarnation, “define or discard.”  Next, I plan to examine CRT in light of the Scriptures, employing Luther’s Schriftprinzip (writing principle) of which he wrote, “Therefore, nothing except the divine words are to be the first principles for Christians; all human words are conclusions drawn from them and must be brought back to them and approved by them” (John Robbins, “The Forgotten Principles of the Reformation,” https://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=202, accessed 6/13/2021). As Robbins noted in another place, the job of the Christina thinker is to find the foolishness in worldly philosophies.  And foolishness is a characteristic CRT has in abundance.  Next, I plan a more detailed look at how CRT has affected churches, liberal and conservative.  I also intend to show how the Roman Church-State has used CRT to weaken the nations of the West and to advance thereby its own goal of world dominion. I then hope to take a closer look at the manifestations of CRT in a host of American institutions – schools, universities, the media, corporations – as well as those of other nations. Finally, I would like to say something about the politics of CRT and warn Americans and citizens of other nations the very real danger presented by this evil philosophy. 

It is to the glory of God and the edification of his people that I undertake this work.  I covet your prayers.   

Posted in Critical Race Theory | Tagged CRT, Gordon Clark, John Robbins, Martin Luther, Refuting Critical Race Theory, Schriftprinzip, Scripturalism | Leave a Comment