Thinking Christian about Critical Race Theory: A Conversation with Ed Uszynski

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by Dr. Ed Yuzinski. Ed has worked for the last 30-some years with Crew Athletes in Action and Family Life, and I know you're kind of going in different ways now. And you've written this great book that we're going to be discussing today, Untangling Critical Race Theory. And Ed also earned his PhD in American Cultural Studies at the... and where was that? I'm not seeing that on my sheet. Where'd you earn your PhD at, man? Bowling Green State University. Bowling Green State. I'm so familiar with that. Yeah. I didn't check where that was. But anyway, we're going to be talking about your book, Untangling Critical Race Theory. It's published by IVP, and Ed, I'm just, I'm really excited to have you here. I read your book last night, loved it, and I'm excited to dig into this conversation. Well, good to be here, James. I've enjoyed having these conversations with people that are interested in it. So thanks for getting me in here. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think one of the things I loved about your book was where you started. I feel like there's some ground that needs to be cleared. And so what I was hoping we could do, and usually I don't like to do the book report thing on the podcast, but I think it's necessary in this case because there's a lot to unpack. So let's talk a little bit about some of these underpinning theories of critical race theory and how you've presented them in the book and we'll have a good conversation about it. So Marxism. Let's start with Marxism, which is, as you say, a dirty word in many Christian circles. And just to preface, you know, before you answer, I've done a fair amount of work with, I don't know, downstream people from Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, if you're familiar with him. You know, he very much expanded on Marx's theories, and I found him to be relatively helpful in thinking through contextual and situational kind of analyses. And so what do we need to know about Marxism? How does it really relate in? Well, maybe we'll get to where it relates into critical theory, but how do we think about Marxism? What do we need to know? Yeah, good. Well, and the only reason I would have anything at all to say about it is because of going and doing that PhD work. So, you know, I did more conservative-ish theological degrees 15 years before that at Trinity and then at Divinity School. So that's really my base and my foundation. And maybe even just for listeners who might be already getting on the defensive, I don't in any way fashion myself as a Marxist thinker now or anything like that. But I was very influenced back in the early 2000s when I went to do my PhD because we read Marx himself and then we read people that were downstream, which is there, you know, there's tons that's just been written that's influenced by Marx. And I'd never really exposed myself to Marx's writing before, which was so interesting to me in my 40s to think, how is it that I have all these different degrees and I've got, you know, my undergrad life, I managed to avoid somebody who, for better and worse, and I think our listeners would say, for the most part, worse, has influenced the globe, right? He's had this global influence and I really know nothing about him except that there's been a lot of evil done in his name. So when I first started to read him, what I realized is that I thought he gave actually a, on the science side of economy, he gave a robust critique of capitalist society and what life is like under the sun apart from God. I think that's the big piece of it too, that if you really, if you remove God from the equation altogether and you just look at the history of humans interacting with each other and how they organize themselves around money and economies, I thought what he wrote was quite fascinating in terms of just his critique of the way things all come about throughout time and that capitalism is not the only way of organizing ourselves. Man, that may seem so obvious, but for me, I was, I just had never even thought about that before, that it just seemed like capitalism was not just the best way, but it was a godly way and it's the way it's usually been all over the world. But that's not the case. So that was all very interesting to me, just to read his critique of how it all came about and the effect then that it has on the way we organize ourselves, the way we think about ourselves as human beings in relationship to one another, the way our education system works, that like every aspect of our society is literally angled towards keeping capitalism afloat. So again, whether you agree or disagree with where he winds up going with that, it was very interesting to me just to recognize in ways that I never had before that that was true, that it really was true, you know, from top to bottom, politics, education, the prison system, our medical establishment, like every aspect of our social relations to one another are dictated largely by how money works. And in this case, how capitalism affects how money works. So that was very new to me. And then I thought there were just a bunch of things that, again, for better or worse, Marx drew attention to that I found that in my own more conservative evangelical Christian upbringing, especially amongst mostly white folks, just, you know, to throw the racial component in there and middle to upper class white folks. We could throw that in as well. Marx paid attention to things that I thought the Bible actually pays attention to this too. But for some reason, my own community tends to underplay these things. So what do I mean by that? Well, just paying attention to marginalized populations. I mean, one of the reasons why Marx is so popular around the world is because he gives voice to people that are being trampled by power and people that are being taken advantage of because they're vulnerable, which again, I think, well, yeah, the Bible has an awful lot to say about that in both Old and New Testament. And yet within my own communities, we weren't paying that close of attention to that. He speaks truth to power. You know, he's not afraid to critique capitalism and the way that we organize ourselves. He gives people a way to make sense of life without God in the equation. That's why people are attracted to him. So I'll stop. That was a long ramble, but those are all the kinds of things that kind of stood out to me that I just had never really thought about it before. And again, maybe people think, how could you have missed that? But somehow across four decades and living for 20 years within my Christian, you know, my Christian world, I'd only ever heard Marx was evil and that's that. Never really understood what he believed or why so many people were attracted to him. You know what I found interesting because I worked to Marx through Pierre Bourdieu, right? And Pierre Bourdieu took not just Marx's economic model. So Marx was more class-based looking at the disparities between the classes and developing his theory from that more economic side, which you just explained. Bourdieu looks at it and says, well, no, this is about capital, but there's different sorts of capital. There's all these different sorts of capital that exist. And so the way I've sort of tried to explain it as I've taught this concept to students and stuff like that is, you think about the difference between a ballerina and an NFL lineman, right? Both are, they have to have coordination. They both have to have strength. They both have to have, you know, athleticism and a certain degree of... Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Understanding of movement, coordination, all those kind of different things. But you would never look to Baryshnikov to figure out how to be an NFL lineman, right? So the game that you're playing, right, rewards certain attributes and characteristics that are different than other games. So ballet, you're not going to see probably a 400-pound lineman doing particularly well at ballet, right? Just in the same way, you're not going to find, you know, a 170-pound guy doing particularly well as an NFL lineman. It doesn't mean that, you know, there's no strength or whatever, but what Bourdieu

So you can kind of see how that structuring works, I think, in the context of a game. You know, you do have sort of characteristics, attitudes, behaviors, skill sets that you have to develop in order to play as an NFL lineman that you'd never need if you're going to do ballet. That's good. Yeah. It's interesting. So I pronounce his name Bordeaux, and I never knew how to pronounce it. It's a French name, but guys like him and others that were cut out of that same cloth that took sort of a Marxist lens and just spun it in a little different direction. So they weren't so much focusing on, you know, the way economy works, but they were talking about different forms of capital. I thought that was fascinating that I have social capital as a resource. In fact, I use that phrase a lot in my ministry and with people that I interact with because we all have different forms of social capital. We have capital that is in a sense given to us by the family that we grew up in or the neighborhood that we grew up in. Right. The school system that we had access to are all significant forms of capital that we wind up spending or using, stewarding in different ways as we move through life. I thought all of that was fascinating. And again, I've never had been exposed to him in any of my theological studies. You mentioned habitus. I actually had a whole chapter in untangling critical race theory that was almost, yeah, and it ended up getting cut just because we ran out of space. But it was one of the things that I most wanted to stay in there because I thought that that is such a fascinating idea that how we grow up shapes the way we see the world. So in the context of race, for example, where we're going in this conversation, we've all been shaped before we even realize it and how we think about people that are different from us racially. Right. Another way of thinking about that is it's called racialization. I know maybe we don't want to get into this quite yet, but we just were shaped to think a certain way. And once we start to take on a Christian mind, that Christian mind should be confronting those initial shapings and looking for ways they need to be transformed to represent a different kingdom. Right. I mean, that's the work of discipleship. It's the work of sanctification that will be changed to be more in the image of Christ and will reflect a kingdom that is already but not yet impacting this world that we live in. So, again, I'm getting off on things here, but that needs to be confronted in me. And it was Marxist thinkers that actually got me to really start paying closer attention to that, which surprised me. I was surprised that I again, a lot of people can't handle hearing that the Marx or his protégés were actually helpful in my thinking as a Christian, but they were. It was interesting. I can remember, and this is a totally non-race based example, but I remember I came into seminary and I had no background as an evangelical. I'd grown up Lutheran, but my parents were, you know, it was what you did in a small town. You went to the Lutheran church. I wouldn't have called my upbringing particularly religious. And so I had no clue what I was doing going to seminary. The guy who was discipling me had just said, you're too hardheaded to learn this stuff on your, you know, for me to teach this to you. You need to go and learn it on your own. And he's like, you should do an MDiv. And so I hopped in, I'd read maybe half the book of John and some of Romans, you know, and just a little Bible studies and stuff. So I'm like total fish out of water. But what I quickly realized was a lot of these guys were second, third generation missionaries or pastors or whatever. They were already known in a number of different networks. They were getting opportunities to preach. They were getting opportunities to serve. They understood how to maneuver the church differently than I did. The guys that you were in seminary with, you mean? The guys that I was in seminary with. Yeah. And so you sit back and I'm like, wow, I kind of wish I can have those opportunities. But what I came as on reflection, what I came to realize was this is in part why people are, and you mentioned this in the book, a little uncomfortable with meritocracy. You know, because your network tends to breed opportunities. And all of us have that, right? We just don't usually like it to be thrown in our face. Right. I know I've gotten opportunities later on in life as I built my professional career just because people knew me and they knew they could trust me. And so even if I wasn't the best candidate, there was a component of me that they knew would fit. And so that made sense. It didn't matter whether the other guy might fit. They were going to take the sure bet that I would fit. You've had relational capital. I had relational capital. That gave you an advantage. That's right. That's not a bad thing. It's just reality. Right. I think we all experience that at different ranges in our lives. It's a very interesting thing to look for as you're sort of walking through different areas of life because our networks really do tend to shape what opportunities, not the only opportunities we can get, but I would argue how hard we have to work maybe to get those opportunities. Well said, James. And if you're in a network or you've been placed in a network that doesn't offer opportunities, you have to work twice as hard, three times as hard, 10 times as hard, not only to get out of that network, but to create a new one, which has all kinds of relevance to what we're talking about here. That there there's still, when it comes to race, there there still really are the effects of 50, 60, a hundred years ago that continue to linger today because people are still in networks that were established under a hyper racist system. Some have gotten out. Some have managed to do the work to develop new networks, you know, but many, many still have not. And so the question becomes, what is our responsibility to those people and to those communities as Christians? I mean, it's two different questions. What is it just as as non-Christian people, just from a political standpoint, what's our responsibility? That's getting talked about and argued about all the time. Another question for us is what is our responsibility as Christians, regardless of what our government and the political, you know, binary that's set up for us, regardless of what they say needs to happen. What's my responsibility as a Christian to steward the resources I have to be a blessing to people who maybe have not had the same access to resources because of historical trends and because of evil that took place. What does that responsibility look like today? Well, I I would say it's interesting. I had, um, Caitlin Beatty on. And she wrote a series of articles called the evangelical bro code. Okay, go ahead. Essentially. So the bro code, she defined it a little bit differently than I will, because it was a more elaborate kind of thing. But basically it was that men in evangelical organizations tend to have certain privileges based on the assumptions of those Christian organizations. So for instance, that men should be the breadwinner in the family. Uh, that, and so you see far fewer, you hear far fewer stories of men working for unlivable wages or working, you know, sort of full-time, part-time jobs in the same way you might women. Um, you see the, um, she talked about the Billy Graham rule and the tension between male leaders meeting with female leaders to avoid the impropriety that may come from, you know, sexuality and those kind of things. Sure. There were a couple others, but as I reflected on it, kind of what I came to is this, the evangelical bro code to the extent that it exists, doesn't help men either. Okay. It allows us to sort of, um, I had a boss one time come into my office early on when I was working and he said, uh, I think you're getting by on your good looks and charm. And I kind of laughed it off at that early point in my career, but I think the reality was he's right. Okay. And so is it good for me to get by on my quote, good looks and charm? No. Right. That's not helping me to develop my competencies. It's not shaping me into a better employee. It's not doing anything for me. Yeah. And I think there may be a lesson there, like sort of a third question to ask, not only how do we help and what's our responsibility, but also how is it hindering our discipleship to continue to live within the quote unquote givens, right. That our culture sets for us as opposed to questioning those givens and saying, you know, God has given us a new path. How does conforming to this understanding of reality hinder us from walking on that new path? Okay. That's good. To the extent that it does, I think it actually hurts us. It hurts us as Christians. Yeah, it hinders us from growing. It hinders us from appreciating and understanding other people's reality outside of our own little sphere of influence. And again, that doesn't mean that I'm an evil person. You know, it doesn't mean that I have to be in this constant or endless state of repentance about the privileges that I have or the social status that I've been able to work with. It means I should, again, just speaking even in biblical terms, I should be regularly and consistently grateful for opportunities for the platform, the bed that I have to sleep in, right. Whatever it is that God has given us, I should recognize those things as things that not everybody

That's not happening very well in the church. I don't expect necessarily folks outside the church, even the best of humanists, will not do that consistently. I do have a little different expectation for us who are being shaped and renewed by the word of God, assuming that that's actually happening. Those of us that are being changed, shaped, reshaped, transformed in our thinking by the word of God, I would expect gratitude and curiosity to be characteristics of how we interact with people, that we'd be known for those characteristics, people that are different from us. That's not really the word on the street right now about us. So I want to keep working towards that, right? In my own life and in the people I have influence over, I want us to keep getting better at that. As long as we have, you know, breath and life in us, let's try to grow in the way we interact with people. I just interviewed Mark Matlock for the podcast, and he wrote a book called Face of the Curious, and one of the comments he made, though, is that what he finds is that most of the curious people are actually outside of the church, that the people inside the church are far less curious, even about their own faith, than people outside the church are curious about, you know, spiritual things, not necessarily Jesus, but just spiritual things. And I think it's a really important point to say, if we lose our curiosity, I think I see a correlation between curiosity and caring for people. If I'm not curious about why they're feeling the way they're feeling, if I'm not curious about the way they're reacting the way they're reacting, if I'm not curious about, you know, their lifestyle and the way that they live and see the world, what I'm really just trying to do is get them to conform to my standards. I want them to act the way I want them to act, regardless of how they feel about it, regardless of what their experience is. I just want them to conform to a particular realm of behavior. Ultimately, we want them to conform to the image of Christ, and I, you know, like that's the ultimate aim, but I think there has to be that curiosity about other people to understand what's going on there, what's under the covers here, how have they been uniquely gifted, how have they been uniquely hurt, how have they been uniquely whatever, right, across that spectrum, because otherwise without the curiosity, I don't know that we can have the care. good. Well, we came on here to talk about a race book, and we started by talking about Marxism, and now we're just talking ministry philosophy, you know, I totally appreciate that. And I was so shaped by Eugene Peterson and the writing of Eugene Peterson, you know, Presbyterian pastor. He wrote the message for people that don't know, but he actually wrote a bunch of books on just ministry and how to do ministry. And he talked about in his book called Working the Angles, Working the Angles of Ministry, he talked about the importance and the need to maintain a sense of awe when you're in the presence of people, which again, I just, I need that. You know, you can just start going through the motion day of dealing with people and tolerating people. You're barely tolerating yourself sometimes. And he said, the reality is every day that we're given, we're in community with people. These people had a million different ways to not be here, to have died on the way here, right, to have had their body stop working in some kind of way. The fact that they're still alive and they're still in your presence means that God is still doing, he's been doing something in them before they showed up in this moment. He'll be doing something after they've left your presence. Why did he bring you together for this time? You know, what role do you play in maybe helping them move a little closer to the Lord or having a little more joy today or feeling hope to keep going? We need, we're at such a deficit of hope right now in our culture. And what role can I play in bringing that into somebody's life? It gives a lot of purpose to life when you look at life that way, you know, and you're interacting with people and just realizing that this is potentially a very special moment right here if I don't miss it. But I have to be then curious. That's what made me just think of it. I have to have a curiosity and a care for people. I need to ask the Holy Spirit to give me that sometimes when I'm so wrapped up in my own messiness that I stop seeing people. So I love that, James. Love that you said all that. Well, I wonder if the flip side of curiosity is really, and to get us back on track, critical, right? Critique, right? Because we're, there's one thing about understanding and accepting that this is another person's reality. It's a whole other thing of accepting that in an unqualified fashion without any additional critical thought given to it, right? And so talk a little bit about maybe critical theory and what role it can play in sort of the way we think as Christians. Yeah, well, again, just getting back even into the history, Marx predicted that there was gonna be at some point an economic meltdown, that capitalism would collapse on itself. And there were plenty of opportunities. He wrote in the 1850s, 1860s. That's when his stuff was being translated and created. Early 1900s, there were a bunch of opportunities for economic meltdown to happen. And there were a bunch of opportunities for the revolution that he'd been talking about to happen around the world. And instead of it happening, there were dictatorships that rose up. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. ...in some ways got stronger around the world. And in those places where communism took hold, it completely worked against human flourishing. It killed millions and millions of people, tens of millions of people, right? So, there were mostly men in the 1930s who were living right before Hitler got going and Mussolini and Stalin who were looking around and saying, how is it that not only is capitalism not folded, but we're being given over to dictatorships? What is it about the now the way the world is structured? What is it? How is it that people who have power like this are able to get it and then maintain it over millions of people? How do we let a handful of people basically control us? That's really what they were after and what they were thinking about. And again, they're doing it with really no concept of God. God is just a manipulative device used by the powerful to keep them under control, if anything. So, they're not trying to think theologically about these things. They're thinking purely materially. And so they introduced this idea of really trying to look at beneath the surface of the water. You see the top of the iceberg, what's just going on, but there's always stuff going on beneath that's allowing people who have power to control everybody. That was their thing. And so again, man, there's all got most of the people that are known in critical theory, a bunch of them committed suicide. A bunch of them wound up being very nihilist in the way they wound up their lives. Because again, they look around and saw no hope. There was no God coming to save them. There was no real revolution that was probably going to overthrow dictators. And every time there was any kind of revolution, a new dictator just rose up to take their place. And that's very discouraging when you're looking closely at the details of history. But again, what I did appreciate about those men and women who started to join that critical theory fray is I appreciated how they got me to stop just taking what I saw on the surface and to start thinking more critically about what's actually happening to bring things about and to maintain the power that people have. So, you know, how has that applied for me even in looking at the church culture of today? You know, there's a lot of critique about big EVA, big evangelicalism and mega churches and ways some men and some women, but mostly men still are able to get an amazing amount of power over groups of people and just studying and picking apart how that happens and why it is that people are susceptible to it. And again, how does money come into the picture and what role does pride play in not allowing them to let go when they are doing things wrong and the people that are around them? What happens when they're able to insulate themselves and what's the psychology of the men and women that allow that to happen? I got most of that kind of thinking from the critical theorists. Again, not necessarily drawing their same conclusions about the way the world works or why it works the way it works, but by infusing some theological categories into it, like sin, exploring the way sin does its work in the church, even amongst very successful pastors and ministry leaders, there's really horrible things that go on. So.

Yeah, no, it's really interesting. I mean, I think I can go back to, and I can't remember when it was first published, but James Findlay wrote a book on D.L. Moody. He wrote a biography on him. And he was talking about the church in relationship to the economic world during the industrial revolution. And one of the passing comments he makes is that the church had become so tied to the business community and the economic model of the United States that they were unable to offer a sustained critique of the economic relationships. Interesting. Good. And I mean, it's this moment where you sit back and you're like, what you really needed was critical theory, right? People who didn't care what they lost, but were going to question the structure regardless and try to understand how this was forming and shaping God's people in ways that were unfortunate. Good, James. Well, and the critical theorists, you just reminded me of something, because they weren't Marxists, but they were super influenced by Marx. Yes. You know, they were influenced by that lens through which Marx was viewing the world. They were looking through the same or at least a very similar lens. And so they were always critiquing the effect of capitalism, always critiquing the effect of the flow of money. You know, we've all heard that saying, follow the money. And they were intense about that. And it really is fascinating and discouraging to see really how much of church life has been more influenced not only by secular economy, but secular politics. I mean, we could say the same thing in some of the concern about Christian nationalism and, you know, the concern about evangelicals being connected to Donald Trump in the 2016 election and, of course, now. There is plenty to be exposed about our fascination with power and our fascination with money and the hold that it gets on us, even as devoted Christian people. It's a constant danger. And critical theorists actually gave us the tools and the, you know, the analytical way of viewing the world to expose a lot of that if we want it. That's your point. Not everybody wants that. Not everybody wants to see how things work. It's too unsettling. You know, what will we do now? If we had to change our church that we were in or the congregation we were in, if we had to change our lifestyle as we got exposed more to maybe the way we've allowed money to become an idol in our own family life or power to become an idol. It's really unsettling to have to rethink that stuff, especially as you get older, you know. It's really unsettling. I've had multiple conversations with one of my buddies. He's an Indian gentleman. And one of the things he talks about, he's like, you know, he read Willie James Jennings' work on Christian imagination. And in the end of that book, he talks about location and real estate as part of the solution to multi-ethnic conflict. OK. And so we've talked a number of times and I'm like, so what does this mean for you? Like, does this mean you move your family? Like, does this mean I move my family? Like, what does that look like? And he said, probably not. He said, sadly, maybe it should. But he's like, you know, you're just so grounded. You know, the realities of life sort of start to press in. And it's like, you know, interest rates have now a bearing on what you can or can't do. You know, how long you've been in the house, what your mortgage is, all those different things. You know, you start thinking about schools and all of these different little areas of life sort of begin to influence the way you think about the importance of this issue is the way I would sort of phrase it. What am I willing to do in order to engage with it? And I've really appreciated him. Like, he's talked about that in terms of, it's not something we should necessarily feel bad about, but it is probably something we should very much own, you know, like really recognizing it. So yeah, it is interesting. And even asking short of taking radical steps to move into completely different neighborhoods or change states, which I've had some friends do that, James. I do know people that have totally done that because they They had new convictions about the way they thought they should be living or the way they wanted to get away from how they had been living. And so they moved into the city or from the suburbs or from the country even. But most people haven't done that. At the very least, what I'd want to keep challenging all of us to do is ask, what is there still something short of that that can be tweaked in the way I operate? Do I shop in different places? You know, do I, do I consider joining up with a different congregation, changing churches? Or at least pushing my, my church to be more in partnership with other congregations that are different from us. I mean, that's probably even harder for some people than it would be to move, you know, work with other churches. But there are steps that can be taken. What we watch, what we listen to, who starts to influence the way we think as we move into this next year. Those are changes that can be made, like significantly easier that begin to shape the way we live in this next decade, you know, if we'll make those moves now. Let me ask you this, because I think I want to move on to CRT. I want to make sure we leave enough time for it. But one of the things that I see in, I think you would probably agree with this, as I was reading your book, one of the things I kept coming back to was this. All of these theories, and often the people who oppose these theories, have the wrong target. And what I mean by that is this. They construct a utopian vision that is not theologically aligned, right? It isn't drawn from Scripture. Right. So they have this hope for a utopian world, and they understand then how to pull the levers and push the buttons to get them to their utopian vision. But that's not the right utopian vision. Are you saying the people that are critical of things like critical race theory are doing that? I would say both sides. Both. Yeah. I think there's a deficit on all of these theories. Right. And I would say this, you know, we're talking about critical race theory, but even in the realm of politics, you know, conservative politics does this same thing. Sure. Right. You tend to see a vision of our nation put forth. Good. And then you start talking about all the levers we could pull or buttons we could push to get there. And one of the great quotes, I love this quote from Ian McGilchrist. He's a philosopher and like neuroscientist. And he talks about we tend to think that simply because we understand how to coerce the world, get it to do what we want, that we understand it. OK. And he said, so it's no wonder that we keep messing things up and that the world falls into chaos because we're pulling levers and pushing buttons, but we really don't understand what we're doing. We just know what effects they have. Interesting. And so when I look at critical race theory, when I look at, you know, anti critical race theories, whatever we want to call those, what I see in both is not a sustained theological critique or a real deep understanding of human limitation, our deficits of perception. You know, what's deeply wrong with the world. What I see are competing utopian visions, neither of which are aligned with what we see in scripture and the desire to build God's kingdom. Wow, that's good, James. Yeah. And maybe an unwillingness to live in the middle of contradiction and to acknowledge and admit that we are all a bundle of contradictions all the time. Again, not to assume we're all evil people. And within the Christian world, we are saved by grace, which should mean that we, of all people, can recognize or should be willing to recognize contradiction. I'll try to say this real quick. Just a few weeks ago for the first time ever, I was in Philadelphia. My wife and I got to go there. And so we went to visit Independence Hall. If you've ever been there, it's an amazing thing. Declaration not signed. You know, it's fascinating. I love history. I love standing in a space where something significant happened. It was very in awe inspiring in me. Then you go outside there and they've got this little area where the Liberty Bell is housed. And of course, everybody is walking by there and taking pictures of it. And that bell represents freedom. It represents this new experiment called the United States of America where people can pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Right. Then you move just a little bit further down the road, a hundred yards, and it's where the president's house was for the first 10 years of the country from 1790 to 1800. Washington lived there and Adams lived there before Washington, DC got established. And in those 10 years, they lived there with slaves, with at least 10 slaves that served them and lived in the basement. Okay. And there was a huge argument in the early 2000s about whether to preserve that reality and make that part of the Liberty Bell experience. Okay. It's fascinating. Look it up, everybody. Go back and look on Wikipedia if you're not familiar with it and see the fight that happened over that. And there were people who said, we want the Liberty Bell and that Liberty experience just to be on its own. Let's just celebrate the ideal of what this nation is. And of course, the slavery thing happened. But let's

That's a separate story. And there were others who said, it's not a separate story. It's completely intertwined. And as you stand there, if you let yourself feel it, it is the ultimate contradiction that represents our nation, that it's this amazingly good thing. So again, American exceptionalism, should we go for that or not? It is definitely exceptional, and it is wildly blind to the fact that in its exceptionalism, it still maintained slavery and oppression of women. And fill in the blank of all the other categories of people that really were still oppressed even within this system right from the start. And so here we are a couple hundred years later, and they're still arguing over whether or not we can face that together. And just allow ourselves to deal with that contradiction. I expect Christians who recognize that we are living as aliens and strangers in this world and that there's another kingdom coming that's trying to break into this world that's radically different, that overcomes that contradiction in the gospel. I want us to be better at being not threatened by that contradiction. Let's just look at it again. We're talking about race in this context. Let's look at, because this is what the critical race theorists wanted us to do. So we're in the 70s and 80s. And the critical race theorists were people, they were actually all, most of them were from law backgrounds. And they looked at what the work that the critical theorists were doing and recognized these are still all white folks who don't want to pay attention to the role that race is playing in the narrative. They won't look through racial lenses. And the people that are looking through racial lenses aren't doing it critically. So they wanted to bring the best of those two worlds. We're going to look at what's really going on beneath the surface of the water that people don't want to talk about. And we're going to focus and highlight race, especially in the context of law in their case. And look at how law actually on the surface, we talk about it as though it should actually be standing against racism. And yet in reality. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Loads of cases, law was actually still being used to preserve and maintain a racist system and keep segregation in place. Keep those who have power, which was mostly white skinned people, mostly white skinned males even, and still in the 1970s. We're going to keep this the way it is. We're going to be able to employ racism without looking like racists. So they committed themselves to saying, well, no, we're going to confront this narrative that's floating around that we're all good now when it comes to race. We had the 1960s. We passed new laws that got rid of Jim Crow. We're good. And the critical race theory said, well, that's just naive. That's crazy talk. We're not good. There are consequences to the patterns that have been established across centuries. There's patterns that have been established that continue to not allow anything but white voices to be at the table. There's patterns that have been established that say that, yes, meritocracy, you used that word earlier, that everybody's starting at an equal point. And now it's just a matter of who's going to outwork the other person. And it's like, well, now work actually still matters, but some people are starting like at minus 100. They're not starting at zero. And so that's what they were doing. They were shining a light on those contradictions. They were shining a light on what's really happening when it comes to race. And even back then in the 70s and 80s, folks didn't like that. You know, there was kind of really, I think, mostly politically motivated fights were going on around those kinds of theories that were being presented. And the same kind of pushback that's happening now. There's just an unwillingness to look at it. So again, I don't think that should be true in the church. Yeah, and I think the big question is, so I think part of this is framing and maybe some of it is what people have heard versus what people have said. I think in other cases, it's what people have said, right? And so, you know, we've all sort of heard the narrative of if you're white, you're automatically racist. I think that's a poor framing of this issue. My tendency would be to think of it in terms of every individual has unique obstacles that they have to overcome and unique resources they can draw on to overcome those obstacles. Right. If we just think about it in general like that. Now what we can look at is we can say, well, those individuals are often embedded in groups. And so are we, is it harder for someone who, and I'll just use me as an example, is it harder for someone who comes from a small rural town with no particular political connections, lower middle-class most of my life, right? I mean, I lived in public housing when I was a little kid and those kind of things. So I would have been lower class at that point. Um, but you know, I also had a mom who had a bachelor's degree. She was a teacher. And so that was one of the advantages. It was like, yeah, you can look and you can see the school system, the academics is a way for you to move beyond where we are. It was cultural capital. That's right. And so I think we all have to sort of acknowledge that and not feel particularly bad about it while we also recognize that people in other groups in other settings, and I grew up with some of them, did not have the same advantages I did, despite maybe even having better economic advantages or better class-based advantages. They just didn't have what I had. And so I think there's an individual orientation that we need to just recognize. But then I also think we need to acknowledge that this happens in tranches. It happens in groups, right? There's a general trend of individuals who are going to have similar, though not exactly the same, advantages and disadvantages. And that's what critical race theory is trying to get at. It's not to say that there's never going to be a Black person who's going to succeed in America. That's ridiculous, right? Individual African-American people or different races are going to have advantages that allow them to sort of transcend out of the group. But the group as a whole, what critical race theory, as I understand it, is saying is that yes, there has been an openness and opportunities opened up for everyone in America, but to access those opportunities requires us to get over 16 obstacles, right? You're running a straight sprint where I'm running the hurdles. Yeah, I'm good. You know what I mean? And so it's like, who's going to win that race? Probably the guy not going over the hurdles. Yeah. You know? Yep. Good, James. Well, go ahead. What else were you going to say? No, please, go ahead. Somebody said this to me. I just want to back up for a second. I thought this was a simple but profound, that theory is neutral, people are not. Theory is neutral, people are not. And I think that's actually helpful because everybody's worked up about saying that theory is this or critical race theory is that and that it's not at all compatible with a Christian worldview. There's so much of that kind of talk in the last five, six, seven years. It's part of the reason why I tried to write what I wrote because I just thought, well, that's not true that all of this is just evil. The lenses through which they're asking us to look are actually quite neutral. So for one of the theories, let's say, one of the critical race theories, one of the predominant ones, is that race is endemic, meaning that it's everywhere. It's hardwired into the entire system. Well, the first time I heard that, I shrugged my shoulders at that and just thought, of course. And in my mind already, I was like, well, that doesn't mean that every single element of society is nothing but racist or that all white people are necessarily all racist. My mind didn't go there. It's just saying race is woven into the fabric of our society across hundreds of years and you can't avoid it. It's always in there somewhere. Now, what people do with that and what they propose as a solution.

solution to it once it gets exposed in a particular element of society or aspect of society, we shine a light on the school system, or we shine a light on the NFL and the NFL's hiring practices, or we shine a light on the prison system, because that's really what critical race theory wants us to do, is look at these individual aspects of society and ask these questions about it. The solutions that people come up with can be very evil. They can not align at all with what, again, I'm saying this as a Christian man. They can not align at all with what a Christian worldview would look like or a kingdom worldview, and I know people even have problems with those phrases these days. Right. Okay, but we don't even need to get into that. They don't align with what Christ would have us do. So I don't have to accept that. I can reject that. I can stand against it. But the theory itself is forcing me to ask really good questions about my congregation or my organization and how we got here. So even going back to the example that you just used, James, it's so interesting as I now have just had chances to travel and be in different parts of the country and be in cities and suburbs and in conversations with churches that are in all these different places. And it's interesting that some people have already been having this racial conversation in depth within their church, literally for decades. And they paid attention to the racial effect of their history and the denominational history, their local community's history where the church is located. They really have paid attention to that, and they've looked to use their resources and they've looked to try to help those who are vulnerable in that community, white or black. But I guess I'm thinking especially of white congregations that are paying attention to non-white people that live in their communities. And they're trying to make reparations, if that's a phrase we want to use. They're trying to use their resources to help fill that gap of inequality that was created by all these hundreds of years. James, other places haven't even, they won't even let themselves think about it yet. So they're literally still functionally in 1950 in ways. You mentioned out in the country of Illinois or I'm in Ohio and, you know, you just go out into the country. It's really different than it is if you're a church that's in a city. Columbus or Cleveland, right? Yeah. And so even to make these blanket statements about where we're at as a church right now when it comes to race, I get sketchy about that because it's not always all bad and it's definitely not as good as a lot of people want to think. It's case by case. And will you take seriously, again, I've said I wish somebody, I wish more Christians had taken seriously the critical race theorists when they first started writing in the late 80s, early 90s. I wish there had been more Christian work done to say, how can we take these lenses that they're wanting us to look through as a society and just apply them to the church? You know, and then we weren't doing that, at least not very little was being done in it. You know, Emerson and Smith wrote the book Divided by Faith in 2000, 2001, which was a decade after critical race theory. You could say that they actually were trying to look through the lens of racialization. Agreed, yeah. But even that was met with indifference by a lot of people. It was met with, you know, political retaliation. But there was a percentage of people that read and said, all right, let's do something different in our space. Let's let this not be true about us anymore on our watch. And I appreciate that. So this book that I wrote is more just a, like you said, it's not, I don't know if you said this on the podcast or we were talking about it. I think it was before, yeah. It's not trying to be controversy or trying to even take a side. It's trying to clarify how we got here, explain a little Marxism, explain a little critical theory, critical race theory, what it was, yes, how it's getting twisted and distorted and talked about now and where it goes wrong when it goes wrong. But what's left over are the questions that they wanted us to ask 40 years ago. How is it that you've never even heard of this before until it started getting talked about by Christopher Rufo on Fox News? These people have been around for 40 years writing about this stuff. And this is all going to go away. It maybe already has gone away. So what's still after critical race theory, what's left now? Are you asking the questions of your congregation or your Christian organization that they wanted us to be asking? And then frankly, black brothers and sisters have been trying to get us as white brothers and sisters and white leaders, they've been trying to get us to pay closer attention to these things for decades. And again, some have done it. Others, not so much. When I think if we wanted, because I know a lot of people are still going to be uncomfortable even thinking through critical race theory. And my hope is that our conversation is opened up a little bit of a window to say, okay, I can read it. I can read it critically. I don't have to agree with everything. I don't have to agree with the solutions. Like, there's just a way for me to understand this so that I am being curious about what these folks are thinking and experiencing. And this is an interesting way into understanding how other people who are different than me see the world. But I would also just say, if we want some biblical handles, right, to approach this issue, I would go at least two places. Number one is the Hellenistic Jews who are not being served as well as the Hebrew Jews in Acts, right? And so you have, it's pretty clear in the text that this is some sort of a language barrier or at least, you know, some sort of quasi-ethnic divide. I wouldn't say it's race, but a quasi-ethnic divide there where a group of these new Christians are being served differently at a lower level than a different group. And the apostles look at that and they say, yep, there's credence to this. We see the problem. We're going to now arrange ourselves such that this is no longer happening. I mean, I would encourage Christians to reflect there. The other place I would go is the notions of partiality that we see throughout Scripture, particularly in the book of James. Wow. You know, partiality, when we think about it, what James is talking about between not being partial to the rich, right? Don't see the rich person at the head of the table. This is the dynamic that we're really, I think, dealing with here. If we got down to the underlying sort of challenges that race poses for us in society, it is an issue of partiality. And so as we're creating these artificial boundary lines in the church, and I don't mean artificial in saying that race doesn't exist or something crazy like that. I'm just saying that we tend to, if we tend to privilege one over another within the church on arbitrary distinctions, like the Bible speaks against that in a number of different places. And so we need to be asking ourselves at the very minimum, Are we being partial to one group versus another? And if so, how do we adjust to be impartial such that the community of faith exhibits this virtue of impartiality within our congregation? Yeah, excellent. And sometimes I don't know where that partiality exists inside of me until I'm in the midst of people that I don't like or that I'm uncomfortable with, you know? And so it's really hard if I'm in a monocultural setting. Again, this is true for black folks, for Asians, for Hispanics, whatever. If you're in a monocultural element to try to have this conversation is almost too abstract. It's almost meaningless. You don't really know whether you're partial or not until you're in a setting where you're with people that make you uncomfortable. And then you realize, I'll say this for myself, I don't realize how much white supremacy I have still lingering in me. Okay, and again, this is a horrible thing to have to admit. This is the problem. Nobody wants to say this out loud about themselves. I don't mean white supremacy in the sense of just blatant, overt hatred towards people. I really don't feel that inside myself. I feel like that's been largely cleansed out of me. It's still, there's seeds that could be watered and turned into fruit if I wanted to water them. I don't. Okay. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. But the thought that white culture is somehow superior to all other cultures around the world, that's been inside me my entire life.

That's what's taught to me, it's what's been reemphasized. It's what came through the education system. It's what came through the entertainment system, okay? So what do I need to do when I see that that's in there? First of all, am I in situations where I have a chance to see where that kind of partiality lives inside of me? I need to be. I need to be among people that are different than me. You talked about that earlier. It's just good to be around people that are different so that I can grow. And part of that growing is sometimes just to see the supremacy type vibes that linger down in those dark spaces of our soul that maybe don't come out, right? It's not even stuff that we say with our friends, but it's down inside of us, and you don't see it until you're with people where you're the minority. And suddenly you realize, I've never sat under any black leadership before. In fact, I never really thought black people could lead in this kind of a way before. And that sounds terrible, but I know that I've seen that in myself, and I've seen it because I have these conversations with other people. That is more the norm than it is an outlier perspective amongst white folks. So you just called us to the Bible. James, it's so easy to read a passage like that in James and just assume, yeah, that doesn't apply to me. I'm impartial towards people. And it's like, okay, I'd like to push into that a little bit more for your own growth and for your ability to appreciate why other people can totally see your partiality. Yeah. Well, I'll say this, and then I have one more question I want to ask you as we kind of wrap up the episode. But I've learned so much just by watching and talking with my wife. So my wife is a upper level. She's a chief pharmacy officer for a hospital system in the St. Louis area. And when we talk about leadership challenges, I used to try to give her advice, and she would inevitably come back and she'd go, that's something you can do. It's probably not something I can do. And as we did that over time, it was like my understanding of the difference between being a male in leadership and being a female leadership is actually real. Okay. There are real differences there that I don't normally notice because I can just do what I want to do and be who I want to be in those settings. And I don't have to adjust to anyone in the room. She does oftentimes. She's got to approach issues differently than I would. And in part, it's just, you know, these weird perceptions of when I push back on someone or if I raise my voice or if I'm, you know, sort of, you know, pointing people to a data or trying to drive to a point, that's just good leadership. But when women do it many times, it's a whole different perception. And we start to unearth these ideas of, oh, well, she's too pushy or she's just being moody today or she's, you know, whatever. And it's like those conversations have really alerted me to this idea that my experience is not completely invalid, but it is absolutely incomplete. And that when I run on my perception alone and I'm not to go back to a conversation we had earlier, curious about what other people are experiencing, I'm ultimately going to be less effective at interacting with them, at giving them advice, at contributing to their overall life and well-being, simply because I haven't understood them first. I've assumed them first, not understood them first. That's good, James. If I could ask, is your wife white? Is she black? She's white. She's white. So if you add a different skin color into that mix. 100%. Now you've got intersectionality. Now you get what the original purpose of talking about intersectionality was exactly what you just described. That's right. That it's just going to be way more complicated for a woman, doubly complicated for a black woman, again, amongst all white men, which is also where you just wind up shaking your head. That just seems so obvious the first time that I heard it. And I know there's a whole bunch of other stuff that's been thrown in with intersectionality now. And I know what happens when you start the sexuality in and everything else. But the original documents that were written about intersectionality were about being a black woman trying to work amongst white males and the multiple levels of hurdles, to use your language, that would need to be leapt over in order to have an equal voice at the table. Unless those guys didn't work, unless they'd done the work to make sure that that wasn't the case. And most of the time that's not happening even now. When I think even some of the earlier cases that Kimberly Crenshaw cites in like Mapping the Margins or some of her early articles, she had a legal focus as well. She was demonstrating the way that you could have justice for black, but not justice for black women. I remember one about layoffs in the 70s, I think, at Ford or something like that. And, you know, you have all these black women who had been laid off because they didn't have seniority in the company. They were the lowest ones on the totem pole. But what people didn't recognize was that they hadn't allowed women to be hired, I think, until, you know, like five years before or something like that. Yeah. So, of course, they were the they didn't have any seniority. They weren't being hired previously. But then the court had to rule, was there a double victim status because the company wasn't being prejudiced against blacks because they hadn't laid off all these black men who'd been working there longer, just the black women. They were basically saying you can't have a dual aggrieved status. Now, I'm doing that from memory. I think that's the right. That's pretty good. OK. But I mean, I think that, you know, you just sit back and you think about that and you're like, wow, that's kind of messed up. It really is kind of messed up. And there's no way. To just sit there and go, you know, well, on a legal basis, I suppose that makes sense. I don't know that making sense makes it better. That's right. You know, it's and some would say, I mean, you would call that unjust. It's an injustice that the system allowed it to get to that point. And now if you don't make any kind of compensation for that, if there's not an intervention to change that, then that injustice, that unjust system will continue to operate the way it operates. Right. So I think it's a great question if people are brave enough within the church to ask themselves, in what way has our history, I think I've already said this, the way we hire, the way we choose what ministries we support, the way we preach through the Bible and which texts we select or don't select, the way we, what social issues do we care about and why? Right. All that is, all that has a racial component to it. All of that has a racial history to it. And if we just summarily dismiss that right away or call it CRT or call it something, this is evil, this is Marxism, that's even worse. Just call it Marxism. And then we don't have to talk about it anymore. The reason why I wrote the book is to say, can we, Christian, can we slow down? Can we slow down and just think about even, James, this has been great, this hour that we've talked about all these things. Let's just slow down and from a secure place anchored in Christ, let's look at what's happened socially in our space, wherever it is we find ourselves living, whatever our community looks like. And let's do this kind of assessment and let's have these conversations. And before the Lord, let's ask, does anything need to change? Is there still a dividing wall that exists between us and other groups of people? We all want to just assume and clap and say the dividing wall has been torn down. Well, it's been torn down between us and God through the person of Christ. And it should be torn down between us and people. We're not judging one another on the basis of ethnicity or gender or these things, right? Paul says that. That's not how we're dealing with people anymore. That's right. Before the Lord, we're not. And yet in our day-to-day living, oh, we've got a great history of doing that very thing. We have totally lived on the basis of skin color and ethnicity and gender and sexuality. And we've separated on the basis of these things. So where there's still a dividing wall, let's do the work to tear it down. If our dividing wall has been torn down, we can celebrate that and try to do more outreach and bring more people into that if we've found a way to live well with each other across racial lines and gender lines. And I just hope more people will be willing to do that work again and not just dismiss this thing called critical race theory because we just don't really want to deal with it. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we could go for another hour on this, man. I mean, this has been a great conversation. And so I really appreciate you being here. And for all the listeners, what I would just say is I would really recommend getting Ed's book, Untangling Critical Race Theory. It's from IVP. He does an excellent job of doing just what he said he wanted to do. Let's clarify some of these issues. Let's understand what they are. Let's try to dig into them, not necessarily accepting everything, but understanding them such that we can take a breath and from a place, you know, we we should be grateful that we live in a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

Right, Hebrews 12, 28, right. We're in no danger here. And so we can entertain some of these ideas and understand where other people are coming from, and hopefully build the body of Christ in a way that is compelling and interesting and demonstrates the difference that Christ makes in our world. And I think, Ed, you've done a fantastic job with the book, so I really recommend Untangling Critical Race Theory to all the listeners. If you're at all interested in this issue, if your church is struggling with it, I think this is a fascinating and really important work that Ed's put together here, so I'd recommend it wholeheartedly. Thank you. I appreciate that endorsement, and I've enjoyed this hour. Thanks, man. Yeah, me too. Hey, we will catch you all on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everybody. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Has fear stolen your peace? I'm Jennifer Slattery, lead host of the Faith Over Fear podcast, helping you fight your fears and grow your faith. Subscribe at lifeaudio.com.