I’m a bi-vocational pastor who works in the real world. In my own small way, I am fighting against the anti-racism madness sweeping our society. If you are tempted to believe I am one of those, “ain’t got no racism in there here country!” evangelicals who worship President Trump and have the GOP party platform sown into my bible between Malachi and Matthew, I direct you to my comments on racism and Jim Crow, and about the dangers of Christian nationalism.

Corporate and government human resources (“HR”) offices are prime movers behind the new religion of so-called anti-racism or critical race theory (“CRT”). This is a movement that’s captured the hearts and minds of the academy and the social science departments of colleges and universities. It may capture you, too. Here’s how it works:

1. Employer watches news and becomes worried.
2. Employer decides it must be able to say it “did something” to combat racism.
3. Employer turns to HR for answers. “Do some training, or something …”
4. HR departments become desperate, then Google (or, perhaps, Bing) “diversity” and “racism training,” and forward random YouTube videos to employees to watch; sometimes watching is mandatory. Little attempt to vet content to weigh ideology and perspective of the video.
5. HR also finds huckster trainers, many of whom drank from the same well as the YouTube videos. Huckster trainers have developed cottage industry peddling a bastardized and popular form of critical race theory from “hot” authors like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi.
6. Employer can now say it “did something.”
7. More employees are indoctrinated into a hot new religion many don’t like, don’t accept, and find extraordinarily offensive.
8. Nobody says anything. The real problem goes unresolved in favor of a new religion that teaches people to hate themselves, their society, and live in perpetual outrage

I speak from experience. I am a government employee; a manager at a State agency. Just last month, our HR forwarded a video to every manager and suggested we watch it and share with our subordinates. The video was everything I expected; an earnest academic telling everyone they’re racists because they aren’t black. Our society is soaked in racism, the trainer assured me. It impacts us all. We’re so racist, we don’t even know we’re racist.

I see.

Well, I replied to the email and sent a response to every single manager and Deputy Commissioner in the entire agency. I did it because I will not be intimidated by this evil worldview. Here is what I wrote:

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It’s unclear where the line is between indoctrination and education, here. When employees are encouraged to watch a video whose thesis is that Americans (implicitly, white Americans) are all unconscious racists with associated unconscious bias, then it makes folks raise an eyebrow or two. Add to it, Professor Eberhardt’s faculty profile from Stanford University reveals she has a very particular thesis to push:

Through interdisciplinary collaborations and a wide ranging array of methods—from laboratory studies to novel field experiments—Eberhardt has revealed the startling, and often dispiriting, extent to which racial imagery and judgments suffuse our culture and society, and in particular shape actions and outcomes within the domain of criminal justice.

This thesis plays out in her comments in the video:

• 1:37: “We are living with such severe racial stratification that even a five-year-old can tell us what’s supposed to happen next, even with no evildoer, even with no explicit hatred. This association between blackness and crime made its way into the mind of my five-year-old. It makes its way into all of our children, into all of us. Our minds are shaped by the racial disparities we see out in the world and the narratives that help us to make sense of the disparities we see …”
• 13:06: “We know that the brain is wired for bias, and one way to interrupt that bias is to pause and to reflect on the evidence of our assumptions.”

Some people are racists. I’ve met people like that. However, Professor Eberhardt believes the very nature of American society is so “suffuse[d]” with racism that it is in “all of us,” even unconsciously. That’s a rather sweeping statement about a country that has had:

1. an African-American President who was elected twice, winning the popular vote each time,
2. an African-American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later Secretary of State, and
3. has appointed two African-Americans to the Supreme Court, one of whom was Thurgood Marshall; a key architect and leader of the NAACPs successful strategy to put a stake into the heart of the Jim Crow laws.

I note that Professor Eberhardt, an African-American herself, holds an earned PhD from Harvard, is a former faculty member at Yale, and now teaches at Stanford. She has done well for herself; and good for her.

However, Professor Eberhardt impugns the integrity of every American (and every agency employee) of any ethnicity or creed, because she claims we’re all unconsciously racist. This is beyond the pale.

I look forward to future recommendations on the important issue of race relations. I can only hope they do not follow the same theme of “if you’re white, then you’re an unconscious racist and I can help you change.” This is a critical topic, as the [agency head’s name] recent communications have made clear. Perhaps it would be best to not begin by unwittingly impugning the hearts and minds of co-workers because of … their white skin color.

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I got away with this for at least three reasons:

1. I have a good reputation at my agency as a calm, intelligent, serious person. At least … I think I do!
2. The email was polite, factual, and acknowledged that racism is an issue in American society.
3. Every manager and Deputy Commissioner at the agency knows I’m an evangelical Baptist pastor.

Christians must not be turtles, hiding in their shells. We shouldn’t be scared kittens, peeking out from under the couch. We can have a voice. We must have a voice. Don’t be driven from the public square.

NOTE: on 04 September 2020, after I published this article, President Trump directed federal agencies to “cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions.” This is likely an attempt to curry favor with his base of support. Still, it is a welcome development.

This article is a short preface to my forthcoming series about critical race theory (“CRT”). This series will offer some reflections about CRT based on a chapter by chapter analysis of this primer written by CRT advocates.

But, first, I offer this observation. CRT can be a religion.

People are very, very religious. Don’t let secularism fool you. It’s a religion, too. Everybody has a religion. You may have seen statistics that say there is a rise in people who claim no religious affiliation. Those statistics are misleading. Religion is alive and well. It’s just a different kind of religion that’s thriving. The religious economy has changed, but it’s still kicking.

Why do I say CRT can be a religion? Why do I say there are lots of religions floating around in the petri dish that is the secular West? Why do I believe that even Communism, as articulated by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, is a religion?

Well, it begins by explaining what religion is. For that, I offer you the words of two sociologists and a well-respected theologian:

1. Kerry Ferris and Jill Stein (The Real World: An Introduction to Sociology, 6th ed. [New York: W.W. Norton, 2018], 313) explain that religion is “any institutionalized system of shared beliefs and rituals that identify a relationship between the sacred and the profane.”
2. Rodney Stark (Sociology, 10th ed. [Belmont: Wadsworth, 2007], 388-389) defines religion as “any socially organized pattern of beliefs and practices concerning ultimate meaning that assumes the existence of the supernatural.”

Millard Erickson, a Christian theologian, offers some complementary thoughts. Religion, he explains, is:

belief or doctrine, feeling or attitudes, and a way of life or manner of behaving. Christianity fits all these criteria of religion. It is a way of life, a kind of behavior, a style of living. And it is this not in the sense of merely isolated individual experience, but in giving birth to social groups. Christianity also involves certain feelings, such as dependence, love, and fulfillment. And Christianity most certainly involves a set of teachings, a way of viewing reality and oneself, and a perspective from which all of experience makes sense.

Christian Theology, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013), 6. Emphasis added.

These are all very helpful; particularly Erickson’s insistence on religion as a prism to understand reality. Here’s what we learn from these definitions about religion:

1. An organized system
2. with beliefs, rituals and practices
3. that explains the relationship between the sacred and the ordinary,
4. provides the basis for ultimate meaning and purpose,
5. acts as a prism to interpret and explain reality,
6. and identifies a particular deity or ideology as a Sacred object of worship.

You’ll notice I adapted Stark’s insistence on the supernatural (which, for him, is key to religion [Sociology, 389]; contra. Ferris and Stein) in criteria #6. I think this is a very good definition that anybody can understand.

Now, perhaps you can see why many flavors of religion are alive and well. CRT can be one such religion, but that’s the sterile name for it. The populist version of this CRT religion is anti-racism which, ironically, can be racist to its core. It’s particularly alive in the streets of our cities, in our universities, amongst our politicians and in our local, state and Federal governments.

Writing for National Review (06 July 2020), Kyle Smith penned an article titled “The White-Guilt Cult” that accurately summarizes the religious nature of the worst elements of this new McCarthyism that has captured the West. Here’s some teasers:

Anti-racism is the most critical element of a broader new Woke Orthodoxy whose other elements include environmental apocalypticism, feminism, and a severing of sexual identity from genetic indicators. Settling on a term for the new religion will take some time. Wesley Yang’s suggestion (seconded by Ross Douthat) of “the Successor Ideology” is clunky, anodyne, and a bit euphemistic given the righteous, roiling fervor and unnerving credulousness that define the cult. As Dmitri Solzhenitsyn writes in National Review Online, a YouTube prankster named “Smooth Sanchez” who walks the streets of New York demanding that white people kneel before him and declare their privilege receives surprising compliance, even as he signals his charlatanry by referring to George Floyd as “George Foreman.” 

Ben Shapiro notes astutely that the new woke religion rushes in to fill a “God-shaped hole” in secular hearts. Devotees immerse themselves in the sacred texts of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi (né Ibram Henry Rogers of Queens), books designed to make white wokesters writhe with a kind of ecstatic anguish. Indoctrination in early childhood is taken up as a parental duty (Kendi’s new board book for toddlers, Antiracist Baby, is a hot seller), parishioners engage in ritualistic incantation of sacred phrases (“Hands up, don’t shoot,” “I can’t breathe”), and there are mass displays of penitential self-abasement. All over the country, guilty white crowds have gathered to reenact the circumstances of George Floyd’s horrifying death. Scores, even hundreds, of parishioners in the new faith prostrate themselves on the ground, hands behind their back, repeating “Mama” and “I can’t breathe.” Sometimes police officers joined these displays, kneeling or prostrating themselves for the sanctified period of time: eight minutes, 46 seconds. Floyd’s death is a kind of new Crucifixion, his final words the new “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

An objective observer of the madness of 2020 would likely concede the quasi-religious overtones of this movement, whatever one thinks of its merits. The National Museum of African American History and Culture somehow managed to summarize the ideological content, the divine revelation, of this new anti-racism religion in its unfortunate article entitled “Whiteness.” This racist screed culminated in a truly horrifying PDF chart which purports to showcase systemic white racism baked into our culture:

This is an ideology; a religion. It’s a racist and warped prism that interprets reality. It’s been popularized most recently and explicitly in corporate boardrooms and in government human resources offices by Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram Kendi’s How to be an Anti-racist.

I’ll tackle the first chapter of the CRT primer in the next article. For now, it’s enough to understand that religious zealots are still with us. Their religion is just a bit different, that’s all. And, like all zealots, they sully the moderates who have legitimate points to make.