If your approach to interpreting the world leads you to call someone a racist who isn’t one, if it leads you to disparage the faith of fellow Christians simply on the basis of their skin color, or if it allows you to feel justified in insinuating that a policeman is akin to James Earl Ray before you have access to the facts of the case, then you are not behaving in a manner consistent with biblical ethics

In a detailed reflection at Mere Orthodoxy, William Murrell offers a trenchant criticism of my article “Evangelicals and Race Theory” (February). He makes an intriguing suggestion: Much of the debate over critical race theory derives from different understandings of what CRT is. While some see it primarily as a method (a mere academic activity), many of its critics see it as a metanarrative (a totalizing worldview), and still others as a mood (an affective response to perceived systemic injustice). A failure to distinguish among these three different expressions of CRT has led to the adoption of faulty reading strategies and misunderstandings.

Murrell suggests that this failure to distinguish has caused me to misread K. Edward Copeland’s “Why I Hate August.” In this article, Copeland made no moral distinction between the lynching of Emmett Till, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the police shooting of Jacob Blake; in “Evangelicals and Race Theory,” I pointed out that he made this moral equivalency without sufficient facts about the police shooting. Murrell argues that I was seeking CRT as metanarrative here and thus failed to recognize Copeland’s use of CRT as mood. Murrell compares the affective register of Copeland’s article to that of Psalm 137, with its terrifying final verse calling for the slaughter of Israel’s enemies. He believes the moral comparison of the three killings is justified by the article’s “mood,” much as the sweeping judgments of the imprecatory psalms are justified by their mood.

I am not convinced that a clear distinction among metanarrative, method, and mood can be coherently maintained anywhere, but even if it can be, it is not helpful for reading the Psalter. The psalms are the songs of the biblical covenant people. They are therefore consciously rooted in a metanarrative (the covenant with Abraham) and in a specific method (meditation on the law of God). This is made clear by the first two verses of Psalm 1:

Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.

These points are reinforced again and again throughout the subsequent 149 psalms. The moods the psalms reflect, from joy to lament, cannot be disconnected from the metanarrative of Israel or the method of piety they evince. Even Psalm 88, the most unremitting raw scream of pain that the Psalter contains, begins with the covenant name of God. Despair in its darkest form is still to be set within the grand metanarrative of God’s dealings with his people:

O LORD, God of my salvation,
I cry out day and night before you.
Let my prayer come before you;
incline your ear to my cry!

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