That is the evil of racism, and it is evil no matter who practices it. The injustice of racism must be addressed, but you cannot fight injustice with injustice. Bigotry by any other name is still bigotry. It is still evil. It is still sin. And no Christian should participate in it, condone it, or champion organizations that do.

The newspaper headline read, “Critical Race Theory Coming to a School Near You?” The paper was The Conejo Guardian,[1] the monthly publication of Conejo Valley—the quiet, diminutive basin where I make my home in Southern California, just beyond the teeth of the LA sprawl.

The article was a warning.

Critical race theory (CRT) is coming to a school near you—to your high schools, to your grade schools, even to your elementary schools (the universities have already been thick with CRT for years).

Critical race theory is coming to your public schools, and to your private schools,[2] and has even stolen into some of your Christian schools and churches.[3] And it’s coming to your workplace, too (if it hasn’t already), in the form of “inclusion” or “diversity” training.[4] And, generally, it’s not optional—in school or on the job.

The indoctrination rapidly penetrating all levels of society is controversial, contentious, and divisive—aggressively pitting one group of people against another. It’s also thoroughly political, with the current federal government championing CRT—and legislatively backing it—lock, stock, and barrel.[5]

Regarding the aggressive education efforts in California (and in other parts of the country where CRT is penetrating the educational system), Anna Mussmann warns in The Federalist:

Parents need to understand that behind the waterfall of vocabulary is a militant ideology. When kids are taught to subject all of life to “critical consciousness” in order to find the “oppressor” and the “oppressed” everywhere and at all times, they are taught that the only ultimate meaning in life is power.[6]

As with other efforts with a totalitarian impulse, disagreement is not welcome. Dissenters are frequently treated with disrespect, harassed, and bullied:

Critical race theorists want students to accept the assumption that anyone who fails to swallow these rules wholeheartedly is a tool of oppression. Ultimately, it’s a highly effective way of preventing dialogue and pitting students against students.[7]

The attraction of CRT for people of conscience is its emphasis on “social justice” as an answer to racism. But CRT isn’t your parents’ (or your grandparents’) civil rights movement.

Not MLK’s Civil Rights

I was a senior in high school when Martin Luther King was murdered. It’s a vivid memory for me, as are the civil rights efforts of that time. The movement was a flashpoint for change in a long, ugly, brutal chapter in the American experiment, a test to see if the noble ideals of the Founding Fathers and of the Declaration of Independence would be enjoyed, finally, by all Americans.

That is how Martin Luther King understood civil rights, since he referred to those documents frequently. As a preacher from a long line of preachers, he also based his stand on Scripture. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he cited the Bible liberally.

In King’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” address delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, he envisioned a nation where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

This famous line reflected a commonsense, liberal (in the best sense), and biblical ethical principle. The most important element uniting every human being—more significant than any differences that divide us—has nothing to do with any incidental physical characteristic. What ought to unite us is our shared and noble humanity.

“Now is the time,” King said, “to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.” Martin Luther King based his dream—his vision of a just America for every human being—on the reality that we were all brothers fashioned in the image of God.

Frederick Douglass, the eminent 19th-century black abolitionist, wrote these words to his former slave master in September 1848:

I entertain no malice towards you personally. There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine, and there is nothing in my house which you might need for your comfort, which I would not readily grant. Indeed, I should esteem it a privilege, to set you an example as to how mankind ought to treat each other. I am your fellow man, but not your slave.[8]

Note Douglass’s moral kinship with King. A licensed preacher, Douglass understood that the theological “solid rock” of any appeal to racial justice was that we are each other’s “fellow man,” equally precious in God’s eyes. We are also, I will add, all equally broken at the foot of the cross.

Keep those two things in mind—our universal intrinsic value as one race of human brothers and our universal moral guilt—as we explore the hazardous world of CRT. They are central to everything we need to know when dealing biblically not only with racism, but with all forms of human oppression. They trade on the notion that genuine justice is always grounded in truth, not in power.[9]

King’s principal thrust during the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s was undoing segregation—whether on buses (the bus boycotts and the “Freedom Riders”), at lunch counters (Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins), in public schools (Little Rock Central High School), and in higher education (the University of Mississippi).

Those days are over.

Today’s fight against racism lacks King’s noble intention to judge people by their character. In fact, rather than de-racializing our country, the current effort is to re-racialize it. Segregation is everywhere now—in graduations, in classrooms, in clubs, in adoptions—systematically endorsed and promoted by the new anti-racism movement.

There’s one significant difference, though. People of color are not the ones disqualified, disenfranchised, or demonized now. Rather, the ones currently disqualified, disenfranchised, and demonized by CRT advocates are white people. And males. And “heterosexual-normative” people. And “cisgender-normative” people.[10] And, of course, Christians.[11]

The consequences are already tragic. At the moment, racial tensions are the highest they’ve been in the 21st century and continue to intensify.

Ask yourself this question. Regardless of your race, or color, or national or ethnic origin, do you feel more comfortable amidst the ethnic diversity of your community now as a result of the events of the last 15 months, or do you feel less comfortable? The trend does not bode well for our communities.

What is going on?

Word Games

Some sage once observed, “When words lose their meanings, people lose their lives.” Proverbs instructs us, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”[12] In short, words matter.

In 1984, George Orwell’s 1949 classic (and oddly prescient) dystopian vision of future totalitarianism, the manipulation of language became a powerful tool of distortion and deception. Orwell called it “Newspeak” and “doublethink”—deceptive vocabulary that citizens of Oceania were socialized by peer pressure to adopt. Some refer to it as “doublespeak”—clever efforts to purposefully distort, obscure, and euphemize ideas or behaviors, masking their otherwise objectionable, unappealing, or even vile qualities. Orwell’s Animal Farm slogan “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” is a case in point.

In both works, Orwell was lampooning Soviet totalitarianism. Rod Dreher reminds us of “the Marxist habit of falsifying language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning.”[13]

The Third Reich did it, too. Segments of the population who were “impaired” were described in German as “lebensunwertes leben,”[14] literally “life unworthy of life.” Thoroughly cleansing the European continent of Jews was called the “Final Solution.”

There is a lesson here for us that we have not learned well, especially the younger adults in our communities: Beware deceptive political euphemisms.

In its current course towards totalitarianism, the Left has shown itself a master at manipulating language. “Antifa,” for example, despite its own fascistic behavior, stands for “anti-fascist.” Who could argue with that? The noble name “Black Lives Matter” makes the organization virtually unassailable regardless of its views. “Social justice” is, well, justice, isn’t it?

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