As I worked my way through Tisby’s portrayal of the truculence and degradation of chattel slavery, I was struck by a singular irony: that Christians who embrace the tenets of CRT overwhelmingly support a sin even more heinous than slavery.  Not a sin committed hundreds of years ago by people we have never met, and not a perceived microaggression, but an outrageous sin committed right now and celebrated by people we can name.  That sin is abortion; the slaughter of innocent human persons. 

On a pilgrimage toward empathy, I’ve recently dedicated myself to reading a selection of the more popular works by the au courant advocates of Critical Race Theory (CRT), viz., Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, and Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise.  Among this crop, Tisby’s book is distinguished in that, while DiAngelo aims to divine the psychology of the Oppressor, and Kendi seeks to foment disruption of hegemonic “Whiteness,” The Color of Compromise recounts the sordid and sometimes gruesome history of the (largely White and Protestant) American Church’s complicity in Black oppression.  The chronicle of brutality and indifference by putative Christians toward the humanity of others, many of whom professed the same faith as their tormentors, is a harrowing and shameful testimony of man’s inhumanity to man, but a salutary exercise nonetheless.  Confronting and confessing this ugly truth provides a window into the soul of every human being.  The enduring threnody of the Black Church supplies a haunting soundtrack to the current racial tensions that have riven the peace and unity of Christ’s Body.

There can be no denying that there is an overdue reckoning for the past failures of the American Church and a need to acknowledge the many sins of commission and omission perpetrated against those of a darker pigmentation; in particular, the grievous wrong of slavery.  And it cannot be denied that many evangelical heroes of the faith were less than stalwart in opposing first, the institution of slavery, then Jim Crow laws, and later the “separate but equal” policies that served to continually remind “colored folk” that their place was at the back of the bus.  And it is nearly inconceivable that some of these Christian notables were slave owners, purblind to the absurdity of worshiping the living God while holding title to His image bearers as property.  We must confess that too often, Christian leaders were men of theological orthodoxy and practical heresy.  We cannot offer justification or excuses for their sin, for there could be none.  These were men with feet of clay, as are we all.  “If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” (Psa 130:3).

But as I worked my way through Tisby’s portrayal of the truculence and degradation of chattel slavery, I was struck by a singular irony: that Christians who embrace the tenets of CRT overwhelmingly support a sin even more heinous than slavery.  Not a sin committed hundreds of years ago by people we have never met, and not a perceived microaggression, but an outrageous sin committed right now and celebrated by people we can name.  That sin is abortion; the slaughter of innocent human persons.  This separation of humanity from personhood for the sake of convenience had its origin in the fiendish eugenic desire to dispense with “human weeds.”  And despite the fact that an outsized proportion of those murdered in the womb are BIPOC, the silence from the Woke Church is simply deafening.  We listen in vain for the outcry on behalf of the most oppressed and powerless among us from those who champion “social justice” and vehemently decry exploitation of the vulnerable and violence against the marginalized.  This is a blind spot so great that it eclipses even that of our forebears in the American Church, and is rendered all the more wretched by the political expediency that propels it.

Predictably, the objections, rationalizations, and excuses for the inexcusable come fast and furious: “Reproductive rights are human rights!”  “A product of conception isn’t a baby!”  “The Bible doesn’t condemn abortion!”

Those who aided and abetted the inexcusable sin of slavery in their day also had rationalizations at the ready: “The states must remain united!”  “Outlaw slavery, and the economy will fail!”  “The Bible teaches that the African is inferior!”

Are the pretexts proffered today for abortion any better than those tendered yesterday for slavery?  Out of wickedness and convenience, Blacks were devalued and dehumanized then, and babies are devalued and dehumanized now.

This observation is in no way meant to attenuate the unmitigated evil that was slavery.  The weight of the evidence convicting the connivance of the American Church of racial oppression is crushing and irrefutable.  The alarm has been sounded, and we must be roused from our ecclesiastical slumber to name and condemn past transgressions.  But this is not “whataboutism” or a fallacious Tu Quoque.  This is a plea for humility.  Christians, of all people, should be the most circumspect in indicting their brethren, whether for historical or contemporary sins.

All who name the Name of Jesus and confess His Lordship over their lives—woke and evangelical—must heed the Savior’s words in this regard: “Judge not, that you be not judged.  For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.  Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”  (Matt 7:1-3).

I can’t repent on behalf of Christians who lived generations before me.  I can’t repent for people I didn’t know and for things I didn’t do, simply because those sinners happened to share the color of my skin.  I reject group identity.  But I can repent for my complacency and callousness toward the struggle of my Black brothers and sisters, and for my reticence in the cause of exposing and rooting out real racism today wherever it exists, in the Church and in society.  And I will commit to becoming an “upstander” for my Black brethren in the Church to foster understanding, community, and trust.  The people of God are called to rejoice together in the fact that the cross-work of Christ reconciles us first to God but also to one another, creating peace and thereby killing the hostility (cf. Eph 2:14-16).

And so I am impelled to press the matter with those who purport to couple a biblical faith with CRT:  abortion is a present-day sin in which your complicity is manifest.  Will you repent?  Will you commit to coming alongside your evangelical brethren—of every tribe, tongue, and nation—to root out the scourge of abortion and disrupt the Culture of Death, in the Church and in society?

What more monstrous iniquity could sully the witness of the American Church than its support for slavery and abortion?  What more opportune time than the present for the American Church to rise up in righteous opposition to those twin spawns of hell?  What more cogent spectacle could there be than an alliance of Christians, too often separated by politics, united in common cause for the love of God and our neighbors?

Knox Farrell is a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in America living in Texas.