I learned what I have long suspected, that Twitter is not entirely representative of Christianity—left or right, white or black.  Perhaps the future lies with that gracious but understandably more timid group stepping forward and gently but firmly taking over the reins of the discussion from today’s loudest voices.

Some years ago, I took a Nazirite vow never to write on race in America.  Yet, persuaded by the editorial team at First Things, I broke that vow.  Now it is time to offer a brief reflection on some of the responses.

There were the predictable Twitter storms with the traditional aspersions cast on my moral character, pedagogical abilities, and intellectual competence. D.C. Schindler for the win! But no real harm was done.  My wife is an absolute saint: she still loves me, however evil, stupid and, ahem, ‘demonic’ I may be.

In a now-removed tweet, one person in the PCA stated that he was rebuked by his church’s associate pastor for linking to the article. It later apparently emerged that the associate pastor had not even read it.

An African American pastor, Thabiti Anyabwile, advised his Twitter followers to ignore my article as a colonialist power play and distraction.  He based his claim on the fact that I had started with a genealogy of critical theory which led back to Europe and the Frankfurt School.  My point in doing that was not to colonize anyone, nor to imply guilt by association or by some application of the genetic fallacy. It was to do what intellectual historians do: use the history of ideas to see what kind of issues certain concepts have generated in the past in order better to assess what questions to ask in the present, thereby promoting constructive discussion.  And given that one prominent Christian activist has referred publicly to Angela Davis—in my view Herbert Marcuse’s most brilliant and influential student—as an inspirational example of hope, I can surely be forgiven for thinking that the Frankfurt School may have some relevance to contemporary approaches to race in the American Christian world.

Both of these examples would suggest that at least some of those concerned with race and the American church consider their approach to be self-certifying, as I claim in my article.

A number of individuals contacted me to say that I had misrepresented Christianity Today and other organizations by incorrectly claiming that they had not published critical voices on the CRT issue.  There are indeed a number of historical pieces at blogs connected to CT and elsewhere on the topic of CRT.  But 2020 was a very long year in the matter of race and politics and my article was specifically talking about claims made in the wake of the BLM protests of last summer.  Given that, my point was correct (at least at the time my article went to press in December). I also meant (though perhaps could have expressed this more clearly) responses aimed specifically at those articles I cited which had appeared on those evangelical sites. Frankly, there needs to be direct criticism – polite and gracious, as becomes Christians, but still direct — of particular people on those same sites. Generic commentary on the incompatibility of CRT with Christianity lacks real pungency.

Read More