Is "Critical Race Theory" Biblical? No.

all right everybody this has been something that i have to apologize for not having talked about more in the past as i realized that i'm coming i'm coming to it late and and in all honesty this this issue is pretty complicated and i really wanted help working through it myself and helping you guys work through it so i've brought on a special guest neil shenvy thank you so much for joining me to talk about critical race theory justice injustice racism all these issues and especially and here's the heart being biblical okay this isn't a talking point this is a commitment that you guys know across my channel this is all that i'm about is i want to think biblically about everything and so we need to think biblically about this stuff because in my view the things that are going on in our culture dealing with racism and injustice they're leveraging like a real serious problem a genuine problem a problem we have to we have to look at honestly we if we deny it we just have a plank in our eye but i think it's a distorted understanding of the problem and solutions in our in our uh in our culture in our policies like our laws but but even more harmful in our the way we interact with each other as humans the solutions are actually causing more problems in my opinion so uh neil shame is going to help us break it down and thank you so much for joining us neil you could tell us just a little bit about yourself before we jump into this stuff sure thank you mike for inviting me i grew up in delaware and i have a wonderful family wonderful parents but i was not raised in a christian home i became a christian in graduate school while doing my phd in theoretical chemistry and that's where i got interested in apologetics which really became a passion of mine as a postdoc so i went to my wife and i went to yale where she did her md and then we moved to durham north carolina where we currently reside and i quit my job as a theoretical chemist at duke university about six years ago maybe seven years ago now to homeschool our four kids so that's what i do currently in addition to doing a lot of reading on these topics yes and um okay we're going to launch right into content and we'll learn more about you and why you're obsessed with this issue and i'm glad you are because we need some people that are obsessed with it that think clearly about it and can break it down with commitment to scripture more so than a political party um so first off let's start with this before we talk about solutions to a problem and how we think that these solutions have issues we should talk about the problem itself and that is the issue of racism and justice um start off with this if you would neil how bad is the historical problem of injustice in the u.s and for my viewers like if you're inclined to reject critical race theory if you're inclined to say like you know being woke is a joke that kind of thing we should start here before we go there and if you would please help us out with that sure so the history of race in the united states is pretty appalling so first of all what is race and race is as we currently understand it today is a social construct it's not a biological reality now what do i mean by that well think about how we conceptualize race we talk about someone being black or white or asian well those are not biblical categories the bible recognizes ethnicity you know that your your ancestry your language your culture but it doesn't recognize race because it erases in the modern sense like black or white or asian is just this grouping that we've developed right my favorite illustration of this would be we call people asian and you know i'm half indian i've been to visit my relatives in india and i'm like you know asia is actually a pretty large place so to call this whole yeah this whole set of people asians is just when you think about it for a second you're like that's ridiculous i mean these were huge nations with very different cultures that were often at war with each other and yet to us they're asians or say black so it turns out that in the us today the average african-american person uh is 80 african ancestry but 20 european ancestry due to unfortunately of rape that went on during slavery and so uh because of that the average black person has 20 percent quote-unquote european genes well that means that if a black man marries a white woman and they have kids if the kids are dark-skinned enough we will race them as black right well oh they're black they're a black kid right but the funny thing is that quote-unquote black child will have a majority of the european dna so it just shows you how it's a that race is a social contract it's a social category so in that sense it's imaginary but it's real in the sense that it has a real salience we notice it so in the same way that um say a college student what is a college student that's a social category it's a social construct right clearly it's not like something that changes about you your ontology because you're a college student but it's a category that's real to determine whether or not you can deduct certain things on your taxes right it'll depend if you if you dress a certain way as a college student is supposed to address people will notice oh he's a college student so or another example would be money money is a social construct little bits of green paper are just bits of green paper and yet they have tremendous real significance if i hand someone a little bit of paper they will give me a car so to say race as a social construct is not to say that it is uh irrelevant it is very much still relevant now second thing to realize is that race is not an innocent social construct so race was constructed in the modern sense around the 17th century in the u.s in 18th century in order to justify white racial dominance they wanted to justify shadow slavery so they created a hierarchy with white europeans whites on the top and native americans maybe in the middle and then blacks on the bottom as an inferior race and in fact 19th century scientists toyed with the idea of what's called polygenesis they actually rejected the bible's teaching that there was one human pair adam and eve that gave rise to all human beings they said no there's no way that the black race and the white race could share a common ancestor they must have come from different first pairs that was an idea that jefferson toyed with right thomas jefferson yeah so the the one and so the point is when we developed race it was not this just happened stands that people happened to group these people in certain ways they intentionally created a hierarchy that explained why whites were allowed to or that blacks were allowed to be enslaved um so what you're saying is there's like there's like world view issues related to human nature that are actually giving rise and justification to the mistreatment and injustice of individuals in the culture and right and again and we need to understand the actual real injustice that's happened in the past that's going to help us also understand why things like critical race theory some of the some of the policy decisions but even more so the way we view each other just in practical life that this is currently still being affected in ways that are it's like in in my view injustice as a solution to injustice instead of like a biblical view of things so um yeah so again back to the history of it all like how bad was this in the past for those who maybe don't realize it because most a lot of us realize it but i've actually talked to people who just they don't they don't get it yeah i mean so first of all what we had in the u.s u.s slavery chattel slavery was a wildly wicked and evil i mean we talked i mean we kind of realized that slavery was was evil but i don't think we appreciate how evil it it was and it is so remember recall that u.s slavery began through kidnapping blacks were kidnapped from africa ripped away from their families their their relatives their culture transported in chains aboard ships where i think a third of them died you know ancient brought to this new world taken away from again all their culture and then were put into perpetual bondage for life with their children being perpetually enslaved also so remember the bible says that man stealing it says that's the word that's used in i think titus uh i think it's 1 8 but man stealing was uh it's called antithetical to the gospel so we have an entire system with millions of blacks that is predicated on this anti-gospel action that it was k that was lasted for 200 years more than 200 years so that was horrific and christians uh you know some of them defended slavery and others rejected it and said and said look this is from the earliest days essentially you're like this is not compatible with the gospel you know this is not treating my neighbor as myself and it's based on manzil and kidnapping and and it was brutal so uh i would say even even under old because this where people would go to justify slavery was old testament law right but even under the old testament law this the people involved involved at all in the slave trade whether they were the ones kidnapping people selling them or those who were buying them and then enslaving that keeping them enslaved they would all get the death penalty under the old testament law you you know for kidnapping that the penalty was death if um there's all these rules that prevent the kind of thing that happened from happening even in old testament law uh i did my own studies on the topic of slavery in the old testament and it was just shocking that people don't realize yeah they would be killed after the old testament law and it would it would preserve um it would it would keep people back from that that sort of race-based uh slavery yeah yeah so that was that i think we realized slavery was horrific and bad and then but then we said well that then then there was emancipation and then there were so so that so that made things better but immediately after it met so with fulfill during before emancipation before the civil war in fact you had the supreme court decisions like dred scott um saying okay uh slaves are slaves and and have no right to freedom even if they're uh they're brought to a free state now why is that so their reasoning was this this is how they how they justified saying dred scott was still a slave despite being living in i think a free territory and a free state for a little while and he's still a slave why and their decision was because the black man has no rights which the white man is bound to accept or retro respect sorry so their decision was that was their that was the basis for their decision so that we have this wildly wicked reasoning that is enshrined in law and justified by a supreme court decision so thank god slavery was ended legally after the civil war but then after that after reconstruction and the period that's called redemption you have it which with the reconstruction was uh the people trying to the north trying to um incorporate slaves back into society and to to better their lot and but then after that period there's a lot of politics going back and forth but after that period eventually the north pulled out and the south tried under what appeared called redemption where they tried to basically go back in them some sense to the old system and they began passing laws called black codes that would criminalize all kinds of behavior so really things like loitering you know would be criminalized that blacks who had been slaves could under this very flimsy pretext be charged with a crime be sent to jail and then through a program called convict leasing they would be leased out to people there were often former plantation owners so they would to to work for free right now what about what year was this that this was going on oh gosh let's see the black codes oh i made this wrong uh so it's the eight it's the late 1800s um i think the first black code don't quote me on this please but maybe 1877. i know we will skewer you if you could i should have had my notes in front of me but the the black codes i believe began in 1877 okay um and then and that would then shade into and then and then um that would shade into jim crow laws later that were again legalized segregation which were the precedent for that was a case called plessy versus ferguson um where uh actually and uh the term was actually i believe in octoroon name uh who was uh one eighth black intentionally went and and so there were laws saying you had that blacks had to ride in separate train cars from whites and he challenged that lot this isn't right and the supreme court again said no it's okay because it's separate cars but they're equal so that phrase separates everybody yeah came became the justification for later segregation jim crow laws um so so that in that period of black codes and then jim crow laws lasted up until basically until the brown versus board of education desegregated schools and there's a series of court cases and culminating in the civil rights act and the voting rights act in the 60s um so when you think about our history you have from roughly roughly this isn't quite accurate but 1619 when not quite the first blacks arrived in the americas but that's the date people usually use 1619 up until 1960 i guess four uh i think that was in the voting right that's what act was passed again don't quote me on that i'm i'm my homework i'm sorry guys but you have that period of what 300 and 40 years where you had some form of legal racism legalized white supremacy not just de facto but de jure according to law we had the you know immigration policy was shaped by white citizens whites could be naturalized citizens and non-whites could not and the funny thing is you look at the court cases and you have the courts actually wrangling over what does what does it mean to be white so who is why who counts as white do you go with what scientists say do you go the sociologists say do you go with common sense and so you had people and there were just horrible laws regarding misogynation miscegenation was uh the pr the they prohibited the mixing of the races there were anti-miscegenation laws so you can you can dig up these court cases where you had a husband and wife hauled into court and they would be questioning them to see what race they were i figured out like is your is your skin bright enough to be counted as white is your hair too curly to be why is it too is it curly enough that you're black do you associate with negroes that was one of the pieces of evidence as to whether or not they were today the case i'm thinking of they had it was a man and a woman who were both like mexican descent and they couldn't figure out whether they were white or black or or both but you and this is a married couple that you're trying to decide whether to throw them in jail or or illegitimize their marriage over what race they were when you can't even figure it out so it was just it would be a farce if it weren't so disgusting so that's our history and it's it's bad now there were i mean there obviously were bright spots there were people who who prayed there were christians who prayed and and begged god to end the legalized racism to end the scourge um and and i praise god he answered those prayers but we can we can be honest about that history both both the good and the bad yeah no i'm not here saying america is the worst nation in the world no i i love being an american but i'm saying that we're first and foremost we're citizens of god's kingdom because of that we can be honest about both the good and the bad parts of our history yeah when i when i think about it i i mean i honest these are the things i think about i think if i had been alive back then would i have had the guts and the clarity of biblical thinking to like really stand against that stuff not because i'm trying to earn points with some crowd or some group but because of biblical principles like i i hope i mean i want to say yes i would i i just hope i would have had the guts but i think the real test is do i have the guts to do it today when i see things today that require that same clarity of biblical thinking where i don't i don't care what reasoning they're using i know what the scripture says about like all men being of one blood and about how they're being no no difference between us and the bible kind of says hey hey there's no difference between you guys and then this you might think elevates everybody but it actually puts everybody in the same boat of sinners who need a savior right but it does leave us still in the image of god so great value but great um issues in humankind but we're all equal in that regard um i hope i would have had the guts and i i think the test though for us today is dealing with race issues justice issues um all the topics like abortion or whatever fill in the blank these are all the issues where today we can test ourselves am i am i really do i have the guts do i have the courage and the biblical clarity to stand up on the right side of these issues so um what about today like you know that's the historical stuff but you know for those who would just say well neil it's a non-issue racism doesn't really exist anymore it's not really a thing what would your analysis of this be and i know you've actually looked at studies and you've been trying to sort of from an analytical side say like what is the current modern impact and situation dealing with uh injustice sure so i'd say first of all you know i'm half indian my father's from india my mother is is white she's kind of mixed irish and i don't know french canadian uh but so so so i am mixed race i'm biracial and uh and i've been a christian for 20 years and every church i belong to was filled with loving gentle compassionate christians who who who embraced me who embrace people of all races and ethnicities and cultures who were invested in the community doing uh ministry to homeless people ministries to you know at-risk youth ministries to immigrants refugees i mean it's true of my church back in berkeley my church in new haven my church in north carolina so i have never experienced racism within the evangelical church at all right i just haven't but here's the thing that's my anecdotal experience and when i ask a question like is there racism in the us today i can't rely on my experience i have to rely on things like surveys and data and experiments and i'm a scientist by training that's what i do i learn to look past my own personal subjective experiences and looked and see if there's been systematic studies and when there have been they've shown that there is still indeed a lot of racism and racial discrimination and other things so just a few examples um surveys on several surveys several big good surveys show that around the year 2016 about one in six whites and one in 25 blacks were still opposed to interracial marriage all right so recently in the last four years one six let me just here's a here's an anecdotal thing to add to your statistics i did a video on interracial marriage not long ago on and i actually had to go to the archives to look up old arguments that people would use to try to say here's where the bible forbids interracial marriage i would have something to respond to like here's your arguments for it now let me show how utterly stupid this is you know and so my video is like saying yes of course there's absolutely no requirements and it's and it's a careful thoughtful study it deals with like rabbinic literature and understanding the new testament all this stuff it was a great video i think i did a really good job blows my mind that in the comments section of the video there are people who are commenting that racism that are not that racist are excuse me they're commenting uh interracial marriage is wrong and they're trying to like they don't build a case because you can't okay not biblically you can't build a biblical case you're you're just a racist and you're trying to project that onto your christian values but i'm blown away that there is even anybody in the comments who's saying these things and i would rather have everybody in the comments going of course of course it doesn't matter of course it's not a big deal and yet i don't know people personally yeah who would say this but that doesn't just because my circle doesn't say it doesn't mean nobody is yeah so and actually for a while my collaborator dr pat sawyer and i were on um basically like a white nationalist email list we got added because they were angry with us because we wrote an article saying that race is a social construct and that triggered them they didn't they were like no it's biological and i kind of without the arguments well no it's not they can show you just as i showed you like if a black person marries a white woman and they have a great a child raised black that doesn't mean anything genetically and they got angry or ambiguous for just using the worst language and these terrible slurs but but yeah we were on that list we're like yeah we saw that and then i gave this similar talk um in new orleans and a guy from i won't say where but a guy from uh an area i i gave that stat about one in six whites are opposed to interracial marriage and he from the back he goes man if that were true where i lived i'd be like god's on the move hallelujah because it's so much worse where he lives it's like probably one in two whites would be opposing interracial marriage where he lived so again that that's so i'm my point is not to be like oh and by the way the the data it shows a decline so there's no question even every year that the percentage goes down and down and down and other surveys have shown that actually you know a larger percentage of blacks maybe are also opposing a racial marriage it's always less than whites but the point is i'm not pointing fingers i'm not blaming anyone right i'm just saying that discrimination still exists and actually the last i'll give you is that another survey asked is interracial marriage not just unwise because you could say well i'm not opposed to it necessarily but you know there's a clash of cultures whatever but another question asked was is it immoral and 28 percent of republicans said yes it's immoral so that's like that's all they ask about is abortion immoral is alcohol drinking immoral and then is interracial it was clear they were asking about the immorality and 28 and then 12 of democrats said it was immoral so it's not just republican so the point is again we're not here to say that that you listener are our opposing racial nurses the point is only that even if you think even if you grant them they're well they're just following their culture they're just you know doing what their tradition teaches them but that's okay but listen they're not thinking biblically that's the point you have to say look the bible does not support that cultural view and it's time to reform your view your anthropology right because it's about anthropology who is human and the answer is all who are from adam right all from adam or a human we all are made in god's image and what's moral here's and this is a huge question for christians who are your people who are my people and the answer is primarily other christians they and actually had a pastor that i know who's very conservative and he actually said he had to discipline a member of his church for being anti-interracial marriage and so when he did that he actually had a disciplined church discipline but he preached a sermon i guess in one of those sundays and he got up on the pulpit and said i'm going to prove to you that interracial marriage is unbiblical and he said why because the bible forbids marriage outside of the christian faith he's like because you are the holy race right christians are the holy race it's not about your skin color it's about the color of the blood that redeemed you right that that's what links you united studies not white or black but red so that was a brilliant way for him to point out that see the reason you're thinking of these wrong thoughts is because you haven't been reformed to scripture's vision for redeemed humanity my only point there and then you can look at other data so there have been studies of hiring discrimination deva pager recently died i think she's from upenn a sociologist but she did some studies at a meta-analysis of hiring studies using various different different methodologies that they were all trying to say all things being equal would a white candidate receive a callback over a black candidate yes or no and to what extent and she found that over two dozen studies over the course of three decades that the white candidates received a call back at rates that were roughly 40 percent higher than those of black candidates and those that number hasn't changed for about 30 years yeah so and that's in that that's controlling for all the factors controlling for resumes and they controlled for things from they controlled things like height physical attractiveness they matched them up and so so they're really trying to control this carefully these are careful experiments um and lastly they're things like just gross measures of disparities which are different but the racial wealth gap is about a factor of 13. that it's like 10 to 13 and it varies year to year but yeah it's hard it's hard to not see a connection between um racism in our culture and society and and the and the wealth gap at least some connection because if you if you relate it to the idea that okay if me if i was exactly me but with dark skin i'm applying for a job and someone else equally the other version of me with light skin applies there's a much higher chance that he'll get that job than me if that's what you're saying right well so what i would say is that it's this is a tricky part um it's hard to know to what extent the wealth gap and other other disparities are produced by various factors so one factor would clearly be things like discrimination like you're black i'm not going to hire you right that's what thomas sowell calls discrimination too like he was one kind you just animus i don't like black people i'm not going to hire you so clearly that would lead to you to get a lower income if you lose a job or you don't get a job things like that but then they're also with thomas sowell who's a black economist you know who he is he labels discrimination 1b and 1a one b would be you discriminate based on group characteristics um so this would be things like uh you look at someone you say because you're black it's more likely that you have criminal record now that's you're like oh my gosh you just stereotyping yeah but it's statistically true right and so people do that because now why do it because they don't want to hire a black person well no it's because they don't want to hire an ex-felon or an ex-criminal now no i said why does it matter it's still terrible for the person you go there and you're black and you'll get hired for no fault of your own and i agree but here's how it's relevant for policy how do you fix that and the answer is unintuitive if you allow employees to ask about your criminal background they discriminate less because they're not trying to discriminate against blacks they're trying to weed out ex-convicts and so if they so if you let them ask about whether you have a criminal record then they discriminate less because they don't care about your race they care about your criminal history so the only point is again i'm not arguing obviously for the black person who goes into the job that gets discriminated against because of their race they don't doesn't matter whether you hate them or not they still didn't get the job but in terms of policy it matters how we can enact laws that will actually reduce the problem and so we can identify we're going to talk about this today is is there's a there's the acknowledgement of a problem and then there's disagreements over what the solution is right and and sometimes over what the problem is even and so we'll talk about this stuff today and this is this is where it gets hugely important for today like right now in california we're voting right now and one of the one of the things on the ballot is they they want to roll back anti-discrimination laws so they can so they can allow employers to discriminate against white people right because they see this is the solution here's the solution if we can if we can just create discrimination in the other direction we can balance things out and of course i see this as an unbiblical solution to a real a real issue but um but anyways please continue well we'll get into that so last thing i wanted to say was the um the other factor in disparities are things that are the legacy of racism so for example things like the wealth gap we're pretty confident that some fraction of the wealth gap is due to the fact that because because of legal racism in the past so legal racism a jim crow laws or then racist practices like redlining where this is a practice where bankers would not lend to qualified black loan seekers because they were living in a black neighborhood so because of that you had black neighborhoods that were impoverished couldn't get loans that became more and more impoverished that was a result of a policy that was racist so but because of that you have a wealth gap that was due to actual de facto or de jure racism in the past but then because you inherit wealth you can't pass on your wealth to your children mainly in the form of real estate and houses so that's again a significant chunk of the wealth disparity because blacks because of historic racism even if there were no racism today at all they still wouldn't be inheriting the same wealth from their parents so my only point is this and this is a point i try to make if you were to say uh i only want to guardians two errors it's all i'm qualified for if you say that zero percent of racial disparities zero percent are due to any form of racism explanation it's zero percent it's not any de facto racism no desiree racism no legacy of racism it's there's none of that at all in disparities you're wrong there's got to be some percent of disparities that are due to legacies of history discrimination whether intentional or even implicit bias whatever it's not just to me this just seems like the most common sense thing in the world right i mean i'm like how hard is it to think that okay you have like for instance and you guys this is part of our discussion here is i want to have neil push back on things that may be in my head so please push back if you disagree but part of my thought is like look if you're if your um your family history is uh suffering from slavery and then there's liberation you're not enslaved anymore yet here's the thing your family doesn't probably experience education historically and doesn't probably value education that much and even though racism might be you know or slavery is technically over right but that doesn't mean you have the same educational opportunities and so you have these strikes against you that you're going to get more education and so you're going to probably have a historic lack of education like my family is an example we have almost no college degrees you know from my parents generation and those above that they know they came from uh farming and rural communities originally and just college just isn't seen as that important there's almost zero college degrees going back in time this leads to less interest and awareness in the family of of college even being important it's like i don't i don't see the importance of it i'll just go get a job and um and and you could debate whether college is important or not but especially nowadays but the um but but i just see how like a culture in this family group that cares less about and you know education because they historically haven't experienced the value of it will not push that value on to their kids and so does that mean that racism is ongoing i don't think so but it does mean that there's an effect of it in the past you know and that this just seems like common sense to me yeah i think it is and i think that when it comes to policy is where we have to then tease out what's what so if racial disparities are caused well but here's the point i want to make you shouldn't say racial disparities like in wealth the average white family has like 11 times 13 times the wealth of the it's median the median white family has 13 times the wealth the median black family those disparities radical disparities in say wealth or education or income they're not zero percent racism uh either historical legacy discrimination unconscious bias it's not zero percent okay it's gotta be non-zero i mean i'm a scientist it could be small but it's not zero the other extreme though i'm saying it's also not 100 it's not 100 uh racism meaning legacies and legacy racism and discrimination and implicit bias now why do i say that because you can find obvious counter examples so a really simple one would be the fact that uh blacks are disproportionately represented in the nba as players right i forget what it's like 70 percent of nba players are black that as that's not because they're discriminating against whites and asians and half indian people like it's that's not at all that disparity is because because i think the best players are black and be because you said certain sports are actually there a lot more items hypothesis i'm gonna hypothesize there are a lot more indian and pakistani cricket players in the us why do i say that because no one in the us plays qriket except for people who grew up say in pakistan and india and in indian england and came to the us so there is an element of just disparities can exist because different cultures like different things and says different things so so the nba example seems like a great example to me of it just so hap okay these are all the top nba players it just so happens that they're black like they're right the they're being black is not why they're in the nba yeah right their skin color is not why they're in be in the nba it's a it's a correlation but not a causation thing yeah and then and it's but it's it's caused in the sense that probably uh you know basketball is more popular among blacks than whites i don't know i mean something like that it's it's it's not because my point is this it's not because of discrimination no one is keeping white players out no one is favoring black players that just doesn't seem remotely plausible to me and there are other examples another silly example about racial disparities not black and white but asians and jewish people are vastly overrepresented in the ivy leagues it's tremendous i forget the natural numbers but it's like a factor of six to ten more asians in the ivy leagues and jewish people in the ivy leagues then should be according to the representation of the population that is not because there is some pro-asian pro-jewish bias in the ivy leagues it's because again this as a generalization uh asian and culture focuses a ton on education it's super important to asian asian culture and similar with jewish culture um so we don't have to so all and all i'm saying is it's not zero and not a hundred percent you say well who thinks that it's zero or a hundred well this is where the california bill comes into play so let me read to you from uh ibram x kendi's book so ibramx candy is a very well known uh author his book stamp from beginning won the national book award in 2016 i think and he's been he was given i think two million dollars recently by the ceo of twitter he's going on speaking towards his book how to be an anti-racist was the number two best-selling book on amazon in june behind robin d'angelo's book white fragility so this guy's a major figure and his book is called how to be an anti-racist i think he did a commercial with mcdonald's recently i saw recently so he's a major figure well listen to what he says here in his book stamp from beginning which again won a book award a national book award he writes this when you truly believe that the racial groups are equal then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large yeah i think we so yeah i mean it's it's obviously problematic your examples come in here okay so that means that the only reason the nba has more black players than say white players is that the people hiring the players are racists and they like they just well i know you'll feel challenged out of a second but the only reason is because of some sort of uh ethnic preference discrimination it could be some subtle way he would say but it's still discrimination and here's what's more i just want to say this real quick before you go on um for those who are like you guys are really really talk you sound like a bunch of democrats who are really going to harp on this stuff um i don't really care what we sound like but we are going to be talking today about why even granting understanding of all these things um you know black lives matter the the movement not the phrase okay everybody like yeah black lives matter amen but the movement is something i don't i don't think is something i could possibly sign up with and i would think personally that the solutions that are being offered by those who are uh championing social justice the most are solutions that themselves are discriminatory in an unbiblical fashion we just want to be i just wanted to unpack the issues first before we explain where that where we diverge from on those things so yeah well that's a good point because i wanna what i wanna say to follow up on that is that everything that both of us have said to this point is completely compatible with a biblical worldview right we're just discussing the history of race which you can look up in textbooks we're discussing again the the degree to which racism and racial disparities and racial history play a role in disparities it's like it's not zero i'm saying it's not 100 all i'm saying i'm not saying it's 80 i'm not saying it's 20 and then it's not zero and it's not a hundred okay all of that we can talk about all of that and we should talk about all of that but we're not using anything remotely related to critical race theory because i'm gonna in the next hour i'm gonna come down very hard against critical race theory but my point i want to make is that you can have this entire conversation about race and discrimination and racism without invoking and even without with explicitly rejecting critical race theory wholeheartedly as i'm going to so that's that we have to when you view all discussion of race as critical race theory what i'm going to argue is that actually plays into the hands of proponents of critical race theory because they'll say see you can't talk about it unless you adopt our ideology yeah and until we can talk about it as christians and say i reject your ideology your ideology looks more and more like a worldview to me that i reject and i'm going to talk about it from my christian world view but i'm going to do it properly and rightly and biblically well see that is actually going to be the most effective in combating this ideology showing you can do it correctly and rightly and addressing the very issues they want to address but failed to because they're working from a wrong worldview a wrong framework or wrong ideology yeah yeah this is what i'm excited about man i get i get emotionally excited at the idea of saying let's let's cut through some of the fog and let's think clearly and biblically about these topics and that's that's why i wanted to do this video talk about these issues and bring on neil shemby because you've been just obsessing on these issues for a long time now and i think that you bring a balanced and thoughtful critique that is committed to scripture as the authority on these issues so so this is perhaps if you guys are starting to get the idea and we're about to find out more on this this is why like um some people they'll merely cite a statistic statistically we have you know black people suffering a disparity in this area therefore here's our solution to that problem and why i would be like wait i believe your statistic i am scared of your solution yeah um and from a christian perspective it seems when i've heard critical race theory explained i thought this is so obviously wrong it's just so obvious it shouldn't be hard for chris we shouldn't be confused about this issue this is not a biblical or moral response to the things that are going on so should we should we talk about that should we um let me delve into let me critical stuff give a teaser here so let's candy here so he said already said it clearly racial disparities are only caused by racial discrimination in this country and in the world at large page 11 stanford beginning what's up more he has three kinds of people he has anti-racists who believe that so anti-racist for him is someone who believes that racial disparities are solely caused by racial discrimination then he has what's called uh racial uh sorry racists who believe that racial disparities are the fault of black people so they have racial anti-racist it's all discrimination racist it's all the fault of black people and here's other thing that's segregationist racist he calls them the other form of racism that he identifies is what he calls assimilationist racism what is that third category so first category is it's all discrimination anti-racist second category segregationist racist it's all the fault of black people the third category is assimilationist racist which believes it's any mixture of the two yeah so in if you believe that which makes me definitionally i am now a racist you are racist you are assimilation and he actually says that he himself used to be an assimilationist races he would list martin luther king uh w.e du bois he would list all of these historic you know heroes of the civil rights movement as in his categorization assimilationist racist they because they all believe it was partly not discrimination that's enough to get you labeled an assimilationist racist in his book um and he is he would even put himself in that category he's now moved on to being striving for pure anti-racist thinking and then okay so then so how does that would you would you describe that thinking that the thinking he represents as being woke is that a good description of being woke no it's it's part of it but it's we'll get into what wokeness is in a little bit more more carefully um this is a lot more than what he's saying well he's he is woke but that's that doesn't really come out there necessarily the other thing he says now about the california uh amendment that's going to remove the protection against discrimination based on race sex and other factors here's what candy says now remember he's he's assumed that all racial disparities are only caused by discrimination now here's what he says in his book how to be an anti-racist page 18. he says the defining question is whether discrimination is creating equity by which he means equal outcomes i can get into that or inequity or which means unequal outcomes that's the question about discrimination listen to this sentence this is really important if discrimination is creating equity then it is anti-racist you have anyway i get it i get it in other words discrimination what i would normally think that's unjust that's racism he sees that as a solution if it's if it's creating equity then it's anti-racist he says quote the only remedy to racist to racist discrimination which creates inequity is anti-racist discrimination the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination let me say that one more time the only remedy to pass discrimination is present discrimination so he would totally just own yes i am going to discriminate based on race but it's going to be anti-racist discrimination as you define that it's going to create equity by which he means equal outcomes so i could say um we need we need the percentage of black ceos based on this this theory we need the percentage of black ceos in the united states to equal the percentage of black people in the united states yes so if it's 28 or 50 i don't know what the percentage is 13 yeah say it's 13 then we need 13 of our ceos to be black and we can like find companies if they're not doing that we could we could actually force them to fire diff and hire different people in order to create that outcome um so someone you know i would say oh so you're getting fired because you're white and you're getting hired because you're black and i would look at that and say that looks a lot like discrimination to me this is and he would admit it this is discrimination but it's ju it's just it's good because all that matters is same outcomes yeah he will he that's what equity means to him equity means equal outcomes um and there's a lot more so that's a taste of you know for i think for candy and there's other other issues with candy um so he defines a racist policy as one that either creates or perpetuates racial inequity that is a racist policy does that but when you think about that and then an anti-racist policy is one that tries to eliminate or reduce inequity racial inequities okay the problem with that definition then and it's a it's literally a manikin definition it's every he says every policy should quote this for you every policy is either racist or anti-racist period that's it there's no in between let me just quote you he says there is no neutrality in the racism struggle the opposite of racist is not not racist it is anti-racist one endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist or racial equality as an anti-racist one either believes problems are rooted in groups of people as a racist or location of problems roots of problems in power and policies as an anti-racist there is no in between safe space if not racist the claim of not racist neutrality is a mask for racism the language of colorblindness like the language of not racist is a mask to hide racism pages nine and ten had to be an anti-racist so he's very clever candy i'll give candy and d'angelo and some other writers credit for being extremely clear they say exactly what they mean and so he's very clear that every policy every every action is either racist or anti-racist with no in-between yeah so this is in other words as soon as you quote a statistic that mentions disparity or difference right where where it's like we have um what's considered a discriminated group is underrepresented in this statistic here that's assumed to be racism and the solution is to pass discrimination laws yes that force you to discriminate against what are considered the oppressor groups the the you know the majority groups in order to fix this um and that's the kind of like um reckless sort of stuff that's going on but ultimately that is that is injustice biblically speaking this is this is injustice like we shouldn't do this we shouldn't do this biblically this isn't fair treatment and scripture i think makes this clear when it says things like do not favor the rich and do not favor the poor in judgment both of those things god hates like this is in the old testament right where it's just like don't don't make a judgment for the wealthy or for those who are privileged or whatever you want to call it don't make a judgment for them because they're privileged don't make a judgment for the poor because they're poor yeah real justice is fair uh treatment under law given equally to all people it's not equal outcomes that would be the biblical view of these things so now is a good time to talk about critical race theory all right because you guys listen up because what we're about to get into is super important because listen this stuff has gotten into our uh and i'm not a conspiratory person at all okay this isn't about a conspirator this is this is about a um a a world view and understanding a a sort of a framing of the issue of race and discrimination that has been in our universities for a long time and has just hit like a tipping point like if you've ever you guys ever seen like the icebergs tip over it's like the iceberg sitting there it might slowly be moving and one day it just goes whoosh and tips over i think those videos are amazing like icebergs flipping over well we're watching the iceberg finally flip on the issue of racism in our culture and the world view of critical race theory is becoming a dominant view and if i'm going to think clearly i have to reject critical race theory but i've got to understand it to be able to reject it right and not just deny that racism is a problem or or become a clumsy advocate for biblical justice so um what is critical theory help us understand these things yeah so let's talk a step back so critical theory is this broad area of knowledge that has been around for you know probably a hundred years so it really has its origin and karl marx um he didn't coin the term but he is considered by most scholars to be the you know first true critical theorists of the words of bradley levinson in his book beyond critique the the term critical theory was coined by the frankfurt school in the 30s in germany and people like max horkheimer theodora donahoe these people they wanted to they took marx's ideas about not about economics per se but they took us ideas about how power operates to produce uh oppression and inequalities in hierarchies and then they wanted to emancipate people from uh from these abuses of power and but they wanted to apply marx's analysis of power more broadly than just economics to areas like culture and mass media and that but that was again 80 years ago and though since then critical theory has spawned entire disciplines like queer theory uh critical pedagogy critical race theory critical legal studies and all these other critics these are all you could major in this in college and people are right yeah well they're very interdisciplinary so you'd probably major in like sociology or gender studies but the framework they're gonna be using would be like so you'd go and major in gender studies but they're gonna be adopting say a queer theory framework for understanding or agenda gender theory is one of the critical social theories and so there are a lot of similarities because all of these social theories treat uh issues of power and dominance and oppression and liberation and what's called hegemonic power which means the ability to control the ideology of the culture so what we think of as objective and normal and natural and neutral is actually the ideology of the ruling class now whether that ruling class are men so the system would be the patriarchy or whether it's whites and the system would be white supremacy or its heterosexuals and the system would be heteronormativity so but all these different social theories cruel social theories would theorize about different axes of identity but in very similar ways in all these cases you're looking at how some system of thinking and discourse and and talking and it's my ideology is being imposed by the ruling class on culture in a way that's taken as normal and objective and then that lead that justifies the power of that dominant group okay so that's those are critical social theories broadly um and critical race theory so they all have to do with like finding dominant groups and then is it always associated with you know assigning some kind of injustice to that group and then sort of looking to right the wrongs yeah um so they would define oppression in terms of this dominance the very fact that your group is considered normal and uh and and and your values are considered the normal valuable neutral values that makes you an oppressor group a dominant social group and the very fact that certain groups are considered to be other or exotic or different from the norm that makes them subordinate oppressed societal groups so that is appropriate and then then social justice would involve um dismantling these systems and dismantling this hierarchy dismantling these oppressive values so that power can be shared between all groups right so all of the um and they do that in various ways so a critical race theory would do that differently than say queer theory but the goal is to achieve the state where power is shared where there is no group that oppressively defines the norms and values for all culture um so hey so that's critical that's a really that's it's a really broad area so yeah it's really bright we're going to wear it if you guys got lost on that it's going to come become more clear just kind of hang in there we're going to give you like maybe you could give um an example of what all this stuff has in common like what's the common thread you see through all critical theory stuff that would help us to maybe if we've never heard of it before to understand okay that's what i'm seeing so in one example critical social theories if i had this in one sentence calculate all these different theories they're all concerned with power they're all concerned with understanding how society is structured in terms of dominant and oppressed groups and then they're all they're all concerned with overturning and liberating oppressed groups right they all want to transform culture and not just observe it there's a huge difference that the frankfurt school brought into their definition of critical theory they said traditional theory aims to describe culture and following marx critical theory wants to not just describe it but transform it to be more equitable to achieve to emancipate people who are are currently oppressed um so okay but let's talk about of all of these different critical social theories let's focus on critical race theory so um that grew out of what's called critical legal studies and critical legal theorists questioned whether or not the law was neutral and objective and universal they were they were cynical they said no what law really is is law is the way for the ruling class to impose on culture laws and policies that benefit the self-interest of the ruling class whether it's the rich or whatever or whites or men right but they wanted to see how law functions to justify dominant groups okay critical race that was critical little legal studies in the 80s people like derek bell and kimberly crenshaw neil gotanda richard delgado miri matsuda these are legal scholars and they became dissatisfied with the way that race was being they felt ignored they wanted to focus on how laws impacted race in particular from within this critical legal framework so their idea was we want to understand how law has been used to justify white dominance and white self-interest over the course of u.s history and today so out of so that's the 80s uh and so these scholars um develop critical race theory kimberly crenshaw coined the term intersectionality we can talk about that later in 1889 i believe or 91. um in 96 critical race theory was um sort of uh made its way into the educational discipline so um bill ledson billings and tate published a famous paper that introduced critical race three to education and now actually uh i would argue following goddessman that education in general uh is deeply shaped by this critical critical theories broadly in critical race there in particular so that's just the way that scholars are thinking about how culture functions so if i summarized it this way and said okay so critical race theory is a world view or a way of looking at culture law society um through the lens you you start to see it through the lens of a presser and oppressed and so there's a problem that needs a solution between dominant and not dominant groups and then that flavors everything else that you do is that like a okay so i like to so i i like to refer to the whatever you want to call the world view people have there's no what no name for it people call it cultural marxism people call it identity politics people call it intersectionality that there's no label for that worldview that that totalizing ideology so call it what you want i think critical social justice is maybe one helpful term um i call it contemporary critical theory but this is my term but there's that worldview and then critical race theory i like to refer to it as a discipline uh it's a it's a you know you can identify the core tenets but once you recognize that there is that worldview out there you'll see how critical race theory really fits very nicely into that way of looking at the world so i wouldn't call it a world view per se but i would say it fits into this world view it impacts your world view yeah it's a piece of a world view yeah it's a natural way to think about race if you already embraced that world view so let me just i'll quote i don't quote because it's long but i'll give you some of the four central tenets of critical race theory and you can find these in lots of papers they will say here are the central tenets of critical race theory you can find it i'm gonna quote let's get these and then and then we'll talk about whether it's compatible with christianity or not which is the main concern so what are the central tenets of critical race so here are the four of general types of critical race theory one racism is permanent pervasive and normal racial oppression has not disappeared it has just evolved that's number one number two racism sexism classism heterosexism are all inextricably linked forms of oppression that must be fought simultaneously three claims of objectivity and neutrality and universality and meritocracy and color blindness all these scare quotes are the scare quotes those claims are mechanisms to disguise racism and oppression and for the experiential knowledge the lived experience of people of color is critical to understanding racism so racism is permanent number one racism is part of many interlocking systems of oppression sexism classism heterosexism claims of objectivity and colorblindness disguise racism it's hidden beneath those claims and four the lived experience of people of color is critical to understanding racism so there's force and i can quote many people saying these same things as these central tenants so um that's the core yeah okay so um what does it mean then like what what is this central tin it's like how does this play out then in culture if you could give us an example before we talk about maybe the problems with it because i feel like we're talking about the theory and the ex but like when the rubber hits the road what does that mean for people when this critical race theory becomes the way we view our society and the way that we view each other and politics and all that yeah so there i mean let me just give you some practical illustrations or examples of how this would play out in like a day-to-day life so forget policy for a second i'm not really big into policy like i said as long as you don't say it's all racism or zero racism you can we can argue but i'm not an economist but i want to show you or practically not policy impact but personal impact so for example let's say you accept tenant number one racism is permanent pervasive and normal now this is a new this claim is very common critical race theorists will say racism has not qualitatively changed since jim crow and maybe even the days of slavery that it simply changes form it's mutated so that's they will say that right it's it's like an and then it's pervasive it's everywhere it's all around you the analogy they use it's like it's like smog you breathe it in you don't even know you're breathing in you can't shut the door and a small gets in the air so number one let's say that you believe that right that means that you you read racism into every interaction so robyn d'angelo actually says the question is not did racism happen the question is how did racism manifest in this context so this is why you will see people finding racism everywhere they're not paranoid exactly they're they're working out this principle this presupposition in their lives they see it everywhere because they they the tenet of critical race theory is it is everywhere they have to um and so they say but wait a minute but why are they finding it i didn't see that you see racism when you actually see people like yelling a racial slur but how do they find it in these other you know places i don't even see it well it's because it's hidden remember that's time number three these claims of objectivity colorblindness are really ways to disguise and conceal racism so for example when you see a disparity and when i say okay disparities um it's not zero percent racism but it's not 100 racism you know there's some element of say merit like the nba the reason that 70 black players are there is merit right now the issue is now kennedy wouldn't apply that to the nba but if he saw that disparities where there were say fewer blacks represented or fewer asians or fewer hispanics he would say i would say well maybe it's maybe maybe maybe that's just merit maybe maybe uh you know maybe asians don't want to play basketball as much as whites and blacks do that's why they're fewer asians and he would say yeah that claim about meritocracy that is a disguise for racism that's why they see it everywhere because again and you'll say wait a minute but i have evidence that it's just merit right yeah that's again that's that's a disguise yeah appeals to empirical research are actually ways to justify the disparity because so number three says yeah one of my concerns here is that like you said how it affects us personally right yeah so let's say that i'm a person who's who's of an oppressed group in these categories and i live my life and whenever something bad happens to me i'm maltreated uh i don't get a job or something like that it's a foregone conclusion that that was racism against me yeah so if i view it that way then in my life i'm stockpiling a list of stories that whether they were or weren't racism i believed they were i believe they were and so my my division from especially other brothers and sisters in christ is way up here i i go and i see them and i don't i don't see the church i see the white church right or i see the black church or i see the and i even though it's terminology well the black church needs and i'm just like i see the terminology there just seems problematic to me yeah um and so it creates a lot of division a lot of division and uh i i live in a the community i live in in southern california is is i'm the minority in this community and the the the experienced tension over the past few years has gone up like as i'm just walking around and it's just things are getting more and more tense between me and like my neighbors for no reason yeah and um and it's it's it's a lot of division and human it just feels like a lot of bitterness and and stuff like that that's that feels like it's justified and it could be based on perceived racism right because of this principle well but here's the problem mike what you just said to your your suggestion that well you know maybe people are perceiving things that aren't there because they've bought into this ideology that tells them it's there no matter what it's pervasive it's permanent to normal it's everywhere maybe that is actually causing them to see racism where it doesn't exist well now that statement that claim would be deemed incredibly problematic because number four the experiential knowledge of people of color is critical to understanding racism so they would argue that because you are white you are blinded by a white privilege right and sure you want to find an excuse to hide from the reality the ugly reality that our society is racist and white supremacist so you are claiming you're invalidating the lived experience of people of color to justify your blindness to racial pain yeah and the problem is the extremes like you said it's the extremes it's like i have to either agree with every claim of racism or reject every claim of racism like no reality doesn't work like that so why should i so what you would so what you would say is what a biblical response would be right that we have to actually examine each case based on evidence based on again that principle of charity you can't assume someone is well there's a question of what racism is well to go back to that but you can't assume that something that happened to you is motivated by animists put it that way um so there are issues there but the point is they would say but if a person of color you know lives that out knows it's you know knows that it is racism right then you can't you shouldn't challenge that because again that would be an expression of your white fragility with robin d'angelo's term is it by saying are you sure this is racism then you're actually imp you're trying to dominate them you need to defer to their lived experience yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna say something really controversial here but that's probably this whole video um so so when i when i heard about hear about like say uh a cop shooting a black man right and i hear about it and i go okay all i know is a cop shot a black man and i know i see some people going boom racism yeah and i and i'm just thinking you don't know that like we don't know anything yet i'm not saying it's not racism i'm not saying it's racist like you can't know that right now you don't know anything about the scenario and yet riots will ensue right and people will pick sides and i'm just going we don't even have the data yet can we get the can we get the camera footage the body camera footage can we look at the situation and see and um but from this principle you're saying um that principle would lead to the knee-jerk reaction and a seemingly justified knee-jerk reaction against anything that relates to a disparity right what they call discrimination yeah what's more yeah this is the key i think people there's there's a lot of disconnect here because conservatives will say well how can you know it's racism we literally have no idea what the details were we just have we know nothing but because a white cop shot a black eyes all we know you say it's racism how can you know is motivated by racism and and they say well you're being irrational no no they are following their definitions their conclusion so they will say it's not we're not saying it's racial animus because racism has been defined to be basically systemic it's a system of racial hierarchy and racial privilege such that like you said disparities point to racism even when it's not animus so like like this is kenny's example kenny doesn't think that disparities are caused by rational conscious animus all the time he doesn't think that he would say there's a system in place that produces these outcomes and that system is racist and produces racism even if all of the actors are not consciously being racist so when a white cop shoots a black man it is racism because this disproportionately we know that blacks are shot a disposition rates to whites and that by kenny's assumption must be due to discrimination by assumption which inevitably leads yeah it just it just leads to injustice towards cops now right because we're gonna we're gonna just assume they're they're the guilt that they have and i mean of course there's racist cops there absolutely is and is there a problem with cops uh in many cases being mean violent abusing their authority absolutely i think that guys who are like that are drawn to positions of power like being a cop but i also know there's great cops so you have to take them individually so what we're doing is we're we're using what i see it as you know you can correct this if you think it's wrong but i see it as creating injustice as a way of fighting injustice by redefining these terms and biblically we should say hold on you know he who answers the matter before he hears it it's a folly and shame to him right and to say it's racism without having looked into this scenario just seems obviously wrong but but but then again the people who hear me say that are thinking who are bought into critical race here are thinking mike you're just ignorant you're just terribly terribly ignorant here well and you have you have what they would say is a white understanding of racism you're defining it as animus whereas they define it again to mean this whole system this you know this very broad system of racial privilege by definition which includes basically it causes all disparities and and and then here's mike here's a this is this is why it's so poisonous you can't answer that you can't say but guys the bible says we shouldn't be judging these cases before hearing the evidence and stuff and they've but they but not only they said that well the racism is systemic meaning not that it's that everybody is is racially uh hatred has hate racial hatred their when they see systemic they means it's a system that produces disparities i can give you quotes systemic to them means a system that produces disparities of racial disparities makes it simply racist even when there's no animus involved there's a book by benia silva whose title is racism without racists and his argument is that racism is a system that can operate independent of the motives of the person who's in the system so he would see again disparities as produced by this racist system in the absence of that's why they can point to any disparity in say police shootings and say that's racist um if you challenge that if you say wait a minute that's a bad way to define racism again that fourth tenet that lived experience is really central to understanding racism they can say you know you're not being empathetic you're not you know you're not you're invalidating people's experience you're being a heartless and cruel and we have to just ge we have to say you know brother i i realize there's real ra there's racism there's animus there's hatred there is unconscious bias there is there are people that that unknowingly hurt you and marginalize you or knowingly both of them right but but brother we cannot let go of this biblical principle of not rushing to judgment of being charitable uh in terms and then what i've begun to start pushing on again it's very hard because i think what i focus on is the underlying ideology which i'm saying that's wrong at the outset you you cannot start lifting up lived experience over things like objective evidence reason logic even scripture like if you see it deadly if somebody uh mistreats say a white person mistreats a black person you find out later the white person's blind and then you're like there's still racism still racism right like hold on guys like you you've got to realize we're creating a system that propagates injustice and based on the quotes you read earlier it does so on purpose and just says yeah but that's not really injustice because we've defined justice in a new way that so everything it's all definitional that's why it gets complicated because it's like we're changing definitions which maybe we could talk briefly about the definition of the word racism because i'll tell you a conversation i had and maybe you could explain this a conversation from with a friend who says mike you're not understanding how how people are defining race this is a black friend of mine we're talking about this issue and i was like well what do you mean and he says it's based upon oppressors and oppresses and you're white you're part of an oppressor group and a black person's part of the the oppressed and so only the oppressed can be the on the receiving end of racism yeah and i said wait a minute are you telling me that if hypothetically and this has not happened to me but hypothetically a black person runs up to me and they say mike i hate you only because you're white and then they take a fork and just stab me in the face with it five times and then run away yelling i stabbed the white devil and then they ran away laughing so based on your definition that's not racism uh or it's not his definition but it's the ones he's talking about and he says yeah that's not racism and i was like that's racism this is you know it's like we're just going to take certain classes of people and remove any sort of concern for their protections and this is of course not being partial on either side is the biblical view and again accountability so that that's right so the definition let's go back to the definition that's very common within a crt and anti-racist literature is prejudice plus power so racism they define as prejudice plus power and so what they will say yeah well people of color can be just as prejudiced and are just as prejudiced as whites they will totally acknowledge that um but they can't be racist by definition because they lack institutional power it's not just individual powers that your your group lacks the power to impose your racism or your prejudice on law on structures on on systems so that means that you can't be a person of color can't be racist they can be prejudiced but not racist and so you're like well isn't that just semantics and i say well but be careful because language shapes our thinking right so for example if i said i'm going to redefine adultery to mean marital unfaithfulness plus power so a man can commit adultery yes but when a woman is merely unfaithful she's just cheating those words have different connotations and what's more biblically sin is primarily against god yeah yeah and this is to me the biblical answer is god hates unjust scales yeah right he doesn't want it it's not outcomes that scripture's actually primarily concerned about as far as the results that play out in a person's life of how much money they have and all that kind of thing it's about just scales same treatment under law that's that's the thing that i think the biblical justice is concerned about right and i think that when you actually had a really good conversation a few days ago with a church in in england and one of the one of the people the panelists there i think was a i think as a pastor but he was saying yeah you know when you redefine language so that you take what is a sin like racism racism is jesus and prejudice is interesting you can be like you know my wife's beautiful but i'm prejudice you're not using the word that way in a mean you're just that's just it's like a joke so but racism is like you can't joke about oh that's beautiful but i'm racist racism is a deeply evil sin that's right yeah when you then change the language so that one group is exempted from this category of sin even if you're like well they're still prejudiced yeah but but the impact is different and and frankly i do think that when as sinners we look for all the loopholes we can find to hate we we love to find excuses for our sin and so when you begin to say well you know common phrases reverse racism is a myth because only whites can be racist by definition when you say it over and over and over again people begin to be more comfortable with being more and more prejudiced in their in their mind towards the whites because they're not being racist it's all language games but it's still serious because i do see if you read these books sometimes i've occasionally taken the books and just swapped out the word black with white and the things that they're saying about white whites if you made it about blacks just sound horrifically racist yeah what if the name of the book was black fragility oh yeah and it would and my thought is that yeah we we should reject all of those statements across the board and this is going to be the hard thing for us to be biblically minded on because they're they're recouching the terminology so that you are racist if you actually have a biblical view of justice at this point yeah um if you absorb critical race theory so maybe i could ask this why do you why is critical race theory attractive like what is it that draws people towards it because some people they get i think they get uh pulled in and emotionally committed to it sure um what is the thing that draws people to it i think there uh are people that first of all they they didn't learn enough about america's actual history uh and the horrible racial history that we have as a country they didn't learn about that you know in the history books yeah or or in in anywhere else and so then the first time they learned these actual truths not the all the ideology but just the truths of what actually slavery was like what actually jim crow was like what actual laws were on the books the first time they learned that was from critical race theorists or anti-racist activists so they're they're they're just their minds are blown they're like oh my gosh i had no idea it was this bad they look on this source as this like this crystal ball they're like oh my gosh i i was lied to so then they treat this new source as like a source of authority they know what they're talking about yeah never had this before so then they accept uncritically all the other ideas that are being sold along with the actual truths um that's one thing so i think i think again christians should do a better job of actually being honest about our history without bringing in these other ideas that are wrong yeah and because that way that'll that'll remove some of the mystification that's that occurs when people are exposed to the first time based on critical research there's an element of this too as a christian where you say look my identity is not like i'm an american like i mean my identity i'm an american and i recognize that i i should be submitting to the government where god has me and all that but but my identity is in christ yeah and i see the fallenness of mankind and i don't have this like rose-colored view of my own nation's history i i i should look at it and go i yeah again i just think boy i sure hope i would have had the guts and the clarity of mine to stand up and say the truth you know in 1820 and i sure hope i have the guts to do it in 2020 and and to me it's on both sides like i have to say racism is a present issue it's present even in many who say i'm a follower of christ and as much as you're a racist you are not a christian like that much part of you i mean i'm using hyperbole here but that part of you that is embracing race racism is is antithetical to your commitments to christ or to the knowledge of the nature of man or the work of christ but the solutions of critical race theory that are being promoted as like the fix this is the way to see the problem and the way to fix the problem both of those things are very unbiblical as well and so we're kind of like i don't know how i'm going to make many friends right now because one side and to be straight right the republican side tends to just you know demote the problem like it's just a myth a myth of racism or whatever and then the the democrat side or the liberal side of things is is seeing the solution is critical race theory and i'm like i you're both wrong and and this is destructive to culture and destructive to the church yeah and it's dividing the church man it's hurtful i see it that's one of the other so i talked about how you know if you embrace this view you will begin to see racism everywhere because you're told it's everywhere it's a basic tenet the other thing that you're told to do is to see you know whites as your friends said whites as oppressors not because of them being personally oppressive because it's a system but they are oppressors by virtue of their skin color their race and you are other the other side of that you are oppressed by virtue of your race independent of any other factors which again is when you think about that for a second then this is actually has happened but you know of very wealthy individually powerful successful highly educated black people asian people hispanic people will view themselves as oppressed relative to a white uh respect a race relative to a poor handicapped you know totally uneducated white homeless white person because of his race now he might be oppressed with respect to his physical ability or his class or his education but when it comes to race he has white privilege again is relative to what he would experience as a black person but the point is it's this one that's not a realistic way to see the world frankly you know a very rich educated powerful black person uh should not see themselves as oppressed they because well the definition of oppression has been changed again it used to mean it's about identities instead of actual you're identifying part of an oppressed group but that shouldn't your actual experience day-to-day is not one of oppression right you know whereas a person a white person who is for this a white person uh could could be in a wealthy family could be educated could be um you know kind of all that could they could be cisgendered and heterosexual and yet if they have parents who hate them they have a terrible family that's not even a category within critical theories like family love between parents and child and yet as christians were like their experiences i you know are so much worse than a poor yet so loving you know uneducated hispanic family or black family right there's no comparison money cannot by love money cannot buy what matters relationship and for us to view everything in terms of group dynamics and power it's just it's not remotely biblical because it bible is not what your experiences are shaped more by things like again the love that you experience between your with your father your parents the love of your siblings love your friends things like being born again right if you have god's love you know you could be physically oppressed absolutely right you could actually be oppressed you could be you could be a slave you could be a sex slave you could be terribly oppressed but if you have god's love that's going to be your primary identity factor that's going to shape your experiences with anything else and and you could be this rich powerful oppressor uh or so you could be you could throw a pressure you could be um on the other side you could have power and wealth and prestige and all these things and if you are not born again then you're under god's wrath and that will shape primarily your experience that you're you know you're not regenerate so the point is that as christians there are so and then what about the church i cannot i cannot walk into a church and say there's an oppressor christian there's an oppressed christian there's an oppressed christian there's an impressed christian that that mentality will destroy the church so we've got to bring back into the church into the thinking of christians not the term racism but the term partiality i think that this is really needed right where we go look we're called to be impartial and if we see that as the rule then it immediately outlaws critical race theory from the heart and mind of a christian because you can't like you said i can't walk into a christian and look at into a church and say look white christian oppressor black christian oppressed yeah that's that's the definition of partiality that's just exactly what that is remember one of the central tenets of critical race theory is that racism this guy is disguised by things like impartiality neutrality yeah biblical teaching of impartiality as a disguise for racism yeah so so i don't know i could go on about these basic incompatibilities about what critical race theory does to your way of thinking and they're just so poisonous um and i i just can't emphasize that enough i i really i want to plead with people i actually have a guy that i know who is a black pastor in texas this was a few about a year ago i guess but he he was he was like you know he dm'd me uh and he said you know i i'm black i i know racism exists i've experienced it right but this critical race theory stuff it's tearing my church apart he's trying to pastor the church he's got we got we got whites we got blacks we got blm supporters and we've got cops right he's like there are four couples that were in his church that were thinking about separating in his words over critical race theory over whether they adopted these these categories or not and it was tearing his search apart and he's like this week i cannot this is not this is not good this is not the solution this is ruining my church so i just want to plead with people um let me talk about again more why it's attractive i think there's some other reasons too but you know brothers and sisters this is not the way this is poison this will poison your thinking and you gotta get out like you you don't you know listen go back and listen to the first half an hour mike and i talked about racism and history well i'll talk in a second about color blindness and why i think it's actually not the best model for thinking about race but there are there are things that we can that i think we can appreciate their insights critical race theory has that are true that we can get from the bible right but i'm begging you not to take the bait you know you're nibbling at the cheese and the trap is gonna snap on your neck and so let's let's think about what you think is what is true that you're getting from these authors you can get from a non-poisoned source which is scripture which is reality so but i'm begging you don't drink from this well and i'm gonna echo that i'm gonna echo that look i i i want to be as biblical as possible in all these things and i see that as the path through the fog okay but critical race theory as a whole is utterly unacceptable to the biblical view of like there is neither june or nor or greek nor slave nor free these it's it's the denial of those things not the emphasis of all those things but what what's talk about the cheese in your analogy of the mouse trap more about the cheese what else what are the the goods or the positives or the things you would have you would actually affirm in a critical race theory right so so i'm going to use i'm glad you mentioned galatians 3 26 28 uh because that's a verse that i think is actually misunderstood uh by a lot of christians to promote color blindness now it's there's there's be careful here is colorblindness good or bad the answer is both so the way that critical race theorists define color blindness is as ignoring race pretending not to notice it now if you define it that way is it good or bad well just silly it's like ridiculous like oh i can even tell what are you are you white are you are you asian i can't even you can tell and and and frankly like because because race correlates with culture you know you notice things like i mean actually there's studies that show like the top 10 black television shows the top 10 white television shows are like totally different so it kind of cultured coral isn't there no black people that watch white shows and whatever no i'm saying that you you notice these things as socially salient features and from a biblical perspective we say there's no neither june or greek slave nor free does that mean oh just stop talking about race we should all just be one in the church not talk about race at all well here's the thing that verse goes on to say there's neither male nor female do we become gender blind when we become christian like oh i'm not a male or female anymore i'm a christian no no gender is a good thing it's a god ordained category and we should exalted it now race is different because race is we said a social construct but ethnicity is a biblical category and what's more paul who says there's neither juno or greek slave nor free in in in galatians paul exulted in his jewish ethnicity yeah and i mean to reinforce that he even called himself the apostle to the gentiles yeah whereas peter is to the jews i mean in modern categories we would think of that as having like an ethnic focus in your ministry oh and they would be like the church can't do that or something and you're like well i mean biblically they had paul had an ethnic focus in his ministry and so did peter it's more that paul called paul called the jews his people paul said that when fellow people of the circumcision came to visit him he was refreshed he was like oh thank goodness there were jews here like paul you can't say that well yeah that's the bible guys so it's fine to feel an affinity for the people of your ethnic they it's so the so paul's not saying there's neither there's no more ethnicities in the church he's not saying that because that would be saying there's no more gender and and clearly we would not say oh you i can't even see gender are you a guy and go tell go tell your female friends like i can't even tell that you're a female that'll be they'd be flattered right they'd love that yeah yeah right so wait what is it what does it mean what's paul saying then neil tell us he said he's saying are standing before god is no longer as juror gentile or male or female we stand equally adopted justified and as christians before god and so that no longer defines our central primary identity so the other reverse to couple with galatians three which is okay or paul's ethnicity matters to him it's fine it's he exalts in it it's fine to be have jewish ethnicity um but look at philippians 2 he says all of that all that was to my gain including his ethnicity i count as scuba as dung compared to the surpassing surpassing worth of knowing jesus so what he's saying is it's fine to have you know to exalt in your ethnicity to exalt in your whatever your identity categories they can be real categories right but compared to christ committed your christian identity they are rubbish and so so rubbish and that's a in the greek word that's not just rubbish that's you know dung it's you know it's it's a strong word um yeah garbage would be a bit better a polite translation so um so when whenever people so people exalting in being black or white or some other ethnic and whites these are different because they're racist but the point is ethnicity is not an evil thing right yeah vody bakum who's no one will consider to be a critical race there's he points out that being colorblind is kind of problematic he's like he's like my my skin is black and it's beautiful like it's it's great you know i love being black and it's yeah i didn't even know i didn't notice at all so and he so he he kind of actually in his is this talk i think he's in his talk ethnic narcissism where he criticizes brutally this this ethnic nazism but he says but when you think when you think that the solution is just to be blind to your color of your skin and blind to these differences that's just silly you can celebrate those things but the second it becomes more important than your christian identity the second you feel distance between you and some other person merely because of their ethnic group because of their race um that is when you need to start saying this is becoming an idol yeah and i have to kill that idol yeah this is where paul the apostle and peter butted heads right in galatians 2. so peter is visiting paul and uh there he has some more visitors that are jewish and when the jewish visitors come because of their conscience about eating food and gentiles and all this he goes and eats with them separately and then paul flips out because he he sees the eating separately as an illustration that they that they're according to paul what peter's doing is quote not true according to the gospel he's not walking in line with the gospel yet yeah so this ethnic separation that was created by the law was taken down by christ he broke down that middle wall of separation and brought us together and i love theology stuff and and paul's like look this and this is how we have to respond with critical race theory and say the categories you guys are creating and the importance you create for ethnicity while it matters the degree of importance is is not true according to the gospel yeah and the division that it's causing we ought to respond the way paul did to peter and say oh no no no no we have to stop this we can't we can't let it have a foothold in our congregations um i recognize there's a yeah so identity ethnicity can be seen as part of who you are but unrelated to the unity you have in christ and the fellowship you have in christ with other people right but this is that just makes it impossible to do that because you just you just see a press depression oppressed depressing in the church and so what i would say is again for people that are attracted to this idea that color blindness is not perfect that's true you can say yeah actually there's a biblical way to think about these categories these identities but the way that critical race theory thinks about it is wrong they get the part about it not being erased right but then they instead of instead of erasing it they just exalt it to this incredibly idolatrous position where it would usurp even your identity in christ which they would there's not even a category for them in that way um the other thing that's uh another again an element of truth which i think again it's it's found in the bible guys you don't need to go to critical race theory to find it but the idea that there can be um you know unhealthy and even sinful patterns of cultural dominance so a simple example um would be how the uh this is alfie actually often invoked but in acts 6 the uh the hip the uh hell no the hell the hellenistic widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food right and so they were you know they're the apostles were giving out food to the widows and that the uh hellenistic jews they complained at least that their widows were being overlooked and now do we think i mean think about it it could be it's not in the bible but do we think that the apostles giving out the food do we think the apostles were like i don't like those hellenistic widows we're not going to give them food no it was probably just unconscious right there they were hebraic jews they were from jerusalem so they were from israel so they could have been just negligence they could have just not noticed it right um so but they but they realized oh my gosh when they saw that that was an injustice they wanted to correct it they weren't and we don't think they were sinning they just realized oh my gosh we shouldn't neglect these people we want to so they appointed deacons who were hellenistic jews helen is yeah all the deacons they're they're people from the and this is something of course that i think this balances us because we go wait this is exactly where like sort of the more conservative side of people would be like wait a minute i don't like that example yeah this is scripture here right right they hire seven deacons every one of them to them to a man is from the hellenistic group the ones that were being overlooked so that's interesting yeah yeah no no the funny thing is that's interpreted as see the reversing power dynamics is that what's going on well no because all the church elders the the apostles are still jewish they're told that he breaks you so so they didn't reverse power dynamics they saw a need it was better met by the group that was suffering from the need so it was i don't think this they're viewing that that story through this critical race theory lens but i think it's just not what's being taught but the point is but the apostles did see a need in this one community and then pick people from that community to address the need so what's the sort of analogy today where we see not through malice but things that are just being overlooked that i think um are and it can it can be not entirely innocent either an example would be uh that comes up a lot i think in multi-ethnic churches is the music you play right oh well what kind of music do you play in your church service we just play normal music normal music what kind of music is that you know chris tomlin matt redmond matt pop you mean white music no no no normal music see but that see that assumption there i don't know that what critical race theory calls that is called is white supremacy because they've redefined that term white supremacy means that whiteness is the white culture is normal that's all it means that the term has been the term used to mean you know basically white people are better than black people and non-white people but but now it means whiteness is the norm well frankly white supremacy by that definition is just like well just majority culture right so the end that's a really terrible term to use but the phenomenon that often assume that their culture is sort of neutral that's a real phenomenon so when you're in a majority white church say it should be on the table to say are you really trying to you know meet all of your congregation's desires and preferences with your music choice yeah you can say that you can say that and you're not adopting critical race theory not remotely and this is the thing it's the all or nothing that concerns me it's it's why should we be doing this all or nothing thing like we need to not we need to have our own world view and then analyze the issues and approach it from that world view well again we're in the bible is that kind of idea that kind of thinking what about romans what about uh corinthians 16 where they're talking in first question 16 we were talking about how each brother should submit to the good of the other right out of love like how can you lay down your rights for the good of the body that's the principle it's not about power dynamics it's about all people whether white black hispanic asian purple green whatever all christians should be looking for ways in which they can say lay down their preferences for the good of the body yeah we don't need to import crt it's not even remotely a crt issue and we can't we can't respond to needs around us and say gosh if i if i try to seek this need to to minister to this need that i think is represented in ethnic differences then i'm adopting critical race theory and i'm becoming you know liberal and all this stuff and that's like no no that's no we we've got to be so firm in our worldview that we can tackle issues and work through chris with christian love and charity and biblical views so that we can tackle these problems and not be picking sides right um but saying no no we've got our own side and it's represented through the body of christ and that's the side i pick so i think that again that's the cheese in the trap is where people will see they say hey color blindness is not ideal here's an and i see christians embracing color blindness wholeheartedly with no qualifications so critical racery sees the problems in it so i'm going to embrace critical race i'm like no stop stop look there's a better way where i i see that my church you know i'm i'm a person of color in a majority white church all the music is like stuff that i don't like all the all the the cultured culture is the different culture than mine and so i see critical race theory calling that white supremacy oh it's insidious it's everywhere it's whiteness is the norm see hold up timeout done that there's a much better way to approach this question to think about again are we really as a body trying to meet the needs of the body all equally and are we all again sacrificing our preferences for the sake of the body again and then here's the key not just the dominant culture you need to think that way paul says all christians need to think that way so on the one hand if i don't like the music i don't say if they don't change the music and according to my preferences then it's because they're white supremacists i don't say that i say you know what i'm here to serve and if i don't get my preferences you know what i can deal with that on the other hand you'd expect the majority culture to say how can i lay down my preferences you know to serve my brothers and sisters to make them feel welcome right and so i mean i think my church for example doing a series of series of things but one of the things we did was we began playing just more variety more like just sort of again gospel music in our church services but but we picked really theologically rich songs but they were clearly like black gospel songs but they were great yeah i mean or in the i know also um before the after before and after the services we would play like christian hip-hop and gospel music in the lobby right so again as soon as you enter you're like oh this is not a typical typical white church we're because why we're because because the church is still majority white we want to be especially attuned to make sure that people that are not white feel welcome they are welcome but do they feel that way so again that's we're not that's not critical race theory that is just christian love that's all it is yeah god gave us wisdom that we could think of ways to do that to do the christian love thing without uh falling into the world view issues that are raised by critical race theory stuff yeah what else you got for me neil what else do you think is important to to say oh man there's so much one i'll say one last thing which is that um the other thing that critical race theory does and it's part of again critical theory more broadly um but it sees racism as part of a set of interlocking oppressions a system of interlocking oppressions um so that's a language from 1970 the kambahee river collective statement which is like a black feminist statement um but so it goes way back but the idea is that you can't extricate racism from sexism from heterosexism from classism from ableism from all these things and so actually you have that chart throughout that chart for me yeah let's see it's a very helpful illustration here of the way that this is a this is a this is a chart from adam's book teaching for diversity and social justice if you can see it it's called the matrix of oppression and it lists various oppressions racism sexism and transgender oppression heterosexism classism ableism religious oppression and ageism adultism and it lists different oppressed different categories race sex gender etc different dominant privileged oppressor groups and different targeted minoritized or oppressed groups and it goes through all those categories that's the way they see social reality and they're all interlocking and so they will say very explicitly that you can't just tackle racism without tackling sexism and a heterosexism um and that's that's important because uh when you begin to christians will often say well i'm gonna only adopt critical race theory with respect to race i'm not going to apply it to things like gender identity and sexuality i mean the bible speaks clearly about those things let's say then you can't really adopt critical race theory you can't because it will tell you you can't address one without addressing the other so i'll just hear some quotes again from ibrahmax candy he says things like anti-racist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anti-capitalism of policies and capitalism policies cannot eliminate class racism without anti-racism to be truly anti-racist is to be feminist to truly be feminist is to be anti-racist we cannot be anti-racist if we are homophobic or transphobic to be query anti-racist is to understand the privileges of my cisgender of my masculinity of my heterosexuality of their intersections so when people say things like i'm going to adopt critical race 3 but not with respect to these other categories because that's that race like have you read much critical history because they don't see oppression that way here's another quote from john calmer he writes uh and here this is great adherence of critical race theory see an interlocking set of oppressions that extend beyond the singular base of race and include the bases of gender economic class and sexual orientation so now we see there's just all these threads coming together under critical theory so the response to a christian teaching that homosexuality is a sin is that's actually um injustice this is this is it it's a type of racism with a different name for it but it's related to homosexuality right like actually i'm effectively a homophobe yes because i think that homosexual behavior not identity you have different discussion of that is is a sinful thing but not only that they will say there's actually quite a bit of literature talking about how sexual norms that are um you know say anti-homosexual norms homophobic norms are actually part of white supremacy so they will say that what defines gender is actually white women what defines sexuality is not not just men but white men white heterosexual men so it's also if you read bell hooks for example who's a black feminist so talk a lot about um how what we think of as uh the gender roles are actually racialized gender roles what we think of as sexuality is really heterosex white heterosexuality white sexuality so again to her it's interlocking you can't say well i'm going to keep the biblical teaching about sexuality and then accept critical race diagnosis of race they'll say no race and gender and sexuality are all intertwined they all emerge from what bell hooks calls like the the white cis hetero patriarchy i think it's just these these long phrases of like that white face i just imagine i just imagine being a college student and you're like but i thought and they go you're only saying that because of your white privilege and your white cis hetero pedagogy or whatever and then i just mentioned the student going i don't know but i know i'm a bad guy and i'm never talking again you know right yeah but the point is i just want to highlight you if you say i'm going to adopt crt but not this not this idea i'm like that this is very central to crt yeah um and she sorry it's the word i keep listening but yeah she has a whole phrase that she uses like 20 times in her book yeah so i white supremacist capitalist patriarchy it appears on in the book um everyday feminism uh okay uh feminism for everyone it appears on pages 4 5 34 40 44 45 46 51 71 73 82 and 110. not including variants like white supremacist patriarchy or patriarchal capitalism so yeah just illustrating that in her mind these are all connected and and and you can i'm sure people can think of examples personally of people who embraced this way of thinking they got woke first with respect to racial issues they got woke with respect to social justice and racial justice and then you begin to see them adopting and they're at first you're kind of like well yeah racism is obviously wrong we have a terrible racial history in our country i see the need for sure you know for for justice today i want to fix the inequalities we see today so i don't see a problem with embracing racial justice now we've got to be careful with that term there but the point is then you begin to see that the same thinking being applied to gender and sexuality and and and class and other issues and this was the link is that this way of thinking is cannot be confined to merely race my collaborator dr pat sawyer who has a phd in education and cultural studies he says that critical social theory this broad way of thinking it he we would both agree that's a world view not critical race theory this narrow discipline but you know this broad way of thinking is a world view because it answers big world view questions like who am i what is the primary problem in life how do i solve that problem right so that way of thinking he says it's it's hungry it wants to colonize i love that word he uses it he wants to colonize more and more of your intellectual territory it wants to occupy a larger and larger place in your thinking so when you say i'm going to give it sort of a foothold i'm going to give it a beach head in just this one area of race but it's inevitably it's naturally going to want more and more yeah so i adopt it because i i feel that racism is a real serious issue and i want to champion truth and justice so i adopt critical race theory because it presents itself as the solution to the problem but in the middle of that it reframes the problem in in in unbiblical ways that are inaccurate not entirely false but inaccurate and then because i've now reframed things i start to realize that frame changes the way i see everything it's like a pair of glasses it's like are these corrective lens lenses or are they are they distorting lenses and then i start viewing everything through that and in my view it's just obviously unbiblical obviously distorting actual justice this is why we have text in scripture about not not having partiality to the poor why on earth did god have this written in the text why is it it's not possible to be overly partial to the poor right the the inequities embedded in their poorness so until until they're not poor it's partial no no there's there's a biblical justice here this is why you don't um you don't answer the matter before you hear it this is why you need witnesses you need to prove things in court and anyway there's just a number of things this is why my core identity is in christ and not in my whiteness my blackness my sexual preferences or temptations or whatever you know that these things are all part of a similar worldview that has been propagated for quite a while now and people they don't realize they're absorbing the world view they think they're just fighting for justice yeah and then they end up with a new worldview a new lens for seeing things that inevitably pushes them into um switching evil for good in some cases in an attempt yeah to fight for justice yeah yeah i think when you said that critical race would get some things right i would say yeah but it gets things that are sort of superficially right but foundationally it's like that's where the incompatibilities are so when you know when people say are they compatible i'd say well no because they're the sort of superficial truths are compatible there has true insights there but if you look at the actual core of it no it's not and it's going to lead to destruction so what i would really urge people to do is i i people will tell me well i get accused of being a critical race theorist and all i'm doing is trying to work for actual justice biblical justice i'm trying to raise conscience about is actual racism that's all i'm trying to do and i i you know i'm not going to say you're no i i'll believe you okay fine if you really are just trying to give them a biblical perspective on actual history on actual racism you know and you're being accused unfairly of being a cultural marxist or a critical race theorist you know i'm sympathetic to that i know what happens here's my suggestion what if you were to explicitly denounce not just the label critical racer don't just say well i'm not a quick race theorist do the reading really understand these ideas so that you can explain to people why you reject not just the label but the actual idea say oh i reject the idea that racism is permanent pervasive and ever evolving and insidious and hidden behind objectivity and i reject that i reject the idea that our lived experiences are critical for understanding you know uh racism say or and really more more broadly that my lived experience has to be judged by scripture and objective evidence it's not it's not valueless like you can know things through your experience i can know that i had a protein bar for breakfast today my lived experience isn't the authoritative cannon of scripture that's right on how i'm going to you know interpret race issues yeah and and or anything and then more than that i can't dismiss another person's beliefs or claims because they're not the you know they're not person of color they're not a woman they're not no it's truth claims are evaluated independent of a race class gender whatever right the truth is truth regardless of who it comes from so but so so tell them i reject that called standpoint epistemology that says that uh my my knowledge is completely as conditioned by my social location i reject that i believe that scripture is sufficient then we can it's a perspicuous we can all people can understand scripture not not every detail of it necessarily but the great truth of the gospel yeah it's not i'm not blind to it because i'm a man i'm blind to it because i'm i'm a i'm a white person yeah so just but so my point is if you feel like you're being treated unfairly then what if you were to explicitly explain what you reject emphatically right and that might help people to see oh okay if he does reject all that stuff that i'm really worried about maybe i should listen more charitably to what he's saying about race and justice yeah and i think an iphone i guess that mike can go back within the first half hour we talked very extensively and honestly about race and racism and and i do that normally habitually and and few people call me a marxist some do okay on occasion but but but it's rare because and the thing is you guys should know like i asked neil because he was because i've seen to speak uh lectures where he talked about the issues of racism and history and and presently and he talked about them towards the end of the talk and i mean i know you've done it in both ways in different settings and i was just like i want to talk about that first because i think the people who are going to click on this video that this is one of our blind spots that we're going to have is that we're minimizing the problems what is what we're saying with critical race theory is it distorts what the problem it acknowledges a real problem distorts what the problem is and then offers solutions that are part of that same problem and um that's the real issue there but we've got to get that plank out of our eye where we're like well there is no ratio or something and no no now how systemic is it and where is it prevalent those are all where the discussions are going to be but um okay look if few questions for you neil if somebody wants to learn about this what's like one resource you would recommend number one if someone's like look i'm on your guy's side i just want to learn more about it what's one resource so primary source the best primary resource is a book robin d'angelo and oslin sensoi's book is everyone really equal sentoy and d'angelo's book is everyone really equal she is a critical racial and social justice educator that's her title um she's very popular that book very clearly outlines this this ideology applied not just to race but to gender sexuality physical ability etc um so that's a that's a very good um book on this whole ideology um i think another resource to give you the christian perspective um would be the booklet that pat sawyer and i wrote for ratio christie it's free it's a 20-page booklet it's not long should be pretty accessible it's free online i just it's called engaging critical theory and the social justice movement again totally free um from russian christie and that'll do would you recommend that also for somebody who let's say they're thinking my buddy's totally buying into this oh okay and i'm really worried about him is that the resource you'd recommend for that person or is there something else i think so yeah because um because it will there are there are zero books right now that i know people have asked me i wish i could recommend one um and pat and i are trying to write a full length book um slowly but well 20 page books actually possibly the best thing to give because boom here's here's a short it's not a massive investment but hopefully it's eye opening so give us the name of that again so engaging critical theory and the social justice movement it's free online you google it you'll find immediately or google shenvy and shenvi engaging you'll find that booklet um but it would be good i think because it's the only book that addresses this ideology i'd argue this world view from a biblical perspective and then but also it we have a whole section on the history of race and racism so we we talk about why it's attractive what does it get right and then also address why um how do you how do you engage people who are wholly bought into it so when you have christian friends or even non-christian friends who have uh deeply bought into this world view how do you show them that it's incompatible with christianity so we have a whole section on that so it'll be great great great because our commitment here and just a reminder to everybody as our commitment here is scripture right we're not trying to say here's the um politically conservative position um and here's how i'm going to try to defend it in the bible but but in all honesty i intend to cover more issues related to issues where our biblical worldview is overflowing onto the topics of politics and i'm gonna look at that way this is my biblical worldview it spills onto every area of my life it spills onto every issue so in the future i'll be covering more of these kinds of things on my channel um as i understand them i'm not going to go beyond my i can't answer every question but as i understand these topics i'm going to try and do that and say look let's let's start with a biblical commitment and then let's analyze our culture and the politics and all that through that commitment and this is the whole goal here i just keep reiterating it because i feel like i just see other stuff a lot where it feels like the commitment is um okay i've i'm i'm dug into my general commitment to a political side okay but i do think our biblical commitment pushes us onto political sides i think it very much pushes us we just have to make sure it's the it's the biblical commitment that pushes us and not with commitment to a side that's having me grab the bible and try to pull it over with me that's right yeah that's why i mean i i will fully admit to knowledge i'm politically conservative i'm not going to hide that but i always focus on the ideas and the ideology because what i always say is our theology should influence our politics but but but that's the order the theology comes first the theology overflows into the politics but if your theology is wrong i want to fix that first i want to fix your politics and your theology's messed up because it'll only just go back so i want to fix the theology so that's why i focus so much on these ideas that are so poisonous yeah yeah amen amen to that all right well if you guys want to follow up with neil um you could go to his website or give us the name of your website again and i will link it below if i haven't already i don't remember if i put it in the description my website is shenvyapologetics.com if you google neil shenvy v n-e-i-l-s-h-e-n-v-i you're going to find my website um and then my my twitter handle also i'm pretty active on twitter it's just at neil shenvy n-e-i-l-s-h-e-n-v-i so i'm on twitter way too much but you can find me there and you can stay abreast of whatever i'm reading and writing yeah great great and neil's doing lots of other people who want to try to get him as a guest speaker or like or you know interviews and stuff like that i'm not saying he'll say yes but but he's you've been doing you know the circuit and that's how i found it was seeing you interviewing other content that i respected but uh but i would caution you brother as someone who i've i think i've turned down seven interviews this week and i'm sure that you're getting probably an awful lot of requests right now so yeah don't feel obligated please please give me a break i don't do this yeah i'm kind of exhausted but yeah i mean i i definitely there's a big need well i'm the big need and i'm happy to try to speak to people and you know my dm's are open so if you have a pressing urgent need i i friday is my day off from the kids they their mother-in-law watches them their grandmother watches them so uh i'm free to answer hours and hours of personal emails but yeah yeah well you know take the time off you need man you know we have to have a sustainable pace not just a sprint right all right man well uh thank you so much neil for joining i'm gonna go ahead and all in the stream you guys god bless you i appreciate you taking the time to be part of of this stream and if this content has blessed and helped you share it with somebody else who needs it this is this is where our biblical commitments need to protect us from weird worldview things that are going on around us and man it's easy if you start with scripture so god bless you

Channel: Mike Winger

Views: 118,933

Rating: 4.8169656 out of 5

Keywords: Mike Winger, Christian view of politics, biblical politics, critical race theory, is critical race theory biblical, a biblical evaluation of CRT, a Christian view of wokeness, woke, wokeness, whiteness, social justice and the Bible, Christian wokeness, Neil Shenvi

Id: yHvJx-rBYKo

Length: 123min 50sec (7430 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MikiSayaka33]

Warning: The vid is lengthy. But this pastor is interviewing an SJW, who has the guts to show up and explain why he believes in CRT. Sidenote: I dunno if the pastor himself is an SJW (The comments are rather mixed).