Some of you have noticed that within conservative evangelicalism--particularly in the last year--the same words are used in preaching but the meanings don't feel quite right or the same. Things may have been ho-hum, but then suddenly, the atmosphere changed within your church, your denomination, your seminaries.
Others who are more involved in their denomination's conferences and events see that the ground has shifted, and not for the better. Things are more hostile, divisive.
The ones on the front lines know what it is. The virus that has infected evangelicalism is the ideology called Critical Theory. It goes by a host of names: Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, social justice, wokeness, etc. And infect is the right word. It is virulent and contagious. It starts small within a church or denomination, and then replicates itself in the minds of the community using the medium of guilt, envy, and the signal of virtue to transfer to its next host.
I recall a debate between Daniel Dennett and Alistair McGrath at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary back in 2003 or 2004. Daniel Dennett spent a lot of time discussing how memes (or ideas in the human mind) seemingly evolve like biological life as it reproduces in the minds of other people. The impetus of the argument rested in an analogy: ideas are like living things who have a desire within themselves to pass its legacy to the next generation. He even intimated that memes are evidence of biological evolution.
I remember walking away from that debate thinking two things. First, it's a crazy idea to think memes seek to replicate themselves. Second, on an unrelated topic, he did more to demonstrate intelligent design because memes require an intelligent host to exist.
Critical Theory, particularly Critical Race Theory, is the best proof that Dennett might just be right. So may have been Carl Jung: "People don't have ideas. Ideas have people."
It has been brewing in academia for decades, but in the last 10 years, the adoption of various sorts of critical theories (Race, Gender, Queer, Fat, even Nutritional) in public schools, private schools, universities, workplaces, and churches has exploded. It is everywhere. The media. Government. Professional sports. Corporations. Churches. Your local pizza joint.
"First slowly, then all at once" is what if feels like. That's how exponential reproduction works, and Critical Theory has been busy creating a mass of zombie hosts in search of the next casualty. The zombies are everywhere now--including your conservative denomination.
My denomination, the SBC, has been in the throes of controversy over CRT (Critical Race Theory) for the better part of 5 years. But the fight, if you can call it a fight, has been within its seminaries for the most part. In 2019, the annual convention passed "Resolution 9", which has a very alarming story behind it. Despite the controversy, most only those who were in ministry and denominationally active knew what was going on. The laity and pastors who focused on their own churches hadn't even heard of CRT a year ago. But the last year and a half has changed that.
First slowly, then all at once.
Voddie Baucham--a black Baptist preacher--has been sounding the alarm specifically on Critical Theory since Obama's first campaign. No one within the SBC listened. However, events of the last year, like J. D. Greear's prostrating before every wind of social justice doctrine, David Platt's apologizing for his own sin of whiteness, Tim Keller's thinking that biblical Hebrew had a contemporary concept of social justice, among countless others has finally awakened the concerns of many laity within the denomination.
Baucham's book is a solid first step for the coalescing "the concerned" in the denomination into a movement against the deceptive, insidious tactics of the social justice crowd in the SBC. But it is also informative for anyone facing CRT in their own workplace, church, academic setting, or denomination.
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