I Just Can't Hear "Woke" As A Dismissive Criticism Without Hearing A Racist Speak

Your periodic reminder that Senator Kennedy is a graduate of Vanderbilt, the University of Virginia School of Law, and Magdalen College, Oxford. https://t.co/bO3vokBqhp

— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal) June 15, 2022

This isn't really about the Senator from Louisiana, it's about the Southern Baptist Convention.

Nonetheless, this year's election revolves around the charge that the SBC has become too liberal and is at risk of being overrun by "wokeism" and critical race theory (CRT). That charge has been lobbed with particular vehemence by conservative Florida SBC pastor Tom Ascol, the leading right-wing candidate for the convention's presidency. In an explanation of his candidacy earlier this year, Ascol declared that the SBC is "in danger of being derailed by the subtle infiltration of secularism and godless ideologies into our ranks." 

So God wants us to be racist and sexist?  

The substance of these charges dates back two years, to a complicated 2019 debate about the question of CRT — a debate which, notably, predated the broader Republican panic about the academic theory by more than a year. As Thiel College religious studies professor Daniel Eppley explains at Political Research Associates, in 2019 an SBC pastor in California proposed a resolution for that year's denominational gathering to condemn CRT. The pastor said he was motivated by concerns that too many SBC parents were sending their children off to college — even to Bible college — only to have them return talking about "white privilege." After lengthy debate, including intense pushback from some Black pastors concerned about racism in the denomination, the original resolution was revised into a compromise that pleased hardly anyone: CRT could be an acceptable tool for Christian scholars, the new text maintained, while warning that it could also be misused.  

Well, certainly we shouldn't learn about "white privilege."  God doesn't want that!

In 2020, as CRT became a national right-wing focus, the presidents of all six SBC seminaries released a statement condemning it as incompatible with the faith and warning seminary faculty not to teach it. Some Black pastors left the denomination in response, Eppley notes, and others threatened to do the same if the SBC passed a resolution condemning CRT. One pastor, Joel Bowman of Louisville, Kentucky, told the Washington Post at the time, "I can't sit by and continue to support or even loosely affiliate with an entity that is pitching its tent with white supremacy." 

I honestly wish I were making this up.

Now the issue has returned one more time with the candidacy of Ascol, who has called the 2019 resolution a "disaster" and argued that "Critical race theory and intersectionality are godless ideologies that are indebted to radical feminism and postmodernism and neo-Marxism." 

Basically, if I don't like it, God doesn't like it.  Christian humility means you should be humble before right-thinking Christian authorities.  Exept it doesn't mean that at all.

In a statement nominating the two men published on Founders Ministries, 11 SBC leaders outlined their reasoning in terminology that merged conservative theology and conservative politics: "While baptisms and evangelism continue their freefall, a small group of leaders steers our institutions ever closer to the culture, from radical feminism marked as 'soft complementarianism' to the false gospel of Critical Theory and Intersectionality. In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, we are all made one in him. But this 'Race Marxism' divides everyone by their most superficial features, in a never-ending cycle of recrimination and hate."

Again, I'm not making up that position, or exaggerating it. I'm not sure I can exaggerate more than they do themselves. 

As Smietana reported in 2021, Ascol's Founders Ministries featured Lindsay in a documentary inveighing against the supposed "liberal infiltration of the SBC" by ideas like CRT. In a promotional clip shared on Twitter, which intersperses footage of moderate SBC leaders with shots of burning buildings and street protests, Lindsay warns that the best way to "end Christianity" would be to "make 'em woke." This January, Lindsay went a step further, calling for the SBC to eject leaders who don't denounce CRT forcefully enough, saying on his podcast, "we really don't want to see our large religious institutions taken over by a totalitarian ideology that's trying to infect and command everything. We want to have something that can stand up against it." 

Please to note that what they want to "stand up against" is any idea that non-whites are equal to, and should be treated just like, whites.

America's hidden wound.  If you cannot confess it, if you cannot admit you are basing your identity on it, you cannot heal it; or be healed yourself.

One of the core tenets of Christianity, coming out of the Roman Catholic sacrament of confession but one held common to all Protestant churches, just like communion/the eucharist, was the need for confession.  I never attended a Southern Baptist church communion service, but I can't imagine it didn't include a confession of sins prior to the sharing of bread and grape juice (wine?  Are you kidding?).  Confession still requires atonement, and atonement literally requires "at-one-ment."  You cannot be at one with God or your brothers and sisters in Christ (or anyone else, for that matter) without confession.

So, even if you happen to be offering your gift at the altar and recall that your friend has some claim against you, leave your gift at the altar.  First go and be reconciled with your friend, and only then return and offer your gift. You should come to terms quickly with your opponent while you are both on the way (to court), or else you opponent will hand you over to the judge, and the judge (will turn you over) to the bailiff, and you are thrown in jail.  I swear to you, you'll never get of there until you've paid the last dime.

Matthew 5:23-26, SV

And how do you pay that dime, if you are in jail?  The picture Jesus paints there is the picture of the system of judgment which will prevail against you (even though you think you are the "good guy" who will receive justice.  Yes, you'll recieve justice; that's what the parable is about), and never let you go. Elsewhere he says "Don't judge, and you won't be judged."  It's a simple concept:  to sit in judgment is to place yourself under judgment.  Stay out of the system, there's no risk you wind up in jail until you've paid the last dime.  And don't try to reconcile with God, until you've reconciled with your friend.

Unless, of course, your friend has screwy political or social ideas; then he's "woke" and God rejects him, too.  Right?

Rather than judge, I'll just say:  yeah, I don't think so.

As for the Senator from Louisiana; well, now you know who he's talking to.