Has Critical Race Theory Been Taught at SEBTS?

The Conversations That Matter podcast, my name is John Harris, it is a beautiful spring day here in southern

Virginia. Fall has a peak, but I hadn't really thought of this yet.

Spring has a peak as well. I guess that's obvious, right? Spring has a peak. There's a certain time when flowers are in bloom and everything's just, the bugs aren't you know zipping around yet because summer hasn't really started, but it's still warm so you can wear a t -shirt.

The breeze is just great. It's kind of dry, it's clear, it's not humid and muggy. It's perfect. It's just, it's amazing.

I think we're just past that peak right now here. The dogwood trees and the cherry blossoms were kind of at full peak last week and now they're kind of becoming green, but still beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

So if you hear anything, it's because I got my windows open and I can feel the breeze and hear what's going on outside with the birds and someone who was doing some,

I think, some pesticide spraying or something at the neighbors. But anyway, here is,

I want to show you this. Here is a mug that someone made me, Conversations That Matter 2020. Actually they made me two.

They're supporters obviously of the podcast. They just sent these to me, Conversations That Matter 2020, two different styles.

And I wanted to give them a plug since they did such fine work and I'm obviously using the mugs that they sent me.

So if you go to, and I'll show you here, Instagram, I'm going to put the link in the info section, claypotcandles on Instagram, and you can see some of the other work that Susan Payne, it is public online, so I guess

I can say the name, that Susan Payne does. And I think she sells some of it if I'm not mistaken, so you may want to check that out.

Anyway, thank you for that. If you're listening, Susan, I appreciate it and I am using them.

Today, I want to, I don't really want to, but I'm going to, we're going to talk about Southeastern again.

Some of you are getting tired of it. Trust me, you're not getting as tired of it as I'm getting tired of it. I'm like done with it.

But things keep coming out and I think it's important, especially because the

Southern Baptist Convention meets in June. And for those, I know I have a large contingent in the audience who are

Southern Baptists or who care about the Southern Baptist Convention, it's important to, if you're a messenger especially, when you go to Nashville this

June, to understand what exactly is going on. We had, last week was just a bad week.

Actually, the last two weeks have been really bad for Southeastern. First, you had the video of Danny Akin from 2018 that no one had watched, but all of a sudden, someone had found it and re, well, breathed some life into it, shall we say.

And you had James Lindsay and Babylon Bee posting it, where Danny Akin's essentially saying, he's the president of the seminary, that it's incumbent on white people to give up power.

And of course, he's still the president. And that minorities just see the world through such a different lens.

It's just so different. And you can't understand it unless you just got to sit and listen and then redistribute your power somehow.

So that happened. And then, I'm not even going to remember all of it. Then, oh, then ACSI, the

Christian School Accreditation Organization, was hiring or using

UnifyEd, which is Walter Strickland's group, to do diversity training. And so I looked into that.

Capstone Report looked into that. Even Founders Ministry started looking into that a little bit. And all kinds of concerns about it.

And so I gave you a little bit of a deeper dive on Walter Strickland. I will say this.

I left out something, though. There's probably a lot of things I left out. But one of the key things that I probably could have included, but it would have been so much longer, is his dissertation from 2017.

And if you read it, he actually uses critical race theory sources in his dissertation.

And I haven't read the whole thing, but I skimmed through some of it.

And he's saying that MLK is an Orthodox Christian. I mean, there's some things in that that are very questionable, to say the least.

A lot of it is more descriptive, like a dissertation should be, than prescriptive. But there's definitely some things where he just kind of lets the cat out of the bag.

Here's my opinion on things. And so anyway, just throwing that out there. There's actually a lot more research that can be done on some of these people.

But we don't all have time to just go researching the false teachings or dangerous beliefs of people teaching in our evangelical denominations.

And there's so many of them that you can't keep up with all of it. But we did a little bit of a deep dive into Walter Strickland, showed that he has an inadequate gospel, at least on certain occasions, he's preached an inadequate gospel.

And that's being very charitable, actually. It's a false gospel. That's what

I think Paul would have said about it. And so we looked at that.

We looked at, and then Scott Crawford, a student from Southeastern last week, came out on Friday with his whistleblowing video and then a whole montage showing from 2018 to 2021, all kinds of very problematic beliefs at the school.

And I went through it step by step, paused it, took about an hour and a half and said, basically explained, interpreted what's going on.

And it just hasn't been good for Southeastern lately. Well, something else just happened.

A student at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, former student, not a student now, but former student at the

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has come out. And this was to be kind of expected in a way because once you get the ball rolling and you start talking about some of these things, other people are going to come forward with their stories.

They're going to feel more encouraged to do that. And I do encourage that. I've actually received some interesting emails from people who haven't come forward publicly, but have some interesting, very concerning stories that have not made the light of day yet.

But the question is, and this is, by the way, this is the wrong question. I'm going to say that up front.

My title of the video is the wrong question. Is SCBTS teaching critical race theory? That's the question that so many people want to know.

Are they teaching critical race theory? And there's some merit to that, but it's not the most important question.

I think it's the wrong question. I think the question that should be asked is, are they being faithful to biblical teaching, historic

Christianity? That's the question that should be asked. Not, are they teaching critical race theory?

Because I'll tell you what happens with this, because Crew's going through the same thing right now, and maybe

I'll talk about that later. Crew, they pumped in so much radical stuff, especially through their

Lenz's Institute. Then when they're called on the carpet for it, we're not doing any critical race theory here.

Then defining critical race theory so narrowly or so broadly to try to, it can be anything.

I mean, look, just being concerned about racism can be critical race theory, or being the most radical critical race theory as possible.

That's also critical race theory. It's this wide spectrum that you can never define it, or it's so narrow that your definition always falls short.

That's the strategy that's being employed by a lot of evangelical organizations who have pumped this stuff in and now are saying, well, we don't have it anymore, because they're obsessing over the term critical race theory.

I've said, actually, from the beginning of this, I've tried to use the term social justice, more broadly speaking.

Even that term, they can try to do games with that. I've tried to be as, to number one, hold institutions and individuals teaching at them to more of an orthodox standard.

Are you falling short of this? That should be the question that we're asking. Not, did you do this one bad thing and then try to justify or blame something else, someone else, something else for whatever happened, blame shift.

That's what happens when you start to do that. It reminds me of the way that I try to approach entertainment.

Instead of asking, well, is it wrong? There's only one scene in it. You can justify that. You can try to minimize, oh, it's only one questionable scene, or there's only a little language.

Instead, I try to ask myself, does it conform to Philippians 4 .8? Is there a positive affirmative standard that you can say, this is good for me?

I should be thinking about these things. If you can do that, then you're much more confident.

Would you watch it? Would you be entertained by it if Jesus was with you? More of affirming standard. I think that's what we should be doing, broadly speaking, when it comes to institutions that are not being faithful, or professors teaching at those institutions.

Are they matching historic orthodox Christianity? This is the question they want to ask.

Are you teaching critical race theory? Because then, again, they can try to minimize it. They can justify it. Danny Akin's done this.

We're just teaching it so you know what the false errors are. No, that's not what you're doing.

That's totally not. You're teaching it in a positive way. So many of the ideas, like liberation theology is the one

I'm specifically thinking of. When it comes to critical race theory, this is the question that they want you to ask.

They want you to ask this question, and only this question, because then they can minimize. They can distort.

They can do a smoke and mirrors thing. We weren't really teaching orthodox critical race theory, or whatever that is.

We were just teaching it for this reason. It wasn't in a positive way.

They play all sorts of games. I think you can ask this question, and it should be asked, but only under the bullet point of, in the broader category of, are they being faithful to orthodox

Christian teaching? We've already seen. I've given you the history already. They're not. At least, in many instances, they're not.

That's how we approach this conversation. We've already determined that there's a problem there, big problems, actually.

This is now just one sub -point. We're going to ask the question. We're going to answer the question.

We're going to go through it. We're going to start here. We're going to be focusing on one professor.

We could probably focus on others. We're going to focus on Matt Mullins, though. Here's what happened.

I'm going to show you the... Here's the post, if I can pull it up here.

Hold on. For those watching, you're going to want to see this. Let's see if I can minimize this screen.

What we'll do is we'll take that away. There we go. Here we go.

This is the screen I want you to see. This is Andrew Daniel, who has two degrees from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

His wife, I believe, has one. He posted this. He also messaged me, though.

I'm sure I'm not the only one he messaged. He said that this was very much... Someone he knows closely,

I guess, was in this course. They have the syllabus for it. Critical Race Theory was taught his assertion in a very positive way.

This wasn't, you know, beware of this. This was, hey, this is useful. This is good. It underlayed the whole entire course.

I'm going to show you what he publicly posted and read some of that for you. That's what he privately sent me.

I'm going to show you publicly what he put there. Then we're going to go through some things about Matt Mullins, who's the professor for this.

We're going to examine his syllabus a little bit. I'll remind you, because he came up in the montage,

I'll remind you of the parts, what he said in the montage that Scott Crawford released last week.

Then I'll show you some clips from an article, some snippets from an article he wrote in 2019 on Critical Race Theory.

First things first, Andrew Daniel says, Critical Race Theory has been taught at SCBTS for years.

It is a guy who has two degrees from there. It's not just some Joe, you know, saying it. This is a guy who has two degrees from SCBTS, and I believe has a degree from Oxford, if I'm not mistaken.

Here is but one example from an undergraduate English class in spring 2015. This course helped radicalize at least one student in the class.

What we are seeing now from SCBTS is the consequence of a metastasized cancer.

And of course, I reacted by saying, wow. Here's the comment section, it's all public. And so he said, here,

Bill Roach, who's a former, he used to teach at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. So this is a former adjunct professor.

He posts, there is no excuse for allowing this material to be taught at SCBTS. I'm thankful you made it known.

There's a former adjunct professor saying, I'm thankful you made it known. This is interesting. So this is what he has there publicly.

And this is the syllabus, I'm gonna show you that. Oh, I wanted to make one comment about this, the radicalized student.

The Capstone Report also put out an article on this. And they're reporting that this student, because they must have talked to the whistleblower here a little more.

The student, I guess, was a campaign for Hillary Clinton and got into some radical Democrat pro -abortion stuff.

That's the claim, at least. And my comment that I wanted to say about this is,

I've said this before, the woke church is the last step.

It's an off -ramp is what it is, actually. It's the last step before someone leaves Christianity, for many.

It's an off -ramp from Christianity. And you think about it, that has to be true. Because if you're teaching that the church, included in broader

American and Western culture, is this racist, sexist, homophobic institution. And it's not until about five seconds ago, till we had critical theory, that we all of a sudden understand all this.

And we're gonna correct all of it. But there's this long history of horrible things, and the church is responsible. Who wants to be part of that?

That's like saying, hey, come join the Klan, because we've reformed our ways in the last five years.

Well, why would anyone want to do that? Go join an organization that doesn't have that baggage, right?

And that's, I think, part of the problem with importing this stuff. You're just teaching children.

You look at the mainline denominations and what happened. It was a generation or two, and then kids and grandkids that don't believe it anymore, they leave.

You just told them that the Bible wasn't really true. But it's so important. Yeah, but it's not true. Why would we come?

Well, you're telling us that Christianity, that Christians for hundreds of years are just immoral.

And they're the cause, actually, the driving cause of the problems that we're encountering now in 2021.

Why would we want to be part of that? And that's what you're doing. And so it'd be interesting to see the children of some of these professors and their grandchildren and what they end up doing.

Do they walk away from the faith? Does their faith even look like Orthodox Christianity? Now, here's some of the facts.

Let's get into what Matt Mullins actually put in this syllabus from 2015.

It's not ancient history, but this professor is still teaching at the institution. And I'm gonna blow this up so everyone can see it a little better.

You may not be able, I'm gonna post this on Patreon. So if you are on Patreon and you're a supporter there, you'll be able to see all this.

I believe if you go to Capstone Report, you can get a link to the syllabus as well. So essentially, it's an

English course, English 3750. Title is Multi -Ethnic

Literature of the United States. Multi -Ethnic Literatures of the United States. It's a little bit of an interesting title in my opinion, but I grew up with going to college in my undergrad years, and you had your social studies courses, cross -cultural kind of, they usually use the word culture.

But anyway, I digress. Course description. Who owns race is the first question.

Who owns it? Well, the obvious answer to that is God. God owns race, right? What is ethnicity?

Are these terms interchangeable? How does identity markers help hinder our ability to communicate? Et cetera. By the way, race and ethnicity were not so inseparable at one time.

This is, you know, when you look at like Darwinism, scientific racism, and the way that the term race started getting corrupted and reduced down to genetic determinism, that's kind of what critical race theorists in some sense are reacting to.

It's a postmodern reaction against an idea from a modernist framework more.

But anyway, they want to go back and say, well, race is a social construct, as if, you know, it got corrupted, and we're going back to the more of a pure understanding of what race is.

But the actual, if we're going to talk about like genos, you know, the Greek word that is used in the

Bible, if we're going to talk about examples, even from the Old Testament of cultures, race, that whole sort of category, what we're going to see actually is something that is way more organic.

And that's how this needs to be looked at. What you'll find, you're going to find some false dichotomies along the way here.

And I want you to be aware of this. Critical race theorists want you to either pick one of two options, right?

And they obviously want you to pick their option. But race is either genetic, genetically determined, wrong answer, alt -right

Nazi, right? Or it's a social construction. And that's the right answer. That's what they want you to pick.

There's an option they're kind of neglecting though. And this is the horns of the dilemma that I think they need to be on.

Is race organic or is race artificial? That's what they need to be asked because they are oversimplifying.

They say that race is so complex, and they're trying to acknowledge that complexity. What they're actually doing though, in getting you on the horns of that dilemma, is they're actually oversimplifying it.

Because the term race, if you think it originated in the middle ages, like many critical race theorists, that's what they preach, was used for hundreds of years.

And it was a term to designate social categories, power relationships.

It was used to oppress people. And when genetic determinism started, proto -Darwinist and then

Darwin, and they would reduce everything down to, your decisions are because of your genetic makeup.

That was also within this framework of power relationships. It also fit within this, well, culture is now trying to designate people as inferior or superior based on their genetic factors.

Now, I'm wearing a shirt. I'm wearing a shirt that says Resend Resolution 9, which by the way, you can get in the info section.

There's a link for it. Be fun if you're Southern Baptist, go to Nashville with the Resend Resolution 9 shirt, but it is green.

And here's the question, why am I wearing this Resend Resolution 9 shirt? The reason I'm wearing it is not because I'm a white man and I've got certain genetics and they just made me pick that shirt.

I mean, that's scientific determinism, genetic determinism. And that's a view that some people did hold at one point, that everything's determined by genetics and chemical relationships, laws of physics, these kinds of things.

Honestly though, the reason I'm wearing this shirt has a lot to do with millions of decisions, most of which

I was not a part of. Ultimately, I made the determination to put this shirt on today, but you think about all the factors that could have gone into this.

There could be some genetic factors. Some people, hey, that's not your color. That is your color.

You have blue eyes, you should wear a blue shirt. You have green eyes, green shirt's better. So there are some factors that can go into, obviously, style that are genetic with someone.

Haircuts, obviously, there's a lot of things that can be, that your genetics, whether or not you have a larger forehead, a smaller forehead, those kinds of things can affect the way that you construct your appearance.

However, there's a lot of other factors. There's taste that is involved in this. And maybe I like a green shirt because,

I don't know, I associate it with something. Maybe it's because it looks kind of military. Well, why did the military pick green shirts?

Well, it fits in with the environment that they're gonna be in for camouflage. Oh, well, who made that decision?

Well, now we're looking at environmental factors that determined why the military would have picked that. And now I'm, after that determination was made a long time ago,

I'm looking at it and seeing, well, I associate that with the military and I wanna have a green shirt, right? A lot of things can affect this.

It's a nice day outside. Short sleeves feel good. Certain colors are going to be warmer or cooler.

I don't wanna beat the dead horse, but hopefully you're getting the point that there's a lot of things that go into just something as simple as a green shirt.

And we don't think about them all, but that's organic. That is over time decisions being made and taste and what's available.

I mean, think of cuisine this way. I mean, if you're living near the ocean, you're probably gonna have more fish in your cuisine and shellfish and shrimp and things like that.

If you're inland, maybe more beef and game that's inland. And this is just the way that things progress.

Different spices that are available, different cultures develop different cuisines by experimenting over time and saying, oh, this tastes good together.

And then they have a dish. You all know this, but you probably haven't thought about it in relationship to critical race theory.

Critical race theory wants to take race and then make it this artificial social construction that you can now using intersectionality, you can flip the script, you can reverse.

So it's always been that white people are up here and all these other races, they stack differently on this intersectional framework that also gets more complex when you add other things to the equation like orientation and gender, et cetera.

In some ways, this is this artificial understanding of just that there's these boxes and it's up to people groups or people elites to construct hegemonies by which to oppress people.

There's the Marxist coming in, Marxism. This is a very artificial understanding.

It doesn't take into account all these decisions that have nothing to do with anyone trying to oppress anyone or constructing a hegemony or anything like that.

It's just, it's the way the term race was used for hundreds of years. That's a people group. They're a little different over there.

Especially at a time pre -industrial when people were more locked into their local areas and their local customs and accents and all those kinds of things, attachments to the land.

Today, those things are being broken up. And so this is, I think that's one of the reasons you have something like critical race theory is because we don't think about those things quite as much.

People that look differently are moving around all over the place, speaking different languages that aren't associated with maybe the languages their grandparents would have spoken.

There's just a lot of global interaction. And so in some ways,

I think that has at least opened the lane for something like a critical race theory to get off the ground with these assumptions that, well, it's not those factors, it's just power relationships.

And that's how this whole thing is always broken down. And the simple solution to that is if it's all artificial, then you can, and there's problems associated with it, you just correct it by doing something artificial.

So create your own hierarchy. And we're gonna have to implement a new hegemony, right? Because the old one is bad.

And this is the way that Christians, especially at the Gospel Coalition, people affected by a more

Neo -Cyperian understanding, by way of Richard Mao, this is how they already thought of culture, that you can just manufacture it.

So like you have the culture here, churches out here looking in. And the church is going to influence the culture by producing certain things.

And they're gonna manufacture, they're gonna artificially kind of, as part of their evangelistic tasks, they're broadening the evangelistic task to doing all these cultural things.

Instead of seeing themselves as in culture, the church is embedded in a culture, like a church at Ephesus or the church at Rome.

And they also have a heavenly allegiance. They're also part of the heavenly church. There's a dual citizenship there.

So instead of, they don't necessarily always see themselves quite like that organically, even bringing in some of the customs of the culture around them.

Their church buildings are gonna adopt some of those customs. And they're gonna in turn affect the culture around them as well.

But the relationship is not like this. It's very organic. I don't know how else to say it.

It just, it grows together over time. And that's what accounts for differences.

So critical race theorists wanna get you on the horns of this dilemma. And I know I waxed long about that, but I think you need to understand at least that tactic.

So when you see it, you can identify it. And then you can get them on the horns of their own dilemma by asking them, is it artificial or is it organic?

How does race develop over time? Is it something that can then, society can just change the power relationship somehow by calibrating it differently and getting all the institutions to circle the wagons?

Is that going to take care of all the disparities and all the power relationship issues that you're saying that exist?

Or are some of those things actually, some of those disparities that you complain about, could they be the result of other things that are more organic?

For instance, even COVID, you know why African -Americans or just people with darker pigmentation in general.

I was listening to a lecture the other day about this, about COVID. And they had, they struggled with it a little more because of a vitamin

D deficiency, apparently. And so that's due to diet, that's due to a lot of different factors.

But it's not like, you know, they're being oppressed and that disparity exists because there's an oppression of some kind.

So the assumption from critical race theorists or people affected by that is that anytime there's a disparity, it's a social problem that we can artificially fix.

No, you can't artificially just, unless you're gonna present vitamin

D supplements or change diets or something like that. But that's all, that's culture. That happens organically.

So that's where not a lot of work has been done on this, if any. I think, you know, this is all original stuff in my head.

I'm sure someone else has thought of this too, but I'm just coming at this saying like, this is what I'm seeing. This is the deficiency

I see in critical race theory. One of the big ones at least is it's just, it's too simplistic.

And you see that reflected in getting back to the topic at hand here in Matt Mullen's syllabus that we are going over here.

So who owns race? What is ethnicity? Are these terms interchangeable?

How does such identity markers help hinder our ability to communicate? We will engage the interdisciplinary fields of critical race theory, whiteness studies, whiteness studies, yeah.

And ethnic studies to consider how these theoretical frameworks might add dimensions to our reading of literature and to examine how literature might redirect, revise, or reinforce these theoretical approaches.

I'm reading for you the highlights that stood out to me in this syllabus. He says here, there are vast cultural, economic, educational, and other differences between groups that often fall along the lines of race and ethnicity.

Since we know that we are all image bearers, regardless of race, ethnicity, and nation, what accounts for these differences?

Well, guys, it's not rocket science. There's a lot of varied things that account for these differences and they're obvious things.

Why does your next door neighbor have so many differences the way their family runs from your family? More specifically, the syllabus says, what implications do these differences have for the spread of the gospel and fulfillment of the

Great Commission? You can't make this up. I mean, what implications do they have?

Well, if they have a different language, you got to learn that language. If they have customs that, you know, sitting on a bed is offensive to them or something, don't sit on their bed.

You know, those are the kinds of things that are helpful when you're trying to do missions work or evangelism is, hey, if you don't have knowledge of a particular people group and they have certain customs, you don't want to unnecessarily offend them if you're trying to preach the gospel to them, right?

This is very Pauline. This is where you're gonna offend them, but you just don't want it to be unnecessary.

So that's pretty much it. But that's not what this course is about. This course is about much more. They're using critical race theory, whiteness studies and ethnic studies to consider how theoretical frameworks might add dimensions to our...

So we're taking these analytical tools, guys. This is resolution nine. It was already happening. We're gonna take the analytical tools from these pagan ideologies that get it wrong, that think, you know, race is just a social construction.

And we're going to then use that somehow to fulfill the Great Commission. Now, here's some of the sources that jumped out at me.

Most of these are just non... They're fictional works in literature. Some of them have some racy stuff, by the way.

And so I think if you go to the Capstone article, I think some of that is talked about, but I'm gonna focus on the critical race theory stuff.

Richard Delgado, his book, Critical Race Theory and Introduction, is a required textbook for the course.

Now you could say, okay, you know, if you're in a class that's talking about Mormonism, aren't you gonna want to read the

Book of Mormon at some point? And the answer to that question would be, yes, you're gonna wanna do that. But you're not gonna be teaching it in a positive way.

You're not gonna say, well, we're gonna look at the insights we can get from the Book of Mormon to know how we better can share the gospel unless it's looking for the errors and understanding how

Mormons think so that you can push sort of the antithesis. Here's what scripture says and here's how you're contradicting it.

But getting positive insights to just affect the way that we think, you wouldn't be doing that.

You wouldn't be doing that with the Quran. Yeah, there's some truth here, some general truth.

And we can take that truth and then we can just apply it to the way that we view ethics or whatever you wanna say.

We don't really do that. But we do do it, at least some institutions like Southeastern have been doing it when it comes to critical race theory.

Some other authors that stood out to me, here's some two other books, Toni Morrison, Playing in the

Dark and Richard Wright, Native Son. Now, the reason that these stood out to me when

I was looking at this was because Playing in the Dark, doesn't have listed the subtitle, but it's whiteness and the literary imagination.

Whiteness and the literary imagination. Toni Morrison though, apparently, so I looked her up,

I'm like, who is this person? Cause it sounds very, critical race theory infused. And she's a raging leftist.

In fact, if you go to keywiki .org, which is organization that just catalogs

Marxists. It's just like a library of Marxists. Toni Morrison has a page there and she's been involved with some radical stuff.

Definitely some more socialist sympathies. She was part of Bill de

Blasio, mayor of New York, closed door meetings to create a progressive version of the contract with America.

Anyway, you can go through all that, but long story short, with her, not exactly a

Christian voice, to say the least, which is funny, not to read Christians, right? But not, she would believe the opposite of probably what most of the people at Southeastern, at least say they believe when they sign their statement of faith.

She would be very pro abortion. Anyway, so Playing in the

Dark, this book is, I'm gonna read for you. This is Wendy Steiner, New York Times, 1992 said,

The moral and emotional force of Morrison's explorations is apparent if the American identity is formed against this black shadow.

It is a sign of abject weakness and a cause for shame. The genius of Ms. Morrison's approach is to enlist various describers and imaginers, white men of letters, in an investigation that can end only in their self -indictment.

Okay, not liking the white men here. Steiner added, It is also not a mere denunciation of white culture.

Instead, it is a self -help project meant both to map out new critical territory and to rearrange the territory within.

And of course, she has also endorsed various books, including a book on critical race theory.

That is Toni Morrison. So I think it's safe to say this is someone very affected and I would feel safe saying she is a popular level critical race theorist.

Richard Wright apparently was a member of the Communist Party. So there's that as well.

He's got his own key wiki entry as well. So these are some of the required textbooks for this course.

And it just, I mean, again, the distinction that we have to keep in mind is it's okay to read stuff that's,

I mean, you should be reading the Communist Manifesto if you're going through a history of ideas course, right? But it shouldn't be taught to you in a positive way.

It shouldn't be, if you're going to at least a Christian institution, it shouldn't be like, well, there's some really great insights in this that we can all just learn from.

We're gonna construct a whole course that gives us this framework so that it can really help our evangelism if we just really apply the principles from the

Communist Manifesto. That'd be weird. That'd be wrong. And that's the distinction that we have to keep in mind because this is not a course critical of critical race theory.

That's not what you're finding here. This is a course that is using critical race theory and whiteness studies, et cetera, as theoretical frameworks to add dimensions to understandings of literature.

And that affects the fulfillment somehow of the Great Commission. Student learning outcomes.

One of them, recognize ways in which literature reinforces and resists. Well, actually, I'll start from the beginning.

Identify, point one, identify their own assumptions about how race and ethnicity are defined.

So it's very important to define race and ethnicity. And you're looking at all these critical theory sources to do so.

I mean, look, I don't know. I wasn't there for the course, but scripture's pretty sufficient,

I think, on this. I think you can... And then it's just a matter of translating those concepts into our language.

But even our language, those terms aren't really that hard. Race, people groups, at least historically, they haven't been.

They shouldn't be. Ethnicity. Ethnic group has carried on more of a genetic kind of composition to it,

I guess, as of late. But ethnicity, the word ethnos, again, you're talking about groups of people.

But they're very obsessed, critical race theorists, with defining these terms and defining them differently and using race as a way to problematize certain...

The hegemony. It's cultural Marxism, the way that they use it. Number two, learning outcome. Recognize ways in which literature reinforces and resists these assumptions.

Well, the literature that is being recommended here, all of them, are from a leftward perspective, pretty much.

They're fictional accounts too, which is kind of unusual. Some of them are based on some things that might not be fiction, but they're all fictional.

And so you're looking at you're examining literature and how it reinforces or resists these assumptions about race and ethnicity.

You can already see in that the critical theory that can underpin all of this, that there's this hegemony and that you have now the textbooks, the recommended texts of the brave sources that are resisting that hegemony and forging their own path for what race actually is.

And we should listen to them and get insights from them. Some helpful library resources.

I didn't look at all of these, but this is in the, again, in the course syllabus from Matt Mullins, Lawrence Hogue, Postmodern American Literature and its other, and its other.

I mean, talk about Foucault and just laying with the other coming up there.

And I was like, you know, I didn't do a lot of research on it because I didn't think it was necessarily necessary, but I'll just show you just a little glimpse of this book.

But also you see Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies.

These are the things he's saying, look, these are helpful library resources to get you started. You're looking through all these things and you're like, where?

I don't know. I mean, there's not, it looks like it's all kind of leftist stuff here. And the thing is, there are sources you can go to that would be,

I think, more on the right. You could, you know, Intellectuals Unraced by Thomas Sowell. You could, you know, even some of Russell Kirk or Richard Weaver's stuff or Richard Weaver, you know,

I think in Ideas Have Consequences even. Well, he's talking more in that book about the way society, the way ideas are permeating society and changing

Western culture. But I don't know. There just doesn't even seem to be an attempt here to find sources that would disagree with a critical race theorist, post -modernist, neo -Marxist kind of agenda.

Now, here's, I just, this is for example, this is the Lawrence Hogue book that he recommends.

You go to Lawrence Hogue's, I think that's how you pronounce it, his professorship page where he gives his biography.

It says, W. Lawrence Hogue received his PhD in modern thought and literature from Stanford University with an emphasis on 20th century

American literature, U .S. minority literature and critical theory. He's one of the first critics to raise questions about literary production and representation and canon formation in African -American literature, et cetera, et cetera.

You go to, here's the contents of the book that Matt Mullins recommends. Post -modern American literature and its other, the

Euro -American male, woman and African -American and American Indian, the poor and the global periphery.

The privileged, sovereign, Euro -American male, post -modern subject and its construction of the other, construction, constructing women as subject, signifying planetary post -modernity.

Yeah, I mean, look, if you're gonna read this, okay, but it's gonna have to be with the understanding of we're debunking this.

That's what we're doing. This is a bad book. You go to the back of the book and this is what it says on it.

Talks about post -modernism being defined in different ways by different people, but it's been often failed to, there's been an adequate representation of African -Americans that's been failed.

In other words, defining post -modernism is also a problem, literary post -modernism, because all these white people, male, other white male authors, there it is.

And you need African -Americans, American Indians, Latinos and Latinas, women, the poor of the center and the global periphery in order to understand even post -modernism.

In this groundbreaking study, Lawrence Hogue exposes the ways in which much post -modern American literature privileges a typical

Eurocentric male -oriented type of subjectivity, often at the expense of victimizing or objectifying the ethnic or gendered other.

Dude, dude, dude, dude, you are so post -modern. It's just, all right.

So in contrast to the dominant white male perspective on post -modernism, Hogue points to African -Americans. So look, it's white guys that honestly came up with post -modernism.

And I'm not taking any credit for that because I didn't come up with it. And I wish that, and I'm not a critical race theorist, so I don't take the credit for horrible things or even good things that quote unquote people that had similar genetics to me necessarily did.

I mean, that's why, but it's just obvious. That's why it's white people that have mostly written on post -modernism.

They're the ones that came up with it. So it's fine, but he's acting like it's such a big problem. And that's the book that Matt Mullins is recommending, recommending people read.

So this, I think it's fair to say critical race theory is being taught at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary or has been taught.

And here's a professor, Matt Mullins, and here's what he wrote. It is in 2019. He wrote a five -part series, Critical Race Theory Un -Christian.

I should say is critical race theory un -Christian. I'm gonna read for you some of this. I first encountered critical race theory while in grad school, he says.

Critical race theory became an interdisciplinary field of study. It's captivated scholars. Anyone interested in how race has shaped their field will find it fascinating of how race works.

He says, when I took my job at Southeastern in 2012 or wherever that was, evangelical institution,

I left a scholarly world where at least some people knew something about it and entered one in which very few had heard the term.

He says, imagine my surprise then when several Southern Baptist institutions, including my own, were recently accused of promoting critical race theory.

I laughed aloud alone in my office. But I also began to think about this claim more seriously.

It revealed two important truths. First, the accusation suggested that critical race theory was entirely evil and unredeemable to be associated with critical race theory in the minds of those who use it as an epithet is to be associated with something bad.

Second, it suggested that critical race theory must not be well understood in evangelical circles. As with any belief system, there are no tenants, there are tenants of critical race theory, which any reasonable person would agree with.

But just because two people share some values does not mean that they will necessarily agree on enough to identify with the same philosophy of life.

This is the same approach Neil Shenvey took, actually. This is the, it's, you know, as a worldview, it's bad.

But there are some insights. Resolution nine is okay. That's what Neil Shenvey says. That's, this is where Matt Mullins is going.

I'm telling you that is the game plan. And it's been the game plan since at least 2019, probably before that.

This is how we're gonna bring critical race theory in. And I've made the point many times on this podcast. So I don't wanna, you know, go over the whole thing again.

But the worldview assumptions come, they are attached to the tools. You bring in the tools, you bring in the worldview assumptions.

If you, you know, it's a tool to look for racism in things. But it identifies as everything being racist because it's just there.

It's just, you're not seeing it. So you need a special lens. Then you get into the postmodern standpoint theory. You gotta bring that in.

It all comes in with it, guys. These aren't fundamental tools that are baked into the fabric of reality, like the laws of logic.

It's not like you can plunder the Egyptians because, you know, they had some good understanding of mathematics and we can use that.

That's part of natural revelation. These are coming, emanating from the imaginations of sociologists.

It's like saying you could use, it's almost like saying you could use Star Wars as an analytical tool or something like that.

And I'm just getting ready. Someone's gonna defend that. They're gonna say, you can use Star Wars as an analytical tool. Well, it's coming from the imagination of someone.

Insofar as it's not, it's because there are people who are borrowing things from other myths and legends and compiling them into a fantasy like Star Wars.

But the fundamental, you know, some of the fundamental things in Star Wars, like the idea that there are all these planets and there's a

Death Star and there, you know, those just aren't true. And those are the kinds of things that critical race theory brings.

It's a bunch of things that are not true that then you're building the tools off of. That's the problem with it.

So you can't do this separation thing. It comes in as a worldview, whether you want it to or not.

You can try to say, I'm a Christian over here. I mean, this is what liberation theologians did in the 1970s, even evangelicals affected by that.

They tried to say, we can bring in this Marxism, but only the tools from it.

We're not gonna, we don't, we're not atheists. We don't agree with that. We're just bringing in the way that it looks at class and it looks at oppression.

And we can then use it to analyze and then come up with solutions for the dilemmas that we have.

That's the, it's the same kind of thing that they're doing. And we know where that led. Fabian socialism, social gospel movement.

We know where that led. We know where liberation theology led. We know where it led. I did a whole podcast on this recently in Nazi Germany with the

German Christian movement. Same kind of argument. We know where it's leading now.

And ultimately the fundamental truths underlying critical race theory are not in keeping with Christianity.

And so the tools that it produces, unfortunately also are not. He says is critical race theory in critical race theory.

Is it critical race theory? There we go. Un -Christian part three. To address the history and effects of race and racism, we first need to understand what race itself is.

If you're not familiar with this conversation, it may surprise you to find out that many scholars and activists disagree about the precise definition of race.

There are two major definitions of race. Race is a biological reality or race is a social construct. And again, guys, here it is.

That's the false dichotomy. That's the hook that the critical race theorists try to get you on every single time. Matt Mullins is doing it again right here.

No, it could have some biological components with it, some genetic things because you're part of a family, your family's gonna look similar, you're gonna have similar genetics.

And there's from the environment, from all kinds of other factors that you might not even be thinking about, religion being one, cuisine, all kinds of things converge to make a people group and it's an organic thing.

You know it when you see it, you look at it and you say that people is distinct. There's a difference there. That's who they are.

And that's just being a people group. That's, I mean, that's like, think about it in these terms.

Look at this again, you know, replace the word race with family. Family is a biological reality or family is a social construct.

Which one is it guys? Well, clearly critical race theorists, you know, they have some truth in there because they think it's a social construct.

Well, actually it just, you know, our family is, there's a lot more going on there.

Yeah, there's a biological similarity we have. Yeah, there's some things that we socially, there's some features that we have in our family, the things we do, customs we do that are different from other families.

Ultimately though, what critical race theorists are trying to get at and what Matt Mullins is trying to, I think get at here is that there's some truth in this social construct stuff that, and this is where the postmodern comes in, that society, there's a hegemony, there's the structures of society, the way they're set up is what creates and defines race.

And that's, the power to define is within society itself. No, it's not.

That organic understanding contradicts that. God is the one that understands what race is. God is the one that sets the boundaries.

God's the one that created this. God understands fully what those things are. And we catch glimpses of them.

We see race. We see people groups. We see families. And we can notice certain things that make them different or distinct from other groups.

We can see that from our vantage point. But it's not because there's this definitional power within some elites in society or the hegemony in society or that make it so or that create it.

No, the power to create race does not belong to society.

You can, societies can categorize things, stereotype things. They can, but they're only reflecting on something that already exists that isn't created by them, by a group of elites or a hegemony of some kind.

Okay. That's the problem here. That's a big, I just want to emphasize that this is exactly what critical race theorists do.

And this is what Matt Mullins is doing right here. Now here's the kicker. Is critical race theory on Christian?

In part six. Here's a bunch of quotes from Matt Mullins. He says, is there any agreement between the beliefs of Christianity and those of critical race theory?

Or are the two at odds with one another? No, Christians should deny that racism is a sin. I think he meant they shouldn't deny that racism is anyway.

Racism is sin to Matt Mullins. Or that racism has been a formative influence throughout the history of the United States. Now here's the question.

What do you mean, Matt Mullins? Do you mean that benefiting from supposedly a system that allocates privileges because of this white privilege thing that that's a sin because that's what critical race theorists say racism is?

Or could be. Just as Christians, he says, saved by God's grace in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ should stop lying, should speak up when they know something is wrong, should show no favoritism, should detest sexual immorality, should love their enemies, and so on.

So should they refuse to play any part in the perpetuation of racism. What do you mean again by racism?

I mean, this all begs a question. He's saying, though, that he believes that critical race theory is a part of this.

So I mean, by implication, what he's saying here is that critical race theory helps us with this. And here's what he says. Critical race theory is obviously not committed to the basic doctrines of sin and salvation, briefly outlined.

For that reason, it is not strictly Christian, but neither is a strong belief in the free market or a passion for environmentalism.

And these are systems of belief that many Christians hold alongside their Christianity. Yeah. The environmentalism thing is its own other discussion, but free market, yeah, free market, you can hold that alongside your

Christianity because it's in keeping with your Christianity. That's why it does not contradict your

Christianity. This is a very, very bad comparison. I don't know if it's lazy thought or if it's just,

I don't know why he'd bring that up. But the question is whether or not Christians can hold the core doctrines of Christianity and any of the principles of critical race theory.

Again, that's not really the core question. The core question is, is critical race theory opposed to Christianity?

And if so, the tools supposedly that it has, are they then also opposed to a

Christian view of reality? If the answer of that is yes, then there is no reason, no fellowship that light should have with this darkness.

There's no reason to use any of it. You shouldn't. If it's just obvious, some of the things are just so obvious, as he said in a previous quote, to Christians, they would agree with critical race theory without even knowing it.

There's so many obvious things. Well, then you don't need critical race theory if that's true. He says, if conversely, you are a

Christian who believes that racism is not only a personal prejudice, but also a social structure, then while your view of salvation by grace through Jesus will be the same, you will likely differ about the solution to the problem of racism.

So again, here we go. This is where it gets political. And he says in another part that race is in the same blog that racism, that there's a sin associated.

Racism is a sin. And so if that's the case, if racism is a sin and it's a structural sin,

I think I'm looking for the quote. I think he says it's struck. He talks about institutional or structural sin. If that's the case, then you've already bought into a category of critical race theory.

If you're buying into this structural sin thing that these impersonal institutions can be sinful in some way.

No, people can be sinful. People can be saved. Institutions, no. So if you buy into that there's this sin that exists in these institutions or these impersonal structures, then what you do is you create a way of salvation for them that's political.

And that's what you're about to see. It's not that you will doubt the sufficiency of God's grace to save a person solely says, it's not that salvation and racism are unrelated.

It's that salvation, listen to this, it's that salvation, he says, can transform individuals without transforming social structures and institutions.

That's the problem. That's why they bring in critical race theory. You can save the individuals, but you can't save these social institutions, can't transform them.

So since racism is more than the sum of its individual parts, it requires structural changes, not just individual changes.

Racial injustice is a collective problem that must be solved collectively. Christians in this camp may feel inclined, even compelled to vote for people or parties bent on changing social structures.

Democrats, hint. In fact, they may view those focused on the individual as turning a blind eye to the structured problems in society that require structured solutions.

So there you have it. That's why you bring in critical race theory. That's why he's bringing it in.

Because, you know, the gospel is just not, not enough to affect these structures. You gotta have some, some kind of a social solution and critical race theory helps us identify the sins in those structures.

And here's the thing, obviously there are, there are problems in society that, you know, the gospel is not meant to fix all of those problems, right?

It's, it's, you know, if you have a leaky, you know, sink, you know, the gospel is not the thing that is, you know, you can't just apply the gospel to your leaky sink.

You have to go and you actually you have to get a plumber, you have to fix it somehow, right? Understanding basic natural revelation, understanding the laws of physics, understanding how water works, kind of like prereqs to that.

And that's how they want to sort of treat critical race theory. The thing is, though, they create this category, Matt Mullins does it, of this sin, this, that applies to these structures, that there's an impersonal sin.

No, people sin. People sin. That's, that's the problem, in my opinion, with all of this is it traces back to a person along the way.

And that's where you identify, that's where the sin is. It's this, this person sinned. These, these people collectively decided to make a decision to sin.

You can't then say, you know, it's, it's just everyone's saved in this institution.

But there's still sin. Or everyone's not saved in this institution, but there's no sin in the structure because, you know, we've corrected it with critical race theory or something.

That's where, I don't see biblical categories for this. And that's what critical race theory introduces. My own view is that he says, is that critical race theory provides

Christians with helpful lenses through which to view the problem of racism. There you go. I cannot see racism as merely an individual problem.

So he agrees with all this. Black and brown folks were cut out of the social safety net for years, intimidated, redlined, out of housing markets, disproportionately sentenced to time in prison for crimes committed by, the same crimes committed by white folks.

And the list goes on and on. The most blatant result of these forms of racism is a country with an unclosable wealth gap. Wrong. Anyway, unlike Marxism, which, and by the way,

I'm not being, I'm not trying to be insensitive. I've covered this before, but I mean, look at the way the

Jews have been persecuted for a long time. The Holocaust, those who fled here don't see a wealth gap there.

In fact, they're doing much better than most white people. Quote, unquote, white people.

Look at Asians who are treated, you know, very bad barriers in some places coming here.

I mean, they were put, Japanese were put in to camps, you know, during World War II. You have, you know, all the propaganda that went against the

Japanese during the World War II, et cetera. They're doing better. Asians in general are doing better than the

United States. White citizens, supposedly. So, so citizens of the

United States who are Asian doing better than citizens of the United States who are of European descent economically.

So anyway, he's wrong about that. But anyway, the most, he says that unlike Marxism, which sees such disparities in terms of class, critical race theory views the wealth gap as a structural legacy and present reality of racism.

Even if every person in America became a Christian, that wealth gap would not disappear. We would still need to make societal changes.

Hmm. So it's just, it's interesting to me.

So this is where the neo -Marxist stuff comes in. It's not, to have laws that treat everyone equally, to even if everyone became a

Christian and treated each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, not enough, not enough because there's disparity.

And something has to come in. And he's saying that it's, it's a social power relationship thing.

That's what race must be. It can't be that there's something else culturally going on that might contribute to some of these disparities.

He says, prior to my exposure to critical race theory, I had a purely individualistic understanding of racism. Critical race theory introduced me to the structural side of the problem.

I may have arrived at this idea without critical race theory, but that's not how things happened for me.

I should add that racism is certainly not the only sin whose sum is greater than its individual parts. Let's see.

There's no substitute for the gospel. You can articulate the gospel and say that the gospel is sufficient for salvation, but then he's saying on the other side, say that you need also critical race theory to address this other, this systemic sin.

He said, I would argue that so long as we do not allow the beliefs and agenda of critical race theory to take the place of the gospel of Jesus Christ, Christians can take what is beneficial from CRT and discard what is not.

We have a long history of plundering the Egyptians in this way, as Augustine famously said. Christianity and critical race theory both see racism as wrong and harmful to individuals in society.

Because critical race theory is not based on Christian doctrine, it does not use language of sin to describe racism. But that does not mean that its solutions are always antithetical to Christianity.

So Matt Mullins is using the language of sin there. Critical race theorists would say oppression. And so that's

Matt Mullins. That's what's happening or has happened at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

And I think it answers the question that many people have had, is Southeastern, are Southern Baptist teaching critical race theory?

The answer is yes. You have examples of it right here and you have a class syllabus that backs the whole thing up.

So he's laughing about it, but then he's proving it. Laughing that people would accuse Southeastern of promoting critical race theory, but then he's, you're the man, you're the one doing it.

So that's all I had to say. I mean, there's so many more rabbit trails. I think I've went on enough of them today, hopefully to give you some food for thought.

But the long and short of it is there's some real problems at these seminaries and something needs to happen.

People need to be fired. Some people need to make retractions and public apologies. None of that's happening. It's all circle the wagons.

And I know some of you out there, maybe even listening to this podcast, really like someone like an Al Mohler and think that he's gonna clean it up or something like that.

And regardless of even some of the things Al Mohler said that in my opinion are on the progressive side, even let's say he's a conservative through and through, this stuff is happening in his convention.

He wants to run for the president. It's happening at the institution he's at too. He wants to run for president of this convention.

And no calls for public apologies, no calls for retractions, no calls for firings. None of that.

It's all, everything's fine here. Circle the wagons. I'll take care of it. It's just sad to me.

It's just sad to me that this is the state of things. So if you're going to Nashville, if you're going to the Southern Baptist Convention, if you're a messenger, you can get your

Resend Resolution 9 shirt. I'm wearing one right now. The link is in the info section if you're interested in that.

I hope this was helpful for some of you who are trying to answer this question. Again, if you're a patron, you're going to get access as well to the

PowerPoint presentation. And I will put the link to the student who was, had direct knowledge of this class and posted the syllabus online.

The link, Facebook link for that will be in the info section as well. God bless. Hope you are having a good day like I am.

Beautiful spring day out there. And hopefully you can enjoy it and hopefully this whole week's that way.