Has Critical Race Theory Been Taught at SEBTS?

Welcome to 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 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 gonna put the link in the info section, Clay Pot Candles 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, Susan Payne does, and I think she sells some of it if I'm not mistaken, so you may want to check that out.

But 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 gotta sit and listen and then redistribute your power somehow. So that happened.

And then, I'm not even gonna remember all of it. 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 it's very, 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 preaching 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 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 gonna come forward with their stories.

They're gonna 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 gonna say that up front. The title of the video is the wrong question. Is SCBTS teaching critical race theory? That's the question that so many people wanna know.

Are they teaching critical race theory? And that is, I'm not, 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, is that 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. But Crew, they pumped in so much radical stuff, especially through their Lenz's Institute.

And then when they're called on the carpet for it, we're not doing any critical race theory here. And 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. So it's this wide spectrum that you can never define it. Or it's so narrow that your definition always falls short.

That's kind of 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. But 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? Is there only one scene in it? And you can justify that, right?

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, right? Would you watch it? Would you be entertained by it if Jesus was with you, right? 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?

And this is the question they wanna ask. Are you teaching critical race theory? Because then, again, they can try to minimize it. They can justify it. We're just, and 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. But 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. And oh, we weren't really teaching Orthodox, you know, critical race theory, or whatever that is.

Or we were just teaching it for this reason. You know, it wasn't in a positive way. They play all sorts of games. So 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?

And we've already seen, I've given you the history already,.

They're not.

At least in many instances, they're not. And so that's how we approach this conversation. We've already determined that there's a problem there, big problems, actually. And this is now just one sub-point.

And so we're gonna ask the question, we're gonna answer the question, we're gonna go through it, and then we're gonna start here. We're gonna be focusing on one professor. We could probably focus on others.

We're gonna focus on Matt Mullins, though, and here's what happened. I'm gonna show you the, here's the post. If I can pull it up here, hold on. For those watching, you're gonna wanna see this. Let's see if I can minimize this screen.

Actually, 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, and I'm sure I'm not the only one he messaged, but he said that this was very much, someone he knows closely, I guess, was in this course.

So they have the syllabus for it. And it was, 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.

And it underlayed the whole entire course. So I'm gonna show you what he publicly posted and read some of that for you. That's what he privately kind of sent me, but I'm gonna show you publicly what he put there.

And then we're gonna go through some things about Matt Mullins, who's the professor for this. We're gonna examine his syllabus a little bit. And 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.

And then I'll show you some clips from an article, some snippets from an article he wrote in 2019 on critical race theory. So first things first, Andrew Daniel says, critical race theory has been taught at SCBTS for years.

Okay, this 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. So 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 like 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, is 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 wanna do that? Go join an organization that doesn't have that baggage. And that's, I think, part of the problem with importing this stuff. You're just teaching children. You look at like 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. Why should they? 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 wanna 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 mean, I grew up with going to college in my undergrad years and you had your social studies, courses, cross-cultural, 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, 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 wanna go back and say, well, race is a social construct, as if it got corrupted and we're going back to the more of a pure understanding of what race is.

The actual, if we're gonna talk about like genos, the Greek word that is used in the Bible, if we're gonna talk about examples even from the Old Testament of cultures, race, that whole sort of category, what we're gonna 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 gonna 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 a 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? You know, well, now we're looking at environmental factors that determined why the military would have picked that.

And now I'm, you know, 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. Yeah, that's a people group. They're a little different over there. And 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 could just manufacture it.

So like you have the culture here, church is 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 with, 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, well, 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, 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 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, 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 culture, that happens organically. So that's where, not a lot of work has been done on this, if any.

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 gotta 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, well, 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.

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 in the Literary Imagination.

Whiteness in the Literary Imagination. Toni Morrison, though, apparently, so I looked her up. I'm like, who is this person? Because this sounds very critical race theory infused, and she's a raging leftist.

In fact, if you go to keywiki .org, which is an 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, you don't have 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.

And 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.