What would it mean for Christianity to be woke? w Owen Strachan -GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 26

Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. On today's episode, we are going to be discussing wokeness, and it's a term that we hear a lot in our culture.

A lot of people are striving to be woke, even Christians trying to adopt some of the popular catchphrases of wokeness, churches even striving to make themselves acceptable by embracing wokeness and all of its ins and outs.

So today on our program, we've got Owen Strachan. He's the author of Christianity and Wokeness, how the social justice movement is hijacking the gospel and the way to stop it.

So Owen, welcome to the program. Thank you so much, brother. Appreciate you having me on. So Owen, to start us off, for maybe those who have heard the term but aren't entirely sure what it means.

So what does it mean to be woke? To be woke means that you have woken up to the nature of systemic racism and inequity in America or more broadly in the

West. So once you did not see this, once you thought the American order was one where people are treated according to the nature of their character and not according to the color of their skin, you probably thought something like Martin Luther King's famous vision of 50, 60 years ago had at least in some form been realized in Western culture in American society.

But in truth, wokeness tells you, no, that society, that vision has not at all been achieved.

Actually, we're in a systemically racist country and the situation has actually in many ways gotten worse than the days of the 19th century, the 20th century, slavery,

Jim Crow, segregation, etc. Because now you can't really see the systemic racism that is everywhere around us.

And I do mean everywhere. So that makes it especially fiendish. And it means that every person needs to have basically this kind of secular conversion such that now they understand, oh, okay, no, we're not in this post racial order or something like that.

No, actually, if I'm a white person, I'm transmitting power through my whiteness over people of color at all times.

And this society, because it normalizes whiteness, so -called, puts people of color in the state of being oppressed.

Basically, all of this depends upon Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' concept of the oppressor -oppressed dynamic in society.

It's about 150 years old. It's applied today to mean that white people, shortened form here, are oppressors because they're the dominant group and people of color are the oppressed.

That's basically what you wake up to when you become woke. So what

I find most interesting about this is you'd think of this was so prevalent in society that is so obvious, this wouldn't be something we need to wake up to.

It would be something we already be aware of. So according to those who promote and believe in wokeness, what is the reason why so many people are not awake to the reality of this?

That's an excellent point and question. I think it's basically because whiteness in the eyes of the woke is such a powerful construct, such a powerful dynamic that it's very normal.

And so it seems normal, for example, in a local church, let's say, to have a whole bunch of white people.

According to wokeness, if you have a church like that, you might think, well,

I mean, you know, we'd love to have more diversity. We pray God gives us more diversity, but basically we're by and large a quote -unquote white community.

And so these are the people God is saving. He's actually saving people from all sorts of backgrounds and gathering them together.

And tons of different ethnicities are represented in this, you know, I don't know, 150, 200 person church.

Wokeness would say, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's nothing good. That's nothing normal per majority culture.

That is a group that is fomenting a white supremacist order.

They may not know they are. They may not have those intentions. But whiteness in the 19th century of the slave owner is really no different than dominant whiteness of 2021 in a

Midwestern church where the people don't at all think of themselves intentionally any way of holding racist views.

So there's this connection made in this system, in this evil ideology

I call wokeness, between whiteness then and whiteness now.

And suffice it to say, it is a cancer, it is a poison, and it has never changed. So it's fascinating to try to study this and figure out where it comes from, how it's impacting people, and then also how to address it from a

Christian perspective. I remember the first time I was having a conversation with someone trying to explain this to me, it's like, no, and this is their words, like, no,

Shay, when I'm telling you that you're racist, I'm not saying that you hate Black people or that you dislike people of color or that you've ever even intentionally done something to someone based on the color of their skin.

It's like, no, you are a participant in the systemically racist system and therefore that makes you a racist.

I'm like, okay, that's, for one, a completely different definition of racism than has been accepted for the past couple of centuries.

And also how can I in any way be responsible for participating in a system that I was born into and that, as best

I can tell, I've never actively done anything to promote. And so it's sort of like a, because of whiteness,

I am inherently a participant in this and there's really nothing I can do to escape out of it.

And to me, that's just such a hopeless and depressing place to be. It absolutely is.

And that's why it's so important to frame this in terms of Marx. Because Marx saw society as not individually driven, but structurally driven.

So if you had, in simplified form, wealth, for Marx, you were an oppressor, right?

Your actions economically or more broadly, frankly, did not matter to Marx and Engels and the movement they built up.

And if you did not have wealth or access to the means of production, then you were oppressed economically and financially.

And what we need to understand is that that is exactly the structuralist argument that people make today.

It is as wrong and problematic today as it was in the 1870s when

Marxism started to gain traction. The Bible, frankly, does not teach a structuralist understanding of sin.

It does teach federal headship. It does teach that we have all fallen in Adam and it does teach that we can only become righteous through faith in Jesus Christ.

But that is not in any way the same thing as saying that a person with a given skin color is either fundamentally an oppressor or an oppressed person.

So it holds to a structuralist understanding of society and the human person that is at odds with biblical

Christianity. Biblical Christianity teaches us that yes, sure, we can get implicated in an evil system of course.

But fundamentally, every person is responsible for their own soul before the

Lord. And I cannot be saved by virtue of being in a group, nor can

I be especially condemned by virtue of being in a group. I am responsible for my own individual soul before the

Lord. But all of that wokeness, this broader movement, really a mood that builds off of Marxism and numerous other ideologies, critical theory, critical race theory more recently, denies the biblical categories.

And that's one part of why it must absolutely be resisted in the church.

So you bring up a great point. So how do we resist this? And I guess this is go by the subtitle of your book.

So two parts of it. So how is the social justice movement hijacking the gospel?

It's hijacking the gospel because it is teaching us that the fundamental problem of the world is systemic racism.

And so the fundamental solution to our world is to embrace what is called social justice.

The movement that wokeness makes, the various critical race theorists and intersectionality advocates make, is not usually an expressly theological one, right?

Like most heretics and false teachers in previous centuries and millennia, they don't wave a banner in the sky.

You know, they don't have a skywriting plane that goes ahead of them saying, hey, just so you know, I'm smuggling in ideas that sound good, but are actually corrupting the gospel.

No, what they do is they corrupt the gospel by using Christian vocabulary in many cases, by using language like justice or fairness or equity, terms that basically sound good, but as I said earlier, have fundamentally changed meanings from what

Christians mean and the Bible means. And what we need to be very clear about is that systemic racism could exist.

If the state of Missouri, where I'm currently living, put a law on the books that barred black people from being able to shop at Target, that would be an example very clearly of what you could call systemic racism.

But what we need to be clear about is that systemic racism today is by and large a boogeyman.

Systemic racism does not exist. Systemic racism is being used, it is the wedge that is being used to transform

America. Remember that when you want a revolution, when you want whole scale societal and cultural transformation, you need an enemy.

For Marx, that enemy was economic oppression by those who owned the means of production and thus were wealthy.

So Marx is the most successful revolutionary in human history. And more people have died because of the revolutions

Marx created than any other ideology has caused that I am aware of.

What is happening today is that that same move from Marx's playbook is being made.

And the boogeyman today, the wedge issue, the evil force and specter that is being used to convince people that America needs to be comprehensively restructured, and even the church is shot through with poison, is again this concept of systemic racism.

And there's a lot to say on these lines, Shay, but basically, systemic racism is said to be anywhere there are inequities between racial groups.

And those inequities reveal injustices. I talk about all of this in Christianity and Wokeness.

I go into this in some detail, though I'm not an economist, but I can track these ideas.

And what we need to be clear about along those lines is that it is not at all necessarily the case that if you have disparities in, let's say, household income between different quote -unquote racial groups or ethnic groups, there's automatically discrimination that accounts for those disparities.

For example, Japanese -American households have much higher per capita household income, as Thomas Sowell has shown, than Mexican -American families.

If you were going by the woke playbook, the critical race theory playbook, intersectionality playbook, you would say, ah, we got them.

That must mean that Japanese -Americans have something approximating white privilege and Mexican -Americans, because they are of brown skin, so -called, are being discriminated against.

But Sowell has shown, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that actually the reason why Japanese -American households have that higher income is because they tend to have fewer children, and the people in the household, therefore, are older, and they earn higher wages, whereas Mexican -Americans, on average, tend to have larger families.

The average Mexican -American family does not have many who are providing money, compared to the

Japanese -American household. Shay, we're a little bit in the weeds here, but this sort of thing matters, because this stuff that you and I are discussing right now, these disparities, is where wokeness makes its hay.

It looks at disparities, it waves a wand, and it says, the automatic answer is racism, and the automatic cure is social justice, which basically means to tear down any concept of authority grounded in the scripture, and replace it with equity of outcome for all.

And again, I've got a lot of things on the table here, but we've got to make very clear that the diagnosis is wrong, and definitely the cure is wrong.

Absolutely. There's something inherently wrong with all white people, is something

I've repeatedly heard, and our response is, you're absolutely right, there's something inherently wrong with all people.

It's called sin. We're all sinners by nature, sinners by choice, and depending on your theological perspectives, sinner by association.

So that's the problem, but you misdiagnosed the problem, and yes, that problem can sometimes rear itself in the form of actual racism, and discriminating against people, and having wrong motives in how you treat people.

But the cure is not something that society, or politics, or government can ever produce.

The cure is faith in Jesus Christ, and the resulting transformation, which then gives us the dwelling power of the

Holy Spirit, so we can overcome sin, including the sin of racism, and what

I've enjoyed most about your book is the fact that if you misdiagnose the problem, you're going to misdiagnose the solution, and I've been seeing this in our culture for most of my life, in that you've got the problem wrong, and then you're prescribing the wrong medicine for it, and it's depressing, it's sad to see, but just seeing how many people are blinded by it, and are buying into this, even in the church, but no one wants to be racist, no one wants that label, and so, okay,

I'm just going to take your word for it, that systemic racism is real, and that you're providing the right solution, when you really look at their motives, you look at their background, you look at where all this is coming from, you're like, well, this is completely antithetical to the gospel, back to the very core of what the actual problem is.

That's right, Shay, and just a quick word here, to back up what you just said, people listening to your podcast,

I know you have a lot of listeners, in a lot of places, they need to throw down the gauntlet on this, when in their local church, especially, or on the local school board, or in the boardroom of their job, or wherever it may be, it is alleged, it is said, it is taken as fact, that systemic racism is found wherever there are a lot of white people.

Nobody wants to challenge that, because of what you just said, because we will be called a racist for that, but actually,

Shay, those who are making that claim are racist. They are racist against white people.

Now, I don't actually believe there is such a thing as race, we are all human, we are the human race, having a different skin color does not make me a fundamentally different slice of humanity than someone who has more pigmentation, or whatever, or less, but nonetheless, that is actual discrimination, partiality,

James too, being shown against people who have a certain skin color, and so,

I don't mean that the person listening to this, listening to us talk, should stand up in church, if the preacher is embracing wokeness from the pulpit, as many are, or some other kind of setting, and start shouting with a red face.

I do mean that with facts, hopefully with the help of Vodie Bauckham's Fault Lines, and my book,

Christianity and Wokeness, both by Salem Books, hopefully you can arm yourself, and then have a principled, thoughtful, gracious discussion with those who are leading this kind of sea change, and hopefully you can be a voice, sometimes, a lot of times, all it takes is one person stepping up and saying, no, no, no, no, no, no,

I reject the terms, I reject the diagnosis of systemic racism, and I reject the cure you are offering of social justice, and if you can, again, arm yourselves with good arguments from scripture, and sound thinking based on divine revelation, and go into boardrooms, and go into school rooms, and go into church meeting rooms, and have these conversations on social media, and over email, and over the kitchen table with your kids if they're going to a

Christian college and university that is teaching them this body of ideas, as many are, that will start to be the counter movement that we desperately need.

You know, it's exciting to hear, I keep hearing of parents, churches, groups standing up to this, pointing out like, this movement itself is racist in that it attributes some sort of guilt or fault to a particular ethnicity, that being primarily a white people, or I've even heard, you mentioned

Japanese Americans earlier, I mean, Asian Americans are supposedly the privileged minority, rather than attributing their success to hard work, to equipment, to education, to families staying together, et cetera, no, it's because for whatever reason,

Asians are treated differently than all the races, I'm like, really, is that, I've met plenty of people who do not like Asians in my life, and so to say that Asians are somehow exempt from racism is, doesn't match reality,

I mean, racism is a real problem in our society, but systemic racism is not, and so it's important to distinguish between those two, but let's jump to like the final part of your,

I guess the subtitle of your book, what is the way to stop this, and I know you've already addressed this partially, but as Christians, as individual believers, also as churches, as Christian organizations, what is the key to stopping this trend towards wokeness and embrace of systemic racism, intersectionality, all these things that are being thrown at us?

Good question, I think it is twofold in the New Testament, it is Colossians 2 .8, do not be taken captive by any ideology, so throw down the gauntlet and say stop, this will not take hold of my family, this will not take hold of my church, this will not take hold of my business, this will not take hold of my classroom, whatever it may be, do not be taken captive by this ideology, it is not neutral, it is not playing for a draw, it is not actually that which is going to fight against racism, racism as you said, or ethnocentrism more technically, is a problem, and every human heart has the seeds of partiality in them, but fundamentally, to argue that systemic racism is the central problem we face today, is without basis, it's just without basis, and so do not be taken captive by this ideology, that's the first thing we do, whatever level we're talking about, individually, don't let this take you over, don't let it take you captive, don't be fooled, don't think that this is the way to fight racism, this is actually the way, ironically, to increase racism in the world, and it's having this effect by the way, we're hearing stories about children in second grade in Canada, who are having critical race theory introduced into their curriculum, these children,

I saw a story about this recently, did not previously separate by race on the playground, you know, and their friendships, and now, because of critical race theory, shock, they are, they're separating, they're thinking that white students fundamentally dislike students of color, and these sorts of things, so I would just say, don't be taken captive, and secondly,

I would say, take every thought captive, so we talked about Colossians 2 .8, this is 2

Corinthians 10, 3 to 6, in other words, build a Christian worldview, study the scriptures along these lines, understand how we are all made in the image of God, Genesis 1, 26 to 28, understand how we have all fallen through a real historical

Adam, Genesis 3, 1 through 13, understand that Jesus Christ is the one hope of the human race, understand that by his blood, by his death on the cross,

Ephesians 2, 11 to 22, he makes one new man, including one new man of Jew and Gentile, who had centuries -old tension, division, hostility, alienation, and condemnation to offer one another, and instead of creating a

Jew church and a Gentile church, what Jesus did in Ephesus and elsewhere, is he brought those people who were once at war, who did have serious problems in their heritage, together, and that is what

Jesus is doing today, that is what God is doing through his son, he is gathering, Ephesians 2, 15, one new man in Jesus Christ, so that's what is taking place in the local church, local churches don't need to pretend as if they can reach some sort of idyllic, utopian diversity vision on this earth, if you're in an area that has a large form of one ethnicity, it's likely at some level that your church is going to reflect that,

I don't want to put some kind of weight around the neck of the pastor and elders to achieve some sort of utopian diversity vision,

I would just say just know that through the preaching of the word, God is going to build his church, and he's going to bring people from all sorts of backgrounds, and pastor, and church member, you don't need to sweat that,

God is doing that, Grace Community Church in LA, pastored by John MacArthur, is known, obviously for being on the strongly conservative end of things, in American evangelicalism, and MacArthur, John MacArthur is not known for being woke, suffice it to say, and yet I have attended that church a couple times in the last year, and I was amazed at the diversity in the congregation, that's not because MacArthur and the

Grace Community elders have adopted some sort of whiteness 101 curriculum, or some sort of woke teaching series, they haven't done anything like that, it is simply that they preach the

Bible, and they preach the gospel, and God saves, and draws, and forms his church, and so I would say that is a major part of what we need to emphasize, and in your

Christian life, last thing I'll say, Shay, I know I'm going on here, but as a Christian out in the big bad world, challenge these ideas, know that this is an ideology that is aggressive, and will take things over, be salt and light,

Matthew 5, 13, and 14, don't be silent, you might think, yeah, but this is going to cost me, perhaps cost me everything, well, that's what we're here for, we're not here to play it safe, honestly, we are here to be citizens of the kingdom of Christ, and advance the kingdom through truth -telling in love,

Ephesians 4, 15, that's what I would say. Oh, and that's, I love how you explain this, like I told you before the interview started,

I'm most of the way through your book at this point, and I've learned a lot from it, so I definitely encourage our listeners to, as soon as it is released, which by the time this airs, probably will be, a copy of Christianity and Wokeness, How the

Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel and the Way to Stop It, by Dr. Owen Strachan, and the

Director of the Center for Public Theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, so highly recommended, love the book, and it's much, much needed, and in addition, you mentioned earlier,

Vodie Bauckham's Fault Lines book, and there's several other great resources by people who have studied these issues, who have engaged on these issues, and Owen is on the front lines of this, and kind of in closing, kind of to jump on what, something that you shared about the, what they're finding in children, and who are being taught critical race theory in very early age, what

I've noticed is that Christians, and even non -Christians, who previously were entirely comfortable spending time with people of color, are so hypersensitive to this, that rather than, they feel like, can't say anything, everything

I possibly say or do could be interpreted the wrong way, that this is causing them to avoid spending time with people of other ethnicities, and that is the exact wrong perspective and attitude, but I understand it, in that, if everything you can possibly say can be taken as, oh, you're speaking as an oppressor, or you're just embracing or supporting systemic racism, it makes me like, not want to address these issues, because I don't want to be labeled that way, and so, and the effect it's having on the body of Christ is one of division, not that it's causing people to actually be racist towards African -Americans, or Latino -Americans, or Asian -Americans, or whatever, it's causing us to be so uncomfortable that it's easier to just avoid people of different ethnicities, rather than engaging and embracing them as we have been, so, oh, and in conclusion,

I know you've shared a lot of great stuff in the interview already, but encourage us, how do we both speak truth and love on this issue without it causing some of the, for lack of a better term, evils that it's, how it's already impacting the church?

Yeah, I just want to say, take those breaks off that the culture is trying to put on in this area.

I think it's important, Shay, that we recognize that this is formal academic ideology, so let that be said.

My book traces that clearly, but I think it's also very important to note that we are not in this neutral area where academics have slightly better or slightly worse ideas.

We are in a zone of absolute spiritual warfare, we are all caught between God and the devil, and the devil wants to send people to hell, but the devil's special enemy is the church, and so my supposition here,

Shay, is that what Satan really is trying to do through critical race theory is divide the church.

He is very happy to divide nations and countries, of course, that are united through some sense of common grace.

I think America has enjoyed a lot common grace, it's not a Christian nation or something like this, but nonetheless, there's a lot to be thankful for in this country, even as there are different things that we grieve, like abortion.

And yet, I don't think Satan's ultimate target is America. He'd love to take it down, given how much

Christian influence there is here, and how much Christian work goes out from this country and has, but I think ultimately what he's trying to do is shut down what you were just talking about.

He wants people in local churches who have enjoyed fellowship and unity and love in a meaningful sense in the body, not because of shared skin color or even shared background, but because of shared faith in Jesus Christ, he wants to shut that down.

He wants there to be more racial division in the church. If we display a cosmic witness to the principalities and powers in our shared gathering, saying, look,

I may have nothing in common with this church member in terms of heritage, but I have everything in common with them in terms of Jesus Christ, does

Satan not want to try to undermine that and defeat that? So I guess what

I'm trying to say here is any way you can fight against that, push through that, there are going to be some sticky moments probably because CRT and intersectionality and wokeness is making things awkward, frankly, but we have spiritual weapons,

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10, 3 -6. The weapons of our warfare are not fleshly, but are spiritual.

The gospel is stronger than any ideology, and I encourage anyone listening to cling to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to build those bridges in the local church and with fellow

Christians, even if it's not in the local church, claiming the gospel as our oneness, as our unity in Christ.

We have union with Christ by saving grace, and we have union with one another through the same.

Oh, and thank you. Thank you both for your expertise on this. I know it involved a lot of work, a lot of research.

Thank you for this book. It's much needed. So again, Christianity and Wokeness by Dr. Owen Strachan, highly recommended.

Please pick it up. We'll give you both insight into the origin of this movement, what it's trying to accomplish, and how to combat it.

So Owen, thank you again for joining us on the program. I really appreciate your insight today. Thank you,

Shay. Great to be here. Great questions. This has been the Got Questions Podcast. Got questions?