Three SBTS Professors Pushing Critical Race Theory: What It Means

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris, and tonight is a special edition because there has been a compilation released, and this is just monumental, on the Enemies Within the Church page through the YouTube channel of one of the producers, Trevor Loudon.

Three Southern Seminary Professors and the Critical Race Theory Compilation

And this compilation is entitled Critical Race Theory Promoted by Three Professors at Flagship Southern Baptist Seminary. And you can see the pictures there. The three professors are first the provost, who's Matthew Hall, and then Curtis Woods and Jarvis Williams, who teach there.

And this video is about 13 minutes long. I'm gonna show it to you. It is monumental. It is, I believe, perhaps a game changer. It's going to do a couple things that I'm going to talk to you about after you see it.

But if you've already seen it, then skip ahead about 13 minutes. If you haven't, though, here we go.

I went through a pretty good college education, good seminary education, did two master's degrees at a large evangelical seminary, and really was never confronted, honestly, maybe I was and I just missed it, but I don't recall being confronted with categories and questions of race, justice, and reconciliation, and including in history classes.

So when I went off to do my graduate work at a secular state university, and was there confronted with those categories, but without any gospel, without any kind of Christian categories, I had to really try to connect the dots.

I went off to my state university experience for grad school and just started reading things in American history that, frankly, I'd never been, had to be exposed to before. It was all these experiences that I started looking in my past in the rear view mirror and realizing, man, the way I interpreted that, the way I navigated that in my community was very much a racialized lens.

And so it just kind of blew up my whole world. When we talk about race, we're not talking about biology, we're talking about ideology. It's a currency, it has to do with power, it has to do with status.

I am a racist. Okay, so if that freaks you out, if you think the worst thing somebody can call you is a racist, then you're not thinking biblically. Because guess what? I'm gonna struggle with racism and white supremacy until the day I die and get my glorified body and a completely renewed and sanctified mind.

Because I'm immersed in a culture where I benefit from racism all the time. You say justice, you talk about racial justice, and white folks get very nervous. I'll just say it, okay? Both in the church and in the culture.

But I think you cannot have a conversation about racial reconciliation, both within the local church or certainly in our United States context without talking about issues of justice. Racism is actually a whole system built upon allocating privileges, power, opportunities in inequitable ways on the basis of race, which as we talked about is an idea.

Well, once you realize that, then that helps you understand, okay, I don't think I hold on to any particular racist ideology that I think, okay, I'm better than people. But I do, once the lights come on and you realize, okay, racism is actually a lot bigger than just that, you realize, oh, we're not post-racial and we certainly have not seen the evaporation of racism in the United States.

You think about what are the dominant institutions in American evangelicalism, whether it's the NAE, the National Association of Evangelicals, Billy Graham and everything surrounding his ministry, a lot of it is very much tied to whiteness.

And frankly, if you get really passionate about life in the womb, but you don't give a rip about life in the hood or life in the suburbs or life wherever, then I don't know that you're gonna have a lot of credibility, frankly.

If we have a proper ecclesiology, a proper doctrine of the church, of the body of Christ, then we understand that brothers and sisters in Christ, united by the Holy Spirit, one of our obligations and callings is to listen to one another.

And that's not just in personal relationships and conversation, I think that has implications for a theological curriculum. So I want to have a curriculum in our disciplines and throughout the institution where we include voices from brothers and sisters from different contexts.

That's bigger than race. It's bigger than ethnicity. I think we need, frankly, a more global curriculum. And even reading a little bit of Du Bois, who obviously Du Bois would cringe if he were identified as an evangelical.

I think he would resist that. But there are so many things that haunt Du Bois in his writing that are deeply Christian. Whiteness is the default factory setting, right? On your whatever product. And then shades of other race, racial identities and racializations are kind of modifications to the default.

So we sometimes, without even realizing it, in our churches, and I say this as an elder at a local Baptist church in Louisville where it is an all-white elder board, we often, I think, assume, well, we want to be diverse but we want to have diversity in our terms.

Or we want to have multicultural, but not really. So we think, well, because we're reformed or because we're this or we're gospel-centered at Southern Seminary. This is a very white institution. And I don't just mean by, I don't mean by that only look at the student enrollment by race and ethnicity.

I mean, the culture of the institution is remarkably white. Like so white.

You are what we call becoming more awake, right?

Just awake into those things. People are far less ashamed to say whatever is running through their mind. White folks. There has been a normalization and an empowering, a legitimization, I would say, of almost explicitly racist rhetoric in the church.

And things that even two, three, four years ago folks would have said, I'm thinking this but I don't think I'm supposed to say it. Now they're like, I'm just gonna say it. Everything that you assumed or thought was normal in the world or everything that you thought was true about your tradition, your denomination, your own family, there's a whole, I'm gonna pull the veil back and what looked like this beautiful narrative of faithfulness and orthodoxy and truth and righteousness and justice.

I'm gonna peel that back and I'm gonna show you the rotting corpse of white supremacy that's underneath that surface. But I think it's clear we will, as joint heirs of Christ, we will exercise a ruling with Christ in the age to come.

And that power will not be allocated in ways to make you comfortable. So it's not gonna be, well, you get to retain more power because you're part of the white majority and you get a little less power because you're the black or the brown minority.

So you might as well just live now preparing yourself for the age to come in your local church ministry. So how can you look for ways, under the authority of scripture, what God plainly and clearly states to be required and prescriptive for the local church.

But outside of that, how can you actively seek to share power with your brothers and sisters in Christ?

One of the reasons why I love Dr. Hall is because he's well-versed in critical race theory and history.

Right, so I wanna immediately, I have to fight against the self-righteousness that flares up and say, okay, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner, because I'm a racist too.

This whole idea of colorblindness is not informed, in my opinion, by scripture. So when I hear people say, I don't see you as black, I say, well, I need you to, because that's what I am. Exactly. So when we say black lives matter, here's what's happening.

For so many centuries in American history, in the American political economy, black lives did matter. You could kill a black man and not even worry about it. You could rape that black woman and it not be considered a crime.

You could have a president by the name of Thomas Jefferson who rapes a 16-year-old child in France by the name of Sally Hemings, who was the half-sister of his wife. This history, y 'all, come on. Race is a victory.

It is an imaginative. The social construct of race came into existence. We see the English term race coming into existence, classification, around 16th century. Race is a proscription, and I don't mean to say prescription.

I mean proscription in the sense that race was developed to prohibit other perceived races for being able to achieve in society. And racialization has made it such that even though we don't experience the jury segregation, it's not legalized segregation, but it's de facto, right?

So as de facto segregation says to me, as long as I can be in my safe community, in my safe space, I needn't pursue the so-called other because I'm concerned about personal safety. And Jimmy, what I explained to Jimmy was, I said, Jimmy, because one day he said, you know what, I want to create a multi-ethnic church, and that's something you've been pushing into me.

Why don't we do this together? I said, well, before you do that, let me ask you this question. Have you ever sat under African-American leadership? And he was like, no. I said, so why should black folk follow you as a leader?

And you've never submitted to African-American leadership. One of the challenges that I had to one of the Anglo pastor teachers was this. I said, Jimmy, for every book, he was a student, he graduated from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis.

I said, for every book that you read, for every one book that you read by an Anglo, I need you to read two books by a non-Anglo. If you don't expect conflict when you're entering into the reconciliation dialogue, whatever it is, racial, familial, socioeconomic, and then that is a naive aspiration.

Whiteness is not about your biology, it's about an ideology. It's a biological fiction, but a social fact. Race is, in our experience, a construct that people created for the purpose of advancing a racist agenda flowing out of Europe into America.

When certain predominantly white churches talk about multi-ethnic church, I think what many mean is they want black and brown faces, but not black and brown voices. They want black and brown people in the seats of their churches, but they don't want to leverage the privilege and power with vetted, qualified black and brown people.

And another thing that I find also happening in certain white congregations is, I'm just being real here, there are certain white pastors who are fine with the passive black and brown body, but they don't want the assertive and the confident black and brown body, who will say what he thinks when racism arises in the congregation.

They don't want, to use a historical analogy, they don't want W .E .B. Du Bois, they want Booker T. One of the things that often happens with, I think, black and brown folk in predominantly white spaces is we begin to think that the beautiful things of the Christian faith are white in your pants, and we begin to self-hate.

So we bash the traditional black church, we think all things that are white are right, and we begin to self-hate. We perpetuate white supremacy in our own lives. Justification by faith is central to the gospel.

I'm saying that clearly. Imputation is central to the gospel, but the gospel is bigger than that. In my view, the gospel is about racial reconciliation. Racial reconciliation is a sociological reality for which Jesus died to accomplish.

I can't live in a way that protects privilege. I can't live in a way that protects reputation if my own character is consistent with the gospel. So what I'm exhorting you all to do is, is to count the cost, and if you believe it's a gospel issue, be willing to die for it, as though you would penal substitution.

Initial Reaction to the Professors' Claims

Okay, what do you say after watching a video like that, after you pick your jaw up off the floor? Wow is the only word probably some of us can come up with. I have a few thoughts I wanna share with you about this.

Number one, did you notice how all three of these professors had the same definitions of racism, or race, I should say? They're in lockstep with one another. It's not biological, it is a social construct, and it has everything to do with power relationships.

This is straight out of critical race theory. There's no doubt that that is what is influencing them. And some of the quotes from Matthew Hall are especially concerning. Twice, I believe, he says, I'm a racist or I'm a white supremacist, not because he harbors hatred in his heart, but because he benefits from a system that allegedly gives him privilege.

I'm gonna talk about that in a moment. Jarvis Williams, I think, said some of the most concerning things in the video. He said that the racial reconciliation that he believes in, which is not necessarily probably the kind that some of us might think of when we're trying to give the benefit of the doubt, but the kind he believes in is a gospel issue.

Not only that, it is part of the gospel. Not only that, you should fight for it, as the last quote in the video shows, you should fight for it in the same way you would die for penal substitution. It is on that level, it is that essential.

Well, that's a different gospel. I don't know how you see that any other way. I don't believe that racial reconciliation in the way that critical race theorists think about it is equal with penal substitution and should be fought and died for.

And I don't see that in scripture. Now, what is racial reconciliation? Well, look at some of the things that were promoted in this video by these three. The de-centering of whiteness, that's part of critical race theory.

Reading books that are not by white people. So reading books from other cultures. And Curtis Woods at one point, he tells a pastor who wants to start a multi-ethnic church, well, if we're gonna do this together, you need to read two books from non-white, non-Anglos is what he says.

For every one book you read by an Anglo. And you need to make sure you put yourself under the leadership of an African American. And in the church, if we're gonna try to get elders, we need to make sure that we're getting elders who are also not white.

So we have a multicultural model. Now, this is not biblical. This is adding qualifications to scripture, but that is part of the racial reconciliation motif. It is instead of in the Marxist, traditional Marxist conception of redistributing money, this is redistributing privilege in their minds.

Now, here's the interesting thing to me. Here's the interesting thing. Matthew Hall, he is trying to show everyone how really terrible their families and their denominations and their country and all this stuff, how terrible it all is.

It's all white supremacy because of the systemic racism that's been going on for years and it's still going on. He is speaking from a place of being the provost. And I think when the video was recorded, he was probably the dean of Boyce College.

Now he's the provost. Either way, speaking from this leadership perspective, along with these professors that are also at this Southern Baptist institution, getting paid to teach. I mean, jobs are in short supply.

They've been having a lot of layoffs at Southwestern and other seminaries, but they have jobs and they're teaching there and they're invited to conferences. And as the video attested to, it's not just that Southeastern that they're getting media outlets.

It looks like they're doing promos online and radio shows and stuff. So they have influence. And their whole conception is that those who are not privileged need to gain privilege from those who are. Well, here's one of the things that I think has been awkward about this whole fight, this whole controversy.

The ideas of Neo-Marxism, if you want to call it that, the ideas of Neo-Marxism essentially say that those on the bottom need to rise to the top and those on the top need to rise to the bottom. And usually the goal is to get this kind of equal playing field, this sort of egalitarian place that we can all live in harmony with one another.

Those who are on the bottom are the conservatives. Let's just be honest about this. And I know from a lot of friends, especially in the Southern Baptist Convention, seminary professors included, there's a fear to sign the Dallas Statement.

I know multiple professors who agree with it and would sign it, but there's a fear that they're gonna get kicked back, that they are not going to be able to get promoted or they might get fired, as one professor told me.

They do not, well, and that wasn't specifically about the Dallas Statement, that was just about sharing conservative beliefs, but I know those who have signed the Dallas Statement that are either working for SBC entities or in evangelical Christianity and leadership positions, and they've gotten some flack for it.

And those who want to and haven't are scared to do so because they know the flack they'll get. As a student, I know I blacklisted myself when I said the things that I did about Southeastern. And I know of other students at other Southern Baptist seminaries who feel the same exact way.

They have to be quiet. They can't say what they really think. And so there is an ideological, if you wanna call it a disparity, there is an ideological disparity. I don't have the privilege that some people do.

Even though I'm a white guy, right, I should have all the privilege in this critical race scheme, I don't. And that has made this whole thing awkward. The guys at the top of leadership who have the most privilege of all are the ones that are so adamant that we need to give up our privilege.

So this has created, I think, in the pews at least, those who are understanding what's going on now because we have terminology to describe it because of Resolution 9, we didn't have terminology before.

We didn't know what to call it necessarily. I said neo-Marxism, but that's kind of a broad category and very sensitive seminary professors didn't like that word. Well, now we can call it critical race theory.

We can define it. We can talk about intersectionality. Southern Baptist Convention has handed that to us. I mean, in a sense, Resolution 9 has become our own analytical tool, right, by which to analyze the Southern Baptist Convention.

And so it's been a great thing in many ways because we have a vocabulary by which we can now identify the enemy, right? We have a vocabulary by which we can identify the enemy. Now, this is an awkward situation, like I said, though, because those in the pews who are now realizing this, I almost said they're getting woke to it.

They're waking up to this reality. You know, they are saying, wait, hey, hold on a minute. Wait, you have power. Why are you talking about redistributing power? Why don't you redistribute your own power?

Why don't you de-center your own power structure? Because you're clearly at the top and I'm not. And I think this needs to be pointed out. And in some ways, we need to actually, and this is a crazy thing in some people's minds because they think unity is the best thing.

But we actually need to get more polarized if we're going to have unity. Because right now, this is where we're at. Peace, peace, and there is no peace. You saw the quotes from Al Mohler that were interspersed throughout that video.

And I've talked before on this about what Danny Akins said. And there's this sense of we are all in line and lockstep because we have the Baptist faith and message. We have the International Mission Board and North American Mission Board.

And we are accomplishing the same kind of goals. So we shouldn't let this kind of thing divide us. This critical race theory and intersectionality battle and feminism and egalitarian, all that stuff. We need to just make sure we have these healthy conversations.

Well, here's the thing. If we can't actually identify who the culprits are, in a sense, who's promoting these false ideas, what those false ideas are, give them definition. If those conversations are considered mean, right, if Tom Askell is a bad guy because he's trying to do that, then you never really get anywhere.

There's a fake peace. Well, now I think we're actually seeing a divergence. We are seeing a split already happening. And perhaps God will be merciful. Perhaps people will realize that they are wrong and there will be repentance and we can come back together.

But if the problem is ignored, it's just not going to go anywhere. You have to be able to identify what the problem is in order to get it right. So that is, I think, a good thing about this video and where we're at right now in this fight.

The discouraging thing is, I think a lot of us have thought, Albert Mueller is the champion of conservatism. This has been going on under his nose from 2014. I think the last clip is 2018. This has gone on at his institution.

And because we have this vocabulary now, a lot of people, I think, are realizing that sermons and blog articles and things that they listened to even years ago were infected with this critical theory stuff.

And so now they're pulling those things back up and they're saying, hey, wait a minute. I thought that was weird at the time. Now I get it. Now I understand what was going on. And there's a race now, I think, to scrub things.

Al Mueller said he had scrubbed that one article by Matthew Hall. Like I've said before, Kingdom Diversity at Southeastern in this early summer scrubbed about 90 of their material at the Kingdom Diversity website.

So things are coming down. And I think there's probably a little bit of a race here to find things before they get scrubbed. But here's the interesting part. These ideas have made their way into books and into podcasts.

And I mean, a lot of these videos that were in this compilation aren't even necessarily in the purview of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. They're just interviews that these guys did with podcasts or promos online for other things.

And so the tentacles have stretched out in all different directions and it's been happening for a few years. So the evidence is out there. And these institutions, even if they wanted to, they can't scrub all of it.

They're going to have to face the music. That includes Albert Mueller. He's gonna have to face the music. And a video like this, I think it helps. It helps clarify things. It confirms our suspicions that this is what was going on.

And MLK50 was the fruit of something that had already been going on. And so many of us weren't aware of it. I was aware of it before a lot of people because I was at a Southern Baptist Seminary. But the only tools I had were, this sounds a lot like my secular education.

My secular education was Neo-Marxist. This is Neo-Marxist. And that's kind of as far as my analysis went. But now we have sovereign nations putting out videos where they're going into the intellectual side of this, explaining what the whole theory is, explaining what intersectionality is.

We're getting tools slowly. There really aren't any good books on this yet from a Christian perspective, but I think they're coming. I think they're coming. And this is a very good thing. More of this kind of thing needs to happen.

Exposure needs to take place. And so I'm encouraged by that, even as I'm discouraged that this is what's going on. But it's just like having a wound. You need to know kind of how bad the damage is if you're gonna try to treat it, right?

And covering it up, covering it up, covering it up has never really fully shown us how bad it actually is. And it is pretty bad. I wish I had good advice for some of the guys at the top of these institutions.

Not that they would listen to me anyway, but I put myself in their position and I think, what if I was Al Mohler? What would I say? I mean, I guess come out and apologize would be the first thing, but then what do you do?

I would think you'd have to clean house. You'd have to fire some people. If you don't fire them, there'd have to be some major guarantees that this kind of thing's not gonna happen anymore and some really sincere apologies and a renouncing of all the former promotion of these postmodern ideas.

I just don't know how they can do it at this point. I mean, this is just three professors. I'm sure there's a lot more. And what about all the students who sat under those guys that are now going to become professors?

We're in trouble. We're in trouble in some of these big institutions. But the good news is, of course, we know we're in trouble. So the other thing I wanted to, this is kind of off the top of my head.

Enemies Within the Church Conference and a Broader Coalition

So I wanted to mention this in passing at least. The Enemies Within the Church conference has now been announced for October 18th through 19th. And I will be there. I was asked to come and present and lead a panel discussion, I believe.

We'll see what happens. I know there's more speakers that have yet to be confirmed. But if you can get there, you're gonna wanna go to enemieswithinconference .com. It's enemieswithinconference .com. And it's a Friday to a Saturday.

And there's, I think, meals provided on Saturday. And I think it's just gonna be a good time. This is another, this is a monumental thing as well. And the reason for that is because I don't think this has happened yet.

You have some of the founders, or not founders, the G3 Social Justice and the Gospel Conference and the Sovereign Nations, I guess, is the one that's been promoting some of these conferences from founders and G3.

But those were not as interdenominational. This is actually kind of an interdenominational. This is a, I think, politically conservative more, but also within the boundaries of Christendom kind of conference.

So I think there's two kind of elements here. There are those who are more conservative who are realizing, hey, this isn't good if the evangelicals start either not voting or voting for Democrats. Our country's gone.

And then there are those who are Christians who are very concerned with, okay, what does this mean for the gospel? This is heresy and it's completely infecting the church. And so you have kind of a coalition being built.

And I mean, I just know from even a few of the people that I recognized on that, some of them, many of them I haven't met. I haven't met most of them. But some of them that I do know are from different perspectives.

You have some Pentecostal, at least one there. You have some more Armenian-leaning people. You have some more Calvinist people. There's just all sorts of different folks. I think Janet Medford, who's hosting a fundraising dinner on Saturday night, I believe she's Methodist, if I'm not mistaken.

So we may not agree on everything, but we agree that this is a problem. And as John MacArthur said, it's the greatest threat to the gospel that he's seen in his lifetime. And so I'm looking forward to that if you live in the area or even if you don't, go to the enemieswithinconference .com, book your reservation and get a plane ticket and come on out and I'd love to meet you there.

So that's all I wanted to say tonight. God bless.