SRR 105 Hiram Diaz on Critical Race Theory

I do a podcast.

I'm not interested in your podcast.

Justification by Faith Alone and Polemical Gospel Defense

The anathema of God was for those who denied justification by faith alone. When that is at stake, we need to be on the battlefield, exposing the error and combating the error.

We are unabashedly, unashamedly Clarkian. And so, the next few statements that I'm going to make, I'm probably going to step on all of the Vantillian toes at the same time. And this is what we do at Simple Riff around the radio, you know.

We are polemical and polarizing Jesus style.

I would first say that to characterize what we do as bashing is itself bashing. It's not hate. It's history. It's not bashing. It's the Bible. Jesus said, Woe to you when men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way, as opposed to blessed are you when you have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness.

It is on. We're taking the gloves off. It's time to battle. Welcome back to Simple Riff from on the radio. This is your host, Carlos Montijo. Flying solo again this time, unfortunately. It's been kind of happening that way for some reason recently.

Tim kind of laments again that he he couldn't make it this time. We had originally planned to do this, the three of us, but he had to he had to work today. So he wishes he could be here with our guest today to talk about some very important topics that are really affecting the body of Christ.

Very pertinent topic. So I do have some administrative items to cover, as you all know. So we did get a new email. Just want to reemphasize that. You can email us now at Thorn Crown Ministries at gmail dot com.

And we also we have a Google voice number that you can reach us by. If you have any feedback, questions or anything, you can leave a voicemail and we can play it on the podcast and interact with your message.

You can find that in the Thorn Crown Ministries dot com website. And the number is nine one five three zero two zero nine one five. So you can reach us out there, you can send us an email and give us your feedback.

So without further ado, I have a very special guest with us today. We have Hiram Diaz of the third with us today. If you have been following the blog, you would have noticed that we've recently published an article from him.

The name of which is is critical race theory, anti-Christian and to which Hiram answers in no uncertain terms an unequivocal yes. And so we want to kind of do a deep dive of what's been going on. So, Hiram, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience?

Let us know. Just tell us a little bit about yourself and your reason for writing the article.

Thanks. Like you said, my name is Hiram Diaz. When I write, I put Hiram R. Diaz the third, just recognition of my predecessors, my grandfather, my dad. So that's why it's there. But you can just call me Hiram Diaz.

I am a lay apologist, which means I don't get paid to be an apologist. It's not like a professional title. It's something that I do because I love the body of Christ and more importantly, love the Lord.

I've been doing apologetics for quite some time now, maybe 10 years or so since my conversion. And before my conversion, I was an atheist. I was someone who had a false conversion. I was like 16 years old, 16 and a half years old.

And I read a lot of theology at that time, read a lot of apologetics, but I wasn't converted. And this showed up, you know, a little while afterward when I started getting more involved in philosophy, I abandoned the faith that I thought I had.

And I just spiraled out of control philosophically, epistemologically, and even in my in my everyday life, you know, drug abuse, partying, things like that. It wasn't until years later that the Lord saved me and delivered me from that.

And when he did, I asked the Lord to just use my life, use my intellect, use all the knowledge that I obtained from philosophy for his glory. So I wrote on my own blog, which is InvoSpec .org. It's my personal blog.

And when I was writing there, I got involved with a guy named Mike Burgos. He's a pastor out in Connecticut. We worked together for CARM for a little while, Christian Apologetics Research Ministry, Matt Slick's thing, when they had a blog and he and I worked together.

And later on, we we came together again and we started Biblical Trinitarian. And that's where you guys found the article, BiblicalTrinitarian .com. And that's where we're trying to provide scholarly resources for everybody, basically, but for pastors also, for people who are going behind the pulpit preaching, who don't have the time to collate all these scholarly sources for different subjects.

We're going to do the work as best as we can and then present it for people, you know, giving full citations so they can look these things up for themselves. Whether we're dealing with annihilationism, Unitarianism or social justice, empirical theory, you know, pastors don't have a lot of time to look these things up for themselves.

And so we're trying to provide scholarly resources while research stuff. So that's what I do. Everyday life, I'm just a normal guy. You know, I have four kids, I'm married and I work 40 hours a week for the school district where I live.

I preach also at my church, Port Cities Reformed Baptist Church here in Lewiston, Idaho. It's been more frequent lately. And Lord willing, maybe I'll move into a full time preaching ministry. But for now, it's just intermittent as my pastor asked me to do this.

So that's basically me in a nutshell.

Very cool.

And you asked me, did you ask me to talk about like why I wrote the article?

Yeah. So before we get into the article that you wrote, I think you've also published a couple of books, right? You want to talk about those?

Books on Conversion, Soul Sleep, Athanasius, and the Trinity

Yeah. Yeah. So I self-published three books. The first one is non-neutrality, a personal testimony. That's about basically it's like an overhead view of how the Lord saved me. And I go into some philosophy stuff, not in too much depth, but enough to show the problems that it causes intellectually and spiritually.

Another one that I put out is called Soul Sleep and Unbiblical Doctrine. And that is where I'm dealing with the question of whether or not the proponents of soul sleep, the heresy of soul sleep, whether or not they interpret the metaphors of sleeping in a literal sense.

And I show that they're not. And I show that if you interpret it literally, then you can't support the doctrine of soul sleep. And most recent lecture, there's another there's four actually altogether.

And I think about it. The third one is Athanasius, ontology and the work of Christ. And it's the title. And in there, I'm addressing another claim from annihilationist regarding the church father, Athanasius.

It's become popular for them to say that he was an annihilationist. But I demonstrate from contemporary scholarship and from writers in the past and even from a well-known annihilationist from the past that Athanasius was not an annihilationist and people didn't consider him to be one until fairly recently.

You know, so they're manipulating history and they show that in the book. And the most recent thing that I put out is called Jesus was a Trinitarian. And that's essentially a response to a book by the Unitarian Anthony Buzard, who wrote a book called Jesus was not a Trinitarian.

Hence the title, Jesus was a Trinitarian. And what I'm doing is showing from Jesus's interaction with the scribe in Mark, chapter 12, where the scribe says, teacher, what is the greatest commandment? And the Lord answers him.

I'm showing from that text itself that although Jesus affirms the Shema Deuteronomy, six, four, he's actually not supporting Unitarianism at all. But he's actually showing Trinitarianism from the text of the Old Testament.

So that's the most recent thing that I published. There's another book that Mike and I and some other people like Anthony Rogers, vocab Malone and Edward Dalkor. We've put out a book recently called Our God is Triune.

And that's just multiple essays from me, from Mike, from Eddie Dalkor and Anthony Rogers and vocab Malone regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. Also Rudolf Bischoff, he's a South African pastor and apologist, and he wrote some articles in there as well.

So that book is it's a little more pricey, but that book is really good, not because I wrote for it, but because of the other stuff that other people wrote for it. There's a lot of meat there. So if you're looking for like systematic Old Testament interpretation regarding the Trinity, there's a lot in there.

And you can you can get all these from Amazon or from other websites as well where you sell books.

Excellent. I didn't know you knew Dr. Edward Dalkor. Ryan Denton actually knows him pretty well, I think, too. That's pretty cool. Small world. Good stuff. You know, in light of what you know, in light of recent events, namely the 2019 Shepherds Conference, you know, we kind of talked about this a little bit before.

And so I wanted to get kind of get your thoughts on it in light of the fact that you also wrote this article. It's really good article criticizing critical race theory. And, you know, so I didn't get to see the whole thing.

I mainly just listened to some like three or four podcasts and listen to Todd Creel, James White and J .D. Hall talk about it. I did hear the I listened to the clips and it was it was pretty bad. It just it looked pretty bad from my from my perspective.

But what were your thoughts about that fiasco there?

The Shepherds Conference, Social Justice, and Defining Terms

Yeah, it was painful. Like I told you before we started recording, we talked about a little bit. It was it was painful to listen to, you know, because it was so obvious that they were avoiding answering questions, the questions that Phil Johnson was giving them.

And these weren't even really that hard to answer. Right. You know, and especially to see Al Mohler get so worked up, you know, he was palpably mad. You could tell he was upset. And, you know, the question I mean, we should come to mind is if there's nothing going on, this is if there's no funny business going on here.

And why are you so upset? Yeah. You know, why not just address the issue? If someone asked me about social justice, I would tell them I don't support and hear the reasons why. It's not a it's not a complex issue.

It's black and white. You either do or you don't. That's it. And if and something that is really frustrating listening to these guys is the idea that, oh, the issue is too complex for us to get into in, you know, in a short Q &A session.

Well, that's nonsense. You know, something that we know as Clarkians is you define your terms. Right. Right. There's ambiguity regarding the definition of social justice, define it and then work within the confines of that definition.

That's all you have to do. But even that is something that they didn't want to do. You know, it was like I said, it was painful to listen to because it was so blatantly obvious that there were nerves being touched upon.

Definitely. Yeah. You know, it was interesting because it struck me as odd because Phil had talked to all of the men at the panel prior to that in the green room or whatever it's called. And they had agreed to discuss that issue.

So it just seemed very strange that when it came up with the cameras shining on everybody's face, like it still kind of just went the wrong way. And, yeah, I was pretty surprised at how badly Muller handled himself.

He was just you could tell he was kind of very defensive, prideful, arrogant even. It was pretty disappointing and it was interesting. I was going to mention this before as well, that I went to Lifeway and I saw they had a little social justice shelf section where I saw Eric Mason's book, Woke Church, and it was endorsed.

Yeah, right on the cover page was Ligon Duncan's endorsement of that book. And so there was an obvious contrast there. And, yeah, it was pretty bad. It was pretty ugly. And I think everybody has said some helpful things.

I don't know if you got to listen to Todd Friel or James White or any of the other critiques of that incident. But one thing I do appreciate is that this at least is going to force the conversation. Hopefully, hopefully it will force a conversation between these men at least and to the church at large as well to kind of tackle this issue head on.

Like you have to deal with it. And so, yeah, this is definitely something that is a lot of people are just misinformed about. They're not they don't have a biblical as your article very well illustrates.

They don't have the proper understanding of just how badly this social justice, critical race theory contradicts scripture. And so and, you know, on that note, I wanted to see if we could just dive right into your article.

I got the chance to read this a couple of times and I was really I really enjoyed reading it. It was a it was a very good kind of an expose of of this critical race theory stuff. And I like how you you basically detail.

It was kind of neat to see how you when you. So. So in our previous discussion, you mentioned that you studied literature, right? Yeah. And so I thought that was pretty neat because I studied literature, English and American literature in college as well.

And, you know, the big buzzword at the time was post-colonialism. And this this whole this whole issue of post-colonialism kept coming up and the literature departments were being practically redefined by it.

And it's it's exactly this stuff that you talk about in the article like this. Academics were formulating theories about critical race and stuff. And it was like happening right under my nose. And it was interesting because I just sort of dismissed it as postmodern babble, but postmodern nonsense.

I never really dug into it. But that's what I appreciate about your article, that you actually dug in and you show just how anti-Christian it really is. So why don't we talk about just first your motivation for for writing the article?

Why Critical Race Theory Is Anti-Christian

Well, like I said, when I was introducing myself, I love God's people, you know, and I love the Lord more, you know, even more so. And it's really sad to see specifically white believers. Right. Because this is an assault in a lot of ways on white Christians, quote unquote, white people, you know.

And it's really sad to see because as a Christian, you are motivated to do good works for God's word. As a Christian, you desire to serve your neighbor, to love him as yourself, to give your life for your neighbor if necessary.

You know what I mean? Right. And to see a group of people taking that good desire that God has instilled in us by regeneration, by the indwelling of the spirit and trying to manipulate that to guilt people into doing something that they're not required to do by God's law.

It's not only heartbreaking, it's also angering, you know, because that's essentially what you see happening with people who are promulgating the social justice nonsense, instead of taking advantage of, you know, the Christians who are going to be more sensitive in terms of recognizing past abuses of one group by another group.

They're taking advantage of it. And that's one of the big reasons why it why I was why I thought I should write about it. You know, another issue is the fact that I am Hispanic and I grew up in the hood, you know, and I see the I see the hypocrisy behind all the social justice stuff.

You know, I grew up seeing my own people, the tensions between Puerto Ricans and tensions between various black groups and various ethnic groups and the racism that exists there that nobody ever talks about.

Right. And the way that it's being promoted now with social justice and critical race theory, even in the secular world, is as it's as if the only people who are racist are white people. And that's not the case at all.

You know, so that's just on a personal level why it was bothersome to me as well, because it's pure hypocrisy. It's not a realistic depiction of what's going on at all. Not at all. Like I said, it's like I talk about in the article, this is an academic thing and it was birthed for academic and social purposes and it's not realistic.

It doesn't match up to reality. But another issue is the fact that critical race theory, social justice, these things depend upon a worldview that is not Christian at all. And if you embrace it, then you are going to come into head on conflict with the Christian faith.

And for, you know, for a pastor to go up on stage like Matt Chandler did and talk about white privilege as if it's a thing. And for Al Mohler to talk about white supremacy as if it's a thing. You know, one of the things that Al Mohler says in a response that someone had that he had to someone who asked him the question, they said, you know, tell us what your take on social justice is.

And so he's going he's saying, well, you can find this on YouTube. He says, well, I don't agree with the Marxists. I don't agree with the Marxists, et cetera. Not a liberal, obviously not leftist. And he goes, but there are issues of white supremacy that need to be dealt with.

And I'm thinking, OK, well, you're saying you don't agree with them. But in order to come to the conclusion that there's such a thing as white supremacy as the academics define it, which is what he's saying.

Right. He's saying he agrees with that. Then you already have to succumb to a postmodern way of looking at the world. You already have to do it. You know, so he on the one hand, he says, you know, my position, you know, that I don't you know, I don't support Marxism.

I don't support the whole leftist totalitarianism that's going on. And it's true. Politically, he doesn't. Right. But if you're going to stand there and say you want to approach white supremacy as the academics define it from a Christian worldview.

Well, congratulations to contradict yourself. If you're accepting the academics definition of white supremacy, of white privilege, then you've already shown that you've given into a worldview that's not Christian and you are a double minded person.

And one of these things needs to go. Either your Christian faith or the social justice, postmodern ideology that's lurking in the background, you know, but this sends mixed messages to God's people. And not only that, but it destroys the gospel.

You know, something James White talked about is the unity of the church in light of the whole social justice movement. Now, the social justicians are basically tearing the church apart by sending black people against white people, white people and black people against Hispanic people, etc.

Right. By dividing us all by our skin color and by our ethnic heritage. And he ties that directly into the gospel. And he's absolutely right, because critical race theory cannot coexist with the gospel.

Social justice, as defined by the academics, cannot exist alongside of the gospel. You know, it contradicts Christianity at almost every point. And purposefully so, because, like you mentioned, it's tied into postmodernism.

And postmodernism was an assault on the Christian faith, like explicitly so. You can read the postmodern philosophers and they talk about their antagonism toward the Lagos Christ. They talk about their antagonism toward reason, rationality and against, quote unquote, the patriarchy.

A lot of people don't understand that the patriarchy isn't just some sort of feminist thing that has to do with men. It goes all the way up to God himself. Right. Because we know from Scripture that God is referred to as a he, as him.

And so the feminist anti-patriarchy thing also ties into an assault on Christianity. So, like I said, these are some of the motivations for writing it. I want to clarify these things and get really down to the brass tacks.

Right. It's not an issue of whether or not those who are opposed to social justice want to love their neighbor. Because that's the way it's presented by those who are criticizing the critics. They say, oh, well, you guys must not want to love your neighbor.

It's like, that's not the issue. That's very superficial. The issue is that when you get down to brass tacks, you get down to foundations, you guys are pushing, implicitly pushing a worldview that is completely contradictory to Christianity.

And it's going to destroy the faith of those who are in the church. And God's elect won't fall away onto perdition. We know that. But that doesn't mean that you won't give them a heck of a time trying to deal with understanding what's going on.

You know what I mean? And they'll bear the responsibility for doing that. If I can help my brothers and sisters not have to go through that struggle, then I want to do that. And if I can do that by writing an article where I clarify some of these things, I want to do that.

I really appreciated what you were doing in the article. And another funny thing. I'm starting to find a lot of common ground between us because I myself am also Hispanic and probably have some similar experiences to what you were describing about where you grew up and stuff.

So that's really interesting. So in terms of the article here, this really struck me because when I first read it, I kind of was just kind of breezing by it and I didn't realize. So in the very first paragraph, I'm going to go ahead and read the first paragraph and then comment on it.

Matthew Mullins, professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has a series of articles titled Is Critical Race Theory UnChristian? in which he seeks to demonstrate that CRT is not incompatible with the Christian faith.

The articles form an apologetic defense of the recent utilization of CRT by professing evangelical leaders such as Al Mohler, Thabiti Anabwile, Russell Moore, and others who are presently attempting to make social justice issues a primary concern for all Christians.

This has been the cause of conflict between themselves and other evangelical leaders, as well as their congregants and other like-minded believers, who see such an emphasis on social justice, quote-unquote, issues as contradictory to the central role of the church in preaching and teaching the scriptures, summarily expressed by the law and the gospel, and not engaging in social activism.

So it's funny because we just talked about the Shepherds Conference, and that is exactly what's been going on. And so I was really pretty surprised. The thing that struck me is that I thought you were critiquing a secular professor, like an unbelieving professor.

And it turns out this guy is a professor, allegedly Christian professor, I would assume, at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. And I'm assuming this is part of—is this an SPC seminary? Do you know?

I believe so, yeah.

Yeah, so, I mean, surprise, surprise. That just hit me right in the face. So why don't we start to unpack that a little bit and see where you're going with it?

Okay, insofar as the first paragraph?

Yeah, yeah, just the article. Mullins, like who Mullins is.

Okay, well, I don't know much about Mullins, but I do know the more I looked into Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, the more I started seeing bad stuff like this. I learned about this series of articles through the Pulpit Bunker on Facebook, J .D. Hall.

Pulpit and Pen, they have a group on Facebook, right, the Pulpit Bunker, where people post different articles about stuff that's happening. Basically, like news, you know, people post news, and sometimes they write about it at the website.

So I found out about the articles, and I was like, are you serious? Is there really somebody trying to justify the admixture of Christianity and critical race theory? So I went in and I read the articles and I was just blown away, you know what I mean?

Because if you know anything about postmodern philosophy, and you do, you know, postcolonialism and all that stuff that comes along with it, you know that these things are incompatible. So I don't know much about Matthew Mullins, but I did see the article and I started reading it.

And then I started looking, just looking around at the college website and seeing different links to things like kingdom diversity, something that they're pushing. Wherein it's basically like a form of, I'm going to say this, affirmative action for people in ministry roles.

You know, that's what they're pushing for. And Matt Chandler talked about where he's famously or infamously talks about, you know, if he has a white pastor that's more qualified and then a black pastor who's just a little less qualified, he's going to hire the black pastor who's a little less qualified.

You know, this is basically affirmative action, like I said, in ministry. So Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, they're promoting this idea as well. And they have other things. I think they recently just started, if I'm not mistaken, a course on postmodern philosophy.

And not in the sense of critiquing it, which a Christian university should do. But in terms of like trying to converse, they say something along the lines of trying to put Derrida and Foucault, postmodern philosophers, in conversation with the Bible.

And if you know about postmodernism, that's very specific jargon. And most people don't catch on to this. But to say that you're putting one text in conversation with another text is to assume that neither text has superiority over the other in terms of which one has truth.

And you're putting these two things together to try to come up with your own conclusion, basically. Right. But people don't know this because it just sounds like regular talk, you know, just like when people say we need to have a conversation about social justice in the church.

That doesn't mean people just talking back and forth. That's a very specific way of talking in postmodern jargon, which is to say conversation is a denial that there is a transcendent communication from God to man.

And the only thing that you have left when you deny that is imminence. You have discussions between people groups and you are negotiating in terms of power between the people groups. And that's what the terminology of conversation really refers to when you get down to the foundation of postmodernism.

You know, so this is something I saw in the public bunker and I followed it through and I was just taken back by. Really, it seems like a purposeful misrepresentation of critical race theory for the sake of, like I say in the article, presenting an apologetic in defense of it.

You know, because. The thing that really is frustrating is when I read these guys is that I believe that they're aware of the fact that a lot of people aren't going to sit down and read Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher.

But they are going to listen to their pastor and apologists saying that these people, these philosophers have ideas that are contrary to Christian faith. So knowing this, the person who's supporting the postmodern philosopher, postmodern philosophy, critical race theory, what it seems that they do.

And I'm going to go ahead and say I believe that this is what they do. They take advantage of the ignorance of the Christian, the naivete of the Christian who's trusting in the word from the apologist or the pastor.

And they say, is it really the case that, you know, just like the serpent in the garden has God really said, you know, is it really the case that these postmodern philosophers are that bad? You know, don't they say things that are similar to Christianity?

And that's the end. You know, that's that's the end right there. They sneak in and then they start promoting the ideas of these people, you know, not not giving a level headed evaluation of what these people are saying.

But saying, hey, they say good things and we say good things. And what's what's the big deal?

Yeah. Yeah, that's that's really dangerous. And the way you describe that, it's funny because that's exactly what men like Tim Keller do and how they repackage Marxism and socialism to the church. And that's it.

And that's no surprise that he as well is on the wrong side of this of this issue. I did want to mention when I read this article, I was really I really appreciated your perspective on this and how you take a very noticeably scripturalist approach or Clarkian approach to to to how you critique the critical race theory.

So I was I thought that was excellent and how you presented the issue and how you responded to the issue biblically speaking and from a from a scripturalist perspective. So I know we talked about that before a little bit that you you you appreciate the writings of Gordon Clark and all that.

So let's let's keep jumping into this. I want to really unpack kind of you have like six major points. Right. As to kind of the problems behind critical race theory. And so why don't we start with the definition, you know, in Clark?

How about we start by defining our terms?

Critical Race Theory, Critical Legal Studies, and Postmodernism

Critical race theory is it's a theoretical framework in social science and uses critical theory to examine society and culture and the relationship of society and culture to the law, to race, to power.

And this started within legal schools. And this was in the 1980s or somewhere around there. But there was it can be traced back a little bit farther than that. But it ties into something called critical legal studies, so critical legal studies in American jurisprudence.

This was at the same time when. The analytic philosophers and the continental philosophers and broadly speaking, you can say the English and British and American philosophers versus the Western European philosophers, let's say, at the same time where all these philosophers were questioning universal truth, absolute truth.

Whether or not man can come to the conclusion of truth, whether or not morality is absolute. These things basically the beginnings of postmodernism at the same time as this. Legal studies in America were questioning whether or not you can use, let's say, a syllogism deductive syllogism to come to the conclusion that a person is guilty for a particular crime because they were questioning, again, universals, transcendent truth, et cetera.

And so critical legal studies builds off of that. It's basically the degeneration of real thinking in terms of syllogistic reasoning and coming to a conclusion about guilt and innocence in the court of law and moving into things like trying to interpret the motivations of groups that are forming laws.

All right. So instead of taking the law as a given, what you say is as a critical legal theorist, you you look at who benefits from the formulation of a law and you make it about that. Right. And so you can see how this ties into critical race theory because critical race theory is kind of doing the same thing.

It's saying no absolutes. And what we're left with is relationships between individuals vying for power. And so you have to look at the terms as we're coming forward to see who benefits from definition of terms, who benefits from society being structured in a certain way.

So that's what critical race is criticizing. But it comes from critical legal studies. And those two things also come from critical theory and philosophy and critical theory was assessment and an assessment and critique of society and culture.

And they did this by applying knowledge from the social sciences and from humanities, literature, philosophy and things like that. And Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were two philosophers in the Vienna School.

This is in Western Germany or in Germany, excuse me, not the Vienna School. Apologize, this is a different philosophical school, the Frankfurt School. And this was in Germany in the 1930s. And they focus on, again, power, social relations.

And they were Marxists. So they utilize Marxist thought, but they also use utilize Freudian thought. This is another part of the background of critical race theory. The critical theory part comes from these guys, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

And they're using sociology and political philosophy to deconstruct society in favor of Marxism, essentially. And another thing with critical race theory is intersectionality. And intersectionality is another kind of framework, another way of looking at relationships in society.

And basically what they're doing is identifying how interlocking systems of power, as they would say, impact those who are marginalized in society. So me as a Puerto Rican male, they would say I have, even though I'm Puerto Rican, so I'm quote unquote oppressed.

I don't believe that, but that's how they put it. So I have an advantage over a Puerto Rican gay male because I'm straight. You know what I'm saying? And so they would look at that and they'd say, well, on the power spectrum, you have more power than this individual because you have straight privilege.

And then they say, and that gay Puerto Rican male is dark skinned and you're light skinned. So you have another advantage over him. And so they look at, so people are analyzed according to the groups that they fit into.

And so that's another aspect of this. And that all ties into, again, a rejection of transcendent truth, a rejection of God. Essentially, this is an atheistic framework in the most, I guess, in one of the most clearest ways.

This is atheistic or attempting to be atheistic, at least. And it's at odds with Christianity. But individuals aren't seen as individuals. They're not seen as persons made in the image of God. Obviously, individuals are seen as the products of the cultures to which they are, to which they belong.

And you're seen as the product of historical circumstance. You're seen as the product of intersectionality, the various categories that you fit into. And so these are some of the things that are involved with understanding critical race theory.

It's a framework. It's a way of looking at the world that divvies things up in this manner.

Yeah, that's crazy. So like, I think, in other words, if you're a woman who's Black and a lesbian, for example, then you have like three overlapping layers of intersectionality that somehow makes you the victim of these, you know, the opposite or the people who have power over you in three different ways.

And that would require some kind of reparations or something like that. Is that is that kind of where that's going?

Yeah, basically.

Yeah, that's crazy. You know, and one of and you're definite when you're defining, you're kind of listing out the definitions of this, the critical race theory. One of the things that stood out to me was, I think, the one where the one where you say race, you're quoting Mullins, I guess, and saying that race is social construct.