Thread by @scott_m_coley

Recent discussion of CRT in conservative evangelical circles is, I think, largely if not entirely a distraction from substantive issues. It’s a transparent attempt to delegitimize the demand for institutional justice without any substantive engagement on real issues.

In point of fact, the concept of systemic racism is used across a number of disciplines to describe a variety of different phenomena. Two general fields of application stand out. One has to do with psychology—racist attitudes and so forth. The other has to do with institutions.

A lot of political and cultural conservatives (some of them evangelicals) identify all claims about systemic racism with CRT, and then define CRT strictly in terms of psychological theorizing about racist attitudes.

They then point out that CRT is vaguely related, in ways that they can’t quite explain, to Marxism. It leaves conservative Christians with the impression that all talk of ‘systemic racism’ originates with Marxists who say mean things about white people and American consumerism.

And they’ve managed to elicit this reaction without saying a single word about institutional injustice—which has nothing to do with CRT, really, except insofar as some critical race theorists happen to comment on the racial inflection of institutional injustice in the U.S.

It’s a remarkable sleight of hand. It allows white evangelicals to dismiss all claims to do with institutional injustice without saying the first thing about, e.g., the federal government’s discriminatory housing policies that remained officially in force until 1968:

policies that produced all sorts of toxic problems—from school segregation to racial disparities in wealth and income, incarceration, etc.—real things that now impact the day-to-day lives of millions of Americans, many of whom happen to be our brothers and sisters in Christ.

A lot of the same white evangelicals who reject the notion of systemic injustice also claim they’re praying for some sort of national revival. I’m not sure whether a modern nation-state is the sort of thing that’s eligible for a spiritual revival. But set that to one side.

The God that I read about in the Bible will have nothing whatsoever to do with a people who store up harvests sown with the seeds of injustice.

In fact, God detests the supplications of such people.

So as long as you persist in denying that systemic racism is a problem, don’t worry about whether the government permits you to go to church, with or without a mask. Don’t worry what kind of music you sing there, or whether you sing at all. Because none of it matters.

As long as you refuse to address systemic injustice, and willingly continue to benefit from it, God doesn’t want to hear from you. Your church is just a building where you meet up with your friends.