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Neil Shenvi Profile picture
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2 Dec, 10 tweets, 4 min read
David Gushee was the first to frame the work of Du Mez, Barr, Tisby, Butler, Jones, Whitehead, and Perry as an evangelical "deconstruction project."

Here's a thread of my detailed reviews of their individual books.
1/
Jesus and John Wayne: Du Mez offers "A Needed Critique" but "no exegesis of key biblical passages about gender, power, or authority. Indeed, the book offers little if any theological reflection at all on these issues." 2/
shenviapologetics.com/cowboy-christi…
Barr's Making of Biblical Womanhood: we should "ask whether our vision of female participation in the mission of the church has been shaped more by culture than by Scripture" but her "reasoning amounts to a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument." 3/
shenviapologetics.com/unmaking-the-p…
Tisby's Color of Compromise is "an important read for anyone concerned with racial justice" that "should provoke introspection and lament" but a "mixed bag" of specific proposals that make controversial assumptions about justice and reconciliation. 4/
shenviapologetics.com/compromised-a-…
Tisby's How to Fight Racism contains some suggestions that are "good and laudable", but the book is "plagued by imprecision, ambiguity, and faulty assumptions."
5/
 shenviapologetics.com/a-house-divide…
Butler's White Evangelical Racism is "a scathing denunciation of evangelicalism" that "contains no footnotes, endnotes, or in-text citations of any kind" and adopts "a deeply cynical approach to the motives of others" that is "unsustainable." 6/
shenviapologetics.com/religion-as-ra…
Jones' White Too Long provides sickening but accurate examples of "racial terrorism." But he has adopted an interpretive lens that sees even a Black prisoner's Christian conversion testimony, as "a complex choreography of white supremacy" 7/
shenviapologetics.com/a-semi-review-…
Whitehead and Perry's Taking America Back for God recognizes that there exists a "dangerous form of religious belief which syncretizes patriotism with Christianity" but "fails to grapple with even basic questions of political theology" 8/
shenviapologetics.com/god-and-countr…
I summarized the approach taken by these books in my article "Sociology as Theology: The Deconstruction of Power in (Post)Evangelical Scholarship" concluding evangelicals should "concede criticism [where] valid" but reject their overarching framework. 9/

cbmw.org/2021/11/21/soc…
Lastly, many claimed my Eikon article was "ignoring criticism" in an effort to protect "masculinity/whiteness" (I'm not white). I urge people making this claim to read these reviews which consistently acknowledge valid critique while rejecting bad assumptions/methodologies. 10/10

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More from @NeilShenvi

Neil Shenvi Profile picture
1 Dec
Thread on the evangelical "deconstruction project":

David Gushee was the first person to use this phrase to frame the work of Du Mez, Barr, Tisby, Whitehead, Perry, Jones, and Butler.

At the time, these scholars praised and retweeted his article. 1/
In his article, Gushee describes how these authors' works expose the fact that patriarchy, toxic masculinity, authoritarianism, Christianity, nationalism, anti-gay sentiment, Islamophobia are embedded in white evangelicalism. 2/
baptistnews.com/article/the-de…
A month later, Jonathan Leeman wrote an article critiquing Gushee along with the books he mentioned for following postmodern methodologies "to expose the will-to-power hiding inside various truth claims." 3/

9marks.org/article/editor…
Read 12 tweets
Neil Shenvi Profile picture
22 Nov
A few days ago, @DennyBurk posted this picture of an @MSNBC legal analyst with the book #CriticalRaceTheory: The Key Writings in the background.

Given the pushback, I thought I'd show how CRT can help us understand progressive commentary on the #Rittenhouse verdict. A thread: 1/
CRT asserts that racism is "ordinary, not aberrational." It is the "usual way society does business" (Delgado and Stefancic, CRT: An Introduction, p. 8).
This is especially true in our legal system, where ideas like "liberalism, neutrality, objectivity, colorblindness, and meritocracy… camouflage [how] racial advantage propels the self-interests, power, and privileges of the dominant group" (Harper et al., JHE, 2009)
Read 8 tweets
Neil Shenvi Profile picture
3 Nov
I've seen people scoff at the idea that kids might be hearing that it's bad to be white, so here's a short thread.

First, here's Robin DiAngelo in White Fragility saying “a positive white identity is an impossible goal” and “to be less white is to be less racially oppressive” 1/
Next, here are Delgado and Stefancic in #CriticalRaceTheory: An Introduction: "many critical race theorists... hold that racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained. If we take this perspective, then no white member of society seems quite so innocent.” 2/
Here's Sandra Bartky, quoted in Applebaum's Being White, Being Good: "On my view, I am guilty by virtue of simply being who I am: a white woman, born into an aspiring middle-class family in a racist and class-ridden society." 3/
Read 6 tweets
Neil Shenvi Profile picture
21 Jul
I finished Applebaum's Being White, Being Good yesterday.

Below is a collection of particularly eye-opening quotes.

1/
2/
3/
Read 12 tweets
Neil Shenvi Profile picture
21 Jun
Time for a @wokal_distance-style thread on two subjects: 1) the claim that #CriticalRaceTheory teaches that "all white people are complicit in racism" and 2) whether CRT scholars are always honest brokers.

First, does CRT claim that "all white people are complicit in racism"? 1/
I often hear it claimed that CRT doesn't teach anything like "all white people are complicit in racism." However, Delgado and Stefancic's CRT: An Introduction is *the* classic introductory text on CRT and it includes the following statement: 2/
"many critical race theorists and social scientists hold that racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained. If we take this perspective, then no white member of society seems quite so innocent.” - Delgado and Stefancic, CRT: An Introduction, p. 91 3/
Read 10 tweets
Neil Shenvi Profile picture
26 Apr
I'd like to ask @brianfraga to reconsider his article criticizing @BishopBarron for saying that #CriticalRaceTheory has "philosophical underpinnings in Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, and Derrida."

Short, instructive thread. 1/
To determine whether Bishop Barron was correct, @brianfraga turned to @SamRochadotcom, a "Catholic philosopher and academic who has written about critical race theory." Rocha made numerous claims, including the claim that 'critical' in "CRT" simply means the difference 2/
between the biological theory of race and a sociological one" and that "nowhere whatsoever does a critical theory of race or CRT emerge from German or French theoretical foundations" and that "it is fiction to claim that they emerge from the secret roots of Nietzche, Marx, 3/
Read 7 tweets

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