Ep 109 | Critical Race Theory Explained — & How to Stop It | Voddie Baucham | The Glenn Beck Podcast

and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia made to travel.

Critical race theory.

It is the knockout punch for America.

If this continues and is taught to our children, there is no freedom left in America.

We will become a very dangerous, dangerous nation.

One of the key leaders of the fight against critical race theory is Dr.

Vodi Bakam.

He is the author and current Dean of Theology at African Christian University in Zambia.

His most recent book is Faultlines, the Social Justice Movement, and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe.

It is a manual for understanding the warped thinking of critical social justice.

The left is clearly scared of him because they've employed all of their usual defamatory tactics, including flat-out racism.

He is a descendant of slaves and the child of the great migration and desegregation, the son of a single mother who raised him in one of the most dangerous urban areas in our country.

Yet, so-called anti-racists

accusing him now of being a white supremacist.

Unlike them, he offers a viable alternative.

He offers a solution.

This is an important and fascinating man.

Today on the Glendeck podcast, Dr.

Vodi Bockham Jr.

Vodie, my friend, how are you?

Oh, man, better than I deserve.

How about yourself?

I'm, well, I didn't have quadruple bypass.

So

I'm actually better than you are, but

I'm glad to hear you're doing well.

You were supposed to come to Texas in America

to

talk to some churches and to do this podcast, but you were in the hospital.

I'm glad to see that you're healthy.

Yeah, man, I am.

It's been great.

Yeah.

We met probably a year ago, and I had you on the air several times because I found your voice.

I found you on YouTube, and your voice was so refreshing, and you nailed critical race theory.

And this at a time where nobody was really talking about it and you've had been talking about it for years

what led you to this uh discovery or what led you to critical race theory

um i i think there are a couple of things uh i was studying other issues um classical marxism for example and then

later on things like the the frankfurt school antonio gramshey um

And I was

seeing these things sort of popping up and becoming more and more popular in the academic realm.

And then 2007, 2008,

when Barack Obama was running for president,

all of a sudden,

I'm seeing some of these same ideas being popularized, not just in obscure academia,

but they're becoming sort of mainstream

and Marxism was becoming cool,

which is not the first time that that's happened.

Right.

So

here's the problem.

I got into a lot of trouble back in 2008.

I was thinking out loud and I was on Fox and I said, I think the president is racist.

No, that's not quite the right word, but he just seems to have a hatred for the white culture.

What I was sensing was critical race theory because everything that I'm seeing now,

the fruits of critical race theory, it does make you hate

the white culture or what they call the white culture.

I don't, but meritocracy, you know, doing the things that get people ahead in life.

Yeah, and I'd say it goes beyond that, Glenn.

It's not just the white culture or whiteness per se um but because of the the the roots of this thing uh especially the the the neo-marxist the grammarian marxist roots of this thing it's the broader culture so that also includes christian culture um it it's beyond just you know yeah white black it's the western way of life it is the judeo-christian west that's what it is that's why there's such a hatred for the jews yeah Yeah.

And so, you know, to go back to our former president, remember, critical race theory, it's born out of critical legal studies,

which, you know, has its heyday in the 70s, but it really comes of age in the late 80s, in particular in 1989.

And Derek Bell, you know, sort of understood as the father of critical race theory.

And he's a Harvard law professor.

And then his protege is Kimberly Crenshaw, who's a Harvard law student she gives us intersectionality and the former president went to law school where

so so you know he's he's swimming in it you know he's bathing it

back then

it must be so frustrating to know and to see it coming and to be shouting from the mountaintops and be canceled because of it.

I mean, they came after you hard.

Before you were even really well known to most of America.

They knew you were poison to them and you had to be eliminated.

Yeah.

And part of that is, again, these tenets of critical race theory, the idea that

even knowledge itself is a cultural construct, right?

You know, there is no objective truth.

And the way that we get to truth is through narratives, and particularly the narratives of the oppressed, right?

And so, when somebody who belongs to an oppressed minority group is saying something that sounds like the wrong narrative, when they're singing from the wrong sheet of music, then they have to be castigated.

It has to be he's not really black, or it has to be he's currying favor with white people.

You know, it has to be, you know, he's a self-loathing black man, so on and so forth.

Because

wait, wait, wait.

Is this written down?

Is there a handbook that explains that?

That is from them that you can go, no, here it is.

That's a serious question.

Is there anything that...

Not that part.

Not that part.

That part you just sort of learn.

Right, okay.

It's kind of like

I think about that scene in A Few Good Men, you know, that scene in the courtroom where one lawyer, you know, kind of does really well with

a witness.

And the other one comes up and says, Hey, can you show me in this book where the mess hall is?

And he goes, I didn't find that in the book.

I just kind of followed the crowd, you know, at chow time.

Right, right, right.

And this is this is the kind of thing where, you know, that castigation of certain voices and the accusation that certain people are not black, and you know, names like Kuhn and Uncle Tom, and you know, skin folk, but not kinfolk, my favorite new one.

You know,

you know, these sort of things

have been happening for a long time, and there is no need for a rule book in dealing with these sort of things.

Can you let me go back for a second?

You used

the word construct.

That's a new word for most of America.

That's just a social construct.

What the hell does that mean?

Yeah.

Well, again, and I keep referring to this name, this Antonio Gramsci.

He's a very important figure in all of this.

Well, let's start there.

Who is he?

Gramsci is an Italian Marxist from the 1920s and 30s.

He spent a great deal of time in prison under the fascists because the fascists wanted to protect Italy from his mind.

He was a small guy, very bookish.

And so after the Bolshevik Revolution,

it was expected that Europe would basically fall, right?

That there would be this sort of Marxist revolution, workers of the world unite, and that, you know, these European countries would fall to Marxism.

But it didn't happen.

And so now all of a sudden you've got people who are going back and trying to figure out, okay, what's wrong?

So Gramsci is doing this same thing.

And for Gramsci, he comes up with this idea of hegemony.

And it's interesting.

It used to be you'd only hear hegemony if you're in, you know, deep in the academic literature or whatever, whatever, but people are even using this word in popular culture now.

And essentially, Gramsci's arguing that the reason that this revolution is not happening is because the oppressors have established this cultural hegemony.

And this cultural hegemony is being promoted and enforced by the robes of society, by people in law and government, by clergy, by people in education and academia, if you will, and so on and so forth.

And basically, because

the populist is being taught to think according to this hegemony,

they're not following through.

They're not seeing the problems with capitalism.

So for Gramsci, what you have to do is you have to first overthrow the hegemony.

You have to first get into the robes of society.

You got to get control of government and the courts and the schools and the clergy and so on and so forth so that you change people's thinking and weaken the culture from within so that it can then be toppled.

So connect him to the Frankfurt School, something else that people don't really know of, which is how it came over here, I believe, from Nazi Germany.

Yeah, so, you know, Frankfurt School, again, it gets its name because it's in Frankfurt, Germany.

And these are Marxist thinkers and ideologues

along the Antonio Gramsci sort of sometimes referred to as cultural Marxism because it's dealing with this idea of

the culture and whatnot.

And

Hitler rises to power and these guys go west and many end up in the United States.

Colombia, right?

Yeah, and among other places, some very prominent

teaching posts.

And again, these guys are sort of

working out

the ideas of Marxism

within the context of Gramsci's understanding of hegemony and with a view toward really applying it to all of society

and gaining influence.

And I mean,

that's exactly what began to happen.

And

that's where the social construct comes from.

The social construct is the hegemony saying,

no, this is the way it is.

Yes.

And so

here's the thing now.

You remember, and I think you and I talked about this too.

That flyer from the Smithsonian Institute.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

The African American History, Museum of African American History or whatever.

Explaining in case people don't remember.

Yes.

It was a.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, it's a flyer that talks about whiteness.

And among other things on the flyer,

I wish I could pull it up.

I should have thought about that beforehand.

But things like being on time, things like the Protestant work ethic, things like the nuclear family,

you know, things like all these stuff.

Crazy stuff.

And we're going, wait a minute, that's not whiteness, right?

And, you know, Christian people are going, wait, that's kind of biblical.

That's kind of, you know,

that's not white.

It's not American.

It's just kind of biblical or whatever.

And so there was a lot of, you know, hoopla around that document.

But if you understand

the concept of hegemony, then basically you get that what's being said is we value these things because the oppressors and the cultural elite have determined that these things are to be valued.

Critical race theory, for example,

really doesn't believe in, you know, sort of the

empiricism of

the Reformation and Renaissance and so on and so forth, in the idea of objective truth, objective reality.

So the point being made is these things are held in high esteem because they're part of the hegemony that the oppressor uses to oppress the oppressed.

And so what they're doing is they're creating a new social construct saying that this is the way that truth looks at it, which is the exact opposite, right?

Yes.

Yes.

And that truth, if you want to understand truth, you have to listen to the voice of the oppressed.

So that's why we already said about elevating black voices, elevating minority voices, LGBTQIA plus voices, or whatever, immigrant voices, elevating these voices.

Because within this construct of critical theory, the oppressor-oppressed paradigm, within critical race theory, the idea is that knowledge is socially constructed.

And if you want to break that hegemony, what you do is you listen to the voices of the people who are on the outside of that hegemony.

Because the oppressed have alternative ways of knowing and access to other truths that the oppressor cannot see or understand.

So this is what's meant by elevating minority voices and elevating the voices of the oppressed.

So

when did it start?

I mean, because it seemed to be in our

universities.

I mean, I found an old article from 1989 that said,

it looks like all major universities now are dominated by Marxists.

It was a fascinating article, but it didn't seem like it was.

It felt like some of these real crazies were still on the fringe.

When did this

start to really be imposed on students in the schools as a rule rather than an exception?

Well,

I would say in the late 80s.

You know,

in my most recent book, I have a section where I talk about the class of 89, right, and a bunch of things that happened, you know, in that same year where it seemed like a lot of this stuff that was ruminating since the 60s, right, the 60s radicals didn't disappear.

They just went to the institutions, in schools of education,

in schools of journalism,

you know, and social sciences.

They just went there.

And these ideas were ruminating, you know, late 60s, 70s in these obscure academic circles.

But they're obscure academic circles that have a great deal of influence.

If you're teaching the teachers, right?

And I mean, again, if you want to find

critical theory literature and critical race theory literature, you go to the schools of education, you go to the schools

of journalism and political science, and this is where you find this stuff.

Then we begin to multiply disciplines.

And so you get Chicano studies and Africana studies and queer studies and all of this stuff with studies on the end of it, right?

Which are really coming from

this same pool, if you will, and operating from these same assumptions and the same worldview.

And we begin to multiply these things, you know, in the 70s, 80s, and even into the early 90s.

And all of a sudden, you look up and it's reached critical mass.

And so, you know, I talk about 89.

In 89, there's this first meeting

of critical race theory has its first official meeting in Wisconsin.

Peggy McIntosh publishes her piece on white privilege.

You know, Kimberly Crenshaw publishes her seminal piece on intersectionality.

And then there's another book that's published by two Harvard professors called After the Ball,

How America Will Overcome Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the Decade of the 90s.

And it's a propaganda piece on how to change the way people think

about

homosexuality, but it's rooted in the idea of presenting homosexuals as an oppressed minority

so that you could then flip the script.

And I mean, this book is difficult to find now, but it's open propaganda operating from the same premises.

And all of these things happened in 1989.

So,

I mean, it is everywhere.

It is so well thought out.

I mean,

it started in the 20s, became institutionalized over in Germany in the 20s, moved over here

in the 30s, 40s, became really strong in the 50s.

I mean,

how do you stop it?

I mean, it's like a cancer, but it seems to be in all of the organs now.

Yeah.

Well,

there's a couple of things we have to do.

Number one, we have to acknowledge it, right?

That's the first thing.

You talked about me and my heart issues that I've dealt with recently.

You know,

the way guys get in trouble with heart issues is they don't acknowledge it.

You start blaming it on a whole bunch of other stuff and the next thing you know, you've had the big one and it's over, right?

So we have to acknowledge it.

We have to acknowledge that this is an issue.

And I'm encouraged because we're starting to see that.

People are starting to talk about critical race theory.

People are starting to confront critical race theory and so on and so forth.

So that's number one, we have to acknowledge it.

But But secondly, beyond acknowledging it,

we have to unpack it.

And

that's where we've got work to do.

And that's what I'm trying to help people do.

I'm trying to help people to unpack it.

So

can you unpack this first?

Yeah.

What is the goal?

What is the stated goal of critical race theory?

To overthrow?

Yeah, well, again, even that term critical, right?

The term critical, and you, you know, you hear critical theory, we get this from the Frankfurt School, that that term critical means that we're looking at something with a view toward problematizing it.

We're assuming that there are power dynamics at work and that there's this oppressor, oppressed dynamic at work.

critical theory, critical studies is about getting at that with a view toward breaking that hegemony.

So when you hear critical pedagogy, critical theory, critical race theory, critical, you know, when you hear that, hear Frankfurt School, okay?

So,

and when you hear that, recognize that the idea is to problematize

with a view toward revolution and overthrow.

This is why you don't reform the police, you defund the police.

Correct.

And any chaos actually works to their advantage, right?

Yeah.

I mean, it's the ultimate win-win,

I think.

I mean, it's a brilliant, brilliant system of a cancerous disease.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's like

I refer to it, and I'm not the first one to refer to it as a religion, but

this religion, this worldview is well thought out.

Like, there's four main tenets, and some people will say there's seven or eight, whatever.

But I break it down into four main tenets.

The first one is that racism is normal.

In other words, America is a racist culture.

Hey, stop.

Would you say that racist isn't normal, but racism is real and it is a human

failing?

Would you say that?

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

So what's the difference between normal and what I just said?

The difference is that according to critical race theory, everything is racist.

You know, Robin DiAngelo,

sort of the crowned, you know, princess of

this ideology,

her book, White Fragility, you know, was just the number one best-selling book for I don't know how long.

But Robin DiAngelo says, when we're looking at an instance in culture, we don't ask whether racism occurred.

We ask how.

We assume that there's racism.

We assume that America is founded on racism.

This is why we talk about systemic racism, right?

It's everywhere.

By the way, this is why the 1619 project is so important.

Because if America

is based on the principles of the Declaration in 1776, or the principles in our Constitution that was ratified in 1787, then there are these ideals that are lofty ideals that I would argue, and I think you would agree, are the best ideals that any country's ever been founded on.

There's never been a republic founded on better ideals than ours, right?

I've said this several times.

I'm for changing the Constitution and changing America, but can you tell me something loftier or better to shoot for than all men are created equal and endowed by their creator?

I mean, there's nothing about it.

We're not a very old country, but we have the oldest constitution in the world.

Right, operating, yes.

And so, yeah.

And so

if you move it back to 1619, though, the goal of the 1619 project was to say, no, no, no, America starts with slavery

when the first slaves get here.

It doesn't start with those documents.

It starts with slavery because the idea is to problematize the very existence of America.

And so, again, first premise, racism is normal.

Everything is racist.

The core of America is racism and white supremacy.

The second premise is this idea of convergence theory.

And convergence theory basically says, so

the first principle is original sin, right?

That's their doctrine of original sin.

Everybody's born with this original sin.

The second premise is the doctrine of total depravity.

So it argues argues that white people are incapable of righteous actions in the area of race and racism unless their interests converge.

And by the way, that's not my words, right?

This is the words of Delgado and Sinsoy in one of the seminal books on critical race theory, right?

So all those white people that marched with Martin Luther King, they only did it because

they had something to gain.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Because they can't do it otherwise.

Right.

Because of original sin.

Because of the original sin of racism.

It's everywhere.

You can't get away from it.

Right.

It is at the heart of whiteness, right?

Whiteness is inherently evil.

The third one is this anti-liberation.

No, no wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Stop.

So far, you have described the theology, I think, of Louis Farrakhan.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

So, and he, yeah, he would be in the line of liberation theology.

Yeah.

Which, which liberation theology theology comes out of Marxism as well, right?

Right.

So yeah,

it's all swimming in the same stream.

So the third point is this point of anti-liberalism,

rejecting,

you know, Enlightenment rationality and classical liberalism and so on and so forth.

Rejecting ideas of meritocracy and objectivity and all these sorts of things.

Basically science.

Science and individualism, right?

In many ways, in many ways.

And then the last one

is this idea of knowledge as a social construct and us coming to knowledge through narratives.

And so, you know, you put these things together.

It was interesting.

I think it was Don Lemon the other day who had a piece on critical race theory and even interviewed, you know, Kimberly Crenshaw.

And they asked about, you know, critical race theory.

And, you know, everybody says it's Marxist and this, that, and the other.

All you have to do is look at the first word, critical, right?

And anybody who knows anything

knows what this goes back to.

And they're like, no, it's not Marxist.

Critical race theory, you know, it's people who just love America.

We just believe in the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendment.

And I'm sitting there going,

is this really happening?

I mean, there's the literature on this.

is

it's there.

The literature is out there.

And if you want to know what critical race theory is, it doesn't take you long to go to the literature and find out what the principles of critical race theory are.

But nobody is

going there.

They're just saying people are arguing against critical race theory because they don't want to have the conversation about race and racism.

Brother, we've been having the conversation about race and racism since the 1860s, at least,

if not from our founding, right?

We've been having that conversation.

Nobody's saying don't have that conversation.

And I'm looking around and I'm like, you know, no, we want to be honest about America's history.

And I'm like,

has anybody, did you go to a school where you didn't learn about slavery?

Did you go to a school where you didn't learn about Jim Crow?

I mean,

what are we talking about here?

And so

it's as though we're creating this another false narrative and this false paradigm that says either you embrace critical race theory or you don't want to be honest about America and her history and her failings.

And that's the fallacy of the excluded middle, right?

There's something between those two extremes.

So

unpack this.

My daughter came and said to me the first time BLM was out and

they were starting to loot things because of the police police officer that was shot or that was shooting

in Minneapolis.

The first thing she said to me is, Dad, it's not enough

to be against racism.

You have to be an anti-racist.

Explain what that is

and how to talk to your kids about that.

Yeah.

So anti-racism, and you know, this is popularized really

by Ibram Kindy Kindi in his book, How to Be an Anti-Racist.

And

Kindy argues that the opposite of racism is not not racist.

The opposite of racism is anti-racism.

And here's what he means by that.

When you see racism as systemic,

not personal animosity, as we would see from a biblical perspective, from a traditional perspective, right?

It is the hatred of a person,

despising a person, looking down on a person because of their particular race or ethnicity.

No, no, no.

Kendi

and the critical race theorist are arguing that racism is systemic.

So you see disparate outcomes,

you know, and whenever you see disparate or unequal outcomes, you are seeing the product of systemic racism.

Now, in the traditional sense,

if

racism is hatred of another person because of their race, then what I want to be is not racist.

I don't want to have hatred towards another person in my heart because of that person's race.

But if racism is systemic,

then if you're just not hating people, but you're not tearing down the system that is creating disparities, then not racist is actually racist.

And you've got to move beyond that to anti-racism, which means that you're constantly problematizing, right?

Being critical in the oppressor-oppressed, you know,

mode, and looking for areas in the system that are creating disparate or unequal outcomes and fighting against that in order to get equal outcomes.

So

that's why Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King can now be called racists.

Yeah, Frederick Douglass.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, they definitely can.

It's amazing.

You know, this whole idea, we started, you know, tearing down statues and whatnot.

There's no end to that.

There's no end to that.

I chuckled recently as a school, I think in Chicago, was considering renaming itself after Barack Obama.

And they decided not to rename the school because Obama didn't do enough for illegal immigrants.

Now, listen, if Obama's not woke enough for you, nobody is.

Nobody is.

And that's the point.

Nobody is.

Because you can always

find some other

intersection, if you will, and press at that point.

And you can problematize anything.

We can divide people up into these sort of infinite minuscule subcategories and always point to the fact that somebody or

some group of somebody's has been underrepresented or mistreated

and therefore

we've got work to do.

That's why Russia's gulags were full and that's why they had stormtroopers in Germany.

Because people that were all for it suddenly had betrayed the revolution to use the French

phrase.

They've done a lot of

work

on

how to destroy.

Have they done any work on what it actually is going to look like after they pull this down?

Well,

after they pull this down,

the pigs are not only walking on two legs, but they're in the farmer's house at the table.

um

this is right so it's i mean it's it's it's animal's chaos yeah it's animal you know um

it just i i i think we talked about this before i think animal farm is one of the most important books that people could be reading right now right because seeing this you know i mean we're actually watching this right now you know animal farm and and 1984 and and you know so much so much so many of these dystopian you know novels

that we read because we were forced to and

didn't really get because that was something over there, right?

That's something over there in the communist countries, so on and so forth.

And

we're seeing those things now.

And I think what we're moving, this is about power.

And then at the end of the day, this is about power.

Right.

So help me out on this because I feel like there's two forces at work.

One, the,

I think, in many ways, the useful idiot Marxist who believes this junk and believes that, oh, there's going to be a utopia at the end of the rainbow.

There never is.

There never is.

And I marked this for a long time as a socialist movement, a Marxist movement.

However, I think the power and the money behind it is actually more of an oligarchy.

I mean, when it all collapses, the people at the top of the ladder, you know, some of the white people that started BLM and funded BLM, those are the people with the power.

And I think they'll snuff these people out.

Do you see it that way?

That there's two groups, one's just a business oligarchy and a raw

push for power and money, and the other one with this socialist utopia?

Yeah, I mean,

at least those two, you know?

And I mean, that's always the case when you have these sort of, you know, ideological battlefields and whatnot.

But I think you make an important point.

And that important point is this, that you have people like, you know, Robin DiAngelo and other, you know, woke white people who are pushing this, who are touting this, who are educating on this.

But there's one thing that they're not doing.

They're not divesting themselves of power, right?

They're not giving up their seat at the table, right?

And so what they're doing is they're telling everybody else to listen to the voice of the oppressed, to elevate the oppressed, and so on and so forth.

But they're not doing it themselves.

They're not giving up their seat at the table.

It's like Gandhi and Jesus.

They lived it.

They lived it.

And if you're not living it, I mean, I don't know how people like Patrice Cullers has any credibility.

I don't, I mean, there's no critical thinking.

There's no questioning.

There's nothing.

How?

Yeah.

Well,

again, because this is a different religion.

You know,

you talk about Jesus and his life and laying down his life, right?

Greater love had no band than this than he laid down his life for his friend.

And Christ comes to redeem sinful humanity through the giving of himself, right?

Right.

And as followers of Christ, we're called to take up our cross and follow him, right?

You know, deny yourself, take up your cross, follow me, so on and so forth.

And so one of the things that we're seeing

is

how fraudulent this new religion is.

Number one, because there's no redemption in it at all.

There's just penetration.

And that's not

just fraudulent.

That's evil.

That is an anti-Christ message.

So

that brings me here.

You said liberation theology, and I know about liberation theology.

What is the difference between liberation theology and critical race theory?

Yeah,

well,

there's a couple of things.

And interestingly enough, there's a lot of overlap.

I talked about Ibram Kendi in his book, How to Be an Anti-Racist.

There was another

instance recently where

I forget where he was, but he was talking about the difference between savior theology and liberation theology.

And essentially, savior theology is people are sinners and they need their souls saved.

And he's sort of poo-pooing that.

And he's saying, no, no, liberation theology

is a theology that says people need to be delivered from their oppressors, right?

So in many ways, there is overlap between critical race theory and liberation theology.

But the difference is critical race theory specifically comes out of critical legal studies.

And it is about how we use the law

in order to get power.

And

liberation theology started as how do we use the church to get power.

Yes, yes.

Or to liberate the oppressed, right?

One of them is looking at liberating the oppressed almost exclusively through the courts and laws and so on and so forth.

The other, liberation theology, is about

this preaching of a different kind of gospel that is pointed toward the liberation of the oppressed as opposed to being pointed towards the individual sinner.

So, Vodi, I have,

I can't think of another word other than evil

for both of these ideas

because,

I mean,

it rejects all understanding of human nature.

You know, I talked to Jordan Peterson recently and I said, you know, I don't know where you stand on God.

I think you don't believe, but you appreciate the psychological benefit of being able to start all over again and to have redemption.

That is every hero story is about redemption.

This completely rejects that.

And so it leaves people in misery, in darkness, and in frustration and anger.

If there is no justice and no forgiveness,

what do you have left?

Well, it's interesting.

This is why a lot of Christians are trying to find this sort of third way.

A lot of Christians would say, yeah, you know, critical race theory, you know, it's, I get it.

It's, it's, it's a problem.

But

but

they're making some important points.

There is systemic racism.

We do have to deal with, you know, this oppression of,

you know, minority groups and so on and so forth.

And so I'm not going to go to war with critical race theory.

I'm going to try to use it as an analytical tool in order to

bring about this

fair society.

A bad tree cannot bear good fruit.

Amen.

Amen.

And the other thing is, there's nothing that

liberation theology or critical race theory can give us that the Bible doesn't give us.

Everything that it does give us that the Bible doesn't give us is wrong

and sinful.

It's evil.

And so this is why, again, like I was talking about earlier, we have to acknowledge that there's a problem, but then we've got to expose it.

We've got to get in there and analyze this and talk about what it is, where it comes from, what its goals are, kind of like you and I are doing here,

so that we can then get to that third phase, which is, you know, when the Apostle Paul talks about, you know, destroying arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and taking every thought captive to obey Christ.

And this is what I'm trying to get my brothers and sisters, Christian brothers and sisters, to understand.

And that is that we have something that is actually lifting itself up

against the gospel.

So then

how can I mean African Americans are more religious than white people right now

and they still have that culture of church, etc.

But look at Senator Ward

Warnock.

He's a reverend first

and his

church is very popular and it is teaching all of this.

How did he take

real religious, God-fearing Jesus people and flip the script?

Yeah, and I think that's because of the influence of Black Liberation Theology.

It has been influential for a long time

and

it's kind of the water that a lot of people

were swimming in.

And there's not much of a leap from black liberation theology to critical race theory.

But here's what's ironic about that.

I want to read this

for you.

This is from a book Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice.

Schools of Education are using this all around the country.

But listen to this in light of what we've talked about.

The term Christian hegemony may startle readers who are not aware of the pervasive cultural position of normative Christianity in everyday life within U.S.

schools, neighborhoods, and the workplace.

Hegemony is another way of describing the cultural and societal level of oppression, of cultural imperialism as a form of oppression.

In other words, Christianity

is part of the oppressive hegemony.

according to critical theory.

And

so this is why I'm screaming this from the rooftops, right?

Not just as an American, right?

And not just as an American who has lived and is now living, you know, in another country,

but as a Christian who recognizes that eventually this comes for us.

That eventually the oppressor, you know, we're fine when the oppressor is just white people.

And then we go, okay, well, white males, fine.

White male, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied, native-born, right, all that stuff.

Cool, fine.

But then when we get down the list and we recognize that Christian

is part of that list.

And it's not just in this text, right?

But Christianity is seen as part of the oppressive hegemony.

And so it becomes even more startling that people would embrace critical theory, critical race theory,

critical pedagogy, so on and so forth,

if they claim to be followers of Christ.

As critical race theory is

just

deepening its roots and seemingly strangling everything,

you call your book Fault Lines,

and it's because you say this is an earthquake that's going to split everything apart.

Can you go into that about what's coming?

Yeah, and it's not just what's coming, it's what's already here.

Glenn, families are being torn apart over this.

I talk to people, I know you talk to people, where their families, their relationship with their children, with their spouse, with their

parents-in-laws, it's being torn apart over this.

Churches are being split over this.

Denominations are at war within themselves over this.

So what should what should what should

start with Christians?

What should Christians look for in their church and

do if they find it?

Yeah, well, again,

first,

we need to acknowledge that this stuff exists.

Second, we need to educate ourselves as to just the basics of it, the stuff that we've talked about here, the main tenets of it.

And when we understand the basics of it and the main tenets of it, then we begin to see how it's influencing the way we talk and the way we think about certain things.

And there's sort of, there's red flags that go off, you know, when we hear people talking about things like diversity, equity, and inclusion.

You know, when we hear them talking about, you know, systemic racism, when we hear him talking about, you know, oppressor, oppressed,

you know, these sorts of things.

And,

you know, red flags, you know, kind of begin to go off.

And so

that doesn't mean that, you know, whoever's using those terms is completely gone.

It may just be that they're not being careful.

It may just be that they're naive, whatever.

But that's when we need to sort of engage and say, hey,

I've become aware.

of this sinister ideology and I'm kind of concerned because I'm beginning to hear some ideas and some terminology that seems to be coming from this, from this, this, this sinister ideology.

But as you said, Don Lemon, they were denying it on television.

Teachers are now saying, I don't care what the law says, I'm going to teach it anyway.

They will say, that's not what it is.

Yeah.

So where do you go in that conversation?

Well, where you go is, well, actually, here is what it is.

And this is one of the reasons that I wrote the book and one of the reasons that I wrote it the way that I did.

I'm hoping that it's one of those tools that people can use to say, hey,

here's something that lays this out for you.

That puts things in people's own words, right?

And demonstrates what this ideology is and where this ideology is coming from.

And it's not just me, there are others out there who are providing resources, you know,

for people to be able to do this and to be able to go, hey, here's what it is, here's what it teaches.

And I even bring some of those up

in the book.

And so I think it's important that we have those kind of resources so that we can engage thoughtfully

in these discussions and in these debates, because we need to have these debates.

And I think that's another point is

the 11th commandment, right, thou shalt be nice,

enough already.

We need to debate these things and we need to have thick skin and real relationships where we can disagree over things and still come away, acknowledging one another's humanity and acknowledging, you know, for those of us in the church, one another as brothers and sisters in Christ who have a different, you know, opinion on something or whatever, because that's the only way that we sort of get at this.

We need to debate this.

Right, but we still still have to love our enemy, which is kind of the basic of kindness, but I don't think we look at it that way anymore.

Yeah, absolutely.

And

then I think we need to warn people about this, right?

I think, yeah, I wrote this book because I believe I have an obligation.

You know, when I look at, for example, in Titus 1, 9, my obligation as an elder is to hold firm to the trustworthy word is taught so that I can exhort in sound doctrine and refute those who contradict it.

That's my mandate.

Tell me,

the name of the book is Fault Lines, the Social Justice Movement, and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe.

What is the looming catastrophe?

The looming catastrophe is this divide.

The looming catastrophe is seeing people's lives in wreckage.

The looming catastrophe is seeing, you know, our children, our friends, our loved ones at the end of the day, riding this train all the way into apostasy, riding this train all the way into

another version of social gospel,

all the way into this Christ-denying

worldview and other religion.

That's what we don't want.

We don't want to see churches go there.

We don't want to see individuals go there.

When this divide comes, we want people to be on the right side of it.

But the divide is coming and it will be catastrophic.

I know my church talks about it and says we will lose half of the membership of the church because they will be swayed,

you know, away from the gospel, and they'll think that they're doing the right thing.

But,

you know, my church at least predicts that 50% of not only everybody's church, but our church as well, that every church is going to come to a crossroads soon

where you're going to have to choose.

And once that choosing happens, you're on either the right path or the wrong path.

And there's not going to be any bystanders this time.

There's no bystander.

And here's what's so sinister.

What's so sinister is

because these ideologies have masked themselves so well.

They frame it as you don't want to be on the wrong side of history.

Racism is real.

You don't want to deny racism.

You know, white supremacy is real.

The people who have a problem with this are white supremacists or they're influenced by white supremacists.

If you disagree with this and don't want to have this conversation, again, that's what the book White Fragility is all about, right?

You are white, you're a white supremacist, you are a racist, so on and so forth.

If you have a problem with that, that's because of your white fragility, right?

So it's kind of like the Salem witch trials, right?

Yeah.

You know,

it's also very, it's also very much like.

She's innocent if she lives.

She was a witch, right?

Right.

It is also very reminiscent of

the Reformation with Martin Luther.

He's being influenced by the devil.

Don't follow him.

Don't ask questions.

The devil is making him ask questions.

Don't be a part of that.

Well, there's a lot of people that were like, okay, well, I don't want to be on the side of the devil.

I mean, it's the same kind of thing, which is stunning to me.

How is it that you have such clarity?

And I say this, I know the answer.

But talk

about your childhood, and in particular, your mom.

Yeah.

And that was kind of my favorite part of the book.

And I thought it was important for people to get to know.

me and who I am and where I'm coming from.

Because there are people who say, well,

he thinks because he's lived this privileged life or whatever.

And I was raised in South Central Los Angeles by a single teenage mother.

My mother was a practicing Buddhist.

I never heard the gospel until my first year in university.

So I didn't grow up in church.

I didn't grow up, you know,

with Christianity.

But my mother did

an incredible job of raising me and of teaching me personal responsibility.

And one of the stories that I tell in the book is of the time when I got a progress report.

And this will tell you what you need to know about my mother.

I got my progress report and I come home with my progress report.

This is not my grade, by the way.

It's midway through the semester.

It's kind of where I stand now.

I get my progress report and my mother looks at it and says, you're not playing football.

So we're in the middle of the football season.

I have to go, you know, to

school and tell my coach, hey, I can't come to practice.

My mom says I can't play.

And she's like, what?

And I say, yeah, she got my progress report.

He looks at my progress report, calls my mother, and he's on the phone with my mother.

He's like, ma'am, listen, this is, I mean,

Vodi's one of the smartest kids, you know, on the team.

And my mom goes, this is not about how dumb the rest of your players are.

This is about my son.

And she goes,

he's like, you know, this is, this is.

And so eventually the conversation reduces to my coach, Diz Reeves, on the phone with my mother going, yes, ma'am.

Yes, ma'am.

Yes, ma'am.

He hangs up the phone and he says, boy, you better go get your

studies done.

Now, my progress report was a C.

It was a C.

I was not failing my class.

I had a C.

And Francis Buckham didn't play that.

And so I had to sit out for a while.

I don't know if I may have missed a game or whatever, but

that's who my mother was.

That's how she raised me.

So

she bought into the white lies.

Here's what would be said now.

That's what would be said.

That's what would be said about my 60s radical.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's funny.

Absolutely.

Yes.

The whole idea of personal responsibility, you know,

that's just something that has always just really resonated with me.

And that's one of the things that really breaks my heart about this whole, you know, critical race theory, systemic racism thing, because

it can't just acknowledge that racism exists and then say, what are issues and problems that we can point to

that are contributing contributing to disparities, like, for example, fatherlessness.

No, no, no, you can't do that.

That's blaming the victim.

Or as D'Angelo would call it, that's aversive racism.

What do you end up with

if

my mother is wrong

for teaching me

that racism was not the biggest obstacle in my life,

but that my character would be.

What kind of world do we live in where my mother was out of line for raising me like that?

Because essentially, in many ways, that's what we're saying.

Now people say, no, no, no, no, no, no, we'd never say that.

But if you follow these ideas to their logical conclusion,

that's where you end up going.

Where merely speaking about personal responsibility now becomes

offensive.

And so that's, again, one of the sinister parts of this.

And I believe that that goes right along with the idea of taking people away from the truth of the gospel and through Christ being our only hope.

He's our only hope.

And then he transforms our lives

and teaches us how to walk in righteousness, right?

And so

again,

it's sinister that we're running away from these things.

And it'll be catastrophic for those who end up on that side of the fault line.

And my hope is that

I can people to the right side of the fault line.

I hope so too.

Bodhi,

your voice, as I told you the first time we spoke, your voice, right time, right place, and so very important.

Thank you for writing this book.

If you'd like to read and really understand what's going on, the book's name is Fault Lines, the Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe.

Bodhi, thank you.

We'll talk again, my friend.

God bless.

Thank you very much.

I really appreciate it.

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