Some are all up in arms over Dr. Voddie Baucham, referring to CRT as a “cult.” John Andrew Reasnor is one such person:
Others have called CRT a “religion,” garnering the same response. Likening CRT to a religion or cult isn’t new, nor is it the invention of conservatives.
Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, whom Derrick Bell called “critical race theory's most politically damaging critic,” used religiously charged language:
Derrick was supremely confident that he knew what policy positions were the correct positions to adopt and thus the ones to urge his students to follow. He was so confident that he became impatient with others who lacked his certitude. He displayed this impatience by routinely portraying opponents as racists, naifs, or opportunists. I lack his certitude and believe that there is good reason to be open-minded about a variety of hotly-contested debates regarding race policy. I therefore believe that a well-constructed course on race relations law should provide room for exploration of alternative resolutions to the dilemmas we face.
I suspect that the “grumbling” to which Derrick alluded stemmed from the displeasure of some students who resented taking a class on race relations law in which they were forced to understand and take seriously perspectives at odds with those that they embraced and expected me to champion unequivocally. That I scrutinized those perspectives searchingly and attempted to present opposing viewpoints sympathetically was seen by some students as a betrayal – an opinion that Derrick largely shared.
One might have thought that the author of Serving Two Masters, which suffered its own confrontation with ideological excommunication, would have understood that determining how best to proceed requires more than an emotional commitment to “doing the right thing.” Useful prescription requires as well an intellectual investment in figuring out what doing the right thing entails. There are, after all, many areas in which people who are thoroughly committed to advancing the interests of blacks disagree over how best to proceed. Some champions of African American uplift urge rejection of integrationist educational policy. Others counsel pursuing integrationist strategies. Some champions of black advancement argue in favor of seeking better housing and other opportunities by encouraging the dispersal of black ghetto-dwellers. Others argue in favor of consolidating the strength of black ghettoes and bringing greater opportunities to inner-city blacks where they already reside. Debates rage over whether it is better to elect as many black representatives as possible from majority-black voting districts or to more fully spread the influence of black voters, even at the cost of sacrificing dominance in a certain number of voting districts; whether it is better to invest more in securing public safety in high-crime, majority-minority neighborhoods or to scale back policing given mass incarceration; whether it is better to prefer to place black orphaned children in black adoptive families or to place such children in the first adoptive homes available, regardless of race; whether redistributive reforms primarily animated by a desire to help blacks are best packaged as race-specific or race-neutral. These issues are not, forgive the expression, black and white. They are complicated and filled with ambiguity and paradox and should be studied as such….
…From Derrick’s vantage, even worse than my writings and classes, were my deviations from Bellian orthodoxy when it came to judging candidates for appointment to the faculty. A black candidate would have had to have been blatantly incompetent to forfeit Bell’s support which meant, practically speaking, that he favored all black candidates since no one blatantly incompetent would have made it to the floor of a faculty meeting. Indeed, Bell let it be known that, absent extraordinary circumstances, he would never vote against a candidate of color. That stance facilitated his marginalization, guaranteeing that his appraisals would be substantially, if not wholly, discounted. He never served on the Appointments Committee at HLS, the committee principally charged with identifying professorial prospects and making hiring recommendations to the faculty. I was put on the Appointments Committee the year I received tenure and served on it on several occasions in subsequent years. In assessing candidates, racial minority status figured positively into my calculations, though much less so than Derrick thought appropriate. In a close case, I thought a thumb on the scale was proper while for him a body on the scale was acceptable.
Already deteriorating, our relationship worsened when Derrick publicly revealed my support for one black woman candidate the faculty had considered and my opposition to another. He never requested permission to publicize my positions and was certainly aware that views and votes about appointments were confidential matters that were intended for the eyes and ears only of faculty colleagues. That breach of confidentiality was deeply painful and injected a poisonous distrust into my relationship with Derrick.
There’s another individual who has used religiously charged language against CRT, but I have yet to see any call this one out. When you see who wrote it, you’ll understand why:
In the book From Creation to Consummation, Gerard Van Groningen explains the reality of the parasite kingdom of Satan wreaking havoc in the world. The Bible uses terms and phrases like powers (Romans 8:38; Eph 6:12; Col 2:15), authorities, and spiritual forces of evil (Eph 6:12; Rev. 16:10; 17:17) to talk about Satan’s strategies in the past and the present. Van Groningen observes,
The kingdom of Satan, however, is a parasitic kingdom. A parasite is an organism that is totally dependent on another living organism…Satan’s kingdom is a parasite because it cannot exist independently. It is totally and completely dependent on the cosmic kingdom of Yahweh. Satan as a created being is not autonomous; he draws all the essential aspects of his existence and activities from his source, the Creator and Ruler of the cosmic kingdom (103-104).
In other words, wherever we see God’s mercy and grace at work, we should not be surprised when the parasitic work of Satan may be adjacent. We see these parasitic realities in individuals as well as systems and structures. CRT is attempting to give an account of evil and salvation. It is merely a form of Gnosticism. CRT’s version of Satan is “white supremacy” and, instead of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, CRT simply wants to dismantle racism in an attempt to achieve cosmic salvation from their perception of the worst of all evils. For CRT, anti-racism will set us free.
This is an extremely damning paragraph! CRT has its version of Satan…version of original sin…replacement for the resurrection of Jesus Christ…version of cosmic salvation. It attempts to give an account for evil and salvation!
Sounds cultish to me. Sounds like a religion to me.
So who wrote these words? Who called CRT a “form of Gnosticism!” It wasn’t Dr. Voddie Baucham or some white, evangelical, conservative.
This comes from Anthony Bradley. Yes, the Anthony Bradley. If you’ve been involved in racism discussions to any degree among Christians, then you know exactly who I am talking about.
I wonder if we’ll see any responses to this from John Andrew Reasnor, or any of the others over at Lamb’s Reign. Probably not. But not because Bradley is black. Voddie is too. You probably won’t see it because they only seem to be concerned with “conservatives.”
For what it’s worth, I do consider one version of the anti-woke movement a “religion.” However, John has identified the wrong prophets, wrong Law, wrong cosmology, and so on. It’s called Biblical Christianity.