Critical Race Theory and Farmer Schmidt

Among the fiercest of the battles of the Church Militant, at least in this country, are the places where Christian people are beset with troubled minds over the rapidly sinking ship that is Western Civilization.

Some of the torpedoes are launched from Critical Race Theory, so-called because it holds at its root the notion that “race” is a purely social construct which has for centuries been used to oppress people who are not white (see Encyclopedia Britannica for more), a definition that was buttressed just this Monday (Memorial Day) by a piece from The Hill : “critical race theory emphasizes how the concept of race was invented to suppress Black people and their access to equal rights.”

According to Janel George from the American Bar Association, the term Critical Race Theory (CRT) was invented by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to “recognize” a harmful cultural system that “relegates people of color to the bottom tiers” of society, insisting that this injustice “is not a bygone relic of the past” but “continue[s] to permeate the social fabric of this nation.” The idea is unfalsifiable, and so of dubious credibility to say the least. The “evidence” of it is always going to be of necessity anecdotal and open to interpretation.

(As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that those who like lecture us that it’s immoral not to support it are themselves silent on the question of abortion, as Peter Scaer reminded us cogently, also on Memorial Day).

Prior to now this disastrous theory has been confined for the most part to college campuses where the “enlightened” (now the “woke”) espouse such views for the indoctrination of the malleable minds of their students. Up to now, we have had the luxury of chuckling and rolling our eyes, all the while worrying just a little about what would happen if this escaped from those laboratories of thought onto the streets of our cities and even the hallways of our elementary schools like a wild virus. Maybe the torpedo metaphor is less fitting than that of biological warfare: the virus has now escaped, and it’s here. It has suddenly become ubiquitous, and we are faced with the reckoning day for those worries (it’s hard to dismiss the coincidence of its coming with that of a real pandemic, though I don’t know quite what to make of that).

So now what? It will no longer do to roll our eyes and scoff. Christians are called to confess the truth in the face of lies. What are the lies, then? With a prayer for sanctified reason, let’s examine.

Is race a purely social construct? We all know that the pigmentation in skin color varies from person to person, dependent on what part of the world they come from. But so what? It is telling that while Scripture recognizes no distinctions between people based on such differences, the current cultural milieu has forced Christians to think about them anyway, which is in itself confusing. And then in that confusion we may begin to wonder, if only just a little, whether the canard of the woke is true? that we were racist all along and didn’t even know it!

It certainly doesn’t help that people like Lutherans for Racial Justice have produced as it were a gain-of-function mutation to the Critical Race virus. That is, they have refined CRT specifically so as to infect LCMS thinking, to attach itself specifically to LCMS usage and acceptability. In their videos there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of outright accusations of racism; rather the purpose is to increase awareness and sensitivity toward races or ethnic groups who may have suffered from discrimination. The implicit assumption here is that it if we Lutherans are not aware of such discrimination, then we have a deficiency that needs to be addressed. Implied further here is the notion that our messaging too needs to be sharpened in such a way as to make us aware. Lutherans for Racial Justice call themselves “a grassroots coalition committed to the pursuit of racial equity, justice, and healing within the congregations, communities, schools, and organizations of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS).” The not-so-subtle intention of this coalition is to say something like this: Can’t you see, you pitiful people in the LCMS, that you have been blind to your own inherent racism? – and the poor unsuspecting regular LCMS Lutheran sitting in the pew—let’s call him Farmer Schmidt—scratches his head and, if only for a moment, starts to wonder.

So, then, on to the task of examining: could it be true?

First, remember this: any time we are made to think in terms foreign to our confession and faith, whatever they are, we ought at least to learn to be suspicious. Somewhere, I recall, Martin Luther is reported to have said something like this: “If it’s new, it’s probably of the devil.”

Secondly, it’s helpful to define racism itself more properly as “antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group,” and then to see it for what it truly is: nothing more, really, than garden-variety hatred of one’s neighbor, whatever the reason or basis for it. And here, then, it becomes easier to see that there is indeed something embedded somewhere in the psyche of white people, some sense of superiority, but that it’s not just there! It’s everywhere, in every race in the world, embedded in the very psyche of fallen man. It isn’t based on race, either; it’s just another brand of sin. And for his sense of superiority against his neighbor, Farmer Schmidt already has the entire second table of the law breathing down his neck, as he knows he should.

Scripture has plenty to say about the evil practice of condemning people we may not like, whoever they are. Of course, Scripture is utterly colorblind: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). To hate people is nothing new at all, but let’s not stop at racism; let’s be sure to address every kind of hatred, and not least the kind that is more likely to crop up in your heart against certain people you already know and have reason not to like. Rather than feeling a new need to join some new crusade against racism, whether the racism of others or your own possible racism against unknown others, it would be far better for you to be brought to a consideration of someone in your own life, someone near at hand, someone you already don’t like, for whatever reason: your fellow worker, your boss, your gossipy neighbor, your troublesome family member, your erstwhile friend. That’s the more needed kind of preaching and inculcation of the law against sin: the kind that needs to convict the very hearers’ sinful hearts.

Third, with this same reckoning we can easily see that the hypocrisy of the woke is palpable, because this is the kind of introspection they refuse to make. It isn’t racism that’s systemic; it’s sin, something that is always in the system of every individual member of fallen humanity. To apologize busily for being white is to miss widely the mark of the true need to repent: the sin of one’s heart. The color of one’s skin is merely outward, but the things that are inward are the things that defile a man (St. Mark 7:15). Moreover, to declare that a “person of color” is intrinsically free of ‘evil’ whiteness is itself not only racist but grossly sinful, because it goes beyond missing the mark of what is sinful to asserting affirmatively that certain people actually have a right to superiority due to the color of their skin.

Fourth, it ought not surprise us that an utter lack of awareness of all of this is very much in sync with an utter confusion about gender, a phenomenon that is not at all unrelated to the debates about CRT. The same college campuses and CRT promoters are just as woke about gender as they are about race, as everybody knows.

Who, then, is the parent of these clearly relatable siblings? Where do they both come from? It’s hard to miss the father that bears all the family traits, and that is the notion of relativism:

Relativism has been, in its various guises, both one of the most popular and most reviled philosophical doctrines of our time. Defenders see it as a harbinger of tolerance and the only ethical and epistemic stance worthy of the open-minded and tolerant. Detractors dismiss it for its alleged incoherence and uncritical intellectual permissiveness. Debates about relativism permeate the whole spectrum of philosophical sub-disciplines. From ethics to epistemology, science to religion, political theory to ontology, theories of meaning and even logic, philosophy has felt the need to respond to this heady and seemingly subversive idea. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Simply put, relativism is the idea that what’s true for you is opposed to what’s true for me, but both are legitimate. It was another notion at which we tended to roll our eyes decades ago, but now we can plainly see its offspring. Gender “fluidity” could not have existed without relativism, and its intuitive rejection by the likes of Farmer Schmidt is really a rejection of relativism. There’s no such thing as a man becoming a woman, and you, sir, aren’t a woman, you’re a man, because you were born that way! (One can’t help thinking of Monty Python with amusement.) In the same way, CRT draws its lifeblood from relativism, seen most clearly in the unfalsifiable claims that we were racist and didn’t even know it, and that our institutions are systemically racist. Just who says? These relativists do, and since they’re relativists, they think they have no need to prove their claim.

So now is a most fitting time to set our sights on relativism again, because, as Luther might say, here you have me by the jugular.

Truth is not relative. Truth is objective, and this has always been under attack. Pilate was wrong in his making of that a rhetorical question. And it is in this area, I would suggest, that we must also build our defense. We are confronted in a myriad of ways with a society that will not accept objective truth, except when it happens to be of benefit to them. How to counter this, but to confess the truth? We must not be duped into considering their various new questions, but must see them for what they are: always, an assault on truth. We observe things for what they are. For all his simplistic ways, Farmer Schmidt, who is essentially right about gender fluidity, may have the right answer against CRT as well. Let’s say he does for a moment scratch his head when he first hears of it; but then, we can hope, if he was catechized well as a child, he could shrug and think or say something like this: Never heard of it, and never saw it in the catechism, but I know about sin, and that everybody is sinful. Farmer Schmidt never had time for relativism of any kind, whatever you call it. So, taking our cue from him, we might simply reply to the woke that we will not play at their requirement that we must question or condemn the objective realities that we already know, but on the contrary will confess for all the world to hear, whatever the consequences, our unwavering dedication to truth. After all, though in the world we have tribulation, Jesus has overcome the world and bids us to be of good cheer. Thus with good cheer we simply, and ever, confront the enemy with the truth, saying robustly with Farmer Schmidt, I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son . . .