Faith Works 5-6-22

Faith Works 5-6-22
Jeff Gill

Worrying about the wrong thing wrongly
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First, let me just lay some scripture down as a marker: "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." That's in Matthew.

Also, "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes." That's in Luke.

Then there's Paul in Second Timothy: "Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels."

Yeah, I know.

What I am willing to stick my oar into is the maelstrom around "critical race theory," or perhaps you say "Critical Race Theory" but we can all just save me the typing and put CRT. We're being told we should worry about CRT. It's become a topic for legislation and educators and preachers and churches, and that's kinda in my wheelhouse. So here goes.

Before I got right with God, if not with seminary, I spent some time in college wandering in the wilderness of pre-law courses and over the years around a great many lawyers, most of whom are lovely and charming individuals. Likewise for judges. And I'd say anyone thinking about theological study in particular or ministry in general would be blessed by a couple of classes in Constitutional Law. It's a marvelous discipline, and a model for theological thinking except I believe the influence actually runs the other way. Anyhow.

There is, emphatically, a field of study called "critical legal theory." CRT is a subset of that concept; critical legal theory looks at matters of legislation and jurisprudence and asks (or interrogates, if you're being all academical about things) where we got ideas like the three-fifths compromise, and how those adaptations, while void in strict application today, are still playing a role in our governance and social interactions through the practice of law.

No shock here, race plays a role in stuff like how the Constitution (salute!) got written the way it did, and how it has played out with amendments and the stray Civil War and various Supreme Court rulings. Hence, critical legal theory has produced a stream of thought called critical race theory. Or, CRT.

In the contentious politics of our day — and I'm writing this is what I anticipate will be a blessed interlude after the primaries are over, but before the fall midterms get roiling in a boiling — CRT has become the cart into which we put all our preferred dislikes. If we don't like it, says a hearty contingent of conservative elected officials, it's CRT, so let's ban it. As many wiser than I have already tried to outline, the big problem is making almost any discussion of race or racism equal CRT is just asking for trouble. Likewise, if you want to argue that racism is over (we elected Obama, etc.) I think that's simply not going to hold up. Nor would I agree with someone who says racism is "worse than it ever has been in this country," a discussion in which I tried not to spit out my coffee.

What I worry about as a Christian preacher and leader is actually not that churches or schools might talk too much about race and racism, let alone about CRT however defined. Our problem is that as CRT is derived from critical legal theory, critical legal theory is itself a subset of critical theory, and there's the real problem.

Critical theory has been around quite a while, plenty of simple primers online you can read to sum it up, and I ran smack into it during college myself which was (off) a few decades back. In brief, critical theory says that reality is socially constructed. Yeah, just about all of it. How we see everything is entirely artificially generated by the Matrix, and . . . wait, different topic. BUT: those movies are riffing on this set of ideas, that we are perceiving differently than things actually are, and by changing language we change perceptions on one level, and reality on another.

Here's the thing. I worry about critical theory, but I do not want to ban it. I want to argue with it. I dispute both its epistemology, and its application to life in general. More to come!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on interpreting reality like we all do. Don't we? Tell him how you refute Bishop Berkeley at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.