How Critical Theory Has Shaped the Cultural Moment 

Dr. Neil Shenvi

Good morning everyone. My name is Dr. Neil Shenvi and it’s my honor to speak to you today. In this talk, my co-author Dr. Pat Sawyer and I will be addressing the topic “How Critical Theory has Shaped the Cultural Moment.” Since you came to this breakout session, I’ll assume that most of you recognize that “critical theory” is the ideology that undergirds “wokeness” in our society. If you’d like some examples, come to my plenary talk tomorrow rather than staying in your room and watching Bluey in your pajamas. You know who you are.

In this talk, I’ll begin by explaining the nature and origins of critical theory: what is it? And where did it come from? Then I’ll suggest three major ways that critical theory has shaped our cultural moment: through its understanding of the social binary, through its understanding of hegemonic power, and through its understanding of intersectionality. In the second half of the talk, Dr. Pat Sawyer will highlight some of the ways in which critical theory is incompatible with Christianity and will offer 15 action steps to help us engage with critical theory in society and in the church.

Let’s start with the nature and origin of critical theory.

Most scholars recognize that the critical tradition began with Karl Marx. Today, we largely think of Marx in terms of his emphasis on class struggle, but many of his other ideas were even more important to later critical theorists. First, he was interested in how power circulated within society to created haves and have-nots, winners and losers, the ruling class and the working class. Second, he believed that oppressed people in society (the proletariat) experienced “false consciousness” and failed to recognize their own oppression. Therefore, he aspired to produce in them a “class consciousness” by exposing the reality of their oppression. Third, he believed that the dominant norms, values, and customs of a culture were merely the norms, values, and customs of the bourgeoisie. In other words, what appeared to be neutral, objective, universal values or rules or ideas were actually the values, rules, and ideas of the ruling class. All of these ideas were adopted and expanded by later critical theorists.

While Marx inaugurated the critical tradition, the phrase “Critical Theory” was coined by Max Horkheimer, a philosopher who was the director of the Frankfurt School, a collection of philosophers and sociologists working in Germany and later in the U.S. in the twenties, thirties, and forties. The members of the Frankfurt School wanted to apply Marx’s analysis more broadly than economics and class. They wanted to understand how human freedom was restricted by phenomena like mass media and the “culture industry.”

Now, you might ask: why should we care about esoteric theories espoused 80 years ago by a group of German intellectuals that no one’s ever heard of? The answer is: while you may not have heard of Horkheimer or Adorno or Benjamin, their ideas were and are very influential in the academy. Since the 1930s, critical theory has grown tremendously, spinning off entirely new fields like critical legal studies, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, queer theory, and intersectional feminism.

But even more important than the academic impact of critical theory, is its social and cultural impact. If critical theory is like a virus that, for decades, was engineered and incubated within academia, then the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the George Floyd riots of 2020 represent lab leak events. Suddenly, phrases like “intersectionality,” “white privilege,” “cisgender,” “systemic oppression,” and “equity” were showing up in movies, music, advertisements, sports, art, government, business, and churches. Today, in 2024, wokeness is endemic. It is simply “in the water.” It’s the background assumption. It’s the lens through which vast swaths of people, especially young people, have come to view the world.

So what are the ideas through which critical theory has shaped our culture? Let me list three. Critical theory has shaped our culture through its understanding of: 1) the social binary, 2) hegemonic power, and 3) intersectionality.

Through the social binary

First, critical theory has shaped our culture through its understanding of the social binary. Contemporary critical theory assumes that society is divided into oppressor groups and oppressed groups along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, physical ability, nationality, colonial status, and a host of other facts.

So, for example, men, Whites, heterosexuals, Christians, the able-bodied, U.S. citizens, and imperialists belong to oppressor groups while women, people of color, LGBTQ people, non-Christians, disabled people, non-citizens, and colonized people belong to oppressed groups. The social binary is the basis for critical theorists’ understanding of privilege. Dominant/agent/oppressor groups are privileged and subordinate/target/oppressed groups are disadvantaged.

As a side note, some Christians hear the language of “privilege” and think: “actually, I can accept the idea of ‘privilege.’ For example, we want all people to have the same basic human rights but, historically, some groups like Blacks have been denied those rights while Whites were unfairly privileged. So what we really want is for all groups to have privilege.” However, this statement misunderstands how critical theorists conceptualize privilege.

To them, privilege is the flip side of oppression. Privilege only exists because oppression exists. Therefore, critical theorists don’t want a world where everyone is privileged; rather, they want a world in which privilege doesn’t exist because no groups are privileged and no groups are oppressed. This explains why so many “solutions” proposed by critical theorists don’t aim to lift everyone up to the same level, but to pull everyone down to the same level. Rather than seeking to raise test scores, they abolish testing. Rather than ensuring that all students learn calculus in high school, they cancel calculus classes. Rather than working to reduce crime, they reduce endorsement. Etc.

Through hegemonic power

Second, critical theory has shaped our culture through its understanding of hegemonic power. When most people hear that all women or all people of color or all disabled people are oppressed they’re puzzled. They say “wait, I’m a woman” or “I’m a person of color” and “I don’t feel oppressed. After all, oppression refers to ‘prolonged, unjust treatment or control’ and ‘tyranny.’ But I don’t experience that. No one is enslaving me or abusing me or coercing me.” This response is common, but it misunderstands how critical theorists have redefined the word “oppression.”

For example, in her important essay “Five Faces of Oppression” Iris Young writes:

In its traditional usage, oppression means the exercise of tyranny by a ruling group…[However] in its new usage, oppression designates the disadvantage and injustice some people suffer not because a tyrannical power coerces them, but because of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society…Oppression in this sense is structural, rather than the result of a few people’s choices or policies. Its causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols.

In other words, critical theorists view oppression primarily in terms of what they call “hegemonic power.” In their book Is Everyone Really Equal? Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, state that hegemonic power “refers to the control of the ideology of a society. The dominant group maintains power by imposing their ideology on everyone.”

This redefinition of oppression explains the social binary. Whites are oppressors not because they actively, cruelly mistreat people of color, but rather because Whites have hegemonic power that allows them to impose their White values, norms, customs, and expectations on the rest of society via White supremacy. Men are oppressors not because they actively, cruelly mistreat women, but rather because men have hegemonic power that allows them to impose their masculine values, norms, customs, and expectations on the rest of society via the Patriarchy. And on and on.

Moreover, the very nature of oppression explains why it is largely invisible to most people. It was designed to be that way. The nature of hegemonic power is to conceal its operation. The values and norms of the ruling class are taken for granted as the default, as natural, as objective, even as “God-ordained.” Not just the ruling class, but also oppressed groups are blind to the way that they’ve been socialized into oppressive systems. They take it for granted! DiAngelo and Sensoy continue:

The key element of hegemony is that it enables domination to occur with the consent of the minoritized group—rather than by force. If people believe that they deserve their unequal positions—that these positions are fair and natural—no force is necessary. In other words, the minoritized group accepts their lower position in society because they come to accept the rationalizations for it.

This understanding of hegemonic power makes it very difficult for anyone to challenge the assertions of critical theory. If you’re a member of a privileged group who disagrees with the claims of critical theorists, then your beliefs can be dismissed because you’re blinded by your power and privilege. However, if you’re a member of an oppressed group who disagrees with the claims of critical theorists, your beliefs can still be dismissed because you’re suffering from “internalized oppression.” You’ve been so thoroughly immersed the cisheteropatriarchy, that you don’t even know it. You’re simply parroting back the beliefs of the ruling class.

Through intersectionality

Finally, critical theory has shaped our culture through its understanding of intersectionality. The term “intersectionality” was coined by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in two papers from 1989 and 1991. Her central idea was that our identities are complex and cannot be understood by looking at a single axis like race or class or gender alone. While this narrow statement seems like common sense, she had in mind a far broader understanding of intersectionality.

She wrote:

“the following analogy can be useful in describing how Black women are marginalized in the interface between antidiscrimination law and race and gender hierarchies: Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked-feet standing on shoulders-with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling.”

In other words, she is not merely saying “our identities are complex.” She is arguing that in our society there exists a hierarchy of value, an oppressive ladder, with rich, straight White men on top and poor, Black lesbians on the bottom. Your place on the ladder is determined by how many oppressed categories you occupy. And, crucially, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and heterosexism all form “interlocking systems of oppression” that must be dismantled simultaneously.

Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality was revolutionary. The walls dividing various critical fields like critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and queer theory were always porous, but intersectionality tore them down completely. Today, critical fields have largely coalesced within an intersectional framework so that a textbook on critical race theory will include chapters on gender and class, or an article on critical pedagogy will discuss race and sexuality.

Antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi exemplifies this intersectional mindset. In his book How to Be an Antiracist, he writes:  “Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anticapitalism policies. Anticapitalism cannot eliminate class racism without antiracism.” (p. 159) “To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist” (p. 189). “We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic… To be queer antiracist is to understand the privileges of my cisgender, of my masculinity, of my heterosexuality, of their intersections” (p. 197)

I’d like to conclude my talk by pointing out how many phenomena (or pathologies) in our contemporary culture make sense once you understand critical theory. Queers for Palestine? What’s that about? Drag Queer Story Hour? Land acknowledgments? Newspaper headlines about Black talk show host Larry Elder being “the Black face of White supremacy”? As John Stonestreet says “ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims.” If we want to help the victims of our culture’s madness, we need to start by understanding the bad ideas that have captivated it. And then you have to show why they’re wrong. So to help you do that better, here’s my co-author, Dr. Pat Sawyer.

Dr. Pat Sawyer:

Two Pronounced Problems with Critical Social Theory and Best Practices for having Successful Awkward Conversations.

—- Again, my name is Pat Sawyer for any who have joined us late. It is wonderful to see everyone. It is a privilege and honor to be with you.  

—- Over the next few minutes I want to mention a couple of concerns regarding critical social theory and then I want to switch gears a bit and offer some helpful tips, best practices if you will, related to getting into conversations about critical social theory or woke ideology as Christians. Conversations that can be freighted with a bit of difficulty or awkwardness if we are Christians challenging the progressive zeitgeist.

—- Ok, first I want to mention a concern related to critical social theory’s approach to identity.

which is, the social binary and its impact on identity. Again, critical social theory divides the world into two main groups: the oppressors and the oppressed, that is, the privileged and the marginalized, perpetrators and victims. It does this by applying flawed intersectional perspectives of identity with flawed conclusions regarding hegemonic power.

—- As I get into this, I want to mention some obvious countervailing reality, because it is just not stated enough, which is – just because someone is a black lesbian woman, it doesn’t mean that she is without significant cultural power today or moreover is actually oppressed. We see this in places where the hegemonic power structures in society are distinctly progressive and where being at the bottom of intersectional standing actually secures cultural capital, where a black lesbian woman possesses significant cultural power partially because she is black, lesbian, and a woman, this can be operative in my world in the secular academy.

—- In addition, just because someone is a white, straight man, it doesn’t mean that he has significant cultural capital today or moreover is an actual oppressor. Just go to a number places around the country where poverty is pronounced and has stripped white straight men of normative social agency and cultural power. And while extreme poverty yields deficits in cultural power for everyone regardless of how one is raced, their class, or gender, it still remains that being a white heterosexual man does not guarantee cultural power and the increasing public calls for “no white men” in various spheres reflect a challenge to intersectional thinking that has permanentized white men at the top of intersectional power.   

—- This spurious binary of oppressor and oppressed which attempts to group everyone in these categories creates adversarial identities that will fracture communities and societies and even churches if pervasively applied.

—- Very regularly I am in prayer meetings at my church with black sisters in Christ. Can you imagine if we viewed each other’s identity via an intersectional framework positioning me as the oppressor and them as oppressed. How close could we actually be? Not as close as we actually are! 

—- While there was some, even significant, truth to intersectional thinking as it relates to cultural power under slavery and Jim Crow, it is no longer nearly as applicable. This is part of the deceit of intersectionality. It wants to appropriate past oppressions and fraudulently apply them to current phenomenological existence, that is, current day to day lived existence. Critical Social Theory argues that US society today is a white supremacist society and a patriarchal society. As race scholar Ijeoma Oluo asserts in her book, So You Want To Talk about Race,   “If you are white in a white supremacist society, you are racist. If you are a male in a patriarchy, you are sexist.

—- One has to water-down and alter the customary meanings of the terms “white supremacy” and “patriarchy”, rendering them essentially alien to a conventional understanding of them in order to assert and apply them pervasively to current US society. Such a dynamic signals that critical social theory will manipulate language and meaning to serve its telos, its ideological commitments and ultimate goals.

—- This approach to identity based upon groups defined by intersectionality wraps up identity politics in “blackness” and “whiteness”. What it means to be black, what it means to be white begins to track with cultural positions and political commitments, progressive VS conservative. When I was in grad school I was at a talk where an academic was doing this very thing. During the Q&A, I raised my hand and said, “given what you’ve said what do you make of Condeleeza Rice, a Republican and former Secretary of State. The academic said with a straight face,  “Condeleeza Rice is not truly black”. My response was “you do not have the power to strip Condoleezza Rice of her black culture and heritage and that her very reality and existence is an embodiment of what it means to be black and her very presence adds to the definition and understanding of “blackness” and what it means to be black.

—- I say this recognizing that critical scholarship has discourse that divorces black skin from the concept of “blackness” and white skin from the concept of “whiteness”. However, in truth, this is often little more than convenient fall back rhetoric when the whole enterprise of critical social theory is predicated on the positioning and regulation of bodies in societal space and the color of skin being meaningful and determinative in that regard. Critical social theorists and those sympathetic are very happy to conflate white skin with “whiteness” and black skin with “blackness” as it suits them. And accuse people with black skin as agents of white supremacy as it suits them when the individual’s cultural commitments and politics run counter to progressive narratives.  

—- The situation with Condeleeza Rice is a reminder that critical social theory and its downstream truncated forms of critical social justice and woke ideology are at odds with individualism. Individualism is a problem for critical social theory. Robin DiAngelo is explicit about this in her book, White Fragility. Critical social theory in its various forms wants the group to define the individual. But the better way to think about reality and preferred societal comportment is that each individual shapes and adds to the definition of the group.

—- From a Christian standpoint we as human beings – all of us everyone on the planet – have ultimate and fundamental solidarity in two critical and significant ways which have major implications regarding identity.

—- #1) We ALL are created in the image of God! The Imago Dei. Genesis 1:27. This is a key reason why racism is so evil. There is only one race, the human race. And we are all created in the image of God.

—- And #2, SIN, the Fall. Rom 3:23, We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. These two realities put everyone on the planet in solidarity.  

—- And then for the Church, all true Believers, we have ultimate and profound solidarity in Christ as our pre-eminent identity. Gal 2:20. “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”  This is who we are, our highest and most preeminent identity. And all of us are in this together, in Christ. All of us from every nation, tribe, people, and language Rev 5:9 and 7:9. No matter how we are raced by society, no matter our ethnicity, no matter our class, no matter if we are male or female, as true believers we are all unified together in Christ, our highest and most prominent aspect of our identity.  

—- So the reality from God’s standpoint, is that we shouldn’t ultimately see the world through the temporal lens of oppressor and oppressed but through the spiritual lens of saved and unsaved, converted and unconverted, believer and unbeliever. 2Cor 5:16, we regard no one according to the flesh. And as Christians we are ambassadors of Christ, imploring others, the unbelieving, on Christ behalf to be reconciled to God! 2Cor 5:20.  

—- Next, more briefly I want us to consider the exalted place of “lived experience” in critical social theory. A couple of key tenets that I’m combining of Critical race theory are as follows: CRT elevates and prioritizes Black “voice,” Black “lived experience,” and incorporates standpoint epistemology as it asserts the indispensability, special insight, and authority of Black experiential knowledge relative to the social analysis of power in law in particular and society in general. Within the notion of lived experience in CRT is the feature of “storytelling,” the presentation of narratives specifically designed to counter and overturn White, majoritarian perspective.”

You see this tenet of critical race theory worked out in critical social justice discourse as Ijeoma Oluo asserts, “If a person of color says that something is about race, it is – because regardless of the details, regardless of whether or not you can connect the dots from the outside, their racial identity is a part of them, and it is interacting with the situation”. (So You Want to Talk About Race).

—- While lived experience is important, even indispensable for ALL of us, not just minoritized groups, all of us, it is not automatically a safe guide to truth and/or broader, universal, and accurate understanding of various phenomena. Now certainly an experience of something may aid one’s understanding in a way that is absent from those who haven’t experienced it.

—- But it doesn’t follow that the person automatically knows more or better about the phenomenon than the one who hasn’t experienced it OR that the one who hasn’t experienced it can’t sufficiently understand the experience, perhaps even much better than the one who experienced it.

—- For instance, my wife broke her elbow. Her elbow surgeon has never broken his elbow but he certainly knows a lot more about broken elbows than my wife. Moreover, many experiences have features that others have experienced even if they haven’t experienced the exact experience in question. Those related experiences give them genuine insight into the experience in question.

—- Next, we have to reject the infallibility of what we think our experiences may be telling us and submit those experiences to the Word of God and to Reason, to evidence. We must reject standpoint epistemology, that various social positions related to oppression yield keen, special insight, elusive to those with so called oppressor social positioning. Epistemology is how we know what we know. If we don’t reject standpoint epistemology we will have to accept on their face statements like:

“As a Black man, I know that society is thoroughly and completely racist”.

“As a woman, I know that abortion is my moral right”

“As a trans man, I know I was born in the wrong body.”

“As a lesbian, I know that God approves of my sexual orientation”.

“As a Hindu, I know that all paths lead to God”.

Do you see how absurd this approach to epistemology is?

And while there is more complexity to this concept in the literature and scholarship. It doesn’t alter my overall point here and the legitimate issues that arise with standpoint epistemology.

—- Next, we must be leery and hesitant to extrapolate universal understanding of a society wide phenomenon from just our personal, anecdotal experience of that phenomenon. The sample set, the data set is just too small.

A few years ago, a small alt right group sympathetic to a white ethnostate was doing some peaceful protesting in the downtown area of Hillsborough NC. I went to peacefully counter protest and got into a discussion with one of the leaders. At one point I asked why he disliked black people and felt they were immoral, substandard, and inferior to whites.

—- He immediately proceeded to rattle off a handful of slights and injustices done to him and his family and friends by Black people. He also rattled off some things that black people had done that he viewed as stupid and foolish.

—- Some of the injustices to him were minor however some of them quite serious if true. I told him…”I sympathize with the pain and the harm done to you and your family but don’t you see you have taken a handful of anecdotal experiences with less than 10 black people and extrapolated universal conclusions about billions of black people that span the planet over millennia. That such a leap, that such conclusions run the high risk of being spurious and false and couldn’t and shouldn’t be trusted to the point that they would dictate your worldview and compel you to be out here holding a confederate flag and racist signs. Never mind the countervailing evidence that exists against your conclusions”.

—- Critical social theory’s valorization of lived experience and the epistemological significance and weight it gives to the lived experience of minoritized groups goes too far, way too far, and will be detrimental to society and the Church if unchecked and not held accountable by Scripture and Reason.  This applies to all of us about our lived experience no matter our ostensible standpoint, our experiences must be held accountable to Scripture and Reason.    

—- Lastly I want us to consider some BEST PRACTICES to having successful awkward conversations. 15 of them.   

These are not necessarily in any particular order except the first one, which is to

1) PRAY PRAY PRAY. Pray in advance of the conversation, pray during the conversation (in your mind, not out loud, unless you want to make it really awkward) and pray after the conversation.

—- In fact, even before a specific conversation, be someone who is regularly praying for God to lead you into difficult conversations for His glory. Pray to know and sense His presence with you while having those difficult conversations. And pray that He will give you the words to say that will be the most effective and edifying, to His glory and honor, and praise.  

—- If you don’t think the person is a Christian, first and foremost be praying for God to save them through your connection with them.

—- Be praying for TRUTH to prevail, and that for God to change their minds and change your mind if it needs to be changed, that you both will be in line with exactly how God thinks on the subject.  

2) Get equipped regarding critical social theory. Do some significant study. I hear there is a decent book on the subject going by the name Critical Dilemma. Get a copy and read it twice. Read the hundreds of primary sources we reference and others to get a good sense of the knowledge area.

3) Know your Bible. Cannot state this enough. Know the Scriptures regarding pertinent aspects of critical social theory but also in general. Study to get a good grasp of systematic theology and the sound doctrine and scripture passages that supports each topic. If a systematic doctrinal study of the Bible is new to you start with the 107 questions of the Westminster Shorter Catechism and study the Scripture passages that go along with the answers.   

4) Have a posture that you are not so much trying to win an argument, but that you are trying to win the person.

5) Commit in your heart, and mind, and prayerfully that you are going to be a genuine friend to the person regardless of how the conversations go. This will mean that you will need to be getting to know the person and sharing life outside of your discussions regarding critical social theory.

6) Start out with a softball question just to get the conversation going and to start figuring out where your conversational partner may be on things.

Maybe something like: “DEI seems to be everywhere, has that been part of your work? And if so, what has that been like?”

Or, “it seems that trans perspective is growing in our society, do you view that as a good thing or does it concern you in any way?”

—- There are many, easy, disarming questions you can offer to get a conversation going. Take some time to think about specific questions that you would be comfortable asking.

7) Play the long game. Try to start an ongoing dialogue. Not just a one shot deal. This will give you time to build a friendship that will give you equity to say stronger, more gospel and biblically centric things that will likely land more effectively because of the love and care that has been developed between you.   

—- Now if it is going to be a one off conversation, then you will need to go for it and go ahead and say gospel and biblically centric things trusting God to lead and give benediction.

8) Try to contextualize and verbalize things as gently as possible while at the same time saying hard truth. Say something like, “The last thing I want to do is personally offend you, and trust me I’m a much worse sinner than you, so there is no self-righteousness here, but as a friend and fellow human being in life together with you, I feel I must tell you XYZ (the hard thing)”.

9) When you are dealing with an objection to your viewpoint that is either defensive or adversarial, or outright hostile, remember that a soft answer turns away wrath. Prov 15. Make that text a core value as to how you communicate in these kinds of conversations.

10) Along these lines we must remember that all our speech and the way we speak must be governed by the totality of God’s perspectives on how we carry ourselves and His specific commands regarding our speech.

—- We must keep in mind the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5. Which apply to BOTH men and women, all of us. We must remember the following texts:

—- that the man of God is not quarrelsome (2Tim 2:24).

—- that we are to speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15).

—- that no unwholesome talk should come out of our mouths (Eph 4:29).

—- that all our words should be full of grace, seasoned with salt (Col 4:6).

—- that as much as it depends on us we should be at peace with all men (Rom 12:18).

—- that we should generally have a good reputation among outsiders (1Tim 3:7).

—- that no man can tame the tongue in his own strength, so we must have God directing our words (Jas 3:8).

—- out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks (Luke 6:45).

—- and we will be held accountable for every idle and careless word spoken, by our words we will be justified and by our words we will be condemned (Matt 12:36-37).  

—- Look, There are professing Christians in Hell who knew a lot of sound doctrine but did not take Christ’s directives and commands seriously regarding speech. Again, hell will be full of people who knew sound doctrine but failed to understand and obey sound doctrine regarding speech. Look at Twitter and our social mediated environments. Look at the vitriol, condescension, hubris, invective, insults, taunting, trolling, slander, and hate spewed out by professing against other Christians. More than a few will go to Hell because of being condemned by their own words!     

11) A relatively easy way to enter in to difficult conversations is to read a book together. Have your interlocutor pick out the first book. Take a chapter at a time and discuss.    

12) Try to find something you can genuinely affirm about the person’s ideas or the way they carry themselves. This was something I regularly did in my grad programs which prepared the soil for my classmates and faculty to better receive my challenges and critiques.     

13) Be sure to ask towards the end of the conversation and mean it: “What is the one thing that you really think I need to know or understand about the things we have been talking about? I genuinely want to consider and contemplate what you think I should be thinking about, what is important to you. Listen well to what they say.  

14) Get some receipts in your push back against racism and all forms of bigotry. Protest and/or openly challenge racism or any actual bigotry including against the gay and trans communities. Recognizing that many things labeled as homophobic are not actually homophobic. Nevertheless when real bigotry happens, and it does, stand against it overtly and publicly as you have opportunity in your providence. This will strengthen your credibility when you have to challenge and critique. For instance when you challenge critical race theory’s flawed diagnosis and solutions regarding racism. Or when you challenge queer theory’s deleterious and destructive claims regarding gender perspective and sexual ethics. And many other things. Your challenge will be given extra weight when you have receipts in pushing back against racism and bigotry.  

15) And finally, Church, brother and sisters, get some receipts in building up and strengthening racial connection, racial healing, and racial unity. These receipts will help you, it will aid your confidence, it will aid you in knowing what to say it and how to say it, and it will aid in the respect your conversational partner will have for you as you critique the narratives of critical social theory.

—- Yes we must challenge our culture, pushback, and critique, but we must not merely tear down, we must also build up and offer and exemplify a positive vision for loving across difference, that is, living in the context of racial difference while being in the forefront of racial reconciliation, racial connection, racial healing, and racial unity as an ongoing testimony to the world of the power of Christ and the love we have for one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, and love we have for our fellow human beings.

—- Look, if you are born again here this morning, then remember you have God. How glorious it is that we have God! We are actually sons and daughters of the one true God of everything! We have Christ. We have the Holy Spirit and His power in us. We are ambassadors of Christ. We go into the world under His power and charge.

—- We are salt and light and in His power we, the Church, the people of God can be and MUST BE the pace setters for society regarding racial reconciliation, racial connection, racial healing and racial unity. Remember, God is love and He is in us. The world will know us by our love for one another. Church, we are in the vanguard for hope, redemption, and renewal for the planet so obviously we should be in the forefront of loving well across racial difference! So Church let’s be who we are! Let us reject and repudiate racism wherever it arises and let us love one another deeply and fervently across racial difference all to the glory of God in front of a watching world that will marvel at our love for one another and be provoked to ask us about the hope that is in us.

—- And may our response and witness lead to their repentance and faith, to the salvation of multitudes, dare I say to the salvation of hundreds of millions of precious souls across the planet! Amen and amen! Thank you.

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