This column continues a BNG opinion series explaining Critical Race Theory.
Growing up with a children’s minister mother, who is intentional to ensure her preached theology is the same as her lived theology, granted me a holistic picture of spiritual formation. However, until I left home, I never realized the vast chasm between what many churches teach their children versus what they teach their adults.
The enormous gaps within churches, schools and other religious institutions that lack a holistic attempt at spiritual formation (birth to death) leads, in my opinion, to two outcomes. Either:
- Individuals leave the church because of the obvious tension between the children’s ministry’s motto of “love your neighbor” and the adult members’ motto of “love your neighbor but …”; or
- Individuals stay in the church and continue to remake the image of God into something other than a beloved community.
Valerie Lott
After leaving home in Virginia to attend college in Louisiana, I visited a variety of churches with different denominational affiliations — Episcopal, Southern Baptist, Presbyterian Church USA, Reformed Presbyterian Church, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, African Methodist Episcopal, Presbyterian Church of America, and United Methodist churches in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee.
And over and over again I heard echoes from the pulpit saying, “You will love your neighbor as yourself” and echoes in the hallways exclaiming, “Those immigrants can use our building for English classes as long as their children don’t interact with our children on the playground.”
The next Sunday the pulpit would echo again, “Treat others as you want to be treated” and the parking lot would hum with, “We’re sending our children to the private school because the public school isn’t safe anymore.” (Which was code for “isn’t white anymore.”)
But I never realized I had a problem with the Greatest Commandment until I found myself in law school, where every night, week after week, I would sit in the library and read case law from the 1800s to present day, written by judges who shared very similar gender and racial identities, shaping and interpreting laws for individuals whose life experiences were very different from their own.
“It is really hard to know how you would want to be treated under the circumstances of someone else’s life.”
My problem with the Golden Rule (“treat others as you want to be treated,” “love your neighbor as yourself,” “try to treat others as you would want them to treat you”) found in many religions, social constructs and elementary school pledges, is that it is really hard to know how you would want to be treated under the circumstances of someone else’s life — someone with a different socioeconomic status, gender, religion or race. Because if I just treated others how I, a white, Christian, female, with two higher education degrees wanted to be treated, it may not be enough to cut to the core of what the writer of Mark is asking of us in verse 12:31.
Which means that, as Christians, in order to follow the Greatest Commandment — which tells us “You will love your neighbor as yourself” — we must consider not only how we want to be treated, but also what factors contribute to the treatment and needs of others whose privilege is perhaps less than ours, whose basic needs are perhaps not being met by current political and social structures.
Just as we employ tools to help us think about Scripture (such as Sunday school lessons with analogies, children’s sermons during worship to help children and adults understand complex ideas at developmentally appropriate levels) it is also helpful to employ tools to help us understand the complexities of the social contexts in the Bible and those we face today.
This is why it is important to employ terms like Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Intersectionality,” which simply asks us to consider how race, class and gender affect individuals.
For instance, when churches consider who they are serving — regardless of where they claim to be on a spectrum from “conservative” to “progressive” — they do consider these characteristics. These tools are not meant to replace the Greatest Commandment; instead they are able to help us fully understand how to faithfully live the commandment to love others.
Critical Race Theory serves as a tool to help us ask questions, as Jesus did, to consider how to meet the needs of others — not regardless of their identity, but because of it, in order to more fully reconcile the ways in which a society systemically casts out in order to create a structure of power. This can be seen throughout the Gospels not only in Jesus’ actions, but also in the narrative descriptions we receive from the writers of the Gospels, who consider the social positioning of those whom Jesus heals, eats with, sits with and befriends.
“A group of white men has attempted to adopt a colorblind approach to racism, while ignoring the opportunity to have a deeper understanding of how to follow Jesus’ commandments.”
In the statement denouncing Critical Race Theory, the Southern Baptist Convention seminary presidents denounce “any philosophy or theology that fundamentally defines individuals using categories identified as sinful in Scripture rather than the transcendent reality shared by every image bearer and divinely affirmed distinctions.” By classifying CRT as “sinful” and attempting to dismiss the systemic injustices that are pervasive, a group of white men has attempted to adopt a colorblind approach to racism, while ignoring the opportunity to have a deeper understanding of how to follow Jesus’ commandments — of how to understand what just, merciful, bountiful love looks like for our neighbors and ourselves.
Especially now, I’ve felt the need to clarify or qualify my Christianity when people find out my partner is a pastor, explaining that I care about the needs of people experiencing homelessness, poverty and injustice. But until recently, what I didn’t realize was that I lacked the language to be able to explain why the social challenges plaguing our country belong to the church.
Not only do they belong as the work of the church based on Jesus’ call to feed the hungry and care for the sick, but they also belong as the work of the church because it is the white church that has continued to perpetuate injustices through segregation, redlining and discriminatory policies.
Critical Race Theory gives us this language. The SBC’s choice not to employ the tool of Critical Race Theory as a way to truly understand how to follow the Greatest Commandment, I imagine, does not come as a surprise to Black, Indigenous and people of color given the SBC’s historical stance on similar issues. But to the white church? A missed opportunity to follow the Greatest Commandment, indeed.
Valerie Lott, a second year student at Elon University School of Law, currently lives in High Point, N.C., with her husband, Timothy Peoples, senior pastor at Emerywood Baptist Church. She also studied under leading critical theorists at Vanderbilt University, from where she holds a master’s degree.
Related articles in this series:
SBC seminary presidents are propagating fear to maintain control | Laura Levens
Is it time for Black Christians to give up on the SBC? | Corrie Shull
How I learned to name my oppression — and my privilege | Meredith Stone