On Nov. 24, 2024, prominent pastors and theologians — including Joe Boot, Jeff Durbin, Andrew Sandlin, James White and Doug Wilson — issued the Antioch Declaration. It describes and denounces “anti-gospel racial categories,” which its authors, rightly, see as a threat to the witness of the church.
The authors claim — rightly again — that the recent eruption of antisemitism and other forms of racism within evangelical churches needs to be confronted, like the Apostle Paul confronted Peter over his succumbing to racial bias in Antioch (See Galatians 2:11-14). The declaration seeks to unify confessionally Reformed, Lutheran and evangelical believers against a rising tide of reactionary thinking.
That’s great, if not a little late.
More than six years ago, on Sept. 4, 2018, the “Social Justice and the Gospel” statement, commonly called the “Dallas Statement,” struck back at Christian social justice warriors. It and reactions to it exposed two camps regarding the subject of racism and social justice: the obtuse and the obsessed.
“Reactions to it exposed two camps regarding the subject of racism and social justice: the obtuse and the obsessed.”
The obsessed are those who wouldn’t stop talking about racism and who, in their “anti-racist” zeal were easily carried away by Critical Race Theory-infused ideas.
The obtuse, like the drafters of the Dallas Statement, are what I called “social justice contras.” For my trouble, I was labeled a “noted contrarian” by a Wikipedia contributor. (That was the funniest thing I’d read in a long time.)
But the problem with being obtuse about racism is that it, predictably, provides cover for legitimate racists. It didn’t take long. Now, many of the same men who endorsed the obtuse Dallas Statement find themselves having to denounce Nazi-sympathizing, slavery-excusing propagandists in their midst.
Hence, the Antioch Declaration.
The spark that ignited this wildfire appears to be the click-bait rhetoric of Joel Webbon, pastor of Covenant Bible Church in Austin, Texas. He hosted Jon Harris, a slavery and Confederacy apologist, on his podcast. Further, Webbon revealed one of his church members shared a Holocaust-denying meme. When Webbon’s church member’s previous pastor, Tobias Riemenschneider, objected that Webbon should initiate church discipline against the Nazi-sympathizer, Webbon boasted to Riemenschneider, “This is why the young men will come to me and no one will remember your name.”
That was sufficient to rouse the obtuse out of their stupor.
The drafters of the Dallas Statement have proved themselves not to be racists, as I defended them at the time in my article “The Social Justice Statement and the Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience.” The problem never was that they were covert racists. It was that they had a blind spot. They hadn’t thought much about racism and, so, when our culture forefronted racism again, they thought it was much ado about nothing.
In their blindness, they presented a caricature of American history like this: Southern slaveholders could not be expected to have understood that race-based, perpetual chattel slavery was wrong because they grew up taking it for granted. (Never mind that originally every American state was a slave state and the reason the Northern states forsook slavery was because Christians decried it, as I described at Acton.). Furthermore, they imply that when Robert E. Lee surrendered, racism virtually vanished until we became obsessed with it again in the 2010s.
“They imply that when Robert E. Lee surrendered, racism virtually vanished until we became obsessed with it again in the 2010s.”
The result of this obtuse history was if you dared to denounce racism and raise awareness of past racial injustices, obsessed or not, the obtuse would reflexively tag you as “woke” just as the woke reflexively denounced everyone who disagreed with them about anything as “racist.”
However, the obtuse were not really racist. They were obtuse. They treated every charge of racism as a false alarm, crying wolf because they couldn’t see the problem of racism.
Then, predictably, real wolves began to appear, with their slavery apology, rehabilitating the reputations of genuine racist slavery advocates from the Civil War, like Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898) or Benjamin Morgan Palmer (1818-1902), denying the Holocaust and claiming, as did Ben Garrett, cohost of the popular evangelical podcast “The Haunted Cosmos,” that Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II and the U.S. was duped by him into being involved in it — or talking conspiratorially of the “post-war consensus,” as if it were a bad thing.
Meanwhile, the mature — neither obsessed nor obtuse — let us down.
In 2019, I defended the gentlemen on that year’s Shepherds Conference panel who politely refused to explain why they didn’t sign the Dallas Statement. But I had hoped that soon, the mature would rise up and spank both sides, telling the obsessed not everything is about race, that their assumption that every disparity is due to racism may, indeed, be the product of “cultural Marxism”, that denouncing David Platt as a racist because he prayed for President Trump is demented. The obsessed were tearing at anyone who dared deviate from their political priorities. We needed the mature to school them. With some exceptions, mostly we got silence, as if they were afraid of being labeled a “noted contrarian.”
I had hoped the mature would teach the obtuse they need to listen to their Black brothers and sisters, that African Americans endured a unique injustice in American history that warrants unique attention, that they need to cultivate a sense of the nastiness and irrationality of racism, that the Dallas Statement’s deafening silence about grievous racial injustices in America’s past revealed their obtuseness, that if you sat out the Civil Rights Movement maybe you should sit out opposing wokeism; that to denounce David Platt as a “Marxist” simply because he acknowledges racial injustice is also demented, and that empathy is not always a sin.
I had hoped that the mature would rise up with a wise, even-handed rebuke to both sides, to overcome their fear of losing an audience, to stop trying to hover above the fray in an elite middle way, and to speak truth to the obtuse and especially to the obsessed. That hasn’t come yet. However, what has come, perhaps, is that many of the obtuse are learning to be mature.
John B. Carpenter
John B. Carpenter serves as pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, Va. He is the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church and the Covenant Caswell Substack.
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