November 14, 2021
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Book review
Fault Lines, by Voddie Baucham
In this book, Voddie presents a case against the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) worldview as it exerts influence in the American church (and denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention and magazines such as ChristianityToday) and in American society. His main point is that CSJ (the popular-level worldview based on the legal Critical Race Theory and other worldview roots) is dividing/splitting the American church and will continue to do so, and he is seeking to 'sound a warning' and encourage people to focus more on the Biblical gospel and Biblical justice rather than on "social justice". He carefully describes CRT from its original founders (Bell, Crenshaw) and roots (Marx, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School) and popularizers (Delgado, DiAngelo, Kendi). He distinguishes between Biblical justice, versus social justice. He says that "real justice requires truth", including truth about the famous incidents of black people being killed by police. He discusses several of the details of these recent cases, and also discusses what studies have found regarding disparities in policing. He discusses several aspects of the religious nature of 'antiracism' and the 'woke movement'. He discusses 'ethnic gnosticism' and standpoint epistemology. He quotes several popular Christian pastors and teachers and discusses the problems with what they are teaching from a Biblical point of view. He spends a full chapter discussing the 2019 SBC Convention and its controversy about Resolution 9 (about CRT and intersectionality).
It is a very personal book, as he tells stories about growing up as a black man in Los Angeles, and eventually becoming a black pastor in Texas, then later faculty at a seminary in Zambia. He tells of encounters he has had with racial prejudice over the years. He tells about his involvement in the SBC and the Dallas Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel, etc.
There were many points he shared that were fascinating to me. One was that the majority of black pastors and church leaders that he taught at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston, held pro-choice views.
This book's concepts are so controversial that podcasts such as Southside Rabbi (KB and Ameen Hudson) spent 4 hours criticizing the book (Season 2 Episode 15 and 16) despite the hosts not actually having read the book first (they hosted guests who had read it... such as Bradly Mason... I can send you my notes from the podcast if interested... the reason I listened to all 4 hours is that an esteemed black friend of mine recommended it to me asked me to listen). Mason criticizes Baucham's statistics on police shootings, saying that we should instead be focusing on the number of police-to-citizen contacts, where Mason says systemic racism in policing is shown. They implied (Ep. 16 ~min 30ff) that Baucham was being careless with his discussion of CRT, first making it sound 'toxic', then lumping other things that he didn't like underneath the CRT label. However, when I read the book, it seemed that Baucham was very careful and did not do this (so Southside Rabbi's discussion was actually misleading).
Also, Mason on Southside Rabbi's podcast (Ep. 16 ~min 30-40) accused Baucham of misconstruing or misquoting or mixing up the quotes from Delgado's textbook on Critical Race Theory. Mason has published some related critiques of Baucham's book which you can read here if interested. https://alsoacarpenter.com/2021/04/21/the-faulty-lines-in-voddie-bauchams-thought-line/ The critiques seem to focus on exactly which scholar first taught particular doctrines and exactly which year, trying to show that Baucham got these details wrong and is thus not to be trusted. Many of Mason's critiques seem weak and overwrought, in my opinion. Mason does seem to show that Baucham should have been more careful in his use of quotation marks when quoting from Delgado's definition of CRT, and that Baucham should have been more clear that when he implied that Delgado highlighted 4 key presuppositions of CRT, Baucham was actually leaving out some of the tenets that Delgado wrote, and Baucham was synthesizing some of Delgado's other points in his own wording. I think Baucham's book could have been made stronger by addressing more of the points made by KB and Hudson and Mason, particularly the points about them suffering under unfair/unjust prejudicial treatment by law enforcement in Chicago (and the legal structure behind the enforcement). I would love to hear a multi-episode discussion between Baucham and KB and Hudson on those topics. It could well be that both are right, in a sense - Baucham right that CRT is anti-Biblical, and KB & Hudson right that systemic/institutionalized racism exists in certain locations and situations (they cite Ferguson as an example). It could be that Baucham is right about the statistics about unarmed black men (vs white men) being killed by police, whereas KB & Hudson are right about the daily experience of many black citizens being stopped/harassed (but not shot) by police related to crimes they did not commit, or stopped for misdemeanors that a white citizen would not have been stopped for. Even if Baucham were to agree with KB & Hudson regarding the harassment-by-police situation on the ground (and hopefully KB & Hudson would agree regarding recent polling indicating that black people want more police involvement in their neighborhoods rather than less), Baucham's points about the Biblical critiques of CRT are very helpful.
Overall, I think that Baucham's book is definitely worth reading. It is good to listen to voices on both sides of these issues, and Baucham is a passionate, experienced (as a black man in America), well-researched, thoughtful, and Biblical voice to consider.
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