We are dealing with a corrupted church as in 'Jesus and John Wayne--How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation' by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. It is a church glorifying wealth and power. And it has tentacles everywhere. It will rape our children and convince us of the separation of church and state. It will deny the separation of the church and state when it wants to wield power. 'Anti-Christ' does not mean 'against-Christ' but, 'in-placeof' Christ. We did not think our own church leaders would call themselves gods, but here we are. I grew up in a Jack Hyles church, and it has been difficult to find my way out of such a cult as this.
Very excited to hear you’re working on this. I Really wish we could have some good faith dialogue about this issue with pastors and other Christian who have fallen prey to this purposeful misrepresentation.
I can't add much to the discussion on CRT because frankly the meaning of CRT *has* become something that it is not so that it can be a bugaboo to rally around. A conservative movement that's losing steam can be revived by the invention of an enemy, and how much better is it that the "enemy" can become defined not by what it actually is and what it actually proposes, but by the worst, most bad-faith and intellectually bankrupt assertions made by people who have an open disdain for the best parts of their own movement.
I was a conservative's conservative for 40 years. I *believed* that conservatives were loyal to the Christian God, believed in strong families, and supported a strong social network of "rugged individualism." I'm sorry to say that nearly all of those beliefs were proven wrong; I'm also happy to say that they were because I believe stuff that was simply erroneous, stuff that was based upon banana-pants conspiracies, magical thinking, and plain ol' made-up "facts." And so I know that wonderful taste of the lies and exaggerations and distortions that confirmed my world-view that conservatives were *right* and anyone on the left (a wonderfully amorphous term!) was *wrong wrong wrong*.
I believed in the bogeyman of Law and Order, and that was a reason I supported conservatives. I believed in the bogeyman of The Strong Family, and that's why I supported conservatives. Believed in the Bible as the Word of God, and so conservative. And so on.
There was always an enemy. The communists. The left. The hippie. The liberal. The gun-grabber. The abortionist. The feminist. The person who did not hold the most extreme of extreme views on conservative Christian theology.
That all blew up in my 50s. I was left with nothing and had to rebuild my faith and my politics and my connections.
I realized that I had spent 40+ years believing nonsense because I had been stampeded into "conservatism" in spite of my real beliefs and true nature. I'm now back to what I was as a child and young teenager who saw the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and who wondered why it was so many people were being horrifically treated and hated.
Building up and proffering bogeymen as against Christ is a very effective tool to wrangle the naive and the sincere. I understand why it's used. I understand how it was used on me.
CRT (whatever it is to them) is the latest bogeyman being used by conservatives (and shamefully, by self-declared followers of Jesus) to generate fear and hostility, and to create a need to be part of the "true" church and "true" movement.
It's exhausting to have to continuously push back, saying "No, that is not what CRT is. No, that is not what 'teaching' CRT means. No, that particular set of ideas is not CRT but is instead a wild distortion. No, CRT is not something that cannot be understood w/o the help of a preacher. No, CRT is actually a loose set of propositions created by scholars examining American history, polity, and law to figure out how it is possible to have a notionally fair and impartial system and yet see that its functionality is riddled with bias and the systemic process that results in abominably distorted justice to the suffering of tens of millions of people thought to be less valuable that wite people."
It's exhausting. It's draining. It leads to discouragement as we see that people willfully do not understand because they have already decided (and it was decided for them) what it is they "believe" about CRT.
Still.
What other tools do we have than speaking the truth in love and bearing in our bodies the witness of Jesus?
They are the only tools Jesus used. I think they are the only tools we are to use as well. And so we must simply, painfully, with commitment and faith, continue to tell the truth and leave the harvest to God.
We are dealing with a corrupted church as in 'Jesus and John Wayne--How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation' by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. It is a church glorifying wealth and power. And it has tentacles everywhere. It will rape our children and convince us of the separation of church and state. It will deny the separation of the church and state when it wants to wield power. 'Anti-Christ' does not mean 'against-Christ' but, 'in-placeof' Christ. We did not think our own church leaders would call themselves gods, but here we are. I grew up in a Jack Hyles church, and it has been difficult to find my way out of such a cult as this.
Very excited to hear you’re working on this. I Really wish we could have some good faith dialogue about this issue with pastors and other Christian who have fallen prey to this purposeful misrepresentation.
Looking forward to Building an Antiracist Culture in Christian Institutions! Very timely help. Thanks!
I can't add much to the discussion on CRT because frankly the meaning of CRT *has* become something that it is not so that it can be a bugaboo to rally around. A conservative movement that's losing steam can be revived by the invention of an enemy, and how much better is it that the "enemy" can become defined not by what it actually is and what it actually proposes, but by the worst, most bad-faith and intellectually bankrupt assertions made by people who have an open disdain for the best parts of their own movement.
I was a conservative's conservative for 40 years. I *believed* that conservatives were loyal to the Christian God, believed in strong families, and supported a strong social network of "rugged individualism." I'm sorry to say that nearly all of those beliefs were proven wrong; I'm also happy to say that they were because I believe stuff that was simply erroneous, stuff that was based upon banana-pants conspiracies, magical thinking, and plain ol' made-up "facts." And so I know that wonderful taste of the lies and exaggerations and distortions that confirmed my world-view that conservatives were *right* and anyone on the left (a wonderfully amorphous term!) was *wrong wrong wrong*.
I believed in the bogeyman of Law and Order, and that was a reason I supported conservatives. I believed in the bogeyman of The Strong Family, and that's why I supported conservatives. Believed in the Bible as the Word of God, and so conservative. And so on.
There was always an enemy. The communists. The left. The hippie. The liberal. The gun-grabber. The abortionist. The feminist. The person who did not hold the most extreme of extreme views on conservative Christian theology.
That all blew up in my 50s. I was left with nothing and had to rebuild my faith and my politics and my connections.
I realized that I had spent 40+ years believing nonsense because I had been stampeded into "conservatism" in spite of my real beliefs and true nature. I'm now back to what I was as a child and young teenager who saw the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and who wondered why it was so many people were being horrifically treated and hated.
Building up and proffering bogeymen as against Christ is a very effective tool to wrangle the naive and the sincere. I understand why it's used. I understand how it was used on me.
CRT (whatever it is to them) is the latest bogeyman being used by conservatives (and shamefully, by self-declared followers of Jesus) to generate fear and hostility, and to create a need to be part of the "true" church and "true" movement.
It's exhausting to have to continuously push back, saying "No, that is not what CRT is. No, that is not what 'teaching' CRT means. No, that particular set of ideas is not CRT but is instead a wild distortion. No, CRT is not something that cannot be understood w/o the help of a preacher. No, CRT is actually a loose set of propositions created by scholars examining American history, polity, and law to figure out how it is possible to have a notionally fair and impartial system and yet see that its functionality is riddled with bias and the systemic process that results in abominably distorted justice to the suffering of tens of millions of people thought to be less valuable that wite people."
It's exhausting. It's draining. It leads to discouragement as we see that people willfully do not understand because they have already decided (and it was decided for them) what it is they "believe" about CRT.
Still.
What other tools do we have than speaking the truth in love and bearing in our bodies the witness of Jesus?
They are the only tools Jesus used. I think they are the only tools we are to use as well. And so we must simply, painfully, with commitment and faith, continue to tell the truth and leave the harvest to God.