Does CRT Belong in Church? (Part Two)
Inside This Episode
In part two of our series on critical race theory, Eric Huffman chats with author and scholar Ed Uszynski about white evangelicals' hesitancy to address racism, and how their silence inadvertently drives onlookers away from the church and toward the "woke" left. On an incredibly personal note, Ed divulges the racist beliefs espoused in his childhood home, the process of examining his own racial biases, and why his journey to championing true, biblical justice is one we should all take. Eric also reveals his family’s own history with racism and offers a strong call to Christians everywhere.
This must listen to episode also features Justin Giboney, cofounder of the AND Campaign, attorney and political strategist.
Read Ed's book, Untangling Critical Race Theory: https://www.amazon.com/Untangling-Critical-Race-Theory-Christians/dp/151400481X
Learn more about the AND Campaign: https://andcampaign.org/about/
Head to YouTube to watch Maybe God’s full-length interviews!
Transcript
Eric Huffman: In part one of our series on critical race theory, author and scientist, Neil Shenvi, argued that CRT is incompatible with the Christian worldview.
Neil Shenvi: Critical theories function like a religion. You can't have two religions. You just can't.
Eric Huffman: While today's guest, author Ed Uszynski doesn't disagree with Neil on that point, he challenges Christians to keep our criticism of CRT from blinding us to the racism that still exists today.
Ed Uszynski: Critical race theory is actually really just wanting us to look at race and racialization and what it means to have lived in a culture that spent 400 years literally making race a big deal, and then all of a sudden in the 1960s, passed a few laws and said, "Okay, we're good now. We can stop talking about race. Let's just act like that never happened."
And these theorists said, "Well, that's just ridiculous. There are tons of consequences to having lived this way for 400 years. It doesn't just evaporate."
Eric Huffman: So if CRT isn't the way forward for Christians, how should we think about ongoing racial inequalities? How can we honor the biblical mandate to care for those who are oppressed and to lead the fight against injustice? That's all today on Maybe God.
[00:01:16] <music>
Eric Huffman: You're listening to Maybe God. I'm Eric Huffman.
As a Christian, I find critical race theory highly offensive. I despise its socialist Marxian roots, its inherent divisiveness, and its assumption that the only answer to past discrimination is more discrimination in the present.
What's more, CRT seems to be serving in our culture as well as our classrooms as a Trojan horse, a vehicle used to smuggle in all sorts of other more nefarious ideas that seek to completely deconstruct life as we know it. CRT's most ardent supporters are fond of labeling everything from whiteness and Christianity to the nuclear family and traditional gender roles as tools of oppression that must be dismantled.
For these reasons and more, CRT stands fundamentally opposed to the gospel of Jesus Christ, which holds that all people, regardless of their skin color, have sacred worth and are made in the image of God and that all people have sinned and fallen short, and that by His grace, God has chosen not to hold our sins against us or to condemn us for the sins that our forefathers committed.
Having said that, I think it's important for Christians today to understand the conditions that have allowed CRT to gain such traction in our culture. Jesus teaches us to always examine our own sins before judging anyone else, and we can't run from the truth that had Christians and churches done more to heal the wounds of America's past and to bridge the racial divide, CRT's influence would be marginal at most today.
So yes, CRT is offensive to the gospel. But if I'm more offended by CRT than I am by racism itself and the suffering of my Black and Brown brothers and sisters, then shame on me. Instead of ignoring this topic altogether, we should be willing to ask, if CRT isn't the right way to remedy racism in America, then what is?
Our guest today, Dr. Ed Uszynski, is the author of a brand new book called Untangling Critical Race Theory: What Christians Need to Know and Why It Matters. Ed has spent 32 years working with college and professional athletes of all races in a sports ministry called Athletes in Action.
His PhD work took him on a deep dive into critical theory and critical race theory. Before that, he was raised in a uniquely diverse setting.
Ed Uszynski: Where I lived, about 20 miles west of Cleveland, there was an intersection of just a whole bunch of different ethnicities. It was predominantly Black folks, White folks, and Puerto Rican folks, okay? But we had high schools that were mixed along those lines.
So I spent my whole high school years... I was a basketball player, so that obviously had me hanging out more with Black kids. But I lived in a White neighborhood, and we all wound up going and playing ball a lot in Puerto Rican neighborhoods. And so again, there was always this constant mix going on.
It's interesting, you know, I've thought a ton about it, Eric, through the years, just what exactly was the racial climate? Because I think I remember that we all got along really well. This was back in the 1980s. I felt like we got along well with each other. And yet, right beneath the surface, race and racism were always like right there, ready to kind of jump out at us at any moment, you know?
I can remember there being lots of fights that took place around race. There were separations in the lunchroom based on race, the more that I've thought about it. So it's like we tolerated each other, and we were in each other's space, and we got along but it was always soaked in kerosene ready for a match to be made.
Eric Huffman: That's a good way to put it.
Ed Uszynski: You know? Yeah.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. And you seem to be especially or uniquely able to blend in with a bunch of different groups rather than being only comfortable with people that look like you.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah. For whatever reason, God wired me that way. I've always been intrigued by people. Period. And so, yeah, I spent time on all different sides of the tracks. And really tried to understand how different people were thinking on those sides of the tracks, you know?
Eric Huffman: Interesting.
Ed Uszynski: I found myself even in high school, when I was with my White friends who were saying this, that, or the other about the Puerto Rican folks or the Black folks, and I remember thinking, "Yeah, that's not really how they are," or "that's not really what they think." Or I'd maybe be with all the Black guys and hear them talk about the White guys and the Puerto Ricans, right, and it's like, "No, that's not exactly how it is."
So I was often in this place of being a... or at least trying to be a translator and trying to be somebody that was building bridges before I even knew what that language was. Before I was even a Christian, because I didn't become a Christian until I was a freshman at Kent State University.
Eric Huffman: Interesting.
Ed Uszynski: So even in high school, God was just already wiring me to be the type of person that was at least trying to build bridges.
Eric Huffman: You talk about, in the book one really formational moment early in life in high school when you decided who you wanted to invite to the prom. Could you share that story with our listeners and viewers?
Ed Uszynski: Nice, Eric. Wow, nobody's gone after that yet. Actually, obviously marked me because I've never forgotten it. I was friends with different groups of people, but I had one particular girlfriend who happened to be Black, and her parents really loved me and my family, so I hung out at her house quite a bit.
And when it came time to go to prom, even thinking back about this, there was a lot of stress trying to decide who am I going to go with, which group am I going to wind up hanging out with. And I really wanted to go with this girl to prom.
And so I thought it would be a no-brainer. My parents didn't mind. I was certain that her parents wouldn't mind, but I still wanted to go over and at least pay the respects of asking her mom and dad for the privilege of being able to take her.
The day that I went over there to ask her, it was very quiet in the room when I walked in, very somber, and I'm like, "Man, what's going on in here?" And I looked at her dad, and her dad kind of nodded over at mom and said, "You need to talk to her." And I just said, "Can I take your daughter to prom?" And she said no.
She started to cry, and she said, "Baby, I love you, but you just can't take her." And I came to find out that the reason why is because she was concerned about what her Black friends would think if their daughter went with a White guy to prom. And some of her church folks is what came out later.
Again, I didn't even realize how complicated that idea was when that was happening to me as an 18-year-old. But it's like, Okay, I never in a million years would have thought that that was going to be their response.
But what it taught me was that race had meaning for people. And even if we weren't talking about what those meanings were in front of each other, there were very well built-up meaning structures behind the idea of race and skin color and where you're from and who you can be with and who you can't be with.
Eric Huffman: When Ed was 18, he left his multi-ethnic neighborhood and headed to Kent State to play basketball. He became a Christian just a few months into his freshman year.
Ed Uszynski: I wound up actually getting let go from the team in November for a number of different reasons. But the bottom line was I needed to be done with basketball because I was going through really a crisis of just identity.
And really, it was a spiritual crisis. I'm like, what am I doing here? What happens when I die? Is there any meaning to life? I mean, I was like classic existential angst guy.
So I started to meet Jesus people on campus that were explaining the gospel to me. And by February of 1988, so this all happened in November. By February, I just realized that Jesus really was who He said He was. As I read the Bible, I just kept sensing, This is true. I don't understand all of it. I sure don't understand all the stuff that goes on in church and all the crazy things that I've experienced and heard other people have experienced. But this Jesus character seems true. And all these words that are in this book are doing something inside me that they had never done before when I'd gone to vacation Bible school or whatever.
So it's like the lights just came on. And I immediately started to be discipled again across all different racial lines. I had a White man that was discipling me who was a former athlete who actually worked with Athletes in Action.
I had a Black man on campus that had a ministry that was geared specifically to Black students that I had met in the gym one day. And he invited me to start coming to church with him and start hanging out in their circles. And I was learning about the faith in both of those worlds.
Two very, again, to use the words that we have available, conservative thinking men, orthodox in their view of scripture, very missionally minded.
It was interesting. I write about this in the book. It was the White guy that was actually probably more liberally minded in the way he operated, the way he thought socially. The Black guy came from East Cleveland, which is super democratic and extremely liberal. And yet he was very conservative in the way he spoke, in the way he talked, the way he thought socially.
So I just had this wild mix, again, of the word coming to me through different racial eyes and different backgrounds.
Eric Huffman: Interesting. I think, as I said, we're all shaped by those experiences and upbringings. My experience growing up was in some ways similar as far as sports is concerned. Sports is where I really started to understand diversity and how other people come from vastly different settings than I did.
But I grew up in a town, man, that was all White people. And that's not an exaggeration. Like Red Lick, Texas was 100% White. It's not that way as much today. It's like 90 something percent White now. But then I didn't go to school with any kids of color.
I played basketball in middle school. In that school, I was a star, I think in part because I didn't go to school with any kids of color.
Ed Uszynski: Interesting.
Eric Huffman: And then I went to high school, which was more diverse and I found myself less of a standout in the basketball arena. But I still loved to play. And I got to know a lot of kids through that.
And interestingly enough, I mean, one half of my family, I would say is much more racist than the other half. Just culturally speaking, my dad's side of the family, very old school, blue-blooded, like Democrat.
Ed Uszynski: Interesting.
Eric Huffman: Pro union, and racially more probably enlightened. My mom's side, not so much. When they met my wife, who is a woman of color from Ecuador, my great uncle, I'll never forget said, "I didn't know you found yourself a Mexican."
It's who he was, right? Nobody really took too much offense to it. But I'm like, "Uncle RL, we grew up closer to Mexico than she did." Ecuador is not close to Mexico.
Ed Uszynski: My family was flipped around actually. So my dad was definitely from the more racist inclination side and my mom, for whatever reason, just had a more progressive vibe to her. She was the one that was playing Motown records. She was the one that I knew wouldn't have a problem if I asked this girl to go to prom.
My dad was always kind of going along with it. He was tolerating it because I think he knew it was right. But all of his mental framework had been structured in such a way that it was uncomfortable to him.
Eric Huffman: Sure. Yeah, man.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah. So even in the same home, you can be getting very different messages about how to think.
Eric Huffman: Though race was always a big part of Ed's life, he never planned on writing a book about critical race theory. He compares writing about CRT to stepping into a war zone.
I asked him why he decided to write this book in the first place, knowing that it was potentially dangerous to his reputation and his career.
Ed Uszynski: The biggest reason why is because I had a friend. Her name was Elizabeth Kaproski. Elizabeth was dying of cancer, okay? Elizabeth always had a heart for immigrant ministry in the Dayton area. She was always crossing over racial lines and class lines to do ministry.
As things were happening in the last 10 years, really the last 15 years, with all the different police shootings and just the different ways that race has been brought to the foreground of our American consciousness again, we were having these conversations all the time amongst ourselves.
I had been speaking very passionately about wishing that my White friends in particular would not be so guided by what was happening in social media and what was maybe being talked about from different news outlets, but would actually do the hard work of being missions-minded Christians.
And as she listened to me give these rants all the time, she said, "Well, when are you going to start writing about this?" She said, "You've got a PhD, you are able to communicate, and so you do this in our circles, but when are you actually going to put this down so that the church has an opportunity to wrestle with some of the things that you're talking about?"
And I basically promised as she was dying, I will do this book. Because I've wanted to stay out of it, Eric. Not in the sense that... I just want to do the work. I don't want to be in arguments all the time with people. I'm not trying to convince people whose feet are dug in and are not interested in changing at all. That's just not where I want to spend my time. I want to build bridges and I want to help people cross them.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. And I can't stress it enough. You're not here to sell books necessarily and I'm not here to promote a book, but this book caught me by surprise, Ed, because so much of the dialogue and argumentation being waged around critical race theory is binary. Especially when you see a Christian author writing a book on critical race theory, you sort of these days know what to expect. This is going to be a total evisceration of critical race theory.
But you talk in a very different way, a much more nuanced way, that I'm sure is opening you up to criticism from both of those sides of that binary. But I just want to lift that up. This is a quote from your book. I think this is in the introduction or first chapter.
It says, "We can't go on avoiding or ignoring racism in America as Christians. We need to talk about race because it concerns brothers and sisters who experience it as more than just a trending topic dropping into their social feed. They feel it every day of their lives."
In this context, this culture we have now where it's just argumentation around, you know, everything is race or nothing is race and racism. You try to enter in with a different conversation. Talk about why that is the approach you chose.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, good. Well, maybe this is part B as to why I wrote it. Elizabeth really pushed me over the edge.
But what was the edge? For me, one, with this whole critical race theory thing, every time I heard critical race theory talked about on the news or in different commentary, I kept having this inside reaction and said, "Well, that's not what critical race theory is." Like, first of all, I'm shocked anybody's talking about critical race theory all of a sudden. It's been around for 40 years.
Like I said, I had studied it a decade, 15 years ago in my PhD program as a discipline, a law discipline, right, and an academic lens through which to view the world, which we can come back to that in a second. But the way I kept getting it talked about, that's not really what it is.
Christopher Rufo, who is a conservative activist, is really the guy that popularized it through Fox News. And by bringing up those three letters, CRT, critical race theory, over and over again, he very deliberately said, "We're going to use this critical race theory idea to annex every progressive idea that Americans don't like."
And when he says Americans, he means conservative Americans. Everything that we don't like, we're just going to put under the umbrella of CRT. And he was super effective at doing that.
Usually, when I hear CRT mentioned, it's not actually reflecting what real CRT is. Neal Shenvi, I know Neal's been a guest, he's done a very good job, I think, of showing that there's something called critical social justice, and there's sort of this critical progressive movement that's taking place. It's really a political movement.
That's a whole nother discussion then that involves sexuality and gender, and it involves, you know, DEI and all these other components of trying to bring a progressive worldview to bear on America.
But critical race theory is actually really just wanting us to look at race and racialization and what it means to have lived in a culture that spent 400 years literally making race a big deal and then all of a sudden in the 1960s, passed a few laws and said, "Okay, we're good now. We can stop talking about race. We're not going to make a big deal about it. In fact, it's illegal to put signs up that say that Blacks can't eat here or Whites only and these sorts of things. It's illegal now. So we're good. Let's just act like that never happened."
And these theorists said, well, that's just ridiculous. There are tons of consequences to having lived this way for 400 years. It doesn't just evaporate.
And if we really just look in our field, which is law, there are still laws in place that actually make it so that inequality is almost inevitable. And that's the work that they were doing. They were looking at how power works through law to maintain inequalities between people and especially looking through the lens of race, which is actually super fascinating stuff.
So most of the time when people are upset about CRT, that's not what they're responding to. You know what I mean, Eric? It's like people aren't reading law documents or trying to understand how local laws even work in their community, which is still a fascinating thing to dig into. It's something else.
So I wanted to clear some of that up. I wanted to slowly look at the different theoretical lenses that CRT, the Regional Critical Race Theorists, were asking us to look through and see what do we see and what does it mean for the church? What would the church's response be if we look through those lenses in a nonpartisan way and asked ourselves hard questions?
Eric Huffman: Just to be clear, Ed isn't a fan of CRT. He's not defending critical theory as a worldview. He's simply saying that there's something worth listening to, a heartbeat underneath the noise of CRT that Christians and churches should be willing to hear.
Hearing that heartbeat will be impossible as long as we're feeling triggered and offended every time that we hear phrases like white supremacy and systemic racism.
Ed Uszynski: I understand why that's offensive on the surface. But again, if you slow down and if we ask ourselves. what are patterns maybe that have been put in place that make it such that even though we say everyone is equal, everyone has a shot based on merit to get this job, even though we say that, because of patterns, policies, or just ways of being, you only have White people who are in these leadership roles, you only have white head coaches in the NFL until recently, for example.
Or at a local Christian school. I've actually got a number of Christian schools in mind, so I know people are always trying to figure out exactly which one I'm thinking of. But there's literally four that I have in mind that I've been associated with whose racial history was such that they purposely were founded in an effort to be separated from Black folks. That's how they started 50 years ago or 40 years ago.
And unless they made changes in the way they operate, it's likely that they still have only White people that are operating and running the school, even though they're located in places where there's lots of non-White folks. So is it possible, and I'm saying yes, that there's patterns, policies, and ways of being, ways of where you go to hire people, what schools you go to to hire people?
When you do a search to fill a leadership position, if all you've ever done is gone to a handful of only White schools or schools that are predominated by White folks, it's very likely you're going to wind up with a White person in that leadership role.
Eric Huffman: I think it's valid. I'm not going to go too hard on this, but I think it's worth also saying that a lot of the conversations being had to this end in the world do seem to want to make culprits of white people on a more individual basis, or at least that's how it comes across.
And it's ironic that a worldview that says it's not how something is said, it's how it's perceived or received, that it really matters, right? And then you have White people going, this doesn't feel good.
It doesn't feel like we're saying there's this overarching structure that's the problem. It feels like you're saying White people are the problem in the words you choose and the way it comes across.
I don't think Christians or white people are just being whiny or something. I think it goes deeper than that. I think oftentimes we feel like we're being held accountable for the sins of people we never met.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, me too, Eric. Again, I get it. I sat in a PhD program where White people were talked negatively about for five years. I know those feelings inside myself. Of wanting to say, well, you can't just condemn all White people for this or that.
But I will say this. This is the discipline that I've tried to embrace instead of immediately getting defensive... Because that is what we tend to do. So when we feel the way you just described, Eric, which I thought was a great description of feeling like I'm being singled out as being singularly evil for being White.
I think it's at least worth... all of us, because we're all White people, I think it's at least worth asking the question, is that true? Or in what ways might that be true? Instead of immediately running to "that can't be true." That there's no culpability over here anymore. Because that's usually what happens. We're not racist in here anymore. We don't have any racial consequence because of choices we've made or the way that we've lived.
I at least want to be open to asking myself... well, I just told you, I grew up in a home where at least half of my parental unit was very racist. So unless I've done work to sort of cleanse myself of that racism, it's pretty likely that it still lives in me somewhere.
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: You know what I mean?
Eric Huffman: Yeah, sure. But just to gently push back, I would say that's not because you're White. It's because one of your parents were racist.
Ed Uszynski: Yes.
Eric Huffman: So the idea that, is it possibly true that I'm inherently evil and racist because I'm White? That I think is a bridge too far for most people. And I think it should be. But I also think that's where the cultural, secular conversation wants to nudge things.
Ed Uszynski: I agree. It definitely comes off that way. So, again, man, don't hear me saying that that's not true. It does come off that way, especially when it's done recklessly and in a sloppy way, often by White people also, which is interesting.
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: Robin DiAngelo and others who have kind of made a platform out of doing that kind of work. But I would say, so my White skin doesn't make me inherently evil, but my White skin does immediately align me with a history. It aligns me with a group category that has done a bunch of evil in the name of race.
So I just personally want to be careful that I don't just kind of dismiss that too easily. And let me just explore that. Let me just explore what that's meant or looked like in my life and see, is there something that I need to repent of? Is there an attitude or something that's latently still living inside of me that I need the spirit of God to excise out of me? I just don't want to move past that too quickly.
Even though I totally agree with what you're saying from a secular perspective especially, as a person who's trying to live by the spirit, who is living in a culture that has been hyper-racialized, it's been hyper-racialized, I can't just sort of cling to my own innocence in the midst of that.
Eric Huffman: There's more work to be done, basically.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah. And I won't do that work if I just right away dismiss those things, even though ultimately, like you're saying, I think the extreme ways that they're talked about is wrong. I at least want to explore it. I'll say, most people that I'm around won't explore it.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Ed Uszynski: And I think that's the problem. Most Christian people won't explore it. They just dismiss it.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Sure. Just to be clear about what racialization or racialized mean, you define it as the unavoidable effect of living in a society wherein race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities, and social relationships.
Then you write, "Within a racialized culture like ours, some may place too much emphasis on race and others not enough." But you encourage your readers, "Let's not be distracted by the extremes. We need help thinking about the repercussions of living in a racialized culture, not by becoming more woke in the radical progressive sense, but by having our eyes opened in a spirit-filled mind of Christ sense." What's the difference?
Ed Uszynski: Excellent, Eric. Thank you. First of all, just to give credit where credit is due, that definition of racialization came from Divided by Faith, which was written back in, I think, 2000 or 2001, where Smith and Emerson did this intense sociological study on race within the world of evangelicalism.
And their conclusion was, yes, there is definitely still separation, and there is a problem. There's a lack of cross-cultural competency that exists mostly in White folks that needs to be addressed. So they were saying that 25 years ago.
What is the difference? I think we just talked about what the difference is. If I'm grounded in the Bible and I'm asking the Spirit of God to be the one that's leading me, it should do two things. It should both open me up to hearing people, again, talking about race. This is true in all categories of life. But if we're talking about race, it should open me up to have a humility to explore where it is that I need to grow or where it is that I've been wrong, where it is that I've been off base.
It should also empower me to be able to see when something is just kind of whacked out. I don't think because there's been a racial problem that that then gives you permission then to mistreat me. I don't think that it gives you... right?
So I think the Spirit of God can lead us in both of those directions, both to give me the humility to learn and also give me sort of a worldview that is able to discern when something is coming from a demonic worldview.
Eric Huffman: I really appreciate how throughout the book you are insistent that we shouldn't just give in to the hysteria of the world and the hysteria of right, left. Everybody's hysterical about this particular topic. And we as Christians have solid footing that should prevent us from falling into that hysteria.
You talk about this sort of critical theory, critical race theory worldview, and the Christian worldview. And if these folks over here, the secular critical race theorists were to respectfully consider the Christian worldview, theirs would fall apart or be really threatened by our worldview.
But if Christians in our worldview just seriously or respectfully consider the concerns that gave rise to CRT, our worldview can withstand that without crumbling. Talk a little bit about why that is. What it is about the biblical or Christian worldview that allows us to, in a heartfelt way, consider something like the underpinnings of CRT?
Ed Uszynski: Well, because my feet are planted firmly on the ground. I say "my". Anybody who's grounded in the scriptures is grounded in another world, right? Like this is not my home. I'm an alien and a stranger here. This is not ultimately my world. I've got a different kingdom in mind that's got a different ethic, that has a different king, that has different expectations for what human relationships should look like, that has different expectations for how power up will actually be used to serve people instead of to serve myself, right? It's the upside-down kingdom.
So I've signed up for a completely different way of doing life that I think... and again, Eric, this is the question, is it true that one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord? I mean, that's the question ultimately that hovers over all of our lives all the time, right?
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: We have to make a decision about what we think about that. I am saying yes to that. I believe that Jesus is the beginning and the end of everything in history. And so there's a security that comes from being tied into Him.
Now, again, there's a lot of messy church stuff up underneath that and around that, right? That's the whole point of your podcast even existing to talk about all that messiness. But Jesus Himself gives me... He's an anchor of the soul. He's a secure foundation that gives me the categories to think in.
Like I said, it helps me know how to relate to God, how to relate to others, and how to relate to myself in a way that reflects true reality. I've never said that all quite like that.
Eric Huffman: It was good.
Ed Uszynski: On the other side, again, and having been with my progressive friends, they've got their feet, as G. K. Chesterton said a long time ago, they've got both feet planted firmly in the air. They really don't. They don't even know what they would really... they know that they want... they know that they don't like people being abused. They know that they want to take care of marginalized and watching out for people that are kind of in the lower or the underclasses, as you think in terms of class.
But if they were to get power, I used to ask my friends this all the time, what will you do with it? What will you do to make sure that the people that you've replaced don't wind up being the ones that start being oppressed?
And they don't have a way because there's no foundation. There is no anchor. There is no kingdom worldview script being given to them. All they're going to do is become everything that they hated in the first place, and that's why they need Jesus.
Eric Huffman: As we all do. Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: If Jesus really is the answer that we just talked about, then he's really what you're looking for. And until you find Him, this quest to find your version of justice and the quest to help oppressed peoples and whatnot, however noble it may look on the surface, at the end of the day, it's demonic. Because whatever spirit does not lift up Jesus as Lord is ultimately coming from a satanic place. Again, that's some deep water right there.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, bro.
Ed Uszynski: It is, right?
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: It is. So, yeah, go ahead.
Eric Huffman: No, yeah. I mean, it's just so unique how you go about it in the book because you're a high, high-level academic with all these degrees and PhD and all this stuff, and you're writing to everyday Christians. And you do an amazing job at distilling the roots of critical theory and critical race theory down to an understandable, comprehensible level.
But you go all the way back to sort of the progenitor, I guess, of this, which is Karl Marx himself and Marxian philosophy that emerged even after his life and others that carried forward the message. But you do that with a more generous perspective than most Christians would.
And it's not because you agree necessarily with Marx, although you talk about how his writings opened your eyes to a lot of things. It's that you saw what he and they were responding to, the brokenness, what we call sin, what they just call oppression or power dynamics and things, and you think it's something you believe strongly. It's something that Christians should know about and pay attention to. Is that accurate?
Ed Uszynski: Yeah. Again, when we say Christians, globally, that means different things. People come from different theological backgrounds. People have had different Bible verses emphasized or not emphasized for them.
The Christianity that I stepped into in the late 1980s was a Christianity that was influenced significantly by the religious right. It was influenced significantly by Billy Graham and the evangelists, the parachurch starters that focused very much on an individualistic salvation message, right, where there's sort of this transactional need for me to get my sins paid for to avoid hell, and judgment on the other side of death, but it was very individualistic in the way that it was handed to me.
Megachurch, Republican politics, right, like that all came along with it. Well, what that ended up doing was putting me on one side of the Bible and neglecting another side of the Bible.
It was spending an awful lot of time. It's funny, I was just in Jeremiah this morning. I'm kind of doing this read-through-the-Bible thing with some friends of mine. In the first few chapters of Jeremiah, you see this rebuke that happens throughout the Old Testament through the prophets, and that is, things will go well for you Israelites if you do two things:
- Do not bow down to other idols, have no other God before me, tear down these Asherah, different sites that you built up that you're worshiping at. So that's one that gets talked about all the time.
- The second one is make sure you're doing justice with people. Don't be oppressive. Make sure that the marginalized and the people that are vulnerable in your midst are not being taken advantage of and mistreated and oppressed.
Again, like Karl Marx is not the one that started using that word.
Eric Huffman: That's right. It's all over the Bible.
Ed Uszynski: It's not just spiritually oppressed, which is what my ilk has tended to do with any of that justice or oppression language is that you need to be set free spiritually. Well, of course, that is also true. But I think God is literally talking about the way people are treating each other and making sure that power is not being used to mistreat people because it's always being used to mistreat people somewhere.
So in our context, are we watching out for the people that God has predisposed to have His eyes on and is saying, make sure that these people are not being mistreated in some kind of way?
Eric Huffman: So in other words, we have a vertical relationship and horizontal relationships. American evangelicalism tends to only focus or primarily focus, probably only, more than primarily, on the vertical relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship with people.
Marxism, on the other hand, which is atheistic by definition, just says it's the horizontal relationships that matter. There is no vertical. In fact, the vertical is just a distraction from what we really need to be about here. It's an opiate, you know, whatever.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, great summary, Eric. Yeah, and so we minimize our horizontal. It's not that we don't have any ethic of how we treat one another and operate with one another. But it's minimized. And somehow we conveniently don't usually do deep dives into what justice means or what does that word justice look like in our community? In our congregational community, in the local community, the city or town where we live in, are we paying attention to these things with people? And most of the time, we're not. Too often we're not.
Eric Huffman: This part of our interview reminded me of my conversation with scientist and author Neil Shenvi, who we interviewed in part one of this series. Neil says that we're invariably forced to choose between critical theory and Christianity because we have to decide if our fundamental problem is sin or oppression, and if our identity is primarily defined vertically or horizontally.
I asked Ed to respond to Neil's comments.
Ed Uszynski: I want to be careful about saying whether or not he's wrong. I think the problem with the way Neil sets it up is he sets it up as a binary, where it's sort of this either-or thing. Some people push back on me, and they're saying, ultimately, you have to choose which worldview that you're going to embrace, so you are making a choice. And I would say yes to that.
But I think the fundamental problem is sin, and sin manifests itself in oppression. So let's look at both of them. Let's not set them up so that they're opposed to each other. Because this is what I see people do. Well, the answer is sin, and so we're not going to talk about oppression at all is what ends up happening.
That's the unintended consequence, I think, of how Neil sets these things up. Is it identity in Christ, or is it identity derived from race or something else? Well, I don't want to set it up as though I have to make a choice. My identity comes from Christ, and He does give me a racial identity that matters in my time on this earth.
And we've tended to neglect that side of things. Again, when I say we, I'm talking about that group of White people that I tend to spend my time with in Christian fellowship, which has not done a ton of work. Those people that haven't done a ton of work in being cross-culturally competent or just increasing in racial intelligence. I guess that's another way of saying it. They just haven't done a lot of work in that when we're honest.
Eric Huffman: And just to play devil's advocate a little bit here for lack of a better term-
Ed Uszynski: Go ahead.
Eric Huffman: The idea that race is a social construct is fundamental to CRT. I mean, that's one of the tenets of CRT is that race is socially constructed.
Ed Uszynski: It's made up, right? That's what it means. It's something that's made up and has to be built.
Eric Huffman: So then what would be so wrong about being post-racial and colorblind, let's say, and just not talking about it anymore like the famous interview with Morgan Freeman where he says, "Let's just not talk about it anymore."
Morgan Freeman: I don't want a Black History Month. Black history is American history. How are we going to get rid of racism and stop talking about it? I'm going to stop calling you a White man. And I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a Black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. You want to say, I know this White guy named Mike Wallace. You know what I'm saying?
Eric Huffman: And I've seen other sort of Black celebrities and influencers, academics even, say similar things. What's wrong with just moving on?
Ed Uszynski: It is interesting that usually the people that are saying that stuff are people that are wildly successful in one way or another, which is interesting that they be the ones that are saying let's just move beyond it.
Now, again, it sounds silly to say that it's wrong to say that. Of course, I would love for that to be a goal. What I always think in my mind when I hear people say that is it's too late for that.
Eric Huffman: Why?
Ed Uszynski: Well, because we've already set ourselves up across centuries and there are implications to having set ourselves up along racial lines and racialized lines. There's implications to that that are still alive and well in our midst today.
So if our history had been we didn't create race as a construct, we didn't come here to intentionally oppress a native people that already lived on this land, we didn't come here and build our economy largely on the backs of slave labor, if we hadn't done that, then it would be way more convenient and easier to say here in America we really are a melting pot. We don't treat people on the basis of their skin color or things like that. We never have.
If we could say that, then it would be a lot easier to say, Yeah, in this part of the world, I know it looks different in other parts of the globe, but on this land, we're post-racial. We never have let race be an issue. But that's not what happened.
Eric Huffman: I wanted to hear another perspective on CRT. So I reached out to Justin Giboney, a Black ordained minister, attorney, and political strategist. In 2015, Justin founded the AND Campaign, a group that aims to connect conviction and compassion by educating and organizing Christians of both political parties on key issues.
Justin Giboney: Analyzing power and seeing how it's used is not necessarily bad. Where I think critical race theory goes off the rails a little bit is when you start getting into, number one, that everything is about an exchange of power. And so everything that happens really is just a reflection of how people want to use power.
The other part that I push back against when it comes to critical race theory is the racial essentialism, which basically says your race says something about your character. Your race says something about your competence. That's a lie from the pits of hell. Right?
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Justin Giboney: Your race, your sex, says nothing about your character, says nothing about your competence. There was a time on the left when we thought that type of stereotype was bad. Now, somehow, that type of stereotype becomes okay.
So I'm more than willing to admit that critical race theory has its excesses. I have young sons. I'm not going to teach them critical race theory. Most Black people, before this was made a big deal, didn't even know what it was.
But you had so many people talking about race before critical race theory was even a thing, whether it's Frederick Douglass or [Bernard Truth?]. You have all these people, all these Christians, talking about race. It had nothing to do with critical race theory.
The biggest issue I have with the right on how they've done this is they created a boogeyman, which it was in some universities. Obviously, it's kind of a legal theory and all that stuff. They made this huge boogeyman about it, and they've tossed everything about race, legitimate conversations about race into this boogeyman, which is now happening with DEI and all that stuff.
Yes, there's some excesses. To me, it's intellectually dishonest to throw every conversation about race, given our historical context, into that poisoned well, and now every time I talk about race, it's critical race theory.
Eric Huffman: What do you say to somebody who says, Look, I wasn't around in the late 1800s. I wasn't around in Jim Crow. I was born 40, 45 years ago, and doing the best I can to be a good person, to love all my neighbors, regardless of their skin color, but I didn't have anything to do with what happened before, and I shouldn't be held responsible for it.
Justin Giboney: If somebody says, "I wasn't there," I would say, well, number one, anytime you're the citizen of a country and you benefit from some of the things that a country brings, you also take on its debts, right? So if something has happened or there's a people that's been treated a certain way within society and you're part of that society, you take on some of those debts. That's part of citizenship. It's not just what you get. There's also some things that come along with it.
Number two, if you are a Christian, regardless of if you were responsible for it or not, love your neighbor doesn't mean love them only if you were the one that hurt them and not... No. If you love your neighbor and you see there are disparities and you see there are people hurting, I don't know why Christians fight so hard to say, well, I shouldn't have to do anything because I wasn't there. But you're a Christian.
And even the debts of the society aside, that shouldn't irk you so to think that, you know what, I may not be responsible for that, but I want to fix it and I want to make things right, especially if some of those issues are still kind of haunting society.
Eric Huffman: What do you think it is about human beings, not just Christians, but human beings that triggers that kind of response in us whenever we do receive critique from people who aren't like us, let's say, we just immediately perceive it as a threat and push back against it without sitting with it and absorbing it. Why do we do that?
Justin Giboney: I think, and this is a deep, deep concept, but I think the ancients called it pride. We don't like to be called out. We don't like to be told anything other than the narrative that we want to hear. And that's everybody. I don't think that's one group more than any other. We all have pride, but we all have to be aware of that pride.
Eric Huffman: In a prior conversation I had with Neil Shenvi, who is an anti-CRT advocate, he says we should stop looking at racism as a systemic issue. What do you think is the problem with seeing racism now as just an individual problem, person-to-person problem, and not a systemic one at all?
Justin Giboney: It ignores the historical context. So you're telling me that for hundreds of years people can be discriminated against and then 60 years after that it has no impact? When we talk about the spirit of America, we talk about a spirit that comes from the Revolutionary War and all that, and that it carries over. But somehow, none of the racism carries over. Only the good things carry over.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Justin Giboney: None of the bad things ever carry over, even though we can see that in disparities. So what I'm telling you is when you compare African Americans to people who came here on their own accord, you're missing something. Because I can't tell you how many times when Black people did make progress it was deliberately shut down.
Eric Huffman: Sure. I believe that.
Justin Giboney: What do you think it does to a people to be enslaved and go to Jim Crow and then create something like Black Wall Street and have it burnt down? What does that do? What impact do you think that has?
If Neil wants to tell me that that has no impact, it means nothing because it's not in the law, then I would say that's intellectually dishonest or allow me to educate you on why that's inaccurate.
Now, do some people take it too far? Sure. But to say it disappeared when nothing else disappears that's not counter to our narrative is I think wrong.
Eric Huffman: To Neil's credit, I think he would acknowledge that past. It's very painful and something the African American community in America is still recovering from for sure. But he would say the word systemic racism is dishonest if the systems being called racist are technically no longer racist as they stand in the books today.
Justin Giboney: Again, I just, I don't think that's how humanity works. I think it's convenient if I want to be colorblind and forget about it, it sounds good. But I also think we can look at some of the disparities and say that's actually not how it works. And we shouldn't be so naive to think that it all just blows away.
Eric Huffman: Will we ever outlive the sins of our past and how long must those sins be atoned for and to what extent? And what's the price to be paid now by white people or by conservatives or by America?
Ed Uszynski: Okay, how about this?
Eric Huffman: I know this is somewhat comedic. Two White guys solving all the...
Ed Uszynski: Well, I know. No, here you go. I don't know. I don't know, right? That's like hours and those are dissertations and classes. Here's what I can say. This is what I've said to myself about those. Those are great questions. They are. I know what I can say inside the church it should look like and can look like.
When we're not just integrated, but we are appreciative of difference, we don't just get together and focus on what we can agree about, but we actually learn to appreciate the way God has made us different.
Because even in the church, it's not just about being the united colors of Benetton and making sure we got black folks up on stage singing the music or whatever, right?
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: It's actually that I have an appreciation for cultural difference and I'm learning to embrace people's differences. Now, the next question that comes out of that is what happens when you're in a monocultural setting and you're in a congregation that is all White or all Black?
Because I would say this to black folks too. It's not just on White people. But we're two White guys talking about White people. I would want Black folks and people from all different ethnicities to be doing this same kind of work.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Ed Uszynski: Where they are having an appreciation for the different cultures that are represented, White folks that are in their church. I know what that looks like when people are sacrificing for each other and loving each other and they're suffering with each other. They're seeing the same things that are going on in culture and they're bothered by more than just what's happening in their community. They know how to suffer when they see a Black death at the hands of a police officer, regardless of how that came about. Again, right away, everybody's mind just starts racing to defending one side or the other.
It's like, dude, Do you just know how to grieve with somebody? Do you know how to see how this moment right here is attached to a longer history for this person and for this family? It is attached to a longer cultural history that you're not guilty for and maybe no one in your family is guilty for, but they're still having and living an experience that's attached to something that you've been able to ignore and not pay attention to.
Eric Huffman: I think the question is, how do we do that without leaving the door cracked open for being co-opted by defund the police movements or other kinds of political movements that are, in my view, ridiculous? How do we open our hearts without losing ourselves?
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, you lead. You don't let it happen. Man, again, I have these kinds of conversations a lot in my circles, and I get it. Well, if we do this, then it'll open the door. Well, I can say, tell me about defund the police. Even there, explain what you mean by that to me. I've been in plenty of these conversations, and people mean a lot of different things by that.
So if you're asking for the police to be penalized in some way until they get X, Y, and Z part of their act together, I think that's actually an interesting conversation. I have these conversations with police friends all the time, okay?
If we're trying to get them to do something different in their training, how are you going to get their attention? That is a question that we have to ask as a society, not just for Black folks. But something seems to be a little wonky in the militarized way that police are trained to operate in our midst.
Eric Huffman: Sure. Everybody suffers under that.
Ed Uszynski: Yes. This is not just a Black thing. So, okay, the question is, how do we get their attention? When they're entrenched and they've got power and they are immune from being challenged in these ways, how do you get their attention? That's always actually the question that ends up coming down when you're trying to bring about a change in society and people either aren't listening or they've created a wall around themselves that's impenetrable. You start setting things on fire. You start blowing things up, right? You start maybe going to an opposite extreme to try to get their attention.
And I'm not saying that that's right. Again, we're not talking kingdom of God now. We're just talking about living life under the sun, apart from God, largely.
So I don't know how all that's supposed to play itself out, but I don't have to be worried about the door getting cracked open. I can say no to things.
Eric Huffman: I appreciate your perspective always calling us out of that binary sort of us versus them, right versus left, just talking in kingdom of God terms. Because when you said the phrase "under the sun", it reminded me of my favorite section of your book, which was when you talked about Ecclesiastes as an exercise in critical thought, which was such a great reminder because some of my favorite preachers often say things like God creates and Satan imitates.
And the idea of critical thought being a secular invention is a falsehood from the Christian perspective, just like the idea of justice being a secular concept before it was a theological one or other kinds of things we're talking about here. Talk about Ecclesiastes as an exercise in biblical critical theory.
Ed Uszynski: Well, the reason why I brought the writer Ecclesiastes up in the book is because he is looking across 12 chapters, really across 11, because I think it changes in the last chapter.
He's looking at life under the sun apart from God. He's trying to make sense of what happens between humans and how do you live a good life and how do you make sense of oppression. Oppression gets talked about quite a bit in the book of Ecclesiastes.
And the fact that there are people that have power that will sit at the top of the pile and there are people that don't that will be trampled by them. And this is vanity, right? He's reflecting on it. He's probably the king. He's reflecting on how this is the way life works with no God.
Somebody said once that Ecclesiastes actually doesn't mention God until the conclusion to fear God is mentioned in the conclusion, probably by an editor. Ecclesiastes asks the questions that the rest of the Bible answers.
That is, how do you make sense of life under the sun apart from God? Well, you need God. You have to find God first. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to make sense of it.
There's going to be injustices. There's going to be brokenness. There's going to be a mess. That's what everything from Genesis 3 on in the Bible taught us is that things get ugly and evil things happen between people. So you better start.
The beginning of wisdom is to find God. Submit yourself to Jesus Christ. Deal with your own sin problem. Right? Some of these just fundamentals of the Christian message. And then live a different kind of life. It's not about them trying to keep a certain list of do's and don'ts or trying to avoid being a certain kind of person. It's about living in the fullness of the already-but-not-yet kingdom being here.
What does that look like on my watch, in my home, with my friends, the people that I can influence? That's what I'm asking myself. I don't know how to solve all the political things that are going on in this world that Satan, the spirit of Satan, is still in control of. I don't know that that's supposed to be my task, is to try to fix all that. In fact, I'm quite certain it's not.
But on my watch, you should be able to smell the kingdom by the way I interact with people. You should be able to smell the kingdom by the way that I'm able to sit in between binary options and transcend them to say, there's a different way of looking at this.
For those who have ears to hear, this would be a different way of looking at this and resist my own impulse to be pulled to one side or the other of that political binary, which is something I think we're all susceptible to. We're going to be forced in November to choose between two sides when we go to the ballot box. That's all we're given are two options or you could throw in some made-up third.
So it kind of sets our mind to think we always end up having to be on one side or another in life. And I've been rejecting that in my soul. I understand, yes, I'm going to have to show up and do something. But ultimately, the way I live my life should look different than what either of these sides are offering me.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. One thing you beautifully articulate in the book is that when we're raising new generations of Christians to think of their life and their faith individually or just vertically and less so horizontally with their relationships, we're not giving them good theological, biblical language and tools to deal with the problems they're going to face in the world, the real-life inequalities and things that go on in the world.
And so then we're just basically handing them over to secular language and ideologies, which is why the sort of neo-Marxist critical theories are gaining so much ground with younger generations.
Ed Uszynski: At the very least, the language is attractive. Because again, I don't think young people are wanting to leave the Christian faith if the Christian faith means an allegiance to Jesus. Their problem is not theological as much as it's anthropological. Their problem is the way the people that they're getting to watch are living out their faith or failing to live out a holistic biblical ethic.
Maybe we don't have... See, this is another thing that I think is hard to admit, because I even keep saying it to myself even after doing theological degrees. Maybe I don't have enough Bible inside me right now to be able to think rightly in the midst of this chaotic time that we live in.
Maybe there was passages even that I knew or visited when I was in my early 20s, and I'm 56 now, and I realize, man, I haven't spent a ton of time in Isaiah. When was the last time I just did a deep dive in trying to understand the spirit of the minor prophets?
Again, so we assume we've got enough Bible to be able to survive. Maybe we don't. Maybe that's where we need to start. It's not about trying to solve the problems of society and CRT and all this stuff. Maybe I just need to revisit the Bible in a deep dive kind of way and understand what really is this message from Genesis to Revelation again. What is God doing in human history right now? What does the coming kingdom look like?
Just revisit some of that because it almost acts like a spiritual chiropractic visit. You get adjusted, and it doesn't fix you for good, but at least for the rest of the day, you're in a different place in the way you view things. I know I need more of that, and I'm guessing it's true for a lot of people.
Eric Huffman: Yeah, and a lot of people are Bible readers, but we tend to gravitate to the same parts of the Bible over and over again, the parts we're more familiar with or the parts we're more comfortable with.
Ed Uszynski: It's just what we do.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. And I think if we were to force ourselves to access parts of the Bible that are less familiar or less comfortable or more arresting, we would find ourselves honestly grappling with some of the same issues, problems, and questions that gave rise to critical race theory.
Ed Uszynski: That's what's interesting, Eric. That's what got my attention is that these pagans who have no interest in the things of God were actually exposing my own heart to areas that I've either intentionally neglected or avoided, or I just... again, in my training and the people that I hang out with, for whatever reason, we've somehow excused ourselves from having to pay attention to the importance of watching out, especially watching out for people that are marginalized. Again, that's not a blanket condemnation. If the shoes fit, put them on, right?
That's the other thing. I have conversations with people in Los Angeles, for example, who are having a really different experience with race than people who are in Ohio, from people who are in North Carolina. It's different depending on the parts of the country you live in. You're in Texas, which is really different than New York City.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. We don't have racism here.
Ed Uszynski: Even the politics, though, is different as far as what gets talked about, what's being forced into the schools, and who's got the power to try to do certain things. It looks different in different parts of the country. So I recognize that.
I want to be a Christian in whatever part of the country I wind up in, and I need to keep separating myself from partisan allegiance and partisan discipleship, of which there is much that goes on, and make sure that I have a holistic kingdom view that influences and informs the way I'm interacting with people and the social issues that are getting brought to my attention.
Eric Huffman: Amen. For all the negativity and pessimism, I see reason to hope and be optimistic, too, in the church. I think some of the fastest-growing or largest or more impactful churches that I've been to recently shocked me by how ethnically diverse and even age-wise diverse they were, and generationally, I guess, diverse.
I think Gen Z is going to be great for... I'm bullish on Gen Z, let's say, and I think they're going to be great for the church, actually, and for the world.
Ed Uszynski: Why is that, Eric?
Eric Huffman: Well, I'm raising two Gen Zers right now, and it's a little anecdotal in that sense, but I'm also starting to write a book about Gen Z and God and a lot of the research I'm seeing just shows not only superficially they're the most ethnically diverse generation that we've seen, but they are also the first generation to grow up entirely online for better or for worse. There's a lot of bad that goes along with that, but they're also being exposed to lots of different ideas and worldviews early on in life, and so they're being forced to ask some of the more philosophical questions before most of us had to ask them.
And so they're, in a sense, maturing faster than we did, and... I don't know. Maybe I'm an optimist, blind optimist, but I just see reasons to believe that Gen Z might be really good for the church in particular in a lot of ways.
Ed Uszynski: I like that. And you know, it reminds me, Eric, we can choose to be as pessimistic as we want to be, and we can choose to be as optimistic as we want to be, and we'll find what we want to find. I've really seen that to be true.
There's plenty of stories of churches that still have their heels dug in on all these different issues and are still very blind in the way they operate. I've got plenty of examples of churches like you said that are... I don't want to use the word progressive because that's so loaded, but they've certainly progressed past their history of ignorance when it comes to race and all other social issues, and they're making a difference in their corner of the world in the way kingdom people should. And it's very exciting to be around those people.
Eric Huffman: It is. You know, I don't say I'm optimistic in the sense that there's still not a ton of work to be done. And I kind of want to end our talk there and just, what do you think it would look like for American churches today to more effectively address some of the root causes that gave rise to CRT and its prominence in our culture, or racism, let's say, writ large? What can churches or should churches be doing more of?
Ed Uszynski: I talk about that in the last chapter, which I wish I could just make available to everybody, because I say, I'm not bringing this list of wisdom for how to heal it any different than what's already being done in the best places, which is that it starts with a humility, it starts with a willingness to say, Okay, again, we're not going to try to figure out how racist we are. We're going to try to figure out what the implications have been of living in a racialized culture.
Are there patterns and policies and things that are a part of how we operate? And I guess this is mostly even for a church leadership team to do this. Is there anything in the way we operate that's in the way of all people not only feeling welcomed, but included? That was the word I was looking for earlier. Not just integrated, but included, okay? That's a big question that I think is worth asking.
And then when we've kind of made a decision that we want to grow when it comes to cross-cultural competency, what are the ways that we do that? We seek out relationship. You seek out relationships intentionally with other churches that are different than you.
You read. You do book studies together on a book that may be like The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby, which, again, I don't understand why he's caught so much heat. He just does an amazing historical overview of sort of the way race has been handled within the evangelical world across centuries.
So you read books. You watch documentaries together, and you discuss them.
Eric Huffman: I would add just you listen to your brothers and sisters. To me, it goes back to that. And I think it's as simple and fundamental as that. We can call it whatever brand we want to call it, critical, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
It's like if you have a brother or sister who's hurting, and they tell you they're hurting, and they tell you the people they love and care about are related to are hurting. I mean, you listen if you love them.
I think it's as simple as that. You listen, and you take it seriously, and you don't get defensive or combative. Even if it does feel like a threat, you just sort of do what Jesus did for us, all of us on the cross, and you just take it. You internalize it. You don't fight back.
That's what love looks like. I think at the end of the day, it's as simple as that for Christians. And unfortunately, we're allowing ourselves to be tyrannized by the hysteria of both sides, really, depending on where you come from. And we're not getting anywhere.
Ed Uszynski: I wish we were equipped... I mean, here's a real practical way to be a good listener that I keep saying to myself. Tell me more about that. That's the first question I should be asking. And then when they tell me more. Tell me more about that. Like, dig in. That's what empathetic listening looks like, right?
Eric Huffman: Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: What do we mean by listening? Some people listen, and they've got Thomas Sowell articles lined up. They've got a Fox News video they want to send. A Candace Owens video or something. It's like, okay, there's time for that.
Eric Huffman: Sure.
Ed Uszynski: But we need to do the work of understanding. So listen for the purpose of understanding, which means lots of "tell me more about that". When did you first feel that way? And do you always feel that way? Or is that just an isolated moment here? Or has that been part of your history?
When you just give a few more questions like that, it's amazing what will happen, and the bridges that get built, and the love that gets experienced instead of getting defensive right away.
Eric Huffman: Amen.
Ed Uszynski: That's true in our marriages too, isn't it? We can apply that in lots of different directions. We need to get better at it.
Eric Huffman: Yeah. Well, you talk about... this is the last time I'll quote your book. I frankly just love your book, and I think it's a needed voice in the whole conversation. The book is called Untangling Critical Race Theory: What Christians Need to Know and Why It Matters. Foreword by Crawford Lawrence, by the way. That's when you got my attention because I love that man.
But you're right. Our response to these disagreements can't be more hysteria. We need tools to promote the kind of civil discord that says, I think I disagree, but help me see and understand your position.
That's what you're saying. Just tell me more, and let's keep the conversation going. And the minute we stop talking to each other, things fall apart.
So any final thoughts, Ed?
Ed Uszynski: No, man. I think I already said them. That's just an appreciation for you and what you're doing on this podcast. If you're treating me like this, I'm sure you're treating others like this. And these are the kind of interactions we need to have in the church.
Eric Huffman: Well, thank you, brother.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, we need to get better at it. So thanks for modeling it.
[01:10:15] <music>
Eric Huffman: I'm grateful to both Ed and Neil for their willingness to enter this war zone known as the Critical Race Theory conversation. Both men made some great points that I agree with.
Neal, for example, rightly criticizes the noise and nonsense that often accompanies arguments in favor of CRT. I also agree with him when he says that we'll never right the wrongs of racism by teaching people to see all of our society's inequities through the lens of race alone.
On the other hand, I found agreement with Ed when he insisted that we can't heal the wounds of the past by acting like it never happened or like racism no longer exists today. We Christians can and should do a better job of listening to the heartbeat underneath the noise of this conversation.
Now, to be blunt, I want to call on Christians, myself included, to grow, to grow in spiritual maturity, to grow some thicker skin. There was a time not long ago when Christians used to criticize secular leftists for being snowflakes, for being too easily triggered, too soft and sensitive, too fragile, we said.
But in recent years, I've seen that fragility make its way into the Christian subconscious. Many Christians these days are so fragile that they'll call you woke for even suggesting that racism is still a problem that we should talk about. And that's just sad, especially because we follow a Savior who is never flustered or easily triggered and never too fragile to handle the worst of us.
Jesus is strong enough to put up with us, so I believe Christians should strive to be strong enough to put up with each other and with the world, even when we disagree with what others are saying. Christians always need to remember that this world can never do anything to diminish our faith, but our fear and our pride certainly can if we let them.
So whether the topic at hand is CRT or BLM or DEI or ESG or LGBTQ or any other acronym that has people up in arms, all we need to do is stand firm, trust God, and try to love people the way that He first loved us.
This episode of Maybe God was produced by Julie Mirlicourtois, Adira Polite, and Eric and Geovanna Huffman. Our editors are Shannon Stefan and Justin Mayer, and Donald Kilgore is the director of Maybe God's full-length YouTube videos.
Please help more listeners find Maybe God by rating and reviewing us wherever you're listening today. And thanks as always for tuning in.