Extrabiblical activism

Drew Hart thinks Christianity is broken. He wants to fix it. His cure, he claims, is a fusion: Anabaptist pacifism blended with Black liberation theology. He calls it “Anablacktivism.” The label is catchy. The content is troubling.

Making It Plain (Herald Press, 240 pp.) reads like a manifesto. Hart writes with passion and urgency, but also with a narrowness that distorts the faith he seeks to renew. From the first page, he frames “mainstream Christianity” as nothing more than MAGA sloganeering—anti-BLM, anti-LGBTQ, pro-birth but anti-family. This caricature sets the stage. Faithfulness, for Hart, is measured by progressive policy commitments. Disagree, and you’ve failed Christ.

Here lies the central flaw. The gospel becomes activism. Salvation becomes a social program. The Christian life is judged by one’s alignment with movements of the moment.

Hart dismisses what he calls “liberation-of-the-soul Christianity.” Accepting Christ, he says, isn’t enough. Faith must manifest in structural change. Of course, the Christian life involves more than private piety. But Hart sets up a false choice: either personal salvation or social transformation. History shows otherwise. John Wesley preached conversion and fought slavery. William Wilberforce opposed the slave trade precisely because of his reborn conscience. Hart reduces the tension to a binary and, in doing so, separates the gospel from its foundation: reconciliation to God through Christ.

The selectivity runs deeper. Hart recounts Christianity’s sins—the Crusades, colonialism, slavery. They’re real, they’re grievous. But he stops there. He fails to mention the missionaries who built schools and hospitals. He ignores the abolitionists who battled injustice because of Christ and the civil rights leaders who prayed before they marched. By highlighting only the failures, he paints the Church as an engine of oppression. What’s presented as history is actually half-history.

Race is treated the same way. Hart leans on scholars like Anthea Butler, and that is concerning. Butler’s work recasts racism not as a sin to be repented of but as the defining feature of American evangelicalism. Her analysis is relentlessly selective, essentially magnifying every failure while dismissing reform and genuine renewal. As scholarship, it’s less argument, more accusation. Hart adopts Butler’s framework wholesale, replacing redemption with resentment. He offers perpetual grievance, not the possibility of unity in Christ.

The Bible fares no better. Hart cites Luke 4 and Matthew 25 as his proof texts. But his readings are thin. Luke 4, Christ’s declaration in Nazareth, is reduced to a political program for liberation. Yet Jesus doesn’t call for a new social order; He claims to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy as Messiah. The crowd wants politics. He refuses, walking away. In Matthew 25, Hart insists final judgment rests on social justice metrics. But the passage describes how nations treat Christ’s messengers—whether they receive or reject the gospel—not a checklist of activism.

This hermeneutic isn’t careful exegesis but ideological overlay. Scripture becomes campaign literature, bent to support an agenda. The kingdom is subtly redefined: no longer Christ ruling over redeemed hearts, but a problematic order fashioned by human effort.

Hart’s “Anablacktivism” is presented as the corrective Christianity desperately needs. Neither tradition is perfect, he admits, but together they can “fix” the failures of historic orthodoxy. The implication is plain: The gospel by itself is insufficient. Faith must be remade in the image of cultural identities.

The tone is equally alarming. Hart writes with a moral certainty that leaves little space for dialogue. Readers aren’t invited to test claims against Scripture; they’re told dissent equals complicity in oppression. This posture alienates believers who share concerns for justice but resist ideological straitjackets.

The book will thrill readers already convinced of progressive activism’s primacy. However, those seeking a gospel-shaped vision of justice will find polemic rather than perspicacity. When unity in Christ is replaced with identity blocs, the Church trades its eternal birthright for fleeting relevance.

The Church’s mission will always outlast political fashions. Christ’s kingdom doesn’t rise or fall on the soundbites of the age. Justice matters. Righteousness matters. But they flow from the cross, not the other way around. Hart gets this backward. And that makes all the difference.