John Shelton: Ibram X. Kendi's Church Without Christ

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, October 3rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: the theological roots of so-called anti-racism.

Recently, Boston University’s Center for Anti Racist Research has come under fire for serious mismanagement. WORLD Opinions Commentator John Shelton says there’s a problem deeper than even that.

JOHN SCHWEIKER SHELTON, COMMENTATOR: Today’s most prominent advocate for critical race theory, Ibram X. Kendi, is under investigation for the potential mismanagement of tens of millions of dollars.

The legacy media is understandably focused on the recent layoffs, financial issues, and criticisms of “employment violence” being leveled at Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. But it’s worth taking a step back to see the social trends that formed Ibram Kendi into a social justice warrior in the first place.

John McWhorter explains in his book Woke Racism that critical race theory is a “religion in all but name.” That helps explain “why something so destructive and incoherent is so attractive to so many good people.” What McWhorter misses, however, is that this new religion emerged out of a progressive stream of Christianity.

Kendi more or less acknowledged this in his breakout book, How to Be an Antiracist. He wrote, “I cannot disconnect my parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from my secular strivings to be an antiracist.” Kendi’s parents met in the leadup to the 1970 Urbana conference hosted by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. They had decided to attend to hear Tom Skinner, whom Kendi describes as “growing famous as a young evangelist of Black liberation theology.”

At Urbana, Skinner taught students about the dark history of Christianity’s entanglement with slavery. As a result, Kendi says, his parents left the “racist church they realized they’d been part of.” The Marxist-influenced founder of black liberation theology, James Cone, even helped Kendi’s dad to redefine Christianity as “striving for liberation.” From there, it was only natural that his parents “stopped thinking about saving Black people and started thinking about liberating Black people,” as Kendi writes.

When Christianity is reduced to a social program, God is left to an afterthought. And when God is an afterthought, it’s no surprise that faith in God would be abandoned when belief in God becomes inconvenient. Even the Apostle Paul would agree: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” Better to look for absolution by making your donations out to Kendi’s antiracism center, because without Christ, the church has no power.

But if Christ is risen, it changes everything, including how we think about race. Kendi complains in Stamped from the Beginning that “a truly multicultural nation … would not have Christianity as its unofficial standard religion.” But the truth is, God is making us into a multicultural people in Christ. In Revelation chapter 7, we see “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb”.

In spite of all the racism that Kendi can chronicle, that great multitude will worship God together in eternity. The Lord, and not the ACLU, will bind us together in this way. This is the Christian hope, and it explains all the difference between orthodox Christianity and the antiracism religion that emerged out of it.

Ross Douthat once warned that “if you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” As it turns out, the post-religious left isn’t so rosy either.

I’m John Shelton.

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