or many years, apart from sporadic eruptions in American society, the issue of race has played Banquo’s ghost at the American evangelical banquet: an unsettling, unwelcome, somewhat passive guest. But recent trends in American public opinion, fueled by reports of police violence, have made race an inescapable topic, fierce and divisive. Critical race theory (CRT), promoted by progressive activists and adopted by many evangelical intellectuals, has become the shibboleth: Are you for it? Or are you against it? A movement already strained to the breaking point by the Trump presidency now faces the very real possibility of coming apart over race.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the Southern Baptist Convention. At its annual meeting in 2019, the SBC passed a motion “On Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality.” The goal was to hold the two sides together. The motion subordinated CRT to the Bible but allowed that it offers helpful tools.
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