Nicholas Martin Davis

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Understanding Critical Theory

Nicholas Davis

What’s your hot take on critical race theory (CRT)?

Everyone seems to have one in evangelical circles, just as everyone in America once had a gluten allergy.

I’d love to go around Christian colleges, seminaries, and churches asking the question, “What is CRT?" My guess is that many of the responses would sound similar to Kimmel’s. People don’t like it, but they can’t even explain it. And they hate it or fear it.

As bestselling author of The Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisbey, has noted, “Slap anyone with the label ‘Critical Race Theory,’ and they automatically become enemies of the church.”

I wonder if the resistance to CRT in evangelical circles has more to do with the outright rejection of critical race theory in American politics last Fall than it does through the eyes of serious biblical and theological reflection. For example, President Trump denounced critical race theory in October of 2020, and to no surprise, six Southern Baptist presidents across the country (conservative evangelicals) labeled it as incompatible with the Baptist faith in November. The nation’s political divide is beginning to creep into churches, as it often does.

But what exactly is “critical theory”? What are its implications? Is it dangerous? Should we accept it outright? Should we despise anyone who seems to smell of CRT?

To be honest, I have only scratched the surface in my own understanding of critical race theory. That’s not to say I know nothing of it. I studied philosophy and was exposed to Critical Theory itself through primary readings from the Frankfurt School (a Western European Marxist tradition that includes Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas). Critical race theory is an approach or method that developed later by lawyers looking at the intersection of race and law and wasn’t officially coined until the late 1980s. Now it is pretty much everywhere, not only in our universities but pop culture and news media.

This year at our church we’ve started having theology nights where we gather together each month to talk about, well you guessed it—theology! Last month, we gathered to talk about “Law and Gospel” in the Reformed tradition. This month, a member of our church asked if we could talk about critical race theory since it keeps popping up in the media and church controversies. So we’re going to be getting together to have some dialogue about CRT at the end of February.

Here are some free online articles and blog posts that I’ve found to be helpful in my own reading of CRT. If you’re planning to attend the theology night later this month, please read at least a few of these so that you have some reference points for our discussion together. If you come across this online and you’re not coming to the theology night, I hope these resources are helpful to you in your own critical reading of critical theory. No matter what we are reading, we should always read critically, carefully, and thoughtfully—testing what we are reading against the teaching of the Scriptures like the Bereans in the Bible did.

Critical Theory Readings