To a racist, everything is about race. This phrase is key to understanding what’s at the very dark heart of critical race theory. And in his powerful new book, Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe, Voddie T. Baucham, Jr. does a deep dive into this and other damning ideas competing to pull down America. Foremost among these ideas is “critical theory.” Baucham examines how it originated and gained traction overseas and was used to subjugate millions of citizens of foreign countries—and how it now is successfully being fine-tuned to target this county’s skin-color soft spot.
Although Baucham’s title contains the word “evangelicalism,” his book’s audience should not be limited to Christians. The social justice movement, along with its deplorable CRT playmate, have vice-gripped society, so the facts presented in Fault Lines cut across both the secular and the sacred. Baucham—an ordained minister and Dean of Theology at African University in Zambia where he lives with his wife and most of his nine children—sounds his wakeup call to an increasingly “woke” church, however, knowing full well that a wayward faith is leading to an unstable nation. And unless the church itself comes to its senses, the current race-crazed culture will completely tear apart our once united United States.
How did all this divisive focus on skin color, so antithetical to the teaching of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., gain a foothold? Baucham provides a clue.
During the 2008 presidential election, Baucham was one of the few black voices warning against what he called “Obama’s penchant for Marxism.” The ideas being peddled by then-candidate Barack Obama came straight from the Marxist playbook, including “redistribution of wealth,” which would lead to the “fundamental transformation of America.” Unsuspecting citizens imagined good things with that phrase, even while Baucham continued sounding the alarm.
In Fault Lines, Baucham refers to several popular books whose authors claim expertise in what can only be described as a vacuous vision. Take for instance the book White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh. Baucham points out that there is absolutely no research to back up McIntosh’s “privileged” assertions, only her own feelings. After a rather lengthy quote from White Privilege, Baucham wonders how “phrases like ‘I decided to work on myself’ or ‘as far as I can tell’ [are] considered appropriate for academic research?”
Then there’s How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, the book that’s currently on the U.S. military’s summer reading list. Kendi espouses an antidote to “racism” that he calls “antiracism”—basically it’s the old racism morphing back into itself. Many of us who are older grew up in an America where racists hated blacks. Today, they’re told to focus on hating whites. This, presumably, will move the country in the right direction.
In the chapter called, “A New Religion,” Baucham zeros in on “the religious nature of antiracism.” “Just as Christians cannot and do not conceive of anything in their worldview apart from the reality that there is a God who created the world,” Baucham writes, “the cult of antiracism roots every aspect of its worldview in the assertion that everything begins with the creation of whiteness.”
So, where is the pushback against this obviously racist cult? Baucham puts the responsibility squarely in the laps of Christians, since he believes that they should be the most awake to this woke madness. Isn’t all this theory and talk about “justice” a clear challenge to the Highest Moral Authority?
But too many Christians, in Baucham’s opinion, adhere to that unwritten Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Be Nice. “And,” he adds, “They don’t believe in the other Ten.”
From start to finish, Fault Lines not only raises the alarm of a fast-approaching cultural catastrophe but makes a plea to the prodigal church to return to its biblical roots, pointing to true justice and mercy found in the God who sacrificed for a world created for love. The biggest question remains, though, right there along the ever-widening fault line: Will this return to a true God-centered justice happen in time to save America from a violent split?