It’s no huge secret that debates about race are causing many big stories on the religion beat these days.
Witness how, the Rev. Russell Moore, the just-resigned head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention, named “blatant gutter-level racism” as one of his top reasons for leaving the ERLC and, eventually, the denomination itself.
The Southern Baptists aren’t alone. What’s been less reported on are the arguments among other evangelicals on whether concerns about race issues are taking over whole organizations and diluting their work.
Christianity Today just broke the most intriguing story about the knife fight going on in Cru –- the college ministry formerly known as Campus Crusade –- about the backlash against the organization’s attempts to address racism. At issue is a series of national conferences that have left its white staff feeling like they’ve been hit by a truck.
The Cru conflict is a microcosm of the stand-off between younger, more culturally liberal staff and older conservative ones. A major sticking point is critical race theory (CRT), which posits that America’s legal structure aids and abets racist practices. While many debate the meaning of this term, CRT seeks to rebalance the power structure by forcing the majority culture to experience reverse bias, reverse ethnic shaming, reverse stereotyping and so on.
Ever since the killing of George Floyd last year, some say that CRT has morphed into a way to pin all racial evils on White people or “White fragility.” (Some Whites from impoverished backgrounds have published essays saying that it was news to them that their poor childhoods were evidence of “white privilege.”) Some of this sentiment has attracted the attention of conservative media such as Fox News, according to this Atlantic magazine article.
The CT article continues:
The debate over critical race theory has landed at Cru, one of the country’s most prominent parachurch ministries, where a 179-page letter alleging an overemphasis on racial justice has exacerbated tensions that have been quietly brewing within the organization for years.
Titled “Seeking Clarity and Unity,” the document was submitted to Cru president Steve Sellers in November 2020 and spread inside the organization before appearing online in May. Its authors, a grassroots group of Cru staff members, raise concerns that a “victim-oppressor worldview” has become embedded throughout the organization, dividing staff and detracting from the true gospel.
“In pursuing [diversity], we have inadvertently adopted a system of unbiblical ideas that have led us to disunity,” the document reads. “These concepts have created distrust, discouragement, and a host of other problems.”
Well, I skimmed that 179-page document and learned that the CT piece doesn’t tell half of it. At a basic level, many staff and students (and certainly donors) are not buying into the CRT or Black Lives Matter message and they’re leaving. They feel that being members of the majority culture doesn’t make them racist in the same sense that being male doesn’t automatically mean that a man is sexist.
The document said Cru is creating social justice warriors, not Christian evangelists and coming up with theological oddities, such as arguments that what Genesis 2 really said is that the first human was not male but non-binary.
The wokeness of Cru began at a 2015 national staff meeting, the document said, then intensified from there. An excerpt:
The meeting really did nothing to help staff understand the answer to the question: ‘Why am I automatically considered racist because I’m in the majority culture?’ After the session was finished, I stopped to talk to my former Campus Area leader who was a part of the Cru 15 conference team. I was feeling confused, shaken, and concerned. ... Now my Christian employer was embracing it and telling me I was racist.
He responded by basically saying, ‘Well, you better get used to it because this is the direction we’re going now. If you can’t go along with it, you will feel so uncomfortable you will want to leave staff. This is not going away.’ I felt put on notice: ‘Comply, don’t ask questions ... this is the new teaching and direction of Cru. If you don’t like it, then leave.’”
What goes unanswered in the article is this: Who started this wokeness movement at Cru? There had to be a group that sent Cru in this direction, but we’re not told where the impetus came from. A number of Cru staffers didn’t believe there needed to be corporate repentance, so the fight was on. More from the article:
Staff members told CT that posts on Cru’s Facebook Workplace highlight the organization’s sharp divisions. Following the killing of George Floyd, Cru president Steve Sellers openly wrestled on the forum about how to respond to the tragedy. “If I call this out specifically, why not every example of racism,” he wrote. “Why not publicly and vocally stand for the sin of abortion, the horrors of women being trafficked or for the assault on the biblical view of human sexuality?”
Some commented that the post felt tone deaf, eliciting the sentiment that “all sins matter.”
As those tensions have grown more evident, disagreements over Cru’s handling of justice and diversity issues have caused both seasoned and recently recruited leaders to resign from staff.
Following this, the article cited a Black staffer and an Asian-American one who left and also mentioned a White staffer who resigned because he felt the organization was getting too woke.
There are several questions here worthy of news coverage. It’s hard, for example, to know which balance to strike. Should Christian groups interact with organizations such as Black Lives Matter even though their aims are quite divergent? InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, another campus organization, allowed a BLM speaker to speak at its 2015 triennial missions conference. Would a BLM conference have invited an InterVarsity speaker to its podium?
College ministries such as Cru and IVCF see themselves on the cutting edge of evangelism and know they have to deal with race (and other) issues that individual churches can afford to ignore. Splits among them are partly generational; the younger evangelicals are lining up behind groups like BLM whereas the older ones aren’t. Where do these debates get real? That would be donors, who tend to be older and who, according to the document, are quickly dumping Cru from their portfolios.
What’s not being said in this debate is how some of the older ones aren’t swallowing the CRT line because they grew up in the 1970s, when race roles were reversed. Anyone who grew up on the East Coast during those years remembers those tensions or how, once they hit the job market, they were told their qualifications didn’t matter, as racial quotas had to be met and the employer was looking for a person of color. Baby Boomers –- at least White ones -– have plenty of these narratives that aren’t being listened to in the current cultural climate.
Some of these Americans are voting with their feet, and so are the donors. According to the document:
(Donors say) we don’t really feel like we can continue to support this ministry. Shame on Cru. You guys are teaching the gospel of grievances and not the gospel of grace. We are heartbroken. How can this organization that was supposed to be light for God is now going dark, and the leaders don’t recognize it?”
From a minority staffer — People need to wake up to what’s really going on. There are now two religions inside the Christian church, and now inside Cru. One religion is the Christianity of old, but the second religion is a brand new religion of systemic racism, white privilege, and systems of power. Both religions are being taught side-by-side at the same time. The new faith labels all of Christian theology a racist oppressive ideology of whiteness. It shocks me to see the mental gymnastics our leaders have jumped through to claim there’s nothing anti-Christian in these new beliefs.
“Two religions?” A “gospel of grievances?”
Is this wide divide just at Cru or is the same conflict happening in other evangelical groups that involve young people such as Youth With A Mission or InterVarsity Christian Fellowship? What the Southern Baptists are fighting over is very different, but there must be similar versions of the Cru experience happening in smaller evangelical groups. According to the document, many staff are totally disaffected with the organization and tired of being labeled evil because of the color of their skin or told how an offhand remark triggers a listener.
This is a generational gap, as well as a cultural and theological one. I’m glad CT tackled it and I’m hoping the secular media will climb onboard this fascinating ride as well.
After all, Cru has served as a pipeline into leadership at other evangelical organizations. If this main feeder group becomes woke, and then divided, expert that conflict to move up the chain to other agencies where similar fights will break out.
IMAGES: All photos are from Cru’s website or Facebook page