Over the weekend, pastor and theologian Timothy Keller was publicly told to “repent.” The source of that instruction was James Lindsay, popular author and atheist who has written extensively about his distaste for both religion and Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Lindsay is a mathematician and author of six books, including titles such as “God Doesn’t; We Do: Only Humans Can Solve Human Challenges” and “Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly.”
In his 2015 work “Everybody Is Wrong About God,” Lindsay set out to prove that “whenever people say they believe in ‘God,’ they are really telling us that they have certain psychological and social needs that they do not know how to meet…Once nonbelievers understand this simple point, and drop the very label of atheist, will they be able to change the way we all think about, talk about, and act upon the troublesome notion called ‘God.’”
Nevertheless, Lindsay has recently become an unlikely ally to some conservative evangelicals for his denunciation of Critical Race Theory.
In 2020, Lindsay co-authored “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody,” going on in 2021 to coauthor “Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond.” His latest work, “Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong—and How to Know What’s Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories,” is set to come out later this month.
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Lindsay’s work, and “Cynical Theories” in particular, has caught the eye of many evangelical leaders who see CRT as a threat to biblical Christianity.
United by a common enemy, Lindsay was featured as a subject matter expert by Founders Ministries, a conservative group associated with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), in advance of the 2021 annual SBC meeting. CRT was one of the main points of debate at that meeting. In a promotional video, Lindsay sat alongside Founders Ministries president Tom Ascol and argued that the way to “end all Christianity” would be to “make them woke.” Ascol threw up his hand in agreement.
Lindsay has also received praise from Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In 2020, Mohler featured Lindsay on his “Thinking in Public” podcast, referring to Lindsay’s “Cynical Theories” as an important critique and “intellectual tour de force.”
RELATED: Ed Litton: Systemic Racism Is ‘Obvious,’ but SBC Has ‘Never Condoned’ CRT
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