In a recent video podcast, mathematician and apologist for atheism James Lindsay called on the Southern Baptist Convention to remove leaders who have not done everything they could to completely repudiate and denounce Critical Race Theory (CRT) within the denomination. Far from seeing this as an act of division, Lindsay characterizes it as an act of salvation, both for the SBC and the Christian religion itself.
Centering his discussion on the SBC’s Resolution 9, Lindsay, who has written at length about what he perceives to be the intellectual and emotional inferiority required to believe in God, gave his account of how CRT has infiltrated the SBC in order to distort its beliefs and what to do about it.
Resolution 9 was adopted in 2019 and says in part that “Critical race theory and intersectionality alone are insufficient to diagnose and redress the root causes of the social ills that they identify, which result from sin, yet these analytical tools can aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences.”
The resolution became a subject of controversy, and at the next denominational meeting in 2021, a new resolution titled “On The Sufficiency Of Scripture For Race And Racial Reconciliation” was adopted. In that resolution, the SBC reaffirmed “the sufficiency of Scripture on race and racial reconciliation.” Some were displeased with the resolution, as it did not explicitly retract Resolution 9 or condemn CRT by name.
In his podcast, Lindsay characterized the passing of Resolution 9 as having occurred under “shady circumstances,” arguing that like many other “woke initiatives,” it was put forth to a vote at the last moment and in a way that intentionally avoided debate.
“This is a tactic. You have to realize that the people who are orchestrating this then realize this is a tactic and are doing it on purpose,” Lindsay said. He went on to argue that the passage of Resolution 9 is significant even for those who are not in any way connected with the SBC, because “we really don’t want to see our large religious institutions taken over by a totalitarian ideology that’s trying to infect and command everything. We want to have something that can stand up against it.”
Lindsay then turned his attention toward the phrase “subordinate to Scripture,” namely the idea that CRT and intersectionality, while useful analytical tools, do not supersede the authority of Scripture.
“This is a trick. This is a Trojan horse,” Lindsay said, referencing a series of videos he filmed in conjunction with Sovereign Nations, a conservative political commentary site. “The Trojan horse is ‘subordinate to Scripture.’ Why? Because, of course, a Christian is going to look at that and say, ‘Well, everything is subordinate to Scripture. That’s key to being a Christian…If it’s going to stay subordinate to Scripture, then it’s probably not that dangerous. It’s probably not that bad. It’s just an analytical tool.’”
“And, of course, it’s not an analytical tool. It is a totalitarian theory,” Lindsay continued. “And that’s why the ‘subordinate to Scripture’ part is a lie. And I would say the people who wrote it probably knew that.”
Lindsay went on to say that the central tenet of Critical Race Theory is that “anything that dominates is evil and must be overthrown—in fact, must be replaced by itself, because it’s actually a theory of totalitarian domination,” making its subordination to Scripture a logical impossibility. Speaking about CRT in almost personified terms, Lindsay argued that it dominates by “calling everything racist.”
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