NSR: What is Critical Race Theory & How Christians Should View It

Critical race theory (CRT) and intersectionality are complicated and can be intimidating to understand. More clarity is needed to understand the danger of CRT and the whole-scale acceptance of it, not just in the secular world but also in the church. 

For this episode, Brody sat down with Zach Carter and Zach Mabry to discuss these topics and bring awareness to the core issues. Christians must always evaluate these conversations through the lens of Scripture. 

Scripture has given us everything we need to interpret the world around us. We live in a world that is sinful and has been damaged by the fall. Because of our sinful nature, the world doesn’t view human beings the way the Bible views them. Believers, we can’t surrender the values of the Church and then pick up the world’s tools to do our work. This episode will be the first of a 3-part series to educate ourselves and other believers on the dangers of CRT and how we should confront it. 

Bible passages

• Genesis 3
• Philippians 2

Resources & further study

• Christ and Culture Revisited by D. A. Carson
• Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes A Feminist Theory Successful by Kathy Davis, Feminist Theory 9, no. 1 (2008)
• Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics by Kimberlé Crenshaw, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139, http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.
• The Complexity of Intersectionality by Leslie McCall, Signs 30, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 1771–1800. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426800.
• Intersectionality by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge
• Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
• Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives by Sandra Harding

Guest: Zach Carter

Zach Carter is one of the pastors at Rivertree Church in Huntsville, Alabama. He is husband to one, lovely wife and dad to two great kids. He is also pursuing his Ph.D. in American Church History at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary where he also manages The Commonweal Project. He has also served as adjunct professor, teaching worldview and church history at Boyce College.

P.S. If you liked this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please leave us a review on Apple or Spotify and help us get the content out to help others grow in their faith and mission to equip the Church.

Read Transcript

Speaker 1: Hey, I recently sat down with Zach Mabry who is the worship pastor and head of the Snowbird Leadership Institute. So he’s a worship pastor at Snowbird Outfitters. He’s also the Director over the Snowbird Outfitters Leadership Institute, which is a college-accredited program that… It’s part internship that focuses on leadership development and ministry development, training leaders, and there’s about 30 people in that program. It’s a year-long program at Snowbird, and it’s accredited, something that some of you might… Some of our listeners might be interested in. So it’s a college-accredited program, and that is accredited through Judson College at Southeastern in Wake Forest, North Carolina, but we meet… But it’s here at Snowbird. So Zack Mabry’s the program director for that, and then he’s also the worship pastor at Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters.

Speaker 1: And then we also sat down with… So we sat down with Zach Mabry, and we had a call in from Zach Carter. Zach Carter is a pastor in Alabama who previously served at a church in… Just outside of Louisville, Kentucky, while he was in school at Southern Seminary, and brought students to Snowbird. And Zach is, he’s a really cool ministry partner for us because we utilize him in a number of ways, including curriculum for our summer programs. But Zach is, he’s a PhD student right now, a PhD candidate, and one of his biggest points of focus is the subject of critical race theory, and then also the subject of intersectionality. And I don’t know if those things… If you ever even heard those phrases and those terms, but they’re very prominent right now in media and politics and in the church.

Speaker 1: And so these three episodes may be a little bit deep, and get a little bit heady, but we wanted to introduce critical race theory and intersectionality and talk about why they’re so dangerous, and throw up some warning flags so that people can… When they hear these things talked about, particularly in evangelical circles, can understand a little bit of context of why they’re not necessarily good and what the dangers are. So we’re gonna spend three episodes talking about critical race theory and intersectionality, and I hope it’s insightful and helpful. While it may be a little bit deep and heady and maybe less interesting to some of our listeners, I think it’s super necessary that Gospel-centered people have an understanding of these things. So if you’ve got questions, then don’t hesitate to reach out and email us or contact us, give us questions. We’d love to answer them and do some follow-up episodes if we need to. And as always, we appreciate you listening to No Sanity Required.

Speaker 2: Welcome to No Sanity Required from the Ministry of Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters, a podcast about the Bible, culture, and stories from around the globe.[music]

S1: So what we’re talking about today, and I’m gonna stay… I’m gonna lay low into Zachs. Zach Mabry and Zach Carter are gonna primarily drive this conversation, but we wanna talk about critical race theory. Critical race theory is something that I’ve become increasingly aware of over the last year. I’ve read as much as I can, I’ve watched videos. And to be honest, more times than not, I get to the end of it and I’m a little bit confused. And so then when I have had conversations with people, a lot of times, that doesn’t clear anything up. And so I’m excited to talk about this because there’s a need for clarity when it comes to understanding, I think, the danger of critical race theory, but the wholesale, large-scale, widespread acceptance of it, not just in the secular world right now, but in the church, in the Evangelical Church, which is a little bit unnerving. So I wanna talk about it.

S1: So let me just get the conversation going. And the first time that we heard about critical race theory or something called intersectionality, which we’re gonna get into, was recently, like the first time I heard it sort of on the public, on the big stage, I was personally familiar with it. But the first time I heard it outside of personal, smaller framework conversations was the President of the United States came out and said, “We’re not going to fund any more training that is critical-race-theory-driven and so… Or that pushes or promotes critical race theory or intersectionality.”

S1: That’s the President; not from within the church, not from within our seminaries. That was where I first heard it go mainstream. And people flipped out over that because it sounds like you’re saying, “We don’t need to be concerned about racism,” that’s where people go with it. So could you, starting off, could you just define critical race theory, intersectionality, and talk a little bit about where they came from.

Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, I can totally do that. But if you’ll let me, too, I wanna set the definition in their respective worldviews because I think one of the reasons it’s so confusing to people is that if you don’t understand the way that people are using the word, it’s really hard to make sense of it. And I wanna return, too, to something you said earlier, Brody, about how nerve-wracking it can be to send your child away to a liberal arts school. And part of the reason it’s so unnerving is because we now use words differently depending on what kind of camp we’re in, what kind of worldview we have. And so, yeah, if we can, I wanna set the stage in the worldviews themselves so that maybe the words might make a little more sense. So critical race theory lives in a space, which is technically Marxist.

Speaker 3: And what I mean by Marxist is not necessarily Soviet Russia. What I mean when I say Marxist is it’s a worldview, which is dedicated to understanding the material differences between people of an upper class or a lower class. And the material is really important ’cause the worldview of a Marxist doesn’t have categories for supernatural. So what it does when it looks for differences in classes is not look to things such as providence, which might be a historically Christian way of looking at it.

Speaker 3: If you were to look at Job, for example, and see what happened in his life, and you did not have a supernatural worldview to understand, you would look at all the disaster that befell him, the loss of his children, property, everything, his intense suffering, and if you didn’t have a supernatural worldview, you would see only the effects of God’s providence in his life, and you would look for the material causes of those, of that change in social class. Such Marxism, hopefully, illustrated in the way that we’re familiar with. Of course, as Christians, we know that’s not what happened in Job’s life. The providence of God was such that he was testing Job to show that Job’s faithfulness to the Lord was not actually based on his material circumstances, but because he loved the Lord his God. So critical race theory operates in that material world that wants to understand why does someone have more or less of something, and it does so using the lens of race.

S3: And the word critical is important, too, it doesn’t just mean that it’s picking at something. Critical holds and assumes two main assumptions about the world. And the first thing is that white supremacy is real, and it’s controlling in history. So it has real material effect. It causes haves and haves not.

S3: The second commitment, the assumptions its made is that the law itself props up and protects a white supremacy culture. So critical, then, once you go in there and say, “Let’s look kinda behind the curtain and see how race is at play to make sure that those who have can keep, and those who have not can never get.” And that’s probably it in a nutshell. But yeah, that’s critical race theory wrapped up in that. And I think, if I heard you right, you wanted one for intersectionality, right?

S1: Yeah, okay…

S3: That is… Go ahead, go ahead.

S1: Alright, so now, when you’re talking about worldviews here, and so you’re saying that for critical race theory, comes out of an inherently materialistic worldview, right?

S3: Mm-hmm.

S1: That’s what you’re saying. So I think we’re gonna get into this even further later on, but so if critical race theory proper, what actually is critical race theory, not just what people have… Are trying to say critical race theory is, or the implications of having critical race theory, but in itself, is it possible to really… Is it possible for someone who isn’t a materialist to even say, to even hold to critical race theory? Does that make sense?

S3: No, it does, it’s… So I’ve done a lot of research on this, I wrote a paper on this. And when you read the scholars themselves who advocate and… So this is a creation out of the legal world. One of the law professors, for example, University of Alabama, is the chief architect of critical race theory, D’Angelo. They, on their own terms, say that if you don’t… If you only use it just to look at the world as just a tool to think about the way the world works, maybe as a way to describe sin, in their own words, they say, “Then you’re not doing it right,” so… Go ahead.

S1: Okay. D’Angelo, is that the same person… Is that the same person wrote White Fragility?

S3: No, this is a different person, I think.

S1: Okay.

S3: I’ve not actually read White Fragility. I’ve read… That is a couple of… I’ve read a couple reviews about it, but I’ve never read that one myself, so I don’t know anything about that book. I’m familiar with it, though.

S1: Okay, so you’re saying, and this is something that… And we’re gonna get to this in just a little bit. So but even with critical race theory, you’re saying that the people who have formulated critical race theory, they’re saying that if you’re just using this as a way of describing the world, then you’re not really using it.

S3: Yeah, you’re not using it properly. ‘Cause the whole point of the project is to dismantle white supremacy as you’re trying to explain the distinctions between, in this case, in critical race theory’s case, the distinctions between, say whites and blacks. You’re using those tools. It’s not enough just to say that they’re there. You’ve also got to press in and then dismantle those laws. This was born out of legal theory. And so if you’re a lawyer, your goal, then, is to try to remove the laws that are doing this. And that gets to another thing about intersectionality, which I’m sure we’ll get to in a little bit, but with intersectionality, it’s even more explicit. There are journal articles where they attack the idea of buzzwords, that journal articles can’t… They can’t fathom people who are just using these buzzwords ’cause it’s entirely inconsistent with intersectionality itself. And yeah, so yeah, I think that’s right. I don’t think that…

S3: But some Christians will use, they’ll use critical race theory and they’ll insist that they’re doing it as just an analytical tool, but it’s… Maybe we’ll get to in a little bit, Zach. I think it’s that that puts us on a very slippery and dangerous slope, especially because the Bible gives us all of our categories to talk about human sin already, and to talk about even structures of sin. Human beings, when they get together, they build the Tower of Babel. They do build sinful things. But using critical race theory to do that can, I think, lead us down a very dangerous materialist path that doesn’t account for human sin properly, yeah.

S1: Okay, one last thing, and then if you can then double back and define intersectionality, but with… So you’re saying that if you’re gonna hold to critical race theory, then you have to believe that white supremacy is the ultimate evil, and that we have to break that down. Is that, something like that?

S3: Oh, yeah, yeah, 100%, yeah.

S1: Okay. And who is a white supremacist in that line of thinking? Who’s a white supremacist? Am I a white supremacist? Are you a white supremacist? Is this anybody who’s white?

S3: Yeah, so I don’t know that it’s anybody who’s white, Brody, but the answer is yes, but to varying degrees. And so however much you’re willing to yield your… We’ll have to… Zach, put this down as one of the words we’re gonna have to define, but however much you’re willing to yield your own privilege in order to ensure somebody else can have material gains so… ‘Cause this is a world where there are haves and have nots. And if you’re unwilling to do that in some way, some real meaningful way, then yeah, you are a white supremacist.

S1: Okay.

S3: I think I wanna offer this, too. I think one of the reasons it’s so compelling to Christians is it sounds, even in the language of privilege that I just mentioned, it sounds so Christian because who doesn’t know Philippians 2 and how… If we look at God, He emptied Himself, took on the form of a man, became a servant, becoming… I mean He died, even death on a cross and so… And if Paul’s instruction to the church is to have that mind amongst them, then is it really wrong for us to use language like giving up your privilege? I think it is, and maybe we can get to that in a little bit, Zach. But yeah, I hope that’s clear.

S1: Yeah, that’s clear.

S3: Okay, yeah.

S1: And I think where… I heard a Christian gal recently say something to the effect of, “Well, socialism seems good to me if it’s done the right way because it seems like what the Bible promotes,” and I think she was talking about the Book of Acts. And so I was explaining to her, she’s super teachable and pliable, and I was explaining to her, “Okay, in the Bible, there are two things that happen structurally in a society where people could confuse it with socialism. One is in ancient Israel, God put in place a way of providing for the outcast, the poor, the refugee, but that was a theocracy.” And so we weren’t put… It’s not a situation where what modern socialism does is it puts the controls into the hands of people who are running a government, for instance, which, in its worst case scenario, turns into the Soviet Union or North Korea, the People’s Republic, whatever.

S1: And then the other example that people will cite is the New Testament church in the Book of Acts, where people are selling what they’ve got, they’re distributing their… As each person has need. The difference there is that’s not government distribution; that’s the Body of Christ taking care of itself under Roman Empire, whatever, Caesar or king is in place at that time. So that looks more like the church in North Korea, Iran or China in our day.

S1: But so people, I think, romanticize the idea of socialism. But really understanding what critical race theory is, it exposes it as a non-biblical, I would even say it’s not biblical… It does, it cannot be harmonized with the Scriptures, it can’t be. It looks like it can be when you go to a Philippians 2 passage, “Well, yeah, this is we’re emptying ourselves. If I empty myself of what I’ve got and,” but it can’t be harmonized with scripture. Why not?

S3: Yeah, yeah, so I… Yeah, you said a lot there and a lot of that’s good. And I wanna go back even to the Acts 4 reference you’ve made about Acts 4 potentially being a pretext for Christian socialism. But you see, if we kept reading, Luke tells us in chapter five that there was a problem with people who had personal property, who sold it, who lied about how much they sold. But the problem is that they lied. The text makes clear they didn’t have to sell all their goods, that… And the sin was not that they did not sell all those goods; they could have just been honest and sold a portion of their goods, but they didn’t. And so immediately after that text everybody loves, there is a vivid personal historical account from Luke who says, “There were people who had private property, who sold it, who sold a portion of it,” excuse me, “But lied and said they sold all of it.” And the sin there is not that they kept some personal property.

S3: And then throughout the New Testament, there are people who, like Lydia, are very wealthy, and we can talk about wealth, it’s maybe some other one. I’ve done a… I wrote a paper on wealth, and even how the New Testament authors view it. But yeah, there doesn’t seem to be any indication in the New Testament for a socialist community. There is a community of sharing, but that’s different than socialism, but I’m sure we’ll get to that as with Zach Mabry’s agenda that he might have for us, hopefully.

S1: Alright. Yeah, so to follow up with that and to lead to the next thing is that it does sound very Christian because who cares more about the oppressed than Christians? We’ve got it, Old Testament, New Testament, we care about the oppressed. So now, then that leads into a definition of intersectionality because we need to figure out who’s oppressed, who’s the oppressors, and who’s the most oppressed. I mean… When… If someone says, “Oh, yeah, intersectionality. What does that mean? It sounds cool, but what does that mean?”

S3: That’s a great question. So I think defining intersectionality is… I’ll give a quick definition, then I wanna give some context, ’cause understanding it in its legal origin, it’s really helpful to really understanding what it tries to do. So intersectionality and intersectional theorists posit kinda their proposal is that every human being is kind of a composite of various identities, and you as a person, are at the intersection or the convergence of all of these various identities.

S3: So there is a thing such as whiteness, and all of us are on that line, so to speak, of whiteness. And there’s a thing of maleness and of femaleness, and then so that’s a line. So on our intersections, a three would be white men. We also happen to be Christian, that’s something as well, and all these composite identities are what form you and how you’re described. But where that comes into play though, is that intersectional theorists will assign, not literally but figuratively, but in some cases, literally, value to the level of oppression. We can talk about why that is in just a moment, but. So they would say that myself as a white man, my identities are less likely to be on the receiving end of oppression, and so I am more likely to be an oppressor.

S3: The idea of intersectionality is to look at all of your identities, and then to kind of come up with kind of an oppressed-oppressor score, and to know where are you at in a conversation, and that’s a way of critically analyzing the world. And going back to that word critical, it doesn’t just mean poking at and stuff, it means to look behind the curtain and understand what’s at play. It came up out of the practical applications of critical race theory in legal studies where Kimberle Crenshaw, who kind of coined the term in 1989, she was… There’s a journal article with, I think, the Chicago Law Journal, and in it, she looked at four cases where she argued that black women were theoretically erased from anti-discrimination law. So one of them was a case that involved these ladies at General Motors, and they said they were being passed over for promotions. They filed an anti-discrimination lawsuit, and one court said they couldn’t possibly be discriminated against because GM has women in upper leadership. Another court said they couldn’t possibly discriminate because they have African-American leadership in this context.

S3: So Kimberle Crenshaw says, “Well, these intersections of black and woman are specific points of oppression,” which is why they are privileged and why the courts would say, they would use the test case, “Are there women and are there African-Americans in leadership position?” But Kimberle Crenshaw’s point was there’s this invisible space where at the intersection of black and woman, there’s no anti-discrimination laws to protect that particular intersection. And so then they’re theoretically erased from law because the law protects all women, and it protects all black men. In the laws, it’s all blacks, but really all races is what the laws… The judge’s ruling was these African-American women were protected under the title statutes, which are anti-discriminatory, but Crenshaw pointed out that they weren’t seen by the law.

S3: That’s where intersectionality played out initially, and people… Lots of people… This is before Crenshaw though. This is in the 1960s, Frances Beal wrote a track kind of like a little pamphlet called Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Woman. And her point was, is that black women are… They suffer oppression on account of being African-American and on account of being woman. So that’s where intersectionality comes from.

S3: So it’s a further subset of this materialistic world view, and I’m supposing listeners know what that means. A materialistic world view just means that you believe that the only thing that is real is the thing and are the things that you can touch, hold and feel in your hand. So you’re looking at the world around you, the people who are being oppressed, why do they have less? And Crenshaw argued, it’s because the law can’t see them, and that’s where it’s born out of, and I think the context is really important to understanding it.

S3: And then understanding why then it has kind of an edge to it, that why it can’t just be an analytical tool even if some people want to use it as one. I would suggest that by the theorists language themselves and what they’ve explicitly stated in some of their publications, you’re not doing it right if you’re not seeking to dismantle those structures.

S1: Okay, first off, that’s the best… I’ve never had anyone explain intersectionality to me, and that makes so much sense, that picture, that word picture of space where something is not being addressed, and then the progression of that has become in the sexual revolution we’ve just experienced and are experiencing, now there are more layers that can be added to create more of those spaces, so I’m black…

S3: A hundred percent.

S1: I’m black. I’m a woman. I’m gay. I’m black. I’m a man. I’m trans. You just keep creating pockets of…

S3: Immigrant status, education status.

S1: Okay. Physical ability.

S3: Single family home. Yeah, and they’re on a spectrum, so physical ability all the way to physical inability, and you might find yourself on any point in that spectrum. Yeah, it’s… And I think it’s compelling to Christians as well because it says that people need to be seen, and we worship a God who does see. When Hagar is hiding, God is the God who sees her crying and he meets her. So for Christians, we need to and we want to have a heart for people that are theoretically erased, but I would posit again, and I’m sure we’ll get to this, Zach, but that we cannot adopt that tool to do so, especially because the Bible already gives us all those necessary categories, scripture is sufficient.

S1: Okay, that’s a perfect place to… We’re 20 minutes into this, and I wanna go… I wanna finish this first episode talking about the last two things you said, I think, is gonna… It’ll bring some clarity for people that might still be having a hard time bringing all this into focus. So I know that the Southern Baptist Convention in 2019, I don’t know if it’s called a referendum or… But it was voted on that…

S3: Resolution.

S1: A resolution, okay. And it was…

S3: Resolution number nine.

S1: And it was accepted, right?

S3: Yeah, it passed.

S1: It passed. Okay, so it passed so that… But so that intersectionality would be adopted as an analytical tool, which sounds… That sounds cool, that sounds great. If you don’t understand what’s going on, that sounds great. And so I’d like for you to talk a little bit about what that means. What do they even mean by that? I don’t even know what they mean by that, the more I’ve read into it and tried to figure it out. What does that even mean? And then, and I’m not being facetious or sarcastic, I literally am… I don’t know what it means, that it’s gonna be an analytical tool.

S3: Sure.

S1: And then the second thing is you made a comment there that goes back to a question I asked earlier that we didn’t… That I’d like to come back to, and you said just now something to the effect of, “Scripture has already given us what we need.” So to set aside intersectionality as an analytical tool and just say, “Well, what does the Scripture teach?” Talk a little bit about why it’s not necessarily the most practical or helpful or Biblical thing that this resolution number nine was passed. And then what does the Scripture offer us that we are missing or that we could be more faithful to pursue and put into practice?

S3: Yeah, that’s a great question. So on resolution number nine, for our listeners who might not be Southern Baptist, I don’t know the composition of your audience, but the Southern Baptist Convention puts forward resolutions, which guide the discussions of the church. It’s not really a rule. And this one was passed under significant controversy. So it wasn’t allowed to be deliberated on the floor. It got packaged into a book of, I think it was in nine through 13, they were passed all together. So what resolution nine did is it said, it affirmed that intersectionality was an analytical tool. And actually, that was the topic of my paper that I wrote: Is intersectionality a valid analytical tool? So an analytical tool is something that is used in critical scholarship, the scholarship going to look behind the curtain to look behind the curtain. But also, we have analytical tools that we really use for all sorts of things. When we look at sports demographics and candidates, when somebody is running for… Now, I’m not a sports guy. This isn’t gonna surprise you, Zach, and probably not you, Brody, but what’s that called when the players go for the NFL and they… Isn’t that called combine or something like that? NFL Combine?

S1: Yeah, they go to a combine, right, to try out, basically.

S3: Oh, thanks, yeah, thanks, to try out. Yeah, there you go, okay. They go to try out. We have analytical tools to evaluate if a person’s going to be a good or a bad fit in a given team in a given plan of action for a coach. So analytical tools on the face of them are not all bad. But what they have a way of doing is to look behind the curtain at a particular thing and know is this good or bad based on the goals of whoever’s using that tool. So I hope that analogy works and fits.

S3: Because if you are a pastor and you’re looking to describe sin, intersectionality is a compelling analytical tool because in your mind, you think, “This gives me a helpful way to look behind the curtain and describe the problem of human sin.” I imagine in another episode, we’ll be able to talk about why it’s wrong on the face of it, but I wanna go now to just that’s an analytical tool. And I don’t think that it’s appropriate to use it as one because Scripture is sufficient, like we said. In another episode, maybe we can talk about why it’s actually bad.

S3: Let’s talk about what Scripture gives us already. Scripture gives us a full framework to interpret the world. The first kind of framework is what did God create? So the Doctrine of Creation is our starting point ’cause that was very good. So we go to Eden as our pattern, that’s the pattern, and then we… Christians have a phenomenal explanation for why the world is the way it is, and it’s the Doctrine of the Fall. And it answers the longing of every human heart: Why do I feel this way about the world? Why is there sin? Why is there injustice? The Fall. But then we have redemption, and then we have restoration, consummation, but basically when Jesus comes back and inaugurates the New Heavens and the New Earth and He makes everything new again. And so that is the analytical framework of the Christian because God Himself gave us that analytical framework. That’s the framework that we’re supposed to use.

S3: So when we look at something, we can look at it and say, “This is the good in the tool. This is the good in the structure. This is the good in the plan. But this is where the Fall has affected it. This is where Jesus restores it by His crucifixion, burial and resurrection and ascension. And then this is where, in the New Heavens and the New Earth, Jesus will redeem it and restore it to its glory.” And I don’t know, Brody, if that gets at it. That’s a general framework, I think, that Christians should operate in, that I think is far more Biblical and then also hopeful ’cause you’re not going for natural and material ends. You’re not talking about just distribution of have and have nots. You’re talking about making things very good again. Not just bandaging a wound, but Jesus is gonna make, not just things better, but He’s going to make them very good again. And we just, we surrender the value added of the church when we take up the world’s tools to do the church’s work.

S3: The great joy we have is we have the real answer of why everything is terrible, and then we have the real answer of why everything is going to be amazing and wonderful and paradise again. And if we just start talking about material things and about redistribution, who cares? All that stuff is gonna burn up one day anyway, so that’s…

S4: That’s super helpful, very helpful.

S1: That’s really helpful. Let me make a couple comments and ask your opinion on this. So what I’m hearing you say is that when we see this intersectionality as a lens of viewing the world, we can acknowledge, “Okay, right, this is as good as the material world can get to defining the fact that there’s a problem in the world,” and they’re gonna say, “The problem is those who have and those who don’t have not,” and we’re gonna say, “Sin is the problem.” Is that what you’re saying?

S3: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. And it might manifest itself in have and haves not, but that’s still just the symptom; that’s not the problem.

S1: Right, okay. And then so maybe to wrap up, we wanna wrap up this episode with… So what we need to be doing is when people are trying to use these categories, we can say, “Okay, yeah, I see where you’re coming from, but as a Christian, I see the world differently. You’re speaking… You’re using things from a different worldview, and it’s not possible to do from a Christian worldview.” But from a Christian world view, I can say, “Yeah, man, God created all human beings in the image of God. And that we can say that everyone has value because they’ve been image-bearers of God. And we just happen to live in a world that is sinful and so, that has been damaged, and that’s why we’re oppressing each other and viewing each other poorly. But we need to get back to a teaching on the image of God and creation.” Is that helpful?

S3: Yeah, I think 100%. I think that, and maybe we can talk about this on another episode. Man, we’re just creating content now, but I think we have a crisis of theological anthropology on our hands all across the board, post-Darwin. So yeah, yeah, exactly what you just said.

S1: Okay. And when you say theological anthropology, you mean we’re not viewing human beings the way that the Bible says we should view human beings.

S3: 100%. And so we end up hurting people because we give them the wrong medicine because we don’t understand what people are, and who they are, and who they belong to, yeah.

S4: That’s a really good stopping point for this first episode, and that’s a really helpful. That last, even that last sentence analogy, “We’re giving people the wrong medicine.” I think that’s real helpful. So again, we got that Zach Carter joining us, and hope you guys will be able to tune in the next episode or two to continue this conversation. So thanks again, we’ll see you next time.