When I think of black liberation theology, I think of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s longtime pastor who Obama conveniently threw under the bus when it was necessary to save his 2008 campaign.
The Daily Wire’s Jon Brown recently interviewed black theologian Voddie Baucham, an American-born pastor who now lives in Zambia where he serves as the dean of theology at African Christian University.
“I’ve come back three or four times a year for speaking tours and it’s always interesting to be an American expat looking back at the U.S.,” Baucham told The Daily Wire. The theologian said he’s able to “sense the temperature change” in the racial climate on each visit he makes.
In his new book, entitled “Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe,” Baucham discusses the divisions and the deterioration he’s observed during his recent trips to America.
“I think that’s one of the reasons that I just became so keenly aware and so passionate about writing this book, because it was really noticeable to me that things were shifting quickly and deteriorating quickly,” he explained to The Daily Wire. “And I’m watching families be divided, churches be divided, institutions and schools and denominations be divided over this thing. Being an expat coming back and seeing that, it was just alarming to me.”
Baucham was born in 1969 in Los Angeles to a single mother. In his freshman year of college, he became a Christian, which forced him to make a choice between “find[ing] his identity primarily in his race or his faith,” according to Brown.
In his book, Baucham writes, “The question of the proper order of faith and ethnicity is critical to understanding the various positions people take in the broader social-justice debate — one with which all people must wrestle, regardless of their ethnicity. However, for black Christians, this concept has often been difficult to embrace for several reasons.”
Before becoming a Christian, he’d been attracted to the teachings of Malcolm X, who “denounced Christianity as a religion designed for slaves,” according to Brown. The theologian explained that such a worldview was incompatible with Christianity. But it was the exposure to those ideas gave him keen insight into “the nature of CRT and other ideologies that seek to politically weaponize race and undermine faith,” as Brown noted.
Describing the book, Brown said Baucham devotes several chapters to the ways that “CRT and the social justice movement twist traditional religious categories into a means by which to assert power. Characterizing the battles facing the U.S. as fundamentally spiritual, he deftly traces such philosophies to their origin in what he describes as the ‘demonic ideology’ of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and their neo-Marxist successors in the Frankfurt School.”
Regarding Baucham’s opinion on the antiracism theories of Ibram X. Kendi (whom I consider to be a fraud, for reasons I discussed here), he called it “a religion without grace” in a May Op-Ed published by the New York Post.
Brown pointed out that Baucham’s ancestors were slaves, and he addresses this in his book. Baucham writes, “The most powerful weapon in our arsenal is not calling for reparations: it is forgiveness. Antiracism knows nothing of forgiveness because it knows nothing of the Gospel. Instead, antiracism offers endless penance, judgment, and fear.”
Baucham told Brown that because the new social justice movement contains aspects of Christianity, many Christians have “fallen prey” to it. Baucham asked, “What Christian does not want to be for justice, right? What Christian does not want to empathize with people if they are oppressed? What Christian doesn’t want unity and reconciliation and everything else?”
“So I think there’s a sinister aspect to the religious nature of this movement in that it’s those religious terms and that religious ideology that it tapped into that has really led people astray.”
But he sees a darker side to these movements. Regarding Black Lives Matter, he writes in his book, “The organization is Marxist, revolutionary, feminist, misandrous, pro-LGBTQIA+, pro-abortion, and anti-family, with roots in the occult. It is unacceptable for Christians to partner with, celebrate, identify with or promote this organization.”
Baucham also opposes the practice of witchcraft by BLM co-founders.
Baucham told Brown he’d been “worried for a while that we’re moving toward a race war. I don’t see that now.”
