Voddie Baucham’s Faulty Fault Lines
Introduction
I first heard, and heard of, Voddie Baucham in the Fall of 2005. He ascended the platform of the chapel at Southern Seminary early in my first semester. He thundered the gospel from Jude, saying he would have loved merely to delight in our common salvation. But, he said, too many were threatening the gospel. Instead, he came “to contend for the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all” (Jude 3). A year later I heard him again, at John Piper’s Desiring God national conference in Minneapolis. Both hearings impressed me in just the same way: Voddie Baucham knows the Word, and he knows how to preach the Word. Thus, I have respected him for a decade and a half as a man of the Scripture. I carried this respect into my reading of his blockbusting best-seller, Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe.
I also carried into my reading the awareness that Baucham has distanced himself from a number of other leaders I have respected for nearly as long or longer. This distancing has occurred over differing Christian responses to racial tensions presenting in our culture and nation, especially since the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012. I have paid close attention to these responses because, after finishing my degree at Southern, I became the lead pastor of majority-black church in a majority black neighborhood. In the last decade, my own study of Scripture and my own research, including writing a PhD dissertation on multiethnic ecclesiology, has led me to key conclusions that differ from Baucham’s.
Thus, I expected to disagree with Baucham while generally respecting his arguments. I finished the book concluding this: I still respect Baucham tremendously and found parts of the book helpful and even moving, yet I found the substance of his arguments surprisingly selective, superficial, simplistic, and generally unpersuasive. Below I will briefly summarize the volume, note its praiseworthy parts, and offer a critique of its problematic aspects, briefly concluding with some thoughts for the way forward.
1. Summary of Fault Lines
In Fault Lines, Voddie Baucham addresses what he sees as the catastrophic future awaiting the evangelical church. He argues that many of the most well-known theologically conservative and reformed leaders in the movement have been poisoned by the noxious gases of the spirit of the age. Specifically, he argues against the worldview or ideology of Critical Social Justice (CSJ), a term taken from author James Lindsay, noting ways in which he sees the evangelical church endangered by it. Using the metaphor of shifting geological plates forming “fault lines” under the surface of the land, he argues that an earthquake approaches. “The current concept of social justice is incompatible with biblical Christianity. This is the main fault line at the root of the current debate” (5).
He aims to accomplish his task through a mixture of historical and sociological analysis, biographical narrative, theological polemic, and gospel proclamation. In all, his volume hinges on the argument that the social justice movement is an ideology, “worldview,” and, in fact, an entirely alternative set of religious commitments (chapter four). He argues that these religious commitments, including “a new priesthood” of ethnic minorities (chapter five) and “a new canon” of literature formed by Critical Race Theory (chapter six), cannot stand together with the faith delivered once and for all to the people of God. He wants to encourage his readers to stand themselves on the right side of the fault line of social justice. The shaking is inevitable. In terms of de-escalating the danger of the fault line, he says, “Nothing will. These divisions are both real and necessary. As I said at the outset, the goal here is to be on the right side of the fault line when the catastrophe comes” (224).
2. Praiseworthy Parts of Fault Lines
Baucham tells a powerful personal story of grace, redemption, and excellence. He movingly honors his mom and her sacrifice for his success in the middle of his heart-cracking remembrances of the crack epidemic. He shares the power of the gospel to convert him and call him into ministry. Baucham emphasizes the critical aspects of any thriving community. Rightly, he explains that no community will thrive without intact, healthy families headed by fathers at the helm of the home. Rightly, he explains that community excellence will shrivel insofar as it de-emphasizes the relentless pursuit of education. Rightly, he explains any community or society that applauds and protects those who kill its children (born or unborn) will find itself applauding and protecting a culture of death that leavens like poison into its very heart. Here Baucham laments the difficulty pro-life crisis pregnancy ministries have engaging black pastors and churches. I know this too well. Years ago, my wife was the director of the main site of the largest crisis pregnancy center in the state of Kentucky. At one point, their center was invited to a community health fair hosted by a large, black church in the city. But my wife and her colleagues were disappointed to discover that the health fair would also be promoting and hosting the services of Planned Parenthood.
Most importantly, Baucham repeatedly emphasizes the centrality of forgiveness.“The most powerful weapon in our arsenal is not calling for reparations: it is forgiveness” (228). Through the cross, God has offered forgiveness to the nations as they repent and believe in Christ and his gospel. This vertical God-directed forgiveness reorients our hearts to forgive others on our right and left, horizontally. Too often, discussions of racial reconciliation and racial justice omit this fundamental reality of the Christian gospel. “And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ” (Ephesians 4:32). Without forgiveness we have no hope, no horizon to expect anything but vengeance, and Baucham rightly points the reader in this direction.
3. Problematic Parts of Fault Lines
1. Fault Lines Uses Selective Arguments and Sources
First, Baucham is selective in his use of data. Baucham cites studies and empirical data about the legal system’s treatment of black men that seemingly disproves the cultural narrative. But the studies he cites seem to be outliers, and he doesn’t give space to other studies or weigh all the data on its merits. I’m not a criminologist, but evangelical Christian experts in criminal law such as Matthew Martens have already addressed this failure in Baucham’s volume (you can find examples of this on Martens’ Twitter feed).
Second, Baucham is selective in his use of anecdotes. Aiming at narrative as a key component of Critical Race Theory, Baucham laments the lack of logical engagement and factual basis for his discussions. Yet he addresses each famous case of a black person killed in the last decade by narrating a similar case involving a white person who was killed. He consistently argues against narrative as a basis for argument, but then he responds by stacking anecdotes on top of each other. Likewise, while wanting rightly to uproot any reader’s faulty assumption that “correlation is causation,” he nevertheless ends each narrative of a white person killed by saying that we didn’t hear about these cases because the victims were white.
Third, Baucham is selective in his use of sources. A main foil of Baucham’s argument is Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, but Baucham cites sparingly from the actual literature on the subject. His most common interlocutors are Richards Delgado and Kimberlé Crenshaw, clear and critical heavyweights in the discussion. But generally he does not give an indication that he has read deeply or closely from the primary sources. I am not an expert in CRT/I, but I got the sense that I have read more deeply in the literature than Baucham, and that online authors such as Bradly Mason and Neil Shenvi certainly have. Speaking of online sources, Baucham cites them constantly, and had the volume provided a bibliography, it would list a “who’s who” of angry and often anonymous discernment bloggers and tweeters. Finally, Baucham repeatedly aims his rhetorical rockets at anyone he suspects has been taken captive to “Critical Social Justice,” but he cites without any critique non-Christians like Thomas Sowell and caustic atheists like James Lindsay. In fact, he takes his key term “Critical Social Justice” from Lindsay, without critical engagement or any interrogation of Linday’s atheist worldview. Why does Baucham charitably pass these men off as authorities while brothers and sisters in Christ with whom Baucham agrees on the vast majority of theological issues are all but villainized?
Fourth, Baucham is selective in his use of Scripture. Baucham fills his volume with quotes and long block quotes of Scripture, for which I am thankful. That said, he uses Scripture selectively in at least two ways. First, while asserting that he will defend “biblical justice,” Baucham ignores or merely nods to relevant passages of Scripture that have historically shaped a Christian understanding of justice. Unfortunately, the volume does not contain an index of Scripture or topics, or a bibliography, but Baucham certainly does not emphasize or engage in detail with key Scripture from the prophetic works on justice or a classic text like the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). Secondly, as Baucham repeatedly cites Scripture in blocks which take large portions of a page, he nevertheless often leaves the Scripture un-interpreted or only superficially engaged. This method fails in a several ways. It fails because he leaves the already-convinced with the impression that Baucham’s position is simply the plain reading of the text. It fails because it leaves the convincible without much deep engagement of these texts. And ultimately it fails because the debate at hand is about the meaning of the Scripture itself: both sides of Baucham’s “fault line” — both Baucham and his rhetorical opponents — claim to be following the Scripture.
Finally, let me briefly address the allegations of plagiarism that have plagued the book and Baucham recently. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can Google it and find lots of information.) Candidly, I find the charges overblown, and the mistakes of attribution in the book seem attributable to sloppiness more than to malice. As Neil Shenvi has said, Baucham should acknowledge these mistakes and fix them in future editions of the volume.
2. Fault Lines Uses Superficial Arguments and Assertions
I marveled that Baucham was able to write and release this volume so quickly, but I discovered the reason as I read: it seems hastily written. In fact, the volume often reads like a book-length blog post from an online discernment website, quickly thrown together rather than marinated in deep, long-term thought on the primary sources under discussion. In full disclosure, I went into the book expecting to disagree. Yet I was still surprised by how much the book lacked coherence and how little Baucham worked to persuade those skeptical of his position. Let me provide a few examples.
First, Baucham throughout the volume defines his opponents with cheap, undefined, and ad hominem slogans taken from the worst of the Internet. Terms like “social justice warrior” (SJW) and “Big Eva” are used to bludgeon theological opponents online and such terms litter the pages of Fault Lines.
Second, Baucham posits a categorical dichotomy between “biblical” and “social” justice (6), yet he gives hardly any space to explicating a biblical vision of justice informed by the whole canon of Scripture and the historic beliefs of the church. This connects with Baucham’s misunderstanding or at least misappropriation of the precious Reformation doctrine of sola Scriptura (cf. 118–119). He argues that “according to critical social justice, without social science, the Bible doesn’t make sense“ (84); but this unfairly characterizes his rhetorical opponents and misunderstands the nature of the doctrine of sola Scriptura, which teaches that Scripture is the only inerrant authority for Christian faith and practice but not that Christians cannot be informed and shaped by other sources of knowledge. Baucham aims at sociology as ruling over Scripture for those gulping at the fountain of social justice. But, for example, my personal theological project has been mainly to work on a theological framework as opposed to merely sociological ones for multiethnic churches. And, yet, this does not remove sociology as a helpful discipline, any more than understanding history would inherently somehow usurp the supremacy of biblical truth and gospel theology.
Third, while Baucham has coined the catchy term “ethnic gnosticism” (91–92), he misunderstands and superficially describes those he asserts are guilty of practicing it. He notes that Richard Delgado says that minorities are more likely to know certain things, but this does not make such minority knowledge secret or “gnostic.” It merely describes an epistemic probability: that those who experience things know more about them than those who don’t experience those same things. It is simply untrue that most Critical Race Theorists argue that such perspectives render someone as ontologically or existentially superior; instead, many would argue that such knowledge merely describes the importance of hearing from those with experiences unique in certain ways to a given group. While Baucham himself demonstrates that the black community doesn’t necessarily speak with a singular, univocal perspective (cf. 94–99), he seems to fall prey here to the problem he seeks to address. He basically says, “If I as a black man from the crack-filled streets can succeed in America, systemic racism cannot be real.” Praise God for Baucham’s faithful and fruitful life. I agree American life provides huge opportunities, perhaps more than any other nation-state to have ever existed. Yet, Baucham does not seem to acknowledge the sheer talent and gifting that has factored importantly in his success — talent and gifting surpassing the vast majority of anyone in our nation, black, white, or brown. Ironically, here Baucham lets his personal narrative interpret other facts on this point — because he was able to succeed, everyone should be able to.
3. Fault Lines Uses Simplistic Arguments and Descriptions
Overall, Baucham’s book has overly simplified the argument on the issues it addresses, as his controlling metaphor of “fault lines” reveals. Rather than approaching CRT with a set of Christian principles allowing him to reject the false and learn from the true, he totalizes the nature of the debate. One is either fully faithful or dangerous compromised by social justice ideology. We see this in his explication of CSJ/CRT/I as irreducibly religious and ideological: “The million-dollar question is whether CRT is a worldview or merely an analytical tool” (144). While J. Gresham Machen rightly discerned the contrast between liberal and historic versions of Christianity as competing religious systems, Baucham has wrongly taken the current debate and framed it in similar terms. Does he really think David Platt and Mark Dever are in danger of rejecting the historic faith for a new CSJ-infused counterfeit? This seems implausible at best and dishonest at worst. While valorizing Machen, Baucham ignores Machen’s own racist segregationist beliefs, never interrogating whether such a “worldview” may have influenced any of Machen’s other ideas. If we can separate Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism from his racist segregationism, might we be able to extract some truth from Critical Race Theorists? I’m already on record as saying I think we need to reject superficial readings and conclusions in such areas. For example, I agree with Baucham about the importance of healthy families, and a vision of responsibility and excellence in the black community (or any community!). But is this intrinsically at odds with a notion of systemic injustice that can plague some communities more than others?
Likewise, Baucham argues that anti-racism does not agree with mainstream definitions of racism as a belief in racial superiority (cf. 80–81). He is mistaken. Instead, many writers in the sphere of CRT argue that such a definition does apply, but that many can hold such beliefs in an implicit and/or unconscious way. Baucham’s answer to a totalizing of racism (156) implies that nothing is racism. He consistently argues against monocausal reasoning (“simplistic analyses and assertions of the CSJ crowd,” 170; e.g., systemic racism) but in so doing he doesn’t allow for any form of systemic racism, implying a monocausality of his own. Such simplistic analysis does not help the discussion. As Russell Kirk notes in his chapter on John Adams in his masterwork The Conservative Mind, the fundamental value of a revolutionary government (and mindset) is absolute simplicity. Kirk says that Adams and Edmund Burke bristled at such solutions: “Man being complex, his government cannot be simple.” I find this very theologically interesting. Classically, Christians have taught that God is simple but all creation is complex. Human government and culture as part of the creation, must be complex. Ascribing or aspiring to simplicity in government, culture, or our solutions to racial issues confuses the creature for the Creator. In other words, simplistic explanations may commit idolatry. If the Left and the Critical Race Theorists may fall prey to this problem, the danger lurks close to home for conservatives as well. We should not respond to simplistic analysis or solutions with simplistic analysis, descriptions, or arguments. We should recognize we live in a complex world, with complex problems, requiring complex solutions, all the while recognizing the singularly simple God who gave us a gospel worth trusting in. Baucham attempts to eschew such reactionary oversimplification, but I don’t think he ultimately succeeds.
Like Baucham, I grew up in California, and when you grow up in California, you learn about earthquakes. That said, I can’t help but see a misuse of the metaphor of fault likes in Baucham’s volume. Baucham rightly notes that when your community sits on a fault line, the question isn’t whether the shaking will happen, but when. But here Baucham misplays the metaphor, because a fault line doesn’t leave one set of people unharmed on one side and another destroyed on the other. Instead, the question, as Baucham notes about the Transamerica Pyramid building in San Francisco, is whether a building’s foundation, engineering, structure, and construction are strong enough to handle the shaking (151).
As an undergraduate in a secular university in northern California, I was required to take one upper division STEM course. I chose one on the dangers and risks of earthquakes and volcanoes. The professor told us two things that sit with me still. First, he said repeatedly, “If you live or work in a brick building, you should move or change jobs.” Brick buildings crumble like cards in a bad earthquake. Second, he explained the worst devastation of the Loma Prieta earthquake happened 70 miles from the epicenter, where the shorelines of the San Francisco Bay had been filled with debris to create more buildable land. The earthquake vibrated in such a way that it created a condition called “liquefaction,” blending the landfill like a milkshake. I question whether social justice is such a fault line. But even granting Baucham’s terms, and building on his critical emphasis on forgiveness, I couldn’t help but wonder how we can move forward when so many white evangelicals would wonder why any black or minority brothers or sisters would have anything to forgive in the first place. Baucham pits reparations and forgiveness against each other, but they are related. Both inherently carry the condition that certain communities have been wronged. If racism is rare and never systemic, why would anyone need to be forgiven or to offer forgiveness?
Conclusion
Ultimately, I hear in Fault Lines the same passion that I first heard from Baucham and Jude 3 in the pulpit at Southern Seminary years ago. It’s a mindset that sees the Christian faith under constant threat and in constant need of shielding from threats from out in the world and within the church. Is there a place for this defense? Yes. The Christian is shielded in faith (Eph. 6:16). We need to take Jude 3 seriously. But the shield of faith is not the only part of the Christian’s armor, and Jude 3 is not the only or primary call for the Christian’s life or the church’s mission. Baucham misreads the social justice movement as full on assault, possibly because if all you have is a shield everything looks like an arrow. But, as I’ve written elsewhere, I don’t think Critical Race Theory necessarily functions as a worldview so much as it is a diverse set of ideas, some of them true and some of them false.
Yes, we are called to truth. We are also called to unity. God’s heart is for both. If we were to ask, “Lord, should we prioritize truth or unity?” His answer would be, “Yes!” (John 17). I already noted that Baucham doesn’t believe the division can be healed: “These divisions are both real and necessary. As I said at the outset, the goal here is to be on the right side of the fault line when the catastrophe comes. In the meantime, we must love” (224). But if we can’t love each other well in the midst of our suffering, what kind of a church will we be? If we can’t love each other enough to see this issue as a disagreement rather than an existential division, what kind of a church will we be? Even if “critical social justice” isn’t a fault line, the church surely inhabits a land filled with shifting tectonic plates. And the question isn’t so much which side we’re on. The question is whether we’re building on the foundation of the gospel, the unchanging faith, and whether we’re following the Creator’s code for his community. Instead of pitting brothers and sisters with basically the same theological beliefs against one another, Baucham would have done better to help us build a church that can handle the shaking.
