Fault Lines

The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe

Voddie T. Baucham

• Publisher: Salem Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781684511808
• eBook ISBN: 9781684512010
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The Ground Is Moving The death of George Floyd at the hands of police in the summer of 2020 shocked the nation. As riots rocked American cities, Christians affirmed from the pulpit and in social media that "black lives matter" and that racial justice "is a gospel issue."But what if there is more to the social justice movement than those Christians understand? Even worse: What if they've been duped into preaching ideas that actually oppose the Kingdom of God?In this powerful book, Voddie Baucham, a preacher, professor, and cultural apologist, explains the sinister worldview behind the social justice movement and Critical Race Theory—revealing how it already has infiltrated some seminaries, leading to internal denominational conflict, canceled careers, and lost livelihoods. Like a fault line, it threatens American culture in general—and the evangelical church in particular.Whether you're a layperson who has woken up in a strange new world and wonders how to engage sensitively and effectively in the conversation on race or a pastor who is grappling with a polarized congregation, this book offers the clarity and understanding to either hold your ground or reclaim it.

CHAPTER ONE A Black Man

I was born on the San Andreas Fault. More specifically, I was born in Los Angeles, California, on March 11, 1969. This was the end of the Great Migration between 1915 and 1970 that saw somewhere between five and ten million blacks leave the South in search of a better life. This migration took place along very specific routes to the North and West and landed large swaths of the black population in cities like New York, Boston, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, and other major urban areas.

“It was during the First World War that a silent pilgrimage took its first steps within the borders of this country,” writes Isabel Wilkerson in her compelling and eye-opening book The Warmth of Other Suns. I can see the expressions on the faces of my grandparents as she describes the organic, almost unnoticed nature of the movement: “The fever rose without warning or notice or much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. It would not end until the 1970s and would set into motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, could have imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take nearly a lifetime to play out.”¹

My family was among those who trod those well-worn paths. My third-great paternal grandfather, Nazarin, was born a slave in North Carolina in 1835. On my mother’s side, I have been able to trace my third- and fourth-great-grandparents back to slavery in Alabama, Virginia, and Texas between the 1830s and 1860s. Both my maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather came from Texas, while my maternal grandmother made her way up I-10 from Louisiana. They all eventually found their way to the City of Angels, where they, along with scores of other immigrants, made a life for themselves and their loved ones that offered more promise than they ever could have hoped for in the land they left.

My father was born in Los Angeles. My mother didn’t arrive there until 1961 at the age of ten; she grew up in Midland, Texas—one of seven children from four different men. She spent most of 1960 living with her father in Odessa while my grandmother—who was unmarried at the time—went to Los Angeles to get established before sending for my mother, her older brother, and her younger sister. Three older siblings had already left home and started families of their own, and a seventh, the youngest of the bunch, was living with her father in Tyler. (My grandmother would marry the man I called my grandfather the year I was born. He was twenty years her senior—and white.)

Mom and her siblings spent two days on a bus from Midland to Los Angeles. Like many who undertook similar journeys, they had only a loaf of bread and some fried chicken. “We had enough chicken for two days, but we ate it all the first day,” my mother recounted as she told me her story again not long ago. “We didn’t have any money, so the second day we just went hungry.” They arrived in Los Angeles and went from a temporary apartment to a permanent home in the Imperial Courts projects in Watts. “We didn’t go outside to play,” my mother told me. “There was so much asphalt. We were used to playing in fields and trees.” She was also shocked by the regular fights in the projects where she lived.

My mother met my father a few years later when they both attended Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles. My dad was a handsome multi-sport athlete. He stood six and a half feet tall with broad shoulders, a booming voice, and a personality that was more imposing than his stature. My mom stood five foot four and more than held her own. She had a keen mind, a sharp wit, and an infectious smile. She was a stellar student destined for great things. Their high school romance turned into a teenage pregnancy, a shotgun wedding, and a brief marriage that could not withstand their personal differences or my father’s departure for university and eventual pursuit of a career in professional football.

I have seen pictures of the three of us together when I was a toddler, but my parents were not a couple long enough for me to have any memories of our time as an intact family. I would be haunted by this reality for decades to come.

A Child of Desegregation

I remember the day when I was in third grade that my school sent me home with a special letter to give to my mother—one that would have a much greater impact than I could have imagined. It informed her that I would be bussed across town to an elementary school in Pacific Palisades.²

I don’t particularly remember my mother’s reaction to it other than her relief that at least this time it didn’t have anything to do with my misbehavior. (Yes, I was that much of a troublemaker. In fact, I was such a troublemaker that the principal made a deal with me: if I stayed out of his office for the last three weeks of the term, he would take me out to eat anywhere I wanted to go.) What I do remember is the discussion we had the night before I got on that bus for the first time. My mother reminded me that, though we did not have much, we did have our good name, and whether I liked it or not, I was going to have to uphold that name.

She also reminded me that I was a black boy about to walk into an all-white school, and this meant that our family name was not my only concern. As she spoke, I did not have the sense that I was a child being instructed, but a soldier being commissioned. I remember feeling like I was about to step onto a stage and assume a role in a drama that, up until then, I had only witnessed from a distance and would rather not participate in.

But my participation was not optional. I had to get on that bus.

They Don’t Want Us Here

My time in the Palisades is a blur. My few memories of the semester I spent there are not pleasant. I don’t think I had a particularly bad time, but the incidents that stand out to me shaped the way I thought about the world. Two of them demonstrate how my racial identity developed.

The first was the fact that my fellow bussees and I weren’t wanted there. At least that’s the way I saw it. Looking back on it, I realize there were several issues, both political and historical, that I could not possibly have understood. To the adults, bussing was an issue involving the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Los Angeles Unified School District, the State of California, the federal courts, and the history of segregation in the United States. But for us kids, it just felt like we were being forced to go someplace where people didn’t want us around.

That semester had a tremendous impact on my understanding of what it meant to be black in America. I may have been too young to understand the complex, multi-layered drama going on around me, but I could definitely understand what it meant to feel unwelcome. I could also understand, perhaps for the first time, what it meant to be poor and disadvantaged. By the time we got off the bus in Pacific Palisades, we were keenly aware that 1) we weren’t in South Central anymore, and 2) these people had a lot more money than we did.

The Day I Didn’t Get Expelled

The second thing that always stands out in my mind when I think about my time in the Palisades is the day I didn’t get expelled. The talk my mother had with me was very effective. I was on the straight and narrow when I got off that bus. We all were—partly because we were in a strange environment, but also because we all felt like we were under a microscope. Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for trouble to find me.

I have heard it said that you “never forget the first time a white person calls you a nigger.” That was certainly the case for me, but not because I’d never heard it before. I’d actually heard it all my life. People had used it to refer to me, and I had used it to refer to others. When black people used the word, it was a rather benign moniker, even a term of endearment. But from a white person’s mouth, it was a weapon being used to demean and dehumanize me.

The little boy who said it probably had no idea what he was doing. He used the word like it was a new toy with which he was learning to play. However, when he saw my reaction to it, he used it with greater fervor. He had struck a nerve, and like any kid on the playground who feels like he has figured out how to get the upper hand, he continued to strike at that nerve.

The boy would say the word, then run and stand by our teacher. At first I stopped short, not wanting to get the teacher involved. But after a few rounds of this, I had had enough. That time, as the boy stood next to the teacher, looking smug and satisfied, I calmly walked up to him and punched him in the chest as hard as I could. He dropped like a sack of potatoes. The teacher began yelling, “What is wrong with you?!” I looked at her and said, “He kept calling me nigger.”

The teacher took us both to the principal’s office, where both of our parents were called. What happened next is a bit of a blur. My mother came to the school. She did not tell me that what I did was right, or even justified. She didn’t say that someone calling me a name, even that name, gave me the right to resort to violence. However, she did say that we were little boys playing a grown-up game and that there was teaching to be done. That boy needed to learn something, and so did I. That boy needed to be disciplined, and so did I. And we both were. (We also ended up sitting together at lunch most days after that.)

Lessons My Mother Taught Me

My mother shaped my thinking about who I was and what I was capable of. She never said or did anything to cause me to believe that my blackness was a curse or a limitation. She gave me a sense of agency and accountability that remains with me to this day. She did this by advocating for me, protecting me, disciplining me, and sacrificing for me. There are myriad examples of this, but four stories in particular have always stood out in my mind.

My Mother Protected Me

The life of a single mother raising a son in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s was tough. There were drugs, gangs, crime, poverty, and a host of other traps to which a young man could fall prey. People often ask how I came out of all that unscathed. My answer is always the same: Frances Baucham. My mother was a tough, smart, hard-working, no-nonsense woman who did not suffer fools. Growing up, there were two things I never doubted: 1) my mother loved me, and 2) if I got out of line, she’d kill me!

One day, as a friend and I were walking home from the store, we took a routine shortcut through the back of a nearby housing project. As we walked and talked, we didn’t notice two young men following us. Suddenly, out of nowhere, they rushed us. One of them shoved a gun in my face while the other searched me and my friend for money and/or drugs. We had neither, so they took the bag of groceries we had just bought and ran off.

Not long after that incident, my mother decided it was time for a change of scenery. So we packed our things, got on a Greyhound bus, and for the next three days we crossed the United States to end up in Buford, South Carolina, where we would spend the next year and a half living with my mother’s oldest brother, Luther Sanders, and his wife before moving to Texas, the place I still call home. Not only would I go to high school, college, and seminary in Texas, but it is also where I met and married my wife, welcomed all nine of my children, and started my ministry. I often say, “I am a Californian by birth, but a Texan by the grace of God!”

Luther (or Uncle Kid, as we called him) was and is a hero. He is a laid-back, soft-spoken, slow-talkin’ Southerner. If you were to meet him, you might mistake him for a simple country boy. You would be wrong. Uncle Kid served for twenty-two years in the United States Marine Corps and survived two tours in Vietnam. He spent part of his time in the Marines as a drill instructor, some in K9 training and handling, and later became a certified scuba diver. Uncle Kid was so committed to the Corps that after 9/11, he walked onto the closest base and tried to reenlist. He was in his fifties at the time.

I could write an entire book about Uncle Kid. Perhaps someday I will. But for now, you just need to know that when my mother saw I needed something she felt she couldn’t provide for me by herself in Los Angeles, she knew where to go. It was the best thing that could have happened to me, and words are inadequate to express my gratitude.

My Mother Sacrificed for Me

My mother graduated from the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas, in 2000. She was forty-nine years old. I remember sitting in the audience and crying like a baby. My wife was rubbing my back and hugging my neck, and our children were asking, “What’s wrong with Daddy?” I couldn’t explain it at the time, but I would go on to use that moment to impress upon my children the value of sacrifice.

My mother graduated from college at forty-nine because she got pregnant at seventeen. Yes, she made a moral choice that cost her. However, not everyone faced with the consequences of that same moral dilemma decided to do what my mother did. Some chose abortion. (It wasn’t legal in the 1960s, but it was available.) Others chose to leave the child with a relative, while still others put their child in the system.

I do not presume to understand the circumstances that led other women to make different choices. This is not about them. My point is simply this: When they called my mother’s name and she walked across that stage to receive her diploma, her classmates and teachers applauded her because of the tenacity and determination she showed in working and going back to school in her forties. I, on the other hand, applauded her for the sacrifices she made earlier in life by working and raising a son by herself in her twenties and thirties. By the time my mother graduated from college, I had two bachelor’s degrees, a Master of Divinity, and was finishing a doctorate.

Some people see their parents’ diplomas on the wall as motivation for them to follow in Mom’s or Dad’s footsteps and get a degree. I had already done that. What I hadn’t done yet was raise my children and launch them into adulthood. My mother’s diploma said, “This is what sacrifice, determination, and redemption looks like.” My mother was neither a perfect woman nor a perfect parent. But in her imperfection, she showed me what it looks like to sacrifice for your kids.

My Mother Advocated for Me

My wife, Bridget, is often amazed by the stories my mother has told her about my days in elementary school. She finds it hard to fathom how much of a troublemaker I was. One of the stories my mother often tells is of the day she came to visit my class (probably for a parent/teacher conference about my behavior). My mother always had a job or two, so she would drop by the school whenever she could. That day she dropped by during reading time.

As she met with the teacher, she noticed that the books on my group’s table were different than those the other groups were reading. She asked about it and was told that my group was at a lower reading level. At that point, my mother called me to the teacher’s desk, gave me a look that shook me to my core, then turned to the teacher and said, “Give me a book.”

The teacher reached for one of the readers on her desk. “No,” my mother corrected her, “give me your book.” The teacher protested, assuring my mother that her book was far beyond my reading level, at which point my mother simply pointed to the book and held out her hand; the teacher handed her the book. My mother opened it to a random page, handed it to me, then folded her arms and said, “Read this, son.”

I knew I was in trouble. There was no way out. If I fumbled through the book, my mother would know I was playing dumb at school. However, if I read it, my teacher would know I had been, well, playing dumb at school. Either way, I knew I would be toast when I got home. So I did the only thing I could; I began to read the book. The teacher, a rather pale white woman, began to grow increasingly red. Her jaw dropped and her eyes doubled in circumference. S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Thought Line
• Introduction
• Chapter One: A Black Man
• Chapter Two: A Black Christian
• Chapter Three: Seeking True Justice
• Chapter Four: A New Religion
• Chapter Five: A New Priesthood
• Chapter Six: A New Canon
• Chapter Seven: The Ground Is Moving
• Chapter Eight: The Damage
• Chapter Nine: Aftershock
• Chapter Ten: Restoration and Mitigation
• Chapter Eleven: Solid Ground
• Appendix A: The Dallas Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel
• Appendix B: Original Resolution on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality
• Appendix C: SBC Resolution 9 on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality
• About the Author
• Copyright