Wheaton College, once one of the finest Christian colleges in the country, proves yet again that evangelicalism has been corrupted by anti-biblical worldviews.

Recently, during a question-and-answer time following chapel, Wheaton College president, Philip Ryken, was asked if Wheaton teaches critical race theory (CRT). Presumably, the student was not asking whether professors teach about CRT as a much-criticized theory. Presumably, the student was asking if any professors promote or affirm CRT as they teach it. It has been reported that Ryken seemed uncomfortable with the question, but ultimately admitted that yes, Wheaton College does teach CRT.

As I wrote earlier (“Wildly Woke Wheaton College Professor Nathan Cartagena,” “Critical Race Theory Finds a Home a Wheaton College” ) Wheaton College Assistant Professor of Philosophy Nathan Cartagena teaches CRT. His faculty webpage says, “His teaching and scholarship focus on race, racism, [and] critical race theory.” So committed is he to promoting CRT that he made employment at Wheaton conditional on his freedom to promote it.

Cartagena is not alone. Here is the content of several slides Wheaton College Associate Professor of Anthropology Christine Jeske recently showed in class:

1. Race is a concept that was created by white people to gain social and economic privileges.
2. “Whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’ (Peggy McIntosh)
3. whiteness—A normative structure in society that marginalizes People of Color and privileges White People
4. Assumed racial comfort of whiteness—the habitus of whiteness learned in the United States includes: ▫ white people being able to avoid thinking about race ▫ white fragility

On Oct. 29, 2021, another Wheaton College anthropology professor, Brian Howell, tweeted twice on an article appearing in First Things Magazine and the subsequent response from a Wheaton College theology professor:

1. “Thank you, @commentmag, for providing space for a thoughtful response to a lamentable piece [by Gerald McDermott in First Things Magazine]. You model the sort of Christian commentary we desperately need today.”
2. This is exactly the right response to a lamentable piece from @firstthingsmag. Thank you, @vbacote! Please. Do better, First Things

In both tweets, Howell linked to the “thoughtful response” by Wheaton’s Vince Bacote, Professor of Theology and Director of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics.

The “lamentable” article to which Bacote was responding is titled “Woke Theory at Evangelical Colleges”  by Gerald McDermott, editor of the anthology Race and Covenant, that includes essays by, among others, Alveda King, Carol Swain, Glenn C. Loury, and Robert L. Woodson, Sr.

In a measured tone, McDermott warns Christian parents who “assume that evangelical institutions are free from” secular ideologies like CRT to look more closely at such institutions given some recent events at Wheaton College, Baylor University, and Samford University. He provides specific evidence to justify his concerns.

Bacote begins his “thoughtful response” by expressing his “exasperation and anger” about McDermott’s “lamentable” article, which Bacote claims suffers from “minimal evidence, anonymous voices, and suggestions of infidelity to the faith.” He described the article as “ephemeral” and “thin, because the article seems not to be the result of an effort to know what is really happening at institutions like my own and others.”  Bacote “wonders whether McDermott thought to go to the sources of purported wokeness at Wheaton, Baylor, and Samford, instead of merely to the voices of concern or worry.”

Bacote also acknowledged the temptation to take the “road of holy rage,” but decided instead to write “from a place of lament.” Yeah, right.

Bacote blames the adoption of a “secular gospel” by “evangelical institutions”—presumably including evangelical colleges like Wheaton—on the failure of these institutions to do the following:

to become places founded on the biblical truth of a God who wants His people to be agents of justice, places that are part of a kingdom whose citizens pursue a primary fidelity to God alone … places filled with kingdom citizens who love their neighbors as themselves  … places that lead the way in showing how people across races and cultures can live well together; places whose members seek a sanctified life expressed by forms of public engagement that help our country become a place of flourishing for all citizens.

Ironically, Bacote doesn’t provide any evidence for his rather breathtaking indictment of evangelical institutions. He doesn’t even try to prove that evangelical institutions have failed to become places founded on the biblical truth of a God who wants His people to become agents of justice or that they have failed to become places filled with kingdom citizens who love their neighbors as themselves. Bacote provides less evidence for his expansive charges than McDermott does for his limited claims.

Bacote alleges McDermott took a statement made by Dr. Sheila Caldwell out of context—a statement McDermott included as evidence for his claim that Wheaton may be awokening.

Until June, Caldwell was Wheaton’s Chief Cultural Engagement Officer, a position she left to become Southern Illinois University System’s Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer. In order to fill in the gap that so incensed Bacote, I will provide more of the context of Caldwell’s surprising (and some would say inappropriate) speech to students at Wheaton’s “Inaugural Racialized Minority Recognition Ceremony” (to clarify the murky sophistry, this was Wheaton’s first racially segregated graduation ceremony). Here is the larger context of the quote McDermott included in his “lamentable” article. These are the words of Dr. Sheila Caldwell:

We must resist America and her institutions when they place limits on our God-given abilities and attempt to regulate us to a caste system, which is defined as a system that presumes the supremacy of one group over another based on arbitrary boundaries to keep the right groups in their assigned place. In other words, if you are a racialized ethnic minority, the caste system communicates that your place in society is beneath the majority or privileged caste. …

As a black woman, many have tried to condition me to believe that if I do not assimilate or if I do not conform to the white power structures or if I’m not deferential and submissive to the patriarchy, then I’m a problem, [that] if I speak boldly, and directly, and clearly that I’ll be perceived as someone who is angry or ill-tempered. Their aim is to have me shrink myself to make them feel more comfortable and to not resist the caste position that was not only assigned to me but my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents in America.

And I’m not the only woman from a racialized ethnic background that has been imprisoned by a tyrannical caste system. One aspect of living with dignity is acknowledging others who have suffered under the dominant caste. Dr. Larycia Hawkins was another woman who experienced more pain than protection because she was not a member of the privileged group.

During my early tenure at Wheaton College, I embarked on a listening tour and came to learn from the testimonies of over ninety individuals that Dr. Hawkins was deeply admired by faculty, staff, students as well as alumni in the Wheaton College community. Every last one of them initiated a conversation without my prompting. I’ve never spoken to Dr. Hawkins. I’ve never met her. But without my prompting, over ninety people decided they wanted me to know what they thought of her.

The overwhelming majority spoke favorably about her unflappable disposition and deep convictions that was [sic] misinterpreted by some as insolence and insubordination.

As I close out my tenure at Wheaton College, I continue to bend my ear to stories told and untold about Dr. Hawkins. Stories that speak to her walking with dignity and declaring her full humanity as a black woman, stories of her maintaining grace, integrity, and composure when she was pressured to know her place and stay in her place. She refused to defer to structures and processes that would cement her position in the American caste system.

In the same way, I would encourage you to not only resist powerful, inequitable infrastructures but to work relentlessly and passionately to pursue anti-racism—not only for yourselves—but for all who are equally, wonderfully, and fearfully made in the image of God.

What I would also like to say is that the spirit of God led me to say that, so please don’t call the Alumni Office. Please don’t email SAC [Senior Administrative Cabinet].

Does it concern Bacote or Howell that while First Things subscribers were free to read McDermott’s article or not, Caldwell delivered her screed to a captive audience there to see their children’s accomplishments honored—not to hear an embittered social justice warrior accuse without evidence Wheaton College of racism?

I’m not sure how Caldwell knew that it was the spirit of God that led her to condemn her employers at a graduation ceremony and without providing evidence. And I’m not sure how she knew it was the spirit of God that led her to remain silent on other aspects of the Larycia Hawkins mess—aspects that many of the parents in the audience might not have known.

For example, Caldwell could have mentioned that Larycia Hawkins said Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Wheaton administrators and the Board of Trustees may have found that more significant than Hawkins’ unflappability.

On Dec. 10, 2016, Hawkins wrote in a Facebook post,

I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.

I wonder too if Bacote was troubled by the absence of evidence from Caldwell for her claims.

Who tried to condition Caldwell to believe that she had to assimilate or conform to white power structures or to believe that if she spoke directly and clearly, she would be perceived as angry?

How did that conditioning happen?

What specifically are the white power structures to which she was conditioned to assimilate?

Was this conditioning implemented by one person, two, ten? Were the conditioners white or black? Was the conditioning part of a system, or was it committed by sinful individuals? If it was part of a structure, what was the structure?

Who misinterpreted Larycia Hawkins’ “deep convictions”?

What specifically did Hawkins say that was viewed as “insolence and insubordination”? Who viewed Hawkins’ mysterious statements as “insolence and insubordination”?

Since “Every last one” of the ninety people “initiated a conversation” with Caldwell about Hawkins without Caldwell’s “prompting,” what exactly was she asking when she embarked on her listening tour over three years ago? It’s odd that alumni would seek out a new employee to share their unsolicited feelings about a person who hadn’t worked at Wheaton for three years. Enquiring minds would like to know a bit about the political orientation of the ninety people who pursued Caldwell to share their unsolicited feelings about Hawkins.

One wonders if Caldwell thought to go to the sources of purported lack of protection for or misinterpretation of Hawkins or if Bacote thought to go to Caldwell for the names and evidence.

Bacote may have a point about the failure of evangelical institutions to address justice from a biblical perspective. I can’t recall hearing from Wheaton College professors or President Ryken about the injustice of men masquerading as women and invading women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. I can’t recall hearing about Wheaton profs protesting the manifestly unjust sexual integration of women’s sports or the efforts to compel teachers to refer to students by incorrect pronouns that deny God’s created order. Do the social justice warriors among Wheaton faculty protest the obscene novels and plays purchased with their tax dollars and which promote biblically prohibited sexual deviance to children? Do Bacote, Howell, and other wokesters at this leading evangelical institution lead the fight against the chemical and surgical mutilation of minors and adults as a “treatment” for healthy bodies created by God? Do those failures exasperate and enrage Vince Bacote and Brian Howell?

In conclusion, Gerald McDermott’s thoughtful warnings are warranted.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Wheaton-College-Is-Not-Your-Grandfathers-College.mp3

Here’s an excerpt from a July 7, 2020, blog post titled “The White Man Leading the White Man’s Party—and the White Church” written by Nathan Cartagena, associate professor of philosophy at evangelical flagship Wheaton College:

From his birtherism charges against President Obama, to his threats against “bad hombres,” to his bragging about getting away with sexual assault, candidate Trump signaled that he was going to be a white man’s president, dedicated to tapping into and drawing from the U.S.’s deep white nationalist roots and their accompanying sexism. Since ascending to office, he’s labored to establish Trumpism identity politics for white folks. And the Republican establishment has coddled his efforts, as Senator McConnell’s four-year defense of President Trump makes clear.

President Trump and establishment Republicans like Senator McConnell show no signs of ceasing their strategic gendered racism. Instead, they’re doubling down on it to keep their base. Yes, they’re cunning enough to place white women such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany before reporters. But they know these women will pull all necessary stops to promulgate the Party’s racist, patriarchal agenda. Sanders relentlessly lied. Kayleigh tirelessly defends Trump while claiming “I know who I’m ultimately working for, and it’s the big guy upstairs.”

…

[R]emember that a white man is leading a white party—and the white church is promoting both. What you’re witnessing is a byproduct of the seventies, the latest manifestation of the deplorable linking of Christianity and male-exulting whiteness. … And, to rift [sic] on St. Paul, beware: You may become someone’s enemy if you tell the truth about the Republican Party’s strategic gendered racism. Christian or not, President Trump’s followers prefer their white lies.

Cartagena seems not to remember that Senator McConnell was compelled by the corrupt antics of Democrats to defend former President Trump against a series of lies, including the whopper about Russian collusion paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Apparently Cartagena would have preferred Christians vote for the lying, race-exploiting, abortion cheerleader Hillary Clinton who supports compulsory taxpayer-funding of human slaughter throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy for any or no reason.

Does Cartagena have any problem with those Christians who voted for either the corrupt Hillary Clinton or the equally corrupt Joe Biden, both members of the party that, as black professor Carol Swain wrote for Prager U,

defended slavery, started the Civil War, opposed Reconstruction, founded the Ku Klux Klan, imposed segregation, perpetrated lynchings, and fought against the civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s.

In contrast, the Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party. Its mission was to stop the spread of slavery into the new western territories with the aim of abolishing it entirely. This effort, however, was dealt a major blow by the Supreme Court. In the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, the court ruled that slaves aren’t citizens; they’re property. The seven justices who voted in favor of slavery? All Democrats. The two justices who dissented? Both Republicans. …

[A]fter Reconstruction ended, when the federal troops went home, Democrats roared back into power in the South. They quickly reestablished white supremacy across the region with measures like black codes – laws that restricted the ability of blacks to own property and run businesses. And they imposed poll taxes and literacy tests, used to subvert the black citizen’s right to vote.

For decades, the Democrat party passed laws and endorsed policies to buy black votes even when those policies destroyed the black family, killed black babies, kept black children in lousy schools, and made urban black communities unlivable. Does Cartagena think those laws and policies are racist?

What about efforts by leftists to defund police which will inevitably result in more black deaths? Are those racist?

Cartagena calls Sarah Huckabee Sanders a liar and implies both Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany are female tokens. Well, is Jen Psaki a liar? Did she lie when she blamed the defunding of police on Republicans? Rhetorical questions, obviously.

Cartagena whines about the GOP’s alleged “patriarchal agenda” and “gendered racism” but says nothing about Biden’s gendered racism in deliberately choosing members of his administration based—not on merit, wisdom, knowledge, or experience—but on their skin color and sex. Biden makes no secret about his commitment to tokenism, aka “gendered racism.”

I’m not sure what a “patriarchal agenda” is or why Cartagena opposes it seeing as the Bible has a lot of good stuff to say about patriarchs and patriarchal structures. But coming from a leftist, this term would suggest Cartagena holds women in high esteem. For those who hold women in high esteem, it would seem that Trump would have been the preferred candidate over both Hillary and Biden, since both have made it clear they support the sexual integration of girls’ and women’s private spaces and sports.

Cartagena writes about critical race theory (CRT)—a lot and favorably. Much of his writing is academic in nature, picking apart arguments from scholars critical of CRT—you know, dancing on the heads of pins kind of stuff. He takes particular aim at Manhattan Institute senior fellow, Christopher F. Rufo, who has been influential in exposing the tenets and influence of CRT in academia, the corporate world, and the government—including the military. About Rufo, Cartagena says,

Culture-war agitators such as Rufo aren’t interested in offering a just, charitable understanding of CRT.

As evidence for this claim, Cartagena provides a decontextualized tweet—yes, a tweet. That doesn’t seem all that charitable now, does it?

But while he fusses about whether some critic gets a point wrong or misses a point, Cartagena doesn’t spend much time acknowledging that when scholarly theories wend their way down the sewage pipe from sullied Ivory Towers, academic theories morph. Big theories pass through filters that strain out the minutiae scholars love to debate. Large chunks of excrement remain to pollute culture. Right now, ideas derived from Marxism, critical theory, and CRT are stinkin’ up the joint.

In addition to CRT theorists Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Cartagena cites Paulo Freire—a lot and favorably—calling him a “Brazilian Christian.” Since “Christian” means many things to many people, a bit more information from Cartagena about Freire’s Christianity might be helpful to Cartagena’s readers, particularly students.

Freire was a Brazilian Marxist/Christian socialist, heavily influenced by liberation theology. Other  thinkers who influenced him include “Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, as well as the radical intellectuals Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Georg Lukács.”

Freire wrote the well-known book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which former City-Journal writer Sol Stern critiqued in an article titled “Pedagogy of the Oppressor,” (subtitled, “Another reason U.S. ed schools are so awful: the ongoing influence of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire”). Stern describes Freire’s polemic as a “derivative, unscholarly book about oppression, class struggle, the depredations of capitalism, and the need for revolution.”

Cartagena wants the church and all of America to study CRT as intensely as leftist scholars study it, and unless they do, any criticism of CRT is, in Cartagena’s view, illegitimate:

Because marginalization and oppression in pigmentocracies operate along racialized lines, Christians should share the common interests of critical race theorists. And they should recognize that assessments of those scholar’s conclusions must be robust and nuanced. An endorsement or rejection of CRT requires examining a lot of U.S. history—especially U.S. legal history—political philosophy, sociology, and theology. … We must repent of our shoddy, unjust presentations of CRT. We must labor to understand and evaluate CRT in light of history, political philosophy, sociology, and theology and the movement’s internal diversity. This is what neighborly love demands.

I’m not sure that “neighborly love” demands the kind of lucubration of an academic theory Cartagena demands.  Does neighborly love demand such laborious study of other academic theories? If so, which ones?

His assertion seems a clever way to use Scripture to force Christians either to spend inordinate amounts of time studying CRT or remain silent. His tricksy reasoning is based on the biblical truth that God commands us to love our neighbors. Then he asserts—with no biblical warrant—that “neighborly love demands” that Christians “labor to understand and evaluate CRT in light of history, political philosophy, sociology, and theology and the movement’s internal diversity.”

I haven’t read everything the Cartagena, prolific devotee of CRT,  has written on CRT (or “whiteness“) but so far I haven’t read anything suggesting he believes neighborly love demands the same kind of in depth study accompanied by “robust and nuanced” assessments of criticism of CRT.

No word about whether all teaching of CRT principles and tenets should be banned in public schools unless and until teachers prove they have studied CRT and its critics deeply.

And no word about whether public school teachers should advocate for CRT or present it without bias or favor.

I first wrote about Cartagena in May in an article about Wheaton’s RACIALIZED MINORITY RECOGNITION CEREMONY, which followed close on the heels of Wheaton’s controversial decision to cancel a plaque honoring slain missionaries, replacing it with one more palatable to Wheaton wokesters—one that removes references to the savagery of the killers who happened to be indigenous people.

With Wheaton awash in wokery, the following letter from Wheaton College president Philip Ryken to the Wheaton College community in the fall of 2020—just after the spring and summer destructive, violent BLM/Antifa insurrections—shouldn’t surprise anyone. Disappoint? Yes. Surprise? Not so much.

Dear Campus Community,

We all are witnesses to the egregious and senseless violence that recently claimed the lives of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. Their deaths speak to the enduring presence of systemic and institutional racism within our society. As a community, we are deeply distressed by violent acts that have persisted in our country for more than four centuries.

As Christ followers, we denounce systemic racism and police brutality against any racial or ethnic group. Today especially our hearts are filled with pain for the inhumane treatment of our brothers and sisters in the African American community. We stand united with African American students, faculty, and staff who are all deeply affected by these ongoing acts of racial violence and other sinful injustices, often on a daily basis.

…

[W]e are also committed to identifying and addressing policies and systems in our own institution that hinder access and success of members who belong to marginalized and oppressed groups. In order to have the impact on the world that God is calling us to have, we are resolved to think and act in ways that create a more loving, equitable, and just community.

Wheaton College pursues a biblical commitment to respect and love all people as equal image-bearers of Jesus Christ. This is mandated by Scripture, promised in our Community Covenant, and detailed in our Christ-Centered Diversity Commitment.

…

To the members of our community belonging to the African diaspora, please know that you have our love, support, and concern.

Disabuse yourselves of any fanciful notion that Cartagena is the only wokester at Wheaton. He’s not. Parents considering paying boatloads of money to send their kids to Wheaton College might want to consider other, less woke Christian colleges. And Wheaton donors might want to reconsider how they steward their donations.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Wildly-Woke-Wheaton-College-Professor-Nathan-Cartagena.mp3

It’s a curious phenomenon that racists rarely see their own racism—the plank in their own eyes. That was true during the long, torturous days of slavery. It was true during the long torturous days of Jim Crow laws. It was true during the Civil Rights Movement. And it’s true now. No, it’s not conservatives who are spreading racism while remaining blithely blind to it. It’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and BLM who are spreading racism like manure throughout our cultural system. And it’s racist Ibram X. Kendi who sees himself as “anti-racist” and wrote,

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

And like racists of yore, they profit handsomely from their efforts to encourage Americans to judge people by the color of their skin.

Leftist change-agents posing as “diversity educators” have captured the wills of corporate executives. Now Big Business is in the business of not only selling goods and services but also in repackaging racism as “antiracism” and browbeating employees into pretending they believe it.

Prior to capturing the wills of corporate execs—not known for their familiarity with or investment in arcane academic theories or for steely-spined moral integrity—leftist change-agents in sullied ivory towers captured the wills of teachers and administrators—not known for independent or “critical” thinking, or for commitments to diversity, inclusivity, or tolerance. In my experience, will-capturing of yellow-bellied teachers and administrators is an almost effortless task. All it takes is a bit of name-calling topped by a dollop of mockery, and the spineless among us bend like paper straws dipped in a Big Gulp.

Now states are requiring ongoing critical race theory (CRT) indoctrination for staff and faculty. Schools are forcing white students to engage in exercises designed to make them feel shame for their skin color (goodbye self-esteem movement).  And schools are racially segregating students in what are euphemistically called “affinity” groups. “Separate but equal” has returned with a vengeance thanks to vengefully regressive “progressives.”

That probably explains why administrators and faculty said next to nothing when the increasingly woke, decreasingly conservative evangelical Wheaton College held a racially segregated pre-graduation ceremony for colorful people on May 8, 2021, which was advertised as “RACIALIZED MINORITY RECOGNITION CEREMONY” (all caps in original) and held in the campus chapel. While it was created “Especially for undergraduate students, staff, and faculty of color,” the school provided “limited seating” for colorless people. I wonder if those seats were way in the back.

One Wheaton faculty member who likely loves Wheaton’s embrace of re-segregation is associate professor of philosophy and critical race theorist Nathan Cartagena who was recently interviewed for leftist Christian Jim Wallis’ Sojourners’ magazine. In this interview, Cartagena explained how he sussed out Wheaton’s friendliness to CRT by delivering a visiting lecture on controversial critical race theorist Tommy Curry during the interview process:

I wanted to see: Is this a place that would welcome such reflection? I received a warm welcome from the students, my department, etc., so I thought “OK, this is a place where I can do this.”

And by “do this,” Cartagena meant, not expose students to the debate on CRT, but to promote CRT:

I taught a reading group my first year at Wheaton that involved one of the important texts in the critical race theory movement, Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell. The following year I asked if I could teach a half-semester class on critical race theory—I got a full thumbs up.

Derrick Bell is another controversial figure in the critical race theory movement “whose writings on ‘critical race theory,’” conservative African American economist Thomas Sowell explains “promoted an extremist hostility to white people.”

Sowell described the academic transformation of Bell, attributing it largely to his scholarly inadequacy at Harvard:

As a full professor at Harvard Law, Derrick Bell was … surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic scholars. What were his options at this point?

If he played it straight, he could not expect to command the respect of either the faculty or the students — or, more important, his own self-respect. …

Derrick Bell’s options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars — or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond.

His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose. His previous writings had been those of a sensible man saying sensible things about civil-rights issues that he understood from his years of experience as an attorney. But now he wrote all sorts of incoherent speculations and pronouncements, the main drift of which was that white people were the cause of black people’s problems.

Cartagena openly admits the cunning way he gets his students to accept CRT:

When I was first teaching on CRT, I was very explicit about when something was a CRT essay or quote. Now, one of the things I do is I present CRT literature without telling students that it’s CRT literature. Then I ask them what they think about it. The overwhelming response from the students is: “Wow, this essay is so rigorously researched, so clear, and so well-argued. Even if I don’t agree with every claim, I learned so much,” etc. Then, after they’ve sung a little praise song, [laughs] I tell them they’ve read a piece by a critical race theorist. You can see a look of disillusionment set in — this part gets really hard, if I’m honest. On the one hand, it’s a healthy destabilization. You’ve gotta remember that a lot of my students are racialized white folks. If they’re not now going to say that everything they just said was false, how do they reckon with believing there are things to learn from critical race theorists while knowing that the stakes, in some of these communities they’ve been a part of, are so high that to say such is to find themselves ostracized?

While this tactic appears to be a means to enable students to approach ideas objectively, with a mind decluttered and “decolonized” by the detritus of white privilege and systemic racism, educators know it’s a tactic that can be used to propagandize. Presenting students with an interpretive lens beclouded by jargon, ambiguous language, assumptions, and subtexts with which students have no familiarity doesn’t educate; it indoctrinates.

At least as offensive is Cartagena’s evident pleasure in “destabilizing” his students and emotionally manipulating them by manufacturing cognitive dissonance.

Enquiring donors and parents considering sending their children to Wheaton may want to know if Cartagena spends equal time having students study any of the many works of criticism of CRT like Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everyone or Voddie Baucham’s book Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe.

Anthony Esolen, professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, senior editor at Touchstone Magazine, and contributing editor at Crisis Magazine, opposes the teaching of CRT in schools:

The problem is that the schools shouldn’t be teaching any “theory” of human behavior at all, for two principal reasons. First, the students do not have anything close to the learning or the broad human experiences that would serve as evidence for checking the theory. For the same reason why it is pointless, and perhaps destructive, to teach literary theory to young people who have hardly begun to read literature at all, because they have no evidence or experience from which to judge the theory, and they will instead be prone to force what literature they do encounter to fit the predeterminations of the theory, so it is pointless, and probably destructive, to teach some theory of human behavior to children who need first to have the experiences, personal or vicarious, that the theory purports to explain.

But the second reason … is more grave. It is that human behavior does not admit of that kind of theory at all. I am not talking here about moral philosophy, or about anthropological observations, or about history and its more or less reliable guidelines. All “theories” of human behavior are necessarily ideological and reductive: whether it’s from Skinner or Marx, it doesn’t matter. The simplest things we do in a given day are steeped in so many motives, passions, thoughts, physical exigencies, and moral commitments, we dare not simply paste a label on them to explain them away and have done with them.

There are glimmers of hope that Americans on both the right and left may be approaching their limits with the racist “antiracism” movement. Virtually everyone on the right and increasing numbers of people on the left are fed up with the ubiquitous manifestations of critical race theory. Americans see CRT is corrosive and divisive. They see CRT is being used to control discourse. And they see that “progressives” are passing CRT off as inarguable, objective truth. “Progressives,” in control of most of the levers of power and influence, feel no obligation to debate CRT’s arguable assumptions. Nor will they acknowledge that CRT is arguable as they use hard-earned tax dollars to promulgate it in government schools. And hoo boy, are they promulgating.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CRT-at-Wheaton-College.mp3

Join us in Collinsville on Saturday, May 22nd for an IFI Worldview Conference about CRT!