Critical Race Theory, Toxic in the Home

Editor’s Note: The following article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Eikon.

Last year, I took a closer look at Critical Race Theory (CRT), and it struck me that CRT is more accurately construed as VRS — Vandalizing, Racialist, Stipulation — stipulation instead of theory since it simply imposes an arbitrary, cranky grid, indeed a vicious mindset, over the social world; racialist, or more nearly racist, since it obsesses over genetics and pigment, valorizing persons of color and demonizing whites; and vandalizing, since it traffics not in thoughtful criticizing, but rather in defacing and gutting Judeo-Christian, Western culture. 

It despises the civilizing work of the traditional, nuclear family, and the civilization it produces and nourishes. When bloody, revolutionary Marxism took hold of Russia but faltered in Germany and Italy, Antonio Gramsci retooled, promoting “cultural Marxism,” whereby class resentment could be insinuated into the various sectors of society to accomplish what Herbert Marcuse called “the long march through the institutions.” And what better institution to infect than the very first one, the family, which predates academia, the military, the arts, commerce, and human government.

Critical theory is an anti-biblical fraud, which seeks to dignify what the Scripture condemns — covetousness, resentment, slander, bitterness, and pride, marshalling them to bring down much that is innocent. Instead of following Paul’s instruction in Philippians 4 to dwell on things that are true, noble, just, pure, lovely, and of good report (such as a healthy Christian family), it schemes to exalt the bogus and noxious. It’s an ideology that divides the world into underserving haves and abused have-nots, the former ensconced as tyrants through systemic treacheries which must be exposed and smashed. 

It lacks what Karl Popper called “falsifiability.” In the end, nothing can count against it. As with Darwinian evolution, proponents will always find ways to adjust their conceit, adding another gazillion years to the story, hatching another “just-so story,” insulting the skeptics as knuckle-draggers, claiming that they themselves are the fountainhead of pure science, and so on. Of course, they’re desperate to do so. Like the old fellow with the worn out, backfiring jalopy, they stick with it since it’s their only ride.

To be sure, there are great wrongs in this world, evils that cry out for redress. Read Amos and see how a prophet announces God’s judgment on all sorts of corruption and nastiness. The New Testament picks up the grim indictment to include those guilty of social sins, such as murder, extortion, and lying (as in fraud and slander). Against these, God provides governmental “avengers to execute [his] wrath” (Rom 13:1–7). And, so, we have a Department of Justice assigned to root out and attack injustice, with specificity, plausibility, and even-handedness (at least, ideally so). But CRT traffics in free ranging and surly defamation in support of vaporous indictments of whole classes of people. 

CRT, “The Cause and Solution”

In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer offers up a toast, “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” I find an analogue in CRT: “We raise our glasses to blaming others for our plight! The cause of and answer to our situation.” (Of course, this isn’t just a race thing. It applies across the board to all of us who palliate ourselves by assigning culpability to others.) In 2023, newly-elected Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson defended the hundreds of black teens who came downtown for destructive rioting, saying that it wasn’t “constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” Classic deflection. 

Yes, the black community’s plight is real. In the summer of 2011, when I moved from Chicago back to Nashville, I read that the illegitimacy rate for black kids in Cook County stood at 79 percent (as compared to roughly 30 percent for Anglos and Hispanics). Several years later, when I led a seminary mission team to Detroit, I learned that the city had an 85 percent rate. As President Obama said in a rare moment of insight and candor, fatherhood was both important and declining among the people with whom he most closely identified. In a 2008 address to a Chicago church, he said,

But if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that too many fathers are missing — missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it. 

You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children. We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

And so we hear, “Wait! Are you saying we messed up, that we’re somehow to blame for these pathologies?” Better to take Mayor Johnson’s route and find someone else to stigmatize. Well, yes, Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” incentivized single-motherhood, with the promise of AFDC (Aid for Dependent Children) checks. But that doesn’t say much for parents who put income above sexual and familial decency. Well, let’s try this: We’re told that ante-bellum disregard for black family integrity established patterns of brokenness. But weren’t black marriages stronger a hundred years ago, when slavery was a far more recent phenomenon? 

Whatever! We all know that the guilty parties (or The Guilty Party) can be found elsewhere, what with their systemic wickedness. 

Oh, and don’t forget to install an insulating roll of “standpoint epistemology”: “You have no right to judge if you haven’t experienced my troubles.” This is the sort of thing abortion enthusiasts deploy to discount the counsel of men, a rhetorical “King’s X.”

My Folks Didn’t Play

By the grace of God, I found myself in a family which refused to gripe, though, on the CRT model, there were some grounds for petulance. But we were white — how is this possible?

Some background: My mother, Agnes, was born into a privileged home. Her father founded the Detroit Economic Club, and she was a class officer at the University of Michigan. Among other blessings, she enjoyed equestrian training as a young girl. Her brother went to Harvard and became a vice-president of J. L. Hudson’s, the Macy’s of Detroit. On the other hand, my father was born into a home which would soon be broken. His father worked for a lumber company in the “hollers” of East Tennessee. His family lived in a shack that was carried up into the hills by a flatbed railcar and, by means of a cable, was set off on the siding. (My dad remembers playing, as a small child, with the lift-ring in the middle of the floor.) When his parents’ marriage broke up, his mom took the kids to Atlanta, where, in high school, my dad earned some money as a messenger boy in a train yard, dodging engines as he hustled notes from one engineer to another. 

To make a long story short, he met my mother when, as a Naval chaplain in WWII, he was assigned to the Ford Motor Company Naval works in Dearborn, Michigan. Within several months, he would ship out for the Pacific, and they were married just before he did so. Her father was so disgusted that she’d thrown her life away with this wedding that he refused to attend it, and she soon departed for the South, where she took a job as dean of women at a little Christian college.

After the war, my dad used his G. I. Bill to earn a doctorate in church history at the University of Edinburgh, and he landed jobs teaching religion at a series of Southern Baptist-related colleges — Cumberland, Carson-Newman, Belmont, and Ouachita. Pay was lean, and supply preaching was a life-saver. Sometimes they paid him in produce or chickens, and I recall one bird running around the yard with his head cut off and my mom’s gutting and plucking it for a meal. 

And then there were the cars. Coming from a poor family, dad had to learn some auto mechanics, and this came in handy when, in the 1950s, he bought a broken down, hump-backed, WWII-era car from a destitute student for $50 and then fixed it up to drive us around town in the midst of the low-slung, jet-finned cars of the day. On trips to his mom in Florida, we’d stay in tourist homes with no TV’s and with bare light bulbs suspended by cords from the ceiling. We couldn’t afford ice cream, so mom served us some sort of vegetable oil substitute called Mellorine.

Finances were a challenge, but never once did I hear my mom complain about their circumstances. It was all thumbs-up and thank-the-Lord for what we had. No longing for the riches of Michigan, no lamenting missed opportunities to marry affluent classmates. We simply had no idea that, one day, the habit of muttering, griping, and recriminating (or the celebration thereof) would become stock in trade for the culture.

And then there was race. Looking back through my mom’s high school yearbooks from the 1930s, I saw black students in her Highland Park High School class. And now she was in the Jim Crow South, with its Dixiecrat segregation. And yes, our downtown, county-seat church was segregated, as were my public schools. My father’s childhood was in East Tennessee, where secession from the Union was opposed two-to-one. Both parents were pulling for the integrationists, with Winthrop Rockefeller elected in 1966 as the first Republican governor since Reconstruction.

That being said, I never heard my parents say a harsh word about the segregationists in our town and church (and they were there too). I recall the day that a wonderful man from Nigeria, the headmaster of a school established by our missionaries, came to our college and sought membership in our church, just a few blocks from the school. It created quite a stir, with six hundred people showing up for the big, Sunday morning vote. Though the longtime teacher of a men’s Sunday School class spoke against it, the vote went two to one in favor of admittance. The richest lady in the church, the one who’d just bought new robes for the choir, left in anger. Of course, we Coppengers were delighted with the tally. After all, we’d been singing “Red, and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight” throughout our childhood, and we’d been sending missionaries and funding to Nigeria throughout the years. How in the world could an old pillar of the church argue that the man would “be happier with his people on the west side of town”?

It was an honor to have the Nigerian over for meals in our home, and I enjoyed playing tennis with him. In this vein, Mom worked with black congregations in our town, enlisting help for the establishment of a charitable “Christmas store,” providing toys for disadvantaged kids. There was no doubt where my parents’ racial sympathies lie, but never was heard an unkind word toward those who did not share in them. And I’m confident that, had I been critical of segregationist townsfolk, I would have been rebuked. We didn’t do race-resentment in our house.

This fact came home to me recently when I was watching Jimmy Carter’s memorial service in the National Cathedral. In a eulogy, Andrew Young said that the president was “something of a miracle,” a product of the Deep South who could relate genuinely and effectively to all sorts of people:

I knew Plains from my pastorate in Thomasville, Georgia, about sixty, seventy miles south of there. And I was even nervous driving through Plains. And Plains and Sumter County gave us one of the meanest experiences that we had in the Civil Rights Movement. So much so that Martin Luther King said that the sheriff of Plains in Sumter County, he really thought was the meanest man in the world.

And when I first met Jimmy Carter running for governor and said, ‘The only thing I know about Plains and Sumter County is Fred Chapel.’ And he said, ‘Oh yes, he’s one of my good friends.’ And that was the last thing I wanted to hear. And yet, time and time again, I saw in him the ability to achieve greatness by the diversity of his personality and his upbringing.

The Family Health Clinic

The cultural forces arrayed against such a color-blind spirit are daunting. We live in a fever swamp of resentment and victimhood narratives, and it’s natural to be infected with various strains of racialism. I’ve been struck by how publishers, both secular and Christian, have gone whole hog into spreading the infection of surliness. In the last two months, I’ve made trips to New York and Portland, and found myself at two massive, legendary bookstores, the Strand and Powell’s. In both, I found double, floor-to-ceiling shelves, bearing hundreds of black-grievance works. For every Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, or Shelby Steele volume, you’d find scores in the Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Michael Dyson genre. 

Of course, the same emphasis predominates in the academy, broadcast media, and wherever cultural elites take charge. I recall my first visit to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Both the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and the glories of Oprah Winfrey (perhaps with her patronage) enjoyed substantial displays. But there was no mention of the inspiring story and signal judicial work of conservative justice Clarence Thomas.  The normal citizen is left to walk around in a fog of ideological racialism.

So, what’s the answer? I’d suggest another analogy. Through the years, I’ve found myself on several mission trips requiring a battery of shots and pills to keep us going, including guards against dengue and yellow fevers as well as malaria when we headed into the Amazon region of Brazil (turns out, I’d have profited from a dose of gamma globulin, which would have protected me from hepatitis A, which I caught from some unclean snacks offered up by well-meaning villagers). Similar medications prepared me for service in Sudan, the upper Nile region of Egypt, and remote Indonesia. 

So let’s think of the Christian family as the clinic where we get our spiritual vaccinations, inoculations, medications, and health advisories, to prepare us for dealing with the spiritual infections of the world. If the home is marinated in CRT passions, the kids are vulnerable to the formal and informal indoctrinations of a culture awash in peevish race obsession. Its instruments are dirty, its medicines contaminated or degraded.

And, so, the epidemic rages.