Doug Stuart: Welcome to another episode of The Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of The Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network.
Doug Stuart: I am your host, Doug Stuart, and with me, if you’re watching on YouTube, you can see, I have Ed Uszynski with us.
Doug Stuart: He is a content specialist for crew, athletes in action, and family life for over three decades.
Doug Stuart: He also serves as a oneness and diversity consultant for church and parachurch organizations.
Doug Stuart: He’s written on a range of online platforms, and he is a frequent speaker and podcaster on the topics of race, sport culture, and marriage.
Doug Stuart: Ed, thank you for joining me.
Ed Uszynski: Those three don’t seem to go together, do they?
Ed Uszynski: That’s kind of a wild bio, but those are the lanes I’ve been running in for a long time.
Doug Stuart: Well, I have to ask, the sport culture, where does that come in?
Ed Uszynski: Well, because the primary ministry that I’ve worked with for 30 years, like you mentioned, is athletes in action.
Ed Uszynski: So that’s the sport ministry of crew.
Ed Uszynski: So my main job in life has been to do ministry with college and professional athletes across the last three decades.
Ed Uszynski: And then that branched into marriage ministry with family life.
Ed Uszynski: And my wife and I speak at weekend to remember conferences for them.
Ed Uszynski: And I’ve been in this race lane for decades as well.
Ed Uszynski: So they’ve all kind of been mashed together.
Doug Stuart: Gotcha.
Ed Uszynski: I’m actually probably not with crew anymore at this point.
Ed Uszynski: And I’ve kind of been planning an exit anyways, just so that I can get my hands in more outside the organization.
Ed Uszynski: And for some other reasons that maybe we can talk about here.
Ed Uszynski: But yeah, I’m kind of moving into a new season, I think, where I’m going to try to be available to more organizations and have more opportunities.
Doug Stuart: Yeah.
Doug Stuart: You look like you were into sports.
Doug Stuart: Did you play any sports?
Ed Uszynski: I was a basketball player.
Doug Stuart: Okay, great.
Doug Stuart: Yeah, that’s cool.
Doug Stuart: So let me tell you a little bit about why I found your book.
Doug Stuart: We’re talking about, I’m going to hold it up here for the camera for those watching.
Doug Stuart: It’s Untangling Critical Race Theory, What Christians Need to Know, Why It Matters.
Doug Stuart: I’ve done a handful of episodes on Critical Race Theory.
Doug Stuart: We call it Critical Conversations.
Doug Stuart: People can go to libertarianchristians.com, listen to those, watch some of them.
Doug Stuart: Conversations, I think it’s important for us to know what’s going on in the world.
Doug Stuart: And for me, talking about race in general, in a really serious way, happened when I was in seminary, which was nearly two decades ago.
Doug Stuart: And I remember at a very diverse seminary class of about 25 to 30 students, maybe a little bit more than that.
Doug Stuart: I think that’s about right, though.
Doug Stuart: Very diverse.
Doug Stuart: And we read one of the books that you mentioned.
Doug Stuart: It’s kind of the first book for evangelicals to sort of, which is, I don’t forget the title.
Doug Stuart: I just know the Christian Smith and Michael Emerson.
Ed Uszynski: Divided by Faith.
Ed Uszynski: It was called Divided by Faith.
Doug Stuart: And they used the, what was it?
Doug Stuart: The word racialized was kind of the term they used as opposed to racist versus racism.
Doug Stuart: And I remember having to read that book, had some assignments on it, had some very important conversations around it in the classroom.
Doug Stuart: And it was a lot to wrestle with.
Doug Stuart: And moved on through seminary, did some other things.
Doug Stuart: And now critical race theory is kind of in the news because, I don’t know, Chris Ruffo wants it to be in the news, that kind of thing.
Doug Stuart: Those kinds of things happen.
Doug Stuart: And then there’s this knee-jerk reaction to things.
Doug Stuart: And I look at pretty much any politician or any sort of grandstander, if you will, who says, oh, well, critical race theory is the next biggest threat, or this thing is the next biggest threat.
Doug Stuart: I look a little bit askance at that because they’re trying to gin up controversy, right?
Doug Stuart: They’re trying to create anxiety and all that.
Doug Stuart: And so usually I don’t trust the amount of negativity toward it that it might warrant.
Doug Stuart: So I decided because it was really, really popular to actually read about it and dive into it a little bit more.
Doug Stuart: And so that’s kind of been my journey, learning a little bit more about it.
Doug Stuart: I think you have obviously a different journey.
Doug Stuart: I want you to share that because it’s really important to understand that before we get into actually talking about the topic of race and the topic of whether CRT is worth anything and why does it matter to a Christian?
Ed Uszynski: Well, and before I take the mic, can I push it back to you just for a second?
Ed Uszynski: When you say that the Divided by Faith book was a lot to work through, what did that mean for you?
Ed Uszynski: I mean, did you find yourself agreeing, disagreeing?
Ed Uszynski: Some of it’s not really whether you agree or disagree.
Ed Uszynski: It just is, right?
Ed Uszynski: Because they were doing a sociological study and they had lots of numbers and statistics and surveys they had done.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, what was your own reaction to it out of your background?
Doug Stuart: No, that’s a really good question, Ed.
Doug Stuart: What stood out to me in my memory, at least, was the conversations in the classroom, and I didn’t even visualize some of those, and sitting with a Korean cohort.
Doug Stuart: It was a cohort is kind of what we call it in the class, but Korean colleagues, some black colleagues, others who wouldn’t be quite white but not quite black, and I can’t remember everything.
Doug Stuart: And we had conversations about that, and the parts of it that I remember are non-white races really liking their non-white, identified church congregations.
Doug Stuart: We like to go to a Korean church, would be kind of like, and I don’t need to go to a white church, or I don’t need to go to a church that’s white plus black plus Korean plus this plus that.
Doug Stuart: That might be good as a global church kind of vision, but in terms of local congregations, what’s so bad about being Korean and just getting together with Koreans and worshiping in our language and that kind of thing?
Doug Stuart: And I came from a perspective at the time, and I’m probably, as I’m getting older, I’m probably a little less in the posture of I’m here to learn more because I’m not in seminary right now.
Doug Stuart: You go to seminary, you’re there to learn more and soak up as much as you can.
Doug Stuart: At least I hope that’s what people are there for.
Doug Stuart: And I was willing to hear and learn from things, but some things didn’t sit right with me in that.
Doug Stuart: And that book brought up the conversation.
Doug Stuart: The professor was leading some of these, and it was very well done.
Doug Stuart: I couldn’t see an agenda in the professor to get white people to feel guilty or anything like that.
Doug Stuart: I know you’ve spoken about that.
Doug Stuart: It all matters in the facilitation.
Doug Stuart: But for the way that I experienced it was, I wasn’t sure that some of the data that they were coming out with was necessarily problematic.
Doug Stuart: Again, I don’t remember all the details.
Doug Stuart: That book is on my shelf.
Doug Stuart: I haven’t touched it in years.
Doug Stuart: So I can’t quite answer your question fully in terms of how I was reacting at the time.
Doug Stuart: But I did learn through that experience in seminary, in that class, and by having African American classmates, that I was woefully unprepared for understanding their perspective and understanding their experience.
Doug Stuart: And it wasn’t a matter of just like looking down on any particular way of doing church or anything like that.
Doug Stuart: I wasn’t at that stage in my Christian development in any way.
Doug Stuart: It was just more like, well, we’re different and you go to your church and you go to this church.
Doug Stuart: And the church that I go to is predominantly white and it’s in a neighborhood that’s predominantly white.
Doug Stuart: We don’t live in the city, so it’s not going to attract those types of people.
Doug Stuart: And I kind of shrugged it off.
Doug Stuart: White people need Jesus too.
Doug Stuart: And white middle-class people need Jesus too.
Doug Stuart: And to do church in a certain way everywhere in America is probably, that’s kind of where I arrive.
Doug Stuart: It’s like we have the ability to be diverse in our local congregations, because that was kind of the focusing question in that conversation.
Ed Uszynski: So anyway, thanks for sharing all that.
Doug Stuart: Welcome to the Ed Uszynski Podcast, where he asked Doug Stuart his issues on race.
Ed Uszynski: I’ve got more questions right now.
SPEAKER_4: We can flip this now.
Ed Uszynski: They don’t want to know about me.
Ed Uszynski: Let me dig into more of your thoughts.
SPEAKER_1: Well, you know what?
Doug Stuart: My listeners know that I’m pretty transparent when it comes to things.
Doug Stuart: And there are moments where they like to hear about me too, but I’m going to go ahead and make you talk next and tell us your story.
Doug Stuart: Because your story, I wasn’t getting a PhD or anything, but when you got a PhD, it was on this topic.
Doug Stuart: And it was, I think, more recently, which I think is during a time where it was more specifically about some of these hot button issues.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, it was in 2008, actually.
Ed Uszynski: So it was before they all became hot button.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, so maybe let me just, let me go back further then just for a second again, because nobody knows me on here.
Ed Uszynski: But I grew up in a very racially mixed environment.
Ed Uszynski: And I thought that was the way it was for everybody.
Ed Uszynski: It wasn’t until I got to college that I found out that was actually kind of an outlier experience to grow up with a lot of black folks, a lot of Puerto Rican folks.
Ed Uszynski: It was a strong Puerto Rican contingency.
Ed Uszynski: I was on the west side of Cleveland.
Ed Uszynski: And really, there were all kinds of different Eastern European ethnicities.
Ed Uszynski: I mean, we had an international festival every year in the summertime where all the different ethnicities were celebrated, you know?
Ed Uszynski: So that was just a big part of my upbringing.
Ed Uszynski: And then when I became a Christian, when I was at Kent State University as a freshman, and when I graduated, I joined CRU with Athletes in Action.
Ed Uszynski: And that is a predominantly white evangelical organization.
Ed Uszynski: Again, those are loaded terms these days.
Ed Uszynski: But back then, it was not nearly as loaded, and everybody just understood that that’s what it was.
Ed Uszynski: And so I was able to do kind of a deep dive just into that form of evangelicalism, which was sort of the predominant form in the late 20th century, right?
Ed Uszynski: From Billy Graham in the 1950s, and the Bill Brights and the Dawson Troutmans who started Navigators and some of these big parachurch organizations.
Ed Uszynski: There were certain qualities and attributes that sort of characterized that movement, influenced by the religious rights significantly, influenced them by Republican politics significantly, because there was such a merger there.
Ed Uszynski: Mega churches were part of that whole world.
Ed Uszynski: Individualism and the personal choice to come to Jesus, right?
Ed Uszynski: And again, I’m not saying whether those are good or bad things at this moment.
Ed Uszynski: That’s just what it was.
Ed Uszynski: So I did a deep dive into that.
Ed Uszynski: And then I’ve always been a bit of a book nerd.
Ed Uszynski: So I, at one point in that ministry journey, went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and I actually did two degrees while I was there.
Ed Uszynski: I did an MDiv, which is just a traditional pastor’s prep degree, right?
Ed Uszynski: And then I did an MA in Christian thought, which was largely angled towards understanding urban ministry and just contemporary issues that we face within Christendom these days.
Ed Uszynski: And so this was back in the mid-90s that I did that.
Ed Uszynski: Then 10 years later, I went and did this secular PhD very intentionally for, and I don’t even remember all my reasons why.
Ed Uszynski: I just knew that I wanted to do a deeper dive into why our culture works the way it works.
Ed Uszynski: I’ve always appreciated my friends who wanted to do missions and to go overseas.
Ed Uszynski: I’ve always had just a deep love and an intellectual desire to understand the history on this land and the way people journey through time on it, you know?
Ed Uszynski: And like you said, Doug, it was way Marxist than I realized it was gonna be.
Ed Uszynski: It basically was a dive into radical progressivism.
Ed Uszynski: All my classes were from a Marxist kind of angling.
Ed Uszynski: There was tons of critical theory that we read.
Ed Uszynski: I didn’t even know what that was when I got there.
Ed Uszynski: It took me a year to even understand what was going on actually because it was just…
Ed Uszynski: I had spent my whole life looking through the lens of very conservative, Republican, Ronald Reagan is a hero, and then I go over here and now I’m with people, and Ronald Reagan is a villain, and they’re going after capitalism, and they’ve got a problem with conservativism.
Ed Uszynski: It actually was super helpful for me because it just helped me to see the world differently, which was the whole reason why I went there.
Ed Uszynski: I didn’t end up deconstructing my faith, or I didn’t have any massive breakthrough that altered the foundation upon which I was ministering from, but it definitely caused me to see a bunch of categories differently.
Ed Uszynski: It helped me to understand even if I still disagree with solutions that are proposed or where it is that they want to wind up at the end of the day, I still had a much better understanding of how they got there in the first place.
Ed Uszynski: So I’ll stop there.
Ed Uszynski: That was my whole background.
Doug Stuart: Well, I wanted to dive in a little bit on that experience.
Doug Stuart: You said you and maybe one or two other people were the only Christians there.
Doug Stuart: I mean, that to me would probably be, like you described, a little bit of culture shock, also a little bit of, like you were a minority.
Ed Uszynski: For sure.
Doug Stuart: At least in an ideological way maybe or faith way.
Doug Stuart: What was that experience like when you had to write papers for Marxists and write papers for critical theorists who absolutely knew what this all meant?
Ed Uszynski: Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: Great question, Doug.
Ed Uszynski: So my strategy in being there was not to be a confrontational apologist.
Ed Uszynski: I was going to be the Christian guy.
Ed Uszynski: They knew I was white, heterosexual, evangelical Christian guy.
Ed Uszynski: Again, they put our cohort together in such a way that they actually wanted me to be that guy because they really actually did appreciate having a diverse experience in our cohort, which I really dug.
Ed Uszynski: I appreciated what it cost the director to actually take that idea of inclusivism seriously enough that they would even have me in there.
Ed Uszynski: And a couple of other conservative people who wouldn’t identify as evangelical Christians, but they were definitely on the conservative side of things politically.
Ed Uszynski: And so, it’s funny, I used to talk to my wife about it, and we’ve been revisiting this.
Ed Uszynski: Man, I felt very, on one hand, very dark all the time.
Ed Uszynski: I just felt like I needed to cleanse myself of the world view that I felt like I was swimming in because it was very nihilistic.
Ed Uszynski: There wasn’t a lot of hope politically.
Ed Uszynski: It really was about deconstructing and destabilizing and trying to erase lines everywhere, which is interesting, to experience freedom, which I think there’s some overlap, I think, with some libertarian.
Doug Stuart: Maybe.
Doug Stuart: We’ll have to talk about the vocabulary piece there.
Ed Uszynski: I’d like to hear your thoughts on that, but they wanted to just do away with things, you know?
Ed Uszynski: And so, you know, humans just don’t flourish in that kind of an environment.
Ed Uszynski: So I definitely felt that way.
Ed Uszynski: When it came to writing papers, though, I really tried on the world view.
Ed Uszynski: And I tried to write with a Christian mind, but fully submitting myself to their language, to the categories that they wanted to think in, and really tried to become adept at speaking within their system.
Ed Uszynski: Again, sort of like Paul did, you know, in Athens, at Mars Hill.
Ed Uszynski: Like, I’m going to speak to them in their language, and I’m going to try to, oftentimes in my conclusions, I’m going to try to present a Christian worldview option to them without preaching it down their throats.
Ed Uszynski: So, you know, sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I didn’t, and I wound up having great conversations.
Ed Uszynski: You know, one of the things that’s just been, if I can just go offline here for a second, one of the things that I feel like our culture desperately needs, both inside the church and outside the church, is just the ability to have civil discourse with each other.
Ed Uszynski: And you champion this, even on your podcast and different people that you have on.
Ed Uszynski: We’re just not very good at disagreeing with each other and then learning why it is we disagree and learning how did you get to this place?
Ed Uszynski: You know, everybody’s got a reason.
Ed Uszynski: Everybody’s got experiences that have led them to the conclusions that they hold right now.
Ed Uszynski: And most of the time, we don’t take time to really get those.
Doug Stuart: Did you have classmates that came to it from, was that their native language, so to speak, or their native culture versus others?
Doug Stuart: Like you said, there was like two other conservatives, but were there people who weren’t conservative or conservative evangelical that were also experiencing a little bit of this transition or culture shock?
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, I’d say that there were four different categories, and I’ll just say them real quickly, because I think it’s actually important, and why it is that I don’t freak out about the theory stuff floating around.
Ed Uszynski: There were a couple Christians who were just like solidly anchored in a Christian worldview.
Ed Uszynski: There were people then that were at the other extreme that were, and most of them, were just solidly committed to a progressive worldview where there’s no God, everything’s a power play, we’re erasing lines, conservativism is the enemy, okay?
Ed Uszynski: And they were all in on that.
Ed Uszynski: And then there were people who were not necessarily religious, but they were definitely politically conservative in kind of a Fox News way, if I can get away with using that.
Ed Uszynski: That’s good.
Doug Stuart: We all know what you mean when you say it.
Doug Stuart: We’re good.
Ed Uszynski: It’s like porn, right?
Ed Uszynski: You can’t define it, but you know when you see it.
Ed Uszynski: And so everything that ever got talked about from a progressive or Marxist position, they attacked.
Ed Uszynski: They just always were in attack mode.
Ed Uszynski: And then the fourth group that was there were people that were not sure where they were, in religion, in politics.
Ed Uszynski: And so they had kind of this bricolage of all these different ideas, and they were pulling things from here and there.
Ed Uszynski: And they were angled towards appreciating, watching out for the least of these, and paying attention to vulnerable populations.
Ed Uszynski: So they kind of liked the progressive language that was being used for that, and they kind of liked some of the Christianity that would get talked about in that direction.
Ed Uszynski: But they weren’t sure what they believed.
Ed Uszynski: They were just trying to piece it all together.
Ed Uszynski: Those were the four groups that I was able to identify.
Ed Uszynski: Maybe they were more, that’s what I felt like I was having conversations with across the five years that I was there.
Doug Stuart: Okay, okay.
Doug Stuart: When you graduate, did you plan to do something with it?
Doug Stuart: Was it just, hey, I wanted this to enhance how I talk about ministry, how I do ministry and in whatever else it is that I’m doing, or was there, I don’t think back then, given the timeframe that you said, you had the plans to write this book back then.
Ed Uszynski: Oh, I did not.
Doug Stuart: So what was your ministry opportunity and plans based on your choice to go?
Ed Uszynski: Great question.
Ed Uszynski: I have a terrible answer.
Ed Uszynski: I really didn’t have a plan.
Ed Uszynski: It’s a terrible way to go to do a PhD.
Ed Uszynski: Don’t ever do that, listeners.
Ed Uszynski: Never go to try to do a PhD without a good plan.
Ed Uszynski: I wanted to get to the top of the educational ladder.
Ed Uszynski: And I had tried to be an adjunct at several schools that said, unless you have a terminal degree, we wouldn’t even think of hiring you.
Ed Uszynski: I had friends that were encouraging me that I should go ahead and just finish, because they knew I was kind of a book nerd type dude.
Ed Uszynski: So go ahead and run all the way up to the top of the ladder.
Ed Uszynski: But I didn’t want to do it just to do it.
Ed Uszynski: I didn’t do it until I actually had a subject that I was super interested in, which was American Culture Studies.
Doug Stuart: Yeah.
Doug Stuart: Was that the degree?
Ed Uszynski: It was.
Doug Stuart: Yeah.
Doug Stuart: Okay.
Doug Stuart: So then how much of this was all about critical theory versus some other things?
Doug Stuart: Or did you get other perspectives at all in there?
Ed Uszynski: Very little of any other perspectives.
Ed Uszynski: It was all critical in nature.
Ed Uszynski: So even when we say what is critical theory, people are labeling things in different ways.
Ed Uszynski: Some of them were postmodern.
Ed Uszynski: Was Michel Foucault, was he a critical theorist or was he a postmodernist?
Ed Uszynski: Well, some of the papers we read was that debate.
Ed Uszynski: Where do these men and women fit in the genealogy of these different ideas?
Ed Uszynski: But it was all coming from that direction.
Ed Uszynski: It was all coming from a radical place where, again, there’s no God.
Ed Uszynski: And we’re trying to erase lines and we’re trying to rewrite what constitutes normal.
Ed Uszynski: That’s what it was.
Ed Uszynski: And we’re just trying to make sense of life under the sun apart from God.
Ed Uszynski: There is no God coming to save us.
Ed Uszynski: So how do we analyze what the human condition is and why we operate the way we operate towards each other?
Ed Uszynski: Again, it was kind of ecclesiastes in nature.
Ed Uszynski: If you remove God from the picture, what is there to write about?
Ed Uszynski: How do you describe what’s happened?
Ed Uszynski: And that’s what a lot of the writings were.
Ed Uszynski: And I appreciated, I really did grow to appreciate them.
Ed Uszynski: In every aspect of society, you know, how we lay out a city and how we decide to organize ourselves within an urban area, we did deep dives into that because there’s psychological realities to where you put buildings and whether you’re going to have parks in the spaces and who gets to decide where highways go.
Ed Uszynski: And right, there’s tons of politics involved, tons of money involved.
Ed Uszynski: And so we dug deep into that stuff.
Ed Uszynski: It was fascinating.
Doug Stuart: Yeah.
Doug Stuart: I think what was interesting about your experience writing, you know, reading this book, you talk about, there’s a lot of people out there who want to frame it as a religion.
Doug Stuart: I mean, you have the John McOrder who frames it that way.
Doug Stuart: It’s a very attractive way to look at it.
Doug Stuart: It’s not quite perfectly right, but it can be that for people.
Doug Stuart: There’s other people who want to say that it’s like an all-encompassing worldview.
Doug Stuart: And as somebody who, the founder of LCI actually debated Al Mohler in a debate once, and Al Mohler wanted to pin libertarianism as an all-encompassing worldview, which it isn’t.
Doug Stuart: And so we understand from people who think that libertarianism is not supposed to be an all-encompassing worldview, what it might feel like for people to say, well, critical race theory is a whole all-encompassing worldview, and people to perhaps yourself be like, well, wait a second, that’s not necessarily the case here.
Doug Stuart: And so is it a framework?
Doug Stuart: Is it a worldview?
Doug Stuart: Is it a, there’s a lot of things coming at it, and it feels like one big package getting thrown at us, whether you’re watching Fox News or whether you’re attending a seminar or whatever.
Doug Stuart: What did you learn as you learned all of that?
Doug Stuart: And again, you talk about this in your book, and I want to hear here, what did you learn about critical race theory that helps us parse out?
Doug Stuart: Is it really a worldview and all those questions?
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, and so I’m just going to say right now, it can be a worldview, and there’s chapters in the book that try to explain that.
Ed Uszynski: It can be a component of an overall worldview.
Ed Uszynski: So this is what my problem has been and why I finally decided I wanted to write this book with CRT in the title and go after CRT because my real concern is more how we do race relations in the church.
Ed Uszynski: That’s really what I care about.
Ed Uszynski: I’m not here to be the critical race theory guy, okay?
Doug Stuart: Right, right, right.
Ed Uszynski: But because of my background and because I had the academic chops, so to speak, my friends were like, dude, when are you going to do something with this?
Ed Uszynski: And I started to feel just a stewardship pressure.
Ed Uszynski: I should be a voice in this, at least one voice.
Ed Uszynski: When Christopher Ruffo, right?
Ed Uszynski: He’s an activist, I’m trying to remember, from the Manhattan Institute.
Ed Uszynski: And probably listeners know that name.
Ed Uszynski: He specifically said and deliberately said, we are going to annex everything that we don’t like about progressivism.
Ed Uszynski: All the progressive ill we’re going to annex under the title CRT.
Ed Uszynski: I mean, he said that.
Doug Stuart: Yeah, it was a big marketing move, basically.
Ed Uszynski: It was, but they did it.
Ed Uszynski: I mean, he was successful at it.
Ed Uszynski: So that now, anytime you hear CRT, immediately what it triggers in our minds is all of the progressive ideas about gender, sexuality, race, how we do education, everything to do with politics.
Ed Uszynski: It’s all thrown in there under CRT.
Ed Uszynski: I react against that because I don’t think that’s what CRT actually is.
Ed Uszynski: Now, we just turned it into that.
Ed Uszynski: We just hijacked those letters and we turned it into everything that’s wrong with progressivism from a more conservative place.
Ed Uszynski: But the original creators of CRT were doing so within the academic discipline of law, and they were very intentionally trying to confront a particular narrative about race that existed back in the 1970s and still exists today, which is that we’re good now when it comes to race.
Ed Uszynski: We passed civil rights laws in the 60s, and from now on, like the consequences of everything that’s gone on with us in the last several hundred years, those are kind of off the table.
Ed Uszynski: In fact, there are no consequences.
Ed Uszynski: There’s nothing really to talk about.
Ed Uszynski: Now it’s just a matter of making good choices.
Ed Uszynski: The playing field is level for black, white, anybody that’s here in this melting pot of a country.
Ed Uszynski: And law will stand on behalf of making sure that people have the opportunity and that the measuring sticks are equal for everybody.
Ed Uszynski: And these lawyers say, well, that’s a bunch of BS.
Ed Uszynski: I mean, that’s just not reality, that everything is just back to equal now.
Ed Uszynski: There actually are consequences that are built into these structures of the way that we do things.
Ed Uszynski: There are patterns, there are policies, there are literally laws that still enable there to be discrimination in the way that things play themselves out in the school system, in the court system, in the housing sector.
Ed Uszynski: And so they started basically, what they did is they were coming up with ideas that were just the opposite side of the coin of what was kind of common at the time.
Ed Uszynski: So racism is gone.
Ed Uszynski: No, here’s a tenet, racism is here everywhere all the time.
Ed Uszynski: Deal with that.
Ed Uszynski: We’re going to be colorblind now.
Ed Uszynski: No, you’re never colorblind.
Ed Uszynski: Everybody always, because we’re racialized, everybody always actually sees color.
Ed Uszynski: And by not seeing color, you actually diminish my cultural differences.
Ed Uszynski: We’re going to come with just objective truth is going to rule the day.
Ed Uszynski: False.
Ed Uszynski: Things are never objective.
Ed Uszynski: There’s always power going on behind every decision that gets made, especially in a courtroom, right?
Ed Uszynski: And on and on and on.
Ed Uszynski: So there were very specific tenets that were countering the prevailing narrative about race at the time.
Ed Uszynski: That was 50 years ago.
Doug Stuart: Is that why when we read them now, they seem a little bit absolutized?
Doug Stuart: Like when they say racism is, you’ll hear critical race theory.
Doug Stuart: So, you know, the book by Delgado and Stefancik is kind of like the intro primer, because it’s like a hundred pages, and they go over those tenets and maybe more.
Doug Stuart: And they’ll say things like race is an ordinary and pervasive, I forget the word you use there.
Ed Uszynski: Endemic they like to use.
Doug Stuart: Endemic, yeah.
Doug Stuart: So, you’ll hear somebody who’s critical race theory, they will say, look, they’re telling you that racism is just always there all the time, no matter what you do.
Doug Stuart: And that sounds like that’s what they’re saying.
Doug Stuart: I think a general past read at it is just like, well, yeah, that is what it looks like they’re saying.
Doug Stuart: But the fact that they were reacting to something 50 years ago and developing even beyond that back before that, is that why it seems like it’s, yeah, I said absolutize, it might not be the right word, but the idea of us looking at it now and saying, well, if this is a tenet, is it better to place it in the reactionary frame that you just talked about as opposed to, well, this is more like a creed?
Ed Uszynski: Well, I think it is.
Ed Uszynski: That’s why I wrote the book that I wrote, because I think, look, you experienced this, Doug, when you were in school, even in a seminary, theories are created as ways of interpreting and analyzing what’s going on in the world, in a social setting.
Ed Uszynski: That’s what a theory does.
Ed Uszynski: It becomes a lens through which to make a hypothesis.
Ed Uszynski: But the whole field of academics then is about writing papers and seeking ways to apply that theory in different settings.
Ed Uszynski: That’s really what it is.
Ed Uszynski: There are these theories that have popped up throughout the centuries that everybody else goes and tries to apply in different ways.
Ed Uszynski: Even when we talk about that, that racism is endemic, it’s everywhere, it doesn’t mean that every single moment is full of racist people doing things.
Ed Uszynski: Sometimes it gets talked about as though that’s the case, but that’s not what they meant.
Ed Uszynski: It means that because of the 400 years previous to writing this stuff, you can’t escape that there’s racial effect that is in everything.
Ed Uszynski: It is kind of woven through every bit of our history and our current reality.
Ed Uszynski: Instead of saying that it doesn’t exist at all, let’s start by saying it does and let’s look for it.
Ed Uszynski: When you go to look for it, let me just say this Doug, when you go to look for it, you may end up finding it in places it doesn’t actually exist because now you’re trying to find it or you’re trying to make race the issue when it really isn’t, because that’s what your application, your solution is dependent on it being here in a way that it actually isn’t.
Ed Uszynski: And so you get these extreme versions of it, these kind of radical way out there expressions of it, and that’s then what gets held up in society as see, this is what that is, this is what it is.
Ed Uszynski: And I say, well, no, it doesn’t always have to be that.
Doug Stuart: Right.
Ed Uszynski: It doesn’t always have to turn into this kind of radical overreaction.
Ed Uszynski: It doesn’t.
Doug Stuart: No, I agree.
Doug Stuart: I don’t think it has to turn into that.
Doug Stuart: And as I was sort of learning about critical race theory, as it started as a legal theory, it’s libertarianism.
Doug Stuart: I don’t know how familiar you are with it, but we’re generally in favor of criminal justice reform.
Doug Stuart: And we can generally, I’m not allergic to the term white privilege.
Doug Stuart: I don’t think there’s a way to look at the world and say, well, that’s just everything about me as a white guy.
Doug Stuart: I just have to constantly think about that.
Doug Stuart: I don’t buy into that.
Doug Stuart: But at the same time, I can’t deny that there’s something about happenstance that I have some sort of privilege that I may not be able to identify.
Doug Stuart: That doesn’t threaten me in any way.
Doug Stuart: It threatens me when people try to get me to do things because of it.
Doug Stuart: And then there’s manipulation, but that’s really the problem, not what they were saying.
Ed Uszynski: Just out of curiosity, why doesn’t it threaten you?
Ed Uszynski: Because I wonder why sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t for people.
Ed Uszynski: Because it doesn’t threaten me either.
Ed Uszynski: I just shrugged my shoulders the first time I heard, and I thought, that’s interesting.
Ed Uszynski: I’ve never thought about it that way.
Ed Uszynski: Let me dig into it.
Ed Uszynski: But lots of other folks have a way more visceral, defensive response to it right away.
Doug Stuart: If I can answer it without reflecting on it for a day or two, because you’re just asking me.
Doug Stuart: I’ve never thought about why doesn’t it threaten me.
Doug Stuart: But if I were to answer, and I was about to say something very similar, parallel to this, when we talk about racism exists, and it’s pervasive, and it’s there, and yes, of course, we can find it in place.
Doug Stuart: It really isn’t.
Doug Stuart: To me, that isn’t saying anything necessarily profound.
Doug Stuart: It’s just saying there’s a particular sin that manifests itself in a way that’s a little bit more corporate.
Doug Stuart: And in order to say we need to deal with this, it’s almost like trying to say, well, we just need to eradicate sin.
Doug Stuart: And it’s like, well, okay, so I can understand why that is.
Doug Stuart: It’s not threatening to me to hear you say, to hear a critical race theorist say that the way our cities are organized, the way highways are organized, the way certain things came about in our culture have elements to them that are based on either race or based on race conflict or whatever it might be.
Doug Stuart: Those are just kind of factually true, but to some extent I’m just like, well, okay, but that’s great.
Doug Stuart: We can pay attention to that.
Doug Stuart: And if there’s a white judge who’s constantly putting, you know, 80% of all blacks in front of him in prison and 80% of all whites, it doesn’t because he’s racist, that’s one particular element.
Doug Stuart: But even the laws themselves, I even understand that those, that the adverse effects of laws can be not really equal.
Doug Stuart: On the legal matter, I don’t think there’s a lot.
Doug Stuart: There’s a huge disagreement, at least from a libertarian perspective, because it can show up in ways that are clearly racist, especially in outcomes.
Doug Stuart: So why doesn’t that seem like a threat to me?
Doug Stuart: Because we can identify things as sinful and just say that is what it is.
Doug Stuart: We know how we’re supposed to deal with that.
Doug Stuart: And that is with the gospel.
Doug Stuart: From a perspective of why do I not feel, to answer your specific question about why do I not feel triggered by the idea of white privilege, it’s like, well, there’s privilege in every society.
Doug Stuart: This just happens to be the one I live in and I happen to be the one that’s in the privilege.
Doug Stuart: I don’t see that as something I did wrong and so I don’t feel guilty.
Doug Stuart: I don’t, if someone’s trying to make me feel guilty, I’ll probably feel triggered.
Doug Stuart: But just saying that something like white privilege exists, well, that’s almost, can you really deny that?
Doug Stuart: It’s not like it’s pervasive in a way that every white person is always privileged.
Doug Stuart: That’s not what people mean.
Doug Stuart: But it’s, again, like I said, it doesn’t threaten me in one sense, but the follow up to it is how are people using that and weaponizing that, which is the real problem.
Doug Stuart: Obviously, it seems like you agree.
Ed Uszynski: I do agree.
Ed Uszynski: That’s when it becomes a problem.
Ed Uszynski: I like that word, weaponize, because I’ve had, and you mentioned white privilege, I’ve had very interesting and redemptive discussions, again, within church circles, within working with a group of Christian athletes and having that discussion about privilege.
Ed Uszynski: What ends up happening is by the end of it, we’re less judgmental.
Ed Uszynski: That’s why it’s so interesting when I hear people say that it makes for more divisiveness.
Ed Uszynski: I just think, I’ve seen what that looks like, again, in the hands of the wrong facilitator.
Ed Uszynski: I guess it can turn into that.
Ed Uszynski: It shouldn’t turn into that in the church.
Ed Uszynski: It could have turned into that easily at Bowling Green because there was no attempt for reconciliation.
Ed Uszynski: Again, it’s more of a power play.
Ed Uszynski: It really is a all or nothing.
Ed Uszynski: I’m gonna replace you.
Ed Uszynski: That’s a different discussion.
Ed Uszynski: In the church, I think I should be secure enough that I come out the other end of thinking about privilege, like you said, not only being less judgmental, but having a more heightened sense of my own need to steward what God has given me in different ways, that I’d start to become more attentive to people who, for whatever reason, don’t have the same kinds of privileges, whether they’re race-based or they’re class-based or just whatever it is that God gives to us to steward, it should cause me to look at people that don’t have that and feel compassion or try to figure out some way to use my resources, my capital to be a blessing to them.
Ed Uszynski: And I just think that’s the gospel, right?
Ed Uszynski: And I’ve seen that happen.
Ed Uszynski: I saw that happen for years before any of this controversial stuff happened.
Ed Uszynski: I mean, literally in the late 90s, we were having conversations around the white privilege idea.
Ed Uszynski: You started talking about white supremacy.
Ed Uszynski: It’s interesting because I got a book sitting here.
Ed Uszynski: I’ll put up another book.
Ed Uszynski: Somebody told me that I need to get this.
Ed Uszynski: So this is Michael Emerson again.
Ed Uszynski: And I don’t know if you’ve seen this book.
Ed Uszynski: This could be really interesting.
Doug Stuart: Yeah, it has come across my, like, I’ve noticed it.
Doug Stuart: I haven’t looked into it.
Doug Stuart: What do we need to know about it?
Ed Uszynski: So I’m just a couple chapters into it.
Ed Uszynski: But, you know, the idea of whiteness being a religion or white supremacy just sends white folks completely over the edge.
Ed Uszynski: And it’s another one for me where I think you guys, literally for hundreds of years, we had no problem identifying who was white and who wasn’t.
Ed Uszynski: My grandparents knew what it meant to be white because there were signs everywhere.
Ed Uszynski: You couldn’t come move in here.
Ed Uszynski: You couldn’t go to school there.
Ed Uszynski: You had to be white.
Ed Uszynski: Everybody understood what that meant.
Ed Uszynski: And there was some debate about where the liminal spaces were in between whiteness and nonwhiteness.
Ed Uszynski: But for the most part, we had no problem talking that way.
Ed Uszynski: So it’s super interesting that in the last 50 years or so across my lifetime, now of a sudden white people just have no concept.
Ed Uszynski: They don’t want to be talked about as a group of white, the whiteness anymore.
Ed Uszynski: They don’t want to think of them as having been part of a race.
Ed Uszynski: And it’s like, well, that just seems really…
Doug Stuart: Yeah.
Doug Stuart: I think I can, on just a quick hunch, explain that.
Doug Stuart: My generation, I was born in the 80s, and my parents’ generation witnessed and fought over, fought through, lived through whatever, civil rights, right?
Doug Stuart: Yeah.
Doug Stuart: And the idea was you do what you can to not, what’s the Martin Luther King Jr.
Doug Stuart: quote, judge a man based on his character and not by the skin color.
Doug Stuart: That wasn’t the quote, but you know what I mean.
Doug Stuart: Yeah.
Doug Stuart: So that was possibly very hard for my parents’ generation to do.
Doug Stuart: Many of them did it better than others, right?
Doug Stuart: When you go to war with people of different races, you tend to get equalized, and so that might sometimes make it easier, as bad as war is, there’s some adverse positive silver linings there.
Doug Stuart: And so now I’ve been raised with the mindset, I was raised with the mindset that you shouldn’t judge a man that he has black skin because he has black skin.
Doug Stuart: You get to know the person, you judge them.
Doug Stuart: Yes, there are stereotypes, but we try to downplay those and not live by how we think those stereotypes are.
Doug Stuart: We judge a person by their character, right?
Doug Stuart: I realize that there’s that whole component of like, well, economic value to society and all that, and we can judge people based on like how much they add to society.
Doug Stuart: That’s not really what I mean here, but that we get to know people by, as individuals.
Doug Stuart: And so now we have a whole generation.
Doug Stuart: My generation, you’re probably slightly older than me, I’m not sure, but-
Doug Stuart: I’m 56.
Doug Stuart: Okay, so you’re a little older.
Doug Stuart: Not quite my generation, but still, I was raised in, you do your best to be colorblind in the sense that you don’t judge people and you don’t put them in boxes and stereotype them as a group.
Doug Stuart: And you treat them as individuals.
Doug Stuart: Now we’re being told we can’t do that anymore, because that is the opposite of what we were raised with.
Doug Stuart: And so it’s almost…
Ed Uszynski: Interesting.
Doug Stuart: Again, I don’t want to say that this is how people are thinking and why white people are triggered by, now we have to talk about whiteness again.
Doug Stuart: There are ways in which we don’t know the water we swim in, right?
Doug Stuart: Like, that’s just the way it is.
Doug Stuart: But you are also, not you, Ed, but you person telling me this, whoever that might be, you’re also a fish.
Doug Stuart: How do I know that you’re identifying water properly?
Doug Stuart: Right?
Doug Stuart: Like, there’s that question too.
Doug Stuart: That’s a very postmodern response, isn’t it?
SPEAKER_1: But it’s true.
Doug Stuart: So I think that’s kind of what it is.
Doug Stuart: It’s just a little bit of whiplash, even though it’s a whole generation.
Doug Stuart: Part of the reason I know this is I have a friend whose kids were in a school and their kids were in a basically multiracial and multicultural experience in our local government school, right?
SPEAKER_1: Public schools.
Doug Stuart: And they all get along fine.
Doug Stuart: My kids have grown up with Black friends, Asian friends, Puerto Rican friends.
Doug Stuart: It just doesn’t come up.
Doug Stuart: Then you hit middle school and you’re told about all this stuff.
Doug Stuart: And all of a sudden, oh, well, now I can make jokes at the expense of a Black kid because I know what the history is behind that, even though it’s all in good fun.
Doug Stuart: Now the jokes start to come up because there’s now new content.
Doug Stuart: I don’t think we should ignore our history.
Doug Stuart: I mean, if we completely ignore our history, that would be terrible.
Doug Stuart: But you’re now taught to see other people as if it’s possible to see them as not equal.
Doug Stuart: And so I think the Coleman Hughes approach, I think it was Coleman Hughes, who just recently wrote the book on colorblindness.
Doug Stuart: I would probably align with him a lot, while at the same time saying what I just said, that there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging there’s something called white privilege or Asian privilege or whatever kind of privilege in different circumstances.
Doug Stuart: I think there might be black people who have certain privileges.
Doug Stuart: As a society, I’m fine with some of these sort of things.
Doug Stuart: I’ll let you respond now when I ask you.
Doug Stuart: I have a question, but yeah.
Ed Uszynski: That was great, Doug.
Ed Uszynski: And here’s what I think is getting pushed back against within the church.
Ed Uszynski: And I don’t disagree with any.
Ed Uszynski: This is why it’s so important to have conversations.
Doug Stuart: Yeah, no kidding.
Ed Uszynski: Around these words, what we’re experiencing, what our kids are experiencing, our friends.
Ed Uszynski: It all matters in trying to understand what’s really happening.
Ed Uszynski: Because what I would say back then is I do think there’s been a generation, and mine was the same way, actually.
Ed Uszynski: So, I mean, we were right before you, but the same kind of thing.
Ed Uszynski: We can all get along, especially in the environment that I grew up in.
Ed Uszynski: We mostly did get along, even though there was always a racial subtext under there waiting to come out.
Ed Uszynski: There was.
Ed Uszynski: It was always kind of…
Ed Uszynski: It was understood that there was racial difference between us, and that could explode at any moment.
Ed Uszynski: But for the most part, we got along.
Ed Uszynski: Here’s where I think it got challenging.
Ed Uszynski: And I will say this even within my own ministry experiences, whether at church or parachurch.
Ed Uszynski: I’ve been mostly…
Ed Uszynski: A couple of times I’ve been in mostly black churches.
Ed Uszynski: Like when I was in college, I was in a mostly black church across the five years that I lived there.
Ed Uszynski: But over the course of my 37-year Christian life, I’ve been in mostly white dominant churches.
Ed Uszynski: It was mostly white people.
Ed Uszynski: And there was always a smattering of non-white people in there.
Ed Uszynski: And I think what’s happened, again, not on every case, but this is something that I think is worth discussing.
Ed Uszynski: What’s happening is as long as my white normal continues to be the dominant normal, everything is okay.
Ed Uszynski: Y’all can come be a part of this.
Ed Uszynski: We like having black folks up on the stage for worship.
Ed Uszynski: We want to welcome all people.
Ed Uszynski: We talk that way until that normal gets challenged in some kind of way.
Ed Uszynski: For example, when there are police killings, which we’ve experienced a ton of that the last few years in fresh ways, regardless of why it happened, where it came from, it’s been interesting to see what my black friends have done around those moments and the grief that they have felt, the lament that they have expressed, the discouragement that they have felt.
Ed Uszynski: And most of my white friends have been very indifferent to those moments, okay?
Ed Uszynski: So when my black friends in these different settings want that to become an issue, can we talk about this?
Ed Uszynski: Can we talk about the concept of injustice?
Ed Uszynski: Can we talk about what it would mean to lament more widely for not just this murder, but the history that’s behind so many of these that I feel in my body?
Ed Uszynski: And the answer is, nah, we don’t do that around here.
Ed Uszynski: That would represent mission drift, or that’s wokeism, or the Democrats are just race baiting you into feeling a kind of way, or I already was a criminal in some kind of way.
Ed Uszynski: Right?
Ed Uszynski: That’s what they bump into.
Ed Uszynski: I know I’m sort of exaggerating, but I’m not.
Doug Stuart: Well, you have to generalize to make the point, so that makes sense.
Ed Uszynski: So it’s those kinds of examples that have caused the La Craze, for example, or some of the bigger name people.
Ed Uszynski: People like Jamar Tisby, other black men who have been historically conservative that haven’t changed their theology, they’ve been frustrated with the anthropology.
Ed Uszynski: They’ve been frustrated with…
Ed Uszynski: Now again, I just got my hands on this.
Ed Uszynski: With this religion of whiteness that you don’t even…
Ed Uszynski: You white people, again, I’m one of them, we don’t even realize that we’ve kind of absorbed into our system in the way we think about the world.
Ed Uszynski: And our black friends have been trying to poke at that and get us to listen.
Ed Uszynski: And now we have another excuse not to listen because now you’re a critical race theorist and you’re woke.
Ed Uszynski: And we’re not doing that around here.
Doug Stuart: What room is there in your mind to somehow push back in a way that says, hey, I think you’re being weaponized against something that isn’t necessarily a threat.
Doug Stuart: And I don’t mean that whiteness isn’t a threat in a way.
Doug Stuart: Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.
Doug Stuart: But I don’t want people, especially minorities, maybe not even especially, I don’t want anybody to be used as a weapon in, let’s just say, the regime’s toolkit for polarizing America to continue its existence because it thrives on conflict, right?
Doug Stuart: And so if it can be done to keep people at odds with one another and create conflict and weaponize one group toward another, that’s a good thing for, I mean, the powers that be.
Doug Stuart: Well, it’s good for both sides, but I think from a spiritual warfare perspective, there is something to be said of the weaponization against each other that is bigger, right?
Doug Stuart: Like somebody’s poisoning the water so that we’re all at each other.
Ed Uszynski: I agree with that.
Ed Uszynski: And I like that you said spiritual warfare.
Ed Uszynski: I think it’s a demonic stronghold, Doug, and it always has been.
Ed Uszynski: Nothing makes people lose their mind quite like race and talking about race.
Ed Uszynski: It’s kind of an interesting phenomenon even.
Doug Stuart: No, no, you’re right.
Doug Stuart: I think the thing that I wonder about is when people say the word whiteness or white culture or things white people do or whatever, it’s often used pejoratively, and sometimes they’re really funny.
Doug Stuart: I mean, there’s things white people do, we can all laugh at ourselves, that kind of thing.
Doug Stuart: If we want to live in a culture that is, or in a society that is legally equal, let’s say we work on those things, but we also want to live in a society that we treat each other with respect and equality.
Doug Stuart: And it is not necessarily the case, at least it doesn’t feel this way, that making fun of black people would be reciprocated in the way that black people can make fun of white people.
Ed Uszynski: No, it wouldn’t be because there’s a different history.
Ed Uszynski: It’s funny because I’ve been seeing a lot of that kind of talk on Twitter.
Ed Uszynski: We’re not all starting from the same spot.
Ed Uszynski: And this even kind of goes back to the whole Critical Race Theory thing.
Ed Uszynski: Like the pure Critical Race Theory is saying, you are acting like we’ve been on this even surface.
Ed Uszynski: And now all of a sudden there’s been these radicals that have risen up to act in some kind of way towards you.
Ed Uszynski: And what they’re saying is the surface is not…
Doug Stuart: It wasn’t equal.
Doug Stuart: No, I’m with you there.
Ed Uszynski: It’s been skewed white, black.
Ed Uszynski: And so Doug, this is what I wish people would do.
Ed Uszynski: This is what I’m trying to get better at.
Ed Uszynski: And I will just say this from experience.
Ed Uszynski: When we say that someone’s going to say this, or they’re going to say that, so much of what we hear is being said is through social media.
Ed Uszynski: It’s vicarious experiences that we have as we listen to people rant, as we see libs of TikTok put something up or whatever.
Ed Uszynski: Which again, that’s why I need to be careful not absorbing too much of it, because it’s just not good for my insides.
Ed Uszynski: My actual encounters with people in the church and with black folks or just any non-white folks, it has a chance of going way better if they say something that’s inflammatory.
Ed Uszynski: I just need to say, tell me more about that.
Doug Stuart: Yeah, yeah.
Ed Uszynski: Whereas, right, instead of immediately getting defensive, instead of immediately sending a Thomas Sowell article or Coleman Hughes or Bodhi Bakkam, how about, let me just try to understand seriously what is behind the use of that language and why to immediately get defensive and triggered by it?
Ed Uszynski: I think really good things happen when we do that.
Doug Stuart: Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: They do.
Doug Stuart: I agree.
Doug Stuart: I mean, that’s partly why we’re having this conversation.
Doug Stuart: I think there’s something to be said for obviously communicating and asking those questions and to get clarity, partly because it disarms people.
Doug Stuart: You might have a Thomas Sowell pamphlet in your back pocket or whatever, but at the same time, you may not need to share that with them if you can show that person that you care.
Doug Stuart: And I don’t mean fake it, but to actually care about those kinds of things.
Doug Stuart: I’ve heard it said or maybe I thought about this when I was learning about Critical Race Theory.
Doug Stuart: It seemed to me that there was a lot of, oh, that’s a really good point.
Doug Stuart: Yeah, wow, we really missed the ball on that, or we meaning society or white people or whatever.
Doug Stuart: Oh yeah, white people need to think more about this than they already do.
Doug Stuart: But it seems to me, so it’s more like a, but how do I put it here?
Doug Stuart: It’s like, oh, there’s a lot of really good points here, but we can’t make an ideology out of it.
Doug Stuart: And it seems to me that you kind of have that same view, like, hey, there’s a lot of good questions being asked here.
Doug Stuart: Christianity is probably very likely the only one that adds all the good answers to it.
Doug Stuart: Would you agree with sort of that?
Doug Stuart: How would you modify if not?
Ed Uszynski: No, I would agree with that.
Ed Uszynski: I think we need to do a better job, and this is not easy work to do.
Ed Uszynski: The easier thing is just to react or overreact.
Ed Uszynski: The more difficult thing to do is to separate out a conversation that we’re having in the church, and I want to keep coming back to that, because I do think what’s going on in political society is just wild and out of control.
Ed Uszynski: I think, here you go, I think God’s judgment is starting to be poured out on us by the fact of who our two presidential options are, as we sit here in June.
Ed Uszynski: I really mean that, Doug.
Ed Uszynski: I really do.
Ed Uszynski: I think it’s so bizarre.
Doug Stuart: Well, there are more than two options, just so you know.
Ed Uszynski: But they’re not being presented.
Ed Uszynski: I know.
Ed Uszynski: You’re doing work, right?
Ed Uszynski: And other people are trying to change that.
Ed Uszynski: But as we sit here right now, it feels very out of control.
Ed Uszynski: And the two options being given are so bizarre as representatives of long-standing political parties, both of which have done a lot of good in the American world that we’re a part of through history, they have.
Ed Uszynski: And right now, they are bizarrely represented.
Ed Uszynski: So I’m really, really bothered by that.
Ed Uszynski: That’s why all this conversation up here, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t have it, we should, is different than me being with another brother or sister who feels like they’re dividing walls that we were told to tear down in the name of Jesus that still exist in some places.
Ed Uszynski: They’re in various states of disrepair around the country and in different congregations and different populations of Christians.
Ed Uszynski: They’re in various states of disrepair because some people have done a great job of doing what we’re talking about right now, of seeking to understand one another, of doing cross-cultural competence and training for ourselves.
Ed Uszynski: Again, even the whole DEI thing.
Ed Uszynski: So now all cross-cultural training kind of gets subsumed under this idea of bad DEI where people are getting jobs just because their skin is black and not because they deserve it.
Ed Uszynski: And they’re getting into schools because of quotas.
Ed Uszynski: And it’s like, okay, I get that.
Doug Stuart: You mean you get the complaint that people are worried about that?
Ed Uszynski: I totally do.
Ed Uszynski: I totally do.
Ed Uszynski: Again, it’s being taken to an extreme.
Ed Uszynski: It’s a political maneuver to try to push back.
Ed Uszynski: I don’t agree with it.
Ed Uszynski: I think it’s ridiculous.
Ed Uszynski: And I think that’s a different conversation than the one that my friends, people I’ve been exposed to.
Ed Uszynski: When I say my friends, I don’t just mean Ray and Ralph and Bill.
Ed Uszynski: They’re just in this circle.
Ed Uszynski: I mean, the black Christians that I’ve been exposed to decades, through their writing, through being with them, being at conferences with them, ministering with them, they’re looking for something very different from their white brothers and sisters.
Ed Uszynski: That we largely, again, I say we.
Ed Uszynski: That’s such a broad we.
Ed Uszynski: That white evangelicals do not have a reputation for having done a very good job of doing the work of understanding.
Doug Stuart: Yeah, that’s a fair statement.
Ed Uszynski: You know, and figuring out what it means to tear down dividing walls where they still exist.
Ed Uszynski: And not just assuming that they’re gone now because we throw a Bible verse on it or we appeal to a Martin Luther King quote.
Doug Stuart: That’s sure.
Doug Stuart: Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: Lazy and offensive to those guys, and that’s why they leave.
Ed Uszynski: And it’s like, we’re trying to use words with you.
Ed Uszynski: We’re trying to reason.
Ed Uszynski: And you’re leaving us no other choice but to start burning things down and becoming more radical ourselves.
Ed Uszynski: That’s what bothers me.
Ed Uszynski: I feel like that stubborn unwillingness to humbly have the conversations and ask more questions than making statements because we’re not doing that collectively very well.
Ed Uszynski: We’re almost leaving them with no other choice but to leave loud, as Jamar Tisby says, which we look at that and say, well, that’s not gospel.
Ed Uszynski: Well, it’s not, it’s protection.
Ed Uszynski: It’s how do I keep my sanity?
Doug Stuart: Yeah, no, I hear you.
Ed Uszynski: You know what I mean?
Ed Uszynski: Amongst white folks who just refuse to have this conversation with me.
Doug Stuart: That kind of connects with my comment about being weaponized.
Doug Stuart: I think that’s what the…
Doug Stuart: You get a weapon weaponized against you, you’re gonna react this way.
Doug Stuart: However, one thing that we didn’t really…
Doug Stuart: I mean, this has come through in this conversation.
Doug Stuart: It certainly comes through in the book.
Doug Stuart: You’re really less focused entirely on the political outcomes or the social outcomes per se and more about how is the church, in particular, the white church leaders and so forth, how is the church asking good or not good questions and why is it that we’re afraid to engage these questions?
Doug Stuart: And your heart is for having the conversation with other brothers and sisters in Christ of multiple races and get to hear what people have to say and to hear them out.
Doug Stuart: And so here’s one thing I was wanting to ask is I was thinking about this.
Doug Stuart: Do you think if critical race theory, whatever it would have been called in this hypothetical, let’s go back in time, if it were invented by Orthodox Christians because we did our job of doing well at talking about race relations and we came up with a way to have truth and reconciliation and nonviolent communication and all kinds of really better non-antagonistic ways of talking about this, would it have come to the same set of conclusions as critical race theorists?
Doug Stuart: And I realize I’m sort of saying that that’s more of a package deal and I understand it’s more complicated.
Doug Stuart: Would the church have done a better job than the Derrick Bell and his, what’s the word, stream of thought?
Doug Stuart: If we had really done this during Jim Crow and the church is the reason why Jim Crow ended and all of that, I’m not convinced and this is why I get a little bit uneasy about Critical Race Theory because it is a little bit competing with a way of doing race relations that the church really has a better answer.
Doug Stuart: And I think that’s what Neil Shenvy in his approach is getting at.
Doug Stuart: It’s like, well, we don’t need these things.
Doug Stuart: We have the church and we have these other tools that we could come up with.
Doug Stuart: I just want to get your thoughts on that.
Doug Stuart: Okay, good.
Ed Uszynski: Of course I want to say yes.
Doug Stuart: Okay, I was loaded the way I had it, but you understand where that’s going.
Ed Uszynski: It’s a fair question, though.
Ed Uszynski: It’s a good question.
Ed Uszynski: I want to say yes to that.
Ed Uszynski: The caveat, my butt is, everybody, people had their Bibles, people who knew their Bibles are the ones that endorsed slavery and stood behind it.
Ed Uszynski: Again, just stay with me for a second.
Ed Uszynski: I mean, again, we’re talking about hundreds of years.
Ed Uszynski: This is why I say we just kind of flippantly just dismiss it.
Ed Uszynski: I feel like we don’t feel the weight of this, that people who knew their Bibles were behind the treachery of what’s gone on in our racial history.
Ed Uszynski: So that’s just really problematic to me.
Ed Uszynski: The folks that have had their Bibles and have known their Bibles did nothing, did little.
Ed Uszynski: Somebody will say, well, they’re abolitionists.
Ed Uszynski: Yes, they were outliers.
Ed Uszynski: The abolitionists were outliers.
Ed Uszynski: They got named something as an outlier.
Doug Stuart: They were the activists, yeah.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, they were activists, okay?
Ed Uszynski: So what are we gonna do with this mass of Bible-believing people that have created and contributed to the dividing?
Ed Uszynski: They were behind it until 50 years ago.
Ed Uszynski: Like I said, I don’t even want to say until 50 years ago.
Ed Uszynski: 50 years ago, laws were passed from the federal government that said you can’t do this overtly anymore.
Ed Uszynski: I don’t just believe that everything went away.
Doug Stuart: Right, yeah.
Ed Uszynski: You know what I mean?
Ed Uszynski: I think it’s silly to think that it just evaporated so there’s people who know their Bibles that still aren’t seeing things any better.
Ed Uszynski: They didn’t back during the Civil War.
Ed Uszynski: There’s books written.
Ed Uszynski: That’s the problem when you actually read the history of the church’s involvement in this discussion.
Ed Uszynski: We have pretty consistently always found a way to justify ourselves and always found a way to not be inclusive in the Christian sense of that word with non-white people in this country.
Ed Uszynski: Stuff going on all over the globe, I know, that we could study.
Ed Uszynski: In this country, white skinned people do not have, not had a reputation for being inclusive, who know their Bibles.
Ed Uszynski: So that’s why I say, okay, sometimes God’s gonna use a donkey to speak to his prophet, right?
Ed Uszynski: Sometimes the donkey will go to Balaam’s ass, right?
Ed Uszynski: He’ll use whatever means he has to.
Ed Uszynski: So maybe we do need a secular voice that just stirs us up to see the questions that we continue to avoid and ignore.
Ed Uszynski: In some cases, I think that that can be okay.
Ed Uszynski: Again, I’m not doing this to be an apologist for critical race theory.
Ed Uszynski: I’m saying we’re overreacting.
Ed Uszynski: We do this all the time.
Ed Uszynski: I said it to Neil, I understand the war that you’re trying to fight.
Ed Uszynski: I get it.
Ed Uszynski: And at some level, I applaud it on the mega political level, but I don’t think you see the consequences, maybe the unintended consequences, is you’re arming people that actually need to change their thinking about race.
Ed Uszynski: They need to recognize that there actually is structural problems in our society that involves race and not just dismiss that offhandedly.
Ed Uszynski: People are never colorblind the way you want them to be.
Ed Uszynski: Yes, it’s worth working towards, but that’s not the world we live in.
Ed Uszynski: Race matters.
Ed Uszynski: It’s always mattered.
Ed Uszynski: Things are never purely objective.
Ed Uszynski: Well, then you can’t, the word of God is, okay, yes, I believe that God is, he brings it to you.
Doug Stuart: How we handle it is always going to be subjective.
Ed Uszynski: Come on, man.
Doug Stuart: Yeah, yeah.
Ed Uszynski: I mean, so stop with this.
Ed Uszynski: You keep retaliating against the cry of our non-white brothers and sisters who are trying to get us to see something that we’ve refused to see for whatever reason.
Ed Uszynski: It’s a demonic stronghold.
Ed Uszynski: That’s why I keep saying for whatever reason.
Ed Uszynski: It is a demonic stronghold that does great damage to the Imago Dei.
Ed Uszynski: It does great damage to the body of Christ flourishing together in unity.
Ed Uszynski: And that’s what I, again, I’m saying this to myself.
Ed Uszynski: I’m not saying this in an accusatory way towards everybody.
Ed Uszynski: I’m saying I’ve been a part of it too, and I want to be part of a solution.
Ed Uszynski: And part of the solution has to be to calm everybody down or try.
Ed Uszynski: Separate out the work Christopher Ruffo is doing from what we’re trying to do in the church.
Ed Uszynski: And just start there.
Ed Uszynski: Before we start trying to solve all of society’s problems, let’s just start by doing the work to dismantle the walls of division that still exists between us.
Ed Uszynski: And take books like this seriously.
Ed Uszynski: Take books like this seriously.
Ed Uszynski: The Great De-Churching.
Ed Uszynski: Do you know this one?
Ed Uszynski: Have you seen this one?
Doug Stuart: I haven’t heard of it.
Ed Uszynski: Last couple of years.
Ed Uszynski: So Jim Davis is a friend of mine.
Ed Uszynski: Jim Davis and Michael Graham.
Ed Uszynski: Jim Davis is a friend of mine.
Ed Uszynski: So I’ve had a lot of conversations with them.
Ed Uszynski: So they did this study on why are people leaving the church.
Ed Uszynski: They didn’t come at it with any…
Ed Uszynski: It was a wide open study to say what are the groupings of people that are leaving church and why are they leaving.
Ed Uszynski: And one of the groupings was non-white people, BIPOC people, Black, Indigenous, people of color.
Ed Uszynski: And the conclusion, as they studied this group and interviewed them and talked to them, was that white folks just need to do a better job of being cross-culturally competent and being concerned about the issues that our black friends care about.
Ed Uszynski: In the Bible verses that they care about, we need to start asking ourselves why it is that we don’t have a good theory of race, like where Sewell Berry says, we have an uncritical race theory.
Ed Uszynski: And that’s been a huge problem.
Ed Uszynski: Let’s do that work.
Ed Uszynski: So people are saying it, sociologists are saying it, theologians are saying it.
Ed Uszynski: I don’t understand why a majority of people, I don’t quite know how to say it, but I want this to become our reputation.
Ed Uszynski: I would like for this to go away in my lifetime, that the church actually became known for doing the best work in this conversation.
Ed Uszynski: And instead we’re firing people, we’re condemning people for repenting of their indifference.
Ed Uszynski: And immediately we’re calling them woke and we’re calling Tim Keller woke.
Ed Uszynski: People that have been very orthodox biblically across decades, but because they’re using some language now that’s unfamiliar to us or that sounds like something we heard on Fox News, this is bad, discussion over, liberal Marxists, you know.
Ed Uszynski: So that was a long rant.
Ed Uszynski: Thanks for letting me get on.
Doug Stuart: No, it’s good.
Doug Stuart: You know, I think as we wrap up the conversation here, I think what’s important to note is your heart for the church to ask better questions.
Doug Stuart: Critical Race Theory apparently seems to be that your view is Critical Race Theory has sort of forced us to ask questions we were refusing to see.
Ed Uszynski: It’s got inherent questions in it that would be good to ask.
Ed Uszynski: And I said somewhere in the book, I think, I wish I had written this back in the 1990s, even back to your question of could we have done this better?
Ed Uszynski: I wish some Christians had read Critical Race Theory and said, oh, there’s some good questions in here before it became a hysterical thing.
Doug Stuart: Yeah, yeah.
Ed Uszynski: And done that, somebody said the book is five chapters of professor and 10 chapters of pastor.
Ed Uszynski: And I like that as a description.
Doug Stuart: That’s about right.
Doug Stuart: Yeah, no, that’s about right.
Doug Stuart: Well, in this conversation, it’s interesting.
Doug Stuart: I was debating whether or not to ask you to sort of summarize CRT and all that.
Doug Stuart: And I’m just like, you know what?
Ed Uszynski: I’m glad you did.
Doug Stuart: Not even.
Doug Stuart: But here, part of the reason was that really isn’t the point of your book.
Doug Stuart: And I’ve got four or five episodes of people.
Doug Stuart: I mean, my guess is that generally speaking, Neil Shenvy did a good job telling everybody what CRT is.
Doug Stuart: Okay, it’s fine.
Doug Stuart: They’ll go listen to my two episodes with Neil Shenvy and Pat Sawyer.
Doug Stuart: Okay, they can get that as good little advertising to go back and listen to more of my episodes.
Doug Stuart: But that really wasn’t the point of your book.
Doug Stuart: The point of your book is race relations.
Doug Stuart: How do we untangle that web?
Doug Stuart: How do we, as Christians, not just as citizens in America, but as Christians, deal with that.
Doug Stuart: And I think the way in which you approach this is very humble, and it also calls other people to be humble.
Doug Stuart: And so, sorry, it’s weird to praise somebody for being humble on a podcast, but I appreciate the tone of which you take.
Ed Uszynski: Thank you.
Ed Uszynski: It’s a posture.
Ed Uszynski: And I strove for that, Doug, again, because I wasn’t writing it to try to be condemning or…
Ed Uszynski: And I know what I’m stepping into when I try to write about this, you know?
Ed Uszynski: So I know we can do better.
Ed Uszynski: I know the gospel is the answer.
Ed Uszynski: It’s interesting.
Ed Uszynski: You mentioned Neil and Pat.
Ed Uszynski: Neil and I have had some conversations.
Ed Uszynski: Yes, I think he describes what critical race theory is in just an abstract way, in a way that’s very accurate.
Ed Uszynski: But I disagree with some of his assumptions about what we can have discussions about, though, and what he just sort of dismisses summarily.
Ed Uszynski: So like white privilege, like you said, or white supremacy, he will write against that.
Ed Uszynski: And I know that there are some ways that that goes bad, but I just think we run to that too quickly.
Ed Uszynski: Let’s talk about white privilege for a while.
Ed Uszynski: It’s a fascinating discussion, actually.
Ed Uszynski: Let’s talk about what different forms of supremacy and what that means.
Ed Uszynski: And if the shoes fit, let’s put them on in our settings.
Ed Uszynski: And if they don’t, that’s okay, but let’s at least be able to have the conversation and not be intimidated by it.
Ed Uszynski: So I feel like he’s being weaponized actually, unintentionally.
Ed Uszynski: He’s making it more difficult for those conversations to happen in some ways.
Doug Stuart: Well, I hope that you guys can have more conversations.
Doug Stuart: I know that you’ve done your podcast rounds and I’ve listened to some of them and you’ve dealt with some of those reactions.
Doug Stuart: I believe you have a website coming out or is out by now.
Doug Stuart: We want to share how people can reach you online.
Doug Stuart: Where can they find the book?
Doug Stuart: Where can they find any of your work?
Ed Uszynski: So the book comes out next week actually.
Ed Uszynski: I don’t know when this is going to post.
Doug Stuart: This will already have been out.
Doug Stuart: We’re recording this in June.
Doug Stuart: This will be out in July.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, so the book’s out.
Ed Uszynski: I should have a website called untanglingcrt.com where people can reach me directly.
Ed Uszynski: I’d love to be part of helping facilitate conversations in church or in groups or whatever.
Ed Uszynski: I want to be very available to do that.
Ed Uszynski: That was at least one of my goals in writing this because I love to facilitate these kinds of conversations.
Ed Uszynski: I’m on Twitter at uszynski32, but I’m off and on when it comes to Twitter.
Ed Uszynski: I get into Twitter and I start getting dark and angry, and I don’t want to be that person.
Ed Uszynski: I’m trying to stay above the fray a little bit and be productive and not just be antagonistic with people.
Ed Uszynski: So the website will be the best place.
Ed Uszynski: I hope the book is helpful.
Ed Uszynski: Thanks for having me on.
Doug Stuart: Amen.
Doug Stuart: Thank you.
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